The Heritage Foundation: Socialism & Personal Responsibility

[Music] [Applause] [Music] Half a billion times people are interested in what you have to say. It seems that way. Somewhat of a shark. Well, maybe it's because you aren't a politician; you are a psychologist, and your understanding more about what's going on in the world than many of our lawmakers actually do.

And I know we've got so many ways that we could go with this interview tonight, and we've got questions. Thank you to all of you in the audience who sent in your questions. I've got some of them right here; we're gonna get into those. But let me start with, let's just start the socialism piece. Do you think Americans truly understand the history of socialism and actually what it is?

As you've gone around and you've had, when you speak to not just college campuses, you've been at events around the world, I think 250,000 people you've spoken in front of. I mean, people are unbelievably ignorant about history, and I mean I would include myself in that. You know, I mean, I know what I know about the history, say, preceding the 20th century is very sketchy. It's embarrassingly sketchy. You know, and what young people know about 20th-century history is non-existent, especially about the history of the radical left. I mean, how would they know? They're never taught anything about it.

So why would they be concerned about it? And then, you know, for many of the people in the audience, you know, you're old enough so that the fall of the Berlin Wall was part of your life. You know, that was really the end of the Second World War, let's say, and in a technical sense, and it was very meaningful. But that's a long time ago. I mean, a lot of people were born since then, and it's ancient history. And we don't have that many good or bad examples left. You know, there's North Korea, there's Venezuela, but we're not locked tooth and nail in a war with, you know, in a proxy war and a cold war with the Soviet Union.

And it's easy to understand why people are emotionally drawn to the ideals of socialism. Let's say the left, because it draws on its fundamental motivational source from a kind of primary compassion, and that is always there in human beings. And so that proclivity for sensitivity to that political message will never go away. And so, and it's important to understand that you have to give the devil his due.

Unfortunately, you've also said that people aren't as resentful at the success of others as we might think. And I think as you watch a lot of people being interviewed today, and you watch some of the students being interviewed, you saw some of the ones up here. You hear people talking a lot about inequality, but you say they really aren't as resentful as we might think, as long as they don't think the game is fixed.

Yes, well, that's certainly the case. Well, first of all, I mean if you look at the psychological literature to the degree that it's accurate—which is difficult to ascertain often—people report far more prejudice against their group than against themselves. So that's quite an interesting phenomenon as far as I'm concerned. There's a tendency for people to exaggerate the degree to which the group they belong to is currently suffering from generalized oppression; they've been relatively free of it themselves.

I also think that if fairness isn't absolutely essential, perceived fairness is an absolutely essential component of peace because people can tolerate inequality, so to speak, or even revel in it, let's say, if they believe that the unequal outcome is deserved. I mean, look at how people respond to sports heroes. You know, no one goes to a sports event and boos the star, even though he or she is paid much better and attracts the lion's share of the attention, hopefully not in a narcissistic manner. People can celebrate success, but they do have to believe that the game is fair.

And the game needs to be fair because otherwise, the hierarchy becomes tyrannical. The problem with the radical left is that it assumes that all hierarchies are too radical, and it makes no distinction between them. And that's an absolute catastrophe because, you know, there's plenty of sins, let's say, on the conscience of the West as a civilization, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And there are far worse places, like all the other places, for example, that there have ever been.

Well, it's the case, and people also don't understand that. And they also don't understand—this is something that's of particular importance—they also don't understand, and that may even characterize you in this audience. It's very the knowledge of how rapidly we're making economic improvements around the world, in the developing world, for example, how fast that's happening. That is not well-distributed knowledge. You know, that between the year 2000 and the year 2012, the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50%.

Now, it's a UN figure: dollar 90 a day. That was their cutoff for absolute poverty. And so the cynics have said, well, you know, that's a pretty low barrier. It's not such an achievement to have attained that. I can tell you it's an achievement to obtain that if you were living on less than a dollar ninety a day to begin with. But if you look at, if you double the amount to 380 or you double it again to 760, you find the same pattern. I mean, the poor in the world are getting rich at a rate that is absolutely unparalleled in all of human history.

And I think a large part of that is happening in Africa where, by the way, here's another lovely piece of news: the child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1852, which is—I mean, that's an absolute miracle. Or it's insane that that's not front-page news, right? That's within a lifetime, and the fastest-growing economies in the world are also there. And so, but as you're saying it— but why isn't it front-page news? And when you consider social media and how fast news and photos and all that can travel, and that young people are aficionados of all this technology, why don't they know these things or why aren't they computing what they see as being progress?

Well, I think part of it is that things are changing so fast that none of us can keep up. Like, it's hard to keep the story updated. I had no idea, for example, that most of the world's economic news—and even a substantial proportion of its ecological news, by the way—was positive until I started to work on a UN Committee about five years ago on sustainable economic development. And I read very widely economically and also ecologically and realized that things were way better than I had any sense of.

That these improvements had come at a tremendous rate, and, but you see— pardon—so partly it is just that it's so new that we don't know and we don't have a story about it. And, and, and, and who is—who would be driving the communication of such things? Especially given two other things. One is that human beings are tilted towards negative emotion in terms of its potency. And so, for example, people would rather— they much— they're much less happy to lose five dollars than they are happy to gain five dollars. We're loss averse; we're more sensitive to negative emotion than we are to positive emotion, and there's a reason for that.

And the reason is, well, you can only be so happy, but you can be dead, right? And I mean dead— that's not good. And there can be a lot of misery on the way to that end, and so we're tilted to protect ourselves, and that makes us more interested, in some sense, and more easily captivated by the negative than by the positive. And so that's—that's a hard bias to fight. And then when you also take into account—and I think this is something that's worth seriously considering because the other thing we don't understand is the technological revolution that's occurring in every form of media. No one understands it, and but one of the consequences is that the mainstream media, so to speak, is increasingly desperate for attention.

Right there exist in a shrinking market with shrinking margins; all of the leading newspapers and magazines are feeling the pinch. Television is dead because YouTube has everything television has and then an incredible array of additional features, and radio is being replaced by podcasts. And so it's a very unstable time for the mainstream media. And what would you expect them to do, except to do whatever they can to attract attention in whatever manner they can manage?

One example of this— one very good example of this is you may or may not know that the rates of violent crime in the United States and actually in most places have plummeted in the last 50 years. It's really quite remarkable. The United States is now safer in terms of violent crime than it has been since the early 60s, and that was probably the safest time there ever was. But the degree to which violent crime has been reported has increased. It's funny; the curves are almost completely opposite to one another. This is the decline in violent crime. This is the increase in the reporting of violent crime. And the reason for that is, well, people read stories about violent crime, and then, of course, they're much more likely to believe that it's on the increase.

And the people who are most likely to believe that it's on the increase, by the way, are also those who are least likely to be affected by it. Because, you know, to be a victim of a violent crime, what helps to drink too much—but it also helps a lot to be young and male, and those aren't the people who are particularly afraid of violent crime, even though they're the ones most likely to be implicated in it. So there's technological reasons for our concentration on the negative, and they're complex. It's not easy to figure out how to combat the spiral of outrage and attention-seeking that I think is accompanying the death of our previous means of communication.

No one knows how to handle that, and that's a big problem. Let's go on. I know so many in this audience, and not just here in New York, but we hear from our members all over the country. They're so concerned about what their children and what their grandchildren are both being taught but also what they're coming back home from college and talking about and saying, "Where are you? Where are they learning this?"

And I know where they're learning it, but how does this get seeping into them? You obviously have spoken out, not just 15 or so in Toronto, but colleges all over the world. What is it you see today on the campus or among young people today that is—that's new? Or may—or is it new? I've heard you say that we're no more polarized today than we were maybe even under Richard Nixon, and the campuses were more on fire than they are today. So what are the similarities and differences that you're saying?

Well, I don't see any real evidence that your society is more polarized generally speaking than it has been at many times in the past. I think the Nixon era is a good example. I mean if you think about it merely statistically, I mean you've been split 50/50 Republican and Democrat for what? Five elections now, and it's almost a perfect 50/50 split. That really hasn't changed. Trump, of course, is somewhat of a wild card, and so that complicates things, but I don't think it changes the underlying dynamic.

What I do think has arisen again, because it's made itself manifest many times in the last hundred years, is the rise of this group identity associated quasi-Marxist viewpoint, with this additional toxic mixture and paradoxical mixture of post-modernism. The post-modernists are famous for being skeptical of meta-narratives. That might be a defining—that was Lyotard, I believe, who coined that—although I might be wrong; it was one of the French post-modernists. That means that they're skeptical about the idea that uniting large narratives are valid, and it's a huge problem that claim because the first question is, well, how big does the narrative have to be before it's a meta-narrative, right?

I mean, is the narrative that holds your family together a falsehood? Is the narrative that holds your community together a falsehood? Like, how big does it have to be before it becomes a falsehood? And so it's a very vague claim, and it's a very dangerous claim in my estimation because I believe that—and I believe the psychological research is clear on this—what we have—we—our cognitive abilities are nested inside stories. We're fundamentally narrative creatures; that's how our brains are organized.

And so to deny the validity of large-scale narratives is to deny the validity of the manner in which we organize our psyches, and that's unbelievably destabilizing for people. I mean, first of all, the simplest story in some sense is that I'm at point A, and I'm going to point B. And that's not as simple a story as it might sound because it implies that you are somewhere and that you know it. You have a representation of it geographically, let's say, socially, psychologically. You have some sense of who you are, but, more importantly, you have some sense of who you are transforming yourself into.

And so that gives you a direction, and now that direction—the direction gives you meaning. And I don't mean that in a cliched sense. What I mean is that the way that our brains are constituted is that almost all the positive emotion that people feel—and still so true of animals, by the way—is it emerges as a consequence of observing that you're making your way to a valued endpoint.

So, you know, you think, well what makes you happy is the attainment of something, and there is a form of reward that is associated with that; it's called consummatory reward. It's the satisfaction that you feel, say, after you have a delightful Thanksgiving meal. But that isn't the hope and the meaning that people thrive on. The hope and the meaning that people thrive on is the observation that they're moving towards something worthwhile, and that might be individually—although it really can't be because we live in collectives—but it should be collective.

And that isn't optional. If you don't have a goal—a transcendent goal, say—something that's beyond you, then you don't have any positive emotion. And that's not good because you have plenty of negative emotion. And then that's—that's the problem with fundamental claims of meaninglessness too in life. That it's this—it's the philosophical error that's made by nihilists, let's say, who say, "What? Life is meaningless." It's like, well, if you're a nihilist genuinely, you've lost all hope. Your life isn't meaningless; it's just unbearably miserable.

And that's—and that's a form of meaning. You know, that suffering is a form of meaning, and you can try to argue yourself out of that with your nihilistic rationalizations, but that is not going to work. You need a transcendent goal in order to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And the destruction of the narratives that guide us individually psychologically and that also unites us socially, familial, and socially, it's an absolute catastrophe.

And well, the question then is why is it being undertaken? And that's a complex question. And I—if we can even discuss that—that has something to do with this unholy marriage of the post-modern nihilism with this Marxist utopia notion, which makes no sense at all because the post-modernists are skeptical of meta-narratives, yet Marxism is a grand meta-narrative. But coherency, it doesn't have to make sense.

Well, that—in fact, the idea that things have to make sense is part of the oppressive patriarchy, and so we can just dispense—well, I'm serious; that people—people teach that in a dead serious manner, that the requirement for logical consistency is an arbitrary—what's an arbitrary imposition on cognitive structure. It's not something necessary for rational cognition, even if there is such a thing.

I mean, you know, you don't know how deep this war goes, in some sense. I can give you an example. You know, there's a free speech debate about free speech on campus, but what you don't understand is it isn't a debate about who can speak; it's a debate about whether there is such a thing as free speech. And the answer from the radicals is that there isn't. Because for there to be free speech, you see, there have to be sovereign individuals, right?

And those sovereign individuals have to be defined by that sovereign individuality, and they have to have their own locus of truth, in some sense. That's a consequence of that sovereignty. And then they have to be able to engage in rational discursive negotiation with people who aren't like them, which means they have to stretch their hands, let's say, across racial or ethnic divides. They have to be able to communicate, and they have to be able to formulate a negotiated and practical agreement.

And none of that is part and parcel of the post-modern doctrine. All of that— all of that—up for grabs. There's no sovereign individuals; your group identity is paramount; you have no unique voice; you're a mouthpiece of your identity group. You can't speak across group lines because you don't understand the lived experience of the other.

And so it's not who gets to speak; it's whether the entire notion—it's a very classic Western notion and a very deep one of free and intelligible speech—is even valid. I mean, this intellectual war that's going on in the universities is way deeper than a political war. It's—and way more—way more serious than a political war. It manifests itself politically, but no, it's politics is way up the scale from where this is actually taking place.

So when you're talking with students, both in one-on-one or what your— their questions, and I'm gonna get to some of your questions here very shortly—these are not all conservative students that are coming up to you, and they're downloading your videos and listening to your podcast. And it's not even though it is a lot of young men, it's not only men. What do you think drives people to the message and to the things that you talk about?

Oh, I think it's that people are unbelievable. And well, that's why, it's—that's why I mean, you know, in most of my lectures, so I've done about a hundred and fifty public lectures or so in the last year all over the world, and to large audiences—and the audience is in Australia; we're starting to approach—well, we had audiences for fifty-five hundred people in Australia, so which is quite remarkable, you know, that fifty-five hundred people would come to listen to like a serious discussion about philosophical, theological, and psychological issues, and to participate in that.

And I don't pull any punches; I'm not speaking down. I would never speak down to an audience, all right? I think that's a dreadful error of arrogance. But the reason that I think people believe what I say is that I'm very pessimistic. Well, I look, because most times when you listen to someone who's a motivational speaker, let's say, you know, it fills you with a temporary optimism, but you go home, and the wiser part of you knows that mostly it's the takeover of rotten wood with a fresh coat of paint.

And I tell my audiences very clearly that their life is going to be difficult, and sometimes difficult beyond both imagining and tolerance. And that is definitely in your future, if it isn't in your present. And for many people, it's in their present. And that—and that can be unbearable. That's enough to turn you against life itself; to corrupt you; to drive you to nihilism; to drive you to suicide; and worse, to drive you to thoughts of vengefulness of infinite scope.

To not only be turned against yourself and your fellow men but to be turned against being itself because of its intrinsically brutal, in some sense, nature. And then it's worse than that, actually, because it's not only that we suffer and that that will necessarily occur, but that we all make our suffering worse because of our ignorance and our malevolence. And everyone knows that to be true.

And so the discussions start, let's say, on an unshakable foundation, but then I can tell people, look, despite that—despite that, we're remarkable creatures. You know, we're capable of taking up the burden of that suffering and facing the reality of that malevolence voluntarily. We can actually do that. And all of the psychological evidence suggests—and this is independent of your school of psychology; if you're a practical psychologist, a clinical psychologist of any sort, the evidence is crystal clear—that if people voluntarily confront the problems that face them and the malevolence that surrounds them, that they can make headway against it.

And not only psychologically—so it's not only meaningful to do that psychologically, which it is to confront the problems that torment you voluntarily; that's meaningful psychologically, but it's also practically useful in that you can actually solve some of the problems that beset you. And God only knows how good we could get at that. You know, I mean, I don't know what percentage of human effort is spent in counterproductive activity. You know, I'm not an absolute cynic about that, but I mean when I talk to undergraduates, I ask them, you know, how much time do you waste every day by your own bracketing?

And it's somewhere between five and eight hours. It's a lot of time. Well, I usually walk through—I walk through students through an economic analysis of that. I said, well, you know, why don't you value your time at 50 dollars an hour and calculate for yourself just exactly what you're doing to your future by your inability to discipline yourself? It's worth thinking through. In any case, people do waste a lot of time, and they also act counterproductively a lot of the time. Regardless, we do make progress, and we can thrive under the difficult conditions that make up our lives, and we can resist the malevolence that entices us. That's within our power, and we don't know the limits to that.

And we also know that it's better to—we all know this—that it's better to live courageously than cowardly. Everyone knows that. That's what you teach people that you love. And we know that it's better to live truthfully than in deceit, and you can tell that too because that's also what you tell people that you love. And we know that you should pick up your damn responsibilities and move forward. Everyone knows that—it's part of our intrinsic moral nature. And that nature is there, and it's not difficult to communicate to people about this; like everyone knows that you wake up at 3:00 in the morning when you've let your life go off the rails, and that you berate yourself for your uselessness and your cruelty and your failure to take off—to take the opportunities that are in front of you.

And if you were the master in your own house, in some sense, the captain of your own destiny, if there was no intrinsic nature, well, that would never happen. You'd just let yourself off the hook; there'd be no voice of conscience tormenting you. But no one escapes from that, and what that indicates to me is that at least psychologically we live in a universe that's characterized by a moral dimension, and we understand that well, and that moral failings have consequences; and that they're not trivial; they destroy you; they destroy your family; they destroy your community.

And you can tell people that, and they listen because they know—they don't know; they know that's the thing. And maybe that's the thing about being an intellectual: you have the opportunity to articulate ideas that other people know they embody, but they can't articulate. And that's what people tell me. You know, they say, well, you help me give words to things that I always knew to be true but couldn't say, or, or they say, I've been trying to put some of your precepts into practice—responsibility being a main one, vision another, honesty.

I was bringing up the pack and saying this is the fun part of doing all of this. Fun is a weak word; it's the remarkable part of doing all of this. I mean, I have people tell me constantly, wherever I go, it's so delightful that, you know, they were in a pretty dark place, and they tell me why, and there's plenty of dark places in the world, and they decided, well, maybe they were gonna develop a bit of a vision and take a bit more responsibility and start telling the truth and putting some effort into something.

And they come up, and they say, well, you can't believe how much better things are. Hearts, like, I've got—I got three promotions. I had one guy tell me—this was a lovely story—you know, 15 seconds, he came up after a talk, he said, two years ago, I got out of jail; I was homeless. He said I own my own house; I have a six-figure income; I got married; and I have a daughter. Thank you. That was the whole conversation!

It's like he decided. He decided he was going to put his life together. And, you know, and so you can look at that pessimism that constitutes, let's say, the core of what—well, I think it's the core religious message, really, is the tragic nature of the world, the reality of suffering—it’s part of the core religious message. But what emerges out of that, properly conceptualized, is a remarkable appreciation for what human beings are capable of: like we are unbelievably resilient and able creatures, and we do not have any conception of our upper limits.

Dr. Priewe, so let me ask you, I mean, we have about 10 minutes, and I'm gonna get a couple questions in here from our audience on this too, but is that—that hope that you're talking about, that you're giving people hope, young people hope— is that one of the secrets to reaching them?

You know, and it's such a perverse sort of hope because I would say for the last 45 years, we've told psychologists have been have been certainly to blame for this, at least in part—you’re okay the way you are—that's what we tell young people. Oh, you're okay the way you are. It's like—and there's nothing worse than you can tell that—you can tell someone who's young than that, especially if they're miserable.

You know, and lots of them are. Why? If they're miserable and aimless, it's like, oh, I'm miserable and aimless, and sometimes I'm suicidal and I'm nihilistic, and I don't have any direction in my life. It's in my life. It's like, well, you're okay the way you are here. And it's like they don't want to hear that. They want to hear, look, you know, you're—and you know this—you’re useless; you know nothing; you haven’t got started; you’ve got 60 years to put yourself together, and God only knows what you could become.

And that's so—that message is so much more. It's so funny because it's such an attack, but it's so positive because there's faith there in the potential that makes up the person rather than the miserable actuality that happens to be manifesting itself at the moment. And young people respond extraordinarily well to that because when you know that—if you're a parent and you love your child, your son, your daughter, what you're trying to foster is the best in them. You want that to manifest itself across the course of their life. You want them to become continually more than they are, to see what they could be.

And well, and I think that's part of the great message of the West is that—that's the ethical requirement of individual being in the proper sense is to constantly note that you're not what you could be, to take responsibility for that, and to commit yourself like body and soul to the attainment of that ideal.

We're gonna get a question here from our members about—right here on the front row—Bob Grantham had a couple good questions right here. He asked, "Much of your effort today is trying to help people improve their lives." We've just been talking about that. "Why does the establishment attack you rather than try to support you efforts?"

Well, you know, we should be nuanced about that. I mean, there's a group of newspapers in Canada called Postmedia that's 200 newspapers strong, and they supported me. You know? I mean, I've had a lot of support from journalists, and I would say I've had more support from the higher quality journalists, which I'm quite happy about. So it's polarized. You know, there isn't—I have a dedicated coterie of people who regard me as an enemy. There's no doubt about that.

And I think it's because I am—I am absolutely no fan whatsoever of the radical left. I think the fact that you can actively present yourself, let's say, on a campus as a communist is—as the fact that that's allowable is as mysterious as it would be if it was allowable to present yourself as a Nazi. I am NOT a fan of the radical left, and I think I understand the motivations on the radical left, both on the post-modernist end and on the more Marxist end, and I'm, because of that, I'm a relatively effective critic, and that makes me very unpopular.

So, and that's fine because I’m not—because what people are being taught that's emerged from that brand of absurd and surreal philosophy is of no utility as a guiding light to anyone, and it's a catastrophe to take young people in their formative years when they're trying to catalyze their adult identity and to tear the substructure out from underneath them and leave them bereft. And I do believe that that's what the universities on the humanities end and to some degree on the social science end do believe that that's what they fundamentally managed to achieve.

So, and I don't admire that. I think there's something deeply sadistic about that; there's something deeply anti-human about that, and it presents itself in the guise of moral virtue, which makes it even worse. And so, well, that's why people don't like me.

All right, we've got about five minutes. I'm gonna try to get into a quick question. This is where's Adam from Vassar College? It's Adam. Oh, there he is! All right, so this was Adam's question: he said, "Given the liberal political order bends towards automation of individuals (e.g., automation and urbanization), how can meaningful community be assured?"

Well, you build that for yourself in part, you know? I mean, Adam, get a girlfriend! Well, I mean, people aren't doing that. You know, that's falling by the wayside, right? And, and so I meant, it's because it's trouble. You don't—well, it is trouble. Life is trouble, and it is trouble to establish a permanent relationship. You know, I mean, we've told young people for far too long that, well, they should be happy in their relationships, let's say. And it's like, that's weak! It's—well, it is. God! Most of you are married!

It's like to be married for 40 years, that's not a triumph of happiness; it's a triumph of character! It's a triumph of negotiation, right? It's a triumph of a will to do that, and, and, and that should be celebrated. But it should also be pointed out that no matter who you find, like they're no better than you. And that's not so good! So, so there's gonna be problems!

And so, but that shouldn't stop you. It's like find someone, you know? You're gonna have—if you're lucky, you're gonna have the opportunity to sort of sift through about five people in your life. That's about it! Then you're gonna have to stake yourself on one of those people, and it's a—well, it's a hell of a risk!

But, but with any luck, it'll make you a better person, that wrestling. You know, one of the things I learned—I did a series of biblical lectures in 2017, which have turned out to be crazily popular. Of all the insane things to be—and I was supposed to ask you, why do you—yes, that is—yes, yes!

Well, I learned one of the things I learned in those lectures—and should have known before—was that the word Israel—the chosen people of God—the people of Israel are those who wrestle with God. And that's such an interesting idea! You know, it's a fascinating idea because it indicates that at least, even in our deepest religious texts, there's some—there's something about existential conflict and engaging in that that's actually part of the moral substructure of life.

That, that simple belief, let's say, whatever that might mean in a deity, isn't sufficient. Is that there's an active engagement with the infinite, and then—and it's—and it's a battle in some sense. And I think that's—that's the proper way to conceptualize; I think it's the proper way to conceptualize a relationship.

It's a battle! It's about towards a positive end! It's a battle towards the transformation of both of you into more than you could have otherwise been. So you need that, and you need your friends, and you need to develop a network of friendship, and you need to put your family together and to act responsibly towards them. And then you need to move out from that into the broader community.

And that's on you, and that's how you fall—you make it a part of the ideal that you're pursuing. And then you realize that that's—that's up to you to do. And maybe then you realize that you can do it as well if you're willing to make the right sacrifices, which really usually means burning off a fair bit of Deadwood. And that's not something that people are particularly excited about doing.

And no wonder our time has been too short. We have time for just one more final question, I'm told. What have I not asked you about? I've been thinking of our theme of standing up against socialism. What have I not asked you about? What have other interviewers not asked you about that would be beneficial for us all to know as we want to take?

Well, you asked a little bit about these biblical lectures. You know, one—what was interesting was I rented a theater in Toronto—I rented it 15 times, and it was a theater for about 500—and it sold out every time! And I lectured about Genesis, which—and it was mostly young men who came. They weren't all young, but they were mostly men, which was very surprising because like, that's just not what happens.

And what the reason that the—the lectures worked was because I put together something that I don't think liberals or conservatives have done a good job of putting together. The liberals are more on the happiness and freedom end of things, and the conservatives are more on the duty end of things, and those are both—they both have their place! But I've been attempting to develop an argument that's centered on meaning.

And I do believe—and I believe that our most central religious symbols, like the symbol of the Cross itself, for example, the bearing of the Cross is a—an embodiment or a symbolic representation of this idea is that you—you have to have a meaning in life that sustains you. Life is a serious business; you're all in! It's a fatal business, right? Everyone's in it up to their neck, and it's—it's dreadful in some sense—in the classic sense—and you need a meaning that can sustain you through that, and that's to be found in responsibility.

And that's something that we have not communicated, I don't think well to ourselves, but we certainly haven't communicated it to young people. It's like, well, you're lost. There's reasons that you could be lost, and they're real. You know, God only knows what terrible things happen to you in your life. It's like, how are you gonna get out of that? Well, not by pursuing impulsive happiness! That is not going to work! Not by thinking in the short term! Not by thinking in a narrowly selfish manner either, but by taking on the heaviest load of responsibility that you can conceptualize, and bear that!

That will do it! It'll do it for you; it'll give you a reason to wake up in the morning; it'll give you a balm for your conscience when you wake up at night and ask yourself what you're doing with your life; it'll make you a credit to yourself and to your family, and it'll make you a boon to your community.

And more than that, there's more than that! You know, it's said in Genesis that every person is made in the image of God, and there's an idea in Genesis that God is that which confronts the chaos of potential with truth and courage—that's the logos. And if we're made in the image of God, that's us! That's what we do is we confront the potential of chaos, the future, the unformed future. We confront that consciously, and we decide with every ethical choice we make what kind of world we're going to bring into being.

We transform that potential into actuality, and we do that as a consequence of our ethical decisions. And so it's not only a matter of putting yourself together and putting your family together, putting your community together; it's a matter of bringing the world in its proper shape into being. And I truly believe that that's the case, and I believe that we all believe that.

But we hold ourselves responsible! You know, that if you've made a mistake with your family because you were selfish or narrow-minded or blind in some manner, that you regard yourself as culpable. You could have done otherwise, and now you've brought something into the world that should not be there, and it’s on you! We hold ourselves responsible in that matter!

And so what that indicates to me is that, in a deep sense, we believe that we are the agents that transform the potential of being into reality. And that is a divine—if anything links us with divinity, it's our capability to transform what is not yet into what is. And, and the other thing that happens—and I'll stop with this—in Genesis, and this is so interesting, it's so fascinating, is that as God conducts himself through this enterprise of the transformation of potential into actuality, he stops repeatedly and says, "And it was good."

And, and then that—that’s a mystery: is why is it good? And the answer is something like, well, if what—if you conduct yourself with the courage that enables you to accept your vulnerability—which is no trivial matter—and if you're truthful, then what you bring out of potential is what's good, and that sets the world right. And that's up to us!

And to me, that's the great—that's the great story of the West! That's why we regard ourselves as sovereign individuals of value— is that's what we are! And we need to know that to take ourselves seriously and to act properly in the world.

And so—and that's what I said in the biblical lectures—in many hours—and that's what's made them popular because people—in, at the level of the soul, I would say people know these things to be true.

So, ladies and gentlemen, please help me thank— [Applause]