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April 17, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:22
FEAR OF FLYING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep813
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Coming up, is it becoming unsafe to fly, to get on an airplane?
I'll talk about a troubling analysis on how Boeing seems to have forgotten how to make a plane.
I'll show how a toxic culture at NPR produces a torrent of lies and I want to make the case for defunding NPR, National Public Radio.
And currency expert Philip Patrick joins me.
We're going to talk about the risk of an economic collapse in the wake of a $34 trillion national debt.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about Boeing and the problems of building a safe and reliable airplane.
I just read an article.
It's in the American Prospect.
And it raises a kind of a remarkable question.
Has Boeing forgotten how to make a plane?
Boeing used to know how to make planes.
In fact, Boeing is very good at making planes, and they've made planes that have flown reliably and safely in the skies for a long time.
But something seems to have gone wrong with Boeing, and we have seen a number of recent examples of various troubling malfunctions.
Now, sometimes when there's a defect in a plane, you find the same malfunction occurring again and again.
And then the regulators and the company itself are very aware something's wrong with the wing, or something is wrong with the software, or something is wrong with the landing gear.
And then you can tackle that problem because it's an isolated problem.
The problem isn't with the plane.
The problem is that we introduce some new software and...
So this is the normal way of identifying problems in a particular company or in a particular airplane.
However, with Boeing, the problems have been all over the place.
In one case, it's the window that blows out.
In another case, it's the landing gear that doesn't deploy.
In the third case, it's the airplane tips over and goes off the runway.
In the fourth case, there's a need to make an emergency landing.
And in the fifth case, it's fumes coming out of the back of the plane and something goes on fire.
And so when you see things going wrong, not here, not there, but all over the place, something is up.
Now, a few weeks ago, a longtime employee of Boeing, and this is a guy named John Barnett.
This is one of those quality control managers who was thought to be a kind of a demanding guy, maybe even a bit of a jerk.
But nevertheless, a guy who's really good at his job, a guy who loves airplanes, who joined Boeing because he was obsessed with airplanes from the time he was a kid, someone who learned everything there is to know about an airplane, somebody who was in charge of the kind of complex supervision of the various elements that go into the deployment and maintenance of airplanes, and yet this guy was pushed out of Boeing.
And he was involved in a case, in fact, he had given depositions about a lot of the problems at Boeing.
Problems with parts, problems with the work ethic, problems with supervision, problems with quality control.
And then, right in the middle of all this, in fact, on the day that he is supposed to give another deposition and be in court, this is in a lawsuit involving Boeing, the guy is found dead in a parking lot with a bullet in his head.
And supposedly self-inflicted.
The guy committed suicide.
Now... The people who know this guy, John Barnett, say he was not suicidal.
There's no reason for him to commit suicide.
He was giving expert testimony in a case, but he wasn't the defendant.
He wasn't facing criminal prosecution.
He wasn't about to be locked up.
So, in other words, there seems to be no evident motive for why this might happen.
And, of course, the case, at least to this point, remains a kind of unsolved, did he really do it?
If he didn't do it, well, what really happened?
Now, the article that I mentioned in American Prospect goes into considerable detail about a kind of degeneracy of a company, a company that was once very attentive to detail, that had a certain kind of employee.
These employees were First of all, academically, very good, particularly in the areas that involved understanding the plane.
Number two, they loved airplanes.
They were old school. They knew the details of airplanes.
They understood every part.
And they saw the job as demanding but also fun.
And then third, there were people at Boeing who were obsessed with quality and so impatient to people who didn't meet up to the standards.
They would report the people who didn't.
They would get the mechanics who weren't doing the job out.
And this is part of what made Boeing such a successful company that built airplanes with the kind of high standards that I think?
Because when you're dealing with airplanes, it's not like other things.
It's not like being, let's just say, a maitre d' or a waiter in a restaurant.
Because if you're a drunk waiter, and Debbie and I once had a drunk waiter, we remember very well, all I have to do, in fact, is I say, the drunk waiter.
And Debbie's like, oh yes, I know exactly the when, the where, and so on.
But if you're a drunk waiter, look, what's the worst that can happen to you?
Well, the worst thing we witnessed, which is the drunk waiter, had a huge tray carrying five plates on it.
And he began to wobble as he was bringing the plates to us.
And Debbie's like, something's wrong with the guy.
And we watched in almost slow motion as the five plates came cascading to the ground.
And then shortly afterward, Debbie smelled alcohol on the guy's breath.
So this was a whodunit in which you were pretty clear who the culprit was.
But, you know, what was the worst of it?
The worst of it was the manager came out and apologized and they got us another meal, which took another 30 minutes, but that's okay.
It was not the end of the world.
In fact, it gave us a story that we've talked about off and on over a pretty long period of time.
But this is not the case with an airplane.
With an airplane, when something goes wrong, lives are at stake.
So we're dealing with a serious business.
And what this article describes is that at Boeing, they, over time, kind of stopped...
Not only did they stop caring about what it's like, what are the highly demanding standards you have to meet to make a plane, but they began to see the kind of anal retentive, obsessed, kind of old style employee at Boeing as a problem.
They began to see that these guys are a pain, they're demanding, they're always writing people up, they're always creating, if you will, trouble at the company.
So what you have is an ethic in which trouble is now defined as the manager who reports other people for not doing their job.
And instead of going to those other people and finding out why they aren't doing their job or should they even stay at the company, you target the manager.
The manager is the problem. Let's get rid of this guy because he's just causing too much of a...
He's not on board with the culture of the company.
So, the article does not mention DEI.
It doesn't mention affirmative action.
In fact, to the degree that it supplies any motive for Boeing doing this, they imply that it's, well, it's mainly because Boeing was trying to cut costs.
Boeing moved from Seattle, Washington into North Carolina.
The employees in North Carolina were not of the same caliber as the people in Washington Now, I think that there may be something to all this, but not quite as much as this article makes out.
Why? Because quite frankly, there were a whole bunch of people from Washington State Who moved to North Carolina with Boeing.
So it's not that if they brought on an entirely new group of employees, they had some of their old employees.
The problem, I think, is not with the location of Boeing.
It is the fact that Boeing bought into an anti-merit ethic.
And this is, I think, where the DEI factor comes in because look at it this way.
What DEI does is it changes corporate culture.
Instead of saying, I want the best guy, you go, how do we get diversity?
All our reports are based upon hiring for diversity, creating diversity, demonstrating diversity, extolling the virtues of diversity.
And so that becomes what you're looking for.
And the simple truth of it is...
That skin color doesn't make you better or worse, for that matter, in flying a plane.
So if you're hiring based upon that, it's kind of like me saying, I want to hire someone, let's just say, to solve math problems.
But instead of looking for people who know how to do math...
You hire me. Debbie goes, you hire me.
Or let's say I decide I need to hire more women.
And so Debbie gets the job.
Debbie's like, Matt, really?
What's this all about? The point is simply this, that I think what's happening in companies, and it's very sad to see this happen at the airlines, is You have a culture of DEI. Now, it's not exclusive to Boeing because you see it in, I mean, I see Delta talking about the virtues of diversity.
United, Debbie and I fly probably United more than anyone else, partly because we're located near a big United hub.
So we're regular United 1K flyers.
And look, I mean, we have not reached a point where I'm like, I have to think twice about getting on an airplane.
But the fact of it is we are heading, I think, more in that direction.
And it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous because airplanes were invented in the early 20th century.
We know the techniques that are necessary to make them safe.
Boeing knows, deep down, they know how to build an airplane.
It's just that building an airplane and having a company that does this and building not one, not two, but thousands of airplanes and doing it in a consistently reliable way requires a corporate culture of airplane building and a culture that pays attention to excellence, attention to detail, those things that take a difficult job and do it well.
And so when you take your eye off of that ball and look at something else, it doesn't have to be DEI. You could be looking at anything else, but if you're looking at anything other than merit, other than getting the right kind of employee, other than having the right amount of attention to detail, you're going to get problems.
I think that's what's going on at Boeing.
It's not clear whether the problem will be fixed, but ultimately I think it's the airplane traveler, it's the American customer who stands to pay the price for the things that Boeing is doing or no longer doing well.
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I want to talk about NPR, National Public Radio, but I want to talk about it in the larger context of what has happened in the mainstream media.
Now, NPR is not the same as other media in that it is a government entity.
It is a, well...
I suppose you'd have to say a state actor.
Now, NPR chafes at this idea.
They act like, no, we're not propaganda.
We're not a state outlet.
We cover the news.
But the simple fact of it is they get substantial government funding.
They're like PBS, public broadcasting system.
So if you get substantial public funding, you are a public entity.
And you can pretend all you want that you're independent and point to your management structure and so on.
But the truth of it is, you know, where's the money coming from?
And if the money is coming from the taxpayer through the state, well, the state which confers benefits always retains the right to pull strings and to use leverage over the entities.
I mean the government for example, think if you have a government-run airline, who's going to say how the airline functions? The government's going to. If the government gives money to universities, the government, even though the universities themselves are private, the government tells you what you can and cannot do with the money. You've got to follow anti-discrimination laws, or you've got to pay attention to the climate, or you've got to, the government imposes conditions.
Now, nevertheless, NPR does resemble other media entities in the sense that it has gone from being tilted to the left, biased to the left, to becoming just a propaganda engine.
And there's a very interesting expose that was done by a guy who works at NPR. This guy is still at NPR. His name is Uri Berliner.
He's a business editor there.
And he's worked at NPR for a quarter century.
And his article begins by talking about the fact that he says, you know, you think of NPR, you think about these kind of weird progressive people who have gray streaks in their hair and they drive, you know, Subarus and they are lesbian activists and they...
They're eccentrics.
And they went to eccentric small liberal arts colleges like Middlebury or Oberlin or Sarah Lawrence College.
And this guy, Yuri Berliner, goes, well, I'm like that.
He goes, you know, I went to Sarah Lawrence College.
He goes, my mom was...
He says he was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother.
Wow. So, this guy...
He says, I drive a Subaru.
And so, he fits the NPR... And yet, he says, although NPR in the past had a liberal bent, he says, nevertheless, these people at NPR were cosmopolitan, they were curious, they were open-minded, they were willing to listen.
And he says NPR had a certain distinctive sophistication, also a distinctive breadth of their coverage, and NPR took pride in the fact that you would have some farm guy on a tractor.
Nevertheless, with his station turned to NPR as he delivered fertilizer, for example, in a field.
So NPR, in other words, was trying to aim for a broad audience.
They were trying to aim for not just a kind of intellectual audience, but an audience of ordinary Americans who wanted to learn about what was going on in the world around them.
And he says, but the whole structure at NPR has changed.
He goes, first of all, while we used to have an audience that was That was tilted left.
But we still had about 25% of our audience was conservative.
And there was a fair number of moderates and independents.
And he goes, no.
In the last 10 years, that has changed completely.
Our audience is not only overwhelmingly left-wing, it's overwhelmingly white.
And he says, we don't even have independents.
Even normal Democrats no longer listen to NPR. We are now catering to the far left.
And to quote him, we don't have an audience that reflects America.
Now, what has changed?
Well, it turns out that one of the biggest things that changed was Trump.
He says that once Trump came on the scene in 2016, NPR pivoted from being a news outlet that sort of covers things to To become a news outlet dedicated to, quote, damaging or toppling Trump's presidency.
NPR saw its mission.
This is our mission. We have to damage or topple Trump.
And so one of NPR's top sources during the whole Russia collusion story was Schiff, was Congressman Schiff.
Schiff appeared all the time on NPR. He was taken as this kind of authority on NPR. And then he goes,
In other words, no admission of wrongdoing, nothing about the fact that we were taken in for two years by this shift guy, we want to put in quality controls to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again, none of that.
Then the Hunter Biden story, same thing.
One of the editors at NPR, this is the managing editor for News at the time, Well, the Hunter Biden story was not a distraction.
The Hunter Biden laptop was in fact Hunter Biden's laptop.
There was all kinds of information on that laptop, there still is, that shows the operation of a corrupt multi-million dollar influence peddling network involving the sitting president of the United States.
So this was immensely newsworthy, but NPR did its best to suppress the laptop.
Same with COVID coverage.
And Uri Berliner goes into it.
He shows that NPR, for example, was constantly putting out false information about COVID. And then when there was a discussion about how do we get COVID, there are two main theories.
One is it developed naturally in a wet market.
The other is that it was made in a lab.
And it unintentionally, or perhaps intentionally, leaked out of that lab.
That's the lab leak hypothesis.
Right. And even though there was conflicting opinion among experts about which is right, was it a natural origin, was it a lab, NPR decided that in fact it was natural origin.
NPR decided that they would not give any respectable coverage to the lab leak idea and then even though More and more evidence appears, prominent scientists.
The energy department conducts its own investigation and goes, we think that it came from a lab.
NPR refuses to budge.
NPR acts like all those sources must be wrong.
Our theory is right.
And so the question becomes, What kind of a news organization is this that isn't really covering the news and is just giving you an ideological narrative?
NPR has a new CEO. And I've been looking at some of her posts, and it's quite clear that NPR is in the hands of people who are, well, at least if the new CEO is any indication, unhinged lunatics.
So here is Catherine Marr, M-A-H-E-R, the CEO of NPR. She complains that CNN has been talking about the tragedy of damage to retail zones and shoe stores in LA. And she says,
this is the head of NPR, I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive, but it's hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people's ancestors as private property.
So what is she saying? She's saying, why are we getting all worked up about looting?
We have a system of capitalism that is itself unjust and structurally evil.
It was based upon taking people's property and land that doesn't belong to you.
What she's really saying is looting could be seen as a form of social justice.
And she goes on to say, also reporting on extinguishing shoe store fires is just lazy reporting.
And she goes on to say that while the stuff that people steal is insured, quote, the right to be black and breathe is without measure.
I guess this is some sort of reference to George Floyd.
So what she seems to be saying is that this looting that's occurring in the aftermath of the George Floyd incident is sort of justified because...
This black man couldn't breathe.
So, again, you're dealing here with people who are flaming ideologues and yet ideologues in powerful positions.
Why? Because they're spending your money and mine.
This is the significance of NPR that I began with.
They're taxpayer-funded. And why?
Why should they be? Not to say that NPR, if it wanted to perpetuate a propagandistic left-wing ideology, well, I guess they have that right.
On their own dime.
So they should fund it.
Get Soros to fund it.
But not you and me.
So I think this is a case where Republicans need to make it clear.
And look, we won't be able to defund NPR just through the House.
But the sad truth is many Republicans vote to fund NPR. And so becoming aware that this is all part of the propaganda engine that is against us, And we should not be a part of bankrolling it.
So defunding NPR becomes a way of stopping to pay through the taxpayer system for systematic assaults, not only on us, not only on what we believe, but in many cases on truth itself.
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They've been part of this terrible cancel culture.
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$34 trillion causing many people to wonder, hey, when is this house of cards going to come crashing down?
And then we have a presidential election, very turbulent, massive implications for the future of the country.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Philip Patrick.
He's a precious metals specialist, a spokesman for Birch Gold Group.
He was born in London, got his degree in politics and international relations at the University of Reading.
He was a wealth manager at Citigroup and London's Wall Street before taking his current position at Birch Gold in 2012.
Philip, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me. I'm trying to make sense of the current state of our economy.
On the one hand, I keep getting proclamations from various spokesmen for the Biden administration.
Things are going really well.
We're bringing inflation down.
the stock market is doing pretty well and yet on the other hand it seems like ordinary Americans are not feeling it are in fact feeling the opposite and so who is right the the Biden administration and its spokesman or is it the ordinary American in the grocery store or trying to fill up gas in his car what is the what is the reality of our economic situation?
Well, I think, you know, the people best suited to judge our situation are the American people.
And the reality for us is that our paychecks are not going as far as they used to, right?
Under the Biden administration, cumulative inflation has been around 18.6%.
Wages have risen in the same time period only around 13.5%.
So that's a net loss of $4,300 of purchasing power for the average American family.
And of course, we have this administration essentially gaslighting.
Right? They're pointing to GDP numbers last year, dressing it up as a positive when GDP numbers match almost the exact rate of inflation.
So we're getting our woes packaged as positives and sort of rammed down our throats.
But The American people, as you mentioned, are not falling for it.
Our paychecks are not going as far.
We're amassing debt at record levels today.
Credit card debt over a trillion dollars.
We're seeing defaults now at very high levels.
So the reality for the American people is a rough economy under Biden.
And I think he's going to have a problem come 2024.
The economy is one of the big issues that he's facing.
Now, I assume that the Biden administration has economists that are advising it that are, even if they're left-wing, even if they're progressive, you would assume that they are competent.
Don't they recognize that this promiscuous level of government spending, this accumulation of debt to the levels in which even paying the interest on that debt becomes a heavy burden, Do they recognize that there is not a whole lot of place for this train to go and that there are quite severe consequences, just like you or I would have?
I mean, if we take on debt beyond a certain point, then our economic situation becomes unviable.
And is that happening to the United States?
And if so, why aren't the experts around Biden sounding the alarm?
Look, I think they're starting to, but the reality is, you know, I've been saying the same thing for a long time now.
There are many examples in history of nations becoming empires, controlling the money supply, increasing the money supply and then collapsing the empire.
This has happened time and time and time again in history.
The levels that we're amassing in the current climate We're good to go.
Basically did a 60-minute interview telling Congress essentially to stop acting like children.
They said, you know, it's really the responsibility of legislators to pay their own bills and not hand them down to our children and grandchildren.
He implied that the problem was becoming unsustainable.
So I think that was a slap in the face to the Biden administration.
This is the man that's essentially responsible for the purchasing power of the dollar, telling our legislators to grow up and stop acting like children.
So I think that as the situation is becoming more urgent, we're starting to hear voices louder and louder, even within the administration or within the Fed, I should say.
When I think back to the Fed under Alan Greenspan and even further back under Paul Volcker, On the one hand, they recognize that Congress has a responsibility.
But on the other hand, they also realize that we at the Fed have enormous leverage.
We decide ultimately on the money supply and we have at least a certain measure of autonomy.
Do you think that the Fed has been sufficiently...
Protective of its own prerogatives, so that they say to the Biden administration, hey, listen, if you want to spend money, go to Congress and raise taxes.
But we're not simply going to act as the money printing machine for your irresponsible conduct.
And so my question is, you know, it's one thing to lecture the Congress and say, you need to do this and you need to do that.
But has the Fed kept up its end of the deal?
I would say up until this point, not really.
They've really facilitated this policy on behalf of the administration.
Certainly, the end of last year, I thought this Fed was getting very political.
Powell was coming out, suggesting as many as three interest rates cuts this year.
At the time, inflation was 50% above the Fed's target.
So, you know, if they're purely impartial, There's no suggestion to do that.
So the Fed were looking political.
Since then, since October, we've seen three CPI reports consistently on the upswing, and the Fed is starting to change their rhetoric.
But quite frankly, this Federal Reserve has a problem, right?
You know, they're trying to get inflation under control.
But we have a government that is dead set on running huge spending packages and huge deficits, which are ultimately highly inflationary, and it's putting them in a very tough position.
Look at the debt we have.
You mentioned Volcker earlier.
Volcker made the hard decisions, but Volcker could make the hard decisions, right?
When inflation was raging in the early 80s, he put the federal funds rate double the rate of inflation, and with Within about 18 months had stamped out inflation that had been burning for 10 years.
We couldn't get interest rates that high, even if we had a Fed that was willing to make the tough decisions today.
We just have too much debt to do it.
So the Federal Reserve are in a tough position.
But I think they're getting less political.
Like I said, end of last year, they were seeming very political.
This year, they seem to be taking the inflation fight a little more seriously, which is why I don't think they're going to lower rates.
Certainly not anytime soon with CPI now ticking up.
And finally, let me ask you, Philip, I see that there are people who use various strategies to protect themselves from the kind of diminution in the value of money.
One of them, of course, is gold and precious metals.
Another that people sometimes talk about is investing in various types of cryptocurrency or they try to say, all right, I'll protect myself by going to another currency other than the U.S. dollar.
Do you recommend a kind of mix of strategies to try to reduce our reliance on the US dollar or to hedge against the dollar, as they say?
Yeah, look, I think diversification is key.
I would say looking at cryptocurrencies, you know, that obviously in this climate have been performing incredibly well, right?
Outperforming gold, certainly.
What you get with crypto, they don't have the direct relationship with currency that gold does, right?
Bitcoin for example has largely been moving in lockstep with the Nasdaq so it's been moving with the market. Gold tends to move against it. Gold and the dollar also have a directly inverse relationship so literally when dollars go down gold goes up. So is crypto an interesting space? Absolutely we're seeing incredible growth in those areas. With incredible growth comes volatility right?
So I would say gold, you're probably not going to see the level of growth you see in crypto, but also, you know, somewhat less volatility.
And I think gold is more of a direct currency hedge.
And you're seeing it now globally.
Central banks in 2022-2023 have bought more gold than any other years in history.
And it's all down to currency, right?
We're seeing de-dollarization amongst the bricks.
The BRICS do not amongst them yet have a currency to dethrone the dollar and they're using gold because gold has stability, legitimacy as a means to de-dollarize.
So demand from central banks is rising dramatically for gold and it's on the back of dollar devaluation and weaponization.
What I always say to people, listen, they're facing the same challenges that we are.
They're seeing inflation and a loss of purchasing power, and they're hedging their exposure using gold.
What applies to them, of course, applies to us as individuals, just at a much smaller level.
Very interesting stuff.
Thank you, Philip Patrick.
I really appreciate you joining me.
I've been talking to Philip Patrick, Precious Metal Specialist at Birch Gold Group.
Thank you. I'm discussing the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and I want to talk today about the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.
The relationship is through the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson, of course, was the author of the Declaration.
He made a draft of it, submitted it to the Continental Congress.
They made some changes and some adaptations, and then the document was jointly promulgated.
So it's Jefferson's document as modified that became the final copy of the Declaration.
And Lincoln revered the Declaration and he revered Jefferson and yet there is a subtle difference between Jefferson and Lincoln and this is the difference that Harry Jaffa highlights in his book Crisis of the House Divided and I want to expound the meaning of this difference.
Now, Jefferson was very much a product of the enlightenment.
He was a product of the enlightenment understanding of man.
And in the enlightenment, the predominant view of understanding society came from the philosopher John Locke.
So according to John Locke, society is something that is not natural.
It doesn't occur all by itself.
And in saying this, John Locke was breaking with a long tradition that went all the way back to Aristotle and Plato.
In which Aristotle believed that man is a social animal.
So for Aristotle, you don't have to explain why there is society because it is the nature of man to seek out society, to create society, to live in society.
And for Aristotle, there's no such thing as man living outside of society.
But in the Enlightenment, a kind of influential doctrine came to be discussed.
It was called the doctrine of the state of nature.
And the assumption was that at some point in the distant past, man did live by himself.
Man lived in the jungle, there was a hunter-gatherer society perhaps, and there was no community.
And there was no felt need for it because people just essentially went out there and found the ways to survive.
And they had no real need for other people.
True, they might be attacked by an animal or a lion and they fought off the lion or did their best to run away.
And they didn't need to be in any kind of community.
So then the question arose, how do you get community?
And the answer is social contract.
And the concept of the social contract is very interesting because, well, first of all, no one ever signed a social contract.
It's not as if you or I got together and go, listen, we are living in the state of nature, but we kind of feel like it's better for us to live in society.
And so let's all come up with a contract and we can all sign on the dotted line.
So the social contract becomes...
A thought experiment, a hypothetical.
But the important thing here is that this social contract is ultimately self-interested.
It's a social contract based upon, well, it's based upon enlightened self-interest.
And here's the basic reasoning of it.
It is that in a state of nature, you can provide to some degree for yourself But on the other hand, your safety is constantly going to be threatened.
And therefore, it's better for you to enter into a society which is a kind of collective pact to provide for your security.
And so you do it, but you do it with a view to your own self-protection.
That's your rationale for doing it in the first place, and that's really your main rationale for staying in the social contract.
Now, the remarkable implication of a social contract is that you are not entering into the contract by undertaking any kind of obligations or duties at all.
Well, you have a duty, if you will, not to harm others or you have a duty to follow the law, but by and large, you're getting into this pact for self-protection.
Now, Let's say that you have a society as existed in the 18th century in which there is slavery in parts of the society, in large parts of the society, and certainly all over the South.
Well, there were many people who believed in the social contract, Jefferson included, who believed that in a social contract, You have a right to enter into the contract, but that contract doesn't obligate you by itself to care about other people's rights.
You're doing it for your own reasons.
You're doing it to protect yourself.
The protection of other people is their concern.
So they can enter into a social contract or not, but if they're not part of a social contract, The people who are in the contract don't really owe anything to the people who are outside of it.
So think about what this means for slavery.
Because what it means really is that even if you concede that the slaves are human beings, the simple truth of it is they're not in the social contract.
They have been brought here by force.
They are outsiders.
They are not citizens.
And so society as a contract doesn't really owe them anything.
Now, this may seem like a very harsh way to look at it, and Jefferson would have modified this way of looking at it in certain ways, but the modifications are also based upon self-interest.
In other words, Jefferson would say things like this.
He would say things like, well...
We have to be careful about the way that we treat slaves because it may be that at some future time, when they are free, we are going to have to deal with them and then they're going to have the memories of all these injuries we inflicted on them.
Or to put it somewhat differently, what if there's a slave revolt and oppositions with the slaves are exchanged and now they're in charge and we're no longer in charge.
Try to think of the bloodbath that they're going to unleash on us because of the things that we did to them.
So you can see here that Jefferson is very aware of the instability of the situation with slavery, the danger of having people who are captives, who are looking for ways to break out, to get out, to run away, to organize a revolt.
But all of this is within the orbit of self-interest.
All of this is a way of saying that, look, Ultimately, the only reason for me to treat the slaves well is because otherwise they may secretly plot to kill me.
And so, I don't owe them anything.
I'm not treating them well out of obligation.
Now, true, I may be a paternalistic and kind master and not inflict undue suffering on the slaves, but again, the Enlightenment philosophy itself doesn't supply any reason other than self-interest for paternalism We're good to go.
Now, Jefferson would partly agree with that.
Jefferson's view is that slavery, he once said, corrupts the masters.
It makes the masters, you know, lazy and indolent and selfish and it makes them act in a kind of brutish and ungentlemanly manner.
But this is a kind of a prudential argument.
It may or may not be true.
Edmund Burke actually did not think it's true.
When Edmund Burke was speaking about this issue in the British Parliament, Edmund Burke said the exact opposite.
Actually attaches the masters more to the idea of freedom.
Why? Because they can contrast the freedom that they enjoy with the captivity and servitude of the slaves.
So the existence of the slaves convinces the masters, hey, freedom is really important and we need to hang on to our own freedom.
So in some ways, according to Burke...
Masters become more protective of their own freedom because they can see the exact opposite of it, namely slavery, in their midst.
And so, while Jefferson is saying that if you're a master, you might want to think about giving up this relationship, for Jefferson, it was mainly due to the fact that That slavery introduced dangerous instability into society.
So you have selfish reasons based upon long-term self-interest to maybe not be a master.
But for Lincoln, it's much simpler than that.
For Lincoln, it comes down to an issue of moral principle and it comes down to an issue that, hey listen, if you want to enjoy your rights of freedom, then you should now and not for reasons of self-interest, but just because of the moral truth of the matter.
You don't want to be a slave, you shouldn't want to be a master either.
So for Lincoln, this is a matter of political morality.
It's kind of like saying, you want other people to treat you well, you treat them well.
Not because you have to, but because you accept the reciprocity built into the situation.
You want to be treated a certain way, and so you need to treat other people in the same way.
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