The History of the Western Enlightenment – And Why It Matters Today
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Good evening. On this beautiful spring day, we had a sod turning ceremony on our campus today. One of the highlights for me was our objective was to put our shovels into the ground and

Throw the dirt into the air. I've spent the last half hour getting that dirt out of my eyes and among other people, but it was a good day. It was a good day because we're investing more in this community. Last year we had an independent study here at Northwood to understand what the economic impact is just for the Great Lakes region. This little university in Northwood, Northwood University contributes about $211 million to our community.

And that was a way when we kicked off our sod turning today, a new field. And you're going to be reading more about a $25 million investment in our automotive space. This is a university that does not have debt and it doesn't plan to do that.

So with that, my name is Kent McDonald. I'm a real privilege to serve as president at Northwood University and something we call America's free enterprise university. And when you look at

a number of the things going on on campuses across the country today. It's starting to cause some level of doubt in terms of the relevancy and currency of campuses today. I'm pleased to say that we happen to be bucking that trend, but it should be a concern for people when we have

16 to 24 year olds in this country, 2 million of them are unemployed. That we have a growing deficit in terms of, and the debt that these students are taking on. They're taking programs that they're not able to find employment. There is a question of what is the value of a university education today. Particularly we're seeing a rapid drop in enrollment from all groups, but in particular young men.

And so here we are in Midland, Michigan at Northwood University and we seem to be bucking that trend where we're upping students in undergraduate education, upping students in graduate education, upping students in online learning. So what might be behind that? What are some proof points that we're trying to do things differently here at Northwood University? It's all tied into something we refer to as the Northwood idea, which I'll end off with, but some proof points.

that this year, once again, Georgetown University in their analysis of

all 4,500 colleges and universities across the country. It's not an obscure ranking where can you ride a bicycle or what type of citations that a professor might have. It actually looks at data over 20, 30 and 40 years after a student has graduated across the country, nearly 5,000 institutions, and we're proud to show that at Northwood,

for the last several years were in the top 11% of all colleges and universities in the country that when you show up here, you pay your tuition, you work hard, you earn your success, you're going to be well on your way for prosperity in the future. A second proof point.

And by the way, you're not going to have Northwood students knocking at your door or the legislative houses asking for taxpayers to pay their debt because they happen to take on programs that they couldn't get jobs. And most of that debt is in graduate school. This is a school that produces young people who understand earned success and are ready to go out

and make a difference. Another proof point, this year Forbes magazine ranked Northwood University among again all 4,500 universities in the top 10 percent. So from an academic point of view, our dean and vice president up there, led by our faculty, are providing our students the things that they need to advance our communities.

The last point I'll say is that this is an entrepreneurship factory. Every college and university teaches entrepreneurship. You don't become an entrepreneur by reading a book.

You don't learn to ride a bike by reading a book. You have to get on it and fall down a few times. This is a business factory that we surround ourselves in the value of capitalism. And I'm probably the only university in the country that has a picture of students in my office that says at Thanksgiving, what are you proud of? And they're holding up a sign that says capitalism. And it's all rooted in the Northwood idea, if you haven't spent time with us.

this ageless set of principles that we're unequivocally clear on, free enterprise, limited government, rule of law, private property, and as a parent who just had their third grandchild four hours ago, personal responsibility.

And so one of the great highlights is to look down Main Street and have an organization like the Mackinaw Center side by side. And the more we get to do work with Joe and his team, I think the better for our students, our faculty, and hopefully we're contributing in that way as well to the broader Gooda communities. Mackinaw Center is led

by an incredible leader and I'm just going to do Joe's introduction if I could, Joe.

So, obviously Joe is the president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and you know that it's an independent, non-profit research and educational institute not only in Michigan but probably right here on Main Street, Midland. The Mackinac Center is one of the largest think tanks that focus primarily on state level policies that affect people's freedom and quality of life. Joe joined the Mackinac Center

30 years ago, 1995. And he later became Vice President for Communications at the Cato Institute before luckily he returned here to the Mackinac Center and became its Executive Vice President and he's been serving admirably as President since 2008. Joe is a leader among all of the state-based public policy experts.

and the State Policy Network recognized him with its Roe Award for leadership, innovation, and accomplishments in public policy. Our job as leader is to train the next generation, and Joe has trained and led more than 600 think tank executives from nearly every state and more than 50 countries around the world in strategic planning, communications, and fundraising.

Joe is a leading global instructor on the Overton Window model of policy change developed by the late Mackinac Centre Vice President Joseph Overton. It's great to do an introduction of Joe and it's even better to call him a friend and a colleague. So Joe, welcome back to Northwood University. Kent, I'm grateful to be welcomed so warmly.

and I feel that I know, you know that I know that you hail from Canada, but not everyone here may know that, so we're doing our part here tonight to strengthen U.S.-Canadian relations, which have been strained recently, but that won't continue if we have anything to do about it. The Mackinac Center loves to work with Northwood University.

We love to hire Northwood University students. We love to hire Northwood University interns. And we even love it when interns sometimes say, I'll work for you for free. And then when their internship is up, they just don't leave. And then we decide, well, I guess we better start paying them. That has actually happened. And talk to James Holman, Director of Fiscal Policy, if you don't believe me.

Tonight we're here to think about a few questions. Why do we approach college education the way we do as a dedicated time of learning about many subjects and not just one subject taught to you by an employer? Why do we try to decide most things with reason and evidence and debate and not with clubs and knives?

Why are accused criminals, even the ones who really, really look guilty, why do they get a lawyer and a trial by jury if they want one? And why does the majority rule in a democracy while the minority still enjoys certain rights in that same democracy? Rights that the majority cannot overrule. Well, here to help us answer those questions is Dr. Yaron Brook.

He is chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute and he is the co-author of a national bestseller, "Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government." And I think you can pick up your copy right outside the front door. I saw one when we came in. Yaron was born and raised in Israel. He has degrees from Technion Israel Institute of Technology and the University of Texas.

Dr. Brook has been an American citizen for 22 years, and Yaron and I wave at each other once a year in Denver, Colorado, where we are both instructors at something called the Leadership Program of the Rockies. I come in and give my speech. He follows me to correct any mistakes I make. And Yaron, I promise, this year I will stay for your whole speech.

Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be back in Northwood. This is my third time. Second time in Mackinac, third time in Northwood. So Midland now four times. It's the middle of nowhere. I don't know if you realize that, but I make it. So over the last 20, 30 years, Western civilization, the idea of the West as a civilization, has

has come under attack. I mean even now when I say Western Civilization, some of you, maybe not this group, but many groups out there, kind of start wiggling in their seats. It's a little uncomfortable. West Civilization, that sounds kind of off. But the ideas that we just mentioned, the ideas of science and reason and representative government, all ideas that represent Western Civilization, or at least we believe they do. And these ideas, the ideas of a civilization,

have come under dramatic attack both from within the West, the geographic West, and from without. And I think the only way we can defend the West is if we understand what it is. One of the challenges I think we have is there's a lot of confusion about what is this thing called Western Civilization? Where does it originate? Where does it come from? How was it born? Where do these ideas come from?

If you think about what's going on at university campuses today, there is a real hostility to our form of life, of government. Hamas, the idea of a theocracy ruled by, you know, mullahs dictating life for everybody, is now somehow superior to Israel, a country where it's part of Western civilization.

All of those features of the West are attributable, you can attribute imperfectly, as it is, to Israel. And yes, our students at the best universities in the country prefer Hamas' rule in Gaza. A lot of the professors, not at Northwood, but at other universities, teach us that all cultures are equal. All cultures are equal. Whether it's cultures that have produced nothing or very little, and a culture that produces the amazing, amazing wealth that we have,

They're the same. There's no difference between them. Indeed, multiculturalism, this idea of the equality of all cultures, is common today, prevalent all over the world. Well, I have an opinion about that. Western civilization as a culture is superior to any other culture that existed in human history. It has elevated us to great wealth. It is the only culture that supports freedom, the freedom of the individual to live his life based on his own values.

It is the culture that has liberated us for the most part from violence. This is by far the best culture in the world that the world has ever seen. And yet we're supposed to pretend that we're just the same as any other culture anywhere else in the world, even those that are still going at each other with bows and arrows and axes. We're not. Our culture, nothing else, not our genes, not the color of our skin, not anything else. Our culture

It's just better. Why? What makes it better is part of the question. And how did it get better? And this multiculturalism weakens us in facing the threats from outside. In Europe, you're seeing a real threat from Islamists in Europe, from people who would like to turn Europe into a Sharia-dominated continent. You see that in the demonstrations that are happening in London and Paris and Sweden and other parts of Europe.

And how do we defend against that if we think our culture is just the same as theirs? That there's no difference between the two. It's very hard to defend. How do we defend it when we don't even know what our culture really is and what it represents? So what is Western civilization? Where does it come from? How did we get here? I think it's really important to note that there was a time when the people of the West, and let's define the West for the purposes of now. Historically, Western civilization is Western Europe.

and the United States once it was created. There was a period in which the peoples of Western Europe were the barbarians of the Earth. If you traveled the Earth in, I don't know, 1400, 600, 700 years ago, you would not have predicted that the West would become what it is. It was more barbaric than Islamic civilization, which was thriving at the time, much richer. And if you think about science, between 400 A.D.,

which is the fall of Rome, about. And 1400 AD, in the West, there was almost no science. One example of this is human beings have always looked to the sky.

And they've always tried to map out the stars and figure out how they move and figure out what's going on. They didn't get it right usually, but they were always curious about what's going on up there and what's happening. And, you know, in Greece and Rome, there were astronomers who had theories about the movement of the sun and the movement of the earth. Everything was documented. From 400 to 1400, there were no astronomical observations made. Nobody in the West theorized about what's going on in the heavens.

In the Muslim world, they were doing it. Even in India, they were doing it. To some extent, in China, they were doing it. Not in Western Europe. No, almost no science. Whatever writing was happening was mostly transcribing ancient books. Very little new things were being written. Economically, the West was generally depressed, certainly not as rich as the Muslim world and not as rich as China. And then, over the course of about 500 years, the West takes off.

It takes off from every perspective. Wealth through the roof. We are, you know, economists say we're 300 times richer today than we were 300 years ago, 400 years ago, 500. It doesn't matter because in those periods, wealth didn't change. 300 times, I think, Didra McCluskey has done the calculation, and 300 times richer than we were back then. That does not capture how rich we are, right?

Because economists can only measure stuff in terms of dollars and cents. That's how we do things, right? You can add up balance sheets, you can add up value of assets. What's the value of running water? Toilets. What's the value of having a toilet in your home? Economists can't tell you because the toilet costs almost nothing. But what's the value to you as a human being? What's the value of electricity? It's not how much you pay for electricity. The value to you is much higher than the value of electricity. What's the value of an iPhone?

much more than the thousand dollars you pay for it. So we are thousands of times richer than we were 300 years ago. So wealth exploded. Science, well we all know the scientific revolution, the technology we have today, unimaginable. We have still, holding on, barely, to the rule of law, due process, we still got them, we still view them as an ideal. That didn't exist not that long ago. There was no such thing. The king, the aristocrats, they did what they wanted, pretty much.

And the peasants, which most of us would have been, tough. Due process? You've got to be kidding me. Equality before the law? No way. These are all really modern innovation, and they all were products of Western Europe. Nobody in the East, nobody elsewhere came up with the idea of economic liberty, political liberty, due process, and of course the economic system and political system of capitalism. All of this is new. It's why it's so precious. It's why it's so easy for us to give it up.

Because it's really, really new. Human beings have been around at least 100,000 years. What we're experiencing today, the kind of life that we have, maybe 150 years, 200 since the founding of America. That's it. 250. That's how long we've lived relatively free. How did this happen? So I'm doing the history of Western civilization in 20 minutes. I think the key...

or the turning point, the beginning, really the beginning, but it took a long time to manifest itself. The beginning is what we call today the Renaissance. And the Renaissance is a Renaissance of what? What does the word Renaissance mean? It means rediscovery. And what are they rediscovering in the Renaissance? What is Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael and the thinkers, the humanists of the Renaissance, what are they discovering? They're discovering an ancient civilization.

An ancient civilization that to some extent had been buried. At least its art certainly had been buried. They're discovering a civilization of people who believed in man, in our capabilities, in our capacity to do great things, in man as a hero. They discover a civilization that portrayed that in their art.

that reflected that in the kind of sculptures that they made. The sculptures are what survived. We don't know much about their painting, but the sculptures we saw, we discovered them when they started digging in the ground all over Italy. They discovered a civilization that had discovered the idea of philosophy and that had written vast philosophical works, many of which had disappeared from the West for a thousand years and were now rediscovered, by the way, because the Christians conquered a Muslim country

Muslim Spain found the libraries of Toledo and these other places and brought the books back to the West. So all somewhat accidents of history. But in the end, these ideas reached the West. And the greatest idea that they discover in this book are the ideas of reason. The idea that the human mind is capable of knowing the world, knowing reality, understanding reality.

They discovered the great scientific writings of the ancient Greeks. The Greeks were actually quite advanced when it came to science, not only in the stars, but medicine, beginnings of physics, the beginnings of biology. Again, all things that were dead for a long time in the West. And to the credit of the thinkers of the time, they took this seriously. And you can see it in the art. If you've ever gone to a museum and you see the art from the Middle Ages, and then you walk into the art of the room with the Renaissance, it's like you walked into a different universe.

It's like the colors are different, the anatomy is different, the individuation. Suddenly in the Renaissance, people become individuals. They stop being just all they're looking the same. Stick figures in a sense. They suddenly gain a respect for the individual, for who he is, and some extent to his mind. Now, the artists get it first, which is really interesting. The artists get it before the intellectuals, before the philosophers. They get it before the great thinkers.

the artists if you look at leonardo if you look at rafael if you look at michelangelo they get this perspective on human beings they get western civilization way before the philosophers write about it but these ideas spread through europe these ideas of science of reason think galileo copernicus kepler in astronomy suddenly you have these geniuses where did they come from

They were always there, but they were suppressed, oppressed by the authorities. Suddenly, they were allowed to experiment, to explore, at least to some extent, right? Galileo gets house arrest, but house arrest is better than being burned at stake, which would have been his fate 100 years earlier. So suddenly, you get a little bit of freedom, and ultimately, this period, which lasts maybe 200 years, it's a period of this rebirth, rediscovery,

But at the same time, it's a period of great stress in Europe. Anybody know what's going on in Europe during these 200 years? A lot of wars, a lot of violence. In the name of what? What is the violence in the name of? Religion. You know, the most violent war in Western civilization's history, in the history of the West, is probably the Thirty Year War. It's probably, in terms of the number of people who died per capita, more casualties than World War II and World War I.

something like a third to half of the German population was killed during that war. And it wasn't other people killing the Germans. It was the Germans killing the Germans. It was Catholics killing Protestants and Protestants killing Catholics. War was a huge part of life in that period of time. The thinkers coming out of that period take these ideas that they got from Greece. They look at the world around them and they see these wars. And they come to the conclusion that something new is needed.

Something different is needed two things happen during this period one is you get philosophers like John Locke John Locke You know he looks at he looks at Europe and he says this this is ridiculous Protestants and Catholics killing each other the slaughter the bloodshed This isn't the kind of life that's appropriate to human being and the idea that he develops as an idea no individuals individuals individuals have rights individuals have a way to their own life and

Individuals have a right to live their lives based on their own values. The state, the authorities, even the church doesn't have a right to dictate to individuals how to live their life. This is a revolution in thinking. It's a revolution that's been developing in a sense was already in the art before, but is now being put on paper, right?

and of course john locke spends a little time in jail and has to escape england to go to the netherlands because these ideas are difficult remember this is pre-free speech this is before the idea of free speech there's no free speech voltaire during the same period has to escape to geneva so this is a period of a lot of like new ideas formats and maybe the most important thing of this period is isaac newton of all people the scientist the physicist

Because what Isaac Newton says is, you know, before that, the idea that reason is good, reason is efficacious, it's like, yeah, that's cool, okay, what does that give me? But Isaac Newton shows us that through reason we can explain the physical world, really explain the physical world, and explain it in a way that's accessible to almost anyone. If you took a physics class in high school or in college and didn't understand Newton's rules of motion,

You had a bad teacher. They're not hard. This is relatively simple stuff. Certainly, if you've ever taken a class in quantum mechanics or in Einstein, then you know. I mean, that's unknowable. This is knowable. Knowable to almost anybody. And Europeans took it that way. Americans took it that way. Americans still were a colony at that point. But they took this as, whoa.

we can understand the physical world. Now in contrast to what in the past, how did we know what was true and what was not? What was the standard of truth before Newton? Does it match the Bible or doesn't it? Does it match Aristotle or doesn't it? They took Aristotle as like the Bible. Like Aristotle was a scientist, he got 90% of it wrong. Method was right, which is the most important thing, but his actual observations, his actual physical theories about the world, biological theories were wrong.

But what's important is the method, right? That's how you correct the mistakes. If you have the method right, you correct the mistakes. They took Aristotle as the truth. And yet suddenly, they were discovering things that Aristotle didn't say, that Aristotle was wrong. They contradicted the Bible. This is why Galileo had to be in house arrest, right? And suddenly, the standard for truth was not ancient books. The standard for truth was the human mind. The standard for truth was science, was observation, was discovering things in reality.

Suddenly, people, individuals, common people, suddenly had this sense of efficaciousness. We have a mind. Whoa, that's pretty cool. Because before that, who made all the choices for you? Like for most people. Like we romanticize the past, so we have movies, but the movies are always about aristocrats. Always. Because you don't want to know how the peasants lived. You're not going to go watch a movie about that. Like who decided what your profession was 300 years ago? Like literally for everybody, who decided what your profession was?

you did if you're a man because if you're a woman it's irrelevant because you have no choices if you're women zero if you're a man you did what your father did you joined the guild you know the story of um it's a funny story about leonardo da vinci you know leonardo da vinci like he got to be a an artist and a engineer and a strategist and hung around with all kinds of people you know what his father did he was a notary so how come leonardo da vinci didn't become a notary he should have joined the guild and become a notary like his dad

That was the law. How did he get the freedom to go out and do all this fun stuff? Anybody know? He was a bastard. He was an illegitimate child. As an illegitimate child, he couldn't join the guild. So he was freer than the legitimate child. The legitimate child would have had to join the guild. He got to go and do all this fun stuff. That's not a healthy society. Did you get to choose who to marry? For the most part, no. Did you get to choose your political leader? No. And there's a reason for that.

Because if you take away human reason, if you say people don't have reason, if you say people have to abide by an authority, a philosopher king, according to Plato, the religious authority, according to our religions, then you're basically saying you can't make decisions for yourself. You don't have the capacity to think for yourself. You have to follow a leader. And, you know, we've had lots of different authorities, but it's always an authority.

What Isaac Newton and John Locke do is they liberate the individual's capacity to think for himself. They say, no, you have reason. You can think for yourself. You can choose for yourself. You can discover truth. You're not reliant on these authorities to discover truth. Truth is accessible to every human being. And suddenly people wake up and say, wait a minute. If that's the case, why can't I choose my own profession? Why can't I start my own business? This is where entrepreneurship comes from.

Why can't I do my own invention without asking for permission? Why can't I move cities? One of the things characteristic again of life before was this idea of you were born somewhere, you stayed there. Travel was very difficult and hard, but people never moved. The whole idea of immigration, which I know is controversial today, but hey, all of your ancestors were immigrants one way or the other. Some point, immigration was okay in the United States. Immigration was unheard of. Nobody moved. Suddenly, you could do that.

You could live your life based on your own mind because you had one. Before there was no mind. This period, which starts at about 1670, 1680, and ends, I would say, right at the beginning of the French Revolution or maybe in the first guillotine of the French Revolution, is called what? Anybody know what that name of that period is? It's the Enlightenment, but it has another name. It's called the Age of Reason. There's a reason it's called the Age of Reason.

Because it's the age that elevates man's reason as our means of knowing the world. And achievements during this period of time, this is the period of time in which we get all the innovations that we today accept and take for granted. We get the political thinkers thinking about liberty and freedom. We get the political thinkers thinking about the economics of freedom. Think about Adam Smith and Hume as an economist. He's a great economist thinking about freedom from an economic perspective.

And the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment politically, what's the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment from a political perspective? What is the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment? The Constitution, or put it more broadly, the creation of the United States of America. I would argue the greatest document is not the Constitution but the Declaration. Declaration of Independence, which I think is the greatest document, political document ever written by far. Nothing comes close. Because what does the Declaration announce to the world?

All men are created equal. Equal in what sense? Like we all have the same income. We all have the same abilities. We all have the same rights. We're equal before the law. But not just equal before any law. Before the law that is based on the idea of rights. We all have the right. Inalienable. Inalienable means what? Nobody can take it away from you. 99% of the people can vote. They still can't take it away from you.

It's you, it's part of you, part of your nature. And every single human being they say, all men are created equal. Not all Americans are created equal, just by the way. All men are created equal, and by men here we want to include women, right? But all are created equal. And they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It would be nice if they kept property in there, it would have made things a little cleaner. But they didn't. Yeah, but they didn't, unfortunately.

But it's still there. What does it mean to say you have a right? What did John Locke mean when he said you had a right? What did the founders mean you had a right to something? Because today, people think we have a right to free health care and free education and maybe free food and free anything we feel like. Is that what the founders thought rights meant? What did rights mean? Yeah, but a right to life means what? I mean, I could say, look, I'm sick. My right to life means that you have to provide me with health care for free.

But that's not what they mean by right to life. What do they mean by right to life? They mean you have the freedom to act in pursuit of the values necessary for your life based on whose judgment? Yours. Not based on a state's judgment. Not some authority's judgment. Your judgment. And what does freedom mean? Because everybody out there in the world is for freedom. Everybody. I could speak in front of a group of communists and ask them, how many people here are for freedom? And every hand would go up.

What does freedom actually mean, not what the commies mean? It means the absence of coercion, the absence of force. So rights mean that you have the right, you have the freedom, which means no coercion, no force, to live your life as you see fit, with nobody has the ability to force you to do otherwise. That's what freedom means. That's what individual rights means. That's what this country was founded on.

And that is only possible, as Thomas Jefferson will tell you, only possible for people who can reason, can use their mind, can discover truth, and therefore, talk about personal responsibility, can take care of themselves. Because the reality is if we can't think, if we don't have a reason, if we don't have a mind, then we can't be responsible for ourselves. And indeed, in the past, you weren't expected to be. The Lord, responsible for the manner, he took care of everybody, right?

Because you couldn't take care of yourself. So the Enlightenment is a revolution that elevates reason. Once it elevates reason, who reasons? The individual. The individual becomes the unit, the end in itself. And therefore, individuals using reason must be free. And that's the political revolution of representational government. And the founders are not...

pro-democracy as we understand democracy in the sense of Greek democracy or really any other democracy. It's not about majority rule. Voting is not what makes America great. I know this is a shock to many audiences. Voting should be trivial. It shouldn't matter that much because the government in the original intent was small. It was limited. It couldn't do that many things.

The possibility that the government and my life would be an intersection was small. So who was in Washington? Eh, didn't matter that much. The bigger the government becomes, the bigger the state becomes, the more we start caring. See, the more we talk politics, the more it's a sign our culture's deteriorated. In a good culture, politics is like, eh, one of the things we do once every four years, we vote, big deal, no big deal.

The fact that it's so important that it animates everything in our world today means that that government is way too big, way too involved in our lives. But this idea of protecting minorities from the majority is what animates the Constitution. Because what is the smallest minority? What's the smallest minority in any country? The individual. What's the Constitution's structure to do? Protect the individual from the majority.

Why do we have individual rights? To protect us from our majority. They can vote to oppress us. And they do, and they have, and they still are. So the Enlightenment brought us science, reason, individualism, and limited government. It's intellectually the greatest period of time, greatest period in, I think, human history. I think it's based almost exclusively on the ideas, ultimately, of the Greeks, primarily Aristotle and some other Greeks.

It has led to the kind of flourishing we have today. It led to what some call the permissionless society that we benefited from in the early 19th century at least somewhat, where you could go out, do what you wanted to do. It was none of anybody's business. Start any business you want. Invent anything you wanted without getting a permit. That, to me, is Western civilization. That's what created what we have today. And indeed, anybody who adopts reason, individualism,

and political freedom is part of the West. Today, I think a country like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan are part of the West because they've adopted these ideas of Western civilization, imperfectly as they have. That's because we have them imperfectly. So Western civilization is a real set of ideas that were discovered during the Enlightenment, manifest themselves in the creation of the United States of America as the greatest achievement, manifest themselves in science

and in technology and the success that we've had. It is a set of ideas that are worth fighting for. It is a set of ideas that liberates man and makes us wealthy and prosperous. And it's what we need to be fighting for rather than just fighting against. And these ideas are the best ideas. They produce the best results because they liberate the individual. And again, it doesn't matter where, it doesn't matter when, but when you liberate the individual, they will flourish.

So fighting for Western ideas, fighting Western civilization, is fighting for the Enlightenment. It's fighting for reason, individualism, and political liberty. And these ideas are worth fighting for. These ideas are important for our future and ideas we are losing. Collectivism is on the rise. Irrationality, anti-reason is on the rise. And, of course, as a consequence, as you lose reason and as you lose the individual, you lose political freedom.

So political authoritarianism is on the rise, whether it's just the size of government, which is pretty authoritarian to begin with, or whether it's real authoritarianism, which wants to dictate everything we do. All of that is on the rise today. And I believe that it's on the rise primarily because we stopped defending the good. Bad evil succeeds when the good stays silent, when the good refuses to fight. So fight, fight for the good.

Fight for the West, not as a geography, but as an idea. Reason, individualism, and political liberty are worth that fight. Thank you. I think we have time for questions. There is a mic. How does man practice? I mean, I think the founders understood that happiness is not something that just happens to you. And happiness is not something that you gain through instant gratification. It's not a fleeting emotion.

Happiness is something that is a consequence of achieving your values. Not any values. Values that are pro-human life, pro-human flourishing, pro-human success. So the founders understood. I think imperfectly, right, if I had to look back. I mean, a lot of the things the founders did were imperfect. You know, obviously the big compromise around slavery is the biggest imperfection. But there were a lot of things that were imperfect around what the founders did. Not because they were at fault, not because they weren't the smartest people on the planet. They were.

But because it was 1776 and we're now in the 21st century, we've got the benefit of 250 years of seeing what's happened and we could do better. So I think their understanding of happiness was living a great life, making the most of your life, using your reason. And again, not all the founders would agree on exactly what that meant, but using your reason to pursue worthwhile values that made you better as a better human being, pursuing virtue.

And they were in that sense, again, children of the Enlightenment. Or they were the Enlightenment, not just children. They were part of the Enlightenment. Because these ideas were coming out of France. It's hard to believe it was France. But they were coming out of France in the years where France had good ideas. It didn't last for very long. Just reality. And then coming out of England. I mean, it was Scotland, really. The Scots would be upset at me. Scotland, England, and France.

The ideas were coming out of there, of the United Kingdom, and they were talking about what does happiness require? What kind of life do we have to live? But all based on this idea of reason as the foundation for all of that. But it's about making your life the best life there can be. And in my view, the thinker who is closest to the Enlightenment

who basically completes in many respects the assignment that the Enlightenment took on is Ayn Rand. So Ayn Rand, at the core of Ayn Rand's ideas is reason, individualism, and she actually gives it a moral foundation. It's not just individualism as a political ideal, but as a moral ideal, the idea of rational long-term self-interest as a moral ideal.

And political freedom, she is an advocate of capitalism. I think the most consistent advocate of capitalism is the political system that we've had. And in that sense, she's completing kind of the work of the Enlightenment, bringing it into the 20th century and giving it to us. So even when it comes to pursuit of happiness, I think Ayn Rand has refined what the Founding Fathers meant even further to give us a set of virtues and a set of values that we should pursue as human beings to achieve our individual happiness.

Yeah, my reaction is that J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, and Trump don't understand the founding of America because it's exactly to prevent us from being a democracy that they established the separation of powers. It's exactly the role of judges to say, uh-uh, that's unconstitutional. You can't do that. The whole purpose of the separation of powers is exactly that. So, look, J.D. Vance famously said recently,

He said it twice, one at the National Conservative Convention and then again at the Republican Convention. He said America is not an idea. Not an idea. America is a place and a people. Now that is a perversion, with all due respect to the Vice President. America is an idea. It is the Constitution. It is the Declaration. And those are ideas. It's not a people.

It's why for the first hundred and something years of America, we had basically open borders and everybody came in. And whoever showed up became an American. America is the idea of freedom, the idea of liberty. And the idea of freedom and liberty requires separation of powers. It requires checks and balances, right? So Congress...

gets to check the president, who checks Congress, and then the judiciary gets to check Congress and to check the president. And if the judiciary really goes insane, then Congress can impeach the judiciary. And of course, it's the president and Congress who appoint the judges. So it's, you know, it's really complicated. We have a crazy political system in America. We have a House of Representatives and a Senate and a president and then a judicial. It's really hard to get anything done. That's what the founders wanted.

They knew that if you made it easy on politicians, we would descend into authoritarianism even faster than we already are. And what you want is to make it hard so every time people complain, "Oh, we won't be able to pass that legislation in Congress." Well, tough. That's what this system is structured around. So you can't just impose as a president onto Congress whatever you feel like. You've got to go through the motions. Getting your legislation, getting it passed,

signing it and then making sure the courts approve that it's still within the Constitution. If I had my way, you know, like 80% of the laws that we have today in America would be ruled unconstitutional. If the courts did their job, we wouldn't be in the condition we are today. We'd still be a free country, right? So for 150 years, our presidents and Congress have been violating a proper, I think, a proper understanding of the Constitution.

So I want judges who say, no, no, you can't do that. And we celebrate that. Conservatives used to celebrate that. Used to celebrate when judges said, no, President, you can't do that. That's not your power. It's not within your realm. And now, because it's Trump, oh, no, now the judges can't do that anymore. It's the Constitution. Thank you. I don't believe there is such a thing as a collective purview. Whenever you get a group of people, it's a group of people, which means a group of individuals.

Now, they might agree on something and you might disagree. Who gets to decide what's right or what's wrong? The numbers? Voting? No, reality, facts, reason, logic gets to decide. And I'd say almost all progress in all of human history has been the result of an individual stepping up and saying, "Uh-uh, you guys are wrong." And usually they burnt him at the stake, right?

And we've got myths about this. Prometheus brings us fire. And what happens to him? He gets punished for that. And we are still busy punishing entrepreneurs today for bringing us fire. We don't like the entrepreneurs. We antitrust them. We take them to court. I just saw a post today by conservatives. You know, Amazon, this is unbelievable to me. Amazon is now going to list...

When you see a price in Amazon, they're going to give you information about how much of the price is the tariff. People are going nuts over this. And some of the comments are like, Bezos is getting married. His wedding is going to cost $500 million. They want him to list how much of the cost of the thing is going to his wedding. That's how envious we become, right? How dare Jeff Bezos have a big wedding when we're paying tariffs, right?

so we still prosecute the individual who changed our lives you remember like before amazon i bet you it's hard like it's so easy today to buy stuff it's so easy to do stuff on the web and you wouldn't be able to do that without cloud services of amazon amazon has changed the world and yet we still prosecute we still don't trust them and we still are envious about their success and we go after them so no i think you have to stand on yourself now do you get information from other groups other people sure

But at the end of the day, it's your responsibility as an individual to integrate that information and to figure out what's right or what's wrong. Nobody can do that for you. And if you join a tribe, a mob, a group, and just follow them, that's the end of civilization. Civilization is about individuals thinking for themselves. When we start following groups, we become tribal, which I fear is what we're becoming today. When we become tribal, we lose our liberties, we lose our freedoms, we lose our minds. All we got is this.

So get information. You know, sometimes crowds have wisdom. Sometimes they're mad. It's your job to figure out which is which and when to listen and when not to listen. Nobody else can do that for you. Nobody else can replace your mind. Yeah, Mao was a, not only was he a monster, but he was a failure. So I wouldn't take anything he said seriously. He killed, I don't know,

You can debate whether it's 50 or 100 million people, somewhere around that, or died under his regime. He didn't literally kill them. And China's a different culture. But this is what's interesting about China. I used to go to China quite often. I donate him more because China's changed the last few years. But I used to go to China quite often, and it was a fascinating place. And one of the reasons it was fascinating, because since Mao died, really two years after he died, 1978, until about 10 years ago, China was booming.

It was thriving. It was growing and technologically advancing and everything. And you go, how can that be? They're like communists, right? And you go there, and they're not communists. I don't know what they are, but they're not communists. And if you look at how they behave and how they act, they're pretty individualistic. Those Chinese will elbow you out of the way. They'll go for what they want without using violence, without a gun. They'll actually go and achieve their thing.

They're smart. They're using their reason. They're trying to figure out as individuals, not as a government. What they don't have is political liberty. Political freedom they don't have. And that's the tragedy of China. China should be Western. And I think China could become Western. And China should become Western.

But not as long as Xi is alive, or at least as long as he's dictator over there. Not as long as the Communist Party, even though they're not communist, they call themselves Communist Party, rules China. They won't. But that's what they should become. So it's not like they are a different culture and they can never adopt the right culture. The right culture is Western culture, and they should adopt it. And I believe they're ready to adopt it. If you look at young Chinese...

They're ready to become Western. They dress like Westerners. They talk like Westerners. The music is very similar to the West. We just need to get-- they just need to get rid of that authoritarian government that they have and liberate themselves. With regard to rights, look, there's always been skeptical about rights. Mao certainly was skeptical about rights. So was every dictator in the world.

But so a lot of people we might, you know, in other circumstances, many of you might admire. I don't know, Judge Scalia famously said that, quoting Bentham, who was a British philosopher in the 19th century, that rights are nonsense on stilts. Where do they come from? Don't know where they come from. And it's hard. It's a hard concept. And it's a philosophical concept. But it's a concept that is basically derived from the requirements of human life.

When we are in a social context, in order for individuals to flourish and to thrive, they must be left free. So if we assume that flourishing and thriving is what we want, then rights are a necessary idea, a necessary concept that we have to implement. They don't come out of the mouth of a gun, although the only way to preserve rights is with a gun. No, it didn't. The revolution came out of a piece of paper, out of a Declaration of Independence.

And then you needed a gun to enforce it, just like you need a gun today to keep the bad guys out. But the rights themselves were always there and were identified and recognized in the Declaration. There was one other hand I saw here. Here's the funny thing about the Middle East, right? So from about 800 AD to about 1100 AD, the Middle East was a thriving civilization. The largest libraries in the world were in Baghdad.

And then, when Baghdad fell to the Mongols, the largest libraries in the world were Muslim libraries in Toledo and Cordoba. And if you've ever been to Andalusia, that part of Spain that was ruled by the Muslims. See, Islam was once a civilization. A civilization that seemed like it was going to overtake the world. It seemed like it was going to be the one that had the Industrial Revolution and the wealth and all of that. And it died.

So the real question is, how do we get Islam back to that? And to do that, you have to ask the question, what caused Islam to be so civilized in about 800 A.D.? What caused the science? There were great scientists. You know what the number system we use today? It's Arabic. Double entry bookkeeping came from the Arab world. So, you know, if you're an accounting student, everything you, you know, the double entry basic accounting system. It's not Western Europe. That's from the Middle East.

So they had it. What was it? So when the Arabs conquered the Middle East, they conquered the Byzantine Empire, what did they discover? Well, they discovered Greek philosophy. They discovered Greek ideas. They discovered Aristotle. And if you read Muslim philosophers of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th centuries, they are engaged in a debate and a discussion with Aristotle over a reason. And they have to make a choice.

Because they face these two things. They have a Koran. They have a Holy Bible, right? Their Holy Bible that says this is what you must do. And they have Aristotle that says go by reason, go by your mind. And they're struggling. How do we faith versus reason? You know that debate? The Muslims are having that debate in 880. And as long as they have that debate, their civilization does okay because reason is still kept alive. At some point, they decide they've settled the debate.

What side do you think they settled the debate on? On faith. And they rejected reason. There's a famous Muslim philosopher, Al-Ghazali, a famous philosopher, who goes into the desert to consider this question of faith versus reason, and he comes back and he said, I've got the solution. It's abandon reason, embrace faith, the Quran is the truth, that is it. At the same time, in the West, who is the philosopher who has the same discovery and the same debate going on in his own mind? Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas, same thing, discovers Aristotle and brings Aristotle into the Catholic Church and has that debate. And at some point during the Enlightenment, the West decided faith versus reason, mostly reason. Faith relegated to your personal life, to your family life, home, but mostly reason. And it's flourished. So what do we need to get the Muslims to do? Embrace reason, rediscover Aristotle. How do we do that? God knows. Really hard because they're so entrenched.

in their religion, in their Quran, in a belief in faith. I mean, there are lots of anecdotes about this. Things like, how many books do they translate from European languages into Arabic? Almost none. Very few. They're not engaged much in science. They're not engaged much in reason-based activities. Studying, learning, scientific inquiry. And as a consequence, they're poor. And they're fanatical. And they're suicidal.

Because that's what a complete dedication to faith over reason leads you to. This is why reason is such an important element. This is why it is what makes the West the West. You want the Islamic world to change, it has to recognize that. And that is going to take some time, but you know what it really must take? It takes us recognizing that in ourselves. Unless we're willing to fight for reason...

nobody else is gonna adopt it they have to look at us and say wow we want to be like you what's your secret and the secret is the Enlightenment if we could market the Enlightenment that's when we when we haven't been marketing the Enlightenment when just as an aside you know when Arab when wealthy Arabs in the late 19th century early 20th century I know I have to finish just this last story when wealthy Arabs in the late 19th century early 20th century wanted their kids to get a great education

Where did they send them? They wanted to be like the West. They looked at the West. This is the late 19th century. The West is becoming rich. They're stuck in the Ottoman Empire. It's going nowhere. Nothing's happening. They send their kids to Europe to get educated. And what do they learn in Europe? They don't learn reason because this is not the Enlightenment anymore. This is the 19th century. They learn German Romanticism and French who knows what, right? They learn egalitarianism, fascism, communism,

That's what they learn because that's what we are teaching. Anti-reason, anti-enlightenment, anti-political freedom, anti-individualism ideas. We in the West have been teaching collectivism in our universities for well over 100 years. And this is primarily in Europe. So when those Arabs who went there to learn how the West got rich come back to the Arab world, they bring with them fascism and communism.

So when they get into power, and this is for example the Baath Party that ruled Iraq and Syria before Assad was just deposed, Baath Party, if you look at their manifesto, it's Mussolini's fascist manifesto translated into Arabic. So what they learned were all the bad ideas of the West and they implemented those and then when those didn't work, who do they blame? The West. And now they're skeptical of anything we tell them because we taught them bad stuff. And by the way,

Just one additional story. Where did Americans send their kids if they wanted to get the best education in the world in the late 19th century? Europe, Germany, France, primarily the two worst places in the world you would want to send your kids to get an education. Bad, bad ideas. And what did they return with?

with all the bad ideas we're seeing in our campuses today. And by the way, when Harvard and Princeton and Yale wanted to become world-class institutions, they wanted to be the best universities in the world, where did they get their professors from?

Germany and France who brought with them all the collective see Germany and France never went through an American Revolution they never had individualism as the standard well France did for a little bit but then it got crushed right they were mired with collectivism and they brought that to the United States into our best institutions into our elite institutions and we've never recovered

They've only just spread from there to infect everything. So it's those ideas that the progressive movement, it was called the progressive movements in those days, those were European ideas that were brought into America and America didn't have the founding fathers to protect itself. It didn't have intellectuals of that caliber. So we just folded and the Europeans dominated us. And we become much more of a European country rather than what America used to be. And on that depressing note,

Thank you. - Everyone, thank you very much, and I hope everyone here