The Best of Conservative Education | Larry P. Arnn | EP 276

This coming here to Hillsdale College is an act of maturity, right? Right. And maturity is a desirable thing. It's better in all ways than being immature. It opens up more possibilities. It's not subjugation to more constraint. That's right. Acceptance of a voluntary system of disciplined striving and the opening up of an immense vista of opportunity.

If I was as good at psychology as you are, I'd trade jobs with you.

Hello everyone, I have the great good fortune today, well first of all to be sitting outside, which is quite nice, and also to be speaking to Dr. Larry Arnn, who is president of Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College is a liberal arts institution in Hillsdale, Michigan and it's quite a remarkable place. I was asked to deliver a commencement address there earlier this year and went up for the day. I knew about Hillsdale a little bit but hadn't visited there. It's a remarkable island of educational sanity in the midst of a sea of educational chaos.

And I'm going to be talking today to Dr. Arnn, who's been president of this august institution for a number of decades, about, well, about Hillsdale College in general, about its history, about his tenure there and his activities and occupation and enterprise, and about the state, the dismal state, let's say, of the higher education enterprise in general in the United States and in the West more broadly.

So, uh, I hope you enjoy the conversation. Welcome, Dr. Arnn. Thank you very much for coming to see me and also for the commencement invitation and for, uh, agreeing to do this podcast. I'm really looking forward to it.

Well, you're a tremendous host and a tremendous man. A great pleasure for me to be with you. Yeah, it's been fun. It's been fun. We had, uh, we're out in the boat for the sunsets, and we had some fireworks at night, and it's quiet and peaceful here and away from the fray, let's say. So that's been lovely.

And Dr. Arnn and I have been talking a lot about plans for educational revival in some sense in the future, and so there'll be lots of things coming down the pipeline on that front. But to begin with, I think we'll start by talking about Hillsdale and about its singular vision and its founding. And so why don't we start, tell everybody about how Hillsdale got its beginning, and let's walk through the history of the institution.

Uh, history starts in 1844. It was on the frontier in Michigan that was far as the country went back then. A bunch of New England preachers who were classically educated—they, uh, they read Latin and Greek—which means that they knew the books that were written before Jesus, and they were very loyal to Jesus. And they brought the tradition of a liberal education with them out to the frontier, and they founded a college.

They met in the town hall. They just—one particular, one of them—and a ransom done rode a horse into town, and there were two hotels, two hotels thriving metropolis. And he said, “I would like to talk to the leading citizens who care about education,” and a bunch of them gathered. And they used City Hall. It wasn't a government thing; the college had never had any money from the government. But City Hall back then was conceived a place where the city could use it, the citizens could use it. And they made a deal, and they started the college.

They, uh, the city pledged ten thousand dollars if the college would raise ten thousand dollars, and that came from, uh, this ransom done and some other people. They went—they were preachers, and they went riding around the countryside all over Wisconsin and Illinois and Indiana and Michigan, and, uh, they'd give sermons, and they'd ask for money, and the money came two dollars and five dollars at a time. We still have the list.

And what did they want to do? Well, they were very clear about that. The college has a very beautiful founding document. It's the discovery of that that made me think I could, uh, find a calling in managing the college. And it commits the college to four things. They are learning, freedom, faith, and character.

And those are all drawn out of the great tradition of the liberal arts that goes back to medieval times, indeed back to Plato's academy before that. And so they, you know, you need to be free in order to—what does the liberal arts mean? It means the study of the ultimate things, the things that are good to know just because they're good to know. And then you need to be able to—you need to have your freedom to do that.

The college has always been interested in the Constitution, uh, and you need to have a strong character. You need to not be overcome by vice but pursue virtue. And what else? And you need to—and God is a big figure. So those are the points. And then, you know, this is in 1844, and sixteen years later the world fell apart. The Civil War began in 1861, and it's curious about that because we didn't have any military training at the college, but effectively all of the young men joined the Union Army.

And they, uh, uh, there were more than 40 of them at the Battle of Gettysburg in the peach orchard on the second day, helped to turn the tide. All in all, about 500 of our students went—more than any place except Yale, which is older and larger than we were then. And the faculty had been very involved. So why do you think these preachers that started Hillsdale, Christians, were also interested in the benefits of a liberal arts education? Why didn't they just agitate and start a seminary?

That's, you know, um, great political rights. Religion is not—can't—can't be simply open to philosophy, but the most open is the Christian religion.

He talks about the Spanish names, Harry Jaffa Teachment. He knows his teacher, Leo Strauss. He talks about the fact that Moses, my embodies, he's a Jew, and all for a Muslim, and Thomas Aquinas are rough contemporaries. And, uh, Thomas Aquinas could write most openly about God, about the truth is known by reason. In the great Summa Theologica, the first query is whether anything apart from reason is necessary to know God. And he says, you know, that book, a wonderful book, is written in the form of the disputed question. So here's the question, then two or three opinions about it, two or three answers, and then his own opinion. And his own opinion is, yes, there are some things apart from reason you need. But you can know a heck of a lot by reason, right?

So there's this alignment and reason in that sense. That's the alignment in some sense between the Greek tradition, the Platonic tradition, and the philosophical tradition and the emergent Christian tradition. There is an overlap there that's really quite remarkable that comes together with the joint conceptualization of the logos.

So, because that conception of reason that you're describing, that's the Greek notion of the logos, and that was adjoined, oddly, to the Christian notion of the logos, which I think is a kind of historical mystery. But the fact that those things actually overlaid and overlapped is a remarkable synchronicity, we could say. And so the Greeks believed that you could move towards the good and the sum of all goods as a consequence of logos, as a consequence of reason, and then the Christians insisted that that logos had been embodied in a particular figure and that there were divine attributes associated with that.

And so, maybe that's part of what's underlying what's underneath the allowance on the Christian side for the Greek philosophical tradition underneath the rubric in some sense of a modified Judaism. It's not something you'd necessarily expect, but it's definitely something that happened.

And I think there's an important thing to lay out in that regard too, because a lot of modern people are taught that there's a real antithesis between the religious, say the Catholic in particular, and education in general and science in particular. But as I've looked into that more deeply, I've become convinced that exactly the opposite is the case and that the university tradition, certainly which grew to the monastic tradition, just as clearly as can be, but also the scientific tradition, are deeply embedded inside the religious substrate rather than operating in a manner that's antithetical.

And I think the fact that the preachers knew that even in the mid-1800s and that drove them to decide that a liberal arts education—studying people like Plato and Aristotle, for example—was actually commensurate with a broader, let's say, ethical and Christian goal. It's not obvious why that would be the case to pull in these pagans.

So, first of all, a prerequisite for entry to Hillsdale College in 1844 was you had to read both Greek and Latin, and so they started prep school for people who couldn't do that. And you just—you'd learn those, and then you could come. But the way they looked at the world, and I, you know, I think it's a wonderful way to look at the world myself, is that, uh, this account of logos, which you bring up—that's the Greek word both for reason and for speech.

And that means that whatever you can think, you can say, and whatever you can say, you can think. And that means that this conversation is a kind of sharing that no other creature is capable of, and it's a transformative process as well—a redemptive and transformative process. And that's right.

And connected, uh, Aristotle writes that we're, uh, more gregarious. It comes from the Greek word for flock than horses or bees, right? And that means—and so it's this nature of man. But then logos is not—when we talk, we can see, you know, how to get from A to B. We can also think about whether to go from A to B, and that brings in the divine, because that would be in both Greek philosophy and in the Christian faith and the Jewish faith. And I think the Islamic faith, uh, that would be the ultimate destination—very God, right? That's like a definition, right?

If you think about this as a mapping problem, and that part of what we're doing, well, dialoguing, exchanging logos is to map out the terrain that includes the destination and the details of the journey, all of that. And then the ultimate destination is a destination that would be guided by the highest good by definition, right? Because your destination is a good. You wouldn't be going there if you didn't think it was better, unless you're aiming down.

And so the ultimate destination, in some sense, is the transcendent destination. And so that's like a definition of the divine path, and in some sense a definition of the spirit that animates you while you're walking down that path.

And then you say, and I think there's an instinctual element to this that's associated with that gregariousness. So you know, people are unbelievable mimics, right? We imitate each other on a scale that's unparalleled among other creatures. And we do that with language, but we can literally inhabit—we can almost literally inhabit each other's bodies, each other's frames of reference, and we do that by exchanging viewpoints, essentially.

And so we're negotiating together this pathway to the highest possible point, and I think that's marked. So you know what I was hoping when we started this discussion, like I always hope with my podcast, is that we would fall into a discussion and be engaged by it, right? And then it would be animated by a spirit that was its own—not instrumental, not planned, but something that would emerge automatically as a consequence of goodwill and honest communication.

And what's so fascinating about that, literally, is that if that happens, it's intrinsically and instinctually engaging, right? You feel the conversation as meaningful, and that's a marker, as far as I can tell, for the manifestation of that logos—that instinct for meaning. It's not something rational; it's way—it's the thing upon which rational discourse fundamentally depends, and maybe the goal of rational discourse.

And then you could also think this is a wonderful way of thinking about it too, you know, is that if you're listening to a symphony, in some sense you're apprehending its completion, right? So there's a voyage to the end, but getting to the end of the symphony is not the purpose of listening to the music, even though you know that end is there.

So you have the end in mind, but if the end is appropriate, then the journey becomes intrinsically meaningful in and of itself. And so you get the destination tied to the journey in that intrinsic sense, and I do believe that people experience that as deep engagement and meaning.

And so, and that's the purpose of dialogue. And there's that Christian idea that goes along with that too, and it's an idea certainly that the therapists have picked up on, is that that redemptive dialogue—honest dialogue—is genuinely spiritually redemptive.

We'll get back to more with Larry Arnn in just a moment. First, we'd like to thank our sponsor, Shopify. Designed for anyone to sell anywhere, Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business—an all-in-one e-commerce platform. Shopify helps business owners achieve independence by making it easier to start, run, and grow your online storefront.

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All that you just said is breathtakingly good, and it shows you understand what teaching is. Today, we think of teaching is doing something to somebody, right? It's not. It's doing something with somebody. Plato writes a letter; he wrote 13 letters, but one of them apparently is his—the seventh—and he says, "How would you capture the teaching of Socrates?" It's just in these conversations, and so he invented the dialogue for that purpose.

And then his student, Aristotle, invented the dialectical treatise where they introduce a thing and you talk about it a while, and you have to go back over, and something else comes up. So it's like a conversation, and the point is we learn together. Talking and thinking are the same thing. Yeah, that's why free speech is so—you think, "Well, why think?" Well, so that you think before you act. Why think before you act? So you don't fall into a pit.

How do you think? You think dialogically. Even if you're thinking only internally, what that means is you've trained yourself to be more than one person at the same time—a very difficult thing to manage. Most of the time, we think through dialogue.

And it's so interesting to me too that these long-form podcasts have become a cultural phenomenon, right? Because in some sense, people like Rogan in particular pioneered these long-form dialogues. In some real sense, that is a return to that platonic tradition of dialectical learning. And part of the reason that people like these podcasts as well isn't because necessarily because of the content, although that's relevant, but this is also relevant to the teaching enterprise.

It's because they love to see the process of dialogue modeled. And so a lot of the comments on the YouTube channels—like I had a conversation with my father and I put it up on my channel. I interviewed him about his life, and I wanted to do that personally. I had my reasons, but it turned out to be a very popular podcast, much more than I had expected it to be.

And I don't think it was because the content per se was like universally fascinating, you know? It was the details of my father's life in a particular time and place in Northern Saskatchewan when he was growing up really on the frontier. But people really like to see the genuine intergenerational dialogue modeled, and we have no idea how important an element of education that is, right?

Because as a professor, partly what you're doing is inculcating knowledge, which is doing something to someone, let's say. But a huge part of it is modeling the process by which knowledge itself is generated and expanded.

So, uh, one can understand Aristotle by reading the first lines—the first line of the Metaphysics is, "The human being stretches himself out to know." We want to know. And so your father—anybody talking with his father—is a demonstration of how one generation affects the next. But your father—you're a remarkable man, and people wonder where does that guy come from?

And so to find out that information and then to find out that it's, uh, normal. You know, you weren't—your father was not a professor at Cambridge, right? Your father was a normal man and a heck of a man. That's—normal man is a fine thing to be. Just think of the conclusion you can draw about the form of government of aristocracy, right? It is one of the most worthy forms of government, but it is also fatally flawed because sons are not necessarily like their fathers and daughters like their mothers and fathers.

So that you see, in other words, there's a—there's an account of how nature works. And hearing you talk to your father—it's hearing a lecture about it is different, right? Because, yeah, there's—they're seeing the look. If you're talking to your dad, they're seeing the raw material.

And we've been talking a lot the last couple of days, and your dad comes up a lot. There's a couple of things I realized about him. I thought about this for a long time. So my father has a very large collection of single-shot rifles—300 of them or something, a lot—and he's been, I would say, compelled and obsessed by collecting them, learning about them and becoming an expert marksman because he was and he is an expert marksman. He was competing at provincial levels, so a very good marksman.

And when he hunted, he hunted with single-shot rifles because the goal was to hit the target with one shot. And it really—I wasn't interested in rifles the same way he was, and he had a craftsman interest in them too because he made gun stocks and he was a good carpenter and handyman—very artistically gifted and very precise in his workings. His grandfather, who raised him, was a blacksmith who could make virtually anything out of nothing.

And so, but his preoccupation with guns—why?—a mystery to me because I didn't share the same thing temperamentally. You know, I was probably too tender-hearted to be a hunter. But it came to me at one point after having meditated on this for a long time that the reason my dad was so interested in rifles was because he wanted to hit the target with a single shot.

And he realized that that was the purpose of life. And I knew at that point that the word sin was a derivation—it's also derived through, uh, the Jewish equivalent of the word sin—the hamartia, which is the Greek word means to miss the target. It's an archery term. And the Jewish equivalent of the word for sin has the same kind of derivation. It means to miss the target. And so I thought, "Oh, I see what my dad was doing." He didn't know this either.

He was practicing to aim in the most deadly possible manner—one shot, dead center of the right target—and all of that perfectionism that goes along with mechanical machining, let's say, and the precision that's necessary to make a rifle. It's all associated with that hunting tradition that characterizes human beings so deeply. Like, I mean, our whole physical platform is a throwing platform, and we aim at everything. All our sports are aims at targets. It's really deeply embedded inside of me, of us. And so I realized that about my father.

I told him that—I said, "I think I figured out why you're so interested in rifles and shooting." So I outlined that. He said, "Yeah, I think that's right." He didn't know that! And then so that was very interesting, that precision element of him, but also one of the things that my father gave me as a gift—and I think my mother did this as well—is that he was really 100% behind me, the best in me. I always knew, even when I was a little kid, that he had—he didn't have my back exactly. He was a firm supporter of the best being made manifest in me.

And many of my friends didn't have that with their fathers, and of course people who lack fathers entirely, unless they're very fortunate, often don't have that at all. And so my dad spent a lot of time with me when I was a very little kid teaching me to read and hours a day when he came home from work for months on end. And I became an expert reader because of that, and that was an unbelievable, unbelievable gift.

And the time he spent—that was just the fact that he taught me how to do it because he was a schoolteacher, but that he spent all that time and valued it so intently; it gave me this deep-rooted admiration and love for literacy. That was maybe—that's the most fundamental element of my existence, I suppose. It's that love. But I know that having that male encouragement firmly on the side of the promotion of your development—that is something that's just of inestimable importance and something, of course, that should be offered by teachers to their students, male or female alike.

If, uh, you know, there's—you hear stories, I guess it happens that, uh, parents want to dominate their kids. Fathers might want the kid to be like them, right? And that's not the natural thing. The natural thing is you think one of the contributions a parent can make in my life is for my children to have benefits I didn't have and to have character better than mine, and that's—you know, that is fundamental to the teaching business.

I think, uh, today in the teaching business if you— in all of it, right? You know, so I’m a teacher at Hillsdale College. I’m the president, but I’m a teacher too. And we think today, if you read about it, we want them to think something. We want to do something to them to make them the way we want. But that violates the spirit of the dialogue that you just—that you brought up earlier, right? In other words, that's conversion therapy—that's what that is.

And, and, and we're gonna—so I’m—we’re gonna set up a system to work on you, and then what you know and what you are will be a product of our work, and that is the most uncharitable approach to education, and it's dominating these days.

Yeah, well, it's not education; it's ideological inculcation. It's propaganda. It kind of reminds me of the Prussian education model. And you know, a lot of that was the foundation, the philosophical foundation of the American public education system. One of the things that was a mystery to me—I built this program a long while back called self-authoring, and there's an element of that future authoring that helps people walk through the process of developing a personal vision.

And so first of all, people are asked to envision what their life could be like five years down the road if they had what they needed and wanted in a manner that would be best for them, if they were taking care of themselves, right? So imagine that you're worthwhile. Now you get to have what you need and want, but you have to aim at it. And so you ask yourself, "What would that be if I could have it?" And so that's the first part of the exercise.

And then the next part steps you through seven major components of your life—your education, your career, your intimate relationships, your family, your physical health, etc. Major sub-components of your life asking you to detail out a vision for each of those and then to make a relatively concretized plan, and then to outline a vision of hell—which is where you might end up if you let your bad habits carry you away.

So I used this in my classes, and we did a bunch of research with it as well, showing that it decreased the probability that students would drop out of college by about 50 percent, which is stunning. It's stunning, and what's even more stunning is no universities have picked it up. But in any case, one of the things that really struck me as a mystery after that—I started using it in my classes—was, "Okay, why the hell do we have an education system where kids are taught for 12 years minimum, if they graduate from high school, and never once do we sit them down and say all right, you could be who you wanted to be in the best of all possible ways, but you have to know what that would be, and then you have to aim at it.”

Even no matter how imperfectly, right? You have to start to flesh out that vision. Why don’t we do that? I thought, well, that’s such an oversight. How can we have structured an entire education system where we spend 12 years doing everything except the one thing that we should clearly do, which is to help students elucidate a vision for the development of their character—which is what Hillsdale concentrates on.

And then I did some background historical investigation and found out that the American public school system—and then public school systems in general, Japan throughout Europe—were based on the Prussian military model. And so the American idea was that when the rural types were flooding into the cities in the midst of the high end of the industrial revolution, that there was going to be a demand for disciplined workers.

And so, the Prussian governmental authorities wanted to produce surf-like soldiers who were nothing but obedient. And so the Prussian education model—the first state education system was adopted in the U.S. and then broadly in the West, and the underlying ethos was: we'll produce obedient soldiers.

And then, I would say that ethos to a large degree spread up into the higher education systems too and so now we have a situation where, well, you know, the proper thing to do with students is to train them to be activists, social justice warriors, and people who are saving the planet in a particular ideologically riddled manner without this dialogical exploration that's actually the basis of true education, which is, by the way, where we're talking about Hillsdale today.

So yeah, see that, I realize now why they won't use the self-authoring program, which we will at Hillsdale College. The point is, if they arrive and you think the purpose is to do something to them, then you're not as interested in what they want to do. And, you know, I think it’s—you know the only rule that works in a college, in my opinion, is be good. You know, there are a few details too, but you know, is that a good thing to do? Don’t do it if it’s not, you know? And you want to teach them to be good human beings, excellent human beings, but most of the work is in them.

I told you a story. When I came to Hillsdale College, about 25% of the freshmen left at the end of the freshman year, and that means that at least one in four are dissatisfied, and that changes everything. Now 25% is a very good number, you know, because it’s more like 50 or 60 percent. That’s right, especially among young men. But it’s… you know, my favorite activity is eating in the dining hall with the students, which I’ve been doing now for 22 years, and it’s delightful.

And you know, they soon forget who you are, and you just have a talk. And I discovered doing that that a lot of them were angry with the college. And why were they? It took a long time for me to figure this out, but the summary of the arguments was, I finally found a phrase that explained it to me: nobody told me. Nobody told me about this, nobody told me about that. About what sort of things? And when was this? This is in the year 2000, 2002—the breakthrough came in 2002.

And you know, like we’re a very old-fashioned college. We have the sexes separated in the dormitories, and there’s no drinking in the dormitories and all that, and so, you know, and that’s in the curriculum—anti-animal house institution. It is very much, you know, and the curriculum is one half of the curriculum is the same for every student.

You know, because there’s—we argue there are great things to know, and you have to be introduced to them, all of them, and then you figure out your major—sure, but you won’t be able to practice your major if you go into a particular line of work unless you know something about the world as it is. So anyway, we—so that’s all very strict, and it was stricter now.

But it was strict when I came there somewhat. Well, I finally got to the bottom of it. They have to agree. You can’t be doing things to people unless they agree that you may do it, right? Policy that involves compulsion is, by definition, bad policy. It is, isn't it though?

And yeah, you have to spend all the time enforcing it, and you produce resistances. And so, your students were telling you 25% of them that they didn't feel that they had entered into this agreement on a sufficiently informed and voluntary basis. That's right. And that—and I was missing that. I thought they had a disagreement with me about whether they ought to be having sex before they get married, and they may have that disagreement, but that wasn't the operative one. The operative one was nobody told me.

And when I saw that, it was a revelation in a dinner with a bunch of frat boys who I—I saw what the rub was, and the next morning we wrote the honor code, and now we don't lose one percent of our students from, from—

Yeah, so we need to say that again. So your dropout rate is what? Uh, after freshman year, one percent. One percent compared to sixty percent. Well, it’s afraid of forty percent. No, yeah, compared to what was, you know, forty percent, right?

And what's the average for institutions? It's more than—no, I'm scared I messed up my number. That's okay. Ours was 20% and the—the run in colleges generally is around 40, 40 to 45. And, and so—and you know, 20% is huge, by the way. It means every time you sit down at the table, there’s a couple of people who are unhappy, right?

And you don’t want that. You want—because college means partnership. It’s so strange that you have this strict and traditionalist college, but aligned with that is an ethos of self-determination and self-development. And so it’s a very paradoxical juxtaposition of order and opportunity, and an interesting one because people—this is—I think part of the downfall of an excessive Protestantism in some sense is that—and, and it's also a downfall of small liberal philosophy—is that we tend to think of all external constraints as inhibitions on self-actualization, right?

It’s just limits. It’s just arbitrary walls that you're running into to stop the flowering of the wonder that is you. But it’s a very perverse way of conceptualizing opportunity because it does turn out that under many circumstances, if you accept a strict regimen of a priori rules, like in a chess game, that what that does is open up a wealth of opportunities to you that you wouldn’t have otherwise had.

So there’s this weird relationship between strict rules and freedom. And one of the things that I love, though, is why we're having this conversation too, is when I went to Hillsdale, I’ve been to lots of university campuses in my life and many in the more recent years, and they’re generally per—a sense of resentment, entitled resentment that permeates the establishment.

You see that the faculty, the administrators, and most of all in the students, and it’s very unsettling and uncomfortable. And, uh, I really felt the absence of that at Hillsdale. Talking to all the students, talking to the faculty, talking to the administrators, there was a harmony there, like a musical harmony.

And I know your campus is also—uh, one-third of the students are involved in the music program, 70—right, 440. Yeah, it’s amazing. And there was music everywhere on the campus, which I thought was just wonderful.

And so, and it’s also so interesting to hear you talk about this old-fashioned approach with sex-segregated dormitories and so forth these 1950s rules or before that let’s say and that students actually find that acceptable if they’re brought on voluntarily. So let’s talk about that honor code more; so why did you decide that the solution to the problem of their discomfort wasn’t alteration of the rules? It was more clear explication of the a priori rules? Why did you go that route, and why do you think it—what was the route, and why did it work?

What I thought before I had this revelation—just quickly, how did I have it? A national class long jumper, a very beautiful young man, a frat boy, began senior dinner. They come over to our house, and we have dinner with them, you know, and this was a senior dinner. He began by forgiving me for the rules, and you know, and I was cranky that night.

And I said, "Why did you come here?" And he loved it. He said, "I said, what do you love about it? You want us to be the same as the University of Michigan? You should." And then I said the golden thing. I said, "Could you read when you came here?" And he said, "Yes." And I said, "Did you?"

Because if you’d read, you’d know. And how can you be complaining about it four years later? And I just noticed I had the moral high ground. And in the end, it wasn’t really the particular rules if you had the most libertine rules in the world there’d be plenty of people who’d object to that.

Right, right. It’s that their will had been consulted, and so that was made thoroughly explicit and understood. That’s what the honor trick—that’s what the honor code does. And see, we were afraid of the honor code, because we weren’t very strong in applications. We’re very strong now, and afraid we wouldn’t get enough, and what if they don’t come?

Yeah, that’s the same sort of fear that I would say paralyzed and castrated, let’s say, the Catholic Church and its liberalization. It’s well, we’re making it too difficult for people; we just have to make it easier. If we make it easy enough, then everyone will come.

I read Kierkegaard, you know, and Kierkegaard has a famous passage where he describes just how useless an idler he really is and how it’s impossible for him to be a benefactor of the industrial age and to make everything that’s already been made easy even easier for people. And so that his signal contribution was to do everything he could to make things more difficult because there would come a time when everything had become so easy that the cry for something difficult would become overwhelming.

And I love that, and that’s a good example of the necessity of these—that’s an excellent rule of thumb when dealing with the young because what is their drive? They’re like, you know, I think of them like plants; I think they grow. I don’t think you’re making them into anything; I think they grow. And you can stunt them, though. You can’t do that.

Oh boy, can’t you though? And so they want to grow. They—they don’t even fully understand the process, but they want to grow up. It’s the reason why a one-year-old or a three-year-old probably will get cranky if the five-year-old is taught—is treated like more of an adult, right? Right?

They want to grow up, right? And so you have to harness that. You know, it’s not really even a harness. You have to get that on your side, and that means encourage you. And that means this coming here to Hillsdale College is an act of maturity, right? Right.

And maturity is a desirable thing. It’s better in all ways than being immature. It opens up more possibilities. It’s not subjugation to more constraint. That’s right. Acceptance of a voluntary system of discipline, striving, and the opening up of an immense vista of opportunity.

Yeah, if I was as good as psychology as you are, I’d trade jobs with you. If, uh, it’s, uh, yeah—that’s a, you know I’ll just tell you when you approach it like that, happiness blossoms everywhere. I mean, Hillsdale College—I used to sit down in the dining hall, and lunchtime in the dining hall is—come to visit Hillsdale College. I’ll take you to the dining hall. We’ll have lunch, and you sit down with these kids—I’m the only old guy who sits with the kids all the time, and it’s delightful.

It wasn’t always; they had complaints, you know? And I would leave the table thinking we’re subsidizing the daily daylights out of these kids, and they’re not happy. What are we spending our money for? And, you know, it’s still very perverse and strange that what you decided to do was to implement an honor code.

So first of all, why honor? Why that archaic and old-fashioned word? And maybe we could walk through what the code is and how you introduce that to students and then why they not only appear to accept it but to accept it so assiduously that they all stay in the college, which is—that's an amazing achievement, right? That’s—that’s remarkable and very unlikely achievement.

So—and it’s such a strange route to get there.

Yeah, so—so why an honor code? Well, honor—so, uh, you know, I have devices reading Aristotle and teaching Aristotle, and that's always good for one, in my opinion. And so what you learn about honor—honor is—you know, a great thing, right? It’s, you know, to be honorable, to commit a great act of honor, right?

You find out that honor is not the highest good. You find out soon because honor depends on other people’s opinions. And a much higher—in fact, the highest human relationship is friendship.

But you can’t start with friendship. Honor does have the advantage of being civic in its nature; it’s something that we adopt together and win respect from each other. It’s sort of like identity in its real sense.

That’s right. That’s right. Honorable identity. So, and we agree what that is. What the code says is a Hillsdale College student is honest in word and deed, respectful of the rights of others, dutiful in study and service, and through education, the student rises to self-government.

Right? Right. And so it’s an apprenticeship with mastery as the goal. That’s it. And you know, and see, commencement is the culminating ceremony. You gave one of the best commencement speeches I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard of past 11.

And that is the annual signification that the college has done its work. And when I say the college, the college—the word means partnership. It means everybody in the room. And you know, there were close to 6,000 people at commencement when you spoke. And who were those people? They were the people who had made it happen. They were the students, and the faculty. They were the parents, uh, they were the friends of the college, uh, and, and they are—they're all there in an official capacity. We have come together to do this thing, and it had to produce these remarkable young people.

That's right. No, not to produce—to see there’s that bloody word again. Yeah, yeah, factory word. To encourage the development of these remarkable young people.

That's it, right? Yeah, you know, if you if you just think—so I know a lot about Winston Churchill because if you know about him, I argue you will come to love him—and I did. And people always say to me, “What explains Winston Churchill?”

Well, the only possible answer to that is God. And Winston Churchill. Uh, Winston Churchill was relatively well-born. You know, Winston Churchill was very smart, had a tremendous memory. But, you know, there’s millions of people who have those qualities and every one of them is different from him, and every one of them is different from each other. And that means—you know, you are to some extent the maker of yourself.

Uh, that’s a beautiful doctrine in Aristotle. And so in education, know the first thing you just need to know two things. When you admit them, you need to know that they want to, and you need to know that they can—willing and able. After that, they're going to do the work, and you're going to help them.

They have to agree on what the work is because remember, it's... yeah. So how do you make the honor code not just a pro forma document that's empty words? What is it? Because you—there must be specific things you do with the honor code that bring it to life.

Yeah, well, we're governed by it, and—

Okay, so it is actually the ethos of the institution. So that’s right, there’s a—you talk to the students when they first come to the college?

Yeah, and so I understand that that’s part of the transmission of the honor code. Yeah, they get—I send them a letter; it’s a page and a half letter, and it says here’s the honor code. It’s a serious commitment. You should read it carefully. If you think that you might not be willing to sign it, you should tell us now; we’ll help you find some place to go to college.

It tells them that on the Monday after you arrive on Sunday for freshman convocation, we will have a talk—me and the senior class—about this document. And then you will sign it all together or go home. And, uh, that's—and you know, I have signed it, see. And so we’ve all— we’ve all made oath to be committed to Hillsdale College.

Now one of the things that happens when you do it like that is that enforcement becomes much less important, right?

Well that's also the sign of good policy, right?

Yeah, I mean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, he was very interested in laying out the rational grounds for the emergence of a moral system. And so one of his propositions, which I love, is that a goal-oriented system established on consensual grounds will outcompete a goal-oriented system—same goal—on grounds of compulsion. Not least because the system that requires compulsion will waste time and resources in the enforcement, so it’s a priori less efficient.

And then you can add to that the fact that most positive human emotion—and so that's the emotion that literally makes you enthusiastic, which is to be filled with the spirit of God, because that's what enthusiasm means, right— is that you experience the positive emotion that propels you forward in relationship to a goal, and the goal has to be established voluntarily or the positive emotion systems won’t kick in.

So if you use compulsion, not only do you waste time and resources on enforcement, but you don’t harness the most fundamental motivational systems. And those are so fundamental, by the way, that the drugs that people abuse—cocaine, perhaps foremost among them in terms of its instantaneously attractive and addictive qualities—cocaine directly activates that positive emotion system, which is why people love it.

And so because it's an analog of purposeful, goal-directed activity, and if you establish a high goal—the higher the goal, the more rewarding in the technical sense every step towards that goal is, but that has to all be done voluntarily because otherwise it's an imposition, and entirely different psychophysiological systems come into play.

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So here’s a Winston Churchill—it is at once the safeguard and the glory of mankind that it is easy to lead and hard to drive. And that’s, uh, when I was hired for this job, there was an MBA fine man on the committee, and you can spot them a mile away. They ask MBA questions, and if you have to drive, you’re not leading.

That’s right, tyrant. Yeah, and they—Churchill believed, by the way, that particular thing he says that in the context of how the implausible thing could happen that Britain could defeat Adolf Hitler, and that's why—and they—right, people hate that.

And, and you know, if you want—and you know, if I’ve become experienced and stubborn now, I don’t like to be in a relationship where I’m telling anybody what to do if they don’t want to do it. Well, you know, I really learned this as a psychotherapist and this is partly why I’ve been so upset with these anti-conversion laws lately.

It's like, in a therapeutic conversation—which is any genuine conversation, by the way, any genuine dialogue—you need humility. And the humility is something like this: this person that I’m talking to is actually different than me. They’re different in their presuppositions, they’re different in their knowledge, and they’re different in their destiny.

And they’re importantly and vitally different in that, because I think that each person plays a signal role in manifesting or failing to manifest part of the reality that moves us towards paradise, let’s say in some fundamental sense. Everyone has a signal role to play in that—that’s part of the destiny of their soul, and you are not to interfere with that because you don’t know.

And so in a therapeutic conversation about identity—so now, for example, therapists are required to affirm the identity of their clients, the gender identity. But more broadly, to affirm it, and that’s never the role of a conversation. The role of a therapeutic conversation is always to inquire about identity, but in the spirit of humility, right?

Like you and I have been trying to work out a working relationship over the last couple of days and also with Stephen Blackwood down at Ralston. And one of the guiding principles of our attempts to do that isn’t that I want something from you or that you want something from me.

And I think it’s partly because both of us know that we don’t necessarily know what we want or should want from each other, but that if goodwill prevails and if we're both aiming up in the highest sense, that we could mutually discover the pathway forward that would be not only mutually beneficial for us in a sense that transcends the merely instrumental but potentially beneficial for the movement towards that higher good.

And that is, I think in some real sense, the foundation of the most genuine friendships, right? Because in a genuine friendship, yeah, you want the best for the other person as well as yourself. But in Aristotle, friendship is the highest human association, and there are three kinds.

In one kind, it’s transactional; commercial friendships are often like that. You know, that’s why somebody who sells you wood might send you Christmas candy, right?

Right, right. And then another kind is pleasure, Aristotle’s—that’s higher. Aristotle says the young are particularly given to that—their bodies are really great and getting better all the time.

And then there’s this ultimate kind, and that’s the rarest, and it’s the permanent kind. And the permanent kind is a shared love of something ultimate and a commitment to pursue it.

And that’s—that’s the only map you can have in a relationship that’s likely to sustain it. And see, I've discovered and you get the additional benefit there of not only the hypothetical movement towards that goal, but the deep engagement and pleasure that accompanies each step along the way to that goal.

And that’s a good marker for the quality of the relationship, right? It’s that it’s interesting in and of itself—that's it for its own sake.

So, in, uh, Book 10 of the Ethics, he describes this beautiful activity, and that is—and you have to—you have to become—you have to get the moral virtues first. You have to be courageous, you have to be moderate, you have to be just, and you have to be—what—and you have to be, uh, wise, prudent, practically wise.

You have to be able to manage your life, you have to be able to control your passions, and you have to—and it goes beyond controlling them too. It means an act of love for the right thing, right?

Yeah, well that—I’m just going to interrupt very briefly—that's a distinction between a Freudian view of emotion regulation and a Piagetian view, because the Freudians—this is one of Freud’s signal errors. It makes him a Protestant of sorts, I would say, and a liberal of sorts—is that the regulation of aggression and sexuality is held to be a consequence in some sense of compulsion—that's the superego. So that’s like the internal tyrant saying no to aggression and no to sexuality.

But the Piagetian view, which is much more subtle and appropriate, is that those impulses are not inhibited; they are integrated into a higher mode of being. And so, and so Jung carried on this idea with his idea of the integration of the shadow and so, for Freud, in some sense, aggression was inhibited by the superego, right?

You need to be aggressive; aggressive—you want to be aggressive. And, but the society imposes a limit on you. That’s essentially a form of compulsion. But for Jung, without the idea of the integration of both the shadow and the anima or the animus, which would be the contra sexual tendency, it’s a matter of bringing the devil in in some sense to play.

It’s like, well, you need that aggression; you absolutely 100% need it. One of the things that struck me about you when I when we first met, which I really liked, was that you were someone who was capable of saying no.

And I know what no means because I thought about it a lot, partly because I was interested in childhood development. No means if you keep doing that around me, something you do not like will absolutely 100% certainly happen to you. And you have to be willing to enforce that, or you can’t say no.

If you can say no, you almost never have to enforce it. But you can’t say no also without the integration of that shadow. And so it isn’t that aggression is inhibited; it’s that it’s integrated into a higher order game.

This is really relevant for aggressive young men because they’re competitive. You say, well, we have to socialize them to be more like little girls, which is like the idiot plan of a multitude of psychologists and social workers. It’s like, no you don’t; you have to—you have to integrate that competitive impulse towards a much higher end.

And then that capacity for aggression starts to become unstoppability and implacability, and the ability to stalwart and noble and to abide by a code of honor, let’s say. So a much—a much more optimistic way of viewing.

Yeah, well, and see that energy, uh, you know, I’m heavily under the influence of the Greeks and the Christians and, um, and the Americans because the founders of America are really great too. If the point is, your motive action—everything that has a soul, you said, uh, you said some form of the word animation or animal about Freud. That just means it moves itself. Anything that’s an animal moves itself, and that's the—the Latin word for soul, anima.

Yeah, and so we move ourselves. And the point is by nature we can, and that means we want to. And so the question is towards what do we move, right? That is the question.

And, you know, reckless little boys, you know, I was one myself—Lord knows what they’ll do, right? But harness that to some high cause, and first of all, you make their life meaningful. Like we don't want our students tearing up our campus over political causes.

We're a very conservative college; we have fame for that. You know, we publish a newsletter to six and a half million people, but we don’t talk about the stuff public policy very much on the campus and we discourage it because why? Because they’re young and ignorant, and they get a chance to learn a lot and then they can figure out what to do with the world, right?

Right. Right. And, you know, it happens often because, you know, kids who come to Hillsdale College in a good college, they’re ambitious. And, uh, so they want to, you know, this and this and then, yeah they’re looking to—they’re looking to take their place in a meaningful way at the table in an important sense.

And they’re eager to get on with that. So it’s no use saying you got to wait; you just show them the place at the table that’s available to them now. And that place, by the way, is difficult, very, very challenging.

You know, you want to learn, uh, a bunch of boys and girls—mostly boys, though—I don’t think that a constitutional convention is a good idea. And you know a lot of people in my line of work and my political persuasion do. And so a bunch of kids get debating me one time, but you know because they know that I’m against it.

And some other famous people—I’m not famous but they are—are for it, and they want to get up a debate. I want me to debate these people and them, and I said, “Okay I’ll do that.” I said, “The stipulation is that you not spend very much time on this.” And they said, “Why not? It’ll be fun.”

I said, “Yeah, maybe.” I said, “But, uh, you’re not ready to define for me the meaning of the term politics, which is not an easy word to define. It’s a form of human community that takes its nature from specific things about the human being that are unique to the human being, right?

And so I said, “And until you can do that, I don’t want you. You’re wasting your time figuring out about this arcane point about the Constitution. And do you want to be just another policy wonk or do you want to be a learned person?”

And they, you know, and have you noticed that there’s actually a difference between those two things, and it’s an important difference? And see it calms them down, you see, because—and you’re—what you said, see, how many come for you—come to you for counseling?

I guess I’m doing that right now mutual. It’s usually a great idea to suggest something better than the bad thing they want. You know, if it’s bad, it might be usually not bad; just not good. Not good—not good enough.

Right now, that, in other words, you stoke their ambitions because that’s the fuel that makes them go, and now you know. Well, and what a dismal proposition it is to set forth to a young person who’s 18 and say, “Well, your axiomatic, a priori political convictions—shallow and unmoored though they are—are sufficient for you to go out and transform the world right now.”

Like how—what a dismal view that is. And instead, you can say, look, if you applied yourself with all due diligence for like 10 years in every direction you could possibly manage, you might be ready to set a tentative toe out on the world stage in whatever manner you could have earned by that point.

You know, the greatness of—and see that’s another thing—if you can teach somebody, you know, the highest human activity in Aristotle is a secular version of the highest human activity in Christianity or any religion—communion with God, and that’s contemplation—it’s hard to get your soul to a state to be able to do that. You have to be courageous; you have to me—you know, Aristotle says if you’re afraid of the bees buzzing around you, you will not be capable of this, see?

It requires all the virtues and years of work, right? And if you get it, it’s an immediate beholding, he says, and you don’t think about anything else at the time. And then he says, “No other—nothing can help you with this except a friend.”

That’s the highest kind of friendship. You do that with people, right? You see something beautiful? Well that’s what you have when you have a friend; it’s the person—there’s something that they see in you, if they're your friend, that they love and want to nurture and cherish.

That's it. And they aim at precisely that, and maybe they're even better at doing that for you than you are for you and that they are for them. So a friend in that sense is in some sense the best ally.

I had a friend, university, Morgan Abbott is his name—a tough guy from a rough background, poor background—he lived in a, in a, he was poor in a serious way, Northern Alberta, rural poor, that’s frontier-level poor man—his dad was a longshoreman; he’s a tough kid. This Morgan Abbott, and he’s worked with the worst delinquents in Canada for like 20 years and then worked with brain-damaged people, and he’s a tough guy. He was a good friend of mine when I went to college; he was older than me, came back working in the lead smelters in British Columbia and then came back to college to get himself educated.

And he’s the person who really talked me out of my initial socialism—and not politically, he just said something like, “There’s a hell of a lot more to the world that is income encapsulated in the socialist philosophy.” And he said, “You know, most people join the socialist political parties to get out of the working class by adopting a leadership position,” which I liked a lot and was commensurate with my experience.

And he was a very, uh, what would you say? He was an inspiring figure for me, probably more for me even than for himself, I would say in some sense.

And, uh, last year, two years ago when I was unbelievably ill, him and I have kept in contact over the years, you know, less intensely than we had, but in contact. And, uh, he walked five to twelve miles with me for almost a year, every single day.

Yeah, see now that’s, if you study the Greeks properly, you learn to love the word beauty because beauty is the perfection of good. And so what you just said was a beautiful thing. It was; you know to know that a thing like that happened is worthy and worthy making to everyone who hears it.

And so the education of the young is—involves helping them understand how much they want that. Everybody wants that. And how noble it is to want that.

Yeah, that’s right. And that’s so, and, and see if you can get that through to them—and you can, by the way, because they’re made to know it, you know?

Well, and then college also offers that stellar opportunity. I mean, when I went from my little town, my pack of narrative well friends there, um, a few of us went off to college—not very many—and then I had this opportunity to shed who I was and to find a new peer group and to become someone else in a radical way and to do that to some degree voluntarily, right?

To pick a new set of people that I wanted to associate with, to pick a new peer group, some of whom were the great thinkers of the past, right? Because that’s one thing college offers you—the opportunity to do is to pick a peer group in some sense; that’s the great figures of the past. It’s a daunting endeavor, but that’s what’s there before you.

And so it is definitely the case that that’s a stellar opportunity and a signal contribution of educational establishments: something difficult to replicate online, too. So you open the door for students to do that and say, “This is what you should be doing at that point”—a stellar group of peers who will ennoble you as you move forward and a shared goal of apprenticeship and maturation and the opportunity to take your place at the table as an adult—a great st—a great adventure—all of that.

Yeah, and that’s—and you know, you don’t want to take the magic out of it. It’s—it’s not working on them; it’s mostly them working, and you work with them, and it’s so fun when you get it right, you know?

And, and you know, we have—because we’re trying—in my opinion these days—and this is mostly because of changes in philosophy that go back 400 years—we’re trying to re-engineer the society all the time.

And that means you have to re-engineer the people in it, and that means school becomes—that’s its purpose. We’re—you’re going to come here, and we’re going to do things to you. Right? Why is that an attractive proposition? It’s attractive if you want to be a slave.

That's it. That's it. And so the truth is, uh, like the best teachers I know—a kindergartner garden teacher who does this, and I know many at the college where I work who do this—in the first 10 minutes of class, there’s tingling anticipation. And there are two kinds of best teachers at Hillsdale. One kind just says, “This is going to be great.”

The other kind says, “This is going to be great and this is going to be hard.” I’m afraid I’m in the second camp, and I’m not claiming I’m the best, but I’m pretty good and mostly because I know that I know this is a beautiful thing and we are going to learn it. And it’s—and we’ll be different after we know it for all time.

There’s a great antidote to cynicism in that too because part of the culture war that’s going on right now is the consequence of an insistence that the fundamental motivation of people who are in positions of authority, like you, is one of power and domination.

So imagine that there is—there’s almost nothing positive in abject and dependent subordination. That’s pretty bad outcome. And so then you might say that the ability to use compulsion and to attain domination is a higher moral good than abject subjugation and dependence.

Now, I’m not saying it is, but I think you could make that case. And then you could also make the case, and the postmodern Marxist types do this, that that’s really the fundamental motivation of mankind in every relationship—marital relationships, historical relationships, business relationships.

It’s like the willingness and ability to use compulsion to manifest power. Power, and I think, well, that’s probably better than dependency, but compared to the pleasure of, let's say, genuine friendship or mentorship, it’s not even in the same conceptual universe.

And so one of the things that the cynics about business organizations, for example, don’t understand by emphasizing the role of power is how much pleasure there is—and this is a paternal pleasure, I think, a patriarchal pleasure in the most fundamental sense—in having the opportunity to find someone who’s rife with potential and to offer them a multitude of beneficial pathways forward.

To be able to participate in that—my graduate supervisor, Robert Peel, great guy, still alive—we’re going to talk to him on the podcast soon. He was a great mentor; he had his wheelhouse of authority and knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge of the relevant psychological literature, great administrator and great manager of people.

And he took immense pleasure in forming a stable of graduate students and undergraduates and facilitating their development forward. That was a primary motivating purpose of his life. And he was interested in being an author on the papers and getting credit for his role—all of that—but fundamentally, he was a man who got obstacles the hell out of the way and enabled movement forward for those who wanted to move forward.

And then there was immense intrinsic pleasure in that. I mean, that was really the hallmark of his life. I went to his fest shift when he retired with my former colleagues, and it was a lovely affair. There was a hundred people there about, and every single one of them got up and said, “Here’s the signal manner in which this man transformed my life.”

That beats the hell of power; it’s not—it’s not only not power; it is the literal antithesis of power, and not this also—not this corrupt collapsing into an ineffectual dependency that you might attain by abdicating all your pretensions to power.

I have, see, I’ll bet when you have that fest shift interview yourself, you’ll have a thousand there. I have some protesters.

Yeah, you’ll have, well, yeah, we both get that, right? I have about 30 students who become powerful people—boys and girls, big in the government, and they are still my students. And when I see them, I don't talk about their power; I talk about their character.

And you know, they—and you know, these are people who can go and, you know, I have equally talented students who are not at all powerful, and I have the same relationship with them. And you know that because you get—you know, there’s—I teach one class a term, and I have about 30 students in it, which is big for Hillsdale standards, but I’m the president, and I don’t teach much, so I let more in.

And then that means that every year 60 I get to know in detail except then we have senior dinner and all that, and there’s 1650 on the campus. That means most of them I don’t know very well, but in another way, I know them all. And the ones I get to know well, I remember.

And that means you see what—what, um, it would be a better life than I am living to be Abraham Lincoln because he was a beautiful human being. Winston Churchill, same thing.

But to be president, just to be president—you and I are leading better lives than that. And that’s, you know, if you know that, you got to keep yourself from being a tyrant, you know? And it’s because most people don’t get to be a grand tyrant; they only get to be a petty tyrant, and how contemptful of that.

But you know, there are wonderful classic books about people who are famous for making people do things they don’t want to do, and it’s universal rulers over hell. That’s it. That’s the accomplishment of untrammeled powers.

You get to be the head demon in a chorus of demons. And to me, that’s the most cataclysmic failure—not a sign of the success of the psychopathic and narcissistic. And then those people are always presented as miserable in the classic books in Shakespeare too— even if surrounded by babbling sycophants, yeah, and schemers—and you’re— and even if your schemes are successful and not found out, you know?

So, yeah, you don’t—you don’t want a life like that.

And, uh, yeah, and maybe you don’t want to impose that on other people either.

No, you don’t, you know. That's—mustn't. You mustn't. And, uh, and that means that pri—it's—it's an excellent guide. It’s not the only way proper authority derives from the will of the person over whom it's exercised.

That's the consent of the government, if I remember correctly—that’s right. And that means that then you don’t have to fight.

Right, we’re going to have to do one thing or another here, and there are people in favor of both. That means some people are going to be happy, but everybody’s given their consent that we’re going to decide this thing this way, and that’s suited honorably—that’s right.

Wouldn’t that be lovely? And you know, we’ve got to get back to that. It’s, uh, well I really saw that at Hillsdale, and I’m going to talk to Dr. Arnn more behind the Daily Wire Plus paywall. I’ve decided to do a more personal interview with people for an additional half hour as part of my contractual obligations to the partnership with this arrangement.

Um, with this—with this group. And so I think that’s a good way of splitting it up. And so, well, I talked today with Dr. Larry Arnn, who’s president of Hillsdale College, which I think is a remarkable institution and I think one that’s whose best days are still in front of it, which is quite interesting, and which is offering a proposition which at the moment has become almost of almost infinite value, which is a disciplined, stringent, strict educational doctrine voluntarily undertaken, devoted towards the true ends of a true liberal arts education.

Man, and there’s nothing more valuable than that. You know, accepting perhaps like servitude to God himself. And so thank you very much for talking to me.

Thank you. It’s going to be a privilege and a pleasure working with you as we move forward. Mine? Very much! Thank you!

Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.