July 27, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:58
4153 The Uniqueness of Western Civilization | Ricardo Duchesne and Stefan Molyneux
Book Summary: "This extensively researched book argues that the development of a libertarian culture was an indispensable component of the rise of the West. The roots of the West's superior intellectual and artistic creativity should be traced back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers. Among the many fascinating topics discussed are: the ascendancy of multicultural historians and the degradation of European history; China's ecological endowments and imperial windfalls; military revolutions in Europe 1300-1800; the science and chivalry of Henry the Navigator; Judaism and its contribution to Western rationalism; the cultural richness of Max Weber versus the intellectual poverty of Pomeranz, Wong, Goldstone, Goody, and A.G. Frank; change without progress in the East; Hegel's Phenomenology of the [Western] Spirit; Nietzsche and the education of the Homeric Greeks; Kojeve's master-slave dialectic and the Western state of nature; Christian virtues and German aristocratic expansionism." Dr. Ricardo Duchesne is a historical sociologist, a professor at the University of New Brunswick and the author of “The Uniqueness of Western Civilization,” “Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age” and “Canada In Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians.” Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. Here with, back with, in fact, Dr.
Ricardo Duchesne. He is a historical sociologist, a professor at the University of New Brunswick, and the author of, here's some great books, we'll put links to them below, The Uniqueness of Western Civilizations, what we'll be chatting about today, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, and Canada in Decay, Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians.
Dr. Duchesne, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Hi, Stefan. I'm really glad to be here again.
It's a nice, bright day here in New Brunswick.
So that's a good way to...
A rarity. A rarity if I remember my time out east.
But all right. Yeah, it is.
So the uniqueness of Western civilization.
This is the big picture, big topic idea that has tormented, tortured, and frustrated, and I guess motivated a lot of historians and philosophers and sociologists over the past...
50, 75 years in particular.
And you go into this in really fantastic detail in the book.
Remember, it's called The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.
So let's just do a quick sprint through the question and some of the various ways in which it's been answered why the Industrial Revolution took off in particular in sort of Western Europe and why there is so many scientific and economic advancements in the West as compared to other cultures over the last two centuries, say. Yes, that's right.
Usually this debate is known as the rise of the West debate.
And when people use the word rise, they mean to say, why did Europeans or Europe rose to become the first industrial society?
That question inevitably brings the scientific revolution.
So usually those two are what people are asking about.
Why did modern science emerge first in Europe and then why the industrial revolution?
And I would say that nowadays, the focus in recent years has been on simply the Industrial Revolution.
And the theme is no longer the rise of the West, but the great divergence.
Why did Europe, and England in particular, diverge from what was a Malthusian pattern of development that characterized all civilizations throughout history?
And that dominates or tends to dominate the discourse on this issue.
Now, I use the title, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, because I felt that The West has always been different from the very beginning of history.
And throughout Western history, you see many divergences.
For example, the discovery of the world.
To me, that's a dramatic new development in world history.
But as you know, because of political correctness, the very idea that Europeans discovered the world was discarded as unacceptable.
And then it was painted in a very negative light.
They didn't discover the world, they just colonized it, took the wealth from those areas of the world, and that's how actually they rose to become a militaristic power in history.
Whereas I see it in a more traditional way, the Europeans actually discovered the world because human beings did not know how the geography of the world was, they did not know in an all-encompassing way Where was China in relationship to the Americas, in relationship to Antarctica?
In fact, when you look at the maps that were coming out of China as late as the 1500s, in my estimation, they were inferior to the maps that you see coming from Hellenistic Greece many centuries before.
So, Europeans had this kind of worldly understanding of themselves, And their place in the world.
And the discovery of the world was really a fulfillment of that process by which Europeans came to realize that there was this big world out there, that they were located in a certain geographical area.
And then through the 1500s, they mapped out the entire world.
So the discovery of the world is a big transformation.
Together with that, there are many other things, like the Portuguese rounding of Africa moving into the Indian Ocean.
And then the Renaissance is associated with that.
You go back to ancient Greece.
People used to call it the miracle of ancient Greece.
The Greeks are known to have invented citizenship politics.
That means that in the population in a city, at least 30% of the population Can participate directly in democratic decision making.
They are also responsible for inventing geometry or deductive reasoning.
They are responsible for the literary style of tragedy, for prose writing.
And many other things.
And for non-mythological history, history that was critical of wars, critical of the ruling class and of the elites, a very self-critical society, which was unprecedented.
Most histories are, you know, the praise of the king and the mythology of how his divine rule is justified, but that's not the way that the Greek histories were actually written or consumed.
Yes, they were the first true historians.
Herodotus and Thucydides in particular, in my view, were the first true historians who realized that you cannot trust every account you hear around.
And they say it openly.
And they say you have to be methodical.
You have to be careful who do you trust.
Obviously, they did not have the kind of modern documentary evidence that we now demand.
But there is no question that they start that process By which they realize that you must be accurate in the way you describe events in history.
So the ancient Greeks were very good at that.
Another thing about Herodotus that is quite interesting is that contrary to this perception that what I'm saying is ethnocentric and it just elevates Europeans above all others, Well, Herodotus, and not just him, there were others, they were the first who said, you know what, we Greeks may have our costumes, our ways of doing things, but other people have their ways.
And it's kind of interesting, and he wrote about it, like he was kind of, look at how the Egyptians live, look at the values they have.
And so that kind of open-minded attitude towards other cultures, and that we should learn about them and hear them out, It's peculiarly Greek from ancient times.
And it goes through Roman times and through medieval times into the modern era when you see the whole science of ethnography being invented by Europeans.
Anthropology is a discipline of Europeans.
Archaeology is another discipline of Europeans.
So those three disciplines testify to people that are interested in what other peoples have done in their history and what their beliefs are.
Well, and we'll get to this, but I just wanted to point out that for me, at least, I have a particular virulent contempt for modern anthropology because it just seemed to be wielded as a tool for Marxists to discredit the West and promote primitivism and every collectivist culture known to mankind.
But sorry, that's the jumping the gun to tie it a little bit.
In the beginning of the book, you talk about this is like a 10-year labor of, and it is a prodigious intellectual achievement, the book that you have published.
I mean, that's a huge amount of time and effort and energy to pour into a work.
What are the major errors that you wanted to push back against to devote this much energy into this kind of work?
Well, I was a leftist, a Marxist, when I was a graduate student.
And even when I graduated and became a professor, I was still a Marxist.
My PhD dissertation was on a famous debate among Marxists, which is why did Europe transition from a feudal to capitalist economy?
They call it the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
I wrote that debate and among Marxists, The Marxists of the 60s, 70s and 80s, not the cultural Marxists of today.
They took it for granted that Europeans were unique in developing capitalism before anyone else.
They also took it for granted that certain things happened in Europe before they happened elsewhere, like modern science.
But then when I was a professor, this is the late 1990s, I started noticing that a lot of books were coming out from a multicultural perspective and they were seeking to revise what was taken to be a standard understanding that the West did rise to become the dominant civilization because of internal characteristics.
So I kind of I started reading these books and realizing that something was going on, that these people were actually not just putting down European history in the sense that they were imperialistic and England took a lot of wealth from the Caribbean and enslaved Africans and those sorts of things,
but they were also saying that Europeans didn't really do anything in particular that made them stand out That they just barely managed to industrialize first, possibly thanks to the fact that they had easy access to coal as a mineral, because they stumbled into the Americas, and they would use this word quite often, stumble into the Americas.
They never intended to go there.
And they were just lucky.
It was a lucky shot after a lucky shot, they would argue.
Others were not saying that.
There were some that were a bit more serious and would argue, no, they did industrialize first and the modern science had a role in that.
But they were still kind of thinking in terms of Europeans becoming the dominant imperial power in the world.
And I was like, yes, that's true.
They did become the dominant imperial power, but there was a lot more to it as I look at the issue.
And then I really just opened up the whole debate and I went back to the Indo-Europeans and I realized nobody was talking about them.
They were afraid of them because they were known as the Arjuns.
And so in that sense, I would say I really felt that this whole debate had to be opened up.
And to this day, even now, because I'm going to go back to this debate and I already started, I see more and more things that are unique.
I even, and I'm not going to get into this today, but I even think that already among the ancient Greeks you see a different consciousness.
That they are conscious of themselves, of their minds, in a way that other people are.
And that this plays a big factor.
It has to do with introspection because of having a sense of self, a sense of individual identity.
That makes them dig into their souls and to realize that the mind is a separate faculty, different from the body.
That we are here thinking beings and there is the external world and you can think about that world and it has its own laws.
This kind of way of thinking, you don't see it anywhere else.
But in any case, these are more recent ideas that I'm developing now.
But when I wrote Uniqueness, and it took me that long for 10 years, it's because first, as you may have noticed, I spent considerable time refuting the dominant multicultural paradigm.
I really thought they were saying things that were just outrageous.
And I mean, some of them are very good scholars.
They go methodically over what they want to say, but the premises are false.
You can tell that they are trying to bring about an agenda that Really, they want a history that is consistent with the diversification of the West.
Well, just to point out, if somebody's a really good scholar, it actually makes them more dangerous if they're wrong.
It's like a well-armed criminal.
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this, you know, speaking of good scholars, Kenneth Palmerans, you know, he wrote a book called The Great Divergence, and it has a subtitle that now escapes me, China and the West, something like that.
And He is very good and I really spent months going over everything he wrote in that book, how he collected the data, how he used sources, and I found out that a lot of misreadings A lot of misuse of data so that on the surface it appears to be really solid and everyone was praising it and he won all sorts of prizes and he eventually became the president of the American Historical Society which is the most prestigious position you can get.
But I realized that you know it was so simplistic to say that England just barely managed to escape the Malthusian world And industrialized because they had easy access to coal and because they received a bonanza of resources from the Americas.
And I thought that doesn't explain the Renaissance.
It doesn't explain the Enlightenment.
It doesn't quite explain Galileo and Newton.
These are very different phenomena.
So when I say the premises were wrong, well, there were Thinking that the rise of the West is just purely about power and conquering other people, whereas to me it's also about the Enlightenment, for example.
They're intertwined and they also speak of a uniqueness.
The fact that you have a civilization with all these thinkers, really critically self-examining everything that had been said in the past, And then saying to themselves, you know, if we're going to build a society that's good, we cannot just rely on traditions because they were handed to us and because we are supposed to be in all of those traditions, but rather let's apply reason to them.
In the same way that Galileo and others apply reason to nature, we can apply it to society.
And that's a key component of the Enlightenment.
So I thought to me that's quite unique.
I don't see that anywhere else.
So I Also wrote about the Enlightenment.
So yeah, that's why it took quite long because there are many points in Western history that you have to study and examine carefully, and I'm not a specialist on those subjects.
So what I would do is look out for what I felt were the standing key arguments about the Enlightenment, about the Renaissance, the Reformation, the key texts, and try and master those key texts.
Rather than becoming an expert on the Reformation, I tried to just Narrow in on the big debates and the major books and then think about them.
But it took quite a long time to do all of that, yeah.
Yeah, that's a forest full of footnotes.
And I think when the leftists as a whole say that everything is political, I really take that quite seriously.
And so when they put out a work of anthropology or history and so on, I assume that it's political.
I don't assume that it's objective.
I don't assume that it's factual.
I assume that it's political because that's generally what they say.
They're up to. And seeing how this cultural relativism, this hostility and denigration of Western traditions and achievements kind of came out of the 50s and 60s, well, you know, as we both know, what was going on in the left in the 50s and 60s was the fact that, you know, Stalin had colluded with With Hitler and National Socialism and Communism weren't doing well.
The cult of personality was revealed in the 60s by Khrushchev.
The collapse of capitalism was failing to materialize.
Germany had been resuscitated by free market policies and Japan had recovered from endless bombings and two nuclear weapons to do very well under the free market.
So the whole theories were taking massive blows, but of course they couldn't Yes,
there is no question that when they realized that communism was a failure and they could not persuade people as much anymore as to the greatness of communism, They shifted their attention to the cultural aspects of Western civilization and then began to chip away at it.
And it was not just the historians that I examined, but this happened with the feminists going after so-called Western patriarchy.
It happened with people who talk about white supremacy, so they began to racialize the issue.
They began to go after Christianity, after the traditional family.
And in the Debate that I was concerned about, they began to try and go after the whole idea that speaking about Western uniqueness was ethnocentric and therefore racist, that you should abandon that way of thinking.
And they kind of really thought that China was more advanced for most of history than the west and that the west just towards the end in the 1700s suddenly it took off.
So there was an element of if you like we are being empirical.
China really was more advanced and the west only became a more powerful dynamic economy In those decades leading to the Industrial Revolution or right during the Industrial Revolution.
And that too, I go through considerable detail demonstrating that no, the West actually, I mean, it did have a dark age after the Roman Empire collapsed that lasted from around 500-600 AD all the way to 1000 AD. But by the 12th century, Europe is taking off and you see very Exceptional inventions like the mechanical clock, spectacle, eyeglasses.
Oh, glasses! I'm sorry to interrupt, but that really struck me in the book, where you talk about how glasses were so powerful for a couple of reasons, not least of which, it doubled the life of skilled craftsmen in their capacity to work with tiny objects.
Yes, and a person that is very good in bringing this idea home is Hayden White and David Landis.
And They make the point that there are certain innovations that are small and they're not loud.
They don't involve big machinery.
It's just eyeglasses.
But as you just pointed out, they can really increase the life of a craftsman who, when he's at his best, when he's just picking and really has mastered the whole craftsmanship that he's involved in, yeah, it just prolongs it.
I've always loved the story that Spinoza died of inhaling little shavings of glass because he was a lens grinder.
So I've always liked the idea that a philosopher died over his dedication to bring better sight to mankind.
Yeah, and that's true.
He died of that.
People think that that likely was the reason.
He was a great philosopher.
And that's another thing that I have written about recently is that most of the great thinkers by far come from the West.
Some people don't want to accept that, and as we become more diverse and multicultural, it's becoming ever more difficult for people to even allow you to say that.
And it's really an incredibly negative development because universities are supposed to be places of higher learning.
I understand that careers, jobs, all of that stuff is important, and many students go there so that they can ensure themselves of a job, which is a very good thing.
But it is also a place of ideas, a place in which you look at that which is highest.
Highest in art, highest in technology, and highest in philosophical thinking, reflection.
If the West produce so many great sinkers, that has to be acknowledged, and it has to be asked why as well.
Well, and I just wanted to reinforce that, sorry to interrupt, but to reinforce that from your book, and you of course talk about Charles Murray's great book, Human Achievement.
And you say the most striking feature of his list, the giants in the sciences, the top 20 in astronomy, physics, biology, medicine, chemistry, earth sciences, and mathematics, is that they are all, excepting one Japanese, Western.
So consider the list for the top 20 in the combined sciences.
And you quote Murray here, concludes, and this is the quote from his book, whether measured in people or events, 97% of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America.
Now, we can say that they're Western or European or North America, but that's just a way of saying white.
Because we can sort of put the geographical or cultural euphemisms in place.
But we're talking about whites. These are facts.
And Charles Murray has a very objective way of measuring achievement.
And it is just the way That it shakes out.
And saying that this is somehow subjective or relativistic and so on is false.
And we should be trying to find out as much as possible how to reproduce these achievements in other cultures so that other cultures can bring as much glory to scientific and material advancement as Western whites have, rather than just trying to pull down these achievements or pretend that they didn't exist.
Yes, and Europeans have done that.
They have really tried and encouraged other cultures to be good in science.
They advised them in the development of their own research institutes and universities.
But to go to Charles Murray again, this is a book, a case in point of someone who doesn't address the rise of the West directly.
He comes from a different angle.
He's famous for his book on race differences and other books that are not directly about the rise of the West.
But I looked at this book that nobody was talking about among the circles that I was debating or having this debate with, and I go, this book is actually really important.
It really has packs of information about things that stand out about the West.
So I took it really seriously, read it very carefully, and realized that here for the first time we have a very good statistical demonstration of How much more Europeans achieved in science and he also talks about the arts.
And he really does try to be objective because the sources that he uses, he said, I rely on reference books, encyclopedias, biographies from other countries as much as they have produced them.
It happens to be the case that Europeans also produce most of the encyclopedias.
The bibliopedias, the dictionaries, and so on.
And in the arts, he points out, if I remember rightly, that 40% of the great composers come from just four countries in Europe.
And this is worldwide. This is not just Western tradition.
This is worldwide of composers whose works are reproduced and studied in other cultures and countries and so on.
40% from just four tiny countries.
Classical music is 100% European.
It's 100%.
Now, some people could say, so what?
All musics are the same.
Muir would disagree.
And it is a difficult argument.
It's not an easy one to say when it comes to something that is about aesthetics and sounds, which one is better.
My sense is that when you look at the notation, the musical notation, the difficulty of learning the instrument of composing original work, I don't think it can be denied.
That it demands a lot more from your brain than any other type of music.
You may not like it, but simply on that criteria, you must be quite intelligent musically to produce Great classical music.
It just demands a lot from you.
Well, and just thinking about the direction of competence, you could call this the Yo-Yo Ma principle to say that there are more East Asians studying Western classical music than there are Western musicians attempting to replicate the glories of Chinese opera.
So it is a bit of a one-way street.
That's right. That's true.
Yes. They themselves acknowledge that.
Right. So let's...
Go back to the Greeks, and I'd like to do a little bit of a hop, skip, and a jump through this stuff, because the traditional way, at least, that I think of sort of the Western history is sort of, you know, the Greeks to the Romans to the Dark Age to the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the glories and disasters of the modern age.
But it all is, to me at least, an inverted pyramid based upon Greek philosophy, Greek politics, to some degree Greek mathematics, to a smaller degree Greek science.
Certainly the Romans were the more practical engineers relative to the Greek theoreticians.
But when it comes to Greek reason, it seems to me one of the great foundations, Dr.
Duchesne, of the West is after the Greeks, and in particular after Socrates, it became embarrassing.
To be contradictory, to have a contradictory hypothesis or conjecture, to have a contradictory theorem, to place limits on reason was vaguely distasteful.
That is not the case in other cultures, as you point out in the Islamic culture.
Placing rationality at the center of your culture limits the power of God, and this was not something that was accepted for much of Western history.
So if you say, well, we have to be rational, In order to be factual, in order for our conjectures to be provable or true and so on.
And if this distaste for contradiction is the foundation of the West, that seems to go at least some way of explaining the Western success in the sciences because nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
And if you have rational thinking, then you can better control nature, which is the foundation of science and the Industrial Revolution.
But this focus on consistency is unique as far as I know to the West and I think is one of the great foundations of our success.
Yes, I mean it is there from the pre-Socratics with the emphasis that they place on logos.
The idea that there is an order out there in the world and that we are part of that world and we have a faculty that can think through the order that you have in the world and that is the way to know the truth.
Also the idea, and you see this in the Socratic dialogues, That truth comes from contestation, from debate.
And this is a big component of why I say the West was unique, is that it was a very contesting culture from the very beginning.
Strange as it may seem to people, logic is founded on this idea of contestation, because when you have arguments with people, you will have noticed we are always trying to find flaws.
Inconsistencies, weaknesses, premises that are just not solid enough.
And it's something that you go after.
I'm just going to refute you.
I'm going to prove you wrong.
And how do you do that? By being very logically precise and consistent.
And Aristotle understood that and he went to fully developed methods by which he say, look, what I'm claiming Must have some element of truthfulness because I am quite consistent in the way I lay out my whole argument.
And I would argue that there you have a solid foundation for what happens later on.
Medieval people understood that Aristotelian logic was a foundation for their own theology.
That's why it's called theology and there's a logic in most disciplines, sociology, And so on, because you have to be logical when you present your case.
So it goes back to the ancient Greeks.
And it really was, in my view, a miracle.
I mean, what was the population?
It's mostly happening in Athens.
What was the population of Athens?
It was very small.
I don't remember the numbers now, 90,000, you know, it's a long history.
But, and of course, it wasn't just The classical Greeks, the pre-Socratics, but then the Hellenistic Greeks, that's the period when you really see scientific thinking emerging with Euclid, the guy who measured the circumference of the earth and others, Empedocles. No, that wasn't him.
His name is not coming on now, but there were quite a few others.
And yeah, it's an incredible period that goes on from around 500 BC all the way to 300 AD. It goes on for about 800 years and then it really influences Christianity.
Christian philosophers from the very beginning they said you know what happened among these Greek pagans and the Romans too in terms of the institutional order is an amazing historical phenomenon and we cannot just throw it out the window and they Christians who are educated are educated in Greek thinking and Roman law.
And these, then they amalgate Roman law, administration, Greek philosophy, and Christianity together and create the Catholic synthesis that holds on for a long time.
Catholicism, whether you're a Catholic or not, are the most rational religious people in the world.
Everything they say has to have a definition.
It has to be proven. And, you know, just go to the Catholic encyclopedia, read Aquinas.
I mean, Aquinas is incredibly logical in the way he goes about doing his theology.
So even proving the existence of God, they felt you have to be rational about it.
I mean, there is faith.
And faith, and there are many things about Christianity that are beyond reason.
Why or how...
Christ possibly be the son of God.
How could that happen? So there is such a thing as faith, but they always felt the two have to coexist together.
This is not the case with Islamic reason, or if you can call it reason, although some of them did try to reason and were influenced by Aristotle.
But yes, you're right. I mean, Greece is a fundamental foundation and their emphasis on reason is key to that.
And this is what's so frustrating to me, and the visceral frustration may be rational, maybe not, but what's so frustrating to me is that if you put forward a conjecture about history that says, ah, well, you see, England and the West became rich because it pillaged from other countries and other cultures.
Okay, okay, so that's a hypothesis.
So the first thing that you would do if you believe in reason and evidence and empiricism and rationality, the very first thing you would do Is you would say, okay, am I trying to explain a singular event with an explanation that has occurred many other times without producing that same event?
So the idea that, let's say that the West...
Let's say that the West...
Well, it certainly did go and take over other countries and it did take resources from those countries.
It tried to trade and sometimes it did and sometimes it didn't.
Okay. Was that the first time that had ever occurred in human history?
Well, of course not. I mean, human history was this Hobbesian nature red in tooth and claw, Nietzschean post-moral survival of the fittest Darwinian crap fest throughout most of human history.
Yeah. And so if you're going to say, well, it's the pillaging of another country that produced the Industrial Revolution and the triumphs of the West, you'd have to then explain why that didn't happen the other 3,000 times that countries had attacked and conquered other countries in history.
And that to me would be the first thing if you had self-criticism rather than you were an ideologue, you'd say.
Or you'd explain why countries like Switzerland became wealthy without having...
Or why Spain was poor for 400 years after they stripped all of the gold from the New World and debased and destroyed their currency.
And so it is that lack of self-criticism that the Greeks so embody that is so frustrating to me when you get these ideologues who come up with this simple idiot explanation without any reference as to why it doesn't explain everything else in history that was pretty much the same.
The thing about that idea, and it is an idea that I first...
I learned when I got into university as a Hispanic.
I went to university and one of the things that is imprinted on us among Hispanics and then professors in universities is that Latin America was underdeveloped by the United States, first Europe, then the United States, and that is why we have all these problems.
And then that idea has been extended in all directions.
The natives, the indigenous peoples of Canada and Australia and New Zealand, again, their lands were stolen from them.
While they were busy stealing lands from each other.
I just wanted to point that out.
While they were busy enslaving and killing and committing half genocides against each other.
Right. And it takes away from looking into your own The flaws of your culture, of your institutions, of your politicians.
I mean, we have in Latin America, Mexico, possibly one of the most corrupt nations in the world.
When I studied the history of Mexico, it just struck me right away.
Well, if you want to know why this place is so messy, it's nothing to do with the Americans.
They just didn't have a solid constitutional history.
It was one militaristic guy, poorly educated, many of them.
Taking power and opposing the other one.
The few instances in Mexican history that you can say are bright lights is when you get the influence of French positivism during the reign of Portillo.
And when you get a decent ruler like Benito Juarez who did care for the poor in Mexico, you get bright lights in their history.
But other than that, it really is a complete mess.
Whereas when I would study European history, you don't see that kind of mess like that.
You see actual new developments happening.
Now, in the case of imperialism, yes, as I said, it's one of the most talked about or used arguments against any form of white pride is to inflict guilt forever Telling them that you should never be proud of your history because you impoverished the whole world and now you should accept masses and masses of immigrants and if you don't it's because you're continuing the same imperialist racist attitudes of the past.
But on so many levels this is wrong for some of the reasons that you gave but also it's wrong because for the Europeans to be so successful the British were the ones who reached the peak in imperialism For them to be so successful, you have to look internally at British history.
First, we get, particularly after the 1400s, 1500s, an incredible history of navigational developments in Europe.
They build one new technique in navigation, and it is continuous.
It is not half-hazard in sporadic Like the Chinese, they have these big chips in the 1400s, but then they cease exploration and barely anything happens in navigational technology.
As I argue in uniqueness, you can see one invention after another or innovation in navigation.
Then you have to look at the whole institutional background behind the exploration, behind the colonization.
Particularly in the case of the British, because they were the most successful.
And so, you know, it's not just that the Europeans were colonizing like everyone else, but they were colonizing in ways that were modern, with new technologies, that they were very successful.
And I would add that ultimately, Yes, a lot of people pay a price for this, including Europeans.
In history, you always pay a price.
That, by and large, the non-European world benefited greatly from European colonization.
All they were, they would not have had electricity.
I mean, just electricity. Just take that one key invention.
It just altered the whole world.
There were no signs whatsoever that they had the science to create electricity.
That's uniquely European.
You get the washing machine, you know, you get all those things that you see around.
Airplanes, all that stuff came from Europeans.
So today, when you look at China, India, with fast-growing economies, and you see that throughout the world, Absolute starvation has declined, except for sub-Saharan Africa.
The situation of the poor in the world has improved dramatically in the last few decades.
Those people who said that Europeans and Americans are simply making the rest of the world poorer and poorer, that argument has collapsed.
I would argue also that it's reversed all the leftist tropes because one of the great, well, two of the greatest curses in world history to me was the infliction of, and it was a Western, infliction of communism upon China and socialism in the post-Second World War period under Nero in India.
And Indian development was stalled for many decades because of predatory socialism and, of course, Chinese culture and lives by the tens of millions were destroyed by communism.
And it was with the reintroduction of free market principles that you have the situation, the greatest alleviation of human poverty in the history of humankind, where you have 50,000 people a month in India breaking out of poverty and into the middle class as a result of free market principles.
The fact that people don't champion this and say this is one of the greatest developments in human history just shows the power and cold-heartedness of ideology to me.
Yes, and Europeans need to emphasize that.
They need to, you know, to use the word Pride is something to be proud about your ancestors.
I think you can say admiration.
Because pride is usually something you've earned yourself.
But objectively, when one culture contributes 97% of the scientific progress up until 1950, yeah, I think a couple of props are in order.
Yes. Alright, so let's talk about this race that is often put forward, which you talk about in the book, between China and the West.
Because there's no doubt whatsoever that, objectively speaking, China had remarkable advancements.
I mean, they had, as you say, gunpowder, and they had essentially IQ tests for bureaucrats a long time before.
But there was, of course, this stagnation.
That occurred, this sort of photocopy of an advanced civilization.
It was not able to break through into the upward self-reinforcing dynamic spiral of the West.
So how is China put forward as some sort of repudiation about the uniqueness of the West?
Well, first, it is interesting that these multicultural historians are stuck with just one nation to make their case for multi-developments, to make the case that The Europeans were not unique or more advanced and that they represent a more global perspective on issues like this.
Actually, no, they just have China.
They're not saying the Aztecs, the Mayas, this African tribe or that African tribe.
Most of the world cultures are not part of the debate.
They are outside it.
I mean, India could come in a little bit, Japan towards the end, but To all intended purposes, it's just a few of them and the West.
So it's important to emphasize that.
It's not West and then, oh, they are for many cultures and look at us.
It's not that way.
So China, they choose it because, as you just pointed out, China chose from early on to be very good, particularly in agriculture.
with the rice farming.
Although I get into that and I argue that a lot of the advantages that China had can be attributed to the nature of rice cultivation.
You can get more than one harvest per year and just the whole idea of wet farming, the water carries the nutrients so you don't have that problem of seeking nutrients from manure and in other ways with dry farming.
You can get so much more food out of a small parcel of rice than come from wheat or any other grain that we have in the West.
You need larger tracts of land.
So naturally, they have a higher productivity.
The West where they surpassed them was increasing their labor productivity starting in the Middle Ages.
But there is no doubt that the Chinese developed the heavy plow before the Europeans, although the Europeans adapted it to the hard Cold soils of the North, and there is no doubt that they had paper,
they had printing in a kind of cumbersome way, some sort of printing, they had water clocks, and they have massive cities because of this massive population being fed through rice farming.
So the debate is about that, that China is more advanced, they argue, and then they say India is more advanced.
But I don't buy that argument because first, to me, it's not just about how many people you're able to feed.
It's also about per capita income.
You look at Denmark today, Norway, Finland, very small populations, highest per capita incomes.
They win a lot of the contests in education contests that we have.
And according to UN indicators, they're very good in other things besides per capita income in terms of literacy and so on.
So I would point to that.
As I was saying from the beginning, culture matters to me as well.
And medieval Europe was the progenitor of real universities.
They just grow in these smaller towns.
They're not big like the Chinese.
But in these small towns, you see one university after another emerging.
And there are three universities because they have real faculty members who need to go through various steps to be given a license to teach and then to be able to adjudicate over master's work, the works of students.
And they are also a real university because they are like a They commune, they're independent, they have their own laws, they regulate themselves.
And this is a legacy that goes on to this day, although now universities will outwork the government in terms of controls and all that kind of thing.
Really, the government has no right to impose over universities what we teach, what textbooks we use, and you can see this already in the medieval times.
And these were universities that, to a large degree, functioned under free market principles rather than the way that it works right now in universities, which is largely dominated by government controls and regulations and licensing and so on.
Yeah, the professors did not get a secure salary.
The students were paid, and if they didn't get students, they had no salary.
I know that feeling. But in any case, they were autonomous in various ways.
And this is true for many other, including the towns themselves were autonomous, free from feudal magnets, free from the king.
That goes back to the paper revolution, where you see many different types of laws for each sphere of human life.
Manorial law, royal law, the law of the king, the law of the feudal lords, the law of the cities, and so on, and the law of the universities.
And each have their own sphere.
Whereas in other civilizations, it's just one law just clamping down over the rest of society.
And you don't have that much autonomy.
It's the elite at the top and then the masses of the population.
Whereas in European society, you have many layers.
You have the king, the feudal lords themselves, with Magna Carta, basically, they are claiming their autonomy from the king.
You can't tax us and not Expect us to be part of your decision-making because we are free men and this is something I trace as being unique to European history that the ruling class is really aristocratic in the true sense that they are free and you find this expressed throughout European history with medieval representative institutions.
The king has to consult these bodies.
You have then eventually a growing middle class that demands representation in parliament.
The parliament itself eventually wins a lot of powers in 1688 and the king has to coexist with it in England and this is happening in different ways in other places in Europe.
So this is also part of the uniqueness of Europe.
So you know to go back to the universities, yes I mean They were more advanced in that way, and while China had this highly productive agrarian system that is able to feed a lot more people,
and thus in that same sense gives a semblance of greatness, superiority, and you can grant that in various ways, I would say that overall The nobelties are happening in Europe.
The things that stand out and that point to the modern world, whether it is the legal system, the universities, the separation of powers, the rights of representative institutions, proper law in the sense that If someone is accused, you have a way to make your case and not just to be arbitrarily taken into Yale.
So all these things are emerging in Europe and they're very important to emphasize.
These people that talk about the great divergence, it's just economics.
Oh, let's compare agriculture in England to agriculture in China.
They stay at that level and they compare a few technological items.
But You have to compare it on every level.
And when you do that, you start seeing these dramatic, drastic differences.
So let's drop into the topic, which remains a very hot topic 150 years after its cessation in America, which is slavery.
Now, many, many years ago, I read...
The idea or the conjecture, I suppose, that one of the reasons why the ancient world did not achieve the Industrial Revolution was because of the prevalence of slavery.
In other words, why invent labor-saving devices if labor is already essentially free?
And those who have capital invested in slaves rather than labor-saving devices and so on.
I'm not sure it's entirely coincidence, as you point out in the book, that in 1807 it was the British Parliament that outlawed slavery throughout the empire.
The first country to do so with the greatest reach in human history.
What an amazing and monumental transformation and elevation of human ethics and human interactions.
Can it really be an entire coincidence that starting in the 1780s when the abolitionist movement began or really began to gain traction, In England to 1807 when it was outlawed throughout the empire, that you start to get an industrial revolution that really takes off after slavery is outlawed.
That to me does not seem to be coincidental.
And if so, then not only did England and the West as a whole contribute enormously to moral progress in the species by outlawing slavery, but it also laid the foundation for all of the benefits that the world enjoys today in sort of free market capitalist productivity.
Yes, there's no doubt that Europeans were also unique in the realization that there is something wrong about enslaving other human beings.
In the medieval era with Christianity, they realized they should not enslave each other because they are Christians, whereas the Romans and the Greeks would enslave sometimes people that were very similar to them, and they would not be morally Apprehensive about the growth of slavery in Rome, which grew by leaps and bounds.
But the Christians began to debate this issue and reached the conclusion that it was unacceptable for Christians to do that.
And then when the Spaniards conquered the Americas or started colonizing it, you see some key Spanish philosophers.
One is Bartolomeo de las Casas, and there's another one, his name escapes me now.
Who start asking themselves, they are not Christians, but they seem human to all.
And it would be inconsistent with Christian principles to enslave them.
And then they come up with a concept of natural rights.
This is something that originates among legal scholars.
His name is Suarez in Spain.
He says that if they're human beings, Then they have naturally given rights to them by God, and these are right to be alive, right not to be treated like they're objects.
And so there are actual real debates.
The king realizes these are serious debates, and they formally put one side that says, no, we can enslave them and mistreat them, and another side says, no, it is immoral to do that.
A side that says that it is wrong to enslave the natives of the Americas actually wins the debate.
And the Spaniards do try and do pass laws to try and minimize and control these guys in the Americas.
But these guys, you know, these are rough guys looking for a living.
Life was not like today.
Many people today in their own comfort like to pointificate about how they would do things.
But in those days, You're on the margins of existence.
So it's not easy to control them.
And so some of the atrocities continue.
In the silver mines in Peru, they continue.
But there's no doubt that they're efforts because they sense that they're human beings.
And then this idea sort of continues to develop.
And it culminates with the British abolition of the slave trade.
And in the United States, there is also a massive debate as well, that there is something simply wrong.
Another unique aspect of European history, which is paradoxical, is that they recognize the humanity of all human beings, the equality of all human beings across the world, and that slavery is unacceptable.
The left doesn't want to really acknowledge that.
I mean, you have middle-of-the-road liberals who have written very good books about this, but the more dominant leftist academics, they kind of dismiss it or they become cynical about it.
Oh, they only abolished slavery when it was no longer giving them enough money and wage labor would be better.
They always have a reason for it.
And there are economic reasons, there is no question, but I do think there are moral reasons as well, because there were really many movements in the United States, organizations all day writing and writing and pressuring politicians to abolish slavery as being morally unacceptable.
And this had an impact.
So that's how I sort of see it again, that it says something about Western uniqueness.
The very people that are accused of creating racism as a scientific discipline or scientific way of thinking Well, that's, you know, no good deed goes unpunished in history and in the modern world.
And just these basic ideas, if you say, well, it is expansion that produces wealth.
Well, the Islamic world expanded often quite brutally, so it should have been the wealthiest culture and should have generated the Industrial Revolution.
Well, it's slavery. That produces wealth.
Well, then the ancient world should have been richer than the modern world because the ancient world has slaves and the modern world doesn't.
And again, the Islamic world should have had an industrial revolution and should be enormously wealthy because the Islamic world took tens of millions of slaves from Africa and castrated them brutally, I might add, took millions of slaves from Europe and fundamentally altered the course of geographic system within the West because you couldn't even have a town by the river, sorry, by the ocean because the Islamic slavers would come and snag you.
And so this is just this basic idea.
Okay, well, so it's colonialism that produces wealth.
Well, then other cultures that are colonial should have been more wealthy, and they simply won't be self-critical enough, or maybe they just hate the West enough that these basic questions, it's considered even distasteful to ask them.
And you know, just to add this one point, this goes back to Marx's labor theory of value.
That theory, even when people don't read it, has had an enormous impact on the thinking of academics.
They think that if you have people that are working under harsh conditions with low wages, that they're the ones who are producing most of the wealth.
It's not true. Marx himself started realizing, he was writing his book Capital, From the 50s all the way to the 1870s.
By that time, the wages of British workers are rising and you see increasing utilization of machinery.
And he kind of begins to ponder the question, how do we compare on skill and skill label?
And how do we measure the contribution of science to production?
And he can solve that question because in reality, Labor that is trained and labor to which science is added from a scientist that is just using the mind will be far more productive and create far more wealth.
So the notion that the slave labor is a source of wealth or the very low wages that are being paid is what allows the capitalists to enrich themselves is not true.
The capitalists realize that was the early phase.
We want to get us fast away from that because in reality Skilled labor and capital intensive industries with science are the most productive.
So the Marxist labor theory of value has been a disaster in that sense.
I myself as an undergrad spent a lot of time defending that theory.
I felt it was essential to my Marxist beliefs, but I couldn't find a way of defending it because it has so many contradictions.
Well, no, you want wages to rise so that automation becomes more valuable and that frees up people to do other work.
So now let's talk a little bit about, I think it's under, you talk about it well in the book, but I think it's underrepresented in this kind of historiography as a whole.
And that is just the basic question of free markets.
So as you know, probably there is this Pareto principle that says in any generally creative and free field, The square root of the participants produces half the value, right?
So in 10,000 workers, it's 100 who are producing half the value, and that's a lot to do with the bell curve of intelligence and ambition, and maybe it's testosterone levels.
I don't exactly know. I don't think anyone does, but it holds true throughout almost all fields of human endeavor.
Now, in the past, The meritocracy of the free market was not present, and therefore the resources were not in a way allowed to accumulate in the hands of those best able to multiply them.
So if you look at Canada, this is just for the listeners more than you, but if you look at Canada population, I don't know what, it's about 35 million about now.
So the Pareto Principle means that in Canada, the population of 35 million, 6,000 people produce half the wealth in Canada.
And if you take the square root of that, you're talking about, you know, 77 people in Canada are producing 25% of the wealth.
Now if you have a very egalitarian distribution and don't allow resources to accumulate in the hands of those best able to create wealth and create jobs and so on, you end up in poverty.
And I think one of the great advances and why I think it occurred to some degree in the Netherlands and particularly in England during this time was that the geniuses of productivity, what are now disparagingly in America referred to as the robber barons, as if that had anything to do with anything.
They didn't steal and they weren't aristocracy, but let's call them robber barons.
But the simple act of allowing resources to accumulate through the free market in the hands of those best able to create wealth was, I think, the big uplift that allowed for this to occur.
But that's really, really tough for people because it goes very much against the Marxist theory of exploitation.
Yes. Wilfredo Pareto, he was an excellent sociologist, and actually he's barely read.
He's not seen as one of the founding important thinkers.
To this day, Marx is the central sociologist that we are compelled to study.
I mean, to this day, he remains the one that everybody has to study more than anyone else.
Then you get Durkheim, and then you get Max Weber, and then they added a feminist here and an African-American.
But Pareto is ignored, and what you just said about Pareto was his refutation of the label theory of value.
It was obvious to him that even looking at a workplace with a hundred workers, that there's going to be a percentage of them that is contributing a lot more value than the rest of the workers.
He didn't say labor per se measure in times is how you know where value comes from.
I mean, I don't get too much into the very late stages of capitalism in my analysis of the rise of the West, what happens after the 1850s.
I kind of, when it comes to economics, I stop with the first, with a few statements about the Second Industrial Revolution.
And in the Second Industrial Revolution, it's very clear that it's all out science generated Technology, in chemistry, in electricity, and then in atomic energy.
Speaking of free markets, I'm not as much of a free market as you are.
Not many people are, so that's fine with me.
Because I appreciate the way the Germans went about it.
Tell me how I know you're not from Europe.
There's not a lot of Europeans, either in the past or in the present, who ever say, I'm really, really glad about the way the Germans went about it, i.e.
mass migration and the wars and so on.
I believe in these variations among Europeans, that the British went in a more really free market oriented way, although the British state, by the way, was very powerful.
The parliament was unified in really making Britain a naval power.
So there was a lot of infusion of resources into the government, into the state, so that Britain could consolidate that empire.
But they tend to be, when we look at just strictly businesses and their interactions, more standoffish.
They kind of let them, as soon as we create the institutional property laws, Let them go about it.
Whereas the Germans came later and the Germans have always been a more collectivist people.
It was Bismarck in the 1880s who created the first welfare state in Europe.
Yes and the Germans were the ones that were at the forefront of the second industrial revolution and they also came to surpass Britain and then the Americans Two were quite nationalistic in the 1860s into the 1870s, not so free market.
The government played a substantial role.
So I have no problem with governments playing a role as long as you do it in the way also the South Koreans did it and the Japanese to some degree, which is you have a government that is not corrupt, that is really committed to their own people.
When you tax, you Put it back into research centers, into universities, unlike what goes on in Mexico.
Many Latin American countries, they gave a bad name to the whole thing of government intervention because there is so chaotic and corrupt that it just doesn't work.
Japan, though, I mean, the country that has, what, more than 200% debt to GDP ratio, that has really sold off the future for the sake of bribing voters in the present, I'm not sure that I would put that in a category of non-corrupt.
I mean, it's the biggest debt on the planet.
I guess it's because they are for their people more so.
They are so pro-Japanese.
Not for the generations to come so much with that level of debt.
But that's a problem with preference in the here and now that is a very big challenge for democracy.
Sorry, you were about to say... No, that's fine.
I mean, it's another debate, right?
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's talk about, to me, there's a difference.
And I work my very hardest to make things as simple as possible, but not too simple that they become useless.
So as far as the West goes, there does seem to be a very, very large industry.
And Jared Diamond is, I think, is foremost among these, which is to say, The planets of massive historical and geographical coincidence just happened to coalesce somewhat randomly over Europe, and there was this weird spark that is not to do with any virtues of intellect or history of philosophy or dedication of intellectuals or consistency of ideas or anything.
It's just that, well, you know, there was this kind of soil, and then there was this kind of weather, and then there was this kind of invasion, and then there was this kind of domestication, and then there was immunity to this kind of disease, and boom, you get this random...
Like, nobody has any matches.
You just have to wait for lightning to strike for progress to occur.
And I do remember reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is one of the foremost examples of this random grab bag theory of history.
And I was curious because, of course, as you probably know, I've studied and educated, sorry, and I've studied and been educated by a lot of experts on this question of ethnicity and IQ differences.
So I was curious how he would deal with this.
And at the very beginning of his book, he says, oh, they're nonsense.
And basically just, they don't exist, they're not valid, they're not real, you know, it's culturally biased and just dismisses it.
And that raised my suspicion because, like, I'm sorry, but the data is very solid on ethnic IQ differences.
It doesn't explain everything about history, but anybody who ignores it completely seems to me to be deceptive to the point of fraudulence.
So... Where do you think these kinds of explanations may have some play in how different societies play out in terms of IQ differences?
I mean, there are cultural differences for sure, but I think higher IQ societies will often say, well, I could be, say, Indian, or I could be right.
I could be dedicated to this culture, or I could actually be empirical.
And that seems like a bit of a dividing line between the West, which is willing to surrender treasured ideas for the sake of empiricism, or I guess used to be.
Well, I think that Jared Diamond's book, as far as explaining the broad civilizational differences between the Americas and Asia and Australia and Europe, let's put Europe in Asia, so let's say the civilizational differences between Asia, Eurasia, Australia and the Americas and Africa, I think his environmental explanation is powerful.
uh for the very early developments that we've seen in history.
Why did agriculture first emerge in the near east?
I think he's onto something when he says because they have the greatest variety of domesticable plants and animals.
Whereas in the Americas you have one maybe animal that you could domesticate and the variety of domestic plants you have corn.
It was a very difficult plant to Transformed from it being a wild, small little thing into what is today took a long time.
And it's also not a very good source of nutrition as compared to the other grains.
When you look at China, they did not have as many animals, but they did have more than the Americas, more than Africa and more than Australia.
And in the case of Australia was also incredible isolation.
So I think he's right Talking about the variety of things that you can domesticate and also he's right about when you get to move and connect what you learn about domestication from one land to the next, it is a lot easier to move it this way.
It's a lot easier to move it this way because the climate doesn't change as much horizontally than it is to move it vertically because then the climate changes a lot.
In the case of Africa, in the north, you did have some plans that in Egypt, obviously one of the first civilizations, very advanced, very difficult to move their thinking into sub-Saharan Africa for climatic reasons.
So I think he did make, it was a work of synthesis.
He synthesized things that were being said before, and he just put it all together.
But it is obvious that he's Kind of silly in the beginning when he tries to say, on the one hand he wants to dismiss IQ, but on the other hand he wants to say that he has met a lot more intelligent people in Indonesia than in America or something like that.
So he's wrong to dismiss IQ as a factor.
However, ultimately I don't think that IQ is what makes Europe unique because as we know, East Asians on average tend to score higher.
Yet, they were not the ones that modernized.
I'm also of the view that human behavior and in connection to that intelligence broadly defined cannot be just captured with IQ tests.
You probably will disagree with me on this, but I do think that Howard Gardner, his idea of multiple intelligences, there is something to it.
It's just that it was taking a direction.
People started talking about emotional intelligence, which is kind of not very good.
It's not the right word to say intelligence.
But when you think of the brain, IQ measures logical, mathematical, and linguistic intelligences, and those two are crucial.
They are the ones that if you're good at those two, you are likely to be successful in your academic endeavors.
But I think there are other attributes to the human personality, you may call them intelligences or not, one of which is, Howard Gardner talks about that, personal intelligences.
And he has two, intrapersonal intelligence and interpersonal intelligence.
Interpersonal is your ability to understand other people, their behavior and to predict it.
And this is very important because when you're trying to survive, when you're engaging in power struggles, A good ruler, and Trump is very good at this.
People don't realize that.
Trump has a highly advanced interintelligence.
He has an instinct to see what that politician might do, what might happen, how they're sensing his policies, how far he can go.
And so we should not underestimate that.
But interintelligence is you looking within yourself to examine your own thinking processes and to be aware that you're a self in contradistinction to the rest of the world And that you have an identity, and so you don't see yourself as being a playfield for external forces, for gods, natural forces, magic.
It's not like you're under the control of those things, but you kind of free your mind through introspection from all of that.
And so I think Europeans had a more advanced form of interpersonal intelligence and interpersonal intelligence.
When the Spaniards conquered Fernando Cortes, when he conquered the Aztecs, one of the things that always, and not just me but other people, astounds people, is why did Was it Montezuma in the Aztec or was the guy in Peru?
But one of the supreme rulers there, one of the things that just surprises you is why did he let the Spaniards live in habit within his own capital city peacefully for so long?
Didn't he realize that these guys mean to conquer, to take them over, that they're a danger.
You can't have them here.
No, they were paralyzed. The Aztecs.
They didn't know what to do.
So that's because the Spaniards had a far more advanced interpersonal intelligence.
And nowadays, right, that's taking a very silly direction.
Interpersonal intelligence means you have empathy.
It means that if Muslims and Africans come to your land, you don't feel threatened by them, but you try to live with them and be kind and emotionally.
Welcoming towards them.
That's how textbooks write about it.
But in reality, interpersonal intelligence should be in a Darwinian way as well, in a power struggle way.
You sense who's a threat to you.
Who's your friend? What did that person mean with those words?
What did those hand movements mean?
What was he trying to say to me?
So these things are very important for survival.
Howard Gardner never explains it that way, but it's implicit there.
So I think that rather than getting into the IQ thing, I would get more into issues of behavioral traits that are different, different intelligences that other people don't have.
And it all comes down to a greater individualism, a greater awareness of their personal being among Europeans from very early on.
And I trace that to the whole European culture.
What I call the aristocratic war-like culture of these horse-riding peoples.
Oh, the big man of the village thing.
I wonder if you could touch on that so people follow that arguing as well.
Yeah, the Big Man Village is kind of like just before you get to big tribal confederations.
But yeah, the Big Man Village is a part of the book that's connected to other parts.
But what I say there is that usually the big man is interpreted as someone who suddenly started intensifying production, being more efficient in agriculture.
And then he would hold a fist and redistribute all the goods to everyone else.
And people saw this as a form of socialistic redistribution, that the first ruler, the big man, at least he was paternalistic and he gave out to others what he earned or managed to cultivate.
But there are other things going on here.
The big man It knows that the more he gives, the more obligations the rest of the population has to him.
Also, the big man is someone that was, if you like, the first capitalistic venture person.
He really is saving more.
He really is trying to be more efficient in the way he uses his land.
He gets other people to help him.
And so he generates a greater output.
You cannot therefore interpret that as just a form of redistribution in the communal sense because it is an individual that's very more aggressive, quite individualistic, and trying to find ways to consolidate his power within this growing village by having many people obligated to him because he gave them things.
You know, when you give and you give, You get power over other people.
And that's why we sometimes feel uncomfortable when somebody starts giving us a lot of things, because we know in our mind what's going on here.
It is my plan to rule the planet by giving away philosophical podcasts for free.
Don't expose my business plan of world domination.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. So yeah, that's the big, it's connected to another issue, but I don't think we have, it's going to be long.
No, no, we should definitely come back for that.
And I just wanted to mention, I certainly, IQ is a rough proxy for, as you know, the intelligence researchers talk about underlying G, which is the sort of rapidity of speed and calculation in the brain as a whole.
IQ is a measure of that.
You know, empathy I have a tough relationship with.
I mean, I think empathy is important in personal relationships.
I'm not so sure it's great socially because a lot of times I see the West as a whole is really committing suicide with pathological altruism.
In other words, they're no longer in the Aristotelian mean of empathy.
Too little empathy makes you cold-hearted.
Too much empathy makes you exploited because you're just running around appeasing everyone because you care so much about their feelings.
You've lost track of your own purposes and intentions and self-interest.
Even Steven Pinker gets into making these errors.
He thinks that empathy Only if it's reciprocal.
If I order a meal at a restaurant and they don't bring me the meal, I don't pay them.
My relationship and honor with them is reciprocal upon a mutual obligation.
Having empathy to people who also share your empathy is great.
Having empathy to people who coldly eye you and figure out how to best exploit you is a disastrous strategy that may in fact end up being the end of Europe.
And having more empathy like the rich stars in the United States do and the journalists for foreigners who are coming into your own land than for your own people, there is a problem there because empathy always has to start with those who are nearest to you, your family, your friends, and then your own sense of morality grows out of that.
I have heard many people that are empathy for the rest of the world like Lenin and Trotsky, but they were willing to annihilate People who used to be their friends, send them to jail, many of them in the name of a humanity that is somewhere in the future, and they now say that's the greatest empathy.
No, it's not. Well, there is a cliché in almost all examinations of intellectuals, particularly those on the left.
And Paul Johnson's written a great book on this called Intellectuals, where the cliché, as you probably are aware, is the guy who loves humanity in the abstract but can't seem to stand any particular person he comes into contact with.
And I think that's a big problem. So IQ is a rough proxy for intelligence.
As far as empathy goes and productivity goes, I've been an entrepreneur for most of my adult life.
You need empathy for the needs of your customers and so on, but you also need to work people hard.
You need to work hard for yourself.
You also have to have no empathy for your competitors because you wish to dominate the field and beat them and so on.
It's like being an athlete. You have to have limited empathy to your competitors.
Otherwise, it's like, well, I know you really want to win, so let me hold back from running too fast and Thinking about people like, I don't know, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or other people, their interpersonal skills were not notably high, but they were enormously productive.
And I think that really was a factor of just innate brilliance.
Yes. All right.
Is there anything you wanted to add?
I mean, I really, really appreciate a long time here.
I do feel like I need to buy you a cheesecake.
But is there anything you wanted to add here?
I do really want to encourage people, you know, we've scratched the surface of a very deep and powerful book.
I'll show you my books.
Yes, please. Here is the unique...
A little closer, a little closer.
Some people have a cell phone only.
Just hold it right up there.
Yeah. There you go. It's a big book, but it is good.
Buy the soft cover.
One of the things that affected it is that the hardcover was being sold at almost $200.
It's still sold, and I actually got pretty good reviews for this book.
Then I have a smaller one that came out later.
This is this, Faustian Man.
A little higher, a little higher? Yeah, there you go.
Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age.
And now this one is still a bestseller.
Yes. Ranked number one in Canadian politics for the last eight months.
As Canada in Decay, Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians, otherwise known as your mating call to the possible Canadian Trump.
So we'll put links to those books below.
And Dr. Tushane, I really, really appreciate your time with the most enjoyable conversation.
And I'm sure that we will get some great feedback on this.
And I look forward to chatting again.
Yeah, I'm glad of the opportunity that you gave me.
You have a big audience, and that's very good, because I'm not bragging, but on the question of diversity and Western uniqueness, I think I'm the only dissenting academic in the West, and people should know about that.
