Tracinski - What If The World Isn't Ending?

Speaker 0 00:00:00 All right. Well, um, we have, uh, people that have shown up on time. I like this crowd, um, dairy, prompt, and punctual. So why don't you go ahead and, uh, start us with an introduction of why we should all be a little bit more optimistic, why that might be a more objectively realistic point of view and more in our self-interest. I will get onto bringing a few more others into the room, Speaker 1 00:00:31 Right? So my topic today for is Y what if the world an ending? And I put it that way, because if you listen to most political and cultural discussion from just about anybody, for, at any, any political perspective or a philosophical perspective, what you typically get is that the world is ending, you know, and if you're on the left, it's ending because of global warming. Um, I mean, I had a middle school girl tell me in great earnestness a few years ago that we had 12 years and then the world was going to be completely wracked, um, because of global warming and people are out promoting this idea, uh, if you're on the right, the world's ending because of secularism or moral decay or whatever, or political correctness, um, woke ism, whatever, you know, they're all they're gonna throw us all around us all up and put us into camps. Speaker 1 00:01:17 Uh, the, the woke into woke concentration camps, and we're all going to be doomed. There's a lot of, you know, gloom and tomb and emergency. And you know why this happens because part of it is that some of these trends are real. You know, some of these trends are things we should be worried about and that if we don't depose them, they could become things that are extremely detrimental to our lives. So it's worth opposing them early on and stopping, and like woke as a more political correctness, you know, to the extent that's a threat to free speech, it's worth nipping it in the bud and being alarmed about it earlier, rather than waiting until it's too late. Um, but it's also because these hysteria is they get people angry. They get people worked up, they create a lot of energy. It creates a huge incentive to rebuild, to stoke that sense of gloom and doom. Speaker 1 00:02:03 I mean, I, as a fur in 20, 30 years as a writer, one of the IRA rules that you have to learn as a writer is that people are like 10 times more likely to respond to something you wrote. If they're angry at you than if they like you, you know, if they like it, they're like, oh, that's nice. And they move on, but they're angry. They will write a note to those they'll mail something in, and you, you sort of have to adjust your expectations that, okay, if I just got a whole bunch of hate mail, it's not that everybody actually hates. What I wrote is that the angry people were more likely to write to me. Um, and the, uh, so there there's these sort of biases, but if you actually look at what's going on in the world objectively, what you see is a steady, even through a lot of turmoil, even through a lot of emergencies, there's actually, what's going on is a steady improvement in human life. Speaker 1 00:02:53 Now I'm going to refer people to Steven Pinker on this because he's written a lot on it in the last few years. I sort of feel like he's a Johnny come lately because I've been writing this stuff for about 15, 20 years making this case. But Steven Pinker has actually done an excellent job. Has, uh, his book enlightenment now, uh, which is a books that have been defensive enlightenment values. Most of that book is he, I, I found that book to be is actually philosophically. If you're looking for a really great philosophical explanation of what the enlightenment was and how would she eat the results, it's not very strong, but if you just want to have drilled into your head over and over again, this story of human progress, I highly recommend the book. I think most people need to have that drilled into their heads. Speaker 1 00:03:36 He has hundreds of pages of where he goes, you know, exhaustively over statistics on every different aspect of human life and shows the, you know, uh, material improvement, the proven a wealthy improvement in, across in health, the, the improvement across all different factors. Um, and the it's distilled sometimes in a graph that that one person is called the most important graph in the world. And it shows basically wealth per capita wealth per human being on, on, on, on the planet earth, uh, a graph of that over like 2000 years. And basically the whole graph is mostly flat until about 1800. And then suddenly it goes whoosh. And does this, you know, geometric, uh, increased tills, practically vertical. And that's really the story of the last 200 years is what somebody has called. Somebody called the great escape, meaning the great escape from poverty and it's accelerated. Speaker 1 00:04:29 And it starts out in, in Europe with the industrial revolution, but over time, it spread across the world, it's accelerated and it's spread across the world, uh, in the last few decades. So that, uh, um, you know, we're now at the point where like, since in the last 20, 30 years, something like 85% of the people who were in what what's classified as extreme poverty, living on something like less than a dollar a day, the number of people in extreme poverty has been cut by something like 85%. It's these enormous progress, uh, in the conquest of poverty across the world, as the benefits of the industrial revolution have spread outward and gone across, uh, to places that they'd never reached before. Um, but what Steven Pinker shows and, and I, I've also looked up a lot of statistics on this, as you can see evidence of moral and intellectual progress as well. Speaker 1 00:05:24 So, you know, one of the fallbacks is people will say, oh, well, sure, we have material progress. You can get a cheap, big screen TV, but morally beef degraded. Well, by some measures, it's hard to measure moral degradation, but by some measures, for example, one of the reasons Pinker's cited on this so much as he actually made us as made a detailed study on violence. So the history of violence and argues that, you know, with the exception of when we think of the crime wave of the 1970s, that's kind of a blip. The overall historical pattern is that human societies are less violent today than they used to be. Uh, the idea of this sort of this ideal, uh, sort of Rousseau Soviet ideal of the peaceful hunter gatherer, the noble Savage. He says the life among these peaceful hunter-gatherers. So it was actually extremely violent, violent death was much more common people killing each other over food, over land, over women, whatever that was much more common a thousand years ago were 10,000 years ago. Speaker 1 00:06:22 And we are live in much less violent societies today, but also education. When we're talking about moral or intellectual or spiritual progress, far more people are educated and have access to education today than I've ever had in the human in human history. Uh, people have more access, especially with the internet and everything like that. They have more access to, to literature, to arch, to music than they have ever had in all of human history. Uh, so, you know, if, if people aren't taking advantage of that, that's up to them, but they have more access to it. So we can see that it's not just material progress, that with material progress also comes by some measures, substantial, moral and intellectual progress. All right. So if this is the overall story in contradiction to what we keep hearing of everybody saying, oh, gloom and doom, the world's going to end either by global warming or, you know, moral collapse or dictatorship, or what have you, there's this disconnect between our normal political debate and what's actually happening in the world. Speaker 1 00:07:27 And so we have to adjust our polite, we should actually be adjusting our political debate to match that. And I have a specific thing to, I'm going to wrap up soon to go to because we have, so we have more discussion, but I think also it poses a specific challenge to Objectivists based on the history of objectives. But I think this comes from, you know, Atlas shrugged tells the story, uh, you know, so Iran has this influence on us as objectivist and Atlas shrugged tells the story of here's society collapsing, and here are the causes of the collapse, and it's indicated how we can get out of the collapse and how we could go back to having progress, but the stories about the collapse. And I think that sort of has colored the way Objectivists look at things over the years that we still sort of think of ourselves as being, you know, uh, in the early pages, right before the story of Atlas shrugged begins, where we're starting to slide into collapse. Speaker 1 00:08:19 And through the 1970s, I totally get that somebody would have that, you know, that would see Barilla over a period of years when things actually keep improving. You have to sort of request one. And I think one specific thing that happened, I, this struck first struck me, and this is why I said I've been in the, on the progress brigade for awhile. It first struck me about two. I think it was 2003 and I was editing the intellectual activist and we were coming up on the 25th anniversary. So I sort of did a, a review of, you know, here's all the things that were written in the intellectual activists here are all the things that were covered over the years, over 25 years. And a pattern I noticed is that the implicit theme of, of the, the news coverage and the intellectual activists, and especially in the Peter Schwartz years, was the implicit theme was here's how the world is going to hell because people haven't accepted objectivist ideas. Speaker 1 00:09:13 So it's like, here are all the things that are going wrong because people have the battle of the wrong ideas. And, you know, early on you could see, you know, this began publishing in 1978, you know, there's inflation, there's the energy crisis. There's, you know, the Iran hostage crisis, there's the Soviet union, uh, on the March. Uh, there were lots of things that were going wrong and you could do, could have a lot to discuss if you want to talk about the world going downhill. But what the pattern I noticed is that as soon as something stops being a problem, it stopped being discussed. So there was never an article follow-up article later on saying, well, okay, now that we don't have inflation anymore, how did we do that? How do we get rid of inflation? Uh, there was relatively little discussion among Objectivists about, you know, the fall of the Berlin wall, the Soviet union overnight, practically ups and disappears without a shot being fired, uh, uh, or at least not a shot directly between us and them. Speaker 1 00:10:04 And there was relatively little discussion about how did this happen? Why would, why did this happen? So I think objectivism has admired into the scene and needs to adjust itself in the same way that it's not just about, oh, here's, what's horrible in the world. You also have to be able to explain what went, right. So I wrote it, I wrote a series of articles called what went, right. Sort of addressing this. And, um, the overall thing I want to say about how this would affect our view of the world and the way we advocate things is I think we need to move less from that perspective of here's, how things are going wrong, because people have the bad ideas and focus more on. I think we'd have a far more interesting and enlightening and much more friendly debates in the culture. If it were a battle over who gets to claim credit for all the things that are going right. Speaker 1 00:10:53 You know, if we go put it and say, well, look, you know, extreme poverty has been, has been conquered. And we can say, well, that's because of capitalism. And that's because of science and technology and reason. And as objective as there's all sorts of things, we can bring to that discussion to say, here's how the adoption of these enlightenment ideas, which we stand for and are able to defend the adoption of those ideas has led to all these beneficial results. So I think that would really kind of appended and very much changed the way we look at the world and the way we debate things, if we sort of grasp and recognize the extent to which human progress has occurred and is still occurring. Speaker 0 00:11:31 That's great. Well, this has also been a theme of ours at the Atlas society for a long time. Um, we've interviewed Marian TUPE, uh, is of course the author of 10 trends, every smart person should know. And, um, you'll have no Speaker 1 00:11:49 Website human progress Speaker 0 00:11:51 Progress. If you, Speaker 1 00:11:54 If you really want to convince yourself, the world is going better, they have they're full of charts and graphs. And I love a good chart and graph, uh, all full of this data, basically comprehensively demonstrating this. Speaker 0 00:12:05 Yes. Uh, also, um, and TUPE, we've had on the show, um, and, uh, Marion to be Johan Norberg and John Tierney, who, who wrote the power of bad. And he, uh, talked about just our, our wiring, you know, how evolutionarily we've been, um, optimized to perceive threats and focus on them. Uh, and I guess the flip side of that is, is our theme of gratitude. You know, my art, um, draw my life video. My name is gratitude and, um, uh, professor Kelly's work on why, uh, gratitude is in our selfish best interest. So I wanted to also remind everyone, first of all, welcome, thanks for joining us. Uh, we are going to record this. So, uh, we do make these chats available on our podcast platform. So if you ever miss one, or you want to go back and check something out, um, you'll find them there. And, uh, I wanted to, uh, recognize, um, professor Jason kill one of our senior scholars. I'm just going to give him an invite. And Casey has something to add to the conversation. And, um, Aaron tau also is here. Um, he, uh, runs our, our book club and I think they had a great book club last night on, um, Stephen Coonan's book unsettled. So, um, so please raise your hand folks, if you, if you have a question or a comment, um, you are welcome, Jason. Speaker 2 00:13:46 Hi. Hi Jennifer. Hi. Um, this is very, very interesting, um, because, um, I tend to been apart from the statistics and the data that's out there, I just, I tend to be an optimist by nature, hopeless optimist, and believe in the idea of moral progress against the backdrop of all the evidence. But there are a couple of comments I wanted to make. One is, um, uh, kind of question or a kind of observation aside from sort of hysterical children, um, and apocalyptic adults who sort of posit the end of the world. It seems to me that what I, what arises in my mind is not whether the world will end, but whether a type of world will end that is consonant with man's nature as a rational creature, that is, will the millionaire that is consonant with his nature as a rational being that is the constitutional of the United States, which was the first unprecedented phenomenon that had a one-to-one epistemological match up between the conditions that are required for man's survival and, and tapping directly into, into, to man's nature as, uh, both a biological and a political creature came together for the first time in history. Speaker 2 00:15:13 So, and I think that's a very real, so I don't think the world is going to end, and I think short of, you know, hysterical children and, and, and apocalyptic adults, but for me, the more pressing question Rob is, um, as a professor of twenty-five years in the classroom, you know, now I see where the type of world that is conducive to flourishing, to thriving against the backdrop of all this progress, because you're right, people are getting an education, more people are getting an education, but what type of education are they getting? It's a completely, um, nefarious kind that they're getting in the universities today. So capitalism, reason, logic, objective reality, although phenomena that promote them India in which we need to matriculate as rational creatures are being undercut. So my question very briefly for you is if we sort of think of the T a type of world that will end, and we look at the forces, the powerful forces that are at work in the world today to obliterate the progress that you outlined, which I completely agree with exists, occasional poverty, longevity of life, um, like et cetera, not to say nothing of hygiene, um, are those forces, uh, are those forces strong enough to overpower or to undermine a particular type of world that is conducive to our nature? Speaker 2 00:16:52 So that will not just survive, but that we will continue to flourish and thrive within the midst of this moral progress that you've so eloquently outweighed. Speaker 1 00:17:02 So, so the way I would, I would take the question, maybe rephrase it. I think you get the essence of it is we've achieved this tremendous progress, but what if we're about to basically throw it all away? What if by not appreciating it, and by opposing all the things that created that progress, we're actually going to undercut it and destroy it. I mean, you, you, you basically are we in the last, uh, central last years of the Roman empire, because they actually did that. You know, they had a highly advanced classical world, incredible achievements in art and technology and, um, uh, uh, and law and that sort of thing. And then they went ahead and they deliberately quite deliberately threw it all away and destroyed the classical civilization. Um, so that's, and that, I think that is the danger, but I also want to caution against this sort of, I call it, um, uh, uh, cultural Malthusian aneurysm, right? Speaker 1 00:17:56 So Thomas Malthus is the west. A lot of these doomsday claims made by the environmentalist come from the calculations made by Reverend Thomas. Malthus a scientist and intellectual in the late 18th century, who basically said the basic calculation he made was that the progress problems and needs of human life are going to expand faster than our ability to provide for them. Uh, and specifically it was about food. You know, the, the, the population was going to expand faster than our ability to grow food, to feed people. And so we're going to start, and of course this turns out to be famously and completely wrong, even though the idea persists in environmentalist today, it turns out to be spectacularly wrong, because what happened is we had economic and technological progress. And what happened is that our ability to solve problems advance far he's writing right before the industrial revolution, when he didn't realize it's our ability to solve problems was going to expand far, far, far, far faster than our ability than, than, than the population pressures that would create problems. Speaker 1 00:18:58 Um, and I think that the cultural method is yet is the idea that we have all these threats, uh, culturally and intellectually, that we're not going to be able to rally that, you know, it's not all we're going to get this dwindling number of people trying to rally to, to address these cultural and intellectual threats to progress. And I have a little more confidence that actually, as these problems pop up, we will rally and people will come up with new ideas, or they will at least come up with defenses of the old ideas and they'll be asking questions. And there's the possibility of us being able to answer these woken, the, you know, the, the political correctness or wokeness of today's universities will be able to answer these things intellectually and culturally and come up with alternatives to them. Um, I'm seeing some signs that we might be sort of turning the tide on wokeness. Speaker 1 00:19:54 I'm sure it'll take a long time for it to reach back to where you are, Jason in the universities, um, in the wider culture. I think it's starting to be beaten back, but I think that is the sort of the question of the age, but I think it comes from the fact that again, the radicalism of political correctness of Marxism, of, of the, of the left and also of the liberal, right, a lot of the radical, some of these anti enlightenment ideas, these ideas that are going to turn back the side of progress, a lot of that comes from the idea that they, they convince people. The world's a horrible place. America is shot through with systemic racism. Uh, the, the working class is being built, bled dry by the evil capitalists that the world's about to end because of global warming. They create this apocalyptic view of the world because it's what justifies the idea of saying everything there isn't supposed to society we have right now, it all has to be burned down, burned to the ground, has to be thrown out. Speaker 1 00:20:52 We have to completely get rid of it in favor of a different avatar of a radically different system. So in a way, arguing for progress is part of the way that we help turn the tide against the intellectual forces that are trying to stop progress, because we show that no, actually, if you create this radical system where you burn everything to the ground, you're actually going to be hugely destructive to a society. That's actually quite good. Uh, I think one of the implications of if we recognize progress is we'd have even as radicals as I am as a radical pro capitalist, it would imply a more incrementalist approach to change and reform more of a sense of, well, actually, if things are pretty good, you don't go radically change the entire basis of society. You go, when you find one thing at a time and say, well, let's change this and let's improve that. And let's question this assumption over there. And it, it, it evolves a much less radical and more incremental and more civil and less revolutionary attitude towards how you, how you discuss and debate political and cultural issues. Speaker 3 00:22:01 Roger, welcome back. Thanks Jennifer. Hey, Rob, again, thanks again for joining. I've got a, uh, a question. So you mentioned, um, Atlas shrugged and you know, that wonderful thought experiment. What if we got rid of, or not comfortable? What if we took the best and brightest and, you know, went to a valley in Colorado, what would happen? Um, of course it would, it would burn down and, and I, uh, I consider myself a Galtier in, because I actually think that that's the right move. Uh, generally I try to organize my sort of thinking and business around that, but I get the sense that uh Objectivists um, and some of what you said right there might resist that, that, uh, that move or that, that strategy to deal with the world as it is. So, so I'm wondering if you could, if you could just comment on, you know, what might be the difference between, you know, how, how we in ran presents that sort of thought experiments solution as a way to address the issues of the world versus what, you know, an objectivist, uh, you know, like yourself might might say today, that is if somebody came up said, Hey, let's do that. Speaker 3 00:23:08 Yeah. What would you, what would be your response? Speaker 1 00:23:12 Well, you know, I sort of feel about that the way I do about the gold books. Now, I've the part of the history here is in the early nineties, I worked for a financial briefly worked in the financial media. And so I know that forever, we know for a long time, there've been the guys back there saying, oh, everybody should be invested. I guess that the moderate equivalent would be the Bitcoin people, right. But it's like, everybody should be invested in gold because the world's currencies are going to collapse. And, you know, these are people who consistently basically said that, that the economy is, uh, the whole world currency system on the verge of collapse. So they've been saying this, you know, consistently for 50, 60 years. And it's one of those cases where, you know, the old joke is that they predicted seven of the last two recessions, uh, so that they're constantly, constantly predicting gloom and doom. Speaker 1 00:24:00 You can always claim, oh, you know, every time there's a market downturn, you can always claim to be proven, right. Um, but you know, if you actually did that, and if you actually, uh, B acted on that gloom and doom approach, and as part of as directing your investment portfolio, you would have missed enormous gains made, you know, kind of consistently over the years by the stock market and that sort of thing. So it's, if you're too much, I think that that's my attitude towards, if you read the Atlas shrugged in 1958, and you hold yourself off, up in a valley in Colorado with your existing technology and wealth of 1958, you know, even if you would survive, managed to survive with a small group of people, unless they were all super geniuses who were going to advance even faster, you probably would have missed out on this enormous you'll global economic growth and technological progress of the last, what is it? Speaker 1 00:24:50 63 years, something like that. Uh, so that's sort of the practical answer. Now, the other part of the answer, probably part of the answer is it was a literary thought experiment, right? It was, she created a series of conditions in her fictional world that would make coast strike, be the correct and only answer. Um, but those conditions are different than the conditions we have. And it's kind of subtle because she doesn't, you know, she doesn't show you what happens before page one, uh, it's sort of hinted at, and I think specifically I wrote about this in my book and Atlas shrugged, that she doesn't really show you a lot of the political background. So clearly if you read it carefully, you can see that it's implicitly, that political and intellectual freedom has disappeared somehow in the years before Atlas drug begins. So, you know, in, in all the debates that are happening. Speaker 1 00:25:44 So Dagny Taggart has never invite event and invited to come on to CNN or Fox to give her position on what we should do about the railroads, right? That the, the good guys are basically without any voice at all in the media. And this is somehow happened. And she doesn't focus on that. She doesn't really show you how it happened or give the specifics of it because that's not her theme in this, in the story that it would be a distraction from her theme, but she does indicate imply throughout the book. She has a little subtle implications and it become less subtle if the book goes on and we get to the later stages where the dictatorships really showing its teeth. Uh, but there are these implications that, that debate had that political and, and, and intellectual debate has been shut down and it's not occurring. Speaker 1 00:26:29 And that's the cake that I think that's the point we have to get to before you said, okay, you know, we go to a valley in Colorado where we all move to Singapore, or we, you know, see stead off of south America or whatever the plat is for withdrawing. Um, but, uh, so that's, that's the other part, but the last part, and this is the radical one, I think that I think objectives needs to rethink. And I got into a lot of trouble, uh, over this theory about 15 years ago. Uh, and that is, I think that the objectivist theory about how ideas move history has been excessively top down. And what I mean by that is it tends to be, you know, the, the idea that ideas move history and philosophical ideas have an effect on, on, and determine the course of, of civilization tended to come to be boiled down to mean the ideas being taught in philosophy classes at universities are the one single determinant that then filters. Speaker 1 00:27:24 Like I said, from the top down, it goes from the top down and totally dominates every other field. And I have, I propose more, I think we need to have a more of a bottom up or reciprocal view that the advance of civilization in all these other different ways, the advance of trade and of capitalism, global capitalism, uh, scientific and technological education in produces this tremendous reserve of implicit good philosophical ideas. Now, what I mean by implicit is if you get a scientific and technological education, you are basically being taught the rules of rational thinking. You're being taught the, the way, how to think, and every guard forth thinking rationally, and that is being propagated out in a way that helps counteract. And I think that explains some of how, you know, Jason can be absolutely right, that if you're dealing with students who are in the universities, especially the elite universities and looking at the explicit philosophical ideas they're being taught, you think we're all gonna collapse tomorrow. Speaker 1 00:28:33 Um, but then you have to realize there's something, something must basically it's, it's me going through that experience 30 years ago in college, and then seeing that we didn't collapse and sort of asking you, well, something must be beating that back. Something must be moving us in the other direction. And I think a lot of it is the spread of implicit good ideas, uh, specifically regard for reason by way of sciences technology, our regard for individualism by way of commerce and trade and the way people actually live their lives. And also, you know, you could see good ideas that it's spread in economics. Um, one of the big, I think, uh, stories of intellectual progress that we tend not to think about very much, uh, but I think is underestimated is what's happened in the field of psychology, where, from what I can tell psycho when the old 41 theory of psychoanalysis has faded in favor of what's called cognitive behavioral therapy, which is basically exactly Iran's view of the emotions, the emotions are the results of thinking. Speaker 1 00:29:35 And that has become, is becoming, I th from what I can tell is becoming the dominant new field of psychology. So there's all this progress happening in other fields that is sort of counteracting the continued collapse of, or the, the ongoing collapse of explicit philosophy. And I think we have to adjust ourselves from this sort of purely top down model of how ideas affect the world and realize that it's actually, you ideas are coming from all different directions from the bottom up from the sciences, from the, uh, um, from other intellectual fields. And that it's not just the stuff being injected in the, in the, in the philosophy classes, because if that were what determined the course of the world, I think we wouldn't have made it this far. Speaker 3 00:30:21 Can I just say the go for the golf move to work? Uh, the, the, the only way to make it work is if you can get all the best people to go to Colorado with you work, if you just go on your own or with a couple of your buddies. Um, and so I I've always thought that as the test, if you can get them to go, then the world is that way. If you can't get them to go, then the world isn't that way, maybe it is doing Speaker 1 00:30:42 Well. Also the, uh, in, in my book on Atlas shrugged, I, I did something where I took, um, I compared dolts strategy in his strike. I compared it to Vaclav hovels, uh, essay, um, the power of the powerless and his recommendation basically, except the, it set the blueprint for the whole dissident movement for the last 10 years of Soviet rule. And I thought that was fascinating, the parallels there, and it's like he had come up with many of the same ideas as I, and ran on a totally parallel track. And he sort of did he, he, it's his version of gold sculpture that I think is interesting and maybe a model for a much more realistic model for us in, in the societies where we live, because his version of golf culture wasn't, oh, we're all going to find a valley somewhere in Czechoslovakia and, and pick out some up in the, up in the Hills and Bohemia we'll find the valuable, we'll be secretly away from the secret police. It was more that you build a parallel society that is you have artists and intellectuals and, uh, people doing whatever they can to work outside the confines of the propaganda.