7 Virtues That Will Make Your Life Better explores courage as an "amoral" but necessary foundation, like Jesus’ crucifixion, while critiquing social media’s reckless prioritization of prudence. Wisdom, distinct from intelligence, thrives in full-time mothers’ life experience, and justice clashes with lenient prosecutors and slow capital punishment. Forgiveness demands divine will over forced sentiment, truth resists powerful lies, and beauty—rooted in Keats’ "truth is beauty"—becomes a spiritual bridge to creation’s order. Together, they arm against the world’s brokenness, with truth and beauty emerging as the most transformative. [Automatically generated summary]
So usually on these bonus videos we like to clown around a little bit, but today I want to talk about something actually kind of serious.
Since we're going into difficult times, I think this is going to be a time when all of us are tested.
And so I want to talk about some of the virtues and why I think they are so important.
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So let's start with courage.
And courage is what you might call an amoral virtue.
People have courage who are terrible people and people have courage who are great people.
And, you know, a lot of times when somebody does something evil, somebody will say, oh, what a cowardly thing to do.
But sometimes it's not.
Sometimes evil people have courage.
So why is it a virtue?
It is a virtue because it is the bedrock virtue.
There is no virtue without it.
In this world, because of the nature of this world, because this is a broken world, if you do something virtuous, you are going to face conflict and opposition.
I mean, the God that we follow, the God who is the foundational God of our culture, did nothing but talk and tell the truth and he was crucified.
And the worst, he was killed in the worst possible way with people mocking him and shouting at him just for talking about what he believed and what was the truth.
So courage, without courage, there is no virtue because if you are virtuous, there will come a time when you will have to have courage to go forward.
It may just cost you money.
It may mean your job, you don't get it advanced in your job as much as you want to, but there are those times when you have to do that.
Fortunately, in America so far, it doesn't come up all that often, but it still will come up many times in a single life.
Prudence is another one, and prudence is an underrated virtue.
Prudence is the virtue of not doing everything all the time in every place.
And that is a tremendous virtue.
You know, there are things that we want to say and want to do, and sometimes we feel, you know, I just can't go forward unless I just speak my mind when you maybe it's not the time to speak your mind.
And while you are having courage, you also want to know when to hold back and when to keep things to yourself.
That's not very romantic.
It's not very dramatic.
It doesn't really give you the chance to show what a hero you are and can be.
But that's why it's one of the virtues.
You know, all virtues cost you something.
No virtue is free.
All virtues cost you something.
And that virtue will cost you glamour.
And so a lot of people throw prudence to the wind and they swagger around and they say things on social media that sound tough and cool and violent and they don't use prudence.
It is a foundational virtue.
Wisdom, you know, is an interesting thing because wisdom is something that you can't start out with.
Nobody starts out wise.
People can start out knowledgeable, they can start out educated, that helps, but wisdom is something you learn in your body as you go old.
And the famous expression that the owl of Athena flies at dusk means that wisdom comes toward the end of life, as they put it in Pennsylvania, too soon old, too late, smart.
And wisdom, you know, wisdom is not intelligence.
I have met many, many an uneducated person who had plenty of wisdom.
People who have underrated wisdom are moms.
Moms see how personalities are formed.
They see what people were at the beginning.
They can look at a president, know that he one day needed his diapers changed.
That gives them a kind of wisdom that no other kind of person gets.
When you meet a wise mom, you have met pretty much the gold standard of wisdom.
A wise at-home mom, I should say, a full-time mom.
You have met the gold standard of wisdom.
And so you ask, what is wisdom?
Wisdom is a knowledge of how things work.
It is, you know, some people say that they know when people have wisdom because they predict things, but the future is always shady and you never can predict the future.
What you know is how things will work.
And I have had moments as I've gotten older where I've said to people, if you do this, this, this, this will happen.
And if they're young people, they say, oh, you foolish old man.
And then they come back and say, you told me it was going to happen and now it happens.
That's what wisdom is.
It's knowing how things work.
And once you know how things work, that's when you can start to use your prudence and that's when you can start to use your courage with wisdom.
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Justice, another underrated virtue.
You know, people sometimes say, like, what is the good of putting people in prison?
We like to say we put them in prison for rehabilitation.
No, we don't.
We don't put people in prison for rehabilitation.
If you can rehabilitate people, really what rehabilitation is, is I hated prison so much I don't want to go back, so maybe I'm going to do something different.
That's what real rehabilitation is.
But the reason you have justice is because we live in a society and a society is a network of relationships.
It's a huge network of relationships.
So you can picture all these people standing with lines, connecting them in various million different ways.
When something is done that is wrong, that is evil, it bends and warps those lines and relationships.
And justice gives people what they need to bring those lines back into order and keep the society good.
When we surrender some of our power to a government, we do it with the understanding that that government is going to provide justice.
And when it doesn't, when you get a Soros district attorney taking more care of the criminal than of the victim, society starts to get skewed and starts to get dangerous and starts to go bad because those lines are being bent by the criminals and they're not being put back into place by justice.
You know, there are people who think that capital punishment is uncivilized.
I think the way we practice capital punishment in America is uncivilized.
I think putting a guy in prison for 20 years and then killing him for something he did when he was another person is uncivilized.
But I think if you created a system where every possible kind of evidence and every possible kind of appeal could be done in 365 days, I would say there should be capital punishment for certain terrible crimes.
Why?
Because some crimes can only, you can only get justice for some crimes by putting the offender to death.
And when that happens, people feel, ah, you know, we have justice, the lines between us, the relationships between us are put back together and society can go on.
Really important.
Along with justice, forgiveness.
You know, it's funny.
It's just funny to say forgiveness gets emphasized too much.
And what I mean by that, I don't think forgiveness can ever be overemphasized, but you can't have forgiveness if you don't have justice.
If you don't know there's going to be justice, you can't forgive people.
If you think, oh, you know, that guy killed somebody I love and he's going to go free, you can't forgive that person.
If he's in prison, if he gets what he deserved, you can forgive him in your heart.
I mean, you need justice in order to have forgiveness.
But you also have to have forgiveness when no society can give you justice, when the world can't give you justice.
So, you know, you might have a parent who has been unkind to you.
You might have a parent who was an alcoholic and did terrible things and then gave up alcohol but can never, you know, take back those terrible things that formed your life and marred your childhood.
You know, you marshal forgiveness because forgiveness sets you free.
It really does.
It doesn't make things go away.
It doesn't make the hurt go away.
It doesn't make the pain go away.
But it does set you free of wallowing in the pain, of wallowing in the anger.
It sets you free of the anger.
It sets you free of that part of the scar, your attachment to the trauma.
And people think that in order to forgive somebody, you have to feel forgiving toward them.
You have to will forgiveness.
This is how forgiveness works.
Many times I have forgiven, not many times, but times when it was necessary, I have forgiven people not by saying, oh, I let this go.
I have said to my God, I have said, God, I will this forgiveness.
I will forgive them.
I will forgive them.
And ultimately, God will gift you with the feeling of forgiveness that sets you free if you make that your will.
He will meet your will with his glory.
Truth.
I can't say enough about the value of truth.
I don't believe in a noble lie.
I think that there are fictions that we sometimes have to tell in order to keep going.
Like all things, you know, work out for the good.
All things work out for the good in the end to those who love God, but that's not in this life.
Not all things work out to the good in this life.
But I think that the truth, when Jesus said the truth will set you free, that is the truth.
That the truth will set you free is the truth.
Knowing the way things are, knowing the world, is what makes your life your own.
If somebody has lied to you, they have taken away some of your freedom.
They have taken away some of your knowledge.
When somebody cheats on you, when somebody, you know, maybe cheats on your marriage vows or, you know, goes behind your back in some other way.
They have taken something from you that is very, very hard to reclaim.
It is not the fact, you know, I used to say when I worked in Hollywood, I used to say that the powerful, no powerful person ever stabbed me in the back.
The powerful people stab you right in the front.
They will say, I'm screwing you, get out of here, you know.
But the little guys, the guys who thought that they were powerful, who thought they were big shots, those are the guys you had to watch out for.
The truth is an amazing thing.
It is hard to tell the truth.
It is hard to tell your friends you don't like something they did.
It is hard to tell people who have more power than you that they're doing something wrong and need to take a look at themselves.
I am, and my wife was teasing me about this yesterday, literally yesterday, was saying, you are the guy that people sent in to tell the truth because you will do it.
And I do it not because I'm super brave.
I don't do it because I'm nasty.
I do it because I know the truth is a valuable thing.
I do it to the people I love more than I do it to the people I don't like.
You know, the people I don't like, I think let them find it out for themselves.
but I will tell the truth to the people I love.
And people who love me know that and they value it in me because the truth is a beautiful thing.
It makes you strong, it makes you free.
It gives you possession of your own life.
The last one, seven virtues to go with your seven sins, the last one is beauty.
And, you know, John Keats, my favorite poet, said, beauty is truth and truth is beauty.
That is all you know on earth and all you need to know.
And why is beauty a virtue?
I often say this in the way that courage is a virtue in men, and I'm talking about physical courage.
Beauty is a virtue in women.
When a beautiful woman walks down the street, she gives joy.
People, feminists, say, well, it's the male gaze, your beauty doesn't belong to you.
It belongs to the people who are looking at you.
What they owe you is they owe you good manners, not to stare, not to catcall you, not to treat you as if you're an object, but to enjoy your beauty as you walk by is, in fact, your gift to them, and you should give it with generosity.
Beauty is a kind of truth that can't be spoken any other way, and that is its great value.
It is not true that all true things are beautiful.
It's not what Keats meant.
It is not true that all beautiful things are true.
Some beautiful things are fantastic.
But beauty is a truth that can't be spoken any other way.
When you see beauty and when you feel beauty, you know that you have connected to the creation and therefore the creator, because the world is a beautiful place because it was made by the most beautiful mind, the mind that is the definition of beauty.
You should always have a heart open to beauty, whether it's art, whether it's clouds, whether it's grass, whatever.
You should never live, try never to live without beauty.
You should find it in other people.
You should find it in faces.
You should find it in the things that people do.
It is everywhere because God's fingerprint is on every inch of the planet and in every moment of your life.
And when you feel beauty, when you experience beauty, that's what you're experiencing.
You're experiencing the connection between objects, which are just physical, and the spirit, which is everything.
And that's what beauty is.
So those are seven virtues that I would say they're not the only virtues.
I know there are other virtues that people hold as dear or more dear, but those are seven virtues that I think you should cling to in these times of trouble.
And truth and beauty may be the most important.
I think if you are experiencing, if you're telling the truth and living in truth and experiencing beauty and living in beauty, the harshness of the world, the sin of the world, the brokenness of the world will be much, much easier to bear.