Yaron Brook is an objectivist. Yoram Hazony is a national conservative. This is a conversation and debate about national conservatism vs individualism. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- Noom: https://trynoom.com/lex
- InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex and use code Lex25 to get 25% off
- SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX to get a free security camera
- ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free
- Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium

EPISODE LINKS:
Yaron's Twitter: https://twitter.com/yaronbrook
Yaron's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ybrook
Yoram's Twitter: https://twitter.com/yhazony
Yoram's Website: https://www.yoramhazony.org/
Yaron Brook's Books:
In Pursuit of Wealth: https://amzn.to/3qmXuGo
Equal Is Unfair: https://amzn.to/3FopKOV
Yoram Hazony's Books:
Conservatism: https://amzn.to/3sv0Nhe
The Virtue of Nationalism: https://amzn.to/3mtxqs6

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:37 - Conservatism
8:32 - Importance of history
20:35 - Rationalism vs empiricism
26:05 - Communism
34:08 - Otto von Bismarck
38:30 - Edmund Burke and the French Revolution
43:17 - USA's founding fathers
56:12 - Founding documents
1:18:01 - Cohesion and Individualism
1:38:54 - Love and relationships
1:47:06 - Individual freedom
2:01:34 - Having children
2:15:19 - Reason vs emotions
2:22:09 - Nationalism
2:34:22 - Finding love
2:46:09 - Hope for the future
2:51:33 - Meaning of life

SOCIAL:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

The following is a conversation with Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony.

This is Yaron's third time on this podcast and Yoram's first time.

Yaron Brook is an objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, host of the Yaron Brook Show, and the co-author of Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair.

Yoram Hazony is a national conservatism thinker, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation that hosted the National Conservatism Conference.

He's also the host of the NatCon Talk and author of The Virtue of Nationalism and an upcoming book called Conservatism, A Rediscovery.

Allow me to say a few words about each part of the two-word title of this episode, Nationalism Debate.

I would like to have a few conversations this year that are a kind of debate with 2 or 3 people that hold differing views on a particular topic, but come to the table with respect for each other and a desire to learn and discover something interesting together through the empathetic exploration of the tension between their ideas.

There's no structure, there's no winners, except of course just a bit of trash talking to keep it fun.

Some of these topics will be very difficult and I hope you can keep an open mind and have patience with me as kind of moderator who tries to bring out the best in each person and the ideas discussed.

Okay, that's my comment on the word debate.

This debate could have been called nationalism versus individualism, or national conservatism versus individualism, or just conservatism versus individualism.

As we discuss in this episode, these words have slightly different meanings depending on who you ask.

This is especially true, I think, for any word that ends in ism.

I personally enjoy the discussion of the meaning of such philosophical words.

I don't think it's possible to arrive at a perfect definition that everybody agrees with, but the process of trying to do so for a bit is interesting and productive, at least to me, as long as we don't get stuck there as some folks sometimes do in these conversations.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony.

I attended the excellent debate between the 2 of you yesterday at UT Austin.

The debate was between ideas of conservatism represented by Yoram Hazony and ideas of individualism represented by Yaron Brook.

Let's start with the topics of the debate.

Maybe in the way you were thinking about it yesterday.

What to you are some principles of conservatism?

Let me define it and then we can get into principles if you want.

When I talk about political conservatism, I'm talking about a political standpoint that regards the recovery, elaboration, and restoration of tradition as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.

Okay, so this is something that if you have time to talk about it like we do on the show, it's worth emphasizing that conservatism is not like liberalism or Marxism.

Liberalism and Marxism are both kind of universal theories and they claim to be able to tell you what's good for human beings at all times and all places.

And conservatism is a little bit different because it's going to carry different values in every nation, in every tribe.

You know, even every family, you can say, has somewhat different values.

And these loyalty groups, they compete with 1 another.

So it's deeply rooted in history of that particular area of land.

You're right that many forms of conservatism are tied to a particular place.

So how does the implementation of conservatism to you differ from the ideal of conservatism, the implementations you've seen of political conservatism in the United States and the rest of the world?

Because it's a loaded term, like most political terms.

So when people think about conservative in the United States, they think about the Republican Party.

What, can you kind of disambiguate some of this?

Yeah, that's a really important question.

Usually the word conservative is associated with Edmund Burke and with the English common law tradition going back, you know, centuries and centuries.

There's kind of a classical English conservative tradition that goes Fortescue, Hooker, Koch, Seldon, Hale, Burke, Blackstone before Burke.

If you take that kind of as a benchmark and you compare it, then you can compare it to things like the American Federalist Party at the time of the American founding is in many respects very much in keeping with that tradition.

As you go forward, there's an increasing mix of liberalism into conservatism.

And I think by the time you get to the 1960s with William Buckley and Frank Meyer, you know, the jargon term is fusionism.

By the time you get there, it's arguable that their conservatism isn't very conservative anymore, that it's kind of a public liberalism mixed with a private conservatism.

So a lot of the debate that we have today about, you know, what does the word conservatism actually mean?

A lot of the confusion comes from that, comes from the fact that on the 1 hand, we have people use the term, I think, properly historically to refer to this common law tradition of which Burke was a spokesman.

But there are lots of other people who, when they say conservative, they just mean liberal.

I mean, It's a problem just to have an intelligent debate is difficult when people are using the word almost too antithetical.

What would you say the essential idea of conservatism is, time?

So a lot of physicists, when they form models of the universe, they don't consider time.

So everything is dealt with instantaneously.

A particle is represented fully by its current state, velocity, and position.

You're saying, So you're arguing with all of physics and your father, as we always do, that their time matters in conservatives.

That's the fundamental element is the full history matters, and you cannot separate the individual from the history, from the roots that they come from.

The parallel in political theory is what's called rationalism.

I guess we'll probably talk about that some.

Rationalism is kind of an instantaneous, timeless thing.

Before I mentioned that liberalism and various enlightenment theories, they don't include time at all.

Their goal is to say, look, there's such a thing as universal human reason.

All human beings, if they reason properly, will come to the same conclusions.

If that's true, then it removes the time consideration.

It removes tradition and context because everywhere where you are at any time, you ought to be able to use reason and come to the same conclusions about politics or morals.

So that's a theory like Immanuel Kant or John Locke is an example, Hobbes is an example.

That kind of political theorizing really does say at a given instant, we can know pretty much everything that we need to know, at least the big things.

It's a traditionalist view, exactly as you say, that says that history is crucial.

So, Yaron, you say that history is interesting, but perhaps not crucial in the context of individualism.

No, I mean, I think there's a false dichotomy he presented here, And that is that 1 view holds that you can derive anything from a particular historical path and kind of an empirical view.

And if we know the history, we know where we should be tomorrow.

And the other path is we ignore history, we ignore facts, we ignore what's going on, we can derive from some a priori axioms, we can derive a truth right now.

And both are false, both of those views in my view are false and you know, Ayn Rand and I reject both of those views.

And I think the better thinkers of the Enlightenment did as well, although they sometimes fall into the trap of appearing like rationalists.

And I agree on 1 thing, and that is that Kant is 1 of, you know, we've talked about this in the past, Lex.

We both think Kant is, I at least think Kant is probably the most destructive philosopher since Plato, who was pretty destructive himself.

And part of the problem is that Kant divorces reason from reality.

That is, he divorces reason from history.

He divorces reason from experience, because we don't have direct experience of reality according to Kant, right?

We're removed from that direct experience.

But I view Kant as the anti-enlightenment.

That is, I view Kant as the destroyer of good enlightenment thinking.

And I acknowledge a lot of History of philosophy, people who do history of philosophy view Kant as the embodiment of the Enlightenment, that is the ultimate.

I think both Rousseau and Kant are fundamentally, the goal, the mission in life is to destroy the Enlightenment.

So my view is neither of those options are the right option.

That is the true reason-based, reason is not divorced from reality, it's quite the opposite.

Reason is a tool, it's a faculty of identifying and integrating What?

It's identifying and integrating the facts of reality as we know them through sense perception or through the study of history, through what actually happened.

So it's the integration of those facts, it's the knowledge of that history.

And then what we do is we abstract away principles based on what's worked in the past, what hasn't worked in the past, the consequences of different ideas, different paths, different actions.

We abstract away principles that then can be universal.

We can come up with a universal principle, it turns out that it's not.

But if we have the whole scope of human history, we can derive principles as we do in life, as individuals, we derive principles that are then truths that we can live by.

But you don't do that by ignoring history, you do that by learning history, by understanding history, by understanding in a sense tradition and where it leads to, and then trying to do better.

And I think good thinkers are constantly trying to do better based on what they know about the past and what they know about the present.

What's the difference between studying history on a journey of reason and tradition?

So you mentioned that Burke understood that reason begins with inherited tradition yesterday.

So what's the difference between studying history but then being free to go any way you want, and tradition where it feels more, not, I don't wanna say a negative term like burden, but it's, there's more of a momentum that forces you to go the same way as your ancestors?

It's the recognition that people are wrong, often are wrong.

Including your parents, including your teachers, including everybody, everybody is potentially wrong.

And that you can't accept anybody just because they happen to come before you.

That is, you have to evaluate and judge, and you have to have a standard by which to evaluate and judge the actions of those who came before you, whether they are your parents, whether they are the state in which you happen to be born, whether they are somebody on the other side of planet Earth, you can judge them if you have a standard.

Now my standard, and I think the right standard is, human well-being, that is, that which is good for human beings, qua human beings, is the standard by which we judge.

So I can say that certain periods of history were bad.

They happened, it's important to study them, it's important to understand what they did that made them bad so we cannot do that again.

And I can say certain cultures, certain periods in time were good.

Because they promoted human well-being and human flourishing.

And then derive from that, okay, what is it that made a particular culture good?

What is it that made that particular culture positive in terms of human well-being and human flourishing?

And hopefully from that, I can derive a principle.

Okay, if I want human flourishing and human well-being in the future, I wanna be more like these guys and less like those guys.

I wanna derive what is the principle that will guide me in the future.

That's, I think, how human knowledge ultimately develops.

I think people often make a mistake, just, I'm not saying your own, but lots of people, you know, don't actually read the original sources.

And so what happens is people will attack conservatives assuming that conservatives think that whatever comes from the past is right.

And actually, it's very difficult to find a thinker who actually says something like that.

Seldon or Burke, the big conservative theorists, Hooker, they're all people who understand that the tradition carries with it mistakes that were made in the past.

And this is actually, I think, an important part of their empiricism, is that they see the search for truth as something a society does by trial and error.

And what that means is that in any given moment, you have to be aware of the possibility that things that you've inherited are actually false.

And the job of the political thinker or the jurist or the philosopher is not to dig in and say, you know, whatever it is that we've inherited is right.

The job is to look at the society as a whole and say, look, we have this job of, first of all, conservation, just making sure that we don't lose good things that we've had, and second, seeing if we can repair things in order to improve them where it's necessary or where it's possible.

And that process is actually a creative process.

This is a way in which I think it is similar to Joran's philosophy that you take the inherited tradition and you look for a way that you can shape it in order to make it something better than it was.

That's a baseline for what we call conservatism.

Just a comment, so the trial and error, the errors is, you're proud of the errors.

So you mentioned trial and error a few times yesterday.

It's basically accepting that the journey is going to have flaws as opposed to saying, I mean, the conclusion there is the current system is flawed and it will always be flawed.

When you listen to your own talk, there's much more of a optimism for the system being perfect now, or potentially soon, or it could be perfect.

And to me, the way I heard it is almost like accepting that the system is flawed and through trial and error will improve.

And Yaron says, no, we can have a perfection now.

I think the difference is that at some point, just like in science, I think, 1 can stop the trial and error and say, I can now see a pattern here.

I can see that certain actions lead to bad consequences, certain actions lead to good consequences.

Let me try to abstract away what is it that is good and what is it that is bad and build a system around what is good and reject what is bad.

I think ultimately if you read the founding fathers and whether we call them conservatives or individuals, What the founding fathers actually did, all of them, I think, is study history, they all did.

They all talk about history, they all talk about examples of other cultures, whether they go back to the Republic in Venice or back to the ancient Greeks.

So they studied these, they learned lessons from them, they tried to figure out what has worked in the past and what hasn't and tried to do our principles.

Now in my view, they got pretty close to what I would consider kind of an ideal, but they didn't get it completely right.

And here we sit 200 and something years after the declaration and after the Constitution.

I think we can look back and say, okay, well, what did they get right?

What did they get wrong based on how is it done and where are the flaws and we can improve on it.

I think we can get closer to perfection and based on those kind of observations, based on that kind of abstraction, that kind of discovery of what is true, just like at some point you do the experiments, you do the trial and error, and now you come up with a scientific principle.

It is true that 100 years later you might discover that, hey, I missed something, there's something.

But to not take the full lesson, to insist on incrementalism, to insist on we're just gonna tinker with the system instead of saying no, there's something really wrong with having a king, there's something really wrong with not having any representation, or whatever the standard needs to be.

In the name of we don't wanna move too fast, I think is a mistake.

And the problem with trial and error in politics is that we're talking about human life, right?

So there was a big trial around communism.

And you know, 100 million people paid the price for the trial.

I could have told them in advance, as did many people, that it would not work.

There are principles of human nature, principles that we can study from history, principles about economics and other aspects.

You know, we've had communal arrangements throughout history.

There was an experiment with fascism and there've been experiments with all kinds of political systems.

Sad that we did them because many of us knew they wouldn't work.

We should learn the lesson and I think that all of history now converges on 1 lesson and that is what we need to do is build systems that protect individual freedom.

That is the core, that's what ultimately leads to human flourishing and human success and human achievement and to the extent that we place anything above that individual, whether it's the state, whether it's the ethnicity, whether it's the race, whether it's the bourgeois, whether it's whatever it happens to be, a class or whatever, whenever we place something above the individual the consequence of negative, that's 1 of these principles that I think we can derive from studying 3,000 years of civilization.

And it's tragic I think, because we're gonna keep experimenting, sadly.

We're going to keep experimenting with different forms of collectivism, and we're going to keep paying the price in human life and in missed opportunities for human flourishing and human success and human wealth and prosperity.

Well, look, let's take communism as a good example.

None of the major conservative thinkers would say, you know what's a good idea?

A good idea would be to experiment by raising everything that we've inherited and starting from scratch.

I mean, that's the conservative complaint or accusation against rationalists.

I mean, using rationalism, Let's take Descartes kind of as a benchmark.

Yeah, these are 2 terms that are in philosophy, especially in epistemology, they're often compared to 1 another.

You're on, said that it's a false dichotomy, and maybe it is a bit exaggerated, but that doesn't mean it's not useful for conceptualizing the domain.

So, a rationalist is somebody like Descartes, who says, I'm going to set aside, I'm gonna try to set aside everything I know, everything I've inherited, I'm gonna start from scratch.

And he explicitly says, in evaluating the inheritance of the past, he explicitly says, you take a look at the histories that we have, they're not reliable.

You take a look at the moral and the scientific writings that we receive, they're not very good.

His baseline is to look very critically at the past and say, look, I'm evaluating it.

I think all in all it's just not worth very much.

And so whatever I do, beginning from scratch, is gonna be better as long as, and here's his caveat, it says, as long as I'm proceeding from self-evident assumptions, from self-evident premises, things that you can't argue against.

Right, and then from there, deducing what he calls infallible conclusions.

So that model of self-evident premises to infallible conclusions, I'm calling that rationalism.

I think that's Kind of a standard academic jargon term.

And it's opposed to empiricism, which is a thinker, I think in universities, usually the empiricist is David Hume.

And David Hume will say, we can't learn anything the way that Descartes said.

I mean, there is nothing that's that self-evident and that infallible.

So Hume proposes, based on Newton and Boyle and the new physical sciences.

So Jung proposes a science of man, and the science of man sounds an awful lot like what Joran just said, which is we're gonna take a look at human nature, at the nature of societies.

Human nature, we're gonna try to abstract towards fixed principles for describing it, human societies, we're gonna try to do the same thing.

And from there we get, for example, contemporary economics, but we also get sociology and anthropology, which cut in a different direction.

I think empiricism, the 1 thing I disagree is, I think empiricism rarely comes to these abstractions.

I mean, they want more facts, it's always about collecting more evidence.

But this is where I think Ayn Rand is so unusual and where I think there's something new here, right?

And that's a bold statement given the history of philosophy, but I think Ayn Rand is something new.

And so she says, yes, we agree about rationalism and that it's inherently wrong.

Empiricism has the problem of, okay, where does it lead?

You never come to a conclusion, you're just accumulating evidence.

There's something in addition, there's a third alternative, which he is positing, which is using empirical evidence, not denying empirical evidence, recognizing that there are some axioms, there's some axioms that we all, at the base of all of our knowledge, that are starting points, we're not rejecting axiomatic knowledge, and integrating those 2 and identifying the fact that based on these axioms and based on these empirical evidence, we can come to truths.

We have certain axioms, scientific axioms, we have certain experiments that we run, and then we can come to some identification of a truth.

And That truth is always gonna be challenged by new information, by new knowledge, but as long as that's what we know, that is what truth.

So truth is contextual in the sense that it's contextual, it's based on that knowledge that surrounds it.

So it's afford to change if you get new facts.

Absolutely, it's always available to change if the facts that you get, and they really are.

I mean, the burden of changing what you've come to, a conclusion of truth is high, so you'd have to have real evidence that it's not true, but that happens all the time.

We discover that what we thought was true is not true, and it can happen in politics and ethics, even more so than in science, because they're much messier fields.

But the idea is that you can come to a truth, but it's not just deductive.

We learn from observing reality and again, coming to principles about what works and what's not.

And here I think this is, Ayn Rand is different.

She doesn't fall into the, and she's different in her politics and she's different in her epistemology, she doesn't fall into the conventional view.

She's an opponent of Hume and she's an opponent of Descartes and she's certainly an opponent of Kant.

If it's okay, can we walk back to criticism of communism?

You're both critics of communism, socialism.

You started to say that conservatives criticize it on the basis of like rationalism, that you're throwing away the past, you're starting from scratch.

Is that the fundamental description of why communism failed?

I think the fundamental difference between rationalists and empiricists is the question of whether you're throwing away the past.

And it caches out as a distinction between abstract, universal, rationalist, political theories And empirical political theories.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Nationalism Debate: Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony | Lex Fridman Podcast #256