We're just going to get started. Some people might go on, but we should get underway. Thank you all very much for coming. We've got a lot to offer on a Monday afternoon. So I'm glad that you all came here. I'm more committed to anyone who's not made me before. It's my pleasure to introduce you all today on the topic of European organisation, why Scotland should not be ended. For those who don't know you're on, it's the host of the YAR group show on YouTube. Chairman of the YAR Alliance too. Thank you. Thanks Morgan. Those of you here, last time I was here we did something on art, so quite different this time. It's always fun. So I understand Scotland wants a referendum on independence next year because I guess pretty confident they're going to win their referendum and the Brits are saying no. The Conservative government in London are saying no and this is going to Supreme Court to try to figure this out and whether this can be vetoed. And the question I think that bewilders my mind and I don't know about what your views is, is why? Why does Scotland want to be independent? What value does independence provide Scots? For that matter what does it really mean to be Scottish other than the fact that you happen to be born in this part of the world? So what is the value of kind of separation? What is the value of creating another country? Is there something important Scotland wants to do that it cannot do with the UK? I mean maybe but is it a value, value for whom? By what standard? How do we measure these things? What is the purpose of a nation state? Why should we have nation states? How many should they be? These are all great questions and to really think about how many should they be? Should they be Scotland versus Britain? I've spoken I think in most of the Balkan states but it always entertains me when I'm in Slovakia. How much did they benefit from not being part of the Czech?  Nobody can really give you a coherent answer to that other than it makes them feel good. But the real funny one is if you go to Montenegro which I don't know is about 400,000 people or something like that but they're proudly proud of the fact that they're not part of I don't know, fill in the blanks Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia and Northern Macedonia, I don't data call it Macedonia because Macedonia belongs to the Greeks and they won't let the Macedonians call themselves Macedonias it's Northern Macedonia. All of that used to be once called Yugoslavia and that conflict is why we have the term Balkanization which is a term coined a long, long time ago because of the many conflicts among the Balkan countries each one to define its own little country and my tribe should be ruled by my tribe and it's shocking to me that this kind of mentality this tribal mentality, this tribalism that inflicts the Balkans and inflicts much many parts in Europe. Here in the British Isles you see a very similar attitude this is to a large extent one of the centers of the enlightenment one of the centers of the idea of some universal values the idea of human beings as sharing a specific nature and requiring a government not to splinter them but in a sense to unite them and here to see it here happen this separation, Balkanization this tribalism is indeed shocking to anybody thinking so what is, I mean to understand all this we have to really think about what is the purpose of a state why do we have a nation? what is it that we're seeking by establishing a nation? and what's the purpose of it? what value do we get by creating a government? what is the role the government plays for all of us as human beings? and here I think it's important to recognize that as individual, independent human beings the reason we want a government is not so it can run our lives so not so it can infringe on our liberties but what we want a government for to protect our ability to live our lives as we see fit as individuals it's to protect our liberty, to protect our freedom I think the best example of articulating this is America is the United States of America and the reason for that is because the US was kind of conceived a new it was a new country nothing existed there I mean it rebelled against obviously it rebelled against the UK and it created this new political system a new political system that was a result of the thinking that was happening here in Edinburgh maybe some in London and some in Paris but it was this thinking of the Enlightenment and they created a new state and they started from asking the question what is the purpose of government and a state you're not going to let me finish? Native Americans were already there you can't say there was no American I didn't say there was nobody there I said there was no nation there there was no state there there was no government there there was no country there Native Americans were there but there was no government there was no nation there were tribes all over America but there was no political entity what they did is start a political entity from scratch and therefore they asked the fundamental question of what do we need a political entity for what is it supposed to do and then formulation I think holds to this day I don't think we live up to that formulation but I think it's the right formulation and that is the job of government is to protect it's to protect our rights as individuals that the unit of measure the unit of importance is not the state not the nation not the group not the collective but the individual that all individuals in their terminology are created equal and the job of the state is to protect the liberty of those individuals the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness the right to life meaning the right for you as an individual to make decisions about your life and to act in pursuit of your life free of coercion, free of force, free of people telling you what you can and cannot do now granted they didn't apply it right and they were far from applying it consistently and in that sense they were the country was founded in kind of an original sense which is slavery but it's not just slavery women didn't have equal rights at the founding but the idea that that is the purpose of a political entity that is the purpose of politics that is the purpose of having a government is to protect us is in my view the right idea the purpose of politics is not to control us but to liberate us to allow us to live free of force human flourishing requires the ability of individuals to use their reason their faculty of reason in pursuit of their values in pursuit of their life in pursuit of their own happiness and in order to do that individuals need to be free of violence free of force, free of coercion free of crooks, criminals, gangsters terrorists, invaders the job of a government is to keep us free is to eliminate those elements from our life so that we can make the choices that are necessary in pursuit of our own happiness and our own success the fundamental unit for human beings is the individual it's not the clan it's not the tribe clans and tribes are just composed of individuals and as an individual each one of us has our own mind nobody can think for you nobody can make choices for you it's your responsibility you have our mind to make choices for yourself so the whole way in which America was set up at least was to protect that ability of individuals to think for themselves and act for themselves in their own interests and in that context it shouldn't matter who you are where you come from what the color of your skin is what gender or sex you have all the matters is your ability to live your life free as an individual and the government is there to protect that ability and in that context once the issue of slavery was resolved in a massive violent war what brought unity to at least the United States was this idea of that is the role of government government is leaving us free we're not collectives, we're not groups but anybody can come into this country anybody can come to this country anybody can become part of this country as long as they live by these basic principles this idea of now we've got we've got secession in the United States we've got talk of secession in the United States we've got talk of in a sense balkanization all over Europe we've got Catalonia you've got Italy threatening to split into two you've got Russia invading Ukraine in the name of the Russian people in the name of expanding the Russian ethnic group I guess protecting Russians in Ukraine the whole idea of creating multiple nation states to protect little tribes is an idea that comes fundamentally from the rejection of the individual as the unit of measurement basically what we're now replacing it with is some kind of describe based on ethnicity based on race based on geographic location what is the difference between Scots and English? a different history I'm sure you'd like to revive your old language why English is perfectly good language what reason would you have to revive an old dead language if language is there as a means of communication we need to express ourselves English serves wonderful purpose there's no reason to bring back ancient languages for what because of the sound they make isn't it about communicating and thinking isn't that what language is for but once the state starts moving away from the principle of protecting the individual once the state starts divvying up goodies once the state starts regulating, controlling and redistributing wealth once the state starts making decisions about how to control your life in the economic realm how to control your life in the social realm how to decide which speech is okay and which speech is not now there are goodies to be had now there's root to be divided maybe your little clan is not getting enough of the goodies or one perceives being produced people start talking about I'm not getting enough of the pie of the national pie is there a national pie the perspective is that there's a national pie and the scots are not getting enough of it the Welsh are not getting enough of it nor the England is not getting enough of it the southern England is not getting enough of it but where does this national pie come from the suppose of the national pie taxes who said taxes taxes, well, anything generating revenue coming to the country those each things contribute to a country's wealth so taxes contribute to a country's wealth as well, I mean you get taxes for on taxes just a way of redistributing the country's wealth, the wealth already exists and you redistributing it you're getting more thought so the pie from your perspective the pie is what the government has or the pie is what is total in society total in society then I would say taxes are just taking a piece of the pie and moving it to a different destination but it's the same piece, right the money's either there or it's not the wealth is either there but where does this pie come from I mean this is a completely collectivistic view of wealth where does this pie come from is this such a thing as a national pie how do we get so tourism, how do we get tourism how does tourism happen people come they spend money here in particular businesses particular businesses make money some businesses are good and they make a lot of money some businesses might provide a lousy service, make a little bit of money some business is going out of business some businesses thrive and expand but tourism is just not some amorphous abstract thing out there that people just respond to tourism is something that needs to be produced a service that actually has to be created created by home by private individuals, by private companies and private individuals manufacturing wealth where does that come from it comes from entrepreneurs building businesses, creating factories employing people, creating wealth or not, some of them go under and lose wealth but the national pie doesn't exist there is no national pie there is your pie and your pie and my pie and somebody else's pie people create their own wealth we're not economists talk about GDP but where is GDP those domestic product proxy to how much wealth is created every year but where is this GDP anybody point to the GDP there's no GDP it's just a mathematical way to aggregate what you produce this year, what you produce this year what I produce this year there's no aggregate the aggregate is just a piece of paper where people sign up numbers one of the things that happens though is once we start conceiving of your wealth and your wealth and my wealth as belonging to the state or belonging to the nation or belonging to some collectivistic enterprise well now I'm a little worried why is my piece so small maybe because I haven't worked hard or maybe because I'm not that productive or maybe a thousand reasons why maybe because I chose to be university professor and that will never grow a very big pie that's just reality, right university professors don't create a lot of wealth but once we start viewing everything as this collective big pie pieces of it and people start complaining about other people's piece and wanting their piece to be bigger at other people's expenses and they want to redistribute this pie so people in South England seem like they're riches and people in Scotland and wait a minute they're getting a bigger piece of the pie than we're getting up here that can't be right maybe we should get our hands on our own pie so we get to decide who gets the pieces of it and there's always somebody who's motivated to tell you the story that if we get our own pie it'll be bigger somehow let me tell you it's almost certainly going to be smaller just be economics 101 it'll be a smaller pie but there are people who gets to make the decisions about how the pie is allocated who gets to decide who gets what piece yeah politicians, people in power and it's immense power I get to take your pie and decide how much to give back to you and how much to give to other people that gives me a lot of power over your life a lot of power over their lives a lot of power over lots of people's lives and the problem right now if you're in Scotland and you're a politician in Scotland is you don't have that much power a lot of the power is in 10 Downing Street in the House of Parliament in London power would be great I want to be able to make more decisions about your life and about how to run you I want to provide more favors to some people at other people's expenses and that's how I get my my kicks that's politicians it's about power so once government starts grabbing people's pieces of pie well wait a minute I want to be in government I want to be able to do this I want to be able to have control and power over other people's lives and it doesn't just apply to money it applies to all the kind of favors that government does today that exerts over our lives I understand you have here in Scotland a much more robust anti-hate speech laws than the Brits do yeah why let them control people once you accept the idea that we should be able to control speech well I want to be able to control speech right here I want to be able to control I want to be able to control the speech I want to be able to pass the laws to control speech I don't want to leave it up to them so in every aspect of control the more politicians they are the more power these politicians have so all Scottish independence is really geared towards is providing a group of Scottish politicians with power over you that now resides somewhere else with a number of people in power and in control and the way to sell it to you is the economy is going to be better we're going to make more local decisions on whose pie should be given to whom you're going to have a greater say in government right I mean where has this worked exactly like that and the more you divide the more you you know the less opportunities the few opportunities you actually have to trade and produce and create and build and make and produce that pie and that wealth so no Scottish independence is just a form of a power grab by a group of your politicians to try to gain control over your life and your wealth there's no value there there's nothing to be gained there's no profit in it for us there's no more liberty in Scottish independence than there is where you are today probably less given the what seems like social inclinations of whoever comes to power in Scotland or who knows how it actually pans out and who knows what's going to happen in London you might see quite a left shift to the left down in London in the years to come but it's basically about power it's basically about control and it capitalizes on the fact that what we've been doing for the last hundred years I think particularly over the last few decades is watering down people's ability or undermining people's ability to think for themselves what we're undermining is the idea of reason the idea of individualism the idea that people can take care of themselves the idea that people can manage their own lives and I see this in the US where our educational system undermines the very concept of independent thinking undermines the very concept of people thinking rationally for themselves we elevate emotion we elevate whim undermined reason and what we what we then create are people who don't know and therefore don't know what values to pursue don't know what's how to live and where people are fearful and where people are uncertain and where people don't have the tools to think for themselves they look for the closest group that looks like them to help them tell to help them decide what to do how to act tribalism is on the rise everywhere in the world racism is on the rise I think everywhere in the world from both left and right people associate themselves with people of the same color skin people associate themselves with the same kind of heritage people associate themselves with a group and abandoning their own minds and abandoning their own individuality that is all on the rise as the idea of the efficacy of reason is in decline as the idea of the individual's capacity to take care of himself to live his life is in decline and what politicians are capitalizing on you can see this again in the US even more extremely I think in some ways than you can hear is on that tribalism to create political power and to elevate themselves but nobody out there nobody on the political spectrum today anyway is talking about those original values that I think justify the creation of the nation state the idea of the individual the idea of the efficacy of the individual mind, the efficacy of the individual's reason the ability of the individual to take care of themselves the ability of the individual to live their life to produce and to build and the role of the state as protector what we have today is this mixed economy where the role of the state has been to redistribute and when you're redistributing other people's wealth that is very very lucrative and very appealing to people who want power to grab a piece of that so what we have today all over the world are states and people are constantly trying to grab a bigger and bigger piece of this pie and what we're seeing is more and more and more conflict between people rather than harmony indeed I think individualism leads to harmony this group politics this collective perspective on wealth and on power is what leads the disunity and fighting and the fragmentation is just one aspect of it we live in a society that is fragmenting all over the world and of course we're living in an era where nationalism is on the rise and nationalism is an ideology is an ideology of placing the group however you want to define that group above the individual as a sacrificial animal to the group the group is the fundamental unit the fundamental political unit and it's shocking that nationalism is on the rise given the history, the bloody history of nationalism in the 20th century and before that but you're seeing it all over the place and again the prime example of this I think right now is obviously in Russia and Ukraine where a war that is primarily motivated or at least primarily what would you call it, talked up on nationalistic grounds it might be about resources but the way to motivate people is not oh we're going to get the natural gas those Ukrainians have the way to motivate people is to tell them about the greatness of the Russian people and the greatness of Russia and the need to unify the Russian people and to build the Russian empire and the importance of Russia historically all mystical gibberish but again in a society where reason is out, evidence is out logic is out where emotions are primary this all makes sense and people are willing to fight at least some people are willing to fight for these kind of causes maybe the best thing happening right now in the Russian Ukraine thing is the resistance from within Russia that is the people who are leaving the people who are resisting the people who are objecting to what is going on the irrational nakedness of this nationalistic tendency but I think that's too way too optimistic to believe that nationalism is on the rise again in the US obviously here we just saw populist nationalists winning in Italy populist nationalists winning in Sweden you know and you're going to see this sweep throughout Europe as we become less individualistic as we denigrate the capacity of human beings to think rationally as we became make the individual dependent on the group more and more the group becomes more and more important and then it's just a question of which group you want to associate with and that's what we're seeing at least throughout the western world what's the cure the cure is a return to individualism the cure is a return to a proper role of government the cure is never to think there's such a thing as a national pie there's only individual wealth your wealth is not mine my wealth is not yours the cure is individualism and the wall of the state in protecting our rights the cure is capitalism a system that is based on individualism and recognizes the fact that wealth is created by individuals capitalism is a system that does not believe the state should control our speech not believe the state should control any aspect of our life except when violence is threatened against us the state has no wall otherwise in our lives but should leave us alone free and the funny thing is that kind of atomized what people view as atomized that kind of leave you alone individualism is what brings about the most peaceful eras in human history eras where capitalism thrived whether it's from the Napoleonic wars until 1914 or whether it's in the post-World War II era when trade individual freedom individual liberty was relatively respected not as much as I would like but relatively respected when individualism freedom capitalism reigned we actually lived for the most part in peace I fear that the direction the world is heading today the war in Ukraine is not going to be the last war we see it's not going to be the last violent conflict we see as nationalism, collectivism and tribalism replace the ideas of individualism and capitalism thank you I'll take questions sure about anything just to say a great speech I have a quick question when you talk about colonization our nations have always been formed do you not think sorry that nations have always been formed on the base of groups of people who identify with each other and how that's sort of something that I think we can't necessarily get around the stock even if sometimes it must be wrong and it is wrong would you say not in the sense of Scottish independence is perhaps the idea of Scottish nationalism maybe rooted in the idea that Scotland was distinct from the rest of the UK when in fact really the idea was maybe it should be that we're British together and our differences in terms of our individual nations aren't enough communities of distinct types perhaps it's the rise of that individual tribe but this is the challenge right so I don't know the chance that the exchequer was just forced to resign right but is he where's Causifam is he British in the ethnic sense in the sense in which we differentiate between Scots and Brits and Welsh I mean where's he from I don't even know where he's from but the colour of his skin suggests that he's not British in the genetic sense of the word in the ethnic sense of the word so I don't know what it means that nations are formed through the fact that people are similar and even if they are formed that way immigration shatters that and forces us to rethink what a nation is and what a nation should be suddenly it's true that in history nations are formed out of tribes out of the modules of several tribes so a state is usually a specific geographic area that is and the state is formed a farmer collection of tribes but in an era of immigration and I think immigration should be and is a right that we all have in an era of immigration what does it even mean to say that a nation is a collection of tribes what about all these immigrants coming in for all kinds of new tribes so what we need to get away from is an ethnic view of the nation's what we need to get away from is this idea that an ethnic state needs to be a unity of people who look alike or people who come from the same genetic background I mean that is an old form of collectivism we call it really racism that we need to abandon but it is racism we might today use the word ethnic in order to round out the edges not to make it too harsh but it's just racism right no to properly be a scottist to be somebody who is living in scotland and as embraced I guess the life living in scotland it would be a shame if you required them to have that awful accent that you have and again I think America is a good example of this to be an American is not to be of a particular ethnic group I mean that would be absurd in America to be in America is to live in America and it would be nice if we had unity and the unity should be ideally around a particular political philosophy it shouldn't be around a dogma that people have preached but the idea it used to be in America that unity was around this idea that we are free that America is the land of the free people defined it a little differently it wasn't clear exactly what you meant but generally there was the sense that to be an American you believed in freedom individual liberty and freedom don't tread on me that's gone that's shattered and now what has happened with that chattering is you've got this disunity you've got these groups fighting each other because freedom is out what does it mean to be British I don't know but that's something that needs to be defined is there something that can unify the British people it would be nice if it was liberty if it was again freedom but to now create a separate Scotland what does that add because the Scots have slightly different genes again but you're getting into racism which is a very very primitive form of tribalism which is a primitive form of collectivism which is all we should be in the 21st century to find these kind of distinctions at the start, oh thank you very much for the talk at the start you said Scotland wants independence but of course the last time we were asked in 2014 most Scots didn't want independence, most Scots don't even people living here so people can hear from my accent I'm British, I'm English by birth I was living in Scotland in 2014 and what's interesting to me is that referendum and the conversations that went on around it which I actually quite enjoyed I think a lot of people were far more engaged in politics and I've seen for a very long time I was teaching here in Edinburgh at the time and I would say that year the students that I was working with were far more politically engaged than I've ever seen before so I think that's a good thing but the conversations that were going on around that time that was the referendum of the generation eight years isn't really a generation but I suppose what I'm wondering is why those conversations which were productive, lots of big issues were being talked about and I think it was important that they were talked about why was it that it wasn't solved when so many people did engage and did think well and did have some of those issues out what stopped it being final I think two things one is the success of the SPN you've got a SNP, sorry you've got a political party dedicated to one issue which is Scottish independence sweeping Scotland winning pretty much every seat and basically what that gave them they felt is a mandate to revisit the issue so they interpreted as you guys have changed your mind because it's not that different from Labour or that different from the Conservatives you have all those choices and yet Scots voted overwhelmingly for this one political party and of course the second is they want political interests they want independence because as I said independence will increase the power they have will give them a boost whatever chemical inside their brain gives them satisfaction from controlling all of us they have less of that they were only members of Parliament in England but here they would actually run things so I think it's a combination of two you and I don't mean you particularly but the Scots gave them power gave them an indication that you wanted independence in spite of the referendum and you know I'm just repeating an animal was already ready for it all their incentives are aligned to want another referendum with the hope that it passes and they gain more power I'm skeptical about I have to say I disagree with you on one thing I'm skeptical about these political debates I mean it's sad to me that we have to be so involved in politics I mean life shouldn't be about politics most people should be able to go about their lives and never think about a politician at all I mean the only reason politics has become so important and crucial and we need to engage is because they're in our lives and everything that we do there's everything that we do today has a political aspect I mean even now I don't know whether you call yourself a male or a female is a political issue but you know the more politics intervene into our lives speech into how we live into our relationships into our businesses the more we need to become political but I view that as sad I would like to live in a world where politics was you know life is difficult, complicated enough you know politicians they have their job the responsibility of taking on Plato's philosopher king they want to run things for us we're too stupid to run our lives we're too stupid to figure out what's appropriate and what's not what can be said and what can't be said and they want and we've given them the mandate it's not just them as controlling us we've given them the mandate to control us and we have to watch them now because they're in our lives and every aspect of it we have to implement that having more smaller states is something that allow for people to basically you both with their feet and move to the country that offers them the most freedom so what would I say to the idea I think that comes out of a certain libertarian thinkers that if you have a lot of small states then you have more opportunities to vote with your feet you can move to the country that's more free options and more possibilities I'd say even today with the limited countries that we have it's very difficult to move with your feet just try emigrating to the United States right now so we have massive limitations in immigration if you multiply the number of states you're not going to loosen those restrictions in immigration you're still going to make them very very tough and very very difficult so I'm all for open voters, I'm all for people immigrating I think immigration is wonderful I think the possibility people having the option to choose the most free place is good but I don't think you get that by multiplying by creating more states Scotland is unlikely to be freer by being independent than Britain it's unlikely that that's the motivation driving the Scots if Scotland actually declared we want to create a more free country we want to respect individual rights the problem with London is they're redistributing too much wealth they're taking from people and the interfering people's lives we want to be free then I'd support it but that's not what they want they want to create this reminds me of this favorite movie but Wallace and everybody else is yelling freedom what century is this what's that 14th something around there what's the conception of freedom that Wallace has or any of these people have when they're yelling freedom what do they mean from the English as opposed to what I want to be ruled by a Scottish king I want to be oppressed by a Scottish king I want to be taxed by a Scottish king I don't want to be taxed by a British king I don't want to be ruled by a Scottish king they still want a king they still want to be oppressed they just want somebody to oppress them who looks like them who speaks with the same accent as them that's all so it's an anti it's not a freedom movie it's a movie about one tribe fighting another tribe that's all there's no freedom there freedom means the freedom as an individual to act free of coercion free of force doesn't matter who the king is where the king comes from kings are bad kings are unfree sorry king Charles but kings with power so I don't see this multiplicity in the Balkans now I think I mentioned all of them any one of them stand out over the others as being more free and not necessarily they're all about the same the same kind of mixed economies but I get to be with Montenegro and he gets to be with Kosovo whatever who cares the beauty of immigration is you get to leave those people so I would like to see more immigration but I don't think you need more countries for that I would actually like to see less there's a huge I didn't mention my talk but there's a huge advantage to having fewer bigger countries huge advantage and that is that you have larger areas geographic areas of more people under the same rule of law it makes trade easier it makes production easier it makes relating to one another easier if there's one governing language if there's one governing system of laws it makes everything beneath it now assuming they're free if they're not free then it doesn't matter if you're being oppressed by this particular king that particular king or big king that rules the whole area so size doesn't matter when it comes to oppression yep you may have just spoken to this a little bit but arguments against individualism frequently what you said that collectivism leads to atomization and optimization and this unity so could you say more about how exactly the individualist approach leads to unity given that the same arguments are often yes because so an individualist approach both as an individual and then we'll talk about it as politics but as an individual family and individualist what do I care about I care about my own happiness I care about my own ability to live my life as I see fit I care about pursuing my values and my happiness what you do with your life is not relevant to me unless you're interfering with me using coercion or force against me I am focused on achieving my values I am focused on succeeding in my life in gaining the values I believe are necessary for my individual flourishing so my orientation is not towards the other it's towards self and towards progress and towards achieving what's good for me so I think you get a lot less envy you get a lot less jealousy I you know I don't look at the other guy saying how much he's got I'm looking at me and thinking how much I want and how am I going to get it not relative to him but relative to me relative to my potential my ability and what my desires or wishes are given who I am so you know one of the astounding things about America the way it used to be I think it's less and less today is as individualistic a country as it was things like envy were very rare so people didn't look for example at wealthier people in Nam and say oh I hate that guy because he's got more than me they looked at somebody who had more than them and say hey you know I'm ambitious I'd like to live in that house but not in a sense of antagonism but in a sense of ambition whereas if you go to cultures like Scandinavia there's this you know if you stick above the rest if you're a little bit different if you have a little bit more people will key your car people will express this real animosity towards you you know I think that's changing Scandinavia at least that's the I forget the name of it they have this name of the Scandinavia rules where you're not supposed to be different you're not supposed to stand up because everybody's looking at each other and comparing themselves whereas individualists don't do that because they're too focused on their own success and their own happiness now politically individualism leads to a system politically that basically protects the individual's life it protects them so that they can live their life based on those values it protects them from violence but otherwise leaves them alone so the state then politically is not taking for your giving to him it's not redistributing wealth it's not allocating resources it's not deciding who are the good guys and who are the bad guys except when it comes to criminal law except when it comes to you violating somebody else's rights it leaves you alone so I have no business with the state this is my point about politics you know today the state taxes this huge amount of money and then it sits there and it basically goes who am I going to give this to come come come beg come lobby come ask I know there's a bunch of non-profits here that consult I've been reading consult the Scottish Government on all kinds of the latest hot thing is gender issues so these non-profits each non-profit is trying to figure out how they can get the most money from the government and what they need to tell them and I'm going to tell them the truth how they're going to tell them what's going to get them the most money if you're a university researcher you know this is a great example of how this works like if you're a university researcher and you're almost always going to get money from the government to do your research and you get money from the government to do your research and at the end of the research you say everything's great everything's cool things are wonderful on planet earth are they ever going to get them money again no but if you tell the government oh I'm researching this problem it looks like there might be really really bad stuff happening in the future could I get some more money to keep researching this then of course you're going to get money so there's a tendency to catastrophize because catastrophes get money and other things don't if you're a particularly ethnic group you want to emphasize or belong to an ethnic group then you want to congregate with your other ethnic members and go to the government and claim oh we need reparations or we need this or we need that because there's a pie to be distributed but under capitalism on individualism there's no pie to be distributed your pie is your responsibility nobody's going to give you anything so there's no motivation to keep grabbing you know to keep going after more and more and more and to create this conflict so what kind of the state involvement in the economy does is it creates these pressure groups that are constantly fighting over the resources that are being taken by the state and now can be divvied up and again those resources are not always just monetary they could be just control so you grapple with someone else has to emulate that so that they might provide them with the same outcome well figure out what would lead to the best outcome so it's key that individuals have the capacity to think the capacity to reason to discover a proper path somebody else does something doesn't mean to emulate them you might want to do better than them or you might want to do something completely different they're not the standard you are the standard and then back so like the view of dreaming wealth as a national pie of nationalism racism and conflict on the rise at that point so this question is kind of like a challenge of your assumptions on human nature could having collectivist tendencies be a feature of human nature and put the enlightenment, the forced enlightenment world a blip on the history that we are coming off it certainly seems that way if we look at history human beings are being with the exception of a few brief periods in history human history is filled with conformity and tribalism and people aggregating around groups and following the leader and not thinking for themselves and I think in that respect we're still a young species so I think we're yet to learn from the mistakes of our past no question that if you look at history collectivism dominates but if you look at human achievement you look at the periods of history in which we have achieved the most then by far it's not even a comparison I mean the fact is the reality is that about 100,000 years from the beginning of basically we did almost nothing as we stayed in tribes and as we stayed as collectives and it's only in the last 250 years that when it comes to wealth creation almost all the wealth created by human beings in history is being created in the last 250 years and that is a consequence of a shift that the enlightenment brought about in the way we think about individuals versus collectives and individualism has created this massive boom yeah we can abandon that we have choice but we will also suffer the consequence of that and we're already starting to suffer the consequence of that with slow economic growth and lots of economic problems all of that a consequence of the fact that we're moving away from an individualistic perspective at least economically and adopting a collectivistic perspective is it human nature what does that even mean to say it's human nature right so human beings have the choice they can choose to rely on their own mind they can choose to rely on their own decisions and be individualist or they can choose to shut off their mind and follow a leader or follow a group or follow something or follow their emotions that's a choice and it appears in history most of the time that we choose to shut off our mind and follow a leader or we're so poor we don't have the time to engage with our own mind so we follow the leader because we just don't have the time right life we were really really really poor 300 years ago so who had time to think for themselves you basically worked and you slept and you ate and that's it not much more than that we have the luxury today to do a lot of thinking and that's what the tragedy is that we're doing a lot of thinking we're conforming we're accepting we're accepting what people look like us tell us we should think but no human nature gives us the capacity to choose now is there something about being human that wants to relate to other people absolutely we're social in that sense we want to relate to other people do we relate to other people do we relate to other people as mindless nothings do we relate to other people as rulers do we relate to other people as serfs or do we relate to other people as equal individuals who we trade with and the appropriate way in which to relate to other people is through some form of material or spiritual trade it's you give you get and you benefit from the production and the ability and the wonder that other people create and that their lives of other people represent so in that sense nobody wants to be on a desert island all by themselves that's not what individualism means individualism means that you're responsible for your own life you do your own thinking and then you engage with other people as a trader not as a victim and not as an oppressor as a trader yeah I said why Scotland wants independence yeah and you started talking about like being able to take our decisions about having local governments but can you really say that because one of the main arguments of the Scottish National Movement it's to leave the United Kingdom to join the European Union so does that really make sense because there's like traditions because they want like politicians in Brussels to rule over them so I wanted to know what do you think of that argument because it's very unlikely that the UK will join the EU again yes even if they suffer dramatically for it they will not join the European Union again it's a one way street so there is a difference between London and Brussels and it's a difference it's an important difference because it's an important difference that leaves Scottish politicians with a lot more power vis-a-vis Brussels than they have vis-a-vis London Brussels there's a lot of regulations and a lot of controls but Brussels doesn't have monetary unity in a sense of authority over taxes and authority over redistribution of wealth Brussels doesn't control free speech it has certain recommendations about these things but every country does their own thing there's a lot of respect in which Brussels leaves countries independent to do a lot of things and that when you are part of one nation London doesn't now there's some autonomy that Scotland has but it's limited so if you're a politician and what you really want is power you're much better off with the European Union Britain now will Scotland join the EU if it does probably because the economics of Scotland leaving Britain are so bad are so horrific for Scotland they're going to have to find somebody to have free trade with because you know they've just lost they've just lost the most important economic player here so my guess is that Scotland is a net beneficiary of the pie not a net contributed to the pie Scotland is significantly poorer for example in the south of England so so I think joining the EU is something they will do but it still leaves them with enough control and this is part of the whole issue of Brexit whether Brexit was a good thing or a bad thing is once the UK left Brexit if it maintains all the controls that Brussels imposed on it to begin with then what was the point of leaving which is what's happening since they left has Britain taken away any of the regulations imposed on them by Brussels? No I mean trusts promise that but now all trusts promises out the window so that's gone Boris Johnson certainly wasn't going to reduce any of the regulations indeed he imposed new regulations that went either on further on things like climate change than Brussels did so again it's all about control at the end of the day it's not about yeah I mean it's all about control Brexit is all about control and a lot of why British politicians wanted Brexit again they wanted to rule Britain they didn't want to share that rule with Brussels we can imagine it's for liberty and freedom and sovereignty it doesn't look like that it doesn't look that way from the way they've actually acted it's a nice story they tell again it's a story to get us to support them oh we'll have national sovereignty we'll get rid of all those bureaucrats and Brussels we'll do the right thing we'll change everything we'll liberate, we'll reform and then when it happens nothing changes except now you're not part of the European Union so your cost of living goes up your goods and you're paying a tariff exports out of Britain are declined because nobody wants to buy your goods because they have to pay a tariff so it's an unmitigated negative given what the government has done I mean I was like my opinion of Brexit was it depends what you do with it if you use it to do the right thing it could be cool, it could be fantastic if you don't do the right thing then it's a disaster and so far yeah well I mean it's it's not a simple post because I think that in a sense what we need to do is resurrect a lot of the ideas that have kind of died when the Enlightenment was died I think the first idea that is really really important particularly in educational context the first idea to resurrect is the efficacy of reason the fact that reason is our basic means of survival it's the way in which we know the world it's the way in which we can understand the world and it's how we survive it's what makes us human I speak all over the world to audiences and I ask people what makes us human people come up with the craziest ideas people offer somebody to say we can think at the very basic level we can think, animals can't and people say we feel empathy, really empathy is what makes us human more important than thinking, abstracting creating, building doing things that are completely new no animal can do that that's what makes us human all people say communicating true thinking, conceptualization having concepts so it all starts with reason and if we teach children that the emotions are more important than their thoughts, if we don't teach them how to think and we don't give them content to their thoughts we don't teach them history if we don't teach them math we don't teach them science and I think UK is a little better than the United States but in America it's a disaster education John Dewey the American philosopher it was very influential in education in the US was very focused on education as a form of socializing people not as a form of teaching them facts and how to think so that's the first thing we have to return to a society a culture of reason we have to elevate reason back to where it belongs there's a great quote from Thomas Jefferson and the Jefferson Memorial you know bring everything before reason even the existence of God something so reason is our way of knowing what's true and what's not nothing else is so that's the first thing and then the second is we have to challenge and this is a whole other topic but we have to challenge the pervading moral code that exists in our society the moral code that says that morality is about and solely about how you treat other people and the to be moral is to negate your own interests for the sake of others and we need to resurrect an Aristotelian view of morality where morality is how to live the best life you can live for you how to achieve happiness how to achieve success how to live a good life but it's not all of morality morality is about how to achieve a good life the good life I think it's all about in terms of things like a courtroom quite violent and aggressive censorship how do you move towards challenging status quo I mean I know that you're an individual that faces a lot of backlash but a lot of people are intimidating and scary how do you begin to overcome that when you lose you have to fight back I mean it's your life there's no other life there's no other place I mean oh you immigrate to a place where you can speak but if you're going to stay in a place you have to fight back you can't let the censors win and in particular I mean this thing about cancer culture in particular when they don't really have power over you where the power is social acceptance or just your classmates being nice to you screw them you've got to speak up I mean this is life you know everybody says well J.K. Rowland's can afford to speak up she can afford not to be sorry but we all can afford that we all need to be brave on whatever issue it is and again there's no real alternative because there's no alternative life you can live and if speaking is important and it is important and requires speaking then you just got to say this is the one thing that I'm willing to to go up against whomever on is my ability to speak because once you give up speech you're giving up thought once you give up thought you've given up life I'm far you know I'm far more relaxed about giving up my money and having them take x percentage of my wealth and control other aspects of my life than my speech because my speech is my thinking my speech is my mind and to give up my mind is to give up everything so it's absurd what's going on in American and British universities and I blame the Americans because they seem to have started this and exported it to the UK there's no question to start in America I remember the first time I went because for years in the UK you could pretty much say anything but the first time I went to Oxford I was told I couldn't say stuff by the students who tell me in an lecture you can't say stuff like that and that was the first time I realized that it would come from America because that was already in the States and it starts at the best universities it always does that it always starts with the best and their prestige then gets it filtered in the way you advance in academia now it is very conformist the whole field of academia is conformist the way journals work the way peer review works it's all geared towards conformity I mean often and I come from my PhD is in finance it's in economics it's not in the social sciences but even in finance all of the real breakthrough articles were published in B-rated journals it was outside of the accepted right you only published accepted stuff the sophisticated accepted stuff but only the stuff that conforms the really outlandish stuff the stuff that's really pushing the envelope is out here and you see that you see how conforming academia becomes and it all filters down from the top academics they make a decision I was reading about Alzheimer research and how for 30 years there's one hypothesis the top people in the field decided this is the only hypothesis worth testing it's the only right hypothesis this is the amyloid theory of stuff and that's all the money went into that all the publications went into that all the academic talks and conferences went into that turns out it's wrong we've lost 30 years of research maybe the most devastating disease all of us probably fear which is the loss of our minds as we get older they might maybe we'd have a cure today and now finally they're starting to fund a lot of different things and trying different things and experimenting and taking some of the radical crazy ideas that some academics had in the past and we started adding putting money into it and we'll see what happens but academia even in the sciences is very conforming Einstein wrote his breakthrough papers not in academia he was a patent clerk at the patent office and he wrote it outside so the collectives in the politicians are taking the pie and we don't like that but following that showing that sort of pro-independence argument because right now there are two sets of politicians eating that pie there's Westminster and Scottish Parliament so are we going to depend on you having one set of politicians eating that pie? well to the extent that yes to the extent that you have this ridiculous system where you've got some autonomy here in Scotland and that is true the question is ultimately given particularly in Scotland you are probably getting some of the pie from England not the other way around because more wealth is created down there than up here so the flow is probably in this direction in order to compensate for that your Scottish politicians are going to have to take more of your pie in order to do what we've all given them a mandate to do so that even though it's now two pies I think the Scottish one pie is going to be larger in terms of the cost to you as a Scott than the two pies are today so it's not a question of how many pies it's a question of the ultimate size how much it costs your wallet economically and I think one Scottish pie is going to cost your wallet a lot more than two pies that exist today I mean whether it's true or not is a question but does that make sense I am not an expert on the economy of Scotland in England so I'm not sure my senses and what I've read the wealthiest part of the United Kingdom is the south of England and generally they to some extent subsidize the rest but I don't like that way of looking at the world at all because I don't like the whole idea of collective pies and I'd like to throw that out in the trash heap of history so I don't do those I don't spend too much time doing those calculations although I do it for my personally I try to minimize my taxes how much is taken from me to that collective pie that would be my focus as an individual that's why I live in Puerto Rico yeah just a similar question to Molly about how the mechanics of actually implementing some of these ideas worked more in political sense perhaps just thinking about the table she spoke quite a lot about reducing bureaucracy reducing taxes and kind of tried to maybe a half bit perhaps but I just wanted to speak about it brings up a lot of issues I'd say one thing you can learn from what just happened to Elizabeth to us is she's not attuned to the people who elected her or the people who elected the conservative party put it that way not who elected her the people who elected the conservative party wanted economic freedom they did not vote for Boris Johnson because they thought he would bring them lower taxes and less regulations and more economic freedom they elected Boris Johnson for a variety of cultural issues and partially to slap down the left there is no constituency either in the US or in the UK for liberty for economic liberty what there is is a big cultural dispute about all kinds of cultural issues that have nothing to do with economics that really are the way we differentiate the left and the right it's not like the conservatives are saying we're going to privatize the NHS if anything the left and the right are competing on who will provide more funding to the NHS and grow it even bigger and make it more powerful it's not like the left wants to massively deregulate and create a free market maybe Elizabeth Truss does maybe but the constituency who voted for it don't the people who voted conservative in the last election that gave Boris Johnson a landslide victory voted for him because he said he wouldn't do that that he'd keep a lot of the regulations that he'd keep a lot of the controls that he was as green as the left was there was competition between them who would build more windmills it wasn't like an opposition to building windmills on the right so I think what let me finish on that now so what Elizabeth Truss did is she got ahead of her own party that if she went in a direction that I don't think the people who voted conservative actually wanted to go then she made two other mistakes one is just awful communication God if you're going to propose something controversial a little bit radical a little bit different then have your communication plan ready know what you're going to say she went on TV and blabbered she didn't know what she was talking about the exchequer guy I forget his name they didn't know what they didn't have and markets want to hear confidence they want to hear you say okay we're assuming a lafakov we're assuming that actually tax revenues will go up we cut taxes lafakov is real this is a I don't I don't argue that way about taxes but they could have right because it's a collectivistic way to talk about taxes but they could have but they need no argument for what they did so communication communication communication if you're going to be if you're going to do something radical and then third you cannot cut taxes on everything and not cut spending until people you're never going to cut spending that is insanity that is unserious nobody takes you seriously if you do that and that's what the market responded to the market responded to the fact that there was no that this government wouldn't deal with a real elephant in the room which is spending which is excess government spending the same in the united states the same in all these countries if you can Republicans are very very good in America cutting taxes and where's it get them nothing because they don't cut spending so if a purely economic perspective it's spending that needs to be cut and the markets know that and the markets reacted you know plus you've got a bunch of real structural problems with the way the pension system is built in the UK and the way to do it is markets function in the UK that you've got to realize the problems and you've got to have a plan on how to deal with them other than let the bank of England step in and pretend that they're heroes by you know by buying up a lot of debt so all of this it just wasn't thought through they just didn't have a plan yeah just a quick point on borough johnson's overriding land yeah oh oh interesting okay yeah because of the way it's yeah yeah yeah but even the 43% that he got right a lot of those votes came from the northern England working class they're not there for free markets they were there on cultural issues, they were there for Brexit, they were there for all kinds of things not for free markets it's just no constituency anywhere in the world today for free markets capitalism is dead for most people so that's the reality that we are struggling against but you can see it in America Donald Trump didn't believe in free markets the public and party today doesn't believe in free markets they just are not the left that's the greatest virtue that they're not the left and that's what they run at that's what they run at affluence is a problem I think affluence is a problem essentially keep surviving, keep trying disappears and you will follow a generation that doesn't really have any incentive to keep going and the generation after that just assumes it's all going to be okay and it increases on and this is this is some lack of ability to function properly and why the state seems to need to be tied to the affluence but it's not like countries that are not affluent to doing any better it's not like there's a huge I don't know movement towards freedom and capitalism in Bulgaria or in Romania which are countries that are still struggling from the legacy of communism and are not affluent and most of the people there wouldn't be defined as affluent by our standards all for that matter you're not seeing a demand for liberty and freedom in Vietnam so which is still quite a poor place so no I don't think so suddenly affluence gives you the opportunity not to suffer the consequence of your own irrationality and laziness so an affluent country can be stupid for a long time and that's what we're experiencing now the west is super stupid and it can last a long time one of the frustrations is there's a sense in which I want it to be over already I know the west isn't decline but I keep saying that and you keep predicting financial crises and they don't happen or the end of the dollar or whatever that some of these financial gurus predict you know it's going to happen but it could take a long time because we're affluent and not only affluent we have a base of capital and a base of knowledge that is so substantial we can milk it without producing really any new innovations for a long time and to a large extent we're doing that so it's super frustrating in a sense you want it to you know you want the bad behavior to lead to bad results so for example I believe that the UK or the American economies can grow realistically at 4-6% GDP growth a year I think that's real you can go for it right now they're growing at 1% a year that 3% difference sounds like nothing but if you extrapolate that over 40 years it is massive and it's massive in particular for poor people basically if you take a low income person today and if the economy grows at a 4% real rate over the next 40 years and that poor person assuming their wages grow at a similar rate over that period of time which they typically do they are earning well into the figures in real terms in 40 years there are no poor people in the UK and in America if that happens if you go at 1% they're better off but not that much that's the beauty of exponential growth but how do I convince people of this that it's really really important to grow at 4% so we could solve all our problems if we grew at 4% because they seem content with 1% again this is just simple economics and our agenda is much weaker than just simple economics we can't even convince them of simple economics they'd rather have the comfort of growing at 1% which they won't because at some point they'll shrink then take the risks associated the risks of individualism associated with growing at 4% and the tragedy is unbelievable if the United States had grown 1% GDP less per year over the last 100 years it would be poorer than Mexico 1% that's the kind of benefit you get from every percentage of GDP growth I think that's also the benefit you get from individualism but that's what it's from individuals pursuing individuals creating companies individuals being entrepreneurs individuals pushing their envelope in every realm because they want to live the best life that they can live they're ambitious it comes from ambition and think of all the thousands, hundreds of thousands of people at universities who are doing mindless work sorry and they're pretty smart people they could be incredibly productive and they're teaching something valuable and they're just churning nonsense nonsense on steroids that get you nowhere and telling you what you can and cannot say and telling you what you can and cannot do and that's deflating everything deflates exactly that spirit that is required to achieve anything economically and the next door is the pro-life society they've come up with that but this protest doesn't just go on to start a fight it's happening right now so I don't need to make you laugh as we're saying that I find I am a poor abortion but people who are into abortion have a right to speak their mind it should be allowed to speak their mind and not to allow them and on many issues my views are much more radical than their views on abortion happen to be and if we can't speak what can we do this relates to this idea if you can't talk about stuff then the only way to convince somebody else the only way to change other people's minds is by force so the only two alternatives in the end are violence free speech and the more we reduce free speech the more we'll increase violence and again I think we're going in a direction a more violent world of more conflict not less conflict because of these intellectual trends yeah successful well I think in the end it's going to depend on the local context like Catalonia clearly wants to be free of Spain and it's interesting Catalonia the pie is going clearly in the other direction Catalonia is super productive and to a large extent people in Catalonia feel like they're subsidizing the rest of Spain but Spain won't let them so if Catalonia votes they probably vote for independence but Spain just won't even you know the I guess the governor or the mayor so I don't think it's going to happen in Spain I don't think it'll happen in Italy I don't think there's ever been a serious attempt to separate into Italy into north and south even though again the pie flows in particular direction from north to south I'm trying to think of other places where there's an attempt other than Scotland and generally right now you know what's rising is nationalism but even the nationalism that's rising the people once they get power you see this in Italy Italy is a great example of this every few years there's an election quite frequently in Italy and a popular party wins and they promised we're going to put the EU in its place we're going to do an Italy exit and then they get into power and they don't and they don't because they know that they can't afford to they won't have any power if that happens they'll be running a they'll pull themselves into a massive financial crisis if they do it so they play along with the EU and then they lose the next election to the next popular party the proper says the same thing so Maloney has rhetoric anti-EU rhetoric but now she's completely you know aligned with the EU so I think right now in the shorter run you're going to see stability and you're not going to see a lot of organization I don't know what's going to happen in Scotland but at least in Europe I think the war in Ukraine has kind of woken people up to some of the dangers associated with fragmentation it's right now just for self-preservation it's better to be together than to be separate the fact that Sweden and Finland are joining NATO is pretty indicative of you know even the even the Swedish Democrats Christian Democrats I guess they're called who won the popular party in Sweden are not going to oppose joining NATO even though they've always spoken against NATO in the past because there's a real threat I actually think that in many ways this war is awful and horrific as it is will actually wake people up in certain respects to the dangers of nationalism at least in the short run of real nationalism the kind of nationalism Putin reflects versus the kind of nationalism in Italy which I think ultimately they're pragmatists and they're just going to be like every other political party in Italy in the past you hear occasionally things about this kind of phenomenon in America called national divorce or things like that do you think that has any traction to it? I don't think there's going to be secession in America and look the problem in America is let's say you're Texas and you want to let's pretend Texas is Republican they want to cede 45 to 45 to 48 percent of your population are not Republicans of your population in Texas that is Texas is not 90 percent Republican 10 percent Democrat Austin, Texas the best city in Austin by far and the most thriving and energized and dynamic is Democratic overwhelmingly it's not even close right so if there's a civil war it's not going to be between states it's going to be inside states right so I think the secession movement in California you could you could pretend that California is all Democrats and yeah they have a majority but I don't know 40 percent are not it's not a trivial number that are not and how do the Californians they kick out all the Republicans is that how it's going to work so the mechanisms of it are going to be very very difficult and particularly if they need supermajorities in order to cede and then the US has to allow them to cede and you know there's a big so I don't see secession as an issue in the US what I see generally in the west is just the decline just everything becoming slower, less dynamic less interesting, culturally less interesting, economically less interesting everything slowing down into this kind of stagnation and economic cultural, intellectual stagnation and partially it's a tax and free speech that make this partially it's the economics that are just devastating economic growth and you're already seeing it you're already seeing kind of a everything becomes duller and grayer and stupider I mean the debates now are pretty stupid over the issues people seem to really care about you know and it's I think that's only going to become worse not better and on both sides and the risk ultimately is at least in the US and I'm not sure exactly how to think about this in terms of Europe but in the US the risk is more authoritarianism because that's what happens that people become dissatisfied unhappy, frustrated wanting change because they know it's bad but they don't know what the solution is and this is what you're getting like the Trump voter is upset and frustrated in many respects justifiably so and they don't know what the answer is if somebody comes to them and says I know what the answer is it's not you you're great, you're fantastic people, it's those other people it's their fault, they did it and if you trust me I'll fix it all now that's the rhetoric of authoritarianism now Trump couldn't do it because America is not a authoritarian country yet but imagine somebody more charismatic imagine somebody more effective at manipulating the system than Trump but with the same kind of rhetoric that's what scares me because the more frustrated people become the more accepting of the more accepting that their life is a dead end that they can't achieve that they're successful the less dynamic a world is the more ripe it is for authoritarianism and I see them rising in the US you see whole intellectual movements now dedicated to illiberalism they're literally calling themselves illiberal right we don't really know if they're illiberal left now we've got massive numbers of illiberal right whether they call themselves national conservatives or just some of them just call themselves I mean some of them are basically just theocrats the Catholics in America who want complete religion and state merger I think that's you know if you had to lay out a scenario for the US where it's heading I'll be heading in that direction more than it is in any other direction although again how it all plays out is going to be hard to tell I had this vision of the future dictator of the US who combines the key elements of left and right to create a true populace kind of thing so you have to have the flag and you have to have religion that's the right and then you bring in something like environmentalism and class warfare from the left and you wrap it all nicely into a nice bundle and you sell that remember that national socialism was national socialism it was a combination of nationalism and socialism that's how you unite the left and the right you just joined Hitler's project because at the end of the day it wasn't that different than their project so you just need to package it right you need to write personality and I think that's the real danger and I don't know enough about Europe to have a sense of where it's heading and whether ultimately the EU breaks up it might but I think right now in the short run it's going to hold together because of an external threat external threats always bring people together it's a good thing or a bad thing they bring people together the appeal to emotion over the appeal to reason has captured the popular imaginary in the way it seems to have done and the appeal to people to position themselves as vulnerable over the appeal to people to position themselves as successful why is that captured it seems to me fast slaves that's a big that's a big question so I think this is a process it's been going on for a long time really since the end of the Enlightenment I think there's a philosophical battle in our culture between the ideas of the Enlightenment and really the ideas of German Romanticism and the German Romanticism is chipped away and chipped away and chipped away and chipped away and what German Romanticism really highlights is Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Marx ultimately is the fact that reason is impotent that was their push Kant divorces reason from reality so he makes reason into in a sense something you just do in your head but it's not really connected to the world out there that's a vast simplification but that's the essential of what he does and then you can go in all kinds of directions at that point because once you divorce reason from reality out there it's basically impotent, it means nothing one of the reasons that it's so enticing is that it basically captures the spirit of Christianity Christianity is fundamentally anti-reason it's faith and in an era where people were giving up Christianity reason is pretty demanding reason requires you to engage to think, to take responsibility to do stuff in swept this alternative ideology that basically accepted the mysticism in a different form of Christianity and let you off of the hook in terms of actually thinking everything through and taking personal responsibility and figuring all this out and now there's a million variations of this Kantian view of reason that have just taken a naked approach to it's all inside your head I did one of my episodes I did on Dugan Dugan is one of Putin's one of Russia's big philosophers whether he advises Putin directly or not, he's one of the big philosophers and Dugan says, you create the world out there the world doesn't exist, there's no objective reality well that's it it's all over once you accept that and what are the trans activists say there's no reality of sex it's all in your head, you can do whatever you want you can imagine whatever reality you want and sexual reality, gender reality you can imagine whatever you want I mean, whatever you think about gender that's absurd you don't create your gender in here ignoring biology, ignoring reality ignoring the physical world so we've shifted from a focus on science on reality on the efficacy of their mind and once you clearly show that once you suggest to people that that is ineffective, that that is bogus, then what are they left with they're left with emotions, that's all they have and then the philosophers who capitalize us directly, Dewey in America clearly says this is a hundred and something years ago that the purpose of education is to socialize to teach students to express themselves emotionally so you have kindergarten teachers kids sitting in a circle and the teacher asks them what they think of Trump well the key there is they don't think they're kids, they don't know what they think there's a solution to the Middle East crisis they don't know, they don't clue they're kids so you're encouraging them to voice opinions about things they don't know anything about which is common in our society we're constantly asking people to comment on things they have no concept about with all the problems with experts in COVID, the bigger problem was non-experts who thought they were experts and everybody became an expert in COVID without doing any research, without knowing any statistic without knowing any immunology without knowing anything about medicine everybody became an expert everybody had an opinion about COVID they saw a video, two minute video on YouTube and they had an opinion about COVID so we've turned people into these emotional so what was the second part of your question, that was about the emotionalism so I think it's that philosophical that anti enlightenment philosophical trend that rose up in primarily in Germany and but was already in the enlightenment because you already had so in the enlightenment who was already anti-reason already rejecting reason and that battle continues and they won, we lost so it's a philosophical battle that affects every branch of knowledge there is that's what philosophy does, it infects every other branch of knowledge and at the Court of Christianity you asked about intersectionality in a sense of meeting on who's being more oppressed well again Christianity right there is an entire the entire ethical code of Christianity is built around the association of virtue of suffering, suffering is virtuous the meek shall inherit the earth Mother Teresa when she went to India to help the poor, she didn't help them become not poor she helped them not die so they could continue to suffer because suffer was virtue you can read her diaries and has a great book on Mother Teresa it's awful what she did because she didn't help them achieve success because success is non-Christian according to that interpretation so we have an ethical code that is focused on the more you suffer the more you are old the more we owe you and that goes back 2000 years we've just morphed it into okay let's make this a science and we'll categorize your suffering based on your race and your gender and your sex and whatever so they're just being scientific about the more code that exists in our society already we have a welfare state because some people are old because they suffer because they're poor and other people have and they fall it's okay to take from those who haven't give to those who haven't everything in our society is built on a moral code of altruism and altruism doesn't mean just helping people because we all love to help people nobody has anything against helping people altruism is the code that says that your priming moral focus in life is other people that is their well-being not your own and indeed if you think about yourself Augustine Compton that's Kant both argue that if you think about yourself oh I like helping other people that's not moral anymore if you like it the whole point is the suffering the whole point is the sacrifice so that moral code needs to shift and nobody nobody has presented an alternative to Christianity in ethics nobody has presented alternative to Christianity in ethics other than Iron Rand there's Aristotle and there's Rand maybe Spinoza but there's nothing everything else is Christian morality secularized and that has to be challenged and until we challenge it we're doomed what are you optimistic about what am I optimistic about you know ultimately I'm optimistic about the human spirit I think that people can change and I think there's the possibility of change I'm optimistic about individuals I'm not optimistic about countries of the culture right now I think there's very little to be optimistic about I'm optimistic about the fact that we do have ideas that are better we do have ideas that can change the world there are solutions we know what those solutions are so it's just a matter of communicating it's a matter of convincing it's a matter of arguing it's a matter of and I do believe that a win in the end I think it'll take a long time but I think the better ideas will ultimately win I'm optimistic about particular areas technological areas I'm optimistic about biology and biotech I'm optimistic about a lot of particular sciences and particular innovations that are happening but it's hard to be right now optimistic about politics and about the state of the world there's a long time call it naive but I was pretty optimistic about China for about 2000 2015 I went to China many times and what I saw in China were people really focused on making life better and producing and living and oppressed for decades and suddenly they got a little bit of liberty and they just exploded with productivity and innovation and the cities just blew up and people who were basically extremely poor something were middle class and they expressed it and they were joyous and it just had this vibe of a great place both culturally and economically and yet instead of that continuing and ultimately having a political expression by political freedom it has turned and basically has moved us into great authoritarianism over the last five years or so and it's only going to get worse even my optimism about China I used to love Hong Kong look where Hong Kong is today it's under the boot of the Chinese authorities I don't know where to look to be optimistic I'm eager to find out from you guys maybe Can I just ask about what you're saying about suffering when you're talking about suffering I would actually say especially if you're talking about Scotland can you not say that perhaps in Scotland when you talk about those hates there's these empty hates I'd say more of a welfare state in Scotland even and the fact that service is one of the better things are put on for you more than the rest of the country but I'd say it's too much of suffering I do actually think it's more of a there's a complete aversion to suffering at all in the UK I'm particularly in Scotland I think it's actually more of no one can suffer no one should suffer you'd say even the fact that the government is dishing out money to everyone no matter what to cover their energy costs 40, 50 years ago in the 70s massive energy costs would be unthinkable now there's no one can suffer I think that's quite especially good there's a sense that that's true but you know I know this doesn't sound like suffering but when somebody sticks their hand in my pocket and takes 50% of my income I'm suffering right it's mine they just took 50% of it that's a lot of my energy my time my effort my focus what I do in life is I try to produce stuff and create stuff and they took 50% but that's fine because I'm successful I'm already wealthy so I'm allowed to suffer the people are not allowed to suffer the people who are not fine right they're not allowed to suffer it's a redistribution if you will of that but it's also the case that yes while from an economic perspective the modern welfare state has made sure that nobody suffers too much economically most poor in the west are taking care of at least to some minimal level then we have to look for other people who are suffering so we find other ways to express suffering so a lot of people declare that they're suffering just because they have a different color skin and by definition they were pressed 200 years ago so they're suffering right now the ancestors were pressed so they must be suffering right now middle class kids who just happened to have coming from and some of them are coming from wealthy families but their color skin is different and they're now on this intersectionality somewhere so we create new problems in order to create new people who are suffering because we can't tolerate a world morally we have to sacrifice to somebody so if they're not suffering economically we have to find other forms of suffering and I think a lot of you know a lot of what we're doing to our teenage kids is encouraging them to not be themselves but to find something where they can associate with I don't know with depression and suffering and you see kids do crazy things around gender that makes no sense and in groups and why I think we shift our focus in terms of suffering to other areas because we in a sense in the west solve the economic side of suffering redistribution of wealth but we've supposedly solved it yeah suffering is a really economic suffering but in a world where some Marxist and Hegelian dialectics of oppressor and oppressed it's a lot sexier to market yourself and be oppressed between them first and there is to be to say I'm part of it yes if those are the only two options that's right so you take away the idea of trade you take away of the idea of human relationships as win-win and the Marxist and Hegelian approaches no there's always an oppressor and there's always an oppressed German romantic philosophy there's always an oppressor and there's always an oppressed so Apple is oppressing me by sending me the iPhone I don't know it but I'm really being oppressed by spending a thousand dollars on the iPhone even though I think I'm much better off buying the iPhone and for having an iPhone the dialectic tells me no you must have been oppressed by them so yes so now we have to find other ways to express that oppression because people don't really buy that they're being oppressed by Apple yeah that a lot of it feels like I've heard Scottish people refer to Scotland as a colonised country and it's a colonised people and I've heard people in a seminar like in the Scottish experience of being in a union to enslave a colonised people which is like insulting an Apple but I think it comes down to the idea that they can either market themselves as being part of the oppressed or they've got to accept that they are not called oppressed and if you are called oppressed then you always need an oppressor no that's right so this is the binary of oppressor and oppressor versus the alternative of a trader the alternative of a free individual making choices and this is the thing about collectivism versus individualism when you think about collectives collectives don't trade but you can view easily collectives as oppressed but yeah there's a competition always to be the oppressed not just because of dialectic but also just because of christianity oppressed is virtue to be successful, to have stuff whether it's wealth or whether it's just happiness or whether it's just being a human being that is good with himself there's no virtue in that there isn't a certain framework but there's no virtue of that in a christian framework you had a question? no you've come in before in the contracts too what's the word people who need help in society in the endless search for other people who need help endlessly down and down and down it never seems to be ending it's never an end it's not really welfare from the suffering because nobody has any interest in the suffering because if you did have any serious interest in those who suffer you would just institute capitalism and it would become super wealthy and we'd all be in 50 years all of you would go home to the left side a lot earlier than 50 years so it's a whole welfare debate really just another classic of unarmed power and authority where it's really welfare for those in the state which is keep this whole ball rolling where the government the elected officials people administering unarmed power are just on this old period which must keep going there's no question that's part of it but I think philosophically altruism was never about the suffering altruism was about penalizing the successful that's what drives it ideologically is we're not really interested in helping the poor people we're not because helping the poor people is easy we're not really interested in in solving problems what we're interesting is knocking down the successful what you're interesting is penalizing the people who are happy and living a good life that's what's unacceptable philosophically and socially and what the politicians do is they capitalize on that they create a gravy train for themselves they capitalize off of the cultural idea that we need to knock them down we need to pull them down and you can see that I know we can't get a whole debate about this but think about the way we treat in America at least the way we treat 19th century industrialists we call them robber barons I mean where would America be today if not for those industrialists they built the country they created even though I'm not an expert that is absolutely the case here in the UK the 19th century is the most important century in all of human history from the perspective of human well-being we went from being dirt poor life expectancy of 35 or 39 maybe in the UK child mortality at 50% before the age of 10 to doubling life expectancy to increasing the population child mortality going down within a span of one century and we hate that century we think the industrial revolution is a plague upon the earth and we hate the people who made it possible those evil industrialists and that doesn't have to do with helping the suffering nothing has helped the suffering more than capitalism has than industrialism nothing in all of human history did more for suffering than the industrial revolution nothing and yet the industrial revolution in England Scotland in the whole UK the way it started schools it's the most evil horrific dark period in all of human history shockingly at the beginning of that century almost no children went to school by the end of the century all children went to school wow shouldn't you celebrate that transition no because a bunch of people got rich and they were successful and they did it themselves it wasn't a state that did it it wasn't a group that did it individuals went out and changed the world and that is unacceptable and that needs to be knocked down we knock it down in the history books and then we knock it down politically but that's what it's about it's about pulling people down look at what the Chinese did to Jack Ma they've learned from us Jack Ma changed China I don't know if you know Jack Ma but he's the guy behind Alibaba and he changed China hundreds of thousands made income possible for millions and millions of people he changed the world but he pissed off the people he charged and he was knocked down and many Chinese cheered him on cheered them on because that's the culture we've created a culture that knocks down people who are successful we want to make them into villains we don't like success we don't like happiness we've made production we've made happiness, we've made success by the way, I don't think it's just in economics I think it's in every realm of our lives we've made success achievement something that needs to be penalized people for in schools in America at least there's this whole trend not to give grades give everybody a ribbon treat everybody the same when we're not the same this is the philosophy of egalitarianism knock down the able it leads to the killing fields of Cambodia yes we invest a huge amount in helping the slow learners we ignore the brilliant at least in America but the brilliant are the ones who are going to change the world but we ignore them thank you everybody


And I'd also like to say that the effects of deforestation could be very serious because this will increase drought, it is increasing drought, it will increase water stress in forests and grasslands and increase the frequency and intensity of wildfires. So all of this is really something that reinforces the problems of climate change. And we know that there are several parts of the world which are already living in a state of water stress. If you look at the case of Africa, for instance, we have projected in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report that by 2020, as early as that, you'll have something like 75 to 250 million people living in a state of water stress. Now think of how this could be redressed through major afforestation activities. And here is something that I feel the forestry profession has to bring about rather rapidly and that's essentially the effective use of scientific knowledge on a large scale. One has seen a decline not only in the research related to forestry and I must say C4 is doing a remarkable job of filling up the vacuum but this is something that has to happen in every country of the world where you carry out adequate research on forestry science and ensure that its outputs are applied effectively to the practice of forestry as a profession and as an activity. I also want to emphasize the fact that as CO2 concentrations increase and climate changes, feedbacks from terrestrial stores of carbon in forests and grasslands and in soils, wetlands, beatlands, et cetera, will take place and therefore the predicted atmospheric CO2 concentration at the end of this century will be much higher than a number of models have actually projected. In fact, these couplings are going to be extremely important and in the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC we're going to focus on them deeply. I might also mention that in the AR5, the Fifth Assessment Report, we're going to look at what we call representative concentration pathways, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, getting into the negative range. You know there's a big clamour and in a small mischievous way I've also added to that to say that the earth must only deal with a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius and not 2 degrees Celsius. Now this is something as I've clarified on several occasions, I cannot say as chairman of the IPCC, but we now have enough knowledge as we brought out in the Fourth Assessment Report of the very serious impacts of climate change in the range of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius increase in temperature and therefore naturally in view of that knowledge and in view of the fact that several societies in the Maldives, in Bangladesh and in other areas where there's a serious problem of food security are now clamouring for the limit at 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than 2 degrees Celsius. And if we're going to bring that about then clearly we have to pull out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's not enough in my view to only reduce emissions, you'll have to somehow turn the direction of carbon dioxide emissions and at some point in time, based on feasibility, we should be able to reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And what's going to be the most viable option for doing that? Obviously forestry and the increase in forest stocks across the world. And the economics of doing this are very, very attractive. For instance, the importance of identifying approaches to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation and forest degradation need to be addressed. I'm afraid this kind of economic analysis has not been done adequately in different locations and under different conditions. And that I think is an extremely urgent task which must be taken in hand. It's also necessary to look at how bringing forests under the umbrella of cap and trade, greenhouse gas emission reduction policies would really work out because I think we need to think in terms of the institutional arrangements, the verification, the monitoring, the measurement. Because in the absence of that, we really won't be able to get off to a quick start if there is a cap and trade regime that comes into existence. I want to go back to what I said about the fact that forestry decisions have yielded space to decisions in other sectors rather than the other way around. And here is a quotation that I'd like to present before you from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report which says, forestry can make a very significant contribution to a low-cost global mitigation portfolio that provides synergies with adaptation and sustainable development. This is a perfect example of mitigation and adaptation going together. And we have determined very clearly that if we really want to meet this challenge of climate change, we would need a mix of both adaptation as well as mitigation actions. So I continue with the quote. It says, however, this opportunity is being lost in the current institutional context and lack of political will to implement and has resulted in only a small portion of this potential being realized at present end of quote. But political will is something, as my friend Mr. Al Gore says, is a renewable resource. And I think that political will has to be generated through grassroots actions. And therefore, I think it is essential for us on the part of those who are really concerned about activities in this sector and concerned about the problem of climate change in general that we create the conditions by which this political will bubbles up to the top. And that I think is a major challenge. So I would stop here. I don't want to leave you with a sense of disappointment that enough is not happening. There are plenty of interesting examples. For instance, not only interesting in a professional sense, but perhaps in a human sense. In Indonesia, I've been told that starting in 2009 on Java, each newlywed couple is to plant 10 trees. And I hope they do that before the honeymoon, because otherwise they might lose sight of it. And each divorced couple is to plant 50 trees in order to combat deforestation in Java. So, you know, if somebody divorces and then marries again, then I think they are huge benefits. So maybe that's what we should propose to these people. Thank you very much.