| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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People Believe What They Want To
00:09:52
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| It's one of the reasons, there are so many reasons, Mao's China, Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the staggering amount of torture of human beings in almost every society, that I have such an anger. | |
| You would think I wouldn't be angry about people, adults, who believe that human nature is basically good. | |
| And I think, are you aware of what has happened? | |
| And some are, and they still say that because they want to believe it. | |
| I'm thinking not Now I'm thinking aloud. | |
| I was thinking quietly about writing something brief called Lessons from a Life Lived. | |
| One of the big lessons is most people believe what they want to believe. | |
| They don't ask, is it true? | |
| They ask, really, what do I want to believe? | |
| For some reason, people want to believe that people are basically good. | |
| A lot of people want to believe that. | |
| I have no wants in this matter. | |
| I only want to know what is true. | |
| Because if I want to believe something that isn't true, I'm actually making the human condition worse. | |
| Is that not obvious? | |
| So why would you want to believe something? | |
| Why would that even be an operative element? | |
| You want to believe it? | |
| I visited China a number of occasions. | |
| I want to believe I speak Chinese. | |
| Now, if I said that to you, you'd think, what are you, out of your mind? | |
| You don't speak Chinese. | |
| Oh, but I want to believe that I speak Chinese. | |
| Okay, but if you want to believe it, and you're in rural China in need of medicine, you might die, because you wouldn't know how to say, I need medicine. | |
| You want to believe people are basically good? | |
| First of all, I don't even know why do people want to believe that? | |
| What comfort does it give you? | |
| I would think it would make you more miserable if people are basically good and there's all this horrible, horrible behavior. | |
| People are basically good, but in every society in history there's been slavery? | |
| And sometimes the conditions, like everything else, there are gradations of evil. | |
| At its best, it's evil, but at its worst, it's horrific. | |
| It's sadism. | |
| It's legal sadism. | |
| People are basically good, but people enjoyed watching cats get burned alive this year. | |
| This was a... | |
| A book on medieval Europe that I was reading. | |
| And just in passing, they mentioned how the royalty would watch cats burned alive and they would just laugh themselves silly while munching on some wonderful meal. | |
| That people are basically good. | |
| Back to the origins. | |
| Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day. | |
| If you read what has happened, were these people aberrations? | |
| Now, I don't believe people are basically evil, because if we were basically evil, we couldn't be good. | |
| We wouldn't want to be good. | |
| I think we can do either. | |
| We have free will. | |
| But basically good is ridiculous. | |
| How often did you tell your child, say thank you? | |
| If we were basically good, you'd only have to tell your child once, twice, three times. | |
| And then your child would realize, oh, of course, it's the right thing to do to express gratitude. | |
| But did your child say that? | |
| Why did you have to say say thank you a thousand times? | |
| Very possibly more than a thousand. | |
| If we're basically good. | |
| But as I said, people believe what they want to believe. | |
| Truth is everything. | |
| It is hard to imagine that a society rooted just in truth will be a bad society. | |
| It really is. | |
| It's hard to believe. | |
| I can't imagine it. | |
| There are many things that are needed to produce good people in a good society, but that's the pillar, truth. | |
| And the left is the world of the lie. | |
| Because you don't ask, is it true? | |
| Like Israel's committing genocide. | |
| That's the contemporary example. | |
| America's systemically racist. | |
| Men give birth. | |
| The enormity of the lies. | |
| It's fair for a man to compete against women. | |
| Where did this just happen? | |
| just happy this issue arose well in some in some school or town and the it eludes me for the moment but I was amazed at how many people were angry At this public official who said that it's not right for men to compete against women just because they say they're a woman. | |
| You're a hater, transphobic. | |
| Those, the very notions... | |
| You see, they don't say you're not telling the truth. | |
| They say you're a hater. | |
| They say you're transphobic. | |
| But of course it's the truth. | |
| It's not fair if a man competes against women. | |
| It's irrelevant that he says he's a woman. | |
| Irrelevant. | |
| Truth. | |
| The motto of Harvard is truth. | |
| Veritas. | |
| There was a time in American history when it was realized truth was everything! | |
| That's why that's a one-word motto. | |
| And who has, one of the other colleges has Lux A Veritas. | |
| Is it Light and Truth? | |
| Are you aware of that? | |
| Take a look. | |
| Lux, L-U-X, A-E-T, Veritas. | |
| I think it's another Ivy League college that has that. | |
| There was a pursuit of truth. | |
| Look, slavery was built on a lie. | |
| The lie that black human beings are inferior. | |
| Yale. | |
| Yale, yeah, I thought so. | |
| And, of course, Yale was the one with the Hebrew, from the Hebrew Bible. | |
| The breastplate of the high priest. | |
| Can you imagine that? | |
| Other than a few religious Jewish students at the college, does anybody at Yale know what their insignia is about? | |
| I'm amazed that they haven't objected to it. | |
| Just amazed. | |
| The whole Holocaust was based on the lie. | |
| Okay. | |
| The whole anti-Israel thing today is based on a lie. | |
| Israel's an apartheid state. | |
| It's just a lie. | |
| 2 million Palestinian Arabs live in Israel. | |
| Full citizens. | |
| Did blacks live as full citizens in South Africa? | |
| We have a video on that, too, from a black South African member of the South African parliament. | |
| He went to Israel to see, is there truth to the charge that Israel's an apartheid state? | |
| He lived under apartheid. | |
| He would know. | |
| And he came back and said there's a big lie. | |
| For how many years did the New York Times and Washington Post and CNN and NPR lie about Russian collusion with the Trump campaign? | |
| 51 members of the... | |
| The intelligence community signed a letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop was probably Russian disinformation a month before the 2020 national election. | |
|
What Is True First
00:00:20
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| They asked, how do we make it easier for Biden to win? | |
| They didn't ask what is true. | |
| What is true has to be the first question before every other thing. | |