Oct. 15, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:03:32
3453 Why Cultural Marxism Is Destroying America | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyenux
What is Cultural Marxism and what impact does it have on Western Civilization? Dr. Duke Pesta joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the scourge of relativism, the infiltration of Cultural Marxism within western educational institutions, looking at the world through the lens of progressive ideologies, the truth about cultural relativism and much much more!Dr. Duke Pesta is a tenured university professor, author and the Academic Director of FreedomProject Academy, a Live Online School offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in Kindergarten through High School. For more from Dr. Duke and the FreedomProject Academy, please go to: https://www.fpeusa.orgFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He's a tenured university professor, which means he can insult your mama and get away with it.
He is an author and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, which is a live online school, offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
You can get his work at www.fpeusa.org.
Dr.
Pester, how are you doing today?
Stefan, great.
Thanks for having me again.
So we're going to talk about cultural Marxism, or as I like to call it, Marxism.
And the degree to which it has really swallowed, like Jonah and the whale, it seems to have swallowed the intellectual life of the West almost whole.
And we really have a tough time viewing history, viewing literature, viewing philosophy and sociology, and sometimes even psychology, outside the lens of the sort of cultural Marxism, social justice warrior fetishism, or whatever you want to call it.
So I wonder if you could give people a little bit of a background of what it is, where it came from, and how it either won or is in the process of not winning, depending on how you look at the lens at the moment.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, the Western world spent a lot of time in the Cold War, really since World War II, fighting off fascism, fighting off communism.
We were engaged in economic warfare.
We were engaged in political, cultural warfare.
We were engaged in actual warfare, many places across the world.
And we won every time.
The values of Western culture, liberty, freedom, all these things you and I have talked about in our previous shows, going back through the Enlightenment all the way back through the classical world.
The values of liberty and freedom won when we actually faced off against the enemies of those things.
But all the time we were doing this, we sort of neglected to pay attention to what was going on in the universities and the schools more broadly.
And even as we were winning these battles on the ground or in the culture, we were losing them in the schools.
You and I had talked about Common Core a few months back.
Common Core is nothing more than the pulling down of this cultural Marxism now from the universities to the middle and elementary schools.
And not surprisingly, I think it was Vladimir Lenin who made the argument, you know, give me the schools.
You can have everything else, just give me the schools.
And in a few generations, we'll have completely taken from you everything that you have.
And I think cultural Marxism, think about the churches.
You think about liberation theology.
In the 50s and 60s, Marxist liberation theology.
So this is one of those problems that has multiple names.
Call it cultural Marxism.
My preferred term for it actually is what you said, social justice education.
You think about in the 50s and 60s how South American social justice Marxism imposed itself in the seminaries, particularly in the Catholic Church, and you got liberation theology.
We have a liberation theology pope right now.
This is the consequence, right?
What happened in the 50s, 60s, and 70s Now the pope of the Roman Catholic Church is himself a social justice Marxist.
And you see what you get with this.
This is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church standing shoulder to shoulder with Raul Castro, one of the great persecutors of Cubans, of Hispanics, one of the great destroyers of freedom in the Caribbean, Castro, standing shoulder to shoulder with the pope lecturing America on its excesses.
This is the kind of thing that comes of it.
So it has lots of names.
You can call it liberation theology when it has a religious tint.
You can call it social justice education the way it's being defined on campuses now.
You and I are right.
And we could even drop the cultural Marxism.
This is Marxism flat out.
And in short, what it is, it is the viewing of everything, whether it's culture, gender, science, history, the humanities, religion, viewing everything, economics, through the lens, first, of progressive philosophy, What's the lack of, for lack of a better word, progressive philosophy, progressive vocabulary, filtering everything through the lenses of progressive thought.
So studying math, as you and I talked about in Common Core, studying math is less about math than it is about the sociology of math, and that's true of everything else.
And so we call it cultural Marxism.
It's really just Marxism.
It is won throughout the university and Western education, and it's destroying generations of kids and And there's a weird contradiction right at the heart of this.
And first of all, relativism, particularly moral relativism, is not new.
It was argued for in the Greek era, the birth of philosophy 2,400 years ago.
It's about as new as dirt.
And the argument is something like this, that there's no truth that you can appreciate or understand or argue for outside of your cultural context, outside of your local environment.
There's no truth that you can get to or reach to.
And the spread of this in the West has been enormously successful.
So recently, a research group polled American high school students.
70% of those students believed there was no such thing as absolute truth.
70% of those students believed there was no such thing as absolute truth.
Truth is relative to each individual.
Well, that's not truth.
Truth, by definition, is something that transcends the individual.
Two and two make four.
Gravity is an effect of mass.
Gases expand when heated.
Whatever you want.
These are truths that are not subjective.
They're not dependent upon each individual.
And this is very powerful and effective in eroding people's moral certainty.
So a study from 2013 that I looked up said that participants who read a relativistic argument are more likely to cheat Participants who read an absolutist moral definition were less willing to steal.
The ideas that go into our head have a strong effect on our behavior, which is why propaganda is pursued so avidly by people with bad or non-arguments.
So this argument that there's no such thing as truth, of course, creates an insurmountable contradiction.
I would call it a self-detonating statement.
If you're absolutely certain that there's no such thing as certainty, then you've already destroyed your own argument.
If you're absolutely...
If you want to, it's 100% true that there's no such thing as 100% truth.
It really doesn't take a lot of intelligence or critical thinking to get that that's a self-contradictory statement.
I'm certain there's no such thing as certainty.
Well, which is it?
And the weird thing is that when people get rid of certainty, they don't end up sort of free-floating, hippy-dippy, everything is fine.
What happens is, it's sort of like, there's an old statement, it may have come from Chesterton.
He said, when you get rid of the big rules, you don't end up with no rules.
You end up with thousands and thousands of tiny rules.
And getting rid of moral certainty, getting rid of critical thinking doesn't end up with this free-floating everything-goes.
You end up with this fascism of tiny bureaucracy.
And I think that really chokes the life out of free thought much more than vigorous argument does.
Yeah, that's what we're seeing in the universities for sure.
I phrase it to my kids as the difference between capital T truth and little t truth.
When I'm teaching in the classroom, you know, These kids all believe in little t truths.
They believe in their absolute authority when they have an opinion.
Their absolute authority when they want to argue that as a biologically male individual, they think they're female.
They see all of this as absolute.
And what you said is exactly right.
You'd think this would give way to chaos.
You'd think this would give way to a kind of moral chaos.
At least I'll take the chaos over what we have now.
Because if it were true that everything is actually relative all the time, Then we'd all have a relative playing field, right?
I mean, it's not just conservative or traditional or Christian or Western values that are deconstructed.
It's progressive ones, too.
One of my university professors when I was in school called this kind of literary theory that you see in the universities the way we read books.
We read books now through Marxist or feminist lenses, all this relativizing garbage.
And this is how we're training our kids to read, even now starting in second and third grade, all the way through graduate school.
You're not reading books to listen to what the book says.
You're reading the books to deconstruct them, to find the patriarchal oppression, to find the theocracy, to find the economic disparagement, the inequalities.
So what we're doing is we're teaching this.
We're giving kids lenses to read books, and all the lenses are leftist.
And if indeed we had a kind of moral relative landscape, we would have the progressive arguments would be just as meaningless as the conservative ones.
One of my professors once described it as this whole argument, this whole theoretical cultural Marxist argument.
It's like a sword without a handle.
The minute you pick it up to cut down somebody else's argument, you've already cut off your own fingers, right?
But that's where the fascism comes in.
Because the people who wield this metaphorical sword, they don't get their fingers cut off.
They can use their progressive sword to cut down every argument they disagree with, except their own.
And so what you get is this autocracy, right?
That my progressive argument...
Take tolerance, which is the only virtue left to us in a world of relativity.
And if tolerance...
I told my students just the other day in class...
If tolerance is the only meaningful virtue that remains, we've gotten rid of chastity, modesty, generosity, humility, all the old, you know, Dantean litany of virtues and vices, we've gotten rid of all of them.
Everything now is tolerance.
You're either tolerant or you're not.
And so if tolerance is the only, it's interesting about tolerance, it's the only virtue that requires other virtues to measure it.
You can't be tolerant unless you are, you understand what the word means and you measure it vis-a-vis humility or generosity or reciprocity.
So as a virtue itself, you sort of see that the word tolerance, which is all we have left from a progressive standpoint, it's fallen into that trap, too.
It's come to mean nothing because we've lost the framework to debate it.
We've lost the framework in which we can decide what tolerant is and isn't.
Right, and the thing that's always confused me, Dr.
Pesta, and I mean, that sounds sophisticated, but it generally is confusing to me how people can have this perspective, that if everything is relative, Then the patriarchy can't be called wrong.
If everything is relative, then rape culture is just another different kind of culture.
If everything is relative, then racism can't be called wrong.
If everything is relative, homophobia, misogyny, sexism, none of these things can be called wrong because everything's relative.
Everyone's coming at it from their own perspective.
There's no such thing as absolute truth.
There's no such thing as absolute right and wrong.
But what I find so shocking, because I'm just I'm like water going down a hill.
I'm sort of drawn towards this consistency.
And when there's inconsistency, it is a splinter in the mind's eye that I have to keep working at until I can resolve it.
But people will very merrily put out this giant chant that there's no such thing as truth and everything is relative, but we need to smash racists because they're evil.
And it's like, well, pick one!
Pick one!
You can't have both!
Let me give you a little anecdote that'll blow your mind, Stefan.
About eight years ago, I was teaching a graduate's course at my university.
I teach a course on Dostoevsky.
Who, of course, is one of the great voices against Nietzschean cultural relativity.
I made the exact same argument you just made to a group of graduate students.
These were 30-year-old people.
The argument that if you're going to be a cultural relativist, then you can't argue that rape is bad.
If you are a cultural Marxist, a cultural Darwinian, for instance, a social Darwinist, you make the argument that power is everything.
And so if I'm stronger than you, if I can take what I want from you and you can't stop me, you can't call that wrong.
That was the argument I made in defending Dostoevsky, who's going to argue against all that.
This was the first day of class.
I had a student, a female graduate student, about 30 years old.
She got up, walked out of class, and never came back.
I had no idea what happened.
A week later, I found out, for that one comment, she had walked over to the university campus police and had reported me For actually having raped her.
She accused me of literally raping her.
This launched a two-month investigation, and I wasn't even informed about it.
The campus police immediately took her seriously.
They removed her from my class.
They interviewed every one of my graduate students without ever talking to me.
I was the accused party here.
Never said a word to me.
Turned out, a couple months after the investigation was launched, the dean of students and my department chair said to me, Well, Duke, it turns out that—explain the situation.
You have been under investigation.
It turns out you can relax that you're not guilty of anything.
You just need to be careful what you say in your classroom moving forward.
So they took this girl, this woman, out of my class.
They gave her an independent study course.
She was given all this special acclaim.
And in her mind, simply suggesting that what you just said, this cultural relativistic argument means that you can't complain.
Nothing is better than anything else.
She took that as a literal rape and walked off to campus and complained about it.
Now, literally, nothing ended up happening to me, but I was under investigation for months.
And the irony, the only person who was never talked to by the authorities was me.
This is kind of crazy stuff.
This is where that fascism comes in.
With the whole rape culture on campus, with President Obama's revision of Title IX legislation, now because of that, males on campus are presumed guilty, not innocent.
If you're accused of harassment, you're accused of anything like that, now the default model on the university campuses is that you're guilty and they've made it almost impossible for an accused person on campus To defend themselves, you just have to wait for the process to take its toll.
Yeah, I mean, you can't have a lawyer.
You can't confront your accuser.
There are no standards of evidence.
There's no beyond a reasonable doubt standard.
It is...
It is a kangaroo court.
It's a witch hunt, so to speak.
And again, it makes no sense.
And of course, the other thing, too, is that rape culture on campus is statistically one of the safest places for women to be is on a campus or married.
But of course, nobody wants to talk about that.
So one of the things, just for people to get a sort of broader historical context for this, one of the things that happened was Marxism, of course, was a very, very big thing among intellectuals.
You know how Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses.
I think the statement could easily be said that Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.
It just seemed like everybody was kind of drawn that way.
And some enormously intelligent people, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw and the progressive movement, they just went full tilt lefty boogie.
And the argument originally was that capitalism was going to eat itself.
It was very self-destructive.
And we can get to this paradise of communism where everyone's going to have plenty and excess.
It was going to be more efficient than capitalism.
And what happened, of course, is when Stalin made his pact of steel with Hitler in the late 1930s and allied himself with the National Socialists, always called the Nazis because we wouldn't want to bespurch the good name of socialism.
Right, socialism.
That's right.
So everybody was really shocked.
The people on the left were really shocked that there was going to be an alliance between Stalin and Hitler.
And then what happened was after the Second World War, Stalin's crimes began to come out.
I mean, the Gulag Apikalago came out, I think it was in the 60s or early 70s.
Khrushchev did his big speech where he talked about the cult of personality and the amount of concentration camps set up under Stalin and the brutality.
And of course, word began coming out, even in the 1930s, about the forced starvation of the peasants and other people in Ukraine and other places.
They couldn't win the economic argument, particularly in the post-Second World War period when the war did pull back a lot of government control of the economy, particularly in Germany, which was heavily liberalized and the currency was normalized after the Second World War.
Capitalism was doing really, really well.
Communism had been revealed economically.
I don't even know what the word is strong enough to say.
It was worse than a disaster.
Literally genocidal for masses and masses of people.
Millions and millions of people died.
And you could see this occurring, of course, in China and other places as well.
So they said, okay, well, we can't win the economic argument, but we sure as heck don't want to stop being Marxists because that's who we are.
So they moved from economics to art, to culture, and began taking the same approach that they did to economics to culture.
And I think that is really, really important to understand how that transition occurred.
And of course, a lot of people fled Europe after socialism and the big battle was between national socialism and international socialism.
That's sort of what people don't understand, right?
The communists versus the Nazis versus the communism, two sides of the same coin.
One was more nationalistic, the other was more international.
When the fruits of this socialism put forward their ugly roses in Germany, the intellectuals fled to America.
And then after the Second World War with the GI Bill, there was a huge amount of academic posts that opened up.
Lots of people flooded into the universities and they couldn't win the economic argument because the soldiers had actually been over and seen what had happened in Europe under socialism.
So they switched to culture.
And I think that's where they've been sort of laying their nests and breeding in the darkness since then.
Yeah, many have made the observation, I think it's exactly right, that with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, where did most of those cultural Marxist warriors in the West as well as the East, where'd they end up?
They ended up in America.
They ended up in the universities.
And it has also been pointed out, and I think it's true, that much of what we call the modern environmentalist movement has become a haven for disaffected society.
I mean, the argument for all of this cultural Marxism, I think even back when Marx was doing it, even back when Lenin I think all of this, even from the get-go, it wasn't a matter of them having to figure out that the socialist model was going to fail.
I think many of them knew it.
That's why the great leaders of all these Marxist movements were rich people.
I mean, very few of them came from poverty and when they did get power, what did they do?
They surrounded themselves with tremendous excess.
In the old Soviet Politburo, for instance, if you were one of the chosen few, you had everything that the people under you didn't have.
I think they knew from the get-go, but it was never useful really as an economic model, but it was always useful as a political model.
The idea of equality, fairness, this idea that you broached on briefly at the beginning of the talk of this utopia, this idea that we're going to create a fairer society, one where everybody is entitled to everything all the time, even though the leaders of those movements never had the slightest inkling to make that happen.
But that's the sort of capital that they sold people.
We've got a bunch of kids in the schools.
A lot of our college kids, I make the argument, our kids aren't stupid, they're terribly miseducated.
What appeals to my college kids, they get the contradictions, they see the quasi-fascism at work in their own classrooms, but what gets them is this promise of equality.
It's what drew so many of them to Bernie Sanders.
Most of my kids wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders when I talked to them last semester.
And I would ask them, name one thing, give me one historical fact about socialism.
Tell me one thing that socialism has done on the positive side of the ledger for people.
They're just historically ignorant.
They still believe, my students still believe, that Hitler's the greatest killer in the history of the world.
They have no idea how bad Stalin was.
They have no idea about the depredations of Mao in China or Che Guevara.
You got Colin Kaepernick, right?
This quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers with all his taking a knee and protesting the way African Americans are treated in this country.
And he's doing it sporting a Fidel Castro t-shirt.
So he comes out and gives a public talk about what his motives are.
And he's actually wearing on his chest the man who killed more African people in the 20th century than American cops could ever wish to kill.
It's a remarkable thing when you think about it.
But it's all sold on this promise of this completely...
Unmeasurable, irrational, uncritical idea of equality.
This notion that unless everybody's the same all the time, there's injustice in the world, and that's just not the way it works.
Well, I was talking to Dilbert creator Scott Adams in a show recently, and he said that the word fair was invented so that children and fools would have something to argue about for eternity.
And the great tragedy, I mean, one of the many great tragedies of cultural Marxism, and in particular the Frankfurt School, is that they began to reinterpret literature along class conflict lines, right?
So there's a quote from Jameson.
He said, literature is fragments of a discourse of class struggle.
And Eagleton said, it's a way of characterizing the transition from bourgeois to socialist morality.
And trying to get Shakespeare or Milton or Dostoevsky into the box of predetermined economic determinism, Marxist class struggle, is such a brutalization of the text.
For me, it's like tearing apart a loved one to have these kinds of approaches taken.
You minimize and try and box in some of the greatest literary geniuses in the history of the world to serve like they're just being dragged along like tin cans behind a new married car.
They're supposed to serve your particular ideology.
And it cheapens and strips bare the depth.
You know, to me, the art has been the exploration of the human.
And it allows you permission to go deeper into yourself when you see how deeply other people have gone into language and the human experience.
Or, as the old saying goes, a book is a chance to try another person's life on for size.
And so the depth and power of literature gets kind of compressed and turned into this tiny little service of class struggle nonsense.
And, um...
I think that has a two-fold impact.
Number one, it trains people to not see art for what it is, but to see it as part of a political objective or a political agenda, which is really tragic and really cheapens it.
And number two, it makes you suspicious of the depth and power of art in history.
I mean, you can always look at Shakespeare.
I played Macbeth when I was younger.
I was in theater school and did a lot of acting.
And you can look at Macbeth and say, well, you know, Macbeth is out there hacking up all these peasants and he has no problem with it, but he kills one king and he can't sleep forever and so on.
And you can do all of that, but that really cheapens the whole point of the entire story.
It's not about the patriarchy.
It's not about kings.
It's not about monarchy.
Of course, he had to live and work in an environment where the monarchy had power and were in many ways his patrons and so on.
But given that environment, what he was able to do, the language he was able to generate, the depth that he was able to reach in the human experience, Blows to me any mere political ideology, particularly one as erroneous as Marxism, right out of the water, but it makes people look back and see not the grandeur of great texts, but it makes them petty and small instead of deep and great.
Yeah, I call it intellectual vivisection.
What we do is, and I cannot stress enough to your audience, most of whom are no longer at the universities, how dominant this has become is almost impossible.
To read any book on a college campus without these narrow blinkers put on you.
And they're Marxist.
All of them ultimately have Marxist ideology behind them.
Whether you call them Marxist readings or feminist readings, which is really just Marxism applied to gender, or their deconstructive readings of texts, or queer theories as they call themselves.
All this is, or cultural materialism, which is very big in Europe.
And all it is is Marxism.
So you're right.
When you read books now, you are not being exposed to the ideas in the books.
You're forced to eliminate all that is original, all that is new, all that is capacious in favor of these really doctrinaire readings.
When I was a graduate student, this was beginning back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, you were beginning to see how dominant this was.
But when I was in grad school, what they did is they couldn't get rid of the Western canon.
So what they do is they let you read the great writers.
But then they'd give you the theory alongside of it.
Okay, here's what Shakespeare says.
Here's what he meant to his culture.
Here's how we understand Shakespeare.
But now that you've done that, let's read a Marxist version of Shakespeare.
For about 15 years, from the mid-'80s to almost about 2000, you got both.
And the professors became despondent because whenever you provided Shakespeare to them and Marxist Shakespeare to them, every single time the students took Shakespeare for the reasons you just said.
Because he opened up texts, yes, Shakespeare talked about politics, he talked about oppression, he talked about gender, all those issues, but they were never the point of his place.
He was always seeking the universal beyond, the absolute beyond the particular.
This drove the professoriate nuts, and for about 20 years now, they have successfully removed, you don't read Shakespeare anymore, nobody gives you the context of Shakespeare, you don't read Dickens or Homer or Spencer, you don't read them anymore.
What you're getting is a text that has been completely overwritten by all this theory.
At my university, I'm a middle-of-the-road kind of comprehensive college, one of the University of Wisconsin systems, and my kids come to class, I'm teaching Shakespeare this semester, and they come to class and they are completely 100% convinced that all they have to do when they open a book is apply the Marxism.
These kids can't read Shakespeare because the language is slightly older.
You'd think college juniors and seniors who are English majors ought to be able to open Shakespeare and read it, but they can't.
So what do they do?
They substitute their inability to actually engage with the book with all these cheap lenses.
So the very first day we were reading The Merchant of Venice, the very first day, all they wanted to talk about was anti-Semitism.
And through the Socratic method, I started asking them, okay, show me anti-Semitism in the play.
Couldn't point to a single passage.
I said, why do you think it's there?
Because you've got Jews and Christians, so it has to be there, right?
I forced them to go back and look at the play.
They didn't know what anti-Semitism was.
They couldn't point to anything in the play.
They couldn't even understand what was going on in the relationships between the characters.
But they had what had gotten them through every other class they'd taken.
They read a book.
They figure out really quick if the professor's a Marxist or a feminist or whatever.
And then they start just vomiting that worldview back.
And they get A's across the board.
It was absolutely staggering to them that I was insisting they read the book.
They didn't understand that.
Well, if you have conclusions, why on earth would you want to go to the source material?
And, of course, you know, the argument, I think, which is pretty easy and strong to make, is that one of the great pleas for tolerance and understanding is in the play, right?
People may not know it, but you probably do, but of course you do.
When Sherlock says, I am a Jew, hath not a Jew eyes, hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is.
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?
If we are like you and the rest, We will resemble you in that.
And so this is saying that there is a common humanity and impulses and cause and effect between a Jew and a non-Jew.
This is not anti-Semitism.
That is a great plea for commonality.
And one of the things that's so remarkable about Shakespeare in that play, not only is Shylock the first really great central Jewish character in Western literature.
I mean, if Shakespeare in his culture is so irremediably racist, why would you put at the center of one of the great Renaissance comedies, why would you put A really compelling, interesting Jewish figure.
And what's so remarkable to me about the quote that you just read, that's the famous one.
People pluck it out of midair, and they make all sorts of arguments about it.
Your argument is right, but keep in mind who's saying it.
Despite the fact that Shylock gives you that wonderful payee into equality, the fact is in the play, he's an SOB. I mean, he is a wicked man who knows how to use that kind of Appeal to equality to work his way, right?
And so what's so remarkable about Shakespeare is he gives you this almost progressive statement.
It's something like you would read in the 1960s Civil Rights era, right?
A wonderful plea for tolerance coming out of the mouth of one of the most irredeemably wicked characters in all of literature.
That's the point, right?
But the kids lack the context.
They see the Jewish character lamenting his mistreatment.
But they don't have enough wherewithal to look at the play and see that for all his griping, he mistreats people worse than almost anybody else in the play.
And that's what we've lost, that critical ability to recognize intolerance and justice when it's there, but also to see it vis-a-vis what's going on with everybody else.
My kids are convinced 100% that, I may have mentioned this in one of our previous talks, my kids do not believe in mass, they do not believe that slavery existed before slavery.
These kids have been so trained, college kids, they really do believe, many of them, that the slaves trade began with Americans and it ended with the Civil War.
They have no ability to mention anything about slavery in a world context outside of American slavery.
So they don't know, of course, about the Muslim slave trade that enslaved many Europeans as well.
What is it they say the UN says that the American government, therefore the taxpayers, owes reparations for slavery?
It's like, well, the Europeans can collect it from the Muslims and then hand it over to the blacks.
Or the fact that the slave trade to North America was one of the smallest ever.
The slave trade to South America was far larger than the slave trade to North.
Anyway, I've got a whole presentation called The Truth About Slavery on this, which we can link to below.
And you're right.
But I've got Christian kids.
I've got kids in Protestant Catholic schools their whole life.
They don't even remember Pharaoh.
You get this weird black Athena argument, right?
This idea that Egypt was the first great civilization and Egypt was, by definition, a black society.
And so black people were actually civilized while white people were living in European caves.
That's fine.
You want to make that argument, however ahistorical it is?
Doesn't that mean then that blacks, if you're going to make that argument, that black Egyptians were the first great slave-holding nation in the history of the world?
Where's the reciprocity of all of this?
Why is nobody demanding that Islam give the Hagia Sophia back to the Christian Byzantines, right?
We're not making those arguments.
The same feckless UN That has condemned Israel, what, thousands of times?
And condemned every other country in the world a handful of times?
It's the same organization now that says this is the cultural Marxism.
What you see in the universities is what you're seeing from the UN. Let's ignore all the real genuine horrors of the world and focus on the West.
Let's tear down Western superiority.
Let's tear down Western wealth.
We're not trying to elevate other nations.
Our job is to decimate Western economies and Western values so that you have a kind of level playing field again, out of which you can raise some kind of Marxist utopia.
Well, and this relativism, which of course sounds abstract, and we're talking about it relative to literary texts, but it has very, very real impacts, even on politics.
So I looked up something from Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope.
And he said, implicit in the very idea of ordered liberty is a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ism, any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course.
Now that's a very sort of abstract statement.
But when he starts to talk about the living Constitution and the reinterpretation of the Constitution according to current morals or the fact that these were not universal principles, the Bill of Rights, separation of church and state, the free market, limited government, separation of powers, these were not principles that transcend time.
They were mere biases of the moment and are subject to any kind of revisionism that you want.
And what that means, of course, is that you can't have any principles I'll give you one pragmatic example of what you just said.
At our universities now, every kid has to take freshman writing, right?
It's a staple of their first year of college.
They have to take one, usually two courses in basic writing.
We have decided now at the university that teaching kids in writing classes grammar is racist.
The idea that there is one way to speak.
So look at what's happened here.
You know, people who don't understand the universities kind of laugh at this.
Oh, these are just those ivory tower academics.
They don't have any really political power, even though we've got one in the White House now.
But think about the consequences of not teaching grammar to kids.
I mentioned to you how my senior English majors, they read at about an eighth grade level.
Literally read at about an eighth grade level.
And it's because no one's ever taught them grammar, mechanics, syntax.
How do you allow kids to become critical, reflective readers if you deny them in the name of social justice?
The idea that there is better writing than worse.
That grammatical writing is better than ungrammatical writing.
But we've decided, even in our writing classes, and I'm an English professor, That to teach grammar and correctness is a kind of bigotry.
That quote you said from Obama is exactly right from their perspective.
The idea that grammar is true, the idea that there's a better way to write, the idea that we should train students to speak and write a certain way, that's hideously, hideously racist according to the universities now.
And if you don't give kids the basic building blocks of reading, is it any wonder that they'll take your political arguments and they won't be able to read around them?
It's hand in glove here.
In order to put forth this progressive worldview, this completely relativistic and utterly absurd worldview, you have to deny kids the building blocks of critical thinking.
It's doubly, doubly dangerous.
You're politicizing their education and you're stealing from them anything that would allow them to educate themselves beyond your politics.
That's why it's been so successful.
People say to me all the time, Why can't a college senior figure this out?
It's not because they're stupid.
It's because they have not been given any tools other than ideology with which to approach culture.
And as we said in our talk about Common Core, the really alarming thing now.
When I started teaching college in the 90s, the kids came to college with a basic understanding of Western history, American history.
It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad.
There were a lot of things they should have known but didn't.
But they at least had a basic sense of the Constitution, the Declaration.
Now, 20 years later, they have none of that.
They can't tell you a thing meaningful about Western culture, about the founding values of the country.
They can't tell you a thing about the very documents that are supposed to govern their behavior as Americans.
They know nothing.
In one generation, they went from being slightly undereducated to being absolutely ignorant, and what they've replaced that ignorance with, Steph, is not humility.
Generally speaking, when you don't know something, The attitude you should have is to be humble before that.
I can't play the piano.
It's one thing I always wish I could do.
When I see people play the piano, I'm humble because it escapes me.
But these kids come to college.
They're not humble in the face of their ignorance.
They have been so politicized that they see their rejection of all traditional forms of learning.
Of history itself, of actual writing, they see that as a political virtue that they don't know that racist, sexist garbage.
They don't speak grammatically correct, and that's a darn good thing, because that shows solidarity with the other uneducated people in the world, right?
So ignorance has its own fan club, and you see how that plays out.
Well, and I think that this also has unfortunately bubbled up to the mainstream media, to political discourse.
I mean, the journalists who write their stories, and they really are stories, not facts, right?
They probably haven't read Derrida or Foucault or anything like that, but they have kind of grown up in an environment, and they've been educated in an environment where you have in the air around you ideas hostile to objectivity.
And This means that they have a purpose for everything that they write.
And the purpose is not to inform, it's not to educate, it's not to bring facts, it's not to expose the machinations of power, at least on the Democrat side.
There is a purpose behind, because if you don't believe in truth, then everything that you do becomes a manipulation.
And you can't usually be very honest about it.
And I've seen this in sort of the coverage of Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, like Donald Trump's just getting hammered for some tax return that he put out where he took deductions of $916 million going forward.
Hillary Clinton did exactly the same thing, I think, with $700,000.
But of course, that's got to be hidden.
And if there's this race, class, gender bias that is considered to be just like the physics of society, Then when there's any kind of shooting, right?
Any kind of shooting where a black man gets shot and these days it doesn't even seem to matter whether it's a black cop or a white cop or any other kind of cop that does the shooting.
Well, now there's going to be this explosion of race baiting and victimization and racist cops and so on.
Because the purpose, of course, is to get people upset so that they'll vote Democrat.
And how many people get killed, how many neighborhoods get burned down is completely irrelevant because there simply is – it's become this bald Darwinian striving for power or, as we talked about a little bit earlier, the Nietzschean will to power.
Where truth is something that you create as a manipulation in order to grease your way to having power over other people.
What can I say that is going to humble people before me, that is going to make them back away?
Oh, I don't want to be called racist or sexist or misogynist, so I'm going to give you your way.
It has become a form of verbal abuse or manipulative bullying rather than the honest pursuit of truth at any cost.
And that, I think, leads a country down an extremely dangerous path in the long run.
Yeah, I think that's well said.
Think about the cop shootings, right?
We've reached the point now because we've lost critical thinking skills, just like we lost grammar in writing, right?
We no longer have the ability to pause, let the system play out, let's look at the evidence.
Every day more trickles out, right, this recent shooting.
We now have what the cop's camera showed.
It took a couple of days to get that because it had to be vetted.
Rather than wait and see what the evidence tells us, Any cop shooting whatsoever, even perfectly valid and justifiable ones, are now signs of tyranny and oppression.
And now, on the other side, when you have people who were not affected immediately by the killing themselves burning down buildings, looting and pillaging, we have thousands and thousands and thousands of looters over the last three years.
On camera, right?
Not one of them has been arrested, even in those instances where the shootings were the fault of the perpetrator, not the police officer.
We won't even arrest them now.
Why?
Because of what you just said, the narrative.
By the way, this is Marxism going back to Marx, right?
It's a Linskyite.
You don't worry about what happened.
You don't worry about the truth.
You just worry about how you can spin it.
And that's what we've done.
And so that's the narrative now.
The cops are always wrong.
Violent, even murderous protesters are always justified.
And now we know if you say all lives matter, you're a bigot who has to be suspended from school.
You're not even using racial slurs anymore.
Simply now, 20 years ago, if you used a racial slur in fighting racism, you were a bigot.
Now, if you just challenge them, using neutral terms like all lives matter, you're every bit as much of a racist to them as if you went on an N-word tirade to end all tirades.
Well, and I think this brings me to me, at least to me, to the cracks of the matter.
There is this belief that if you put...
The average person into a university, they become exactly like people in university 50 years ago or 75 years ago.
It's hard for us to remember just what an elite, tiny, tiny percentage of people ever went to Yale or Harvard or Cambridge in England or whatever, or Oxford.
It was a very, very tiny, tiny elite.
And in my opinion, that's kind of how it should have been, because it takes an enormous amount of intelligence.
I remember once when I was taking medieval economics because...
That's how exciting I am to sit next to at a dinner party.
Are you an unapologetic feudalist, Stephen?
I've got to tell you, it can be tempting at times.
It certainly was a kind of meritocracy, but a bit of a mode of meritocracy.
But I remember my professor telling me about someone he taught who was able to read Latin and translate it straight to ancient Greek without even going through English.
He'd just watch and he would just like...
And that level of like stone genius stuff is really, really important.
And there is this idea, and I think it comes out of the left, which is the sort of plastic malleability of human nature and human abilities.
And it's sort of as weird as saying, well, you know, there's a lot of tall people on the basketball team, so if we take the short guy and put him on the basketball team, he'll get taller.
I think not allowing the meritocracy of the people who are the most intelligent to float to the top of academia, but rather opening the gates.
This sort of happened in three ways.
There was, of course, the GI Bill, where tons of people went swarming in to the halls of academia after the Second World War, largely to get programmed in socialist nonsense, which flowered into the 1960s and the drugs and the sex and the rock and roll, like the rock and roll still, but the socialist welfare state and all of that.
There was that infection of socialism that came from Europe and was implanted into a generation of people coming back from the Second World War.
But of course, when you get masses of new people coming into college, what happens to your standards?
This also happened when feminists, and rightly so, opened up more academics for women.
It also happened when minorities are in and certainly out in California, right?
They have to adjust the scores, entrance exam scores of Asians and whites and Hispanics and blacks in order to try and get some proportional representation.
But you're letting less able people into what used to be a very refined environment.
What happens to your standards?
Well, a lot of people, obviously, I think less intelligent people are much more indulgent in their feelings.
They have much less capacity to defer gratification and the pursuit of truth is nothing more or less in many ways than the deferral of gratification because the truth can be uncomfortable and unpleasant and difficult and it might cost you friendships and it might, you know, cost you peace of mind with yourself at times when you're in hot pursuit of truth.
I think that allowing this flood of less qualified people coming into academia and, of course, the flood to just keep wanting to do more and more and more.
This is why, you know, Bernie Sanders is a free college for everyone.
It's like it's not going to make people smarter.
There's so much to do with genetics and intelligence.
It's not 100%, but I've heard estimates from sort of 50% when you're young to 80% when you're older is genetic.
And the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the people who are less intelligent, tend to think that they're way better at things and things are way easier.
Well, If we had the same standards as we had in 1930, we had the same entrance exams, we had the same standards, we had the same marks, we had the same rigor, how many people coming into university would actually graduate?
I mean, the number of people who are graduating is pretty low as it stands, which means that it's kind of like a...
I wouldn't say exactly a scam, but you're letting people in who really can't make it.
But what happens is you have to just keep lowering and lowering and lowering your standards.
I mean, I remember having...
A high school teacher, a fantastic guy.
I mean, he was having us read Chaucer.
We went through Beowulf.
You know, these are challenging texts to get through.
It's a big tunnel of time, and you think Shakespeare is tough.
Man, you try getting into Chaucer, and you've got yourself a bit of a mouthful.
And I just don't know what's happening now, but I do know for sure that any time you widen the tent, you have to lower the standards, and that means you're going to have to appeal more to the feels than the thinks.
Yeah, you know, I call it educating people beyond their intelligence.
We're doing a lot of that.
It's not insulting.
I mean, look, my math skills are rudimentary.
If all college was was the study of math, I shouldn't go.
It's more than that.
But what we're doing is we're, like you said, we've lowered overall standards.
And because we can't push kids, so we're bringing in all these kids to college who shouldn't be there, I would argue, easily.
40% of my kids, 4 out of every 10 of my university students shouldn't be there.
Either they cannot do the work, they are intellectually incapable of doing the work, or attitudinally, they are so recalcitrant that they won't do it.
So literally, almost half my kids in every single class shouldn't be there.
I can't fail 50% of my kids.
If I failed 50% of my students, I wouldn't have a job, because that's 50% of those kids are paying...
Administrator fees.
They're helping us build new dorms.
They're building the new workout palace for the college kids.
You can't fail them.
And so you bring in 50% of the student body that can't perform.
You can't get rid of them.
You got to lower the overall for everybody.
And so you see the Obama push.
It's not just mandatory free college.
Obama, Hillary, Bernie Sanders want this.
College is a right now.
It's not a privilege, right?
That's the lie.
College isn't a right.
Our kids are learning in college now what they used to learn in high school in the 1970s.
And so you just keep lowering it.
But this is the point.
You're going to so overwhelm the system with people who aren't qualified that it forces you to completely jettison what's worked for 2,000 years and adopt this new model of teaching, right?
We can't educate most of our kids right?
We can't educate all of them to be doctrinaire progressives.
And we win-win, right?
Not only are we destroying the traditional value system that motivated the country for 2,000 years, the Western world for 2,000 years, not only are we getting rid of all of that retrograde garbage, we're re-infusing these kids with politics.
You mentioned it in journalism, right?
At least in the 1960s, as bad as Walter Cronkite was, He made an obvious effort to try to be neutral when delivering the news.
Obviously, he's a doctrinaire leftist, but you couldn't always tell from listening to him.
Now we've just decided in the field of journalism that there is no truth, so everything is political.
This is the formulation that was made on campus.
Everything is always political.
I agree that everything has a political dimension, but we have made it the only dimension.
We no longer talk about truth and beauty when it comes to the study of art and literature, as you said earlier.
We only study now the politics of it.
And so if politics is all we have, even though everything is supposed to be relative, progressive politics must be pushed and conservative politics has to be destroyed.
So once again, we're back to the hypocrisies that we pointed out at the beginning of the hour.
Yeah, what is it?
The New York Times says that diversity is a strength except they won't allow any Republicans to write for them because apparently half the population of the United States is just a little bit too...
And of course, if I was on the left, if I was a Marxist and so on, I'd love the idea of free college because then I'd get people who weren't going to college to pay for the indoctrination of people who were going to college so that I could have even more power over them.
But it is really brutal to not tell the truth to people.
You know, you're not good at this is one of the most wonderful things that you can ever hear because it helps you focus.
You know, we all have limited time on the planet.
We all have limited resources.
You know, human desires are infinite.
The resources are always finite.
So helping people focus on what they're best at to leverage their strengths and avoid their weaknesses where they can't be remediated is a fundamental kindness to human beings.
I actually think that men are slightly better at it than women as a whole because women are a little bit more nurturers and men have to sort of go out into the woods and deal with real bears and stuff.
But, you know, that's sort of a debatable point.
But, you know, what I think is particularly tragic is these kids who go into college, who can't hack it, who are going to end up with what?
They're going to end up with their debt.
They've gone through four years of foregone earnings.
Like I got a friend who's an econ professor who was making this case because he was saying, you know, every week, a couple of times a week, I have my office hours.
Do you guys ever come by?
It's free, free education.
And he went through the list and he says, here's how much you're foregoing in income.
Here's how much you're paying.
You know, it's going to, it's like three, four hundred thousand bucks by the time you're done.
It's going to follow you because you're going to be four years behind everywhere you go in your career.
so if you can get something for free like my expertise when you're spending three four hundred thousand bucks to get a college degree why wouldn't you take it and that's a very important question i remember all i wrote when i was doing uh philosophy classes took a class in harris i wrote extra papers i sat down with the professor we went through them because i'm like i'm paying for this you know i better get my money's worth out of it and i think it really did pay off in the long run but it's really tragic when we say everyone can go to college
everyone can be an intellectual, everyone can be a writer, everyone can be a critical thinker.
No, no, that's not the case.
It's like saying everyone can be a plumber.
No, some people are better at it.
Some people have that sort of three-dimensional space thing going on that's fantastic.
Not everyone can be an engineer.
Not everyone can be a brain surgeon.
And we need to let sort of the free market sort people into their relevant categories of utility.
And utility means value for them in terms of income and so on.
But this idea that everyone can be anything, again, it's like we're these interchangeable blobs, and we pour water into whatever container the state puts us in, and that becomes our shape.
We are much less flexible than people think in terms of our abilities, and giving the lie to everyone that they can be anything is very cruel, I think, in a lot of ways.
It is cruel, but it's effective.
I mean, these kids who come through the college, because they all get their degrees, you push them through, you can't fail them out.
And even the ones who do, even the really miserable lowest 20% who have no business being on campus, it's going to take them two or three years to fail out with all the remediation they're given.
But the reality is that these are kids now who are trained to be entitled to a college.
I have the piece of paper.
I may have spent $200,000 that I don't have on it, but I've got the piece of paper on this worthless degree.
But now I'm entitled to not have to pay for it.
And so what you see is how effective it's been.
Who's voting for Democrats?
Who's voting for Hillary Clinton?
You take away that 18 to 35 demographic from Obama or lowered slightly the percentage of vote he got from that group, he would have lost twice.
But that's the generation now that you're growing up.
They've been given their degree.
They've had to take out loans for it.
They're entitled to college-type jobs, they believe.
They have nothing.
So this is the group that is the most reliably progressive.
They will vote for somebody.
Why do they want Bernie over Hillary, even though they've been schooled in the art of we need a woman president?
They wanted him because he was more vociferous than she was about waiving your college debt, right?
So what you've done is you're training up an entire generation who is entitled.
And they're more than willing to throw away liberty, freedom, responsibility if it means they will be taken care of.
And that was the plan from the beginning, right?
If you can get all those people educated, and all education means is not critical thinking, or prepared to do anything, it just means politically on our side.
You grow up all these people to believe that the government owes them everything.
And Lincoln was right.
In one generation, one generation, the philosophy of the classroom becomes the philosophy of the government.
Yeah.
And it puts me into...
I think it's fair to say that there's quite a significant amount of media bias against Donald Trump.
And so I've done a series of videos called The Untruths About Donald Trump.
I'm just trying to correct the record.
But of course, everyone then thinks I'm completely supporting everything that Donald Trump says.
And it's like, no, I'm just, you know, if one person walks down the side of the seesaw and you want it to balance, the other person's got to go on the other side of the seesaw to give it some balance.
And people are so polarized and so unable to see nuance.
As you were pointing out with Shylock, he makes this great case for egalitarianism while being a bit of a dick himself.
This is the kind of nuance that we need to get.
Shakespeare's masterful deconstruction of intergenerational warfare is, to me, one of the great geniuses of what he did.
But everyone has a perspective that makes sense.
You might dislike King Lea's arrogance at the beginning, but when he says, I am a fond, foolish old man at the end, and he's begging for forgiveness, I mean, there's not a dry eye in a remotely sentimental heart in the entire room.
And so this kind of subtlety where, you know, I can say, well, look, these falsehoods are being said about Donald Trump.
Let's just at least get to the facts so that you can make your own decisions.
People are like, oh, you're pro-Donald Trump.
You agree with everything he said.
It's like, Why does it have to be this black and white?
But black and white thinking, again, I think, is part of less intelligent approaches to the world.
It's got to be this or this.
There's a very famous, well, not famous, but I was struck, there's an old Cheers episode where Fraser Crane is reading from, I think, Great Expectations, right?
The very famous beginning where he says, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
And I think Cliff Clavin says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Which was it?
It can't be both.
It has to be one or the other.
It has to be the best times.
It can't be both, right?
And that to me is one of the great, you know, of course, Fraser Crane was a highly intelligent man in the story and the postal carrier, not so much.
And I think that needing to see nuance, nuance is where the fun in life is.
Nuance is where the value of your brain is.
You know, if it's either or, you don't need much intelligence.
I mean, mice can figure out whether they can eat something or not.
I agree.
And so it doesn't matter if men are guilty of harassing anybody.
It doesn't matter if Shakespeare is much more broad-minded than your feminist readings will make him.
We've got to get rid of evidence to usher in this new sensitivity, right?
And so to step back to what you just said, I think you're exactly right.
Nuance.
I do the same thing.
Your readers are quite sensitive.
Your viewers are quite sensitive and intelligent, certainly compared to what I see on college campuses.
Talk about places.
Where people are educated beyond their intelligence.
This idea that having a PhD somehow in this day and age intellectually separates you, it doesn't.
I mean, I know from having gone through it, if you pay, it's like the undergraduate degree, you pay enough money and you stick it out long enough, get enough student loans, they'll hand you a PhD just to get rid of you.
It doesn't signify anything necessarily.
And so on campus, I see this all the time.
And wherever I try to push back like you do, Right?
That, okay, okay, okay.
You're going to say Trump is all these things.
Let's stipulate that he is.
But do you not see those things in Hillary, too, like you said about the tax evasions?
They get angry with you, right?
It's not a matter of being able to say, yes, Trump is a tax evader, but then again, so is Hillary, right?
They can't do that.
Sorry, he's not a tax evader, he's a tax planner.
I agree with you.
Using their language, right?
So when Trump skillfully manipulates our Byzantine tax system, he's a criminal.
When Hillary Clinton just flat out doesn't pay them, this is somehow swept under the table.
With this inability to see both sides of an issue, and my kids can't do it either, And so when I do it, I become quite radical.
On campus, we've reached the point on campus, and this, I guess, is the horrifying thing to me.
We've reached the point on campus where simply pointing out the bias is a symbol of your bigotry.
Simply standing in the void and pointing out the ludicrous hypocrisy of seeing the speck that is in your brother's eye and ignoring the moat that's in yours, to do that on a college campus is considered an act of Tremendous irrationality, unbecoming a university professor.
That's what's so sad.
Even those few of us who will still point it out, all we get is branded as apostates for doing it.
There's no place on campus, really, where you can have the kind of conversation you and I are having.
You can't have this with professors.
You certainly can't have it with students anymore.
Well, and there's sort of two other, I think, tragedies which maybe we can close on, and I could chat all day, but eventually people are going to pass out on their keyboards, but...
And similar to the Trump thing, you know, I when I talk about the facts of particular police incidents, which I do because Black Lives Matter and I don't want neighborhoods to get burned down.
And this is not helping advance the course of race relations, having this hysteria, which escalates to both sides.
When I point out the facts of police encounters, you know, that that's, you know, the Scott guy who was shot recently, he was not sitting there reading a book.
You know, he had a gun and he had a criminal record and he'd been his wife had taken out a restraining order because he threatened her and punched his kid in the head.
I mean, you know, this is just facts.
Suddenly, I'm completely pro police.
I agree with absolutely everything that the police come up with.
And the mastery of emotion, which was one of the fundamental aspects of philosophy, because.
The first one.
It was the first principle of philosophy.
Know thyself, so that you know your biases.
Yes, exactly.
So the mastery of emotion, we've become such an emotional society.
I hesitate to say girly, but you know, you could say that as well.
Emotions and passions are a wonderful part of life, but I'm sort of Aristotelian, right?
You should not be passionless, because then you won't have any particular motivation, but you should not be ruled by passion.
It's an Aristotelian mean, I think.
And we've become so emotional that people can literally say, well, your argument's bringing facts to bear on this.
Make me upset.
And because I'm upset, you are a bad person.
And that is the tyranny of the feels.
You know, it's the fascism of the squishy heart that has become so brutal.
That's number one.
And the second thing I wanted to mention is there's this weird kind of reversal of cause and effect.
So in the past, people who graduated from colleges and particularly top tier universities, well, it was a mark of significant intelligence.
And people said, wow, you know, those guys who graduate from Yale, who get a master's or a PhD from Yale, they earn like, I don't know, five, I'm just making a number out of them, they earn five times the average population's earnings.
So the more people we can stuff into these universities, the more they're magically gonna be able to make this money.
But no, it is, the effect of intelligence is getting through the college educational system.
And if you look at people's IQ and its relationship to income, it's a very linear progression, whether they go to college or not, right?
Because smart people are going to succeed in most situations in most environments.
And I think with this in particular, with regards to the black community and the Hispanic community to a large degree, but I think America has much more responsibility to the black community because of this sort of history of segregation, Jim Crow slavery, and so on.
That when black people would go to college in the past and face the same standards as white people, then the black people who graduated were viewed as the same and same level of competence and so on.
But when you get all of this affirmative action, stuffing the pipe, you know, lowering the standards and so on, there are wonderful, brilliant, genius-level black people going through these programs, but people who are hiring on the other side don't know who's there because of native ability or who's there because the numbers were jigged to hit diversity quarters.
And what that means is that the very smartest blacks look at going to college and say, well, I'm going to get lost in the shuffle.
People aren't going to know whether it's me because of my native abilities, my hard work, my dedication, my intelligence.
That's why I got the degree or if I'm basically an affirmative action quota higher.
And so it makes, in particular, getting a college degree the least attractive option for the most intelligent blacks.
And that, to me, is one of the brutal things.
How much has been robbed from blacks who would be fantastic in school and Because of all of this quota stuff, and that to me is part of patience.
I mean, you can stuff the pipe, you can put a rock into a university and graduate it with a PhD if you want, and you say, look, we've hit our rock quota.
But the problem is, if you're patient and wait, then these things evolve of their own accord.
But our desire to just, well, we hit these numbers, and therefore everything's solved, that to me is not being able to defer the gratification and wanting the appearance of a solution rather than a genuine and organic solution in the long run.
And you just defined Marxism to bring us full circle, right?
The immediate impact, the immediate equality, not society becoming more fair and just by a natural working out of freedom and liberty.
You're imposing it from the outside.
That problem exists because we've chosen Marxist dialectic over genuine knowledge.
But I'll just close by saying what you said.
Go back to your first point.
Because we allow the passions first place in our – even in our universities, think about the irony of that.
The one place the passion should not be allowed pride of place is our university, our educational system.
But because we've allowed emotion, feeling, which everybody can have regardless of IQ, because we've allowed emotion and feeling to completely swamp logic and thinking, we now no longer have the ability to decide what's good and bad emotion.
We no longer have, because there are, and Aristotle will be the first to tell you, the unjust feeling of emotion, right, is what he called sentimentality.
That feeling for causes, feeling sympathetic to causes that intellectually you shouldn't feel sympathetic for, that's the hallmark of weak thinking.
And so because we've sub-subordinated thinking to feeling, we are ginning up all this feeling for foolish things, right?
We're ginning up all this feeling for Black Lives Matter, for instance, which is nothing more than a left-wing, agitator, provocateur group who tacitly and sometimes implicitly and sometimes tacitly supports violent measures to achieve their aims.
We're sympathetic to that because we haven't thought through the idea that we need to treat people beyond race and class.
We've lost that, and the consequences we're reaping now are this kind of destruction of the country, destruction of the universities on an intellectual level, and now destruction of our cities on a very visceral level, all because we've put feeling first and we've relegated genuine thinking and discriminating.
Because that's what we do.
The purpose of education is to teach people how to discriminate.
I don't mean...
Discriminate on the basis of race.
Obviously, that's a foolish discrimination.
But better and worse, righter from wronger, truer from falser, the word discriminate has been so absolutely demonized that we won't use it even when we're supposed to.
And that's to the deficit of all of us.
Yeah, I mean, Aristotle, read him on emotions, you know, as he pointed out, he said, any idiot can get angry.
I may be paraphrasing a little here, but any idiot can get angry.
I step my toe, I can get angry.
Any idiot can express that anger, can yell and scream and so on.
But getting angry about the right things, in the right way, in a just manner, which has a positive effect on the injustice you're angry about, that's just a little bit more complicated than just, you know, and the same thing is true with altruism or empathy.
You know, pathological altruism has been sort of touted as one of the reasons why Western civilization is undergoing significant challenges to its very foundation.
Yes, there are people who have had great misfortune who we should be charitable for.
However, there are people who have also engineered their own misfortune.
And maybe charity is not the right approach to those people.
Maybe letting them learn from the consequences of their actions is more fair and more just.
It's a big, complicated mess.
Big, giant government programs, of course, can never, ever achieve that kind of discrimination.
So thanks so much.
Of course, a great pleasure to chat as always.
Let me just remind everyone that the final statistics for Dr. Pesta is you can go to fpeusa.org to have a look at the excellent coursework that he has available.
If you should happen to wish to airlift your children out of the indoctrination camps of government schools, he is a great helipad to land on.
