Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…What about the dramatic formulation of that same question? Do you think there’s some ideas that are good and some of that are evil? Do you think we can draw such lines or is it more complicated like the old soul genius in line between good and evil that runs to the heart of every person? I philosophically agree with Solzhenitsyn, for sure. I do think some ideas pull on the good side and some ideas pull on the bad side, absolutely. And I think that’s probably why people dislike Rand so much, is they feel like she’s giving license to the bad side, and she’s saying, “It’s okay to be selfish, and it’s okay…” They feel like she’s the dark forces. And in some cases, that may be true, but she’s also unloosing some of the light forces in terms of reflecting on yourself and trying to be true. But definitely, there are ideas that are dangerous to play with. And there are ideas that I think give license to the darker sides of human nature. But I think you can see that in the historical record. So I think that it’s possible to show that. And obviously, there’s some places like Germany. They think the ideas are so dangerous, they can’t be allowed to circulate. And in some contexts, that may absolutely be true. And then still even that, we should take with a grain of salt because perhaps censorship of an idea is more dangerous than an idea. So all of that, that’s the beautiful thing about us humans. We are always at tension trying to figure out what ideas are the ones that are going to help humanity flourish. Pothead question, do humans have ideas or do ideas have us? So where do ideas come from? You have Milton Friedman sitting there after Rutger’s trying to figure out what he can do about the Great Depression. Do you ever think about this? I sometimes think aliens are actually ideas. They’re just kind of travel through human brains and captivate us. And we get all real excited with the monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey, a monolith lands, and everybody gets excited. And somehow this idea just gets everybody to be on the same page, and it reverberates through the community, and then that results in an implementation of some action that results in us figuring out that that idea was actually bad, and we learn new ideas. But it feels like the idea is right in the show.…

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