Sept. 17, 2022 - Epoch Times
09:29
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Vivek Ramaswamy, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. | |
| Always love being here. | |
| Thank you, Jan. | |
| Vivek, I'm very excited about your new book, Nation of Victims. | |
| It's sort of a sequel, I guess. | |
| It's being described to Woke Ink, which I thought was an incredibly important book. | |
| You're actually telling people I've seen that it's more important than Woke Ink. | |
| So why don't you tell me why you think that? | |
| In Woke Ink, I point out the problem. | |
| And I particularly point out the problem of how corporate America exploited many of these victimhood narratives. | |
| And this postmodern ideology to sell more products to consumers. | |
| And I point out all of the hypocrisies of corporate America in doing it. | |
| However, it does take two to tango. | |
| And this book is about the other side of that equation. | |
| What is it about our national psyche, the general population that causes us to gobble up these victimhood narratives, to eat it up? | |
| And that's a deeper question. | |
| It goes to the heart of a national identity crisis that we're in, where today Everyone in America, black, white, left, center, right, doesn't matter, views themselves as a victim. | |
| And the question I ask in this book is, how can we turn that around and restore a national identity based on the unapologetic pursuit of excellence? | |
| And this is personal to me. | |
| I mean, this is part of the reason my parents came to this country four decades ago. | |
| It is the meritocratic system that they taught me America was all about when I was growing up. | |
| It's the one that actually allowed me to achieve the success that I have. | |
| But if we lose that, I think we lose the heart of American identity itself. | |
| At the end of the day, you can point to hypocrisies on the other side all you want. | |
| That's not going to improve the country meaningfully unless we fill our national void, our vacuum of identity, with something more meaningful. | |
| And that's something I try to do in this book. | |
| It's incredible that victimology or this victim narrative has taken such an incredibly prominent place across, it seems like, all of the major institutions of the country and almost of the West. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's right. | |
| This is not just an American issue. | |
| I look at this in an American context. | |
| Almost every theme in this book is a transnational question for the modern West as we know it. | |
| One of the things I try to do in this book, Jan, is just to be very frank and very honest. | |
| I did two things that I was advised not to do by different people. | |
| One is I have a chapter in this book about black victimhood. | |
| I think you cannot have a thorough discussion about how to improve black lives, how to lift up people from poverty, how to Restore greater equality of opportunity in America without having an honest conversation about the culture of victimhood that I think has oppressed the black community from within. | |
| And I use those words intentionally. | |
| They said, you can't write that chapter, you're not black. | |
| I said, I don't believe in that. | |
| I think that if we care about driving solutions in this country, we have to be able to speak openly and candidly about the problem, including the victimhood complexes, wherever they may exist. | |
| But right after that chapter comes a separate chapter on what I call conservative victimhood, a new reactionary kind of victimhood to the liberal or woke victimhood narratives on the other side, to say that, you know what, you're a victim? | |
| Well, guess what? | |
| I'm a bigger victim. | |
| I've been even more oppressed. | |
| Look at the free trade policies and what that's done to us here at home. | |
| Look at the way in which the reverse discrimination against me now prevents me from being able to succeed. | |
| You know what I say is that Everyone thinks they have a legitimate claim for grievance. | |
| We're not going to move forward as a country if we just remain mired in the Oppression Olympics, in the Victimhood Olympics, because there is no gold medalist in the American Victimhood Olympics. | |
| It is only America that loses in the end. | |
| And what we're going to have to do is rediscover our path back to excellence, to the shared unapologetic pursuit of excellence. | |
| That's a complicated shift. | |
| It's a 180 degree move from victimhood to excellence. | |
| And the most uncomfortable part of the book is I think the path from victimhood to excellence runs through forgiveness. | |
| And I do make a case for mutually assured 360-degree forgiveness because I do think that that's going to be part of what it takes for us to lay down, metaphorically speaking, at least for now. | |
| Lay down arms to be able to move forward to a shared national identity revolving around excellence. | |
| And so the goal is going to be in some ways to make the audience uncomfortable. | |
| Whether it's a liberal audience or a conservative audience, no one's going to leave this book feeling totally comfortable. | |
| But I think each of us, myself included, I mean a lot of this on the conservative side of this was introspection to what I've been doing over the last couple of years to take a hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves what part we're playing in reviving that national identity because simply tearing down the other side That's easy. | |
| That's not going to get us there. | |
| One of the things that, you know, sort of comes out as I've been reading is that, and it reminded me of something Thomas Sowell talks about, I think, repeatedly in his work, and that's just how incentive structures work and how they've been changed to kind of support this victimhood narrative in so many ways and how this would be an important part of the transformation you're describing. | |
| No doubt we've created an incentive structure in this country that rewards victimhood over actual victory. | |
| Victimhood, not victory. | |
| That's kind of the mantra for who gets rewarded. | |
| That's why you have college applicants now reinventing themselves. | |
| Even Asian Americans, second generation and third generation Asian Americans, find it hard to get into college with just their SAT scores or being good at the violin or whatever it might be, to use the stereotypical examples. | |
| Now, we're going to actually say that, no, no, no, I'm actually a person of color. | |
| I, too, have been through hardship. | |
| Everyone's competing to tell their own tale of victimhood because that's what society rewards, culturally, even economically, certainly educationally. | |
| And the way I describe it in the book is, to use the parlance of markets, Victimhood is a new currency that is trading at an all-time high. | |
| It's in a bubble. | |
| And what do people do before a bubble bursts? | |
| They cash in their chips. | |
| And that's what everyone's trying to do, is to cash in the chips of victimhood before the victimhood bubble bursts. | |
| And that's why everyone's in a race, to compete, because that's what society is ultimately rewarding. | |
| From college admissions, to the kinds of jobs you get, to even how many people like you on the internet or on social media, that's become the new currency of our nation. | |
| More valuable than the U.S. dollar is almost a tale of U.S. victimhood. | |
| What happens when this bubble bursts unless there are prescriptions that are enacted? | |
| Have you thought about this? | |
| Yeah, look, I think that one of the things I say in the book is that we may be in for times of hardship ahead, including severe economic hardship, but, and this is the hard part, it's the hard pill to swallow, but that could actually be long-run good for our culture. | |
| In certain ways, in the last 15 years, our problem may be that we haven't encountered enough hardship. | |
| I mean, the Federal Reserve is printing money from on high, falling like mana from heaven, skiing on artificial snow. | |
| As a society, when the party stops turning, now rates are going up. | |
| I mean, economically, we're entering a climate where we may encounter real hardship. | |
| That, hopefully, can be a dose for reflection, a catalyst for introspection, both as individuals and as a people, to increase our actual real productivity. | |
| Part of increasing real productivity is letting go of this culture of laziness, where people assume that they're going to have a job and that they're entitled to have a job, even if they're actually quiet quitting, as the new expression goes. | |
| I think that this economic shock in the coming years, if it comes, Could actually be fortifying for our culture, fortifying even for American identity. | |
| We have to not just walk the walk. | |
| We have to not just talk the talk. | |
| We have to walk the walk. | |
| Hardship is not the same thing as victimhood. | |
| I think that this next few years may, for better or worse, give us the opportunity to discover that ourselves. | |
| So how do you envision this sort of excellence and forgiveness route as a, I guess, a means to reimagine the American identity that can actually kind of work for society as a whole, which I guess is something that the role that Christianity played in the past? | |
| I think absolutely Christianity has played that role. | |
| And to those who aren't of the Christian faith, I'm Hindu myself. | |
| I think many other religious traditions borrow on the same concept of forgiveness. | |
| And if you don't like religion as your cup of tea, fine. | |
| Immanuel Kant, who I actually explored deeply in this book as well, offered a similar case For forgiveness. | |
| So whatever your path is to getting there, I think this is the hidden bridge from victimhood to excellence, where right now we have the victimhood wars. | |
| Everyone has their swords out, fighting it out, duking it out. | |
| Who ranks higher on the victimhood hierarchy? | |
| But in order for us to unite around a shared path to the pursuit of excellence, we have to lay down our arms first. | |
| And I think that that is the case for forgiveness that I make to say that, you know what, if you look back long enough, everyone is going to have a grievance as defined by their genetic identities or by their tribes. | |
| But given that we can't possibly adjudicate and hierarchically rank those, let's just put our grievance weapons down. | |
| Ask ourselves what actually binds us together as one people. | |
| And I think that our shared pursuit of excellence ranks pretty high in the list. | |
| For something that could fill that void. | |
| And it sounds pretty high level when we're talking about it here, Jan. | |
| It takes a whole book to go into the philosophy behind that, both from a secular perspective and a faith-based one. | |
| But I hope that that's something that people have a chance to do in the book. | |
| Well, Vivek, I'm very excited about finishing it. | |
| The book is Nation of Victims. | |
| You know, this is a quick hit. | |
| I'm excited to have you on for the full American Thought Leader sometime in the very near future so we can really explore some of these issues and also talk a little bit more about your new fund and some of the work you're doing. | |
| Thank you, Jan. | |
| It's great to see you, as always. |
Export Selection