| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Goodness in Groups?
00:05:43
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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. | |