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Feb. 17, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
05:43
Ultimate Issues: Few Of Us Actually Achieve Goodness
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Anyway, the stories are quite remarkable.
So I concluded, among other things, only minorities of people, only small numbers really achieve good.
It is very rare for goodness to be achieved by large numbers of people.
That's the way it is.
I wish it were not so.
There's a phrase in Hebrew about such a group.
It's called, in English, the saving remnant.
That there is a saving remnant that saves a place.
I feel that in the United States today.
How many of you are alone at your place of work?
At your school?
Feel alone?
Because you are largely alone.
In upholding liberty and freedom and objectivity and truth, the basic Judeo-Christian value system, you're alone.
There are a few of you, but you're largely alone.
I felt this when I was at Columbia in my graduate school years.
I remember it.
I'm mentioning it because I so distinctly remember one night at a restaurant across the street from Columbia.
Broadway and 116th Street, Manhattan.
And I remember thinking, I'm alone here.
I believe in God.
I believe in the Bible.
I believe in America.
And I knew one other student.
Literally one.
I'm sure there were more, but I only knew one who shared my values.
So please understand, this is the way it works.
So here's another question, and the one I want, or not question, this is the statement I wish to make for the Ultimate Issues Hour.
All of my life, I have said that the single most important question in society is how do you make good people?
That is the single most important question society must address.
And the left has made it that we don't ask that question.
We ask, they ask, how do we make a good society?
Wrong question!
That is like saying, how do you make a good salad?
The ingredients have to be good!
You can't make a good salad without good ingredients, or a good cake, or a good anything.
How you make a good society is stupid.
How you make individuals good is everything.
There is no attention to the question, how do you make a good individual?
None.
It is all macroethics, not micro.
Ethics are micro.
You know how you make a good society?
You make good people.
There is no other way.
The Judeo-Christian tradition and values understand that that's the question.
So they have character development, like I did in my religious Jewish education.
The motto in my yeshiva, as it was called, which I went to until 18 years of age, half the day in Hebrew, religious studies, half the day in English, secular studies.
It's pretty intense.
And they never said something very popular in the 70s.
I'm okay, you're okay.
That was a big motto, name of a book, very popular.
By the way, the end of the sentence, it was not the end of the sentence.
In the book, the book was I'm okay, you're okay.
But the real implication was I'm okay, you're okay, it's America that stinks.
Or sucks, to use the language of the day.
We're great, America stinks.
Turned out it was the opposite.
America was great and they stunk.
That was the real case.
As usual, it's the opposite of what folks on the left say.
But this is everything.
Fight racism, all this, all that, make equality.
Everything is society concentrated.
Meanwhile, we're not producing decent people.
But it's the single most difficult question and most important question in life, in society.
How do you make good people?
Because the raw material ain't great.
You can make good people.
The raw material of human nature enables us to be truly good.
But undirected and undisciplined and without values we become what we are made to be.
Animals.
1-8 Prager 776 877-243-7776 Ultimate Issues Hour on the Dennis Prager Show.
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