It's a pleasure to be here this is I think my sixth time I can't remember one of them I'm getting old but at least fifth time if not my sixth time at Exeter I think two of my most viewed lecture talks ever were actually delivered here in in Exeter a long time ago so it's been it's been probably 10 years but yeah it's great to be back thank you guys for facilitating this and making it happen this is great let me before I get started let me just say the I'm gonna do it has a conference this weekend in London Friday night Saturday Sunday you can register for it just kind of Google we had flyers I'm not sure where they are but just Google I ran conference London 2022 and you'll find it and you can register if you'd like to come out the train ride it's not bad I've done it now six times back and forth so today we're talking about capitalism and war and I think the best way to start this is to acknowledge something or to recognize something that is really really important and it is kind of self-evident and if it's not self-evident you can watch TV and you can see it and that is the war is horrific it is evil it is destructive it is everything those of us who believe in freedom who believe in liberty are against it is a but it is not a zero-sum game if you will it's not a game it's a negative sum activity there are no winners in a war certainly not from economic perspective everybody loses the left often claims that wars result in economic activity we should be the one calling them on it that is just not true World War two did not result in a boom we would be much richer if that war would have never happened wars are destructive they destroy on both sides the winners and the losers and it is in human activity a last resort maybe we we could talk about when they are justified but as a principle the initiation of war is never justified it is an unmitigated evil because it destroys the thing most precious what's the thing most precious life human life standard of value a standard for the good should be human life human flourishing human success human well-being wars destroy that not only do they kill large numbers of people and thus end life the people who survive whether they are injured or traumatized or have lost loved ones in every part of life this is devastating generations are traumatized by this this is not something that goes away very easily I in you know if I can share personal experience you know I've lived through wars I remember when I was 12 1973 we were it was a Yom Kippur you know the the high Jewish holiday we were in synagogue fasting and suddenly the sirens go off and soon after that somebody comes and calls my dad and off he goes and we don't see him for weeks and this is the beginning of the 1973 war with Syria in Egypt I was 12 I was the oldest male in a in the apartment building I had a one week old sister and one of the things we would do is we would look in the afternoon you would look out the window to see the cars coming up with a soldier with flowers and which house were they gonna go to to tell somebody their loved one has died right war is an unmitigated evil it is never good for those who on the right and on the left valorize war you know valorize muscle valorize force think this is noble and good you know no words can describe how evil and awful that is it's nothing noble about a war you have to defend yourself sometimes but that's still not a pleasant activity even if it has to be done wars of evil because they hurt human life they destroy an economy they destroy all the wealth that is being built I mean look at some of these cities in Ukraine now this city in the southeast of Ukraine Mary Pearle I probably distorting the name I mean it's just being flattened I mean this was a thriving city of half a million people and in no buildings they all that wealth all that wealth creation all that activity all that vibrant economic activity that many of us know is win win that trading that went on right the production the consumption the trade that win-win that's all destroyed and the only way to build it up again is to deploy capital that is now not gonna go for something that could have been above and beyond now it's just to get us back to where we were before so there's no there's no perspective in which this is a good thing so I think the question we must ask is given that it is so destructive and evil and harmful and really really bad for everybody involved why are we still seeing it and why are we still seeing it of our places in Europe why are we seeing it in what we associate with civilization with peace with flourishing with societies that supposedly care about human life why is war not dying we thought it was you know famously President Wilson declared the World War one to be the end of all war it was so horrific World War one was so horrific so many people died for what what was the cause of World War one was there was a reason to go to war nobody really knows right Austrian Hungarian Empire wanting to sustain its whatever and the British feeling a little you know insecure and the Germans rising because they oh I don't know but it's none of it sounds really good as an excuse for why millions of people had to die and it was supposed to be the war that ends all wars according to Wilson and of course not soon after we get World War two and why was World War two there what was well because some really really evil people wanted it and we'll talk about what motivates them why they want it and yes we had to defend ourselves the West UK United States had to defend themselves ultimately against the evil but why why is this the means for achieving aims what is war attacking war attacks human life but underneath it what is human life about what what makes human life possible what is it that makes us human what is really being attacked when we engage in war what makes us human don't say thumbs please what makes us human reason makes us human ability to think ability to conceptualize to observe the world out there to abstract away from it to create general con general concepts and ultimately to go out there and change the world to fit our needs reason is our means of survival it is the means by which we exist as human beings we were born with nothing we're not born with any instincts we're not born with the ability to survive none of you have the instinct to hunt even though some of you might think you have nobody has the instinct to do agriculture today we learn those things but somebody had to invent them like you know you try going out there and running down a bison and biting into it or I don't know if you bite you don't have bison in the UK I don't know what do you have in the UK a big you know yeah you can have boring cows maybe you can run down a cow I'm not sure you could bite into it though and yet you know if I'm in Colorado or somewhere like that and what can I say yet I just had a bison booger can't get bison boogers in the UK how's that well because we've developed the tools the skills the strategies the hunting capabilities to run down any one of those animals how do we do that by using a reason reason is the way in which we survive reason guides our actions and reason is it's two reason that we understand that our well-being depends on our ability to trade with other people who use reason in order to produce and create the fundamental to human survival in a group in a society fundamental to human society is the ability to trade what is the what is the fundamental nature of a trade that it is win-win that we both benefit that there are no losers at least in the transaction and that wealth in a sense is created that would better off wealth being a representative of being better off because of that trade you know if you've watched my videos you know I like to use my iPhone I bought this for thousand bucks how much is this worth to me a lot more than a thousand books don't tell Apple why because this is amazing I mean you guys were born with this kind of attached to you I know your generation doesn't know life without an iPhone but this is I remember when you know when I moved to the United States I moved to the United States in my in my 20s and I never called my parents right they were in Israel I moved to the US never called my parents because of long-distance charges it was just unbelievably expensive and and if you call collect and they get a paid the charges they didn't want it it's just super expensive right today no thought to call anybody anywhere in the world anytime or maybe the time zone differences you think about that I can video conference with my kids read them a bed night story I can access every movie every song ever written I mean the beauty of trade I gained Apple gained and I gained enormously wealth in terms of quality of life and human well being improved dramatically reason is the way in which we survive reason is the way in which you thrive reason is the way in which we interact with one another and if we disagree then reason is our means of discovering who's right and who's wrong or we have developed means by which we arbitrate disputes means by which if we disagree and cannot settle on dispute there is a court of law there's arbitration there's all kinds of mechanisms by which what do we do we present facts we present evidence we use reason for a neutral judge to decide who's right or wrong and then they will we built civilization is about building a society grounded in reason where reason is the way in which we deal with one another in every aspect of life and what do we do the people who don't deal with reason the people who want to cheat or steal or use violence against any one of us well we put them away they go to jail at least if it's explicit so violence we have recognized as something we don't deal with we don't sanction we don't let be right so we build these societies based on reason I think that's what civilization is post enlightenment that's what the West that's a contribution that the West has made to the world is this understanding of the world of reason and therefore how you built societies based on this principle and we understand that that requires the elimination of force at least to some extent from society but every single time we do this and this is new right we've only I think the post enlightenment political era has only been the last 200 250 years not more than that but every time we do this there are people out there with you know reactionaries people who don't believe that reason is our means of survival and one of the things that offends them the most is that reason is an attribute of whom who reasons small people not big people smart people that only smart people reason yeah everybody but but which human beings I mean how who reasons like there's a particular word I the particular word I'm looking for right starts with an eye yeah individuals reason there's no group reasoning there's no collective consciousness flowing above your heads here in which thinks for itself each one of you thinks for yourself only you can think for yourself I mean it's no different than the fact that who eats who said individuals individuals groups can't there's no collective stomach there's no collective immunity there's no collective anything yeah we're a group of individuals he's good catching on we're a group of individuals only individuals think and yet there's always being a train of thought in our world that wants to suppress individuals that wants to eliminate the individuality of individuals that wants to collect a device everything it is the notion that the individual doesn't matter that the individual doesn't count the word counts as the group and that the individual is just a sacrificial animal for the group that the purpose of life every aspect of life is not to serve your happiness your well-being your prospects but it's to serve the group and you can fill in the blank in which group it doesn't matter there are lots of groups that would love your sacrifice then encourage your sacrifice indeed often impose their sacrifice on you so groups this reactionary idea that the collective is what matters that the individual doesn't matter keeps coming back whether it's the proletarian that's what matters you don't matter what matters is the proletarian and even if you're part of the proletarian you particular don't matter it's the proletarian as a group that matters and how do we know what the proletarian is good for the proletarian what's required for the proletarian what the proletarian needs how do we know this since the proletarian doesn't speak then what do we need if we're gonna if we're gonna have the proletariat express itself this one starts with an L we need a leader we need somebody who can communicate with these consciousness that the proletarian has somebody who can communicate with the world of the proletariat and then tell the proletariat what they really need what they really want any group every group needs somebody to tell them what they really want because they stop thinking as individuals they've given up their task to the group but there is no such thing as the group the group can't think the group can't act the group can't do anything only individuals exist so we need one individual or group of them to declare themselves the spokesman of the group the representative of the group have some mystical insight into what the group needs and then tell the group what to do so you know it's not an accident that Marxism evolves into authoritarianism this is no other way you need an authority to tell the masses what's good for the proletariat otherwise how would they know we're not born with that knowledge no we're not born with any knowledge we have to discover the knowledge how do we know what the Aryan race needs how much land it needs how much blood it needs how much whatever what we need a leader we need somebody who can commune with the part with the Aryan spirits and tell us what they need and notice that this communing with the spirits is the opposite of reason it's the negation of reason it doesn't involve facts or evidence it involves revelation mysticism the essence of mysticism Nazism communism are mystical ideologies they're not based on reason as some people would like to claim they're based on revelation and both ideologies all ideologies of collectivism ultimately will argue as Lenin did he was Lenin you know you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet you have to kill a few tens of millions of people to get the utopia we all desired I mean Hitler said the same thing this is the standard what's good for the group which I know because I have commune with the spirits and if we have to kill some people if some people have to die in order to achieve it it doesn't matter because the individual does not matter only the group only the collective matters and this is true of you know human history going back a long time I mean I'll try the tribes that we all belong to a long long time ago how did they maintain control over us as individuals well they had a political leader and they had a spiritual leader and they conspired together to do what to tell you you knew nothing the spiritual leader was the one communing and the spirit has said that you have to follow the political leader and who are you to disagree and who are you to speak up tribalism and collectivism always rely on two things muscle and spirituality or mysticism in order to achieve their goals they need the negation of reason because reason is the tool by which individuals stand up and say I don't agree you don't speak for me I come to a different conclusion and it's why they eliminate free speech as one of the first things they do because they want to take away the power your power to stand up and say I don't agree I want to do something different is a collectivistic vision at the root of war is the negation of the individual negation of reason and their duration of the collective one kind or another you see that in Russia right now I mean if you listen to Putin and I encourage you to listen to Putin he's telling you exactly what he believes he longs for some great Russian Empire where the Russian people are all united around one spirit and they have to be led because who's gonna talk for the Russian people and those poor Russians in Ukraine they don't know what's good for them Putin knows what's good for them and therefore Putin speaks for the Russian people and is willing to destroy and kill as many of his old people and we think about all those young your age soldiers on the Russian side who know they don't have a clue why they're there because Putin told them to go there thousands of them are being killed right now did the aggressor so we somewhat celebrate that right because we'll maybe pro-ukrain but they're still young mostly innocent kids who are dying for cause that is not theirs they're dying for cause of their leader who claims to speak for them and who is not challenged by anybody within this collective all for some Russian you know mystical vision of what Russian greatness is supposed to be I don't know when Russia was great maybe somebody can enlighten me later Russia generally is being a pretty dark place pretty mystical place and a pretty backward place it never embraced the enlightenment it never embraced capitalism it never embraced freedom and as a consequence it never became particularly rich as a country maybe the Zars were rich but then their people were treated horribly so which union slaughtered tens of millions of people maybe in excess of a hundred million it's not clear well now probably never know Putin has said the greatest tragedy of the 20th century is not the Holocaust not World War one not World War two the greatest tragedy of the 20th century is what the dismantling of the Soviet Union really the greatest tragedy I have bigger tragedies every single day so what do you do when you face a tragedy of that scope well you try to rectify it you rectify it how when you don't care about individuals when you care about some spiritual direction you're heading in when you care about some ideal that is not real and that hasn't got nothing to do with the individual lives of the people your people won't you go to war every single war is driven by some collectivist ideology individual lists don't go to war individual lists seek what trade they're trying to make their lives better they're trying to better themselves they're trying to make their lives as individuals good they're trying to pursue their happiness you don't attain happiness through war you don't attain success as a human being through war that is through trade through study through self-reflection through lots of things lots of ways to make yourself a great human being violence is the negation of all of that and indeed if you look at history the periods dominated by collectivism dominated by collectivistic ideologies are periods dominated by war I mean maybe the bloodiest war in all of western history is the 30 year war where Catholics who believe they had the truth in the name of all Catholics and Protestants who believe they had the truth in the name of Protestants slaughtered each other left and right all over Europe and put on a per capita basis maybe the bloodiest war ever probably more bloody than World War One or World War Two World War One was a war of I don't know you guys tell me it's always bewildered me you know this war what you know that it was a war about empires wasn't a war to achieve anything for any individuals within the empire and yet millions of young kids your age died and I remember you know that all the stories and history about the Brits going to war ball enthusiastic we're gonna win this for what for Britain you gonna die for Britain what is that gonna do exactly and is it for Britain you're dying in the fields of France you're dying in the fields of Germany for what is that patriotism love of country for oneself which is what I consider patriotism because I love this country because it allows me to become the best human being I can become or was it just bravado a collectivistic notion of how wonderful Brits are and they could defeat anybody and let's go and have a have a go at it some Sunday afternoon but think how many Brits came back dead I mean you can you can see the grave sites I mean it's just horrific and why why did the Soviet Union invade Poland and people forget the World War two was started not only by Hitler right World War two was started on a single day with Hitler invading Poland from the West and Russian Soviet Union invading Poland from the from the East and start of World War two was both those entities why did they do it well Russia in order to impose the will of the proletarian and everybody because the proletarian is what matter and again no individual matters and Hitler in order to impose the will of the Aryan people to give them more space and to destroy its enemies whatever those were fantasies that Hitler had about what those who those enemies were and everything and anything in the way of achieving that cut those collectivistic goals were okay to do okay to destroy know the periods of peace well it's a piece there's never been complete peace on planet Earth unfortunately but when are the errors of relative peace well from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until World War one Europe was mostly peaceful why there was some small wars here and there but nothing on the scale of what was before and what was after why was it relatively peaceful yeah but what is it about the Industrial Revolution what is it about the process of the war going on during this period that led to peace of all things trade trade did this globalization which definitely benefited peace and we can talk about why globalization encourages peace but more fundamentally more essentially yeah individualism in the if you look at the 19th century what what is what's the enlightenment particularly the Scottish and British enlightenment what is it about what are what are the core principles really I think two core principles of the enlightenment what is the enlightenment about what does the enlightenment bring back I mean it follows the Renaissance and the Renaissance brings these back from Greece and then they're embedded and then they're philosophically defined during the enlightenment two ideas the idea that reason is efficacious the reason is not means a survivor and we learn that from more than anybody we learn there from Isaac Newton because he explains the world to us in ways that all of us can understand in ways that are based on reason mass science and the whole scientific revolution that explodes and suddenly we can understand the physical world but then there's the realization that people have I can think and and this is real right reasoning and thinking is an achievement and when you're constantly consumed by being told that you shouldn't think for yourself and and and thinking is is is no good and don't stand out and you know your survival is dependent you're working 16-hour days in the fields nobody has time to think and most people can't read so before the enlightenment and by the way truth the arbitrary of truth is not reality what's arbitrary truth a book written 2000 years ago that determines truth gala those put on the house arrest because he dares question right if the earth goes around the sun or the other way around because a book said that the sun goes around the earth and they thought that's the truth so suddenly suddenly people wake up to the idea that they can think for themselves that they have reason and they say if I have reason if I can think for myself why can't I choose my own profession you couldn't what did you do back then what was the was the profession you followed 300 years ago whatever your father did or farming or whatever if you were in a guild then whatever your father did if you were woman forget profession forget education forget at all right most people forget most kids didn't make it 810 life was pretty miserable but you couldn't choose your own profession you know there's a it's a funny story you know why Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo da Vinci you know who Leonardo da Vinci is right pretty pretty real genius why did he do whatever he wanted he was like an engineer and an artist and he just roamed around and he did these amazing things and he didn't follow his father anybody know what his father was father was a notary and why didn't Leonardo da Vinci become a notary why wasn't he forced into the guild why was he allowed to wonder and do whatever the hell he wanted which was unusual like nobody in those days could do whatever they wanted even Michelangelo when he's painting the Sistine Chapel he gets fed up he doesn't want to paint the Sistine Chapel he wants to go sculpt his passion the sculpture not painting so he runs away how what happens when he runs away anybody you know the Pope sends his troops they go catch him and they bring it back and he finishes the Sistine Chapel there's no freedom right so Leonardo how come he how could he gets this this freedom because he's a bastard i.e. a child out of wedlock and therefore he can't follow his father's footsteps he's not allowed to the guild won't accept him he's an illegitimate child that gives him freedom so in those days it was that was a plus one if you were illegitimate you could do whatever you wanted but that's the kind of society we lived in where everything was regimented because we didn't trust that you had the capacity to reason it's only the enlightenment that liberated us and then who did you marry who your parents told you to marry who are your political leaders whoever the aristocrats decided they were you had no say in it and some people woke up and said wait a minute if I can think for myself if I can understand the physical world like Newton explained it to me why can't I choose my spouse why can't I choose what career to have and why can't I choose my political leaders and that is the political revolution that it comes out of the enlightenment so the discovery of reason and a discovery that the individual matters individualism are the two ideas that come out of the enlightened and what they generate in the 19th century is an industrial evolution the answer of evolution just doesn't come out of no way it comes out of these ideas and it's not an accident happens here in Britain because this is the heart of the enlightenment it happens here in the United States and slowly filters into Western Europe and once people start respecting individuals once people start seeing the world as not a zero sum but as an additive suddenly wealth is being created trade makes everybody richer everybody richer why go to war we're too busy making money too busy pursuing values too busy pursuing a happiness too busy trading too busy making life good on earth right remember life sucked most of you are middle-aged right because you're gonna be dead in your 30s that's life expectancy back then 39 in the most developed places in the world 39 life expectancy most kids don't see the age of 10 common for women to die a childbirth and you basically work from sunrise to sunset no reading partially because very few people knew how to read partially because there's no light at night you go to sleep nothing else to do industrial evolution liberated us and people recognized that and they recognized they were too busy living to want to fight a war but these powers these reactionary powers of collectivism keep reasserting themselves Marx Hegel Schopenhauer all our great supposed Western philosophers were all collectivists rebelling against the enlightenment from Kant on every single one of primarily German philosophers in French French and you all bad things anyway they rebelled against the individualism they rebelled against the idea of reason and in rebelling against individual reason resurrected kept resurrecting the collectivism and you can see in the late 19th century early 20th century they're growing influence and the growing appeal of collectivism and World War one in a sense is inevitable once those ideas are common and World War two is suddenly inevitable once you have communism and then fascism as supposedly the counter force of communism when both are really the same thing and then after World War two you get again a dominance of a culture the American culture was fundamentally individualistic fundamentally grounded in reason fundamentally interested in wealth creation fundamentally interested in trade and you get a world order that is focused on trade you get slowly you get greater and greater and greater globalization and yes you still have wars here and there but you don't get the wars on the scale that you got in the past and we've relatively certainly in Europe over the last 80 years lived in a pretty peaceful place 75 because we mean too busy living too busy creating too busy building but they are always reactionary forces on the edges who wanted otherwise who want to bring back the collectivism and you're seeing it on this campus on every campus you're seeing the reactionary forces of collectivism within our own midst you see it in America which is split now along tribal lines collectivist of the right and collectivists of the left and while I'm mostly anti-left I am vehemently anti-collectivist rightists the right is just as bad as the left if they're collectivist the enemy is not right or left the enemy is collectivism the proper way to think about politics is that there's a spectrum collectivism over here evil bad really really nasty and individualism over here and there's a fork in collectivism there at least two different branches one that goes left towards communism and socialism one that goes right towards fascism and nationalism and a bunch of other isms which one is worse it doesn't matter when you're dead doesn't matter when you're a slave it doesn't matter when they put you down in your a pawn of the state doesn't matter if they did it in the name of a red flag or I don't know what the other flags color is but on the other side is individualism and individualism stands for the sanctity of each one of our lives where the state only job is to protect that sanctity to protect your life should be not is right to protect you to protect you from force and coercion and bad guys and war and fraud and pretty much that's it that's capitalism the system that protects individual rights the system that excludes from society the anti-reason what's anti-reason force so capitalism the political systems only job under capitalism is to eliminate force stealing cheating fraud murder pretty much it arbitrate disputes so we don't go dueling in the streets and other than that leave us alone because of the individuals capable of reason who else knows what's good for us other than ourselves only we as individuals know what's good for us what's right what values to pursue and how to pursue them so war is the most horrific activity men engage in but to eradicate war we have to have a positive ideal to offer in its stead and to understand where it comes from it comes from collectivism it comes from mysticism it comes from the negation of the two ideas of the enlightenment reason and individualism if we want to end war what we need is more capitalism what we need is more freedom what we need is more individuals pursuing their values what we need is more respect for the individual and his capacity to think and reason and choose his own values and follow his own path towards his own happiness the solution to war is capitalism is individualism and that particularly in a world where now your generation is seeing war maybe for the first time in real time in its destructive nature that is something worth rallying around as an anti-war agenda an agenda of individualism and freedom thank you thank you very much Francis Fukuyama and the end of history famously said you know at the end of the Cold War capitalism the new neoliberal world order will prevent wars and you know that was it was the end of history it was time for like a new kind of unipolarity of American capitalism but since you had clash of civilizations by Huntington arguing that no there will be a multi-polar war at world sorry and obviously yes we are living in this long peace but do you think since 2020 China on the verge of war with Taiwan obviously Ukraine you think that actually world capitalism is is failing and it needs some kind of revamping as as the world order starting to kind of collapse a bit all right there's a lot there so I think so let's start with Fukuyama Fukuyama is wrong not because he identifies that collectivism in the form of communism failed and therefore was destroyed and and that is you know I get a good thing but he's wrong because he associated with the West you know he thinks of the West as this liberal democracies what does that even mean he has no concept of individual rights he calls it capitalist but really do we live in capitalism I mean is the government separated from the economy there's a government not regulating control and tax almost every single activity we're engaged in we're as far we're far removed from capitalism so communism died and then what we were left with is what's called a mixed economy some capitalism some freedom and some controls quite a bit of controls and it varied you know the United States maybe had less controls and more freedom maybe Europe had maybe more controls and less freedom but it was these mixtures and basically what he said is the mixture one and the mixture is the end of history and that's bizarre because the whole point of a mixture is it's a mixture the two still elements still exist a mixture like that is unsustainable you can't have I associate controls in it all of that with collectivism and the freedom with individualism a mixture of collectivism individuals is not stable it will either drift towards more freedom or it would drift towards more collectivism but in the end the battle between collectivism and in individualism was just beginning he should have said the beginning of history because it just started and you're seeing with the decline of individualism in the West particularly in the US what you're seeing today is that collectivism that battle over collectivism is is heating up in the US I mean if the I expect more war in our future not less not because capitalism leads the war but because collectivism is on the rise everywhere I mean I know I don't want to offend you Brits but you know the whole point of Brexit the whole point of Brexit was to make you free it's made you less free that's the reality so I said when Brexit happened it's a great idea if they do the right thing with it right because it gives you control you did the wrong thing with it so you have all the regulations that Brussels imposed on you then now British regulations cool they're still the same regulations they're still the same limitations those same control it's just London instead of Brussels who cares and what you've given up so you have the same regulations you know maybe you could have escaped a little bit from the green agenda in Brussels good luck Johnson is gonna outgreen the greens he's gonna make sure that you're way more green than anything Brussels intended right and that of course notice with the one Ukraine that is now problematic and at the same time you lost what did you lose the free-flow of people I was in line in Madrid in line to get into Spain with all these Brits complaining and bemoaning because a couple of years ago they could go in the fast track lane with all the Europeans and I was stuck with me the American in this long one took an hour to go to Basel control in Madrid right and all the Brits were complaining about that I mean it's an hour it's not a big deal but it's a big deal one of the things I love most about Europe is I can get into a car in Lisbon drive to Madrid to Amsterdam to Paris to anywhere and never see a border control you don't appreciate that until it's taken away from you and you Brits have just taken it away and you'll start appreciating the freedom you used to have then trade the whole idea was that British I was going to become a free trade zone that I remember people arguing and saying why they were for Brexit we will now have trade policy now control so we'll lower tariffs with the rest of the world how's that going for you you raise tariffs with the rest of the world you raised it with Europe it's very difficult to send a package to Europe or get a package from Europe you don't have any more free trade with the US than you had before you can't even pass a free trade agreement with Canada Canada right you've done nothing you've made yourself much more protectionist so this what ultimately I'm convinced drove Brexit is nationalism not freedom it was never about freedom it was about nationalism and a little bit of xenophobia thrown in there there's certain people you'd rather exclude and and and it was hard to do when you were part of the European Union now your Brits you can exclude them freely so you had free movement of labor but my hotel is understaffed every hotel here is understaffed because they don't get those you know temporary workers from all over Europe easily you don't have free movement of labor which is hard you don't have free movement of goods and you're not gonna have free movement of capital so all the good things about the European Union and those and and you think oh well those there are only three things those are biggies those are like if you believe in freedom those are big if you believe in in the benefits of globalization so it's the rise of collectivism in the UK and and you're seeing that on both left and right and you're seeing and you're seeing that in different ways in both left and right because they collective is composed of different people but it's it's the same phenomena so you know it when I look at the world from that perspective it looks pretty bleak right you're looking rising right wing nationalism all over Europe and at the same time rising influence of the radical left at universities and you've and everybody's now bifurcated you the collectivist of the right collectivist of the left and where's sanity and where's rationality and where's capitalism nobody's a capitalist nobody's that's the one thing you can be sure of nobody actually believes in capitalism or freedom anymore like Donald Trump was the opposite of capitalism and boss Johnson is the opposite of capitalism is no freedom anymore that's the one thing that's not so whatever happens it's not capitalism it's not global capitalism now you asked about China for variety reasons I don't believe China will invade Taiwan anytime soon you can write that down and call me on it if I get it wrong I didn't think Putin would evade Ukraine so I admit that I get stuff wrong sometimes I think China's plan for Taiwan is longer term I think we're looking at 10-15 years they hope is that they can integrate it peacefully because they can convince the Taiwanese that they're better off under China I don't think that'll work for them so ultimately they'll invade but they're waiting partially because their military is still too weak well it's in the Taiwanese Taiwanese is a much stronger military than Ukraine much more sophisticated much more better technology so I think that's gonna wait but yes you're gonna see more wars in the world because of collectivism because we're moving away from capitalism it really is interesting that as the world moves away from capitalism and it's one of the least capitalist countries in Europe or the least capitalist country in Europe that did the invading Russia is the least capitalist country in Europe it's an authoritarian state that allows for only one industry basically natural resources there's no entrepreneurship there's no you know technology there's no business creation there's no trade there's they go they extract oil and they sell it they extract natural gas and they sell that's brute force kind of industries they depend on all their this is why they're losing and why the Russian economy is going to be devastated for anything sophisticated in the Russian economy they need Germany or they need the United States they can't produce anything sophisticated in in Russia and you can see their tanks are worthless the airplanes are worthless if they ever got into a fight with NATO they would be crushed in a day and you're seeing the consequence of authoritarianism and anti-capitalism on their ability to wage war so but it had to be you're not going to see a free capitalist country initiate war for some mystical arbitrary reason like the Russians did that was a long answer so this site I know you choose oh I have the responsibility you have the responsibility of choosing I get a talk you get a choose okay thank you very much for the talk it was very interesting but I want to kind of zone in on this idea of individualism because you used it quite a few times in the talk he did I didn't well yeah we'll make sure he knows yeah but individualism I think yes sure we're all individuals and we can all be part of groups and that might be defined as you know collectivism when it gets to that point of you know particular individuals having their views for everyone else and through that guise of collectivism but individualism I mean as a whole it's kind of like referred to quite a lot libertarians especially I'll admit as this sort of like it's freedom it's individual liberty and conceptually it's a bit Mickey Mouse I'm in reality I don't think it really gets to that point I mean we we see that societies are I mean they they are groups and they may be made of individuals but surely surely you can see though that in these societies they inevitably do result in this hierarchical form of like well governments in group settings it always delves and devolves into these hierarchies is it just that's the natural state of being maybe we reason towards groups maybe we reason towards collectivism maybe reason is not necessarily just you know individualism is right collectivism is wrong maybe this is just the natural state of being no no no no no the fact that something exists doesn't make it right doesn't make it just doesn't make it good indeed most of human existence we have lived in political and cultural what's a technical term I think it's shitholes really really bad places that human beings shouldn't live and you could say you could sit in the in the ninth century in in in Britain knowing and say this is life can't expect anything better than this and indeed everybody did and Hobbes right one of your guys said life was what short brutish and nasty brutish and short something like that right I don't remember the order and it was it was but we are better than that and that's what the last unit if you ask this question 300 years ago would have said you know maybe but we've just lived through this amazing period how much richer we today than we were 300 years ago on average in terms of dollars or pounds with 300 times richer but that's minimizing their fact because how do you measure the value of electricity not your electricity bill the value of just these gazillion times more than your electricity bill at problem with economics is we can only measure things that have dollar signs next to them we can measure actually actual utility what's the benefit of electricity a plumbing indoor plumbing toilets I'm pretty you know that's more than just a little bit that's more than 300 times better right having the ability to flush your toilet the iPhone I haven't even started describing all the wonders of an iPhone it's not 300 times better with thousands of time better in fact and what's interesting is that 300 years ago they might have been 500 million people on planet Earth the 8 billion of us and generally we're all living better this you know maybe five to ten percent of the people who are not we're still living the way that we live 300 years ago and that's a tragedy but they can do better and they will do better if they get the right ideas if you study history what you see is that ideas shape history not well it's human nature that's what we do we kill each other no we don't we don't have to we do but we don't have to and the question always is will we rise to the challenge will we exert the effort as I said thinking using reason requires effort will we use that effort and to do that we have to teach people that they can do it this is why I really hate these evolutionary psychologists who tell you you're just a product of your genes and nothing you do makes any difference but you're not and you're not a product of the environment either that's BS as well yeah you're a little bit of a product of both but what's the real factor that determines who you are you the choices you make the free will that you have whether you acknowledge it or not whether Sam Harris likes it or not we all have free will we are the writers of our own script now some of us choose not to engage the free will and then we're just products of society and then if collectivist rights to power we become collectivists and if it's collectivist of the right collectors the left it just we do what we are told but you have the ability to write the script yourself you have the ability to take control over your own life and you have the ability therefore to be an individual and what does individualism means it means that your life is valuable to you indeed it's the most valuable thing you have you don't have anything more valuable than your life and that you don't want because you have this mind you don't want to be told how to live you want to make those choices yourself now people can advise you people can recommend you can read great books about how people have lived and then you get to make the choice of how you live that's what individualism means and if you are like that then you don't want authorities and coercion and people telling you what's true and what's not what's right or what's wrong what to do to marry and who not to marry right we've overcome that and we're the we're the turning point right now Western civilization is it it has these liberties it's had these freedoms for a long time at least to some extent and we're giving them away we're throwing them in the rubbish and we're doing it in the name of what in the name of ancient reactionary ideologies I mean I love the fact that the I don't know that the modern left thinks they're inventing something new no they're just rehashing the same old you know failed policies and failed ideas that have destroyed human life everywhere they be tried in the world and the new right is doing exactly the same thing rehashing the same ideas that have destroyed you know there's nothing new here they just we're then you know we're trying to save civilization to the extent that we're fighting for individualism but what else is there to fight for so I'm not saying groups are not valuable of course groups are valuable families are valuable friendship is valuable business business is a group right we but but what's the nature of groups like that the nature of groups like that is the voluntary engagement except family you're stuck with the parents who had you that's the one involuntary thing right and hopefully they're good parents and and that's okay but if they're not good parents it sucks but so you want to maximize your voluntary interactions and to minimize the interactions that you you can't avoid like family right and even if your parents are lousy don't hang out with them I'd good parents and move 5,000 miles away I quite liked it I was quite surprised especially as a reactionary but my my question is rather on a similar line to Owines it's I agree with your general premise that civilization is built upon reason and rationality but I think there's something within human nature and the desire our desire within humanity for destruction for death I think Freud called it the Thanatos it's why you get alcoholics drinking themselves to death you get gamblers throwing everything away you get drug addicts we've got something within us that wants to do something unreasonable wants to go to war wants to do something wrong how would you fix that with your ideas of freedom and liberty yes I think it's a mistake to think of it as something within us look what makes us different than the animals is our reason but reason requires effort to engage if you don't engage in reason you become an animal animals are driven by their instincts we don't have instincts not the same way they do the guides have the action so we have emotions so when you kill your reason what you're left with is emotions emotions are not tools of cognition they're not a way to live life they're beautiful I mean I'm a passionate guy and what you live through you experience life through your emotions but they're not guides to action they're not guides of cognition and that needs to be taught that needs to be expected of people civilization doesn't just happen it needs to be embraced it needs to be people need to think about it people need to be engaged with it and you know so so there's a reason why the Industrial Revolution happens after in lane because people were engaged in these ideas and they embraced them and that's why we got to where we are today but it's easy to give up in the sense that we are flooded with ideologies that tell us and from postmodernism to I don't know every every every version of philosophy that exists out there every version of intellectuals that exists out there all at the end of the day anti-reason you know reality is whatever you want it to be or you create your own reality or there no there's no such thing as objective facts facts is just whatever you feel like they are today or tomorrow I mean we're flooded with this and our philosophy department I'm sure here at Exodus flooded with this and the sociology and psychology and you quoted Freud which is another one of these you know mistakes right it's not fact-based it's not science-based it's not reason-based and you know the world is driven not by our instincts not by something in bad inside of us that's that's the Christian in you guys right you've got original sin there's something bad inside of you no you've got emotions if you got reason and if you if you brought up to think then that's what you you know and if you respect thinking that that's what you do but ideas will influence we ideal either undercut or support and in this context all of the West is basically being a battle between two philosophers Aristotle and Plato and you can track the entire history between these two there's a there's a wonderful book called the cave in the light which I recommend that basically does that it tracks Western civilization you know and the influence of Aristotle and Plato but think what plate what does Plato represent what represents a cave you guys in a cave this is why the book is called the cave in the light you're in a cave you don't see reality you don't know what reality is you can't reason because you don't have facts you can access the facts who accesses the facts who can actually step outside of the cave and see the world as it is the philosopher king and therefore he has all the knowledge you're just an ignorant nobody and you have to be there's no way for you to escape that only certain people can be philosopher kings only certain people can be the fewer or the guy who represents the Polaterian only see purple people can be Putin and reflect the will of the Russian people right but that's the philosopher king and that's embedded in our Western civilization that's because it's in our genes but because that's what we mean taught forever I mean Christianity is a version of this the Pope communes with the spirits he knows you just have to follow and do what you told you don't think for yourself nobody wants you nobody expects you nobody demands it of you so religion is platonic not accidentally it doesn't associate reason with individuals it associates ignorance with individuals and only some individuals to communicate with the spirits get to decide everything so we live collectivism is a philosophy of philosopher kings and then Aristotle is the opposite Aristotle is about logic and about reason and about the individual having possessing logic and reason and therefore making their own decisions and he rejects the world of forms that mystical place in which we can commune with to get our knowledge and he says no it's all here reality that's what matters I'm an Aristotle site but it's a battle it's not human nature yeah no it's a battle it's a battle each site each one of us if we have the knowledge and if we don't have the knowledge and it's a battle between people's respect for their own mind and their dismissal of it and the and the appeal of their emotions and you know if we know as intellectuals as people who go to college you know I think part of what our responsibility is if we want a good world is to exhibit the behavior of individuals following reason and model that so that you know people see that it's good and follow it wow all right I better make my answer shorter otherwise I'll miss my train how can someone with a purely individual individualistic framework handle the allocation of essential yet arbitrary placed and finite resources what resources cold iron oil I mean cold iron oil are not resources so 200 years ago if you happen on land in which there was oil seeping from the ground you basically you know would depressed because the oil just destroyed the value of your property it was it was horrible you can grow anything on the property now all this gucky black stuff was horrible what turns the black stuff into a resource reason science technology people's ability to think so their resources all over the world but what matters is not the stuff because anything could become a resource sand who thought sand would become what glass okay that's cool cooler than glass what's in here yeah it's sand there's sand in here silicon that's a resource and everybody has it but to turn sand into silicone and to put it into a chip and to make a computer from it wow that's stunning and yet everybody has access to it because everybody has sand so the real resource the only resource that matters is the human mind it's our ability to reason and the fact is the civilization that had quote resources often we're not rich for very long Spain finding all that gold in South America who got rich offer that gold you guys did the Brits did it all went to UK and to Amsterdam and place like that why because you produce stuff they just mine stuff why isn't Russia's fabulously rich it has immense resources because resources don't really matter what matters is the freedom to use your mind to produce and create and build and trade stuff but so the whole idea of natural resources is important my favorite place used to be up until about a year ago two years ago but one of my favorite places on planet Earth was Hong Kong just an amazing stunning beautiful place with amazing people filled with energy and production and success here's a little place there used to be a fishing village that's seven and a half million people live on today more skyscrapers in Manhattan GDP per capita greater than the United States done in 70 years when it took the United States 250 years how many natural resources they have none zero zilch what did they have a British governor who by accident not listening to the government which were socialist by accident imposed freedom on the Hong Kong basically said we're not going to do anything we'll protect your property rights to the extent you know we'll protect your contracts you can come and go as you see you can say whatever the hell you want you can't vote but other than that we'll protect every other freedom except voting and guess what people from all over Asia came there because not because they wanted welfare not because they wanted free health care not because they want anything for free because they wanted freedom they wanted to be able to do their thing they want to use the one natural resources they had and and and many of them achieved great wealth many of them achieved middle-classhood and they keep coming seven and a half million they keep coming at this tiny little place so being there is now hung near it's finished because China's taking it over it's imprisoned all those freedom fighters it's hollowed out a lot of people have left luckily you guys in the UK offered them all visas to come here good for you I wish the United States had half the balls that you did in this case Canada offered them so they're all gone right the talent is is leaving if it hasn't left already it's leaving because talent doesn't tolerate authoritarianism it doesn't tolerate authority it doesn't tolerate people telling them what they can and cannot do you want to be free if you if you have the ability right even if you don't have ability you want to be free this site thank you for the talk and all the work you do with the iron rand institute this is more of a practical question we saw classical liberalism and the ideas the Enlightenment have so slowly degrading in from ideas of negative freedom into positive freedom I think this could be summed up quite well in the quote from Milton Friedman where Sir paraphrase he says something like libertarianism doesn't have a PR department but governments do all right doesn't have a what a PR a PR yes public relations and so how I asked this question of an MP of ours so Christopher Chope how do you make freedom sexy and stop it from declining into a more positive idea of so-called freedom that is actually just collectivism under a different banner my guess is he gave your lame answer because what do politicians know freedom depends on philosophical premises freedom requires that at least those of us who advocate for it who are going to go out and market it and make it sexy have a deep understanding of the philosophical foundations of freedom and I know libertarians don't like hearing this certainly conservatives don't you need iron rand you need a philosophy you need a metaphysics and epistemology and an ethics you need grounding you come across as we love freedom we want to take our drugs that's what you come I mean that's what libertarians come across particularly in the U.S. right and even if you don't want to take your drugs right I mean it's that's what it comes across as you need to have an intellectual philosophical argument the attack on you is not random it is from Plato it's not a second-rate guy it's like a first-rate guy the attack against individualism and capitalism and freedom is from Plato it's from Emmanuel Kant it's from Hegel and Schopenhauer and Marx and Nietzsche even and these are big shots and you have maybe Locke Hume who's a skeptic so you know it's freedom and skepticism I'm not sure go together Anna Smith who basically said yeah we all practice our self-interest but we don't really like self-interest but so there but there's an invisible hand that makes the self-interest all be good again because society's better off see falls onto collectivism in the end you don't have intellectuals you don't have you know the firepower to win and you got to have iron rand iron rand is the only one you have and yet the sad tragedy of libertarianism and people who advocate for free markets is that they've rejected iron rand I mean imagine a world in which Hayek actually respects iron rand doesn't have to agree with them but just respects and engages in in a dialogue and promotes who is a philosopher right and imagine a world in which von Mises that I think the greatest economist who ever lived says look I'm a great economist but I'm not a philosopher ran you for the philosophy go to who no he has to have proxology and all this nonsense and try to and try to be a philosopher instead of sticking to what he's really really good at which is economics same with Hayek by the way great economist just middle of the road social thinker he's just not that exceptional when it comes to social thinking he's fairly conventional um so to make it second and and think about within the libertarian world the free market world who makes it sexy who brings people to these ideas more than anybody else who's more sexy than Dagny Taggart or Howard Warke if you're you know that you know so you need art you need aesthetics you need philosophy and we definitely need aesthetics and art you need to be able to convey their ideas in a variety of different formats but you need for that a philosophical grounding you know the problem how can libertarians defend good art when they're the the two they're subjectivists in too many areas in their life including art well anything goes no some art is good some art is lousy and some stuff that we consider art is not even art at all right but you need standards and where you're going to get those standards not from your emotions from your reason you need a philosophy so what we need is to embrace a real philosophy and I think Ayn Rand is it keep promising short answers I think you said at the beginning that nobody wins in war um there's a commonly held idea that's um banks and you know benefit from war um I was wondering do you agree with this and if so could you attribute at least partially war to banks as a large lobbying power no I mean suddenly um it might be true that in the distant past you know bankers lent money to kings so they could engage in war and then those loans were paid off but it wasn't like other loans were not paid off you know they lent it to a king and the king did what he wanted with the money and indeed sometimes I think this is true of york um sometimes the king decides after the war instead of to return the debt to kill the people he borrowed the money from not very helpful to the to the to the money lenders this was uh the case of killing the jews I think in york at some point was a king or a or a prince or whatever an aristocrat who decided not to pay off his debt to the jewish money lenders um so I you know the Rothschild's benefit is this mythology that the Rothschild's benefit what they benefited from was better information than everybody else and they could play the market based on war what was it they knew more who won one of the battles with napoleon before everybody else so they they they played it in the market but no how do banks win banks lend you money and then if you can't pay it back because you lost the war they lose and if you pay it back because you won the war then they just got what was theirs anyway but what's the upside where's this huge upside that they get I don't know I I don't get it and suddenly I don't know anytime in history where bankers were the ones who promoted war promoted war I mean with the bankers in Russia pushing for this now that they've been sanctioned by by the whole world I doubt that the bankers in Russia pushed for this I'm trying to think of American bankers and and wars that Americans have been engaged in I don't think JP Morgan has benefited from the one Afghanistan or the one Iraq or any of these wars I mean suddenly if you build weapons maybe if you're going to blame any industry the weapon building industry is probably the the one that is most eager to go to work as they want to see their it's a best marketing right so right now if if you make anti tank missiles in the west you're looking pretty good versus if you make t-72s yeah thank you so much for an accent talk so you talked about how sort of capitalism and individualism sort of go hand in hand against the and you know obviously there's the threat of collectivism but surely there are some cases when capitalism can individualism and particularly with regards to censorship with big tech that we're seeing increasingly at the moment so how do you suggest that we can kind of create a way to safeguard against these kinds of capitalistic threats to individualism so I don't think you can blame any phenomena I don't know if this is mine or not let me take this one this is mine I don't think you can blame any phenomena that exists today among big tech or by anybody in capitalism because we don't live in a capitalist world so yes the big tech is is restricting what you can say in ways that we find offensive and absolutely we should all find offensive we do find it offensive but do we know whether a whether this is their strings being pulled in the background where government is is telling them I mean you can see this with Facebook right the government brings zuckerberg in and says behavior will regulate you no what does that mean what does behave mean it means do what they tell you otherwise they'll regulate you which is false so are they acting in in capitalist freedom or are they trying to figure out what the government wants them to do and and and trying to do that is elements of that also to what extent is it easy to compete with them um well there's already competition to twitter and and facebook it's not very successful but that might be because of the culture maybe we want to be limited in what we can say right culture seems to think that in capitalism they'd be more competition but more importantly to get to the point where we have capitalism the culture has to change dramatically we are going to be different we're going to be more individualistic so are the people running the successful companies and it's not a problem it would never become a problem if it became a problem then as individuals will all say you know what twitter's behaving really really badly we're going to stop using it we're not individualist enough today to stop using twitter I mean how hard is it to just say I don't like this company what they're doing or I don't like what China is doing so I'm not going to buy Chinese goods so I'm not going to that's what individualists do they make moral decisions for themselves they don't go with the crowd or do what the government tells them to do we have time for two more quick questions so Dr. Brook can actually get his train on time thank you thank you excellent speech thank you for rating my city so highly now I suppose it's a bit of a summary of other questions we've asked you've said an exhibition of trade of of individualism and of maybe art and philosophy is way out to this whole thing but allow me to quote China again as an example back in the 80s when we signed the sign of British joint decoration and during the open up policy period there was sort of a dream that we were thinking China would turn into Hong Kong instead of Hong Kong turning into China but obviously that didn't happen now it says push here should I push to see what happens you can you can stop the recording and oh okay you know we can say push here follow orders but uh no uh but uh yeah but um as I'm going to say uh yeah but now as we see as a result of that handover and a lot of other things so I'm going to shorten it because because we're short on time so the question is China no how does China fit into my talk not really as in okay and in life's sense it's just an example uh now China, Russian oil, garks, a lot of people uh they basically hold capital and they they hold every every single meaningful production they hold media they hold the China of TikTok they they they they they own a lot TikTok is not base by the way yeah uh not not the little dark edits uh uh no uh so they hold everything they allow capitalism to flourish for until it reaches our goal look at Alibaba it's great business Jack Ma used to be the typical example of how Chinese could become rich after yeah I get it question but but yeah but the question is now they've dominated all of those ways that we can so fight back how how how can we do it um I don't think they're as dominant as you think they are China's completely dependent on the west um it's dependent on the west for technology it is not almost no real innovations have come out of China they're very good at copying and making stuff better they're very poor at innovating um almost no innovations come for China because authoritarian regimes don't innovate um China has all its money in U.S. bonds I wouldn't put my money in U.S. bonds but they have all their money in U.S. with trillions of dollars of U.S. bonds if they do something like China like Russia did in the United States froze their accounts stopped paying them back on the debt that they supplied China's in big trouble so one of the beauties of trade is you make it makes you mutually dependent right we in the west depend on their stuff there they depend on our investments on our cash um you know the world would survive the loss of tiktok it would be tough for some people but we could survive what's that yeah and and tiktok it's probably the most innovative company to come out of China in in recent years right so I don't think China's anywhere near as big of a threat as people think it is it's certainly a threat to Hong Kong because partially because the world didn't care partially because the Brits basically signed it away anyway and partially because they took advantage of a weak American administration everybody thinks Trump was tough on China he was pathetic on China and as a consequence they snuck in during Trump's administration it took it over and it disappeared but you know they hesitated for a long time they let those demonstrations go for a long time they took advantage of covid this you know to everybody who's distracted and they did it um and look if the west had been capitalist if the west has understood the value of individualism maybe we wouldn't have been so eager to hand everything over in terms of trade maybe we would have been as I said before maybe we would have been thought again about should we trade with China in what and as China becomes more authoritarianism since Xi came about how do we adjust our policies given that Xi is doing this as individuals not as states tariffs is like the worst solution to a problem right but we as individuals can have an impact and if enough of us individuals who care about freedom we can have a big impact um and why didn't China become free because I believe so China was on this path towards greater economic freedom and ultimately I think greater political freedom and it reversed course on the Xi since 2015 I think China's reversed course because the west is so weak because they look at us and they say we don't want to be like that these weaklings and they and really the shift happened in China in 2008 during the financial crisis they saw our politicians panic they saw our markets crash they saw that we all blamed it on capitalism and I don't have time to tell you why it wasn't capitalism but they blamed it on capitalism and said we can't afford to be them we don't want to be them and the shift started in 2008 away from markets away from freedom and towards more of a nationalist collectivist authoritarian mode maybe that was the plan all along but that wasn't the trend line pre 2014 2015 so I think it's our weakness I think most problems in the world are our weakness I think Ronald Reagan viewed America as a shining city on a hill I think it never lived up to that it could have been that but it never lived up to that it didn't live up to that after 9 11 it didn't live up to that in 2008 it's not living up to that today certainly Donald Trump didn't live up to that lived you know way below that so there's no model there's nothing for them to strive towards to emulate so I think it's our weakness has driven China in that direction and the only thing that can bring it back is our strength and the more China becomes authoritarian the weaker it will become authoritarianism leads to the destruction of innovation and progress and economic growth economic growth depends on freedom our philosophy our ideas of freedom are right they work the bad guys don't work they lose long term they might take us with them but they lose right ladies and gentlemen fortunately we are going to have to call it there can we give a big round of applause to dr. Aaron brook please


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