Nationalism Debate: Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony | Lex Fridman Podcast #256

The following is a conversation with Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazoni. This is Yaron's third time on this podcast and Yoram's first time. Yaron Brook is an objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, host of the Yaram Brooks show, and the co author of Free Market Revolution and Equal Is Unfair. Yaram Hazoni is a national conservatism thinker, chairman of the Edmund Burke foundation that hosted the National Conservatism Conference. He is also the host of the Nat Khan Talk and author of the Virtue of Nationalism and an upcoming book called A Rediscovery. Allow me to say a few words about each part of the two word title of this nationalism debate First Debate I would like to have a few conversations this year that are a kind of debate with two or three people that hold differing views on a particular topic, but come to the table with respect for each other and a desire to learn and discover something interesting together through the empathetic exploration of the tension between their ideas. This is not strictly a debate, it is simply a conversation. There's no structure, there's no winners. Except of course, just a bit of trash talking to keep it fun. Some of these topics will be very difficult and I hope you can keep an open mind and have patience with me as kind of moderator who tries to bring out the best in each person and the ideas discussed. Okay, that's my comment on the word debate. Now onto the word nationalism. This debate could have been called Nationalism versus Individualism or National Conservatism versus Individualism, or just Conservatism versus Individualism as we discuss in this episode. These words have slightly different meanings depending on who you ask. This is especially true, I think, for any word that ends in ism. I personally enjoy the discussion of the meaning of such philosophical words. I don't think it's possible to arrive at a perfect definition that everybody agrees with, but but the process of trying to do so for a bit is interesting and productive, at least to me. As long as we don't get stuck there as some folks sometimes do in these conversations. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with Yaram Brook and Yoram Huzoni. I attended the excellent debate between the two of you yesterday at UT Austin. The debate was between ideas of conservatism represented by Yarram Mazoni, and ideas of individualism represented by Yaron Brook. Let's start with the topics of the debate. Yaram how do you define conservatism? Maybe in the way you were thinking about it yesterday. What to you are some principles of conservatism?

Let me define it, and then we can get into principles, if you want. When I talk about political conservatism, I'm talking about a political standpoint that regards the recovery, elaboration, and restoration of tradition as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time. Okay, so this is something that, if you have time to talk about it like we do on the show, it's worth emphasizing that conservatism is not like liberalism or Marxism. Liberalism and Marxism are both kind of universal theories, and they claim to be able to tell you what's good for human beings at all times in all places. And conservatism is a little bit different because it's going to carry different values in every nation, in every tribe, you know, even every family, you can say, has somewhat different values. And these loyalty groups, they compete with one another. That's the way human beings work.

So it's deeply rooted in history of that particular area of land.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily say land. You're right that many forms of conservatism are tied to a particular place.

So how does the implementation of conservatism to you differ from the ideal of conservatism, the implementations you've seen of political conservatism in the United States and the rest of the world? Just to give some context, because it's a loaded term, like most political terms. So when people think about conservative in the United States, they think about the Republican Party. Can you kind of disambiguate some of this? What are we supposed to think?

Yeah, that's a really important question. Usually the word conservative is associated with Edmund Burke and with the English common law tradition going back centuries and centuries. There's kind of a classical English conservative tradition that goes Fortescue, Hooker, Koch, Seldon, Hale, Burke, Blackstone before Burke. If you take that kind of as a benchmark and you compare it, then you can compare it to things like the American Federalist Party at the time of the American founding is in many respects very much in keeping with that tradition. As you go forward, there's an increasing mix of liberalism into conservatism. And I think by the time you get to the 1960s with William Buckley and Frank Meyer, the jargon term is fusionism. By the time you get there, it's arguable that their conservatism isn't very conservative anymore, that it's kind of a Public liberalism mixed with a private conservatism. So a lot of the debate that we have today about what does the word conservatism actually mean? A lot of the confusion comes from that, comes from the fact that on the one hand, we have people use the term, I think, properly, historically, to refer to this common law tradition of which Burke was a spokesman. But there are lots of other people who, when they say conservative, they just mean liberal. And I think that's a big problem. I mean, it's a problem. Just to have an intelligent debate is difficult when people are using the word almost too antithetical.

What would you say the essential idea of conservatism is? Time. You mentioned your father's a physicist. So a lot of physicists, when they form models of the universe, they don't consider time. So everything is dealt with instantaneously. A particle is represented fully by its current state, velocity and position. You're saying. So you're arguing with all of physics and your father, as we always do, that time matters. In conservatives, that's the fundamental element is the full history matters. And you cannot separate the individual from the history, from the roots that they come from.

The parallel in political theory is what's called rationalism. I guess we'll probably talk about that. Some rationalism is kind of an instantaneous, timeless thing. Before I mentioned that liberalism and various Enlightenment theories, they don't include time at all. Their goal is to say, look, there's such a thing as universal human reason. All human beings, if they reason properly, will come to the same conclusions. If that's true, then it removes the time consideration. It removes tradition and context. Because everywhere where you are at any time, you ought to be able to use reason and come to the same conclusions about politics or morals. So that's a theory. Like Immanuel Kant or John Locke is an example. Hobbes is an example. That kind of political theorizing really does say at a given instant, we can know pretty much everything that we need to know, at least the big things. And conservatism is the opposite. It's a traditionalist view, exactly as you say that says that history is crucial.

So, Yaron, you say that history is interesting, but perhaps not crucial in the context of individualism.

No, I mean, I think there's a false dichotomy he presented here. And that is that one view holds that you can derive any, anything from a particular historical path and kind of an empirical view. And if we know the history, we know where we should be tomorrow, we know where we should stand today. And the other path is we ignore history, we ignore facts, we ignore what's going on. We can derive from some a priori axioms, we can derive a truth right, right now. And both are false. Both of those views, in my view, are false. And Ayn Rand and I reject both of those views. And I think the better thinkers of the Enlightenment did as well, although they sometimes fall into the trap of appearing like rationalists. And Jom and I agree on one thing, and that is that Kant is one of. We've talked about this in the past, Lex, but we both hate Kant. We both think Kant is, is. I at least think Kant is probably the most destructive philosopher since Plato, who was pretty destructive himself. And part of the problem is that Kant divorces reason from reality. That is, he divorces reason from history, he divorces reason from experience. Because we don't have direct experience of reality according to Kant, right? We're removed from that direct experience. But I, I view Kant as the anti Enlightenment, that is, I view Kant as the destroyer of good Enlightenment thinking. And Yoram and I acknowledge a lot of history of philosophy, people who do history of philosophy view Kant as the embodiment of the Enlightenment. That is the ultimate. But I think that's a mistake. I think both Rousseau and Kant are fundamentally the goal, the mission in life is to destroy the Enlightenment. So my view is neither of those options are the right option. That is the true reason based Reason is not divorced from reality. It's quite the opposite. Reason is a tool, it's a faculty of identifying and integrating what it's identifying and integrating the facts of reality as we know them through sense perception or through the study of history, through what actually happened. So it's the integration of those facts, it's the knowledge of that history. And then what we do is we abstract away principles based on what's worked in the past, what hasn't worked in the past, the consequences of different ideas, different paths, different actions. We abstract away principles that then can be universal. Not always. We make mistakes, right? We can come up with a universal principle. It turns out that it's not. But if we have the whole scope of human history, we can derive principles as we do in life, as individuals. We derive principles that are then truths that we can live by. But you don't do that by ignoring history. You do that by learning history, by understanding history, by understanding in a sense, tradition and where it leads to, and then trying to do better. And I think good thinkers are constantly trying to do better based on what they know about the past and what they know about the present.

What's the difference between studying history.

On.

A journey of reason and tradition? So you mentioned that Burke understood that reason begins with inherited tradition yesterday. So what's the difference between studying history but then being free to go any way you want and tradition where it feels more, I don't want to say a negative term like burden, but there's more of a momentum that forces you to go the same way as your ancestors.

It's the recognition that people are wrong, often are wrong, including your parents, including your parents, including your teachers, including everybody. Everybody is potentially wrong. And that you can't accept anybody just because they happen to come before you. That is, you have to evaluate and judge and you have to have a standard by which to evaluate and judge the actions of those who came before you. Whether they are your parents, whether they are the state in which you happen to be born, whether they are somebody on the other side of planet Earth. You can judge them if you have a standard. Now, my standard, and I think the right standard, is human well being. That is that which is good for human beings. Qua human beings, you know, is, is the standard by which we judge. I can say that certain periods of history were bad, they happened. It's important to study them. It's important to understand what they did that made them bad. So we cannot do that again. And, and I can say certain cultures, certain periods in time were good. Why? Because they promoted human well being and human flourishing. That's the standard then derived from that. Okay, what is it that made a particular culture good? What is it that made that particular culture positive in terms of human well being and human flourishing, what made this bad? And hopefully from that I can derive a principle, okay, if I want human flourishing and human well being in the future, I want to be more like these guys and less like those guys. I want to derive what is the principle that will guide me in the future. That's, I think, how human knowledge ultimately develops.

I think people often make a mistake. Just. I'm not saying you're on, but lots of people, you know, don't actually read the original sources. And so what happens is people will attack conservatives, assuming that conservatives think that whatever comes from the past is right. And actually it's, it's very difficult to find a thinker who actually says something like that. The Seldon or Burke, the big, the, the, the big conservative theorists, hooker, they're, they're all who understand that the tradition carries with it mistakes that were made in the past. And this is actually, I think, an important part of their empiricism is that they see the search for truth as something a society does by trial and error. And what that means is that in any given moment you have to be aware of the possibility that things that you've inherited are actually false. And the job of the political thinker or the jurist or the the philosopher is not to dig in and say whatever it is that we've inherited is right. The job is to look at the society as a whole and say, look, we have this job of, first of all, conservation, just making sure that we don't lose good things that we've had, and second, seeing if we can repair things in order to improve them where it's necessary or where it's possible. And that process is actually a creative process. This is a way in which I think it is similar to Joron's philosophy that you take the inherited tradition and you look for a way that you can shape it in order to make it something better than it was. That's a baseline for what we call conservatism.

Just a comment. So the trial and error, the error, you're proud of the errors, It's a feature, not a bug. So you mentioned trial and error a few times yesterday. It's a really interesting kind of idea. It's basically accepting that the journey is going to have flaws as opposed to saying, I mean, the conclusion there is the current system is flawed and it will always be flawed. It will always be flawed and you try to improve it. When you listen to Yaran talk, there's much more of an optimism for the system being perfect now or potentially soon, or it could be perfect. And to me, the way I heard it is almost like accepting that the system is flawed and through trial and error will improve. And Yaron says, no, we can have a perfection now.

That's the way it sounds to me.

Yeah. And I think that's right. I think the difference is that at some point, just like in science, I think one can stop the trial and error and say, I can now see a pattern here. I can see that certain actions lead to bad consequences, certain actions lead to good consequences. Let me try to abstract away what is it that is good and what is it that is bad and build a system around what is good and reject what is bad. I think ultimately, if you read the founding fathers and whether we call them conservatives, individuals, what the founding fathers actually did, all of them, I think, is study history. They all did, they all talk about history, they all talk about examples of other cultures, whether it's. Whether they go back to the Republic in Venice or back to the ancient Greeks, they studied these, they learned lessons from them, they tried to figure out what has worked in the past and what hasn't and tried to derive principles. Now, in my view, they got pretty close to what I would consider kind of an ideal, but they didn't get it completely right. And here we sit 200 and something years after the Declaration and after the Constitution. I think we can look back and say, okay, well, what did they get right? What did they get wrong? Based on how is it done and where the flaws and where the. And we can improve on it, I think we can get closer to perfection. And based on those kind of observations, based on that kind of abstraction, that kind of discovery of what is true. Just like at some point you do the experiments, you do the trial and error, and now you come up with a scientific principle. It is true that a hundred years later you might discover that, hey, I missed something, there's something. But to not take the full lesson, to insist on incrementalism, to insist on we're just going to tinker with the system instead of saying no, there's something really wrong with, I don't know, having a king. There's something really wrong with not having any representation or whatever the standard needs to be in the name of. We don't want to move too fast. I think is a mistake. And the problem with trial and error in politics is that we're talking about human life, right? So there was a big trial around communism and 100 million people paid the price for the trial. I could have told them in advance, as did many people, that it would not work. There are principles of human nature, principles that we can study from history, principles about economics and other aspects what we know. It's not going to work. You don't need to try it again. We've had communal arrangements throughout history. There was an experiment with fascism, and there've been experiments with all kinds of political systems. Okay, we've done them. Sad that we did them because many of us knew they wouldn't work. We should learn the lesson. And I think that all of history now converges on one lesson. And that is what we need to do is build systems that protect individual freedom. That is the core. That's what ultimately leads to human flourishing and human success and human achievement. And to the extent that we place anything above that individual, whether it's the state, whether it's the ethnicity, whether it's the race, whether it's the bourgeois, whether it's whatever it happens to be a class or whatever. Whenever we place something above the individual, the consequence of negative. That's one of these principles that I think we can derive from studying 3,000 years of civilization. And it's tragic, I think, because we're going to keep experimenting. Sadly, I see it, I'm not winning this battle, I'm losing the battle. We're going to keep experimenting with different forms of collectivism. We're going to keep paying the price in human life and in missed opportunities for human flourishing and human success and human wealth and, and prosperity.

Well, look, if we. Let's take communism as a good example, none of the major conservative thinkers would say, you know what's a good idea? A good idea would be to experiment by raising everything that we've inherited and starting from scratch. I mean, that's the conservative complaint or accusation against rationalists. I mean, as opposed to empiricism, using rationalism, let's take, you know, let's take Descartes kind of as a, as a benchmark.

Can you also maybe define rationalism?

Yeah. These are two terms that are in philosophy, especially in epistemology, they're often compared to one another. Yaron said that it's a false dichotomy and maybe it is a bit exaggerated, but that doesn't mean it's not useful for conceptualizing the domain. So rationalist is somebody like Descartes who says, I'm going to set aside, I'm going to try to set aside everything I know, everything I've inherited, I'm going to start from scratch. And he explicitly says, in evaluating the inheritance of the past, he explicitly says, you take a look at the histories that we have, they're not reliable. You take a look at the moral and the scientific writings that we receive, they're not very good. His baseline is to look very critically at the past and say, look, I'm evaluating it. I think all in all it's just not worth very much. And so whatever I do, beginning from scratch is going to be better as long as, and here's his caveat, as long as I'm proceeding from self evident assumptions, from self evident premises, things that you can't argue against, I think therefore I am right. And then from there deducing what he calls infallible conclusions. So that model of self evident premises to infallible conclusions, I'm calling that rationalism. I think that's kind of a standard academic jargon term and it's opposed to empiricism, which is a thinker, I think in universities usually the empiricist is David Hume. And David Hume will say we can't learn anything the way that Descartes said. I mean, there is nothing that's that self evident and that infallible. So Hume proposes based on Newton and Boyle and the new physical sciences. So Hume proposes a science of man. And the science of man sounds an awful lot like what Yaron just said, which is, we're going to take a look at human nature, at the nature of societies and human nature. We're going to try to abstract, towards fixed principles for describing it. Human societies, we're going to try to do the same thing. And from there we get, for example, contemporary economics, but we also get sociology and anthropology, which cut in a different direction. So that's rationalism versus empiricism. Can I just say. Yeah, go ahead, please.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think empiricism, the one thing I disagree is I think empiricism rarely comes to these abstractions. I mean, they want more facts. It's always about collecting more evidence. But this is where, you know, I think Ayn Rand is so unusual and where I think there's something new here, right? And that's a bold statement given the history of philosophy, but I think Ayn Rand is something new. So she says, yes, we agree about rationalism and that it's inherently wrong. Empiricism has the problem of, okay, where does it lead? You never come to a conclusion, you're just accumulating evidence. There's something. In addition, there's a third alternative which he is positing, which is using empirical evidence, not denying empirical evidence, recognizing there are some axioms. There's some axioms that we all, at the base of all of our knowledge that are starting points. We're not rejecting axiomatic knowledge and integrating those two and identifying the fact that based on these axioms and based on these empirical evidence, we can come to truths, just again, like we do in science. We have certain axioms, scientific axioms, we have certain experiments that we run. And then we can come to some identification of a truth. And that truth is always going to be challenged by new information, by new knowledge. But as long as that's what we know, that is what truth. So truth is contextual in the sense that it's contextual, it's based on that knowledge that surrounds is it for it.

To change if you get new facts.

It'S always available to change. If the facts that you get and they really are. I mean, the burden of changing what you've come to a conclusion of truth is high. So you'd have to have real evidence that it's not true. But that happens all the time. So it happens in science. Right. We discovered that what we thought was true is not true. And it can happen in politics and ethics, even more so than in science, because they're much messier field. But the idea is that you can come to a truth, but it's not just deductive. Most truths are inductive. We learn from observing reality and again, coming to principles about what works and what's not. And here I think this is. Ayn Rand is different. She doesn't fall into the. And she's different in her politics, and she's different in her epistemology. She doesn't fall into the conventional view. She's an opponent of Hume and she's an opponent of Descartes. She's certainly an opponent of Kant's, and I think she's right.

If it's okay, can we walk back to criticism of communism? You're both critics of communism, socialism. Why did communism fail? You started to say that conservatives criticize it on the basis of rationalism, that you're throwing away the past, you're starting from scratch. Is that the fundamental description of why communism failed?

I think the fundamental difference between rationalists and empiricists is the question of whether you're throwing away the past. That's the argument. And it cashes out as a distinction between abstract, universal, rationalist political theories and empirical political theories. Empirical political theories are, are. They're always going to say something like, look, there are many different societies. We can say that some are better and some are worse. But the problem is that, you know, that, that, that there are many different ways in which a society can be better or worse. There's an ongoing competition and, and we're learning on an ongoing basis what are the ways in which societies can be better and worse. That creates a kind of, I'd say a mild skepticism, a moderate skepticism among conservatives. I don't think too many conservatives have a problem looking at the Soviet Union, which is brutal and murderous, ineffective in its economics, totally ineffective spiritually, and then collapsed. Okay, So I think it's easier for us to look at a system like that and say, what on earth? What should we learn from that? But the main conservative tradition is pretty tolerant of a diversity of different kinds of society and is slow to insist that France is so tyrannical. It just needs a revolution because what's going to come after the revolution is going to be much better. The assumption is that there's lots of things that are good about most societies and that a clean slate leads you to throw out all of the inherited things that you don't even know how to notice until they're gone.

Could I actually play devil's advocate here and address something you've also said? Can we, as opposed to knowing the empirical data of the 20th century that communism presented, can we go back to the beginning of the 20th century? Can you empathize or steel man or put yourself in a place of the Soviet Union where the workers are being disrespected? And can you not see that the conservatives could be pro communism? Like communism is such a strongly negative word in modern day political discourse that you can't like, you have to put yourself in the mind of people who like red colors, who like.

That's what it was.

It was, it's all about the branding, I think, but also like the ideas of solidarity, of nation, of togetherness, of respect for fellow man. I mean, all of these things that kind of communism represents. Can you not see that this idea is actually going along with conservatism? It is in some ways respecting the deep ideals of the past, but proposing a new way to raise those ideals, implement those ideals in the system?

Yes, I'm going to try to do what you're suggesting. But historically we actually have a more useful option, I think, for both of our positions. Instead of pretending that we like the actual communists, we have conservative statesmen like Disraeli and Bismarck, who initiated social legislation. Right. The first step towards saying, look, we're one nation, we're undergoing industrialization, that industrialization is important and positive, but it's also doing a lot of damage to a lot of people. And in particular it's doing damage not just to individuals and families, but it's doing damage to the social fabric. The capacity of Britain or German to remain cohesive societies is being harmed. And, and so it's these two conservative statesmen, Disraeli and Bismarck, who actually take the first steps in order to legislate for what today we would consider to be minimal social programs, pensions and disability insurance and those kinds of things. So for sure, conservatives do look at industrialization as a rapid change and they say we do have to care about the nation as a whole and we have to care about it as a unity. And I assume that Yaron will say, look, that's the first step towards the catastrophe of communism. But before Euron drives that nail into the coffin. Let me try to make a distinction. Because when you read Marx, you're reading an intellectual descendant of Descartes. You're reading somebody who says, look, every society has consists of oppressors and oppressed, right? And that's an improvement in some ways over liberal thinking because at least he's seeing groups as a real social phenomenon. But he says every society has an oppressor class and oppressed class. There are different classes, there are different groups and whenever one is stronger, it exploits the ones that are weaker. That is the foundation of a revolutionary political theory. Why? Because the moment that you say that the only relationship between the stronger and the weaker is exploitation, the moment that you say that, then you're pushed into the position. And Marx and Engels say this explicitly, you're pushed into the position. We're saying, when will the exploitation end? Never. Until there's a revolution. What happens when there's a revolution? You eliminate the oppressor class. It's annihilationist. I mean, you can immediately, when you read it, see why it's different from Descartes or Bismarck. Because they're trying to keep everybody somehow at peace with one another. And Marx is saying there is no peace, that oppressor class has to be annihilated. And then they go ahead and do it and they kill 100 million people. So I do think that despite the fact your question is good and right, there are certain similarities in concern. But still I think you can tell.

The difference between that extra step of revolution to you is where the problem comes. Like that extra step of let's kill all the oppressors, that's the problem. And then to you you're on the whole step one is the problem.

Well, it's all a problem. First, I don't view communism as something that radical in a sense that I think it comes from a tradition of collectivism. I think it comes from a tradition of looking at groups and measuring things in terms of groups. It comes from tradition where you expect some people to be sacrificed for the greater good of the whole. I think it comes from a tradition where mysticism, revelation as the source of truth is accepted. I view Marx as in some sense very Christian. I don't think he's this radical rejecting. I think he's just reformatting Christianity. In a sense he's replacing, in a sense he's replacing God with the proletariat. Knowledge. You know, you have to get knowledge from somewhere. So you need the dictatorship of the proletarian. You need somebody, the Stalin, the Lenin, who, who somehow communes with the spirit, the, the spirit of the proletarian. There's no rationality, not rationalism, there's no rationality in Marx. There is a lot of mysticism and there is a lot of hand waving and there's a lot of sacrifice and a lot of original sin in the way he views humanity. I view Marx as one more collectivist in a whole string of collectivists. And I think the Bismarckian response, which Bismarck, I mean, I know less about Disraeli, so I'll focus on Bismarck. I mean, Bismarck is really responding to political pressures from the left and he's responding to the rise of communism, socialism. But what Bismarck is doing, he's putting something alternative. He's presenting an alternative to the proletarian as the standard by which we should measure the good. And what he's replacing it is the state. He's replacing the proletarian with the state. And that has exactly the same problems. That is first it requires sacrificing some to others, which is what the welfare state basically legitimizes it. It places the state above all. So the state now becomes. I think the biggest evil of Bismarck, and I definitely view him as a negative force in history, is public education. I mean, the Germans really dig in on public education and really develop it. And really the American model of public education is copying the German, the Prussian, Bismarckian public education.

Can you speak to that real quick? Why the public education is such a root of moral evil for you?

Well, because it now says that there's one standard and that standard is determined by government, by a bureaucracy, by whatever the government deems is in the national interest. And Bismarck's very explicit about this. He's training the workers of the future. You know, they need to catch up with England and other places and they need to train the workers. And there's going to be a. He's going to train some people to be the managerial class. Is he going to train other people to be. And he decides, right, the government, the bureaucracy is gonna decide who's who and where they go. There's no individual choice, there's no individual showing inability to break out of what the government has decided is their little box. There's very little freedom, there's very little, you know, ultimately there's very little competition, there's very little innovation. And this is the problem we have today in American education, which we can get to is there's no competition and no innovation. We have one standard fit all and then we have Conflicts about what should be taught. And the conflicts now are not pedagogical. They're not about what works and what doesn't. Nobody cares about that. It's about political agendas. Right. It's about what my group wants to be taught and what that group wants to be taught rather than actually discovering how do we get kids to read? I mean, we all know how to get kids to read, but there's a political agenda around not teaching phonics, for example. So a lot of schools don't teach phonics, even though the kids will never learn how to read properly. So it becomes politics. And I don't believe politics belongs in education. I think education is a product, it's a service. And we know how to deliver products and services really, really efficiently at a really, really low price, at a really, really high quality. And that's leaving it to the market to do.

But your fundamental criticism is that the state can use education to further its authoritarian aims.

Well, or whatever the aims. I mean, think about the conservative today critique of American educational system. It's dominated by the left.

Yeah.

What did you expect? Right. If you leave it up to the state to fund, they're gonna fund the things that promote state growth and state intervention. And the left is better at that. It has been better at that than the right. And they now dominate our educational institutions. But look, if we go back to Bismarck, my problem is placing the state above the individual. So if communism places the class above the individual, what matters is class. Individuals are nothing. They're cogs in a machine. Bismarck, certainly the German tradition much more than the British tradition or the American tradition. The German tradition is to place the state above the individual. I think that's equally evil. And the outcome is fascism. And the outcome is the same. The outcome is the deaths of tens of millions of people. When taken to its ultimate conclusion. Just like socialism, the ultimate conclusion of it is communism. You know, nationalism in that form, kind of the Bismarckian form. The ultimate conclusion is, is Nazism or some form of fascism? Because you don't care about the individual, the individual doesn't matter. I think this is one of the differences in the Anglo, you know, Anglo American tradition, where the Anglo American tradition, even the conservatives have always acknowledged. And it goes back to, especially the conservatives.

The conservatives were there first.

They acknowled. Well, you've defined conservatives to include all the good thinkers of the distant past, and they're all good thinkers. We agree on that.

I'm defining conservatism the way that Burke does. Look, this is a very simple observation. Burke thinks when you open Burke and you actually read him, he starts naming all of these people who he's defending and it's bizarre. I'm sorry, it's just intellectual sloppiness for people to be publishing books called Burke the first conservative, the founding conservative. I mean, this is non stop. It's a view that says Burke reacts to the French Revolution. So conservatism has no prior tradition, it's just reacting to the French Revolution. And this is just absurd.

Can I ask a quick question on conservatism? Are there any conservatives that are embracing of revolutions? So are they ultimately against the concept of revolution?

Yes. Burke himself embraces the Polish Revolution which takes place almost exactly at the same time as the French Revolution. And the argument's really interesting because there's a common mistake, is assuming that Burke and conservative thinkers are always in favor of slow change. I think that's also just factually mistaken. Burke is against the French Revolution because he thinks that there are actually tried and true things that work, things that work for human flourishing and freedom included as a very important part of human flourishing. He, like many others, takes the English constitution to be a model of something that works. So it has a king, it has various other things that maybe your own will say, well, that's a mistake. But still, for centuries it's the leader in many things that I think we can easily agree are human flourishing. And Burke says, look, what's wrong with the French Revolution. What's wrong with the French Revolution is that they have a system that has all sorts of problems, but they could be repairing it. And instead what they're doing by overthrowing everything is they're moving away from what we know is good for human beings. Then he looks at the Polish Revolution and he says the Poles do the opposite. The Poles have a non functioning traditional constitution. It's too democratic. It's impossible to get to raise armies and to defend the country because of the fact that every nobleman has a veto. So the Polish Revolution moves in the direction of the British Constitution. They repair their constitution through a quick rapid revolution. They install a king along the model that looks a lot like Britain and Burke supports it. He says this is a good revolution. So it's not the need to quickly make a change in order to save yourself. That's not what conservatives are objecting to. What they're objecting to is instead of looking at experience in order to try to make a slow or quick improvement, a measured improvement, to achieve a particular goal, instead of doing that you say, look, the whole thing has just been wrong. And what we've really got to do is annihilate a certain part of the population and then make completely new laws and a completely new theory that that's what he's objecting to. That's the French Revolution. And that then becomes the model for communist revolutions.

And for me, I mean, the French Revolution is clearly a real evil and wrong. But it's not that it was a revolution, and it's not that it tried to change everything. I mean, let's remember what was going on in France at the time, and people were starving, and the monarchy in particular was completely detached, completely detached from the suffering of the people. And something needed to change. The unfortunate thing is that the change was motivated by an egalitarian philosophy. Not egalitarian in a sense that I think the Founding Fathers talked about it, but egalitarian in a sense of real equality, equality of outcome, motivated by a philosophy, by Rousseau's philosophy. And it inevitably led. You could tell that the ideas were going to lead to this, to massive destruction and death and the annihilation of a class. You can't. Annihilation is never an option. That is, it's not true that a good revolution never leads to mass death of just whole groups of people, because a good revolution is about the sanctity of the individual. It's about preservation, liberty of the individual. And again, that goes back to. And the French Revolution denies, and Rousseau denies, really, that in civilization there is a value and a thing called the individual.

I think this is a good place to have this discussion. The Founding Fathers of the United States, are they individualists or are they conservatives? So in this particular revolution that founded this country, at the core of which are some fascinating, some powerful ideas, were those Founding Fathers, were those ideas coming from a place of conservatism, or did they put primary value into the freedom and the power of the individual? What do you think?

There were both. I mean, this is something that's a little bit difficult sometimes for Americans. I mean, even very educated Americans, they talk about the Founding Fathers as though it's kind of like this monolith. Yeah. This collective entity with a single brain and a single value system. But I think at the time, that's not the way any of them saw it. So roughly, there's two camps, and they map onto the rationalist versus traditionalist empiricist dichotomy that I proposed earlier. So on the one hand, you have real revolutionaries like Jefferson and Paine. These are the people who Burke was writing against. These are the people who supported the French Revolution.

So when you say real. So when you say Paine, you're referring to revolutionaries in a bad way. Like this is a problem.

These are people who will say, history up until now has been with Descartes, but applied to politics. History up until now has been just a story of ugliness, foolishness, stupidity and evil. And if you apply reason, we'll all come to the same conclusions. And Payne writes a book called the Age of Reason. And the Age of Reason is a manifesto for. Here is the answer to political and moral problems throughout history. We have the answers and it's in the same school as Rousseau's the Social Con. No. You don't like that? Not at all. Oh, I thought it was opposite.

I think they're the opposites.

Okay, so let me just throw in.

A quick question on Jefferson and Paine. Do you think America would exist without those two figures? So how important is spice in the flavor of the dish you're making?

I don't want to try to run the counterfactual. I don't have confidence that I know the answer to the question.

But it's so much fun.

You know what I'm going to offer something that I think is more fun, more fun than the counterfactual is America had two revolutions, not one at first. There is a revolution that is strongly spiced with this kind of rationalism. And then there's a 10 year period after the Declaration of Independence. There's a 10 year period under which America has a constitution, its first constitution, which today they call the Articles of the Confederation. But there's a constitution from 1777. And that constitution is based on, in a lot of ways, on the hottest new ideas. Instead of the traditional British system with a division of powers between an executive and a bipartisan, bicameral legislature, instead of that traditional English model which most of the states had as their governments. Instead of that, they say, no, we're going to have one elected body and that body, that congress, it's going to be the executive, it's going to be the legislative, it's going to be everything. And it's going to run as a big committee. These are the ideas of the French Revolution. You get to actually see them implemented in Pennsylvania, in the Pennsylvania Constitution and then later in the national assembly in France. It's a disaster. The thing doesn't work. It's completely made up. It's not based on any kind. It's neither based on historical experience nor is it based on historical custom on what people are used to and what they succeed in creating with this first Constitution is it's wonderfully rational, but it's a complete disaster. It doesn't allow the raising of taxes, it doesn't allow the mustering of troops. It doesn't allow giving orders to soldiers to fight a war. And if that had continued, if that had continued to be the American Constitution, America never would have been an independent country there. I'm willing to do that counterfactual. What happens during those years where Washington and Jay and Knox and Hamilton and Morris, there's like this group of conservatives. They're mostly soldiers and lawyers. Other than Washington, most of them are from northern cities. And this group is much more conservative than the Tom Paine and Jefferson School. Some historians call them the Nationalist Party. Historically, they give up the word nationalism and they call themselves the Federalists, but they're basically the Nationalist Party. What does that mean? It means on the one hand that their goal is to create an independent nation, independent from Britain. But on the other hand, they believe that they already have national legal traditions, the common law, the forms of government that have been imported from Britain, and of course Christianity, which they consider to be part of their inheritance. This Federalist Party is the Conservative Party. These are people who are extremely close in ideas to Burke. And these are people who wrote the Constitution of the United States. The second Constitution, the second Revolution in 1787, when Washington leads the establishment of a new constitution, which may be technically, legally, it wasn't even legal under the old Constitution, but it was democratic. And what it did is it said, we're going to take what we know about English government. What we've learned by applying English government in the states. We're going to create a national government, a unified national government that's going to muster power in its hands, enough power to be able to do things like fighting wars to defend a unified people. Those are conservatives. Now it's reasonable to say, well look, there was no king, so how conservative could they be? But I think that's a reasonable question. But don't forget that the American colonies, the, the English colonies in America by that point had been around for 150 years. They had written constitutions they had already adapted for an entire century, adapted the English constitution to local conditions where there's no aristocracy and there's no king. I think you can see that as a positive thing. On the other hand, they have slavery. That's an innovation. That's not English. So it's a little bit different from the English Constitution. But those men are conservatives. They make the minimum changes that they need to the English Constitution and they, they largely replicate it, which is why the Jeffersonians hated them so much. They called them apostates. They say they've betrayed equality and liberty and fraternity by adopting an English style constitution.

So I would imagine, Yaron, you would put emphasis of the success of the key ideas at the founding of this country elsewhere, at the freedom of the individual. So the tradition of the British.

I mean, the one thing I agree with Yoam is the fact that yes, the Founding Fathers were not a monolith. I mean, they argued, they debated, they disagreed, they vote against each other. I mean, Jefferson and Adams for decades didn't even speak to each other, though they did make up and had a fascinating relationship after that.

You and I are making up too.

There you go.

It's like the Founding Fathers.

You know, there's this massive debate and discussion. But I don't agree with the characterization of Paine and Jefferson. I don't think it's just to call them rationalists because I don't think they're rationalists. People who've looked at history, at the problems in history and remember this is the 18th century and we're coming out of 100 years earlier. Some of the bloodiest wars in all of human history were happening in Europe, many of them over religion. They had seen what was going on in France and other countries where people were, where people were starving and where kings were frolicking in palaces. In spite of that, they were very aware of the relative freedom that the British tradition had given Englishmen. I think they knew that, they understood that and I think they were building on that. They were taking the observation of the past and trying to come up with a more perfect system. And I think they did. And in that sense, I'm a huge fan of Jefferson. There are two things that I think are unfortunate about Jefferson. One is that he continued to hold slaves, which is very unfortunate. And the second is early support for the French Revolution, which I think is a massive mistake. And I wouldn't be surprised if he regretted it later in life, given the consequences. But they were trying to derive principles by which they could establish a new state. And yes, there was some, there was pushback by some and there was disagreements in. The Constitution, in the end is to some extent a form of compromise. It's still one of the great documents of all of human history, political documents, the Constitution, although I think it's inferior to the Declaration, I'm a huge fan of the Declaration. And I think one of the mistakes the conservatives makes, one of the mistakes the Supreme Court makes and American judiciary makes is assuming the two documents are separate. I think Lincoln is absolutely right. You can't understand the Constitution without understanding the Declaration. The Declaration, what set the context and what sets everything up for the Constitution. Individual rights are the key concept there. And one of the challenges was that some of the compromises and compromises, not necessarily between groups, but compromises that even Jefferson made and others made regarding individual rights set America on a path that we're suffering from today. And I mentioned three last night. One was slavery. Obviously, that was a horrific compromise, one that America not just paid for with a civil war, 600,000 young men died because of it, but the suffering of black slaves for all those years. But then the whole issue of racial tensions in this country for a century and to this day really is a consequence of that initial compromise. Who knows what the counterfactual is in America if there's a Civil war right at the founding, right, because there would have been a war no matter what, but if it had happened in the late 18th century, early 19th century, rather than waiting till 1860s. But then second was Jefferson's embrace of public education, his founding of the University of Virginia, which I think is a great tragedy, which nobody agrees with me on. So that's one of the areas where I'm pretty radical. And then they embrace both by Jefferson and by Hamilton, for different reasons, but embraced by both of them of government, role in the economy. And I do finance, so I know a little bit about finance. And the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton about banking is fascinating. But at the end of the day, both wanted a role for government in banking. They both didn't trust Jefferson didn't trust big financial interests. Hamilton wanted to capture some of those financial interests for the state. And as a consequence, we set America on a path where, in my view, regulation always leads to more regulation. There's never a case where regulation decreases. And we started out with a certain regulatory body around banks and a recognition that it was okay to regulate the economy. So once we get into the late 19th century, it's fine to regulate the, the railroads, it's fine to pass antitrust laws. It's fine to then continue on the path of where we are today, which is heavy, heavy, heavy, massive involvement of government in every aspect of our economy and really in every aspect of our life because of education. So I think the country was founded in certain mistakes, and we haven't been willing to question those mistakes. And In a sense that we've only moved in the opposite direction and now America's become. Whereas I think it was founded in the idea of the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of the individual, at least as an idea, even if not fully implemented. I think now that's completely lost. I don't think anybody really is an advocate out there for individualism in politics or for true freedom in politics.

We'll get to individualism. But let me ask the Beatles and the Rolling Stones question about the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution. What? Well, because it's like which document? Beatles are all. Which document is more important?

It's obviously the Beatles, right? Is there a question?

Is there even a question? But let me then even zoom in further and ask you to pick your favorite song. So what ideas in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence do you think are the most important to the success of the United States of America?

I'll answer the question. But before answering the question, I want a dissent from registered dissent from your runes.

Is it the public education? Is it which.

No, no, no, actually we're not. So look, we're not so far apart on public education. I'm actually kind of surprised that you're so anti Bismarck because his public school system, his national public school system was created in order to stick it to the church. It was the church that ran the schools before then. And okay, but. So that's a different.

I'm all for sticking it to the church any opportunity, but not when the alternative is the nation. Free educational system, where freedom is in education.

Okay, so I want to register a dissent about Lincoln. Look, Lincoln is an important figure and a great man and he was presiding over a country which at that point was pretty Jeffersonian in terms of its self perception. He said what he needed to say. I'm not going to criticize him. But I don't accept the idea that the Declaration of Independence, which starts one revolution, is of a piece with the second constitution, the Constitution of 1787, the Nationalist Constitution, which is effectively a counter revolution. What happens is there is a revolution. It's based on certain principles. There are a lot. Not exactly, but in many ways resemble the later ideas of the French Revolution. And what the Federalist Party does, the Nationalist Conservative Party does, is a counter revolution to reinstate state the old English Constitution. So these documents are, if you're willing to accept the evidence of history, they are in many respects contrary to one another. And so if I'm asked what's the most important values that are handed down by these documents, I don't have an objection to life, liberty and property, all of which are really important things. I do have an objection to the point. The pompous overreach of these are self evident, which is absurd. They can't be self evident. If they were self evident, then somebody would have come up with them like 2,000 years before. It's not self evident. So that's damaging. I like the conservative preamble of the Constitution which describes the purposes of the national government that's being established. There are seven purposes. A more perfect union, which is the principle, the principle of cohesion, justice, domestic peace, common defense, the general welfare, which is the welfare of the public as a thing that's not only individuals, but there is such a thing as a general welfare, liberty, which we agree is absolutely crucial and posterity. The idea that the purpose of the government is to be able to sustain and grow this independent nation and not only to guarantee rights no matter what happens.

But you don't like the. We hold these truths to be self evident. So you're definitely a Beatles guy. You don't want the, you don't want the pompous, you don't need that revelation.

Look, I think that that expression self evident truth, it does tremendous damage because instead of a moderate skepticism which says look, we may not know everything, it says look, we know everything.

Here it is, here's what we know. We know.

We don't know everything.

No, we think so. I'll agree with you, Oram. I don't like self evidence. I don't like self evident because he's absolutely right, it's not self evident. These are massive achievements. These are massive achievements of enlightened thinking, of studying history, of understanding human nature, of deriving a truth from 3,000 years of historical knowledge and a better understanding of human nature and a capacity. It's using reason in some ways better than any human beings have. I mean the founding Fathers are giants historically in my view, because they came up with these truths. I do think they're truths, but they're certainly not self evident. I mean, if they were, Yorm is right. They would have discovered them thousands of years earlier or, or everybody would accept them. Right. I mean, how many people today think that what they state in the document is true? Pretty much, you know, five people. I don't know.

It's very your criticism of modern society.

We'll get there. It's very, very few people recognize that if they were self evident, bam, everybody would have become, you know, would have accepted the American Revolution as Truth and that was it. A lot of work has to go into understanding and describing and convincing people about those truths. But I completely disagree with your about this idea. Or I'll voice my dissent. As we said about.

Register your official dissent about A, this.

Being two different revolutions and B, that the American Revolution had any similarity to the French Revolution.

You know that Jefferson and Paine were. They were in France running a different resolution.

I know they were waiting constantly. I mean, they were in communication with Madison and there was a lot of input going on.

I know. And Jefferson's sitting there in Paris pulling his hair out because Madison has come under the influence of these nationalists and he can't believe it.

The reality is that the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution is vast. And it is a deep philosophical difference. And it's a difference that expressed, I think, between the differences. Yoram in his writings lumps Rousseau with Locke and with Voltaire and with others. And I think, I think that's wrong. I think Rousseau is very different than the others. I think again, Rousseau is an anti Enlightenment figure. Rousseau is in many respects harkening back to a past, an ancient past, and I think a completely distorted view of human nature, of human mind. He rejects reason. I mean, Rousseau is on the premise that reason is the end of humanity, Reason is the destruction of humanity. Reason is how we get civilization. And civilization is awful because I don't disagree.

We're only talking about different texts. When I say I'm just talking about the social contract.

Yeah, but social contract, there's similarity between others, but he takes it in a completely different direction. And we agree social contract is a bad idea, but you can't have a contract that you don't actually voluntarily accept. But so is the French Revolution. Rousseau is about destruction and mayhem and chaos and anarchy. He is the spirit behind the French Revolution. I think the American Revolution is a complete rejection of Rousseau. I think Jefferson is a complete rejection of Rousseau. I don't think Jefferson is a fan of Rousseau. He is of Voltaire and he certainly is of Montesquieu. If you look at it and if you look at the Federalist Papers. The intellectual most cited in the Federalist Papers, I think in terms of just the number of times is Montesquieu. So I think that the American Revolution is an individualistic revolution. It is a revolution about the rights of the individual. The French Revolution is a negation of the rights of the individual. It's a collectivistic revolution. It's not quite the Marxist revolution of the proletarian but it's defining people in classes and it's a rebellion against a certain class and yeah, kill them all, right, off with their heads. And it is a negation. It's about egalitarianism in the sense of equality of outcome, not in a sense of equality, equality before the law or equality of rights, which is the Jeffersonian sense. So I think it's wrong to lump Jefferson into the fraternity egalitarian notion of the French, which is far more similar to what ultimately became socialism and Marxism and kind of that tradition. It's anti individualistic. The French Revolution is. Whereas the American Revolution, the first one, is individualistic. It's all about individual rights. And while there's certain phrases in the Declaration of Independence that I don't agree with, it's beautifully written and it's a magnificent document. So it's hard for me to say I don't agree. Who am I, right? These were giants. Self Evident is one of them. I'm not particularly crazy about endowed by the Creator, but I like the fact that it's Creator and not God or not a specific Creator, but just kind of a more general thing. But putting those two ashes aside, it's the greatest political document in all of human history. In my view, by far nothing comes close. It is a document that identifies the core principles of political truism, of truth. That is, the role of government is to preserve and to protect these rights, these inalienable rights. And that is so crucial that these rights are unalienable. That is a majority can't vote them out, revelation can't vote them out. This is what is required for human liberty and human freedom, the right that is the sanction, the freedom to act on your own behalf, to act based on your own judgment. And as long as you're not interfering with other people's rights, you are free to do so. That is such a profound truth. And that to me is the essence of political philosophy. That's the beginning. And it's based on just. Just not to fall into. Yoland's going to say it's a rationalist. It's based on a whole history of what happens when we negate that. It's based on looking at England and seeing to the extent that they practiced a respect for individual liberty, of property, of freedom, good things happened. So let's take that all the way. Let's not compromise on that. Let's be consistent with the good and reject the bad. And when England goes away, distance itself from the rights of man, from the idea of a right to property. And so on. Bad things happen and when they go to, let's go all in. And I'm all in on the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. And I think the idea of pursuit of happiness is profound because it's a moral statement. It's a statement that says that sanctions and says that ultimately people should be allowed to make their own judgments and live their lives as they see fit based on how they view happiness. They might be right, they might be wrong, but we're not going to dictate what happiness entails and dictate to people how they should live their lives. We're going to let them figure that out. So it has this self interested moral code kind of embedded in it. So I think it's a beautiful statement. So I think the Declaration is key and I, I think there was an experiment and the experiment was post in that period before the Constitution where the experiment was let's let the states, let's have a loose confederation, let's let the states experiment with setting up their own constitutions and role of government and we won't have any kind of unity. And I think what they realized, and I think even Jefferson realized is that that was not workable because many of the states were starting to significantly violate rights. There was nothing to unify, there was nothing to really protect the vision of the Declaration. You needed to establish a nation, which is what the Constitution does. It establishes a nation. But the purpose of that was to put everybody under one set of laws that protected rights. The focus was still on the protection of rights. And I agree with six of the seven of the principles. Right.

Which do you disagree with?

The common welfare, which the general welfare worry about. Right. I think in the way the founders understood it, I think I probably agreed with it. But it's such an ambiguous.

I'm sure you don't agree.

Maybe don't. Maybe I don't.

Can you state the general welfare principle?

Well, the idea that part of the world of government is to secure the general welfare.

Look, this is something we didn't get to it in the debate we really should have is the question of whether there is such a thing as a common good or a public interest or a national interest or a general welfare. Do these terms mean anything other than the good of all of the individuals in the country? That's an. Sorry, I'm interrupting.

Yeah, that's right. So that's why. So I object to it because I think it's too easy to interpret it as. So I interpret it as well, what's good for a general. A group, a common people are just collection of individuals who are. What's good for the individual is good for the common welfare. But I understand that that's something that is hard for people to grasp and not the common understanding. So I would have skipped the general welfare in order to avoid the fact that now the general welfare includes the government telling you what gender you should be assigned. So I would have wanted to have skipped that completely. So I think the Constitution is completely consistent with the Declaration, with a few exceptions, the general welfare. But know perfection is, is. Is a difficult thing to find, particularly for me Right. Politically. But it's, It's a magnificent document, the, the Constitution. It doesn't quite rise to the level, I think, of the Declaration, but it's a magnificent document because, you know, and this is the difference, I think, with. Between the English Constitution. Here's, here's what I see as the difference. The difference is that the, the Constitution is written in the context of why do we have a separation of powers, for example? We have a separation of powers in order to make sure that the government only does what the government is supposed to do. And what is the government supposed to do? Well, fundamentally, it's supposed to protect rights. I mean, all of those seven, or at least six of the seven, are about protecting rights. They're about protecting us from foreign invaders. They're about protecting peace within the country. They're about preserving this protection of rights. And why do we have this separation? So that we make sure that no one of those entities, the executive or the legislature, judicial, can violate rights. Because there's always somebody looking over their shoulder. There's always somebody who can veto their power. But there's a purpose to it. And that purpose is clearly signified and characterized. And that's why I think the Bill of Rights was written in order to add to the clarification of what exactly we mean, what is the purpose? The purpose is to preserve rights. And that's why we need to elaborate what those rights. And Madison's objection to the Bill of Rights was to say not that he objected to having protection of rights, but to listing them because he was worried that other rights that were not listed would not be. And his worry was completely justified because it's exactly what's happened. It's like the only reason we have free speech in America is we've got it in writing as a First Amendment. If we didn't have it in writing, it would have been gone a long time ago. And the reason we don't have for example, the freedom to negotiate a contract. You know, independent government regulation is. That was not listed as a right in the bill, even though I think it's clearly covered under the Constitution and certainly under the Declaration. So there was a massive mistake done in the Bill of Rights. They tried to cover it with the ninth Amendment, but it never really stuck. This idea that non enumerated rights that are still in place. So I don't see it as a second revolution. I think it's a fix to a flaw that happened. It's a fix that allowed the expansion of the protection of rights to all states by creating a national entity to protect those rights. And that's what ultimately led to slavery going away. You know, under the initial, the initial agreement, slavery would have been there in perpetuity because states were sovereignty in a way that under the new Constitution they were not. And in a sense the Constitution sets in motion the Declaration and then the Constitution set in motion the Civil War. The Civil War has to happen because at the end of the day you cannot have some states with a massive violation of rights. What's more of a violation of rights than slavery and some states that recognize it's not, it inevitably leads to the Civil War.

Yaron was just saying that other than the general welfare, these principles are about individual liberties. I just don't think you can read it that way. The first stated purpose of The Constitution of 1787 is in order to form a more perfect union. A more perfect union. It's describing a characteristic of the whole. It is not a characteristic of any individual. If you look at how the individuals are doing, you don't know whether their union is more or less perfect. So what they're doing is they're looking at the condition in which in order to be able to fight the Battle of Yorktown, somebody has to write a personal check in order to be able to move armies. A more perfect union is a more cohesive union. It's the ability to get all of these different individuals to do one focus thing when it's necessary to do it.

Well, it's more than that. Right, so I agree with that. But for what purpose that is. And this is why, you know, this is why it's so hard with these historical documents. Because there's a context and there's a thinking that they can't write everything down right, which is sad because I wish they had. What's the purpose of a more perfect union? The purpose of the more perfect union is to preserve the liberty of the individuals within that union.

Well, how do you know?

Because if you look. What's the rest? So what is the common defense? The common defense is to protect us from foreign invaders who would now disrupt what the rest of the Constitution is all about. All of the Constitution is written in a way as to preserve, find ways to limit the ability of government to violate the rights of individuals. That the beauty of this Constitution and again, its connection to the Declaration and tradition. Right. What came before it. What came before it was a document which they all respected, which was the Declaration, which set the context for this. And now the Union is there in order to provide for the common defense. Great. Because we know that foreign invaders can violate our rights. That's what war is about. To protect us from peace, to establish peace and justice within the country. That's based on law, the rule of law, and again, individual liberty. So to me, when you read the Founders, when you read the Federalist Papers, when you read what they wrote, what they're trying to do is figure out the right kind of political system, the right kind of structure to be able to preserve these liberties. And not all of them had a, from my perspective, a perfect understanding what those liberties entailed. But they were all, even the conservatives that you call conservatives were all in generally in agreement about the importance of individual liberty and importance of individual rights.

Of course, because almost all of these rights are traditional English rights. They exist in the English Bill of Rights, in the English Petition of Right. They exist. All of these.

What you're trying to do is perfect that. They're trying to take the British system and perfect it.

But you keep leaving out that they want to be like England in that they want to have an independent nation. An independent nation is not a collection of individual liberties. An independent nation. The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is the Declaration that there is a collective right, that we as a people are breaking the bonds with another people, and we're gonna take our place, our equal station among the nations of the earth.

For what purpose? The purpose is to protect individual rights. And there's no collective right.

No, your argument is completely circular. You're not allowing the possibility that there could be. That there could be great and decent men that you and I both admire who wanted the independence of their nation, not because that would give individuals liberty, but because the independence of their nation was itself a great good.

So we clearly disagree on this, because I don't think the independence of the nation is good in of itself because it's just as they think it was. I don't think they did. And this is why they tried so hard not to break from England and why many of them, many of them struggled, really, really struggled with having a revolution. Because England was pretty good, right? England was the best. And this is where we should get to the universality of these things, because I do think England was the best and universally and absolutely was the best system out there. And what they struggled to break from England because they didn't view the value of having a nation as the primary. But what they identified in England is certain flaws in the system that created situations in which their rights were being violated. So they figured the only option in order to secure these rights is to break away from England and secure a nation. Now, I am not an anarchist, as Michael Mao says, because we've discussed it, I believe you need nations. You need nations to secure those rights. That is, the rights are not. You can't secure those rights without having a nation. But the nation is just a means to an end. The end is the rights. And I think that's how the founders understood it, and that's why they created this kind of country.

I think this is a good place to ask about common welfare and cohesion. Let me say what John Don wrote, that no man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. He went on, any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. So let's talk about individualism and cohesion, not just at the political level, but at a philosophical level for the human condition. What is central? What is the role of other humans in our lives? What's the importance of cohesion? This is something you've talked about. So Yaron said that the beauty of the founding documents is that they create a cohesive union that protects the individual freedoms. But you have spoken about the value of the union, the common welfare, the cohesion in itself. So can you maybe elaborate on what is the role of cohesion and the collective, not to use that term, but multiple humans together connected in the human condition?

Sure. I keep getting the feeling that Yaron and I are actually having a disagreement about empirical reality, because I think that Enlightenment rationalist political thought features the individual. It features the state. There isn't really a nation other than the nation. The people as a collective is created by the state. And when the state disappears, then the collective disappears. Now, I think that when conservatives of all stripes look at this kind of thinking, that there's the individuals and then there's the state, and there really isn't anything else. When they look at that, they say, even before you get to consequences. It's a terrible theory because when we try to understand any fields of inquiry, any domain, any subject area, when you try to understand it, we try to come up with a small number of concepts and of relations among the concepts, which is supposed to be able to, to explain, to illuminate as much as possible the important things that are taking place in the domain. And conservatives look at this individuals and the state, and they say, you're missing most of what's going on in politics. Also in person.