should accept yourself just the way you
are what does that say about who I
should become is that just now off the
table because I'm already good enough in
every way so am I done or something get
the hell up get your act together adopt
some responsibility put your life
together develop a vision unfold all
those manifold possibilities that lurk
within be a force for good in the world
and that'll be the adventure of your
life
[Music]
we do not believe that we are beings
primarily motivated by lust for power
and the desire to dominate
we do not regard ours ourselves or our
fellow citizens
as destructive forces living in an alien
relationship to the pristine and pure
natural world we pause it
instead that men and women of faith and
decisiveness made in the image of God
can arrange their affairs with care and
attention so that abundance and
opportunity could be available for all
we hope
and I think we truly hope
and
in our wiser moments truly pray
we hope to encourage the development of
an alternative pathway uphill
out of both tyranny and the desert
stabilizing unifying and compelling to
men and women of sound judgment and
free will
welcome aboard the ark
thank you
[Music]
hi everybody
on January 27th I
announced on Joe Rogan's show that I
have been working with a group of people
in the UK and Europe and Australia and
New Zealand and Canada
and the U.S
to organize
a series of questions about
well about what about
how many might want to conduct ourselves
and what we might want to happen
individually and collectively as we move
forward into the future
from the level of the individual all the
way up to the level of the
say the universal Collective what kind
of planet do we want to inhabit
uh I'm going to tell you
why that all came about
insofar as that's possible so
last year
I had the opportunity to tour
extensively
throughout
North America and Europe and
the idea to do what I'm going to tell
you about today really
started to
make itself manifest to me when I was in
Europe first of all in Scandinavia
surprisingly enough
and then in Eastern Europe I was very
fortunate when I was touring to have
the support of many people who I've been
privileged to meet as I've toured around
the world
who were very well connected
internationally and what happened when I
was touring with Tammy my wife
in each of these countries in Europe was
that we'd arrive in a city
and
the day of or the day before a talk and
we'd have the opportunity to meet for
lunch or for dinner or for breakfast
with 30 people from that
City from that country who were active
and competent and influential in
cultural or political or faith-based
or communication domains and so it gave
us an opportunity to get a snapshot of
the local environment and you can't
become an expert about something as
complex as a city or a country in one
day obviously but
if you have 30 people with you for a
couple of hours
you can certainly at least hear about
what is of concern to them and to
everyone that they're in communication
with and so
one of the things we encountered
continually was the puzzled
questioning
from especially the Eastern Europeans
although this was also the case in
Scandinavia about just what the hell was
going on in the West
so that was probably most acute in
countries like Albania and so Albania
just so you know a small country was
probably the worst of the Soviet era
countries in terms of tyranny and
oppression and that was a damn hard
contest to win
and Albania was ruled by brutally
punitive dictatorial structures for well
the entire post-war period up until
1989. and uh to say it was bad is to say
almost nothing
almost everyone was informing on
everyone in in Albania and
the co the country is riddled with
tunnels that were dug by mad
paranoid politicians who insisted that
Albania was the center of the world and
that they were the inevitable Target of
all the jealous poor people who were
clamoring
violently in in potential to do nothing
but to move to Albania
beyond belief freely but nonetheless
happened all these Eastern Europeans you
know they suffered under the brutal rule
of the
radical left ethos
from 1945 sometimes earlier until 1989
and then of course underwent quite the
period of catastrophic collapse after
that and they're looking over at the
West thinking what in the world are you
people doing toying with these ideas
when the evidence is crystal clear that
they devastated the lives of 100 million
people took the lives of 100 million
people devastated the lives of far more
and laid our countries to waste don't
you understand
and so
um I'd certainly thought the same thing
being in the west and it was very
interesting to see that echoed
by the people who whose lives had
included sojourns under those systems of
Oppression now you might say if you're
cynical while you only met conservative
people and and they were just echoing
back to you what you wanted to hear and
that's actually not true because lots of
the people I met were disenchanted
liberals or leftists who
were not left enough to be enamored of
the Communist regimes let me say or who
had also been canceled in mob by the new
woke tyrants and so I don't think I was
seeing a non-representative sample
although admittedly only the people who
would talk to me did and the other thing
people told
us Tammy and I continually was that they
felt like voices crying in the
wilderness but after we'd been in about
six countries we thought well every
place we go people say the same thing
they're appalled by what's happening on
the culture War Front
especially with regard to the radical
left they can't believe these ideas are
making the incursions that they're
making and they feel absolutely isolated
in their attempts to do anything about
it but you know when you go to eight
countries and 30 people in each country
tell you that you think well why aren't
people coming together let's say those
who occupy the moderate Center whether
they happen to be conservative or
classically liberal
why aren't they coming together in some
International manner to
to discuss exactly this problem is there
no
overarching
structure of communication that would
make that possible so then I started
thinking about well maybe we should
organize such a thing and bring people
together for a conference somewhere in
Europe maybe in North America bring
people who are
centrally inclined and that would be the
vast majority of people together so they
could share best policies and share
their ideas about
what they've done in their own country
that might be extremely useful if other
countries duplicated it and to develop a
vision that would be an alternative to
the globalist woke you type in utopian
nightmare that threatens to engulf us
all and so I started talking about that
Preposterous idea and I've talked to
people about Preposterous ideas before
let's say on the business front or on
the academic front ideas that were of
sufficient
radicalness that they would require a
fair bit of movement on people's part in
order to instantiate and normally what
you experience is that people
especially if they are inclined to be
gracious events interest and and even
enthusiasm in the moment but
they're already busy with their lives
especially if they're competent people
and so nothing really gets going but
that isn't what happened when I started
talking about this what happened instead
was that everywhere we went
virtually everyone
virtually without exception from across
the political Spectrum said
we really need something like that
we'd be happy to help what could we do
to help and we'll drop everything to
make this a priority
and I was getting serious offers of
exactly that help
right away and then that happened in
the remaining Eastern European countries
that we visited Tammy and I so probably
10 something like that and then I went
to the UK and discussed it with my
connection network there which is
actually quite extensive and exactly the
same thing happened
and then I went to Washington and I
spoke not least to the Republican study
committee which is the Federal committee
um that is responsible for the
formulation of Republican policy it has
been for decades and
people were very enthusiastic there too
and they said well if you do have this
conference make sure you have it at a
time when we're not sitting and could
attend which is you know kind of
response you'd really hope for and many
people clambered
on board enthusiastically
and these are people who had other
things to do like I said and then I went
to Australia
to New Zealand in exactly the same thing
happened
and so
that was pretty interesting and so I
started to formalize this with some of
the people that I knew in the UK
I was interested in doing it in the UK
partly because the UK has already
decided that they're not exactly part
and parcel of the globalist utopian
scheme even at the European Union level
and there's a pretty strong free speech
and individuality ethos in the UK
rivaled only by the U.S I would say on
the world stage and
England is also halfway
between Europe and the US and so not
such a bad meeting place and London is
an attractive City and so and I had been
working with people on the Free Speech
front in the UK so that seemed
promising and I sat together with a
number of people all of whom are going
to announce their participation in this
project very soon on their own time and
in their own voice
and we started to
talk uh we spent
we've met three different times in
person between five and twenty people
and
well what did we think about
well we thought about
how what we would like to have happened
on the international front
if we could have
what would be best
and not what we think is best but what
would be best even how to construe what
would be best we started and we decided
that we would actually approach this by
asking a sequence of questions rather
than by delivering a sequence of answers
and I've been working on the
announcement document
one of our announcement documents which
I'm going to read today and comment on
and
we decided that we wanted to take a
decentralized approach which meant
trying to get as much input from the
public as possible and we're trying to
build that into the architecture of the
project and that we wanted to put
forward a series of questions rather
than a series of propositions about how
the world would have to be and that we
were also going to avoid entirely any
apocalyptic Notions
um refusing to accept in principle the
notion that
everything is such an emergency that all
the power should be ceded to a
centralized committee to save the planet
let's say it's like they are we don't we
don't buy that uh
it's not like there's any shortage of
emergencies confronting us because there
are certainly plenty of them whether
that means that we should run around in
a panicked delusional State and
centralized power in the control in the
hands of a small hypothetically
omniscient Elite which is is a
completely different matter
um we'd rather rank order the problems
and address them like
wise and calm people uh and wise people
remain calm even in a crisis and they
certainly don't use the crisis to
leverage their own grip on power
you know never let a crisis go to waste
it's like yeah that's especially true if
you're trying to
clamber up the power hierarchy and take
all the control for yourself we're not
interested in that you know
probably we're interested in that to the
degree that we're all still on repentant
narcissists you know and everybody's got
a little bit of that in them but I tried
to gather people around the table who
were
sensible enough not to want that partly
because they already had pretty
productive lives
and partly because they were wise enough
to know that that was a disaster in the
making and so
you know first of all we just we thought
we would put forward something
approximating a vision
um and we tried to talk about the
dimensions along which this Vision might
elaborate itself but then we after
thinking about a law we realized it
would be better to put forward the
um an invitation to participate in a
discussion
that
that centered on a number of questions
the questioning approach is a better one
because it's an invitation rather than a
top-down imposition of
of the principles that that must be
we also decided that one of our guiding
principles would be that
we're not going to formulate policies
that would require
compulsion or the imposition of state
power to
to implement so like here's an example
we should be exhaustively searching
through the universe of possible sources
of energy so that we can provide a
diversity of possibilities on the energy
front but
we do not believe that
anyone has the right to
compel people into absolute poverty by
increasing Energy prices to
to hypothetically achieve some
environmental goal it's like you want to
put forward Renewables you're concerned
about industrial pollution no problem
but you don't get to do that
as a matter of compulsion on the backs
of the world's poor not only because
that will be very very very hard on poor
people
and will even according to the world
bank's own projections
put 100 million or more at risk of
starvation
but will also be counterproductive on
the environmental front because if you
stress people too badly
they're going to start acting
impulsively impulsively maximize the
short-term return and you're going to
produce environmental Devastation that's
exactly what how by the way in Sri Lanka
it certainly happened to Germany to some
degree as they pursued idiot green
policies now they have energy prices
that are four to five times as much as
they were
where the power supply is much more
unreliable they're beholden to the
Russians which turned out to not be very
wise and uh they're polluting more
rather than less so even by their own
standards it's been an abject failure
we're not walking down that route
uh no compulsion involved in this
Enterprise and we'd like to have the
voluntary asset of the people governed
you know like you might in a democracy
now that's hard to do on the
international scale because we don't
have the
processes put in place to do widespread
public consultation but
we can at least move in that direction
to the degree that that's possible we're
going to throw this Enterprise open to
public participation as as we can manage
and we're going to try to make
everything we do as transparent and
decentralized as possible
so in any case we
met a number of times in person and on
line and we decided that we were going
to put forward a series of questions and
we agreed on the main areas
um that we would derive the questions
from and we know and this is part of
being transparent we know perfectly well
that
if you're having a discussion
what the discussion about is about is
the key issue and so if you control the
questions
you haven't
abandoned all governance or principles
you've established the playing ground
but
you can't just have everyone talk about
everything that isn't going to work and
so what we're striving to do is to get a
balance between the imposition of
structure a game-like structure let's
say that everyone would like to play and
the acquisition of information and we
are offering these questions genuinely
to see what we can all come up with
as answers to the questions and we're
hoping that the vision that would emerge
as a consequence of answering these
questions would be
compelling enough to people so that they
would voluntarily get on board no
compulsion right and so I'm going to
read you the document I've been writing
this document banding it back and forth
with uh the people who are the core
conspirators or contributors depending
on how you look at it to this Enterprise
um
it isn't a committee effort precisely I
wrote it in my voice
but I passed it by
a large number of the people involved
who are willing to devote some time and
resources to it and I think that the
consequence of that joint editing
process was the production of a shorter
Tighter and hopefully more compelling
story so I'm going to read this to you
and I'm going to comment on it as I go
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the name of this organization which was
probably the issue that caused us the
most trouble actually was we're calling
it it's called The Alliance for
responsible
citizenship the alliance for responsible
citizenship we like that name because
well if you're a citizen then you're an
autonomous individual and if you're a
responsible citizen then you're the kind
of autonomous individual that can take
care of yourself and maybe some other
people and that would be a good thing
and if it's an alliance then
well the implication there is that
citizens who are responsible can
aggregate in something approximating
responsible groups that also take
responsibility for developing
responsible citizens Arc Alliance for
responsible citizenship and the acronym
is Arc and Arc is a good acronym
um it has Echoes of the Ark the biblical
Arc which is a container that allows
people to withstand the trials and
tribulations of life to navigate through
the flood and to preserve and Arc is
also
there's a lifetime Arc which is the
trajectory moving forward and so arc's a
good name so we had to scrap about that
a fair bit but
the consequence of that was
well a name that made everybody happier
than all the other names that we had put
forward so so uh
welcome aboard the ark if you're
interested
and this is the statement of vision and
invitation
that starts with
I'll tell you the structure of of the of
the Proclamation or the vision statement
first of all so when I wrote my book
maps of meaning I analyzed the structure
of Redemptive stories and
and your life is a Redemptive story if
you're fortunate because you have a lot
of trouble in your life and yet you plow
through and take care of that trouble
and that's the story of redemption and
the typical Redemption story is
something like
there's a stable State a stable City a
stable family a stable plan and then
that's disrupted by some cataclysmic
event the arrival of The Barbarians the
uh the entry of uh uh of a of an
interloper into a marriage for example
some fracture occurs there's a descent
into an intermediary period of chaos and
then there's the reestablishment of
order that's of a higher order as a
consequence so you sort of go through
life like this and hopefully you know
order chaos order chaos order chaos and
hopefully as you do that the order gets
deeper and more profound and you get to
be better at mediating between Order and
Chaos and and this is an order chaos
story and it opens up with a description
of the current state of order
and we called that the good news so I'm
going to read this as I said and comment
on it life
has improved dramatically over the past
few centuries for almost everyone
everywhere at an Ever accelerating rate
far more people are thriving on our
planet than we could have imagined even
mere decades ago we live longer are
increasingly and globally literate
educated and connected and enjoy
unparalleled access to freshwater food
energy and resources now that's that's
quite the miracle because back in the
1960s when we started to become aware of
our uh increasing industrial power and
ability to operate at a planetary level
let's say we started to get worried
about such things as whether
well we were going to overpopulate the
planet and we were going to run out of
food and we're going to pollute
everything into Devastation and
the you know the whole civilizational uh
uh Endeavor was going to collapse into
a degenerate chaos and there was plenty
of Dooms saying at that time plenty of
people Paul Ehrlich for example at
Stanford who wrote the population bomb
and the club of Rome who were the
original apocalyptic doomsayers on the
environmentalist front claiming that by
the year 2000
there'd be Mass starvation we'd be
running out of basic Commodities and
that life was going to get a hell of a
lot worse quickly and so we better put
the brakes to the population growth and
de-industrialize rapidly or look the
hell out and you know none of that
turned out to be true
and the the people who put that Vision
forward might say well you know it's all
a matter of time frame eventually it's
going to come true and it's like well if
your prediction is
eventually I'm right
that's not a very good prediction is it
you have to specify time frame an
airlink by the way Paul Ehrlich did
specify time rate frame in a very famous
bet he had with uh with uh Julian Simon
The Economist and Eric lost famously and
what's happened actually is that we have
way more people now than we thought we
would in the year 2000.
we have way more people now than people
in 1965 thought would be on the planet
in the year 2000 when all the starvation
was supposed to hit and by and large
people are way better off than they've
ever been in the history of mankind
about seven out of eight billion people
now have
a reasonable standard of living it's not
luxurious Say by North American
Standards but they have enough to eat
they have a certain degree of security
and their children have a certain amount
of opportunity and there's still
hundreds of millions of people who have
trouble but we're we have over
especially over the last 20 years maybe
since the Berlin Wall fell and the
Communists kept quit wrecking everything
they got their hands on we've moved away
from absolute poverty at a pretty decent
rate so and there's other good news as
well
we exist in comparative peace violence
of every form from murder to
Insurrection is increasingly rare and
universally condemned and fewer people
than ever before confront the ravages of
War so we've become less violent and and
more peaceful at every level of social
organization to note that all this is a
miracle is still to understate the
enormity of the accomplishment and so
you know we can take stock now in 2023
and think well we've got a fair number
of problems and we're certainly not
perfect but
things are a lot better than they might
have been and there's a lot of good news
on the local National and international
front and so
many problems of course remain hundreds
of millions still labor under conditions
of extreme privation they're absolutely
poor we still organize ourselves less
effectively than we might if we were
truly wise and we are still determining
how to maintain our Economic Security
and prosperity in an efficient
cost-effective and nature conserving
manner
all right so you don't have to be a
Pollyanna
to take optimistic stop stock of the
current situation you can note that
95 percent of the world was living in in
conditions of absolute privation by the
UN definition of poverty in 1860
including in the west and most people
simply aren't
burdened by that kind of inadequate
provision in the modern world and so
that's a pretty good deal now is it
sustainable well
that's not a good question the better
question is
under what conditions is it optimally
sustainable or expanding that's a better
question questions are important
so you can say perhaps you can argue
the the foundations are secure and good
we've learned how to act and to conduct
ourselves both individually and socially
so that true human flourishing is
possible on a scale heretofore undreamed
of and practically impossible we put in
place systems of governance that are
like historical standards quite
effective there's been a sequence of
absolute technological Miracles that
have enabled us to feed ourselves we've
been able to provide people with access
to inexpensive energy and energy is work
and work is the amelioration of absolute
privation and so that's all pretty damn
good
so
that's the upside the realistic
non-naive upside
the challenge so you might think that's
the impending crisis despite all this
good news this undeniable progress a
shadow has emerged
an adversarial challenge
to this state and process of expanding
abundance
an emergent crisis of meaning and
purpose
God is dead or so the story goes and the
future is uncertain
five centuries of ascendant reductionist
Enlightenment rationality have revealed
that this starkly objective World lacks
all intrinsic meaning
a century and a half or more of
corrosive cultural criticism has
undermined our understanding of and
faith in the Traditions necessary to
unite and guide us
well we underwent the Scientific
Revolution started 500 years ago saying
it concentrated on delineation of the
nature of the objective world we found
out that
the heavens were other than what we had
presupposed and that the God we had
imagined inhabiting those Heavens did
not appear in the
starkly empty and Barren immense vast
landscape of the cosmos and
we believe that if you were sensible and
abandoned your superstitions that you'd
see the world as the cold dead
mechanistic inert
object of process that it most truly is
well
we've gone a long way with that
Viewpoint you know that that
reductionist materialism has made us
unbelievably powerful technologically
but the downside of that is that it
stripped the world of meaning and that's
produced a crisis of faith and you might
object while the world's necessarily
been stripped of meaning but
it's not always that obvious just
exactly what constitutes what's
necessary so
in the middle of this existential chaos
the false idol of apocalyptic ideology
inevitably beckons
so what's that proposition
well you lose your traditional Faith
your traditional religious Faith you
still need an interpretive structure to
guide you and so what you might say is
that
well as the classic god of the
monotheistic Western tradition collapses
then his polytheistic adversaries rise
up to replace him you are bound to act
out your belief in something and maybe
it's your own hedonistic will a
fragmented impulsive hedonistic will and
you might think that's you but that's
just a lower that's just a sequence of
lower gods that are possessing you so
we find ourselves in consequence
inundated by a continual onslaught of
ominous demoralizing messages
most particularly in the form of
Environmental catastrophism
the insistence that we all confront a
severe and immediately pending emergency
of biological destruction
causally associated with our degenerate
social structures the patriarchy
the oppressive patriarchy and their
excess and destructive industrial
production
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[Music]
from my perspective and I've thought
about this deeply and talked about it
with many wise people this is a
quasi-religious worldview replacement
for our original traditional religious
Viewpoint and
it's predicated on a
a narrative a story
we see the world through a story
inevitably a description of the
structures through which we see the
world is a story
the apocalyptic environmentalist
ethos is a story and it has characters
and
here's the story
The Narrative generating these messages
quasi-religious in its structure and
intensity paints a dismal existential
picture
the individual
is a rapacious predatory parasitical
consumer
too many mouths to feed
Society even the little Society of the
family is an oppressive tyrannical
despoiler
marriage is a patriarchal institution an
exploitative patriarchal institution all
our economic interactions are nothing
but the manifestation of a corrupt Will
To Power
and that's the proper reading of history
and the current moment
and nature herself is a hapless fragile
virginal victim in need of continual
sympathy and protection
for our sins
so The Story Goes the Horsemen of the
Apocalypse are to be loosed upon us and
justly so
the Ultimate malthusian Nightmare is
about to be realized
the planet is unsustainably and
unforgivably overpopulated there is
simply
too much fundamentally pathological
human activity
plague political Anarchy and starvation
await us all
Malthus Malthus was a biologist who made
the observation that under natural
circumstances
populations of living organisms tended
to expand
through reproduction to the point where
they consumed all available resources
and then precipitously collapsed now in
a dynamic natural environment the deer
don't multiply to the point where they
eat all the uh
everything that they could forage for
because they're held in check by
predators
so you see in principle a balancing of
some sort emerge in complex Dynamic
natural environments but left to their
own devices unchecked the malthusian
nightmare
emerges the yeast will in the petri dish
will consume all the agar and then all
of it will die and
that's a biological model
and it's a model that's valid under some
conditions but we're not East human
beings and we're not yeast because we
can let our ideas die instead of us and
what that means is that if we do stupid
destructive things we can learn to stop
doing them and we can get more efficient
and we can get wiser and we can make
more with less and we've done that
consistently throughout our entire
biological in throughout the entire
duration of our existence as a species
and there's no evidence whatsoever that
we have got less good at that in fact
quite the contrary and so the economists
rejoined her to the male enthusian
biologists is
um
resources are not defined by their
finitude in the manner you presume
because there is no upper limit to the
scope of human Ingenuity especially if
it's conjoined with the appropriate
governance that makes Cooperative
ingenuity
both possible and more likely so
for those of you who are thinking that
we should be following the science and
that the science is necessarily
malthusian then I would say you don't
know as much about science as you might
need to know to make such a claim
in any case from this malthusian
perspective
the UN Ultimate Nightmare is about to be
realized the planet is unsustainably and
unforgivably overpopulated there's too
much pathological human activity plague
political Anarchy and starvation away to
Soul it is in consequence
High Time
to repent and change our errant ways to
admit in defeated shame that our current
social and Industrial Enterprises are
corrupt and unsustainable
to radically revolutionize all
traditional forms of conduct and
governance
to question even the propriety of
bringing new devouring most into this
world
except without resistance the limits to
growth and opportunity made increasingly
mandatory by a codery of concerned and
hypothetically expert Elites
well what's the problem well part of the
problem is
a panicked response to a hypothetical
emergency can be far worse than the
hypothetical emergency itself and given
what we all just did when the covid
when the hypothetical covid pandemic
hypothetically emerged we should give a
real serious second thought to panicking
and running off a cliff in the same
manner as a consequence of the
Chicken Little sky is falling doomsayers
who are proclaiming that the emergency
justifies their acquisition of all the
power
from the malthusian perspective a deep
worldwide social economic and revolution
is therefore allegedly at hand
and necessarily so those who dare
suggest otherwise are blind if not
malevolent and must be silenced
what are the results of such theories or
the consequences of such proclamations
well we can see it unfolding the
increasingly
and increasingly the increasing and
increasingly compelled imposition of
severe involuntary limits to material
abundance and growth
more expensive energy for example the
resultant artificially inflated prices
particularly for the aforementioned
energy that most truly punish
the poor
the fraying of our social fabric into a
chaos of alienated polarization
simultaneously and in predictable
lockstep the extension of reach and
control over even the most private
details of Our Lives
by increasingly gigantic and centralized
organizations governmental and corporate
alike
and the spread particularly among the
young of a demoralizing and socially
divisive doubt and hopelessness well why
does doubt and hopelessness well
look if you're a young person in the
world today well if you're female
the first question that confronts you
giving the looming environmental
apocalypse is
well who are you to bring a child into
this world and so that pretty makes
pretty much makes the whole Enterprise
of motherhood which is a fundamental
part of life
as you may have noticed all of you who
have mothers
that makes that what morally untenable
and then of course if motherhood itself
is morally untenable with the whole
utility of having a relationship let's
say with a man that becomes entirely
questionable
I mean then it's what sex and
companionship and that's not nothing but
that might not be enough to unite people
in a manner that allows them to maintain
in the intense social bonds that are
necessary to keep us
free of Terror and anxiety and hopeful
into the future and then for men for
young men in particular it's like well
all their ambition is nothing but a
manifestation of patriarchal oppression
and the Very oppression that's
destroying the planet and so if they get
up and attempt to move forward all
they're doing is contributing to the
catastrophic mess that human beings that
cancer on the planet have already had
always made of the planet and so what do
you expect
on the behalf of young people and you
should expect exactly what you get which
is a radical increase in depression and
anxiety a radical elimination of their
in their sense of agency
um uh growing sense of hopelessness and
despair all of which is being forced
upon them and even the abandonment of
the entire sexual Enterprise
30 percent of people on in Japan it's
the same in South Korea and we're moving
in that direction pretty damn fast in
the rest of the West 30 percent of
people under 30 in Japan are virgins
we've demoralized young people so badly
that they're not even having sex even
with themselves and so I don't know man
if your solution to
if your solution to saving the planet is
to demoralize young people your vision
of the acceptable future is
diametrically opposed to let's say my
vision of the
desirable future so
all right
we've talked about the current situation
optimistically we talked a little bit
about the crisis that we're facing
existentially and practically and the
dangers that might emerge
because of overreaction to that
hypothetical crisis we'll talk about the
alliance for responsible citizenship a
bit and what we're
tentatively offering and what we have
as an invitation to the table
the catastrophizing must stop
it is existentially perilous
to insist upon the impending end of the
world in this Doom saying manner
lest the ensuing panicked tyranny
produce exactly the result that is in
principle most feared the use of
increasingly powerful and invasive
technology to Monitor and control
everything
in combination with the willingness and
ability to use compulsion and force
and that can be Taxation and increased
energy prices because that's compulsion
and force too can lead only to tyranny
and despair regardless of the
hypothetical nobility of the end goal
we have improved almost everything and
we appear to be rapidly getting better
at doing precisely that as the Great
British historian Macaulay long ago
acquired inquired
on what principle is it that when we see
nothing but Improvement behind us
we are to expect nothing but
deterioration in front of us
we have therefore initiated the alliance
for responsible citizenship
the ark
a new movement of hopeful Vision local
National and International in its aim
and scope aimed at the collective
voluntary establishment of a maximally
attractive route forward well why local
National and international well there's
a
historically
there's a there's historical precedent
for the conception of the good
governance that's neither tyranny nor
degeneration into chaos and that's
something like distributed
responsibility so imagine that a
well-governed state doesn't have good
leaders from the top
shepherding
the chaotic and ignorant masses what it
has instead is responsibility
distributed across the social hierarchy
of citizenship so you want individuals
who are taking responsibility for their
own lives who are educated and attentive
and productive and generous enough to
take care of themselves and then you
hope that
if they get good enough at that they can
extend their hand and start taking care
of someone else so maybe you get married
and you take care of your wife and she
takes care of you and that's a pretty
good deal for both of you and then the
two of you are productive and generous
enough with each other so that you can
now take care of some kids and then you
put your family together and so your
family's solid and well constituted and
you have a little bit of leftover
resource
so that you could be evade to your local
community and so the local community
thrives with its level of responsibility
and then well the the town native
communities thrives and the province
made of cities thrives and then the
nation made of provinces Thrive and then
what's ever left at the international
level can make itself minimally manifest
and that's a vision of distributed
responsibility and it's a vision that
allows everyone
to have their proper place and
encourages them precisely to take that
predicated as it is on the idea that
just because you're in the uppermost
echelons of an abstracted organization
does not mean that what you're doing is
more important and vital than the people
who occupy something at a lower level a
more local level
so that means the housewife's job is as
important All Things Considered and as
valuable as the
prime minister's job
and you might think well that's
preposterous and then I would say well
then you're not taking the job of
housewife seriously enough
it's like not that easy to make a home
and it's not that easy to make a home
where
things are set up to maximize the
possibilities of your children and God
only knows how you can
bring goodness into the World by
optimizing your relationship with your
children
so
everything in its proper place and
everyone deeded their appropriate level
of responsibility and that's the
antidote to tyranny and slavery and
that's the invitation here too it's like
we don't want to do this top down we
want to help figure out how to make res
how to facilitate the development of
responsible citizens in well-functioning
families in well-constituted communities
in properly put together cities and to
leave responsibility requisite
responsibility at every level of that
hierarchical structure and that is the
antidote the subsidiary antidote to
tyranny and the desert
we'll be right back first we wanted to
give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new
series Exodus
so the Hebrews created history as we
know it
'll get away with anything and so you
might think you can bend the fabric of
reality and that you can treat people
instrumentally and that you can bow to
the Tyrant and violate your conscience
without cost you will pay the piper it's
going to call you out of that slavery
into Freedom even if that pulls you into
the desert
see that there's something else going on
here that is far more Cosmic and deeper
than what you can imagine the highest
goal
presented precisely as that spirit that
allies itself with the cause of Freedom
against tyranny I want villains to get
punished but do you want the villains to
learn before they have to pay the
ultimate price that's such a Christian
question
we have therefore initiated the alliance
for responsible citizenship Arc a new
movement of hopeful Vision while they
say the people parents perish without
Vision what is hopeful Vision well
hopeful vision is what you're working
toward you know you think well if I
could have things this way in my family
in my life
in my community that would be worthwhile
I could get on board with that well your
vision of the future that attracts you
and also provides you with security and
Direction orientation that unites you
with others that's your hopeful vision
and you perish without that and
hopefully through discussion and
negotiation we can develop something
approximating a collective hopeful
Vision that we could all be on board
with like part of that for me is
well how about if we work as hard as we
can as quickly as possible to ameliorate
absolute poverty provide inexpensive
energy as widely as possible everywhere
in the world and lift people out of the
poverty that
what would you say
compels them to adopt a cataclysmically
short-term vision of the world
now you know you might say well that's
not priority number one it's like fair
enough we could have a discussion about
what priority number one might be but
but that's for me at least an element of
what might constitute a hopeful vision
and I think it's realistic one too given
that rich people care more about the
planet they can afford to
so
aimed at the collective voluntary
establishment of a maximally attractive
route forward well why maximally
attractive
so that people will be on board without
compulsion
because one of our principles is all
policy that requires compulsion is
sub-optimal now you have to use
compulsion on criminals now and then
Psychopaths people who just will not
abide by any set of principles
whatsoever except the advancement of
their extraordinarily narrowly defined
self-interest but other than that if you
set up an organization and people aren't
willingly on board you haven't developed
your vision properly and so we want to
do that collectively in response to the
questions that admittedly we are putting
forth
um voluntary establishment well you get
the best out of people if they're
voluntarily on board you know you don't
want to play a game with someone who's
been forced to play with you and that's
that's the definition of fatal social
catastrophe even when you're a kid you
know
your neighbor's mother has to tell his
son your neighbors
mother
you have a Kid Next Door you'd like to
be friends with and he won't play with
you unless his mother tells you to well
that's tells him to that's not going to
be very fun for you or for him
you can't have an optimally structured
social organization that relies on
involuntary participation so voluntary
establishment the ark will open itself
up to widespread public membership as
rapidly and extensively as is
practically manageable at as low a cost
as is possible and desirable because
nothing's free
so that everyone interested in Canadian
voluntarily formulating this story and
strategy and to discuss how its
implementation might be encouraged now I
set up a mailing list already which will
be a precursor let's say to a broad
membership list and I'll put the link to
the mailing list in this video so that
you can sign up there's about 30 000
people that have signed up to that
mailing list already and we're going to
put up a website where the questions I'm
posing today or we're posing today can
be answered and where people can vote on
the answers and so you know that's not a
perfect voting structure but but it's
not nothing and we can probably improve
it as we move forward we're also
announcing our first conference schedule
slated for Greenwich London England
October 30th and 31st and November 1st
concentrating on issues metaphysical
cultural and practical so we would like
this to be a beautiful conference we'd
like it to focus on
elements beyond the political cultural
elements
um
philosophical elements psychological
elements
issues pertaining to the meaning of life
the significance of existence and and
then also to become practical in with
regard to the realization of policy and
to start that discussion some of this
conference
will be necessarily limited and it's
scaled to 2 000 or so initial attendees
some of it will be made open to as
widest swath of the public as possible
the happenings on both fronts will be
made available online insofar as that is
pragmatically possible either live or
recorded for later reading viewing or
listening we'll have 2 000 people there
I hope to do a public talk in the midst
of that
and at the old two if if we can get that
arranged we'll get something
approximating fifteen thousand people to
that and do us a series of discussions
in one evening about the fundamental
issues that the conference is going to
discuss and as I said we'll record the
conference proceedings so that people
who are interested can
can uh can see what's going on we'll do
it live
online as much as that's possible but
we're also not going to sacrifice the
utility of the in-person meeting to that
end and then we'll try to expand that as
we move forward you know you got to
start
not too or not too large a scale if you
want to figure out how to make something
work
we plan as well to render the operations
of the Ark public and transparent to
operate under the assumption that each
citizen has the inalienable right and is
well equipped when engaged informed and
consulted choose and adhere to to the
desirable sustainable productive and
generous future path
so I'm hoping that everybody involved is
wise enough not to think that they're
the only person in the room or on the
planet who's wise you know by sense of
the world is that there are
extraordinarily competent people
operating at every domain ranging from
the sheerly practical wisdom of plumbers
and and carpenters and
Highway workmen and who do their job
diligently and properly complex though
it is to people who are operating in the
realm of abstraction and that for things
to work out properly everybody at every
level has to
value their productive capacity be
valued for their productive capacity and
be seen to operate
as
contributing members to the broader
social Endeavor and to be regarded as
valid contributing members and that's
not some utopian dream that's
hard-headed reality
so
so the more people that participate and
the more people we can consult insofar
as it's possible to aggregate a diverse
range of voices uh the better as far as
as far as we're striving to be concerned
no and so
the sheer complexity of the world and
the genuine diversity of individual
ability and preference means that
distributed decision making is a
necessity not a luxury no Elite
technocracy
is capable of knowing best and then
determining how we should all move
forward as individuals and communities
it follows from this that policy
requiring compulsion let alone let alone
Force rather than the voluntary Ascent
of the participants is bad policy
we therefore offer for the contemplation
of those potentially interested in our
invitation six fundamental questions
the answers to which might form the
basis for a vision
that is voluntarily compelling
motivating
that moves you forward into the future
stabilizing provides a certain amount of
structure so that you're not overwhelmed
by complexity and uniting uniting in
that if we all share the vision or to
the degree that we do we're going to be
moving forward
in a manner that's mutually
comprehensible
productive stabilizing and hopeful
well that'd be good
domain One Vision and story what Destiny
might we envision and pursue such that
we are maximally fortified against
anxiety and despair motivated by Faith
and Hope and voluntarily United in our
pursuit of a flourishing and abundant
world
responsible citizenship
how might we encourage individuals to
reflect
and to act
so that they adopt full voluntary
responsibility for themselves present
and future that's
that's the difference between impulsive
self-interest and wise self-interest
right if you're wise you act in the
present so that the future you will
benefit from your actions in the present
you don't do that if you're impulsive or
hedonistic
how might we encourage individuals to
reflect and to act so that they adopt
full voluntary responsibility for
themselves present and future as well as
their families and communities so that's
that extension of individual
responsibility from the bottom up from
the local upward and
how to how to how to encourage that
recognize it fortify it develop it
distribute it
family and social fabric so we're sort
of moving up the hierarchy of of society
how might we effectively conceptualize
value
and reward the sacrificial
long-term peaceful
child-centered Intimate Relationships
upon which psychological integrity and
social stability most fundamentally
depend
well the minimal model for that is
something approximating the nuclear
family right long-term committed stable
heterosexual marriages Sanctified by the
community and by the tradition
providing the basis for
the mutual for mutually satisfying and
engaging relationship for the adults
involved and offering the necessary
minimal foundation for the security for
the for the creation and security of
children and so
well we have to discuss exactly what
that means at the minimal level
um I'm
particularly impressed this is me not
Arc by the way with the Hungarian family
policy uh Provisions that have been put
forward most recently I think they're
well worth considering
um if you're a mother in Hungary
you have one child you're exempt from
income tax 25 percent of income tax for
the rest of your life and that scales up
to four children 100 reduction and I
like that because
well it
it helps redress the imbalance in
relationship to reproductive
responsibility that's part and parcel of
the human existential landscape and you
know maybe that's not a perfect solution
but
it seems to me a variant of the solution
that the feminists to give the devil
his or in this case her do have been
clamoring for for ever but certainly for
the last 300 years
people aren't isolated and atomistic
individuals they need a family context
what that family content text minimally
constitutes particularly in the ideal
can be subject to intense discussion as
a conservative in this matter I tilt
towards the minimal traditional nuclear
family unit and uh
having said that though I would also say
that I know perfectly well that we all
fall short of the ideal and that
many people are divorced many people are
unable to find a partner
people people spouses die
we're unfaithful to each other
homosexuality is an eternal reality
and even within the confines of a
traditional marriage
there isn't a person alive who
makes that ideal manifest in all
possible ways that every possible moment
and so we need an ideal on the family
front that we all hold as an ideal and
that's probably something like the
heterosexual nuclear family at least in
my estimation with a very wide swath of
genuine tolerance for
human variation surrounding it
but the fact that that tolerance exists
and that there is recognition of The
Fringe and its right to exist doesn't
mean that we should sacrifice the ideal
I think when we do that we destroy the
center and we destroy The Fringe so
going up a level free exchange and good
governance how can we continue to gain
from The Genius of unbridled human
Innovation and the productive
reciprocity of voluntary production and
free Exchange
while protecting ourselves against the
tendency of successful organizations to
degenerate into a state of willfully
blind and narrowly self-serving
authoritarianism well there's a free
market element to that so the idea there
is that we're all best served when
people are left to hell alone to do what
they need to do to produce what they can
produce and to trade but we also have to
as the
reasonable left-wingers insist note when
any Enterprise of any magnitude gets so
large that it starts to co-opt the very
Rules by which the game is played and so
we have to sort that out and that's
complicated how do we forestall
regulatory capture and the proclivity of
government corporation and Communication
Enterprise alike to collude at the
highest levels of abstraction and become
authoritarian and self-serving
energy and resources
how do we ensure provision of the energy
and other resources crucial to our
shared security and opportunity in a
manner that is inexpensive reliable safe
efficient and widely and universally
accessible
We Energies work work is the
amelioration of absolute poverty
we want to provide energy as widely as
possible
at as low a price is
properly sustainable within the confines
of a market economy and we want to do
that as rapidly as we can there's no
excuse for
putting forward energy policies that
punish those who are absolutely poor it
will not help them it will hurt them we
have no right to do that we have no
right to deny the developing World here
in the west those of us who have that
Western privilege we have no right to
deny the developing world the
opportunity to pursue the opportunities
that we've been blessed to pursue
and furthermore if we do deny them that
opportunity we will not produce a
beneficial environmental outcome you
play a net zero you play a zero-sum game
you're going to get a uh conflict ridden
catastrophic outcome it's not a good
model for governance
so
and then environmental stewardship
stewardship right that's not that word
itself implies that human beings are not
a cancer on the face of the planet and
that we do not exist in pure opposition
to some hypothetically pristine natural
order or part parcel of the cosmos just
like all the other creatures and we're
conscious and self-conscious
to a degree that makes us unique and we
have
opportunity power and responsibility
that's commensurate with that
differentiated ability
how might we properly pursue the
environmental stewardship
that most truly serves the needs and
wants of all individuals today tomorrow
and into the foreseeable future
and that's a lot different than
how do we sacrifice human interest to
save the virginal planet
concluding words
we at the alliance for responsible
citizenship we at ARC do not believe
that humanity is necessarily and
inevitably teetering on the brink of
apocalyptic disaster we do not believe
that we are beings
primarily motivated by lust for power
and the desire to dominate
we do not regard ours ourselves or our
fellow citizens
as destructive forces living in an alien
relationship to the pristine and pure
natural world
we pause it
instead that men and women of faith and
decisiveness made in the image of God
can arrange their affairs with care and
attention so that abundance and
opportunity could be available for all
Those Who present a vision of inevitable
catastrophe in the absence of severely
enforced material privation
are not wise seers of the inevitable
future
but forlorn prisoners of their own
limited faithless imaginations
and those who scheme to lead using
Terror as a motivator and force as a
kajal
reveal themselves by definition as unfit
for the job
we hope
and I think we truly hope
and
in our wiser moments truly pray
we hope to encourage the development of
an alternative pathway uphill
out of both tyranny and the desert
stabilizing unifying
and compelling to men and women of sound
judgment and
free will
welcome aboard the ark
foreign
that's
that
and so
I'm working diligently with
the people who've
agreed to shoulder the initial
responsibility for this project to
try with all our might to do exactly
what I just described right to produce a
decentralized vision that's as
attractive to people
as we can make it in the hopes that we
can unite our vision and
move towards the future that we all
would need and want if we wisely chose
what we need and want and if you would
like to participate then we'll do
everything we possibly can within the
bounds of ability and will to make that
possible
and so
welcome to the table