← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
The “Pandemic of Lunacy”: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy, J. Budziszewski
00:49:06
University of Texas at Austin professor and moral philosopher Prof. J. Budziszewski discusses his new book, “The Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy,” which examines 30 modern delusions and why they spread on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” ft. guest host Jack Fowler.
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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
I haven't had a word to say yet because I'm happy with everything that you said. Oh, okay, good. We could do the whole podcast with just you. That's fine. Just keep praising my book.
- [00:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
You applaud in the background.
- [00:43]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Now every society falls for some delusions. What's unusual about our time is that we are passing through a season. We are passing through a pandemic of lunacy. The interesting thing, the unusual thing about our time is how many lunacies we fall for and how deeply they cut. If I'm falling for one of these lunacies, I don't just think that the error is true, not just mistaken, and think that the error isn't an error. I want the error to be true. I have a question for you, too. I still want to know how many of those Snickers bars you need to survive in a month, but maybe we can talk about that another time. Hungry? Why wait? Another thing, though, that makes clear thinking difficult is that we have to get back into the habit of thinking at all. One of the things that I do with my students, they will say, and I wonder whether people did this in a previous generation. I don't think so. I read things that were written earlier in the 20th century and people didn't talk like this. People didn't say, well, Aristotle felt like, Thomas Aquinas felt like Karl Marx felt like. They said they believed that. They concluded that. They argued that they judged that. They maintained that they proposed such and such as the solution to this problem. They didn't say they felt like. Feelings are not reasoning. They're not reasons.
- [02:06]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, hello ladies and hello, gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Alas, alas, without Victor Davis Hansen. But you knew that. You know, twice a week now Victor does two podcasts, but twice a week we have on special guests, pinch hitters. It's like Faye Ruth pinch hitting for, say it's like Ted Williams pinch hitting for Babe Ruth, something like that. I'm a Yankees fan and we have important people on who have important things to say. And today we have Professor Jay Buzeczewski who is. I'll read his bio in a second. He's got a brand new book out. It's called the Pandemic of how to think clearly when everyone around you seems crazy. I'm holding it up. Some people listen to this so they can't see me holding it up. But for those of you on YouTube and rumble, there it is. Brand new book from Creed and culture. My dear friend Dan Mahoney, who's a peer professor on this podcast before he pinch hit one issue and he sent me the book. And if Dan sent me a book, that means A, I have to read it. B, there'll be a quiz. But it's a terrific. It's a terrific book and it's an important, terribly important topic. Of these lunacies, plural, that have infected our culture and our society and live in our head. Some people have embraced them. Some people want to jump off a cliff over the volume of them. So that you have written about this and that you're here to discuss them, the broader context of this pandemic. I just think it's terrific. I think our listeners and viewers are going to are going to love it. You are a professor of government, philosophy and civic leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. In case you didn't know that. You're a moral philosopher. You've written 20 previous books. What We Can't Not Know, how to Stay Christian in College, how and how not to Be Happy are just some of them you've written for National Review. You used to write some significant stuff back in the day there Weekly Standard, which doesn't exist anymore. No one's crying over Bill Crystal, First Things, Wall Street Journal and others. Actually, this podcast is sponsored and supported by the Daily Signal and you've written recently for the Daily Signal. So I'm very, very appreciative that you are here and I've got five or six questions to ask you. And I'm going to begin asking them right after these important messages.
- [04:44]
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- [05:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
We are back with Professor J. Buzhevsky. I'm sorry, professor, you'll forgive me. Just give me a C there. I did want to read this one quote from Peter Frieft, who's a professor at Boston College, and he said, this book is simply the most complete, clear and uncompromising account of our decaying culture's insanity that I have yet read. That's pretty high praise and more evidence of the importance of the book. So are you ready to answer? I haven't even given you a chance to say a dang word.
- [05:56]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Well, that's fine, that's fine. I haven't had a word to say yet because I'm happy with everything that you said. Oh, okay, good. We can do the whole podcast with just you. That's fine. Just keep phrasing my book.
- [06:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
You applaud in the background. All right, here's a long winded question. But you know what? You'll handle it. Professor, you say that these lunacies, of which there are some 30, and you detail 30 of these in the book, and we'll look at some of them specific ones shortly. You say that they can be in part harmful because they can prove to be contagious. So what is it about some of the things that are so patently bogus or weird or loony, like men can be women, that kind of. What is it about that that can trigger delusion? And I'm going to have some appendages here. Or does the triggering have more to do with human nature or with nature itself? Like Ecclesiastes, there's a time to sow. It's time to reap, time to laugh, time to cry. Is there a time for lunacy and a time for clarity? So are there seasons for lunacy? And it seems that the 2020 with the lockdowns and George Floyd riots, boy, oh boy, did that seem like there was a season. By the way, professor, before I let you answer the outset of your book, your intro, you quote Hannah Arendt's classic work, the Origins of Totalitarianism, and it essentially focuses on the contagion's propensity, the fact that lunacies say, like Bolshevism, they take hold not only with individual, but they take hold with large swaths of society. So talk to us about the contagiousness of these lunacies and what triggers such.
- [07:54]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
It's interesting that you mentioned Bolshevism, because Bolshevism was really not just one lunacy. We call it one ism Bolshevism, but actually it was a package of separate. You can decompose it. There's this lunacy. There's a lunacy about the function of government, a lunacy about the nature of conflict between classes, a lunacy about history. There are all kinds of lunacies that are wrapped up here. But the fundamental lunacy there, of course, is that we can save ourselves, that human beings can save themselves and put a fundamental stop to everything that ails us. By our own efforts, we can certainly ameliorate things. And we should try to do that now. Every society falls for some delusions. What's unusual about our time? You ask about a season of lunacy. What's unusual about our time is that we are passing through a season. We are passing through a pandemic of lunacy. And the interesting thing, the unusual thing about our time is how many lunacies we fall for and how deeply they cut. It's phenomenal. One reason that lunacy can take root, I think, is that lunacy irrationality is motivated. Philosophers have a term, motivated irrationality. I don't think, in other words, if I'm falling for one of these lunacies, I don't just think that the error is true. I'm not just mistaken and think that the error isn't an error. Want the error to be true. I think it's in my interest for it to be true. Take the crazy idea that basic right and wrong. Easy example that basic right and wrong. I'm not talking about the details like, gee, would it be stealing to withhold the car keys from my friend when he's drunk and he can't drive? I'm talking about the basics like thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder. The crazy idea that basic right and wrong are different for everybody. Now, if I'm trying to cheat on my wife, if I'm trying to justify cheating on my wife, that's a very convenient lunacy for me to buy into because it gives me excuses. Nobody can believe that all the way down. Basic right and wrong is different for everybody. Yeah, Wait until somebody breaks into your house and steals your tv. The relativist is suddenly gonna be morally indignant. But that's stealing. But nevertheless, we hold these things onto at least the surface of our minds and a couple of layers down because they excuses and disordered ideas produce disordered behavior, which produces more disordered ideas. Because then we have to justify how we've acted. Another reason that lunacy can take root in a society and we can suffer a pandemic of it, have a season of it, as you put it, is that there's always some grain of truth in every lunacy, no matter how loony it is. You know, the fact that there's a grain of truth in every error has even been used by some of the great teachers of philosophy. Aristotle, for example, he would say, what is happiness? And somebody might say, pleasure. Well, pleasure is not happiness, but Pleasure has something to do with it. You could say, well, what's wrong with this idea? And what's right with it? If you didn't have any pleasure, we could hardly call you happy. But you know, you can have all kinds of pleasure and still not be happy, right? You say, gee, are we having fun yet? The there's a grain of truth in every lunacy, and that makes it more plausible. Just like there's a grain of truth in every lie. And liars know that. They build as much truth into the lie as they can so that then people aren't looking when they sneak in the part that distorts it. Take the loony idea that men and women don't need each other right now. It's true that some single moms do a heroic job and they aren't in any way at fault. It doesn't follow the children don't need dads. It doesn't follow that men and women don't need each other. And we do. Still another reason, a third reason. And then I'll stop. Why lunacy can take root is that the premises which we embrace in order to justify our crazy idea often lead to other lunacies that we didn't see coming. So that for example, the loony idea that the unborn child doesn't rise to the dignity of a human person, we say, well, why doesn't he? Oh well, a person is somebody who can perform the functions of making decisions and carrying out decisions and communicating in a complex way. You know, well, the unborn child doesn't do any of that. But you notice that by that reasoning, infanticide and toddlercide ought to be okay too. In fact, some medical ethicists have followed that line of reasoning and say they call infanticide after birth abortion. So one thing can lead to another. And I think these are some of the reasons why the pandemic of lunacy can just sweep across us like a tidal wave. And inund do you think this is
- [12:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
not one of the questions I planned to ask you? But do you think the availability of relentless social media is a force multiplier for this? Or could it have been the same in 1820 without when there was no Instagram?
- [13:05]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
I think it is a force multiplier. And I wonder whether if Instagram had existed in 1820, I wonder whether it would have been a force multiplier. I don't think that TikTok and all these other viral kinds of things would do nearly as much damage if we are already pretty crazy anyway. Yeah, but when you've got to the stage in society where teenage girls get more likes on the social media, the more clothes they take off, you're already in a bad situation and the social media is just taking advantage of that.
- [13:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
Okay, we pay our bills around here, Professor. So for our listeners and our viewers, if a major disruption happened and you couldn't get to the store, how long do you think you would last with what's in your house right now? I have two sticker bars here. I don't think it lasts long. If it's anything less than a month, you need to check out our friends at My Patriot Supply. They're America's number one preparedness company with over 3 million satisfied customers. And right now, when you go to preparewithvdh.com, their best selling four week emergency food supply comes with an additional week of free food. An additional week of free food. This is the best long term storable food you can find. You're getting at least 2,000 calories a day. Real meals made with real ingredients, no artificial flavors or colors, and shelf life measured in decades. Look, we all know what we need. We all know we need to have some food stored for emergencies. So why not get it from the most trusted folks in the business and get a free week of food while you're at it. Go to preparewithvdh. That stands for Victor Davis Hansen preparewithvdh.com to get your free week of emergency food today. That's preparewithvdh.com, and we thank the good people from my Patriot Supply for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen. We're in his own words. So, Professor, I have a prejudice which I have meekly expressed in other episodes of this podcast when Victor has been discussing larger issues. And that prejudice is that the decline in religious worship and in held faith is the key ingredient to so many of our societal ills and to our delusions. Now, your laundry list of lunacies, and there are 30 lunacies that you, that you analyze in this book. It ends with a cluster, a series of five of them. They're all related to God. That he doesn't exist, that he doesn't matter, that he is unknowable. And others. Would you tell us how the divine fits into this pandemic and if you would maybe elaborate on just one of these particular God lunacies.
- [15:58]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Yeah, you know, I could have started the book with just these five lunacies about God in one sense. I don't think it would have been quite as user friendly, but it would have made logical sense because all of our sin and all of our craziness, I think, go back to the ancient desire that God not be God, that we be God or Gods knowing good and evil. I'm pretty familiar with that desire because it describes my own young adulthood. And it was. I mean, I was. When I speak of lunacies, I'm partly speaking about many things that I had to escape from. Now we talk about so called repression, but you know, psychologists, I think, rarely talk about what happens when we, quote, unquote, repress the strongest natural desire that we have. And it isn't sex, it's the desire to know the truth about God. It's also one of the easiest ones to suppress, though, paradoxically, because it's in our minds, it's not in our bodies. I don't have this hunger in my belly, I don't have this pain in my elbow. But it's a very powerful desire. And when we press it, bad things happen. One writer that I mentioned in the book Pandemic of a Lunas, he said that he'd finally figured out that he wasn't an atheist, he was an apatheist. An apatheist. He just didn't care whether God was real or not. Now that's sort of flabbergasting to me. Most people who say that we can't know anything about God, one of the lunacies haven't tried very hard. They just say, well, I. I can't figure it out. And there have been centuries of discussion among this, among wise people, and many of them ordinary people. It's accessible, you know, you don't have to be some PhD genius. In fact, you would have to know a lot of things about God in order to know that you couldn't know anything else about God. You'd have to know, for example, that either he didn't exist so there's nothing to know, or else that if he does exist, he isn't interested in you. Because if he was interested in you, presumably he would have made the means of knowing him available. If you can't know anything about God, then how is the skeptic going to know those things? I would ask Agatheists. Apatheists, excuse me, apatheists, like that gentleman. A couple of questions. The first one, what do you have to do to yourself to suppress that longing? What do you have to do to yourself to tell yourself you don't have it? To swallow the notion that the most important thing in all reality, the foundation of all meaning, doesn't matter. The second one is this. In a Certain sense. I don't think there are any atheists. There are certainly people who don't believe in the God who is the first cause, the creator of all things. But a lot of these lunacies are essentially false religions because if you aren't worshiping that God, you're going to be worshiping some other God. You're going to be bowing the knee to something. There will be some commitment in your life, whether it's pleasure or whether it's. My race is the most important thing there is. My so called gender identity is the most important thing there is. Getting revenge on that bastard is the most important thing there is. There's going to be some other God in your life. So that would be the second question that I would ask. And here's an experiment that I would pose for people who are apatheists or skeptical of whether you can know anything about God. Instead of living as though, you know, people say, well, I'm not an apatheist and I'm not an atheist atheist, but I'm an agnostic. I just don't know. Well, you don't act like you don't know because you're living as though there is no God. Try living as though there were a God. Try it seriously for a while. Try living as though it was a God. Pray, you know, worship, try to follow him, see what happens. You may be surprised.
- [19:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
Do you mind if I ask you. You have your own trajectory and oh yeah, correct does that. So you know what you're talking about here. But I have to. I'm curious if the apatheist is just really someone posing. I can't see that as a real intellectual.
- [20:15]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Of course it's a pose. Of course it's a pose. Most of these delusions are at least partly or largely self deception. When I was, I was never an apatheist. I didn't say I didn't care about whether there was a God and I wasn't a theoretic. In other words, I didn't think that I could demonstrate, prove that there was no God. But I did think that if there was God, if there was a God, he was powerless to do anything, so he couldn't help me. It didn't matter. I was then, you might say a practical atheist. There wasn't a God who mattered in that sense. And believing this certainly mattered because it made life sort of a living hell. It meant that it emptied it of me. Meaning. Now that was opposed, though it wasn't until sometime after I came back to faith, God brought me back. I won't take any credit for that. That I realized that I'd really been lying to myself when I said, well, you know, there's no God. Actually, I knew better than that when I said, well, human beings just make up the difference between good and evil. There is no rationally discernible difference. I knew better than that. I loved my wife and children. When I said, my decisions are not in my control. I'm just a process. I'm not even a person. I actually knew better than that. And so I think that a large part of my own work has been about self deception because I was so powerfully self deceived myself. And I talk about it a little bit in this book.
- [21:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, well, we're gonna.
- [21:54]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Not mine, but about self deception in general.
- [21:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, well, I have a few more questions to ask you and I'm going to get to them when we return from these important messages.
- [22:03]
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- [22:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
We're back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words with Professor Jay Busky from the University of Texas at Austin and the author of an important new book, Pandemic of Lunacy. And I'm going to ask him a question about out the subtitle of the book, but I don't know if it came through in the production here. But he did ask me about. Professor asked me about how many snickers I should have said how many bags of party size M and Ms. That would have been more. But it's lent, so they're all gone. I don't know. I'm confused without my chocolate rush. So. Hey, professor, your book is not just an observation and a laundry list of maladies. The subtitle promises. It's a promise. I take it as a promise. You can set me straight. How to think clearly when everyone around you seems crazy. So how do you do that? And I wonder if the more difficult thing is not so much the thinking clearly, but maybe acting courageously. So in this era of ideological lawn signs and social media avatars, that seem to demand communal adherence at the risk of shunning and shaming and condemnation, or worse, such as we saw. I mentioned it earlier, the COVID lockdowns, the George Floyd BLM riots. I think some courage is needed there. But anyway, what are your thoughts about your subtitle?
- [24:08]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Well, let me first talk about thinking and then talk about courage. And I agree with you. These two things are connected about thinking. One of the things that I try to do in the book is just to model thinking clearly. So when I say how to think clearly, I'm trying to say, here are some clear thoughts. All right, Here are some clear thoughts about the differences between men and women. Kitengi Brown Jackson says, well, you know, I'm not a trained biologist. I can't tell you what the difference between a man and a woman is, which is a ridiculous thing to say. Well, what is the difference between a man and a woman? I try to talk about that clearly and model it. Another thing, though, that makes clear thinking difficult is that we have to get back into the habit of thinking at all, thinking at all so much. Today, one of the things that I do with my students, they will say, and I wonder whether people did this in a previous generation. I don't think so. I read things that were written earlier in the 20th century, and people didn't talk like this. People didn't say, well, Aristotle felt like. Thomas Aquinas felt like. Karl Marx felt like. They said they believed that. They concluded that, they argued that, they judged that. They maintained that. They proposed such and such as the solution to this problem. They didn't say they felt like. Now, feelings are not reasoning. They're not reasons, they're emotions. Now, I won't say that emotions have nothing to do with our reasoning. For instance, if somebody is about to strike my child and I become angry, the anger arouses my mind so that I am in readiness for my child's defense. And, you know, the emotion and the proper process of the intellect are going hand in hand there. Still, emotion is not the same thing as thinking. And you can't just be. The mind should be directing reason instead of being controlled by it. Now, about courage. Courage. Courage is a virtue. Courage is actually about the regulation of fear and its opposite, which might be boldness. There's a right amount of fear to have, which varies from situation to situation. You ought to be afraid of fearful things, but not incapacitated. There's a right amount of boldness to have, not to the degree that you dash into a burning building when there's nobody left to save and screaming out, don't worry, I'll save the little girl's dolly. That this is insane. But this is courage. Now I think we need courage in order to think clearly. It takes courage to face the fact that I've been wrong about something. Sometimes it takes courage just to try to follow what. To try to think what follows from these premises. Because the conclusion might show me that I've been wrong about everything. It takes courage to change my life if I realize I have been wrong. How much easier it is, how much less fearful it is to give in. Especially when all these people around us who have no historical memory say history is against you. History is against you. Yeah. The last 15 minutes of history are against you.
- [27:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
On the wrong side of it. Yeah.
- [27:29]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
You're on the wrong side of history. Not many people say to themselves, I will do what is false. But a great many people say to themselves, if everyone is around me is wrong, they must. And it's. You know, it's a funny thing about courage. Too often people who promote crazy ideas, it's partly sincere. They have to convince themselves at some level. But it's partly a grift too. They portray themselves as courageous victims, when in fact they're celebrities. The mainstream media, the social media, the opinion forming classes, all egg them on.
- [28:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. I have a feeling you are in the ground zero of all this. If you were a plumber, you may have had less opportunity, but, well, let's say the need to be courageous. I'm not giving you. You can be humble if you want, but let's say a non leftist scholar in the academy is a rare thing and you are surrounded by proponents or the propagation of lunacy in the life you have chosen. Would that be a fair thing to say?
- [28:38]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
I won't deny that. Now there are some. I do have some sane colleagues. Yeah. But I also have a lot of colleagues who do not buy into these lunacies, but who don't have that courage that we spoke about. And they're in the closet.
- [28:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah.
- [28:52]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
They won't say anything.
- [28:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
I forgot to mention, you do have a website, right? The Underground.
- [28:58]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
The Underground. Thomist T h o m I s t.org the Underground Thomas and at Texas.
- [29:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
Are you part of the Civitas Center? Is that at University of Texas also?
- [29:11]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
My home based department, in other words, the one that pays me my salary is the government department. But I'm jointly appointed in the philosophy department. And I'm jointly appointed in the School of Civic Leadership. And I'm a fellow in The Kavitas Institute that you just mentioned.
- [29:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
So I would say that kavitas.
- [29:28]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Some people say civitas. I say civitas, some people say civitas. Everybody says it differently. They're going to have to make a rule.
- [29:38]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm going to say this right, Buzishevsky. Okay, so, Professor Buzyzewski, a cluster of weirdo ideas found in your book Pandemic of Lunacy have to do with family and sexuality. So I'm going to pick one of them. That's manhood. And womanhood can take any shapes that we wish. That's one of the lunacies you address. I do want to commend you for being brave and using the word manhood, by the way, I'm not sure that anyone's allowed to technically use it anymore, but I'm sure the thought police would go after you for that. But anyway, would you tell us about this particular lunacy as an example of the 30 that you have profiled?
- [30:17]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Yeah. You know, I mentioned Kitenji Brown Jackson's theatrical bafflement over the difference between a man and a woman. One national newspaper commented at the time, well, a competent biologist would not be able to offer a definitive answer either. Either. For goodness sake, we're talking about biology. That any biologist who couldn't give you a definitive answer would not be worth his salt. A woman is a human being of the sex whose members are potentially mothers. Now I'm talking about both biological and spiritual motherhood. Some people are not fertile. It doesn't mean they can't be mothers in an extended sense. And a man is a human being of the sex whose members are potentially fathers. Fathers and mothers are different. They contribute something different to the well being and the development of the child. The differences between men and women all stem from this. No competent biologist should be befuddled. All the other sexual differences stem from this. Men and women are not just different. By the way, I wrote once about complementarity of men and women and a woman wrote to me and said, well, I and my partner are not of opposite sex, but we are complementary because she's of this religion and I'm of that religion and I weigh twice as much as she does. And things. That's not what's meant when we speak of sexual complementarity. We mean that the differences are such as to balance each other, men need women. There's frankly something that's not as fully present in us as it is present in a woman. And there's something that's not as fully present in a woman as it is in a man. We need each other and as a result, we balance each other. And the world is much more full of color and full of music because both kinds of us are in it. A world with no sex or with all of us, just one sex would be much more boring. And yet it's amazing. You talked about being at ground zero. It's amazing. The pushback that I sometimes get, I don't always, but that I sometimes get. If I say in class that a kid needs a mom and a dad or that two moms or two dads are not the same as a mom and a dad, the next thing I know, somebody is going complaining to the dean that I've established a discriminatory atmosphere. And yet actually, most of the people in the class agree but don't speak up. They're afraid.
- [32:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I, I. Excuse me, Professor. I have two more questions. I said I have to ask five. I think I've already asked like seven, but I have two more and we're going to get to them after we come back from these final important messages.
- [32:57]
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- [33:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
And we are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words with Professor J. Bushechevsky and the author of a new book, I'll hold it up again here, Pandemic of Lunacy, just out a couple of weeks ago from Creed and Culture books. So, professor, you have tracked the metastasizing of lunacy, how one crackpot idea quickly becomes an idea. That's in your words, I think, taken for granted. Such as it's okay if. Use one example, a dude competes in boxing in the Olympics against a woman. Oh, no. All of a sudden it's normalized. You write in the book about a metastasization process.
- [34:05]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Yes.
- [34:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
Could you tell us about how does a crazy idea become metastasized in society?
- [34:11]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Yeah. Well, metastasis is our word, right? For how malignant tumors in the body spread and produce other tumors in other places. That happens with malignant fallacies. Malignant lunacies, too. They spread and they give rise to other lunacies. They are fissiparous. They germinate. They lay seeds. One reason is that the mind which accepts one bad idea becomes fertile ground for related bad ideas. If you're used to dividing the world into hostile groups according to race, you may Also be more congenial to dividing it into hostile groups according to sex. If you overrate the importance of having money, you're more likely, probably you're more disposed to think that those who have more of it than you do are keeping you down. The second reason I think that they can metastasize is that bad ideas, lunacies, give rise to such unacceptable results that certain other bad ideas become much more attractive to us than they would have been otherwise. For instance, take radical individualism. I don't mean believing that individual persons have dignity and rights, but I mean the attitude that says, I'm looking out for number one, nobody matters but me. We sometimes think, well, that produces strong people. No, it doesn't. It produces weak people who are chronically restless, chronically dissatisfied, chronically irresponsible, unable to accept discipline. If families, you know, families under the influence of people like this become disordered, the kids have problems. The citizens may find that there's disorder in society. If these disorders become great enough, then people might. Citizens might begin calling for an excessively strong government in order to try to put an end to these disorders. And so you see what's happened. From radical individualism we slide to what at first might seem like it's polar opposite, which is authoritarianism. And actually they're connected. The third one one is the revenge of conscience. That's my expression for it, but it requires a bit more explanation. There are things that we can't not know about right and wrong. You might tell yourself you don't know them, but you really do. If I do something which is dreadfully wrong, and I know it now, I have two choices. I can either repent or I can dig in. Right. Repenting is hard, hard, painfully hard. Digging in, on the other hand, is driven by powerful psychological needs. I don't want to believe myself capable of such a horrible thing as what I did. So what do I do? For example, if I've treated you very badly, but I refuse to be sorry, I refuse to repent, then to silence the voice of my conscience, I might try to persuade myself that I wasn't really unjust in treating you that way, because you deserve it. Once I believe that you deserved it, well, who knows what else you might deserve. And I've got an excuse to treat you worse and worse and worse. So that conscience, which ought to inhibit these bad behaviors in its depraved condition, it sort of eggs them on. The third thing, or the fourth thing rather, is something that I mentioned before, and that's that every loony Idea has some grain of truth behind it. And so that tends to make them spread and metastasize, too. So that unlim wealth does not make people happy, but many people believe that it would because they observe, and this is true, that utter destitution makes people unhappy. Squalor makes people unhappy. Actually, though, what happens is that suicide rates, that's a much better measure of unhappiness than asking people, are you happy? You know, people often don't know. Suicide rates are very high among the poorest. They drop in the middle, and they rise again, again among the very rich. Isn't that interesting? Well, you know, but the fact that lies and errors do contain some grain of truth, which can then be exaggerated and distorted helps explain why ordinary people who aren't at all deranged can come to hold some ideas that are deranged.
- [38:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
Okay, well, final question, and I'm glad you mentioned the word repent. I just have to say on the side, I'm Catholic, I'm practicing. Doesn't mean I'm a good Catholic. And I assume you are also.
- [38:42]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Yes, I am a Catholic. Huh.
- [38:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
And the decline of. I mean, there's still a sacrament of confession, but it's a decline, I think tracks with what's happening in society. If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to repent from. So I encourage everybody go to confession who's a Catholic. So here's my final question. Forgive me, my Protestant, my Baptist brothers who are watching right now, I love that you're conclusive.
- [39:09]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
I was raised a Baptist. You know, I'm grateful to my Protestant forebears. I learned from them. But I am Catholic, so you can respect me.
- [39:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
You're not a Christian. Okay. Well, I love that your conclusion about how to address this pandemic says we quote. I'm quoting, we can repent. Repent is a word that most often comes. Not most often, but it comes from the mouth of Jesus frequently. But it gets lost in the modern societal editing process. So I hope I have not given away the ending of the book, but you are by trade a moral philosopher, so I cannot help but ask not so much for your wisdom, not your wisdom about how society at large must exercise these nutty ideas, but how an individual maybe say, you know, a mom. I'm sure there are many people here, watch the show, will listen to it that have, you know, they have children who just off the deep end with just. They're brokenhearted. They're home praying for their child. That's just an example. But how an individual in that situation should respond to the pandemic that you portrayed, because we're living it, we're living in it. It's in our head. It's probably in our own home with other individuals anyway. How do you address the individual deal with this pandemic?
- [40:35]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Yeah, that's a very important question. The first thing that I would do is say, if you know that you've done something wrong with respect to your children, of course you have to repent for that. But if your kids have gone off the deal, it doesn't necessarily mean that you did something wrong and that you're to blame for it. Don't beat yourself up over that. Ask God to show you if you have done something wrong, but don't worry about it unduly. Now, on the other hand, I think the first thing that moms and dads have to do, even apart from our children, is face our own craziness and our excuses. Honestly, we can't help our own children to be honest with themselves and to see through self deceptions and lunacies unless we've seen through our own. And that's pretty nearly impossible without the grace of God. God, we're just too bent, we're too broken. We're like a guy who's cut off his hands. He's a surgeon and he's cut off his hands and he has the skill to sew hands back on, but he can't do it because he doesn't have any hands anymore. You know, all too often we call ourselves moderate only because we're only moderately lunatic. Or we call ourselves conservative because although we want to complain about new craziness or other people's craziness, we want to conserve the craziness that we've swallowed already. So first, the second thing, besides be honest with yourself, but don't beat yourself up is but be honest with yourself. The next thing is to pray for our children like crazy. You mentioned praying. I think a lot of people pray almost hopelessly, almost in despair because they think that prayer isn't really action. They think that God isn't listening. I guarantee he's listening. And this is more active than anything else that you can do. We gotta pray before we're with our children, pray while we're with our children. Pray. Pray to be with our children, which sometimes is a big deal. They might not want to be. Pray after we're with our children and ask God to help us to model sanity and charity to our children. Some things can be done with words. People who say, oh, I try to witness with my life and not with my words. Oh, come on. It takes both. Some things can be done with words, but some things have to be done without words. Waiting for the moment when a word will be welcome. And to wait, to wait like that on God also takes prayer on our own behalf. We have to trust him. So what can we do? We can open our eyes. We can try to think clearly ourselves. We can counteract the appeal to inappropriate feelings by appealing to appropriate feelings like the goodness of family and the exuberant joy of happy marriage. Exuberant joy. Do you know that comes from Thomas Aquinas, a medieval friar, a celibate? He spoke of the exuberant, exuberant joy of it. We need to model that we can meet lunacies not just with counter arguments, but with sounder, more beautiful visions of how things really are. And I think that's a lot.
- [43:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. Wow, you're terrific. Do you like teaching, by the way? I mean, do you like it?
- [43:33]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Well, I do like teaching, frankly. Even the hot moments when a student starts screaming at me or yelling at me or something like that, that I have to say, they're at least interesting. And so called dumb questions. I won't say there's no such thing as a dumb question, but I don't mind them because I've learned more from trying to answer naive or dumb questions than from answering sophisticated questions. Right. How would you think how deep a geometry professor has to dig in order to explain to a puzzled student why parallel lines don't meet? Making what is obvious in itself obvious to another person is a challenge. This is my last semester teaching before retirement.
- [44:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Oh, okay, okay.
- [44:16]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
And I don't want to. I was hoping that I would be able to get through it without anything unpleasant happening, but, you know, I'm having fun this semester and it almost makes me wish a little bit that I wasn't retiring. Although I'm not going to change my mind and I'm still going to continue to write and continue to do some lecturing and things like that.
- [44:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
So you've taught for 40 plus years?
- [44:36]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
45 years. 46, let's say. Is it 46? Since 1981? Yeah, 45 years.
- [44:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
Where did you first. So did you, did you get your doctorate at Yale? Was it at Yale?
- [44:48]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
I did get my doctorate at Yale and while I was at graduate school, I'm not counting that while I was a graduate student. School, in graduate school, as a doctoral student, I was an. I guess they called it an acting instructor. I mean, I did have a course of my own to teach. But I didn't teach as a regular faculty member until I got here to the University of Texas, at which time, by the way, I was still lost in lunacy myself. I didn't believe that there was a God. I didn't believe that there was a real good and evil. I didn't believe that our commitments are in control or that we have free will or that I'm responsible for myself. And I told this to the faculty when I gave my dog and pony show and they said, give him a job teaching the young.
- [45:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
What was your doctoral thesis on?
- [45:26]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Oh, it was absolutely insane. It was trying to prove the things that I just said. Okay, well, I had to repudiate it.
- [45:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm happy that I asked you these questions because people who see behind me there's Bill Buckley's mayoral campaign poster. And he was my boss at National Review for many years. And like you, he was an instructor at Yale, even though it was in Spanish for a few years. But anyway, professor, it's been just terrific to have you on and I want to again recommend to our listeners and viewers not the it's pandemic of lunacy how to think clearly when everyone around you seems confident crazy. Highly praised and it's a very accessible book. It's very readable.
- [46:17]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
I'm glad to hear you say that. I did try to write it in such a way that an ordinary person could read this. It wasn't written for philosophers.
- [46:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, well, mission accomplished. Thanks very much, Professor. Thanks folks for watching. Thanks for listening. Thank you the Daily Signal for hosting this. And we will be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye bye.
- [46:39]
Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Thank you.
- [46:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features. In addition,
- [46:57]
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Professor Jay Buzeczewski
Get it.
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