There is a new January, 2020 Prager U video out, about Jordan Peterson (Jordan Peterson Educates Climate Activist); the video is about 8 minutes long, and is narrated by Dennis in person.
This video is a model of Prager clarity, and is a nice short summary of the differences between the values of the Left and the Right.
Peterson is apparently sitting on stage with other panel members somewhere in England or a Commonwealth country, when a young, self-righteous woman of some college education, went Socialist on him and ridiculed Jordan's general advice that individual solutions to fixing societal problems is generally the way to proceed. She demands immediate, involuntary, even totalitarian governmental action running and ruling peoples' live to force them to accept drastic, New Green Deal kinds of efforts to save the planet right now before it is too late.
Peterson schools her that though there can be a place for collective responsibility and united attempts to solve society's problems, but, generally, people must be more competent and powerful in their careeers, and then they are more able to be effective in the political arena as leaders.
He warns that people unfit in their own lives, that are a mess and not dealing with their own problems, feel paradoxically, supremely fit and able to join a political movement to inflict collective answers upon citizens by governmental forces, trampling liberty and individual rights in the process.
Peterson points out that people unwilling to solve their own problems, disguise this inadequacy by rushing to social activism, adopting a pseudomoralistic approach to society's problems "requiring fixing" by their interpretation, a pose to impress their friends and neighbors.
Prager then begins to narrate the video to expand on what Peterson said. He contrasts nicely how the Left and the Right differ in their approach to solving problems. The Right wants to improve society morally by improving the individual. The Left would solve all problems by passing laws and federal means to bring about the completion ofsocial justice goals in America.
Prager agrees that collective solutions might be the only means of reform available to people in violent, evil societies like fascism, Communism or Islamic tyrannies. (Note from Ed: Notice that totalitarian states are groupist, wicked, extremist, absolutist, hierarchical with government running everything, and personal liberty, personal privacy, and free marketeering are extinct.).
By contrast, Prager offers free and decent countries like America as places where collective action is unnecessary, will not work and actually damages much more than it cures social problems. The Right wants us here to reform the self, and then millions of reformed selves indirectly will improve society.
That is too slow and too uncertain for the authoritarian Left. Morals are irrelevant but social justice causes like ending racism, classism, materialism, homophobia, Islamophobia, intolerance, capitalism and sexism must be addressed promptly for involuntary means, managed and supervised by Big Government. Prager notes that the Left is preoccupied with politics to improve society--activism is their favorite motto.
The Right, Dennis offers, promotes personal self-improvement as the way to bring about a better America (not much in need of changing and improving anyway, Ed says)--gradual change one person at a time.
My observation: note that gradual change, voluntarily accepted (or not), one person at a time, the individual's plan of self-reformation is very traditional Americanism--moderation, individual self-help and bootstrapping, personal liberty, and immense privacy and liberty wielded and owned by the private citizen, without much government intervention, hindrance or interference. This American Way is the foundation upon which I would build a Mavellonialist future on: moderate, individual-living, anarchist individuators and supercitizens, living their county-centered lives under their federal umbrella, the traditional American constitutional republic set up by the Founders.
Prager laments that such gentle improving, so glacially slow, freely elected and gradual is way too slow and inefficient for Leftist social activists. They seek revolutionary transformatin of America right now from the top down, run by federal and clerisy elites, using tyranny, reeducation camps and violence if necessary to effect total change immediately. The truth of the matter is that revolutionary change brought down on the heads of the masses almost never fundamentally changes anything. Real, deep, revolutionary change can only be produced by a personal change of heart, one person at a time. Anything else is just a coup det'at.
Dennis goes on to show that the American tradition emphasized character development so that our children through the vehicles of familial child-rearing and and education, did bring up children to be good persons and good citizens. He quotes Adams and Franklin pointing out that only a moral and religious people are capable of freedom.
Dennis regrets that the church, the family and the school no longer teach character development to children as social issues like climate change, identity politics, the LGBTQ gender agenda, etc., are inculcated into the minds of children all the way through college.
Prager warns that only a self-controlling people can handle freedom. A vicious, impious people will embrace disorder, bad anarchy, lawlessness and entropy, so then they trigger the arrival of an authoritarian government that will enforced social peace and control, but tyranny is installed as the law of the land, and liberty dies.
The ways recommended by the Right are all that will work, and the agenda of the Left will only convert America into Venezuela, which the Left is very self-pleased with and eager to bring about.
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