My Conversation with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College
The 12th president of Hillsdale College and professor of politics and history, Dr. Larry Arnn joins The Charlie Kirk Show for an exclusive interview where Charlie and Dr. Arnn discuss the nature of truth, of being, liberty, and the essential form and function of the United States of America itself. As one of America's most esteemed historians and educators, Dr. Arnn outlines the true purpose of education and why so many of America's educational institutions get it so wrong. Also, Dr. Arnn identifies the single largest and most dangerous threat to the America's constitutional system devised by our Framers with an answer you're not going to want to miss. In a 40-minute conversation you'll be wishing lasted four hours, this is a can't miss episode of The Charlie Kirk Show with the man who, in recent years, has taught Charlie more than anyone else alive. Share this episode with your friends and visit CharlieForHillsdale.com to take Hillsdale's free online classes. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Partnering for Education00:07:09
Hey everybody, happy Saturday.
What a week it has been with Virginia and New Jersey all across the country.
And this Saturday we want to bring you a partnership.
Actually, it's a perfect word to use because the word college actually comes from the word partnership with our college that we love here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
Hillsdale College, the beacon of the North, the place where real learning gets done.
We have the president of Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arn, the last college you could call Hillsdale College, where they talk about Christianity, faith, theology, liberty, truth, America.
I have learned so much from Dr. Larry Arn over the last year and a half and especially, or last year and a half, especially.
And before we get into that conversation, I want to tell you more about our partnership with Hillsdale College.
I have completed eight online courses.
It is my goal to finish every single online course that they offer.
It takes work and things in life that are meaningful.
It take work, takes commitment.
I asked Dr. Arne about this in our conversation, and I could definitely agree with this in my own personal life, which is we want to point upwards.
We want to go towards things that matter.
I know in my own personal life, when I push myself to keep climbing to eternal things, to beautiful things and good things, I find that fulfilling.
And I wouldn't have told you that five or six years ago.
Not that I wouldn't have thought it mattered, but as you start to realize the more you learn, the less you know when you thought you knew it all.
So we've partnered with Hillsdale College, charlie4hillsdale.com, for you to be able to take the very same courses that I think will actually help you make sense of some of the things we talk about here on this program.
We are going a million miles a minute sometimes and dropping names like John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato.
Who were these guys?
Were they important?
From Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, Hillsdale has courses on all that stuff.
And they're interactive.
They're easy to learn, easy to understand.
It takes work.
It takes time.
But I'm right now working through their American Civil Rights course.
It's incredible.
I never knew there was so much depth to the history of civil rights in America.
And as I told many of you, I have finished the Western Heritage course all about Rome, ancient Greece, the medieval period, all the way up to the glorious revolution.
I got an 85% on that test, actually.
So maybe you're at a stage of life where you feel as if there is something missing.
And maybe you come to this podcast to learn something.
Well, let's learn together.
That's what we're doing at Hillsdale College.
Their mission is to try and supply the nation with the information, the knowledge, and the wisdom, which is the knowledge of things that do not change, to anyone who wishes to learn.
I believe right now when we have chaos and uncertainty around us, it's the perfect time to learn.
It's the perfect time to open up books and pursue big ideas.
And that's exactly why I've been so enthused and so excited to tell you about this partnership and work through it.
We have a fair amount of people that are already taking these courses, and I know that it will enrich your life.
And if you have children, or if you are a college student or high school student, these classes will help give you another side of the story if your teacher is teaching all this left-wing, Marxist, post-modernist, deconstructionist, socially relativistic, atheistic garbage.
I think the Hillsdale Online Course can help you at charlie4hillsdale.com.
Or if you're homeschooled and you're just looking for a little bit of an addition to what you're already teaching your children, I think that it can be very beneficial to you.
I asked Dr. Arn about what does education mean?
And Dr. Arne goes through in great detail why we need to dismiss this phrase.
Oh, we just want to teach young people how to think, not what to think.
He says that's a bunch of rubbish.
So charlie4hillsdale.com, check it out.
It's free of charge.
You guys can go through the courses.
You just put your email in there.
You can download them as podcasts.
I know personally, even with my hectic schedule, 90 minutes a day I dedicate towards learning.
I know a lot of you can't do that because I'm literally in the business of teaching at times.
And so therefore, I need to always be learning.
But I encourage you guys to just put part of your schedule saying we want to pursue things that are eternal, beautiful, good, and true.
And I love hearing from you when you guys email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
Two more short things.
I'm really excited to see all of you in Phoenix, Arizona at AmericaFest, tpusa.com slash A-M-F-E-S-T, December 18, December 19, December 2021.
We have Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., Candace Owens, Jesse Waters, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and so many other amazing speakers, including my wife, will be there as well.
Tpusa.com slash a mf.
You can get your tickets today.
In fact, we're running out of space.
We're anticipating well over 10 000 people.
Tpusa.com slash amf.
While you're at it, start a high school or college chapter.
Every young person out there should get involved with their Turning Point USA chapter on their high school or college campus today.
I want to thank all of you that support our show at Charliekirk.com slash.
Support you.
Allow us to continue to grow strong and remain honest with all of you.
Okay, dr Larry Arn is here.
We talk about education, we talk about the founding fathers and he is so wise, so get your pens out, start taking notes and I hope this course actually I hope this conversation motivates you to enroll in one of their free online courses, charlie4hillsdale.com.
It's time to learn.
Everybody, buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House.
Folks, I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk show.
With us today is someone who has taught me more than anyone else in the last year and a half.
I have listened to hundreds of hours of his lectures and read many of his books and honored to have him on the show today.
The president of Hillsdale College, where we have a great partnership together.
Charlie4hillsdale.com, dr Arene, honored to have you with us today.
It's great to be with you.
I've become a great admirer of Charlie Kirk.
Well, thank you, and you've taught me quite a lot.
I tell everyone that your Aristotle course really touched me and strengthened my beliefs in a variety of ways.
Parents in the Partnership00:07:38
So, dr Arn, To start with this open question, and we see this in the news lately: of what is education?
What is the purpose of education?
I see a lot of people kind of fumbling that recently, even people on the center right that would call themselves conservatives, people that say, Well, we got to teach people how to think, not what to think, or we got to listen to kids and give them what they want.
What is the purpose of education?
And that's not the how to how to think, not what to think.
If you just think about it for a minute, it's silly, right?
Do we want to raise them up to think that the moon is made out of green cheese?
Uh, so the point is, if you step back from our mechanistic engineering society, which touches across the political spectrum, by the way, education is not like making anything, it's like helping something to grow.
But the growth is in the thing, right?
You can plant an acorn all day long and you'll never get a pine tree out of it, right?
No matter how you cultivate it.
So, education is growth.
Now, you know, the Latin word education means to lead forth, educare, and that raises the question: which way is forth?
And that means, you know, the Bible says, train up a child in the way he should go, which is not the same thing as the way he wants to go in all cases.
But of course, people do want to grow to be fully what they are.
So, education is just helping them learn.
And you have to step back again in another way, too, because human beings love to know.
The first line of Aristotle's metaphysics: the human being stretches himself out to know.
We want to know.
And that means in any class, it's just highly likely that if you've got something interesting to talk about, the kids will be interested.
And what we think is all the focus, it's across government and it's rooted in education.
We think it's something we do to people and we don't.
So, some parents are saying that they are dissatisfied, they are angry at what's happening at the local school district for good reason.
In response, we see the American Federation of Teachers and Randy Whitgarten say that parents have no role in their kids' education.
In the ideal, Dr. Arne, what is the parents' role in education?
Well, they're partners in it.
In the ideal situation, I mean, first of all, see, parents are in the same position as teachers, by the way.
You know, I have four children, and now I have a grandchild, and I have another one on the way.
And the current grandchild is the most important being on earth.
And my wife and I are going to help her parents raise her.
But that doesn't mean we're going to make anything out of her.
We're going to help her be what by nature she is born to be.
And she is going to do it.
And, you know, she's 11 months old.
You can already see her working on that.
So parents are like teachers.
Now, what should happen is the parents should join with the teachers.
They should be involved.
And, you know, in any partnership, you know, the word college, by the way, means partnership.
And parents are in the partnership.
And you have to agree the terms of the partnership.
But if you do, then you can cooperate.
You're all trying to get the same thing done.
I noticed about homeschools, by the way, that very encouraging thing.
Homeschooling itself is very good and it's growing very fast now because this point you make that people are sick of the schools.
A great exciting thing is co-ops.
Parents get together and pool their resources and their children and they teach them, take turns, hire somebody sometimes, right?
In other words, they're building a school and a school is a natural thing.
Schools are as old as Plato's Academy or older.
So yeah, they should be in the schools.
And see, here's another point.
The curriculum, K through 12, almost everything that's taught are things that anybody can know if they have common sense and take trouble to gather knowledge and think about it, right?
And that means that expertise is not the thing in school.
In fact, at almost any level, you know, you don't have to be a rocket scientist unless you're teaching rocket science.
And so schools can be, must be, should be transparent.
And that means parents can understand too.
Of course they can.
And this whole deal, you quoted the guy from the teachers' union, that we're just the experts and you know nothing.
Think what that would mean if it was true.
It means that you're not competent to raise your own child.
Yes.
And then what work is there for you in the world then?
What can you do?
Everything.
Here's a great episode from the life of Winston Churchill.
When the socialists beat him after the cataclysm of the war, they put a guy named Mr. Douglas Jay, he's famous, for this statement, in charge of education.
And there weren't any ministry of education back then, but he was the guy working on it.
And he said this, and he made the terrible mistake of making it in the hearing of Winston Churchill.
He said, mothers don't often know what's best for their children.
The gentlemen in Whitehall know better.
Whitehall is the governing center of England.
The gentlemen in Whitehall know better, right?
That's just exactly like that idiot Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.
In other words, because we're scientifically trained in some way, by the way, and almost none of these bureaucrats are actually scientifically trained because you can't be scientifically trained in this kind of thing.
So, yeah, it just, and just remember, these arguments that lie behind the administrative state will deprive us of the ability to operate as effective human beings because everything will have to be done for us.
And we are then mere subjects in every sense, like subjects of a tyrant, but also like subjects of all of their work upon us.
And that's it's just despotic.
And it's, you know, very entrenched.
And one of the reasons I think education is important is, you know, you, Charlie Kirk, are a young phenomenon.
Forming Opinion into Truth00:14:29
And have you got married yet?
Yes.
Back in May.
So you got yourself a girl now, a lady, and you got to take care of her, right?
And that means your domain is growing.
And it starts with the family.
And no matter what success you have in your life, and I expect you're going to have a lot more, if you get yourself some kids, which I encourage, then what you will know because they live is that there will be that many people who think something is extremely important has happened the day you die.
You'll have this relationship with them, and it's sacred and it's tight and it can't go away.
If it's destroyed, the resentment will last forever.
And so that's the first thing: the primary human experience.
After that, you got to make a living.
You got to get your bread from the sweat of your face, as Lincoln would say.
And that is sacred to people.
And then the last thing is your contact with the divine, which is written in every reflection you have about right and wrong, every perception you have about what things are and how they fit and in what order.
You're always thinking about God when you're thinking that way.
That's something you said you liked about this course in Ethiopia.
We taught on the ethics, which is Aristotle just explains that sublimely.
And that means that those three things, right?
Your family and your work and your contact with the divine as a moral, intellectual, responsible agent, those are the three fundamental elements of human life.
And Lord, they're messing with them all.
And that means there'll be nothing left for us to do.
And I think what happened in Virginia is people are coming to see that now.
I completely agree with that.
And so I want to kind of zero in on one thing you mentioned, which is debated, which is if education means to lead forth, and I learned this in a Hillsdale online course.
So for everyone listening, go to charlieforhillsdale.com and check it out.
It's a phenomenal course on Western philosophy and just intro to philosophy.
The lead forth, I believe, Dr. Arne, you could correct me, is from the allegory of the cave, is where that imagery came from, where it's a lead forth from darkness into light, which is, so then what is the proper way to lead children?
That is the debate in some ways, because there is three types of camps right now in the education debate that I'm able to perceive.
One that wants to lead children forth towards critical race theory, an emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, the 1619 project.
Another camp that says, we're not going to make any truth claims.
We're just going to show the kids everything that's out there and they can kind of go through the buffet line and choose as they see fit.
But then there's another way, I would call it the Hillsdale way or the classical education way that says we're going to lead them forth towards truth, towards people of strong character, or I learned from you, which means that which is etched in like tattoo.
So, Dr. Arn, can you help explain that a little bit?
Because some parents get nervous when you say you're going to lead them forth to something and say some things are better than others.
Well, remember the caveat, they're going to make the trip, right?
You don't grow for the plant, you just nourish it.
And if you nourish it right, it will grow better.
But yeah, so the first thing, you know, in this day and age, it's kind of extreme.
And so this thing that I think is always true in education is especially important today.
And that is all you do is show them, help them figure out what things are.
And it starts with what they are.
What are you?
What kind of thing are you?
How are we able to have this conversation?
That's one reason why Aristotle is so great.
Because he explains all that, right?
But just think, now compare Aristotle's account of the human being, which, you know, anybody can understand, by the way.
I mean, it takes some work to divine it directly from Aristotle, but Aristotle says, how do you see the cup on the table and know what it is?
How do you do that?
First of all, what is the cup on the table?
And what he says is, like everything that's a being, it's an essence.
It's not just matter, because you could grind it up and it'd be just a pile of matter, right?
It has a form.
It has something to hold it together as what it is.
And the reason we can see its essence is because we have a receptive soul.
Whatever is holding this cup together, I've got one in my hand, whatever is holding that together is also working on my intellect to build it in there.
And he says the intellect is nothing before it thinks.
It is only what it thinks.
And that means it's more perfectly receptive than anything except God.
Now, an immaterial thing cannot have a color, right?
And so when they teach that your race is a structural feature of your being, they are telling the students it is impossible for you to have objective knowledge of anything.
It destroys the enterprise at the first step.
And, you know, that's all materialism, communism, socialism, Nazism, all of those things.
What they do is they reduce the human being to matter.
And so education, and you're not going to get all that in kindergarten.
Education has to be built on the assumption from the first day that you are a free being able to think and comprehend and speak.
And reason and speech are synonyms in Greek.
Logos is the word, right?
And so you start on the first day and you're telling them that.
You're displaying that in various ways.
And as they gain knowledge and character, the way is open for them to understand even that slightly complex thing that I just explained.
And, you know, the best of them will be reading Aristotle's Deonima, which is not a simple book, but it is a beautiful book.
That argument about the soul, that is in book three of chapter four of Deanima, which is Latin for the soul.
The Greek is perisuc.
Suce is soul.
That's where we get psychology from.
And that chapter, book three, chapter four, is about four pages long.
Now, they're difficult pages, but they're very worth understanding.
And things like that should be put out as a goal to students early.
Like, you know, you think you're going to, like there's a proscription in literature today that you do not privilege the text over the reader.
What that means is don't tell them that this is good or bad.
Let them make up their own mind, right?
And, you know, when they're young, you're establishing a point already, and that is whatever claims about excellence are made are questionable, right?
Maybe even foolish.
So instead, what you do is you want students to learn Shakespeare.
You want them even to learn to love it.
But you have to start by telling them, this is very valuable.
This is a wonderful thing.
You're going to see the beauty of it.
In other words, that's how you lead them.
You show them a way up.
They have to travel that way.
I had a kid say to me one time, my dad made me go to church.
And I said, good.
And he said, he never thought to ask me if I should go.
And I said, of course not.
And he said, why is that right?
And I said, because, first of all, he thinks it's valuable.
Telling you that's neutral, that's a position too.
Telling him it's bad, that's a position, right?
But by taking you to church, he could be certain that in the end, you would have to make up your own mind, as you have just demonstrated.
And he said, how did I demonstrate that?
I said, by asking me that question about your dad.
In other words, you're not, you have to get them on a road to build their essential skills, which are reading, writing, and arithmetic, and their knowledge.
And as they learn to evaluate, they will be able to question whatever they need to question.
Whereas if you start them off with the final answer, which is nothing is true except what we think is true, then that crushes all questing for knowledge.
Education works that way.
It needs to be enthusiastic.
It needs to be presented to the students as good, as good for them, as good to know, as beautiful thing to know.
And, you know, by the time they get to college, it's a, you know, the way we proceed around here is, first of all, we, you know, everything is open to question.
But that doesn't mean the teachers and the college are not very influential with the kids because we have a structure here.
And, you know, you can't get into this college unless you commit to the structure.
That means you have to be a volunteer.
And we even explain at the moment that they volunteer that they can't right now understand everything they're getting themselves into.
They will be able to think it through while they go.
And that means they're free and their freedom is cultivated in them by the discipline of learning.
That's education.
So, Dr. Arn, you say this in some of your interviews where some freshmen or sophomore students will say, well, Dr. Arne, I feel or I think a certain way.
And you'll say, well, I don't really care about how you think.
Can you talk about that?
Because that's an interesting way to put it.
Maybe I'm miscategorizing it, but it's a different way than most colleges would do it, which is to say, well, the students know best.
We got to listen to them first and foremost.
Well, so, you know, I'll illustrate with a story.
Many years ago now, 15 years ago or something, I had a young man stand up and it's a crowd, a big, big crowd of people, four or five or six hundred of them.
And he said, if I come to Hillsdale, will you respect my opinion?
And I said, yeah, we don't give a crap about that.
And everybody laughed.
And I said, are you 18 years old, 17 years old?
What can your opinion be worth?
And I said, shouldn't you be about the business of improving your opinions until they approximate the truth?
By the way, you also will not be encouraged to respect my opinion.
You will be encouraged to respect the forming of opinion into truth.
And that's a lifelong effort.
But first, by the way, you have to learn a bunch of stuff in order to go about it.
I think I asked a young man at one point, he, you know, that young man's a graduate of Hillsdale College now.
He asked me, he said, Should I go to Hillsdale or should I go to Princeton?
And I said, You should go to Princeton.
And he said, Why do you say that?
I said, Did you name Princeton because it's very prestigious?
And he said, Well, it is.
I said, Good.
If that's what you want, you should go there.
But if you want to hold to your opinion and be prestigious, go to Princeton.
What if you want to know the truth?
That takes some finding out.
And it's no good me just telling it to you.
You know, I know some things that are true and can argue for them, but why are they true?
How do they fit into all the other things that are true?
That's a quest you have to go on.
And so that's the thing.
You know, it's, you know, the great question to ask young people is always why.
You know, I get kids come up to me wanting to get into Hillsdale College, which turns out it's difficult to get into now.
And they'll say, I'm a conservative and I'd like to go to Hillsdale College.
And I always say, What's a conservative?
It turns out it's kind of hard to define that word, right?
Because there are lots of things.
How do you know which ones to conserve?
You know, there's a lot that need destroying.
And so, you know, eventually you'll reach the definition that, first of all, all such definitions depend upon a claim that the thing is good.
And, you know, because only good things.
And then, and then that raises the question: what makes a thing good?
Which are the prime subject in the Socratic dialogues, for goodness sake, right?
Some of the most important and beautiful things ever written, exploring all the time what is it for a thing to be good.
Aristotle does that too.
And so you've got to get kids on that quest, and then their souls will elevate and they'll become good at figuring out things that are good and not good.
And that's, you know, that's what education is.
The Constitution Explained00:12:16
Well, I can say that taking the online courses and reading your work, Dr. Arne, I've been on that journey and it's been so fulfilling.
And I might have got a later start than I would have liked, but it's been nourishing to my soul.
So I want to ask you about one of your books, The Founder's Key, and kind of a series of arguments you make in that book and the lectures that you do around this topic.
I think it ties into some of the national news items today around our history and also education.
So it's a good segue.
In the book, you make the argument that the Declaration and Constitution fit almost perfectly within one another.
This argument is rejected by a lot of academics.
They think they're actually two separate types of documents, and the Constitution was fixing the errors of the Declaration of Independence.
You argue that the Declaration is kind of our birthday, our birth certificate.
And that's a big deal where the French or the Chinese or other nations, you could kind of approximate within a couple hundred years where they started, but not a specific date and a moment.
Please explain that to our audience and just also about the exceptionalism of our founding and a little bit of what you talk about, the connection, the divine connection between the Declaration of the Constitution.
Okay.
Well, you know, first of all, remember, it's conservative scholars when they differ with the Declaration of Independence who say that the Constitution fixed its errors.
The liberals think that the Constitution blemished the Declaration of Independence.
And my argument, I claim it's the true argument, is that they're hand in glove.
And that's easy to demonstrate on just these simple grounds.
First of all, there's a wide overlap between the people who wrote them.
Second, they didn't understand the Declaration as a departure.
I mean, there's a historical record about that.
The third thing is just read the documents, right?
The Constitution gives its chief task is to give a structure of government.
And the structure is a beautiful thing.
It's worth thinking about for years about that thing, because remember, the first three articles of the Constitution are each about a branch of government.
And the branches are separate.
And the reason for that, Madison says, is because something about the human soul.
Men are not angels, and angels do not govern men.
And so you would only entrust all the powers of government to God.
Now, come to find out.
In the Declaration of Independence, God appears four times.
He appears as the creator, which is the equivalent of a founding father.
He appears as the maker of the laws of nature and of nature's God, the legislative branch.
He appears as divine providence.
That's the executive branch.
And he appears as the supreme judge of the world, the judicial branch.
And those are the four times he occurs.
And the lesson, even in the Declaration of Independence, is you put all those powers in one set of hands if they were God's hands.
Then inside the Declaration of Independence, because you know, the Declaration of Independence is in three parts, a beautiful beginning that's a kind of universal statement of the authority under which they are proceeding.
And they needed that, by the way, because they're getting ready to throw off the English law, and they need something outside and above that to start.
And they start with the laws of nature and nature's God.
The last part is the legislative act, very grand.
Appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, we hereby declare these free and independent states.
So that's the legislature.
In the middle is the case.
They make a case against the king.
That case is introduced at the end of the first part when they say, prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established will not be changed for light and transient causes.
In other words, you need an argument why it's right to do this crazy thing.
And so they make the case.
And the case is in 17 paragraphs.
And the paragraphs are about the bad things the king did.
He interfered with representation.
That is to say, he messed with the legislative branch.
He prevented elections.
He prevented the legislatures from meeting.
The case is about violating separation of powers.
He makes himself more than one branch of government.
And then the third thing is he deprives people of government.
He won't let them make any laws.
And so if you just think about it, what would it, if you just read all of those charges and think, what kind of procedure would it take to remedy all these evils he's done?
And the answer you get is the Constitution of the United States.
And that's how they wrote it.
And so this idea, and see, they also are related in this way.
The Declaration of Independence is a statement of principle.
And the word principle is a very interesting word because it means beginning in its root.
It means the first thing.
But for the thing to be a thing to be a first thing in a series of things, what makes the things into a series?
The answer is they all share the same essence, right?
So that means the word principle has to be a statement of essence.
It has to mean this thing means this.
This thing is this.
That's what the Declaration of Independence does.
Although it outlines, now, for anything to be a being, I'm using these complicated words, I can't help it.
They've become familiar to me.
For anything to be a being or an entity, it has to have something more than a principle.
It has to have a form.
It has to be shaped in a way.
It has to be something you can look at and see.
And the form of the government is named in the Constitution of the United States.
If you want to know what the United States looks like when it acts, it looks like three branches of government.
And you can actually visibly see it because if you, you know, which I do not encourage, if you watch TV, don't.
If you're still going to watch TV, don't watch the news.
Read instead.
Or listen to the radio.
It's better.
But a big event happens in the government.
The TV cameras will be outside the White House because the executive branch has acted, or outside the Capitol, because the legislative branch has acted, or outside the Supreme Court because the judicial branch has acted, right?
And that's what America looks like when it's acting as a whole.
Now you have to have the principle or the final cause, and you have to have the form or formal cause in order to have an entity, a being.
And they each are necessary and related.
Now, it's interesting about the Constitution that they made a form, the Articles of Confederation, during the Revolution, and they regarded it quickly as faulty.
And what was wrong about it?
Well, you know, first of all, it doesn't have separation of powers.
It doesn't have an executive that can act and a judiciary that can check the executive.
And it doesn't have legislatures that can empower the action.
And then the worst thing about it of it all is because our form of government is so radically from the bottom up.
We authorize and make the government.
The government does not authorize and make us.
And the trouble was the Article of Confederation were passed in the ordinary legislature.
And that meant that it couldn't be an authority above them.
And that's what Madison says in a very important document called The Vices of the Political System of the United States.
One of the documents that led to the Constitutional Convention, he says that's a fatal flaw, right?
We, the Constitution of the United States, is the only law that the people as a whole have ever passed.
And then, by the way, the method by which they passed it, which was constitutional conventions appointed by the people, especially for this purpose, singularly for this purpose, and then that whole method disappears, right?
So we make a law, and it can be the supreme law because it's the only one we ever made.
And the only partial making of it after that are the amendments to the Constitution.
And that means those are all recurrences to extraordinary method so that the ultimate authority of the people can remain above the government.
Now, I said that the I just described the United States as a in form as a relatively simple thing, three branches of government.
But of course, there are now 150 or so, it's actually controversial how many there are, law-making bodies in America.
It's very difficult to name them all, right?
But they make laws through procedures that are quite outside the Constitution, and they make the great majority of our laws now.
That's the reason there can be so many laws.
And that's a change in the form that is, in my opinion, extremely threatening to our liberty.
And we have to subject those agencies again to the legislature.
And that's their ways of doing that.
There are plans for that that have been partially, one of them is passed the House of Representatives.
That is to say, if a regulatory act is not ratified by the legislature within a certain period of time, it becomes null.
And then you'd have to have some checks so they don't just automatically ratify them all without thinking about it.
And this is a fundamental change in American government.
If you look at each of the three articles, the first three, there's seven in the original Constitution.
They all begin: this power shall be invested in, right?
So legislative, judicial, and executive.
Only in the first one, only in the legislative power, does it say all the legislative power shall be invested in.
And that's very important because the doctrine, there's a chapter in John Locke's second treatise on government about this on the delegation of the legislative power, he says.
And that's a great evil, dangerous, right?
And so the greatest single overturning of the Constitution is the creation of this administrative state.
And my opinion is we got to bring it back under control.
Fighting for Liberty00:01:05
Well, I totally agree.
And for people that want to learn more about it, they can go to charlieforhillsdale.com.
And Dr. Arn, I want to next time talk to you about Churchill and Lincoln.
But unfortunately, we're out of time for this conversation.
And I just want to reiterate our gratitude to Hillsdale College for what they're doing for our nation.
Just in primus alone, I think makes America a more free place, not to mention their online courses, which, as I mentioned, have really blessed me.
And we have lots of people taking the online courses, Dr. Arnon, and they're finding great fulfillment in them.
So thank you.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
And together we're going to keep fighting for liberty.
Let's save the world, Charlie.
We can do it.
I like the sound of that.
Thanks so much, Dr. Arn.
Talk to you soon.
Take care.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.