Ignasi Boltó, a.k.a. the Spanish Libertarian, asked me eleven questions for his YouTube channel. Here is the transcript:
Ignasi Bolto: Hello, friends from the internet. It’s Ignasi from Spanish Libertarian. Today we’re making another interview in English. I know most of you usually speak in Spanish, but we also like to give content in other language. Also, if you’re not from Spain or Latin America and you’re hearing this interview, so good for you and thanks for being here.
Today I’m especially happy and I’m nervous, I’m shaking a bit, I have to admit. We have with us the American-Canadian philosopher, Stephen Hicks. Stephen, how are you?
Stephen Hicks: I’m very well. Early spring weather here, so we’re happy.
Ignasi Bolto: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Springtime is arriving here. That always make the day better.
Stephen Hicks: Exactly.
Ignasi Bolto: Well, for the ones who don’t know Stephen, I mean I definitely recommend you to check his books and especially his YouTube lectures. I’ve been making some research. I hope I don’t mess it. Stephen is a philosopher and he specializes in Marxism, postmodernism, and some authors such as Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and then some authors from the left, such as Foucault.
We will try to discuss many different topics, but I always try to make these interviews a little bit different and personal. I would like to know something about your topics in which you are an expert, but also something about you, starting with this. The first question is who is Stephen Hicks? How can you define yourself or at least professionally, intellectually? Then we will be talking about different … I know it’s hard to talk about one’s self, but okay. The floor is yours, Stephen.
Stephen Hicks: Well, my professional definition would be as a philosopher, but aside from my work, I enjoy, on my off hours, doing philosophy and especially intellectual history. I just love how arguments and positions develop over the centuries and have crossed generational influences and how, in many cases, abstract philosophical theories, when they are applied, make major differences politically, economically in the history of religion and so forth. All of that’s fascinating to me.
Also, I do enjoy the technical issues in philosophy, if you’ve taken it out of a historical context, just what is the nature of reality, when do we really know, where do we get values from. All of those questions are fascinating.
My career is working on those issues. Typically, my career has fallen into, I would say, seven-year chunks, where I like to read and think and write short pieces for maybe five years about some topics. Then for two years, work on a book, and then publish it. Then I’m ready for another topic. Seven years later, I’m ready for something else. I don’t know that that pattern will hold, but that’s how it’s been so far.
Ignasi Bolto: Well, I think it makes sense that during these seven years, life changed itself. It definitely makes sense. The first question would be like … I think it’s one of the topics that most of the people know you. How could you define, like one-on-one, like core definition, what is postmodernism for the ones who don’t know? Also, I would like you to link it with this post-Marxism. You’re saying that postmodernism is a consequence of Marxism. Am I right?
Stephen Hicks: Okay. Fair enough. Well, postmodernism, as the name suggests, is a rejection of the main principles of modernism. If you think about the modern world philosophically, it’s a strong advocacy of reason, of individualism, some sort of liberalism in free markets economically, liberalism, of religious tolerance, liberalism politically, some sort of democratic, republican politics.
Also, a characteristic of modernism philosophically as a consequence of the advocacy of reason is a valorization of the scientific method and seeing science and its children in technology. It’s important for us to figure out the way the world works and then to use that knowledge to transform the world in a way that makes it possible for us to live better.
Postmodernism is, in varying degrees, a suspicion of all of those elements of modernism or, in stronger forms, an outright rejection of them. You’ll find anti-rationalism, anti-individualism, certainly anti-liberalism and anti-capitalism and anything in markets, and often when it comes to science and technology, a very pessimistic or skeptical assessment of the power of science and technology. That would be a very short answer.
You asked about Marxism. I don’t see postmodernism as a Marxism. I think there are probably four important strands that come together intellectually to make the overall postmodern package. There’s a certain theory about epistemology or knowledge. There’s a certain understanding of human nature. There’s an understanding about metaphysics, kind of some core philosophical issues.
But certainly Marxism and it’s evolution has contributed one important strand to postmodernism. Almost all of the leading postmodernist of the 1950s and 1960s were well-schooled in classical Marxism, various neo-Marxist variations that had developed in the 20th Century as classical Marxism an into theoretical and empirical problems.
But even if you just confined yourself to the political issues, as important as Marxism and neo-Marxism are to postmodernism, I don’t even think that’s the whole story. I think as some title of my book indicates, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is also extremely important to understanding the political background to current postmodernism. Those are all things we could drill down further into.
Ignasi Bolto: I guess you could say, in a broad sense, or maybe that’s too generic, that postmodernism is dangerous. I mean could you agree with that statement?
Stephen Hicks: I think it is. I think I’m a modernist, philosophically. I think there are a lot of philosophical weaknesses in the major philosophical systems as they were presented in the early and mid-part of the modern world.
But essentially the modern project was the right path to go down, and the Enlightenment Era as a capstone intellectual and cultural project of the 1700s with the revolutions in religious toleration, separation of church and state, the importance of developing the scientific project, physics, chemistry, biology, increasingly psychology and economics, the development of liberal democratic, republican kinds of political system with checks on political power … Political power has always been very dangerous … over the course of the centuries, the morally charged movements to extend equal liberty rights to women, to put slavery on the defensive and to reject it, the application of scientific method to human health and the dramatic increase in human life expectancy.
All of those things are achievements of the modern world and enlightenment philosophy. Despite the weaknesses that the postmodernist and the anti-enlightenment thinkers will exploit in the modern theoretical framework, that still is the system that we try to work within.
It’s dangerous, I think, about postmodernism is that it takes often a grain of truth that there are skeptical weaknesses, there are holes that can be poked in various modernist theories. Some people have taken elements of modernism and put them to bad use. All of those things are true, but postmodernism is a much more wide-sweeping rejection of the power of reason, the power of science, the power of markets to improve the human condition.
In my view, when you take the stronger versions of postmodernism, the strong skepticism, the strongly cynical and negative appraisable of our possibilities for living together peacefully or crossing the various boundaries that have always set people against each other, getting rid of the racial hatreds, getting rid of the gender warfare, getting rid of the ethnic hostilities, all of those things the enlightenment said we should be able to get past as civilized human beings, if you reject that project and you stop trying to do those things, then I think we will just be plunging ourselves back into the kinds of negative pathologies that had dominated human beings for all of human history. We’ll be plunging ourselves back into ignorance, back into group warfare, back into various superstitions that will arise to fill the vacuum.
Ignasi Bolto: I was about to ask you about why this ideology, we could say, is against western values. But first of all, could you define for us and for our audience, what it means, like the core values of western society. Then we can continue talking about postmodernism.
Stephen Hicks: I think the core values of western civilization are the same values that inform any civilization. If you’re going to have a large number of people living together peacefully, then there are certain civilized values that one has to respect, certain respects for the individual, certain autonomy over people’s lives, an agreement that, by and large, we’re going to try to sort out our differences through discussion and diplomacy.
We’re not quickly going to the savage direction and try to conquer you and take people’s stuff. As civilized people, we’ll respect others for their accomplishments, for their skills in technology, their skills in the arts, their skills in craftsmanship and so forth, that they will have a more or less stable political system where people know what the rules are, that they have some confidence that there will be a fair administration of justice.
You have to have a civilization in which people are secure enough in their property, that they can start businesses, the wealth that’s going to them supports some science, supports some technology, and support the arts, so to speak. All of the civilizations, whether they were western civilizations or ancient civilizations in the east and in Africa, have, to some extent, got those core values correct in a widespread administration of them.
It is true that western civilization has been unique, and I would say it’s been unique in the systematicity with which it developed a full philosophical understanding of what those civilized values are and was able to do so consciously and then systematically apply them through political institutions, educational institutions, and particularly getting the economics right, particularly getting the politics right and getting the science right so that, in an unprecedented way, it was able to have a civilization that accomplished amazing things in the arts, the sciences, and in politics.
What I would say is that most civilizations then have grasped these principles, sometimes in implicit form and sometimes unsystematically, that one of the achievements of early western civilization was to grasp them explicitly and systematically and then to apply them.
Then more of the proof’s in the pudding has just been that western civilization is now a misnomer. Those core values are being adopted by civilizations all over the world. We’re talking about a global civilization that’s broadly in favor of democratic markets, free trade, respecting people despite their ethnicity, religious toleration, equal rights for women and so forth.
Ignasi Bolto: Now we’re going back to the other side of the spectrum. The question would be like what do you think is the strategy of the postmodernist the new left or the cultural relativist, the hidden strategy in order to see the world burn? You know what I mean?
Stephen Hicks: Yeah.
Ignasi Bolto: What’s the intrinsic motivation of this ideology in order to implement their … But, in this case, ideas?
Stephen Hicks: Yeah. Well, postmodernism comes in degrees. There are some people who are semi-postmodern for epistemological reasons, where they are semi-postmodern because they are attracted to the oppression analysis that comes in the normative realm. But if you talk about systematic thoroughgoing postmodernism and you take it to its logical conclusions, the way a significant number of intellectuals and activists will do, you do end up in a nihilism. That is the position that says, “Yes, I would rather see the world burn,” or, “I’m willing to see the world burn.” It’s not that there is any positive vision that is going to come out of that.
If you think of older religious versions of end of the world, where you had people really hoping that there will be the apocalypse and that the whole world will burn, at least officially behind that is an idea that then there will be a second coming and there will be some sort of ideal world that will replace it.
In some versions of the older socialist apocalyptic vision, yes, we do have to be brutal and, yes, we do have to have a violent revolution. We have to destroy all of the institutions of current society. But even there, out of it, there was some vision that there would be some sort of a beautiful socialist society that would then replace it. You don’t find that in the contemporary, more nihilistic postmodernists. It is a destructiveness for the sake of destruction.
Now this, I think, is where we need to get a little bit speculative because you asked about motivation, and that means you have to get inside people’s heads. Then that’s always something that you can only do indirectly, by seeing what they do when they have power. Do they have any sense of positive value that they’re trying to create with their power, or is their power used purely for destructive ends? If it’s only used for destructive ends, then you know that this person really is more nihilistic.
Certainly in a lot of the rhetoric, what you find is among the more nihilistic of the postmodernist is a really strong sense of despair, that they had certain ideals, certain hopes, most of them political and economic hopes. But intellectually, they have come to believe that those ideals are not going to be realized. I do think it’s a natural reaction when you have a strongly hope for idealistic system, but you can’t believe in that anymore, that you will go through a nihilistic phase, that you just want to destroy things.
In our personal lives, we know what it’s like, I don’t know, if we’re playing a video game. We spent money for our video game system. It’s many hundreds of euros and my television is many hundreds of euros, and I put a lot of time in it and I really want to win the game. But we do know that there are lots of people, when they are extremely frustrated in their video game, they will do things like take their controller and throw it at the screen and destroy hundreds of euros worth of stuff.
That is something that’s possible in the human condition. If you do not have a psychology that teaches you how to handle your negative raging emotions when they come along and if you have a philosophical system that encourages you, as many strains of postmodernism do, to just let your rage and anger come out and that you’re justified in doing so because you’re in a totally corrupt system anyway, then we can expect some pathological nihilistic results.
Ignasi Bolto: I would like to change our topic, but that’s too interesting that I need to continue making questions about that. What’s the psychological bias or the psychological chemical reward that activates on the system of either on the typical social justice warrior or the new-left activist when they see us correct to see the world burn? I mean, honestly, I don’t get it. As you’re an expert, I need to ask you.
Stephen Hicks: Right. Well, I’m not a neurologist or a psychologist, so I’m going to speak only in an informed, amateur way speak to this. But it is true that if you look at the history of philosophy, and I’m in my expertise here, you do find any number of highly intellectual people who are exalting in the destruction of others.
Again, if we go through the history of religion as an example, obviously, there are many types of religions and several types of psychologies at work there, but there are consistent constrain in most of the major western religions of theologians and strongly religious people talking about what’s going to happen to people who disagree with them in the afterlife. They are going to go to hell, they’re going to burn. It’s going to be such a beautiful thing when I am up there in heaven seeing my hated enemies just melting and in torment. It happens across the centuries. You find it in Tertullian, you find it in Agustin, you find it in Jonathan Edwards and so on.
Religion is, of course, one of these things that people think is an important vision. It pushes their value buttons very hard. Politics is another one, and you find the same thing in the history of politics of people who are willing, in family discussions, to destroy friendships, to destroy their family relationships if someone disagrees with them politically. I really want to just smash your face in and see you bleeding and hurt. I want you to know how frustrated I am.
It’s not too big of a leap then to say that people become activists and they stop thinking. In many cases, of course, they get together in groups. They became a mob. We know that mob psychology things kick in that we just want to destroy anything that we perceive as an enemy just for the sake of destruction.
The problem, I think, is then a combination of certain negative tendencies that are possible to human beings when they are psychologically worked up with a philosophical position that we call broadly postmodernism that says, “That’s okay.” Those two together, you then have intelligent young people with a very skeptical, negative, nihilistic outlook who seem justified in their activism, but their psychology puts them in a very destructive place. That, unfortunately, is a manifestation that we’re dealing with in our generation.
Ignasi Bolto: Well, we change a little bit topics. We come back to our site. I guess you are a capitalist. I can say I am, too, and I don’t feel bad by saying it. But I think most people think that capitalism is just this greedy system of accumulation of wealth and just accumulating dollars, but I’ve heard in your interviews that you think that philosophy matters in order to defend capitalism. I think it’s an interesting approach. Could you give us your two cents on this?
Stephen Hicks: Sure. Free-market capitalism, I see that as one part of the overall liberal project. More broadly speaking, I’m a liberal in the classical sense of that. That means people should be free in their religious lives. They should be free in their family life. They should be free in their sex life and their romantic life. We do not need and should not have a government managing our religious life or our sex life. In my artistic life, I should be free to pursue my artistic pursuits, whatever I want.
When we turn to business and the economy, it’s the same thing. I should just be free as a producer to make whatever I want, to be put out there in the market, to negotiate whatever price I can with consumers and as a consumer, to decide for myself what I’m going to buy, what I’m going to consume, what I’m willing to pay for and so forth.
Just as we should have a free market in religions, let people do whatever they want as long as it’s peaceful, Free market in art, let artists do whatever they want. In the economy, let people do whatever they want, again, as long as it’s peaceful. I would then say free market capitalism is a subset or a special application of my broader philosophical commitments to a kind of liberalism.
Why I think this is relevant to philosophy is because almost all of the major arguments against free market and against more broadly are philosophical markets. One kind of argument, for example, it does into the accumulation of wealth and the pursuit of wealth.
I am very much in favor of the accumulation of wealth. It’s a beautiful thing. For so much of human history, people were in stinking, grinding poverty with barely enough to survive on, often living in pain because they didn’t have access to good medicine and the science. It’s a beautiful thing that we have been able to become as wealthy as we can and as we have just in the last two centuries, thanks to free market capitalism.
When we travel to the parts of the world that are still poor. Within relatively prosperous nations, we go in to some neighborhoods that are very poor, what we should be saying is, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful … ” What we should not rather be saying is, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful that these people haven’t been corrupted by wealth,” and just don’t be greedy. No, we want those people to be greedy and to be able to work hard and to have the freedom to produce the wealth to get themselves out of poverty.
Poverty sucks. Wealth is a beautiful thing. Any system, economically and politically, that enables lots of people to produce lots of wealth, that’s a good thing.
But if we think about the enemies of wealth, we do have some strong philosophical enemies. There are those who are metaphysically opposed to the material world. They have this strong view that anything physical, anything material is not the true human aspiration. You are a soul or you are a spirit and you shouldn’t be thinking about the body, the way monks in various religious traditions are supposed to be living, and that you should devote yourself purely to spiritual matters and nothing physical.
Well, if you believe that metaphysics, then, of course, you are going to say things like money is corrupting, money is bad because money only buys physical things and so forth. We do need to have a philosophical response to those who want to say the only important reality is a non-physical, higher spiritual reality and a physical world is relatively valueless.
If you want to make a good argument that liberalism is a good system because it delivers the goods, so to speak, it has enabled people to develop science and technology, increase life expectancy and so forth, just that part of the argument in favor of free market capitalism and liberalism then depends on saying that science is good and that science’s method works.
But what is scientific method? Then we say, well, scientific method is about experience, an observation, about doing experiments using logic, using mathematics. If we’re going to have science, we have to have a theory of knowledge that says, yes, science does reach truth or justifiable beliefs because it used these tools epistemologically.
When you then have other philosophers that start to attack those tools, who say, “No, observation does not give us any awareness of reality really,” or, “Logic and mathematics are merely subjective conventions,” or, “Abstract principles and generalizations are just arbitrary social constructs,” all of those philosophical arguments have the effect then of undercutting scientific method which then undercuts science which then undercuts the achievements of science. There’s a long philosophical set of foundational principles that have to be traced back and defended if we’re ultimately going to defend some of the achievements of liberalism.
Or if you want to say part of free market capitalism is a principle to commitment to say that when I deal with you, I’m going to deal with you on an honest basis. I’m not going to steal from you, I’m not going to try to defraud you. If you and I are trying to do a deal and it’s not working out for me, I’m free to walk away. If it’s not working out for you, then I’m going to respect that you have the right to walk away as well.
We might have a difference of opinion about lots of things, but I’m going to tolerate your different values and I’m only going to interact with you to the extent that it’s mutually beneficial. That commitment to tolerance in the pursuit of material values and business values, that commitment to the idea that it has to be mutually beneficial if we are going to interact with each other, that principle also requires a philosophical justification because we do know there are lots of philosophers who will say, “No, you cannot be trusted to know what’s best for you. You’re too stupid,” or, “You have some other problem with you, and only an elite number of people like me really know what’s good for you. Even if you think that something is good for you, I should have the power to override your decision making and make you do something that I think is better for you.”
That philosophical position leads to a political authoritarianism that’s going to override religious toleration, that’s going to override free markets. We do know right now that many of the interventions in current liberal markets are explicitly based on the idea that individuals don’t know what’s good for them, that people are too stupid or too short-sighted or too driven by their emotions to make their own good decision, so we need to turn things over to an elite group of government policymakers who will make all of the major decisions for us. Again, a philosophical decision has to be defended there.
Ignasi Bolto: Again, I wanted to change of topic, but that’s too interesting, so I will make another question.
Stephen Hicks: It’s all too interesting.
Ignasi Bolto: Yeah. We’ll have to do four hours interview. But do you think there’s any negative externality in the same capitalist system? Because let me put you an example. There’s a Spanish professor. He was giving a speech to millennials. He was saying, “Now you’re burning wealth because your grandparents were working the hell off. Now you feel entitles and you’re not working as hard as them because … ”
The previous generations without rights, positive rights, so to speak, they just worked and they lived under their life expectancies. Now it seems that this accumulation is now creating again this redistribution bias. Do you think that’s inherent in the human nature or just temporary? I don’t know if I expressed myself correctly.
Stephen Hicks: Yeah, the first part of that question was quite broad. Are there externalities in a capitalist or a free market system? Absolutely. I think there are. That’s a feature of a capitalist system. I mean if I’m going to say you are going to be free, just as a silly example, to wear whatever clothes you want, everybody should be free to have their own fashion, well, one of the externalities is that when I walk down the street, I’m going to see lots of things that I think are ugly. Your fashion choices will be an externality and will impose an aesthetic cost on me. But then I just have to say that’s one of the prices you pay for freedom. There are going to be lots of things like that.
But then you had a narrower, interesting thesis. I believe Joseph Schumpeter is famous for arguing a version of it. It goes something like in the early generations of free market capitalism, when people were very poor, but they then have the freedom to be entrepreneurial and to work hard to create wealth, what they will then do is they will deny themselves short term gratifications in order to save up and accumulate and grow their businesses.
A big part of their motivation is that they want to have their children have a better life than they have. I do think that that is a part of human nature, especially if you are a parent, because your children are a hugely important part of your life project, and you want to improve their life as much as possible.
Then what often will happen, though, is that the first generation, this is the thesis, they will pass on their wealth, but also they will pass on their values that enable them to create a lot of wealth to their children. But then in the next generation, those children when they grow up, they will work hard but they will not have the same pressure necessarily to work as hard because they already have some accumulation. They don’t have as much fire in the belly, as the saying goes, and they will also indulge their children, and maybe they will not be as good at passing on their values to their children and the grandchildren.
Then the thesis says that the grandchildren have just grown up in prosperity. They don’t know what it’s like to be poor and they don’t see immediately, when they are young, the need to work as hard, and maybe the values of having to work hard have not been instilled in them as much. They didn’t have to have a part-time job when they were 12 years old or work after school when they were 16, they were able to. Then the thesis is that there’s a softening of character that comes along with prosperity that, in turn, undercuts the kind of character and value commitment that leads to prosperity in the first place.
Now I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. It’s probably a social-psychological thesis. Certainly you can find lots of cases where … There were some data that I have seen that shows the people who are born into prosperity never have to work, never have to do any chores around the house, anytime they ask for something, it is given to them. When they turn 18, there is a trust fund, and they have an income of €100,000 a year that they don’t have to work for. You do have a higher percentage of people who are in failed marriages, who are alcoholics and abusers of drugs and so on, so I’m willing to accept that data.
I do think it’s a lesson of education for the modern world that parents need to learn and think hard about, that if you want to raise your children, one of the challenges is how do you raise your children with prosperity without letting that spoil them. There is now a good literature out there for parents about how to do that. But it’s part of the cultural learning process.
At the same time, I would say it’s more properly part of human nature to say that humans want to be creative, they want to do things their own way, they want to make something of their lives. I think that’s more normal. Again, this depends on developmental psychology claims.
But when you observe little children, they’re playing in the sandbox, we don’t have to teach them to start digging and making and trying to do various things. When you have two or three children, we don’t always have to teach them. They want to play together, so they start to learn to make rules and make up their own games. When you teach them how to hold a pencil, they do like to draw and make some scribbles and so on.
I think human beings are more naturally makers and creators. They want to do things themselves. Three years and four-year-old children, if their parents try to do things to them, the kid pushes away and says, “No. I want to do it myself.” I think that independence and growth toward independence is also a part of human nature.
With proper raising, even in prosperity, if parents and educators can find a way to take that natural creative impulse that human beings have when they are young and use the now many resources we have available as tools to help that children become more creative and more entrepreneurial, then I think it’s open-ended and we will have an ongoing flourishing society, and I don’t see any necessary end to that in the future.
Ignasi Bolto: Well, thanks for this advice for parents and for these useful tips. We always appreciate that. Most of our audience is from Spain and Latin America. I was checking one of your interviews. I think it was from the PanAm Post. You said, quote, or more or less, “that Latin America must abandon victimism. They must open to the world”. I mean I know it sounds hard. I know this is the kind of message that not all the people want to hear, but what did you mean with that? By the way, I absolutely agree.
Stephen Hicks: Okay. Well, if we start at the individual level, I think we all have doubts about whether we can succeed. We all fail at some of the things that we try. One of the things that I don’t know how natural it is, but it happens a lot is when we fail is to want to find some external reason why we failed. It’s not that I failed, but something happened to me and that caused me to fail.
Sometimes, of course, that’s true. Sometimes the failure is outside. But I think if you live in a place where you have freedoms and you have lots of resources available and you fail systematically over the course of years and decades and never get your act together, almost always the failure is yourself.
An important part of self-knowledge and honesty is being able to admit to yourself that you have made a mistake, that the failure is your failure, to own that failure, and then to set yourself the project to figure out what do I need to do to improve myself so that I don’t fail again?
Now that can be encouraged in different subcultures and, in some cases, in broader cultures. My observation is when I compare Europe with North America with South America, the place where I’ve done most of my traveling, there are marked differences culturally.
One of the things that I do notice when I travel to Latin America, which underperforms relative to North America, I mean in both Latin America and North America, you have relatively new countries. Both Latin America and North America are enormously well-endowed with natural resources. You have energetic immigrant populations from all over the world, but the North American countries are performing economically at a multiple of four or five times than even the best of the Latin American countries.
I do think that part of the explanation for that is not only political corruption, although Latin American do have worse political corruption. We have bad corruption in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Canada, but certainly it’s much worse in many of the Latin countries.
Interestingly, the two Latin American countries that have been performing relatively well, Chile and Uruguay, if you look at the measures of corruption, one of the things that they did was they cleaned up their political corruption. That is a big part of why they have been able to become more economically successful. The countries that have been struggling, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, where that interview was filmed, are notorious for their political corruption. Although, of course, in the last couple of years, there are some signs in Brazil and Argentina that the corruption is being dealt with in a much more serious fashion.
But there is more of a widespread sense among Latin Americans whom I interact with that they will … Aside from their own internal problems, say that the problems they have are due to outside sources, it’s multinational corporations from Europe and North America and Canada coming down and exploiting them. They will take a Marxist or quasi-Marxist and say, “Yes, we have all of these natural resources, but the Yankees and the Germans and the French come in and steal them all and they take all of the profits out of the country.” That then is to say you see yourself as just a passive victim of big bad foreign forces and so forth.
Now I think that’s a really bad excuse because if you look at the countries in which the Europeans invest, there are lots and lots of cases where the European big firms go in and invest. Yes, the European countries get rich, but so do the countries in which they invest. The same thing happens for the Canadian companies and the American companies and the Australian companies and so on. These trades should be a win-win.
The more likely thing is that you have a significant amount of wealth extraction that’s happening by the political class in the corrupt Latin American nations, and that’s a homegrown problem. Or that they’re victims of American foreign policy, for example. Again, that’s a big bad foreign country that’s coming in and messing up our situation and so forth.
But at the same time, the American foreign policy record is far from perfect, but there’s lots of cases where American foreign policy goes in and it works out well for the country that is working with the Americans, Japan after World War II, Germany after World War II, Israel, Taiwan and so forth. All of those American strong initiatives are for the positive. If there’s American influence in Latin America and it’s not working out well for the Latin Americans, chances are good that a big part of the blame also rests with the Latin Americans.
The point is not that there are difficult external forces for Latin Americans to deal with, but mostly if you have that victim mentality, you’re not going to take ownership of the problems that are your problems. You’re always going to say, “Well, it has to be sold by someone else.” What Latin Americans need to do more, and many of them, to their credit, are doing this, to say we need to have a healthier intellectual culture. Get rid of the neo-Marxisms and the postmodernisms that are dominating life and turning us all into cynics.
We do need to clean up our own political act. We do need to deregulate our markets, let entrepreneurs go into business, let foreign capital come into Argentina and other places, open yourself up to the world global market. That’s the way you’re going to stop the wealth destruction that’s happening at the political level. That’s the way that you’re going to unleash the entrepreneurial energy that’s all over the place in South America. That’s the way you’re fundamentally going to solve your problems.
Ignasi Bolto: It’s really hard to move on because I think everything is very fascinating and interesting.
Stephen Hicks: Each of them could be a wonderful discussion.
Ignasi Bolto: If you could say briefly do you think that this misconception, so to speak … I mean the problem is directly the mindset of the people. I mean that the root of the problem is the mindset of the Latin American average individual.
Stephen Hicks: It is a mindset problem. I mean I think the most important resource that any human being has is their mind. We are the dominant species, not because we are physically strong, we’re weak. Not because we are tough. As soon as it starts to get … And we’re all waiting for summer to come here in North America. But when it gets here, we’re going to start whining about the humidity and how hot it is. We are very delicate in that respect. We’re not fast. I don’t have sharp teeth for biting prey.
The way human beings survive is by being smart, so your mindset is absolutely crucial. If you have a mindset that says your mind can’t know the world, that philosophical position, well, you’re not going to try to use your mind to know the world. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to do science and you’re not going to do technology, and you’re going to remain poor.
If you have a mindset that says, “I’m not in control of my character and my actions. I am pushed around by forces beyond my control,” well, then you will try to control your own character and your actions, and you will be pushed around by forces beyond your control. If you say, “I am a pawn of political elites, and there’s nothing that I can do to change the political corruption,” well, you won’t try to change the political corruption and you will then live under corruption for the rest of your life.
A certain pro-rational, pro-optimistic, pro-entrepreneurial mindset is absolutely essential for human beings to make it in the world. This is important for individuals, no matter what culture you’re in, to cultivate within themselves. Then, of course, there’s a broader cultural work there. Collectively and socially, we’re going to be better to the extent that we can put together social networks that are pro-reason, pro-individual creativity, pro-entrepreneurial, and have the idea that, yes, we are going to try a lot of experiments, we’re going to fail a lot. But sooner or later, we can solve this problem, and we will do it. That’s the kind of culture that will advance.
Ignasi Bolto: Well, to this issue, I think we can be optimistic. For example, if we take the success of Jordan Peterson. Using this technology in YouTube as we are doing right now, he can send a powerful, direct message to the mindset of the people, like do you want to make revolution? Why do you think that these direct simple but honest message arrive and change so many people’s lives, especially young?
Stephen Hicks: Yeah. Jordan Peterson is a multifaceted and fascinating phenomenon. He certainly is among the very first of the public intellectuals of the 21st Century to utilize all of the tools. I think in large part is because he, in many ways, is a unique individual. Whether you agree with him or not on all of his philosophical issues, there’s lots to argue about, but he is a first-rate mind. He is very well-read in psychology and, more broadly, in technical psychology, with lots of good published papers there, widely cited. But then, more broadly, in humanities, in social sciences, and the sciences as well. He’s a very well-rounded, first-rate academic intellectual.
At the same time, he does have many years of clinical practice and many years of teaching students. He’s a very good communicator at a small group level and at a one-on-one basis—the best understanding that he has of the various theoretical knowledge coming from the sciences and the social sciences, and how do you actually use that to improve people’s lives when he is engaging in his clinical practice, when he’s working with his students to help them become the full human beings that they need to become as students.
He’s taking theory and applying it to practice. In contrast to many intellectuals, of course, is that they remain in their narrow specialty and they aren’t too interested in the applications to the real world of their views. Then, of course, he’s a master at using the technology in low-budget ways initially, but then increasingly sophisticatedly. He’s gone up that learning curve as an intellectual entrepreneur should.
But I would say probably … I don’t know. It’s hard to quantify these things, but it might be the most important factor is that he is a courageous man. It’s often surprising to me how much … And this will be blunt, but cowardice there is among academics and among intellectuals.
For more than a generation now, we have had some very pathological things, sickly things going on inside higher education, kind of an abandonment of civility, abandonment of commitment to educating young people by teaching both sides of an argument, very slanted, one-sided argumentation, unscholarly teaching, unscholarly productions, to the point where things have become politically correct in some campuses in a very bad fashion.
Jordan Peterson is one of the few people who drew a line in the sand, a principle line, and said, “No, I’m not going to capitulate to you when you’re making unreasonable demands. If you’re going to undercut my free speech, my right to free inquiry, the principles of civil discourse and so forth, that’s the bottom line.” He took a very principled stand on that and a principled public stand. That made him standout compared to many academics who just go along, who are not willing to stand up in faculty meetings, to stand up to administrators, stand up to certain kinds of student activists and so forth.
I think, in addition to his intelligence and the breadth of his knowledge and his use of the technology, the fact that he’s willing to stand up against what seemed to be a tidal wave of political correctness and say no makes him then a very attractive figure to lots of people who are then willing to say, “Okay. I’m going to support Jordan Peterson sometimes financially, sometimes by going to his events, by buying his books, by spreading the word,” and so forth. Many social movements do need a figure like that, someone who knows what the principles are but is also willing to take a stand in favor of it.
All of those factors together I think are the explanation for why, I don’t know, what is he? Perhaps the number one public intellectual in the world right now. I have my philosophical disagreements with him, but one of the wonderful things about him is that he’s the kind of intellectual with which you can have productive intellectual disagreements. I’m very glad that he is out there doing what he is doing.
Ignasi Bolto: Well, I can say more than I agree with your analysis. Maybe that’s one of the motivations also for making this kind of interview, just to create content on both things and both opinions around decentralized and spontaneously. I think he has succeeded with that, and we can see the results
And here goes the big question. Imagine I am a social justice warrior, Stephen, and I say you’re a bigot and you’re spreading hate speech and my feelings are hurt, et cetera, but what I give you one minute and I said, “Okay. I’m willing to take the red pill, but you have to convince me.” I know it’s hard sometimes to simplify things, but that’s a real tricky thing to do. Could you give one-
Stephen Hicks: What would the one-minute red pill be for a social justice warrior?
Ignasi Bolto: Yeah, yeah. I mean I know it’s hard stuff, but we have to give our best. What would be your anti-social justice warrior red pill that you could give to …
Stephen Hicks: Okay. Well, what I would say is if you take a stereotypical social justice warrior, so an undergraduate university student who’s intelligent and fired up about certain things. What I would say is without being patronizing, but you’re a young person and things matter to you. But recognize that things matter to everybody who’s interested in politics, who’s interested in economics, religion and so forth.
I would say keep an open mind to the possibility that you have had only a partial education at this point in your life. The chances are good that you have heard one side of a set of arguments, one way of looking at the world, and you’ve heard some very clever people, and clever people are very good at taking almost any position and making it seem attractive.
I would say at the same time, while you have been told a story that says the world around you is ugly and full of oppression and full of people who hate you just for who you are and don’t want you to succeed, recognize that at the same time there are other young people just like you who are passionate, who are working on themselves in the sciences and they are going to become emergency room doctors, or they are working on music and they are going to be composers of songs that are going to make people laugh and cry in 10 years, or they are historians who are going to write important textbooks that are going to shape the minds of the next generation.
There are other young people like you who are working on positive projects. What is going to be best for you is to realize, yes, there are problems in the world, but if you let yourself get sucked into a deeply alienated poisoned, ultimately nihilistic worldview, you are going to through your life away. Your life is important and what you need to do is find something good, find something global, find something beautiful in the world, and solve the problems in a way that works with other people, because there are other people who want to work with you to solve the genuine problems, something like that.
Ignasi Bolto: Related with that, I would like to hear your opinion. Do you think that capitalism, although is spreading to most of the countries of the world, somehow embrace capitalism, and globalism is spreading and some new economies flourish? Although all these facts, do you think that capitalism has lost its cultural battle? I mean, again, we come back to the ideas of the average citizen.
Stephen Hicks: Yeah, that’s another big picture question. I don’t agree that capitalism has spread. I think what has happened is some elements of capitalism have been allowed in many countries around the world that were formerly authoritarian in various source.
I think it’s true to say that what has happened in China is that China has liberalized itself in some parts of the country, created economic zones and opened itself up to foreign trade. To the extent that it has done so, it has improved. It has some capitalist elements, you might say. The same thing has happened in India, I think, to a lesser extent.
At the same time, though, in the more famously capitalist nations, like Canada, the United States, Australia, some of the Western European countries, they are mixed economies. They have a lot of capitalistic elements, but they do also have a large number of socialistic elements and has a large number of mixed economy interventionist elements as well.
If I were to look at a crystal ball, I don’t see any triumph of capitalism in our future, instead what I see is that things will move to be more mixed economies. I think that what is going to happen is that cultures will allow markets to a certain extent and the markets will be more global. But at the same time, there’s going to be significant amounts of government management of sectors of the economy, price controls, tariff, a significant amount of redistribution that is going on.
It’s a less triumphant story that I would say is going on right now. While some of the formerly anti-capitalist nations of the world are moving back toward the middle and will have some kind of a mixed economy, the countries that were more capitalist and more free market, I think, also are moving more towards the middle, and so some middle territory between authoritarianism, socialism, and capitalism is the likely overall trajectory.
Ignasi Bolto: Could you say briefly that postmodernism is already succeeding? I mean is that the consequence of what you’re saying?
Stephen Hicks: Okay. Oh, that was the second part of your question. Capitalism, I think, in the undeveloped parts of the world has a more positive reputation and it has morally a more negative reputation in the more developed parts of the world. I do think that in the more developed parts of the world, people are comfortable, they don’t know poverty, they don’t know what it is like to live under a really authoritarian nation or under a socialist nation. All they do is they look around and they see the current system, and they call it capitalism. Anything they don’t like about the system, they think that is the fault of capitalism, so they are more likely to be anti-capitalist.
But countries that are developing, that know what poverty is, they want to become rich. They are attracted to the policies that made riches possible. The countries that have suffered under authoritarianism, religious authoritarianism, ethnic authoritarianism and so forth. They want freedom, and so they’re attracted by liberalism. It’s a different story in different parts of the world.
Ignasi Bolto: Exactly. I’m from Europe, and I can see that of the Eastern European countries. I mean they don’t want to hear about communist ideas at all. They’re succeeding on … There’s big entrepreneurial spirit there and so on.
Stephen Hicks: Right. That’s right. Absolutely, yeah. My experience of Eastern Europe is more limited, but when I’ve been there, the anti-westernism, the anti-liberalism, the anti-capitalism is much, much lesser and almost always confined to the political class and the intellectuals, some of the intellectuals. They want what made Western Europe rich. They know that that was some sort of liberal capitalism. They want what America has, exactly.
Ignasi Bolto: Well, Stephen, we are more or less close to finish, but there’s a question that I would … I mean it keeps stuck in my mind for quite long. Do you think that history has been unfair when we talk of Nazis and compare it to communism?
I don’t know if I’ve heard this from Jordan Peterson, I think, that most of the people, that they were talking to schools about the holocaust and Nazi was terrible, and it definitely was. But when we talk or when we hear about communism, we usually hear something like, “Well, the idea is good, the spirit behind each system. It was fine, but it has been badly implemented.” But if you talk about Nazism, no one of the average is going to tell you a good thing.
Why do we have these bias of who has written this story? Because communism, I think they killed 100 million people or somewhere in there, that the data was like that. I mean it’s terrible.
Stephen Hicks: Yeah. Well, I think there’s a long story behind that, but it’s also been, for several decades, my entire adult life that this asymmetry that you’re talking about has been prominent. Absolutely, Nazi is the most horrible both in its ideology and its practice. Communism is horrible in its ideology and in its practice. But the asymmetry has been that Nazism has rightly and properly been demonized and attacked and used as a great lesson in evil historically for several generations now, but it’s to a much lesser extent that the evils of communism have been exposed.
I think the simple reason for that … probably I would say two things: One thing is that in western societies, we do take individualism more seriously and racism and ethnocentrism are sins that we are still trying to get past. We’ve made significant strides in doing so. We should treat people equally without regard to race and ethnicity. That is a principle that is dear to most westerners’ hearts.
The communists did not commit that sin. I mean there’s lots of anti-Semitism working right in there and so forth, but at least officially and to a large extent in practice, the communists were equal opportunity exterminators. They would kill everybody equally. They were not just going to kill people if you’re a member of this group, but you may not be killed if you’re a member of that group. That commitment to equality under communism fits with some parts of the western liberal project because we take equality seriously.
The Nazis’ embrace of ethnocentrism, their embrace of racism explicitly makes them, in the minds of many people, more evil. It doesn’t become just a body count, they have this other ideological element that is deeply repugnant to many people. I do agree, on that score, the Nazis were more evil than the communists.
The other point, though, is partly a who writes the history books issue, if you go to the 1930s and the 1940s, there are three broad ideologies that are dominating intellectual life. In the west, you have a lot of liberal democrat, republican market-oriented types of people. Some sort of free market liberalism is the right paradigm. You have Nazism and fascism that is dominant in Central Europe and the other major ideology is some sort of Marxist or neo-Marxist communist ideology. It’s a three-way battle that is going on.
Historically, the way it plays out is World War II happens. The Nazis and the fascists lose, and so they are out. Then it just becomes a battle between liberal capitalism and communism. Then in the Cold War, in the geopolitical war, and the intellectual war, people line up on one side of the debate.
What has happened since then is on the left side of the divide, there have been more intellectuals sympathetic and some degree of leftism shading into socialism and communism and so forth. They have been more willing to say that communism has some problems in practice, but we still like the theory, and so they’re willing to try new variations of the theory and to try the experiments again and so forth.
The number of people who are on the left side of the spectrum, who have been in positions of intellectual prominence, who were willing to soften the historical record of communism, has had an impact. You don’t get as many negative portrayals of the history of communism as you do of the history of Nazism. That would be my short answer.
Ignasi Bolto: Wow! That just blew my mind for a while. I don’t know, Stephen. You take ideas very seriously, or it looks like-
Stephen Hicks: Well, that’s true. I’m glad it comes across.
Ignasi Bolto: Yeah, I mean that would be the last question. I know it’s a big one, but why do ideas matter? I mean do you think that ideas move the world? I mean at the end, it will be like why do you what you do?
Stephen Hicks: Well, yes. Certainly I became a philosopher just because I love the issues, I like thinking about philosophy and all the puzzles and arguments back and forth. But, ultimately, my motivation is that I do think what we believe we live. We act or we fail to act based on what we think is true and important about the world. Our lives are ongoing experiments. If we have bad ideas and we act on them, then they will fail. But if we get it right, then we will survive and we will prosper.
Fortunately, I think Karl Popper put it this way: we are a species for which our ideas can die in our place. What he’s then saying is the important thing is if we can take ideas very seriously and test them, and we test them in argument, we test them against the data, and we’re going to have lots of failure of ideas, but we take that lesson seriously and we reject the false ideas, we’re more likely then eventually to get to ideas that are going to work, that are going to be true. Then when we act on them, because we do have to act in the world, we’ll be acting on the ideas that have the best track record, that are more likely to enable us to be practically successful in the world.
Getting the ideas right, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re always going to get them true. Sometimes they’re just going to be in the right area. But being as far along that process as we can is our best chance of living flourishing lives, happy lives, fulfilled lives, and making the world a better place.
I love philosophy, but I also think it’s life and death importance. We die because of bad philosophy. If the enlightenment and its results, longer life expectancy and prosperity is any indication, we have prospered because, to some extent, some philosophers in the past got some things importantly right, and we are all the beneficiaries of that.
Ignasi Bolto: I like this ending, this call to action. I agree with you. I mean that’s a serious, serious question, not just philosophy and to talk. I mean we are talking about real issues. What projects do you have in mind for this year or for the seven-year cycle that you’re talking about, from seven to seven?
Stephen Hicks: Yeah. Well, I’ve been doing a lot of work on entrepreneurism and entrepreneurial philosophy for the seven years previously. I’ve published a couple of short collections in 2016 and 2017 on that. But my major philosophical project right now is, I think, a sequel to the Explaining Postmodernism book.
The postmodernism book is essentially a negative diagnosis. It tells a negative story about what has happened in the last two centuries. Then where we are now is the counter-enlightenment has been very successful at undermining the enlightenment intellectually, but if we are going to reinvigorate the enlightenment, and I think that’s a worthy project, what are the philosophical weaknesses that need to be addressed so that we can have a better enlightenment philosophy going forward. What’s the positive answer to postmodernism? I’m working on that slowly. The academic year’s underway right now, so my writing time is very limited. But that is what I’m working on.
Partly, that is a philosophical project, but also unfolding into that some discussion of a reinvigoration of liberalism. You mentioned, kind of broadly speaking, liberalism, neo-liberalism, capitalism, and free markets. According to many intellectuals, those are insults or pejoratives. Integrating the philosophy with a practical understanding of how a healthy liberal outlook would be, that’s the overall project.
Ignasi Bolto: Well, Stephen, thanks for your time. Thanks for your effort in the …
Stephen Hicks: Oh, my pleasure, too. Very good questions. I enjoyed the chance to speak.
Ignasi Bolto: No. It’s my pleasure. Also, we’ve been one hour and 10 minutes talking.
Stephen Hicks: Oh, okay.
Ignasi Bolto: I think my-
Stephen Hicks: It feels like we just got warmed up, huh?
Ignasi Bolto: I think my IQ just increased a couple of grades. Thanks for talking with you because-
Stephen Hicks: Okay. Thank you for that.
Ignasi Bolto: No, I mean it’s-
Stephen Hicks:All the best to your program. I hope it’s valuable to your listeners.
Ignasi Bolto: Okay. It has been a wonderful experience. We say goodbye to our audience. I really had a good time. I think Mr. Stephen Hicks, too. I hope you enjoy this talk. Well, see you soon and see you soon, Stephen. Thanks for everything.
Stephen Hicks: Yeah.
Ignasi Bolto: Bye.
A video of this interview is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL3860znZCY.