Ben Shapiro: Changing the System Doesn’t Change Human Nature

Every single generation, hopefully, if society doesn't implode, we don't have nuclear war, every single generation is going to learn from the mistakes of the past and hopefully improve. That's what we're hoping for. And we should be happy that we can look back on a lot of these people and say, we understand now how deeply flawed they were and what was wrong with George Washington. What was wrong with Thomas Jefferson? Although he did draft the Declaration of Independence, he was a slave owner. And this is one of the contradictions of our society and our culture. And fathered kids with a slave. I mean, yes, yes. I mean, you don't have to shortchange the evils of human beings in order to recognize either the direction of American history or recognize the good things about people. People are a little more complex than I think we want to think of them as. And this is one of the arenas that this sort of gets back to the point about the system. If you recognize that human beings are capable of great sin and also capable of doing great things, what you really want is a system that of checks and balances that prevents people from gaining too much power to hurt other people. And what you also want to recognize is that the flaws of human beings are not necessarily the flaws of the system and that just changing the system is not going to change the underlying flaws of human beings, which means you actually have to think through the policies that you're promulgating before you implement them. Clearly, if you say this, you're not paying attention to what happened at Chaz or Chop because they had it nailed. It was paradise for a short period of time. That's one of my favorite stories of this year because these people basically took over this gigantic chunk of Seattle and said, we're going to show you how it's done. They wind up being the police. They wind up beating the fuck out of people who did anything they didn't want to do, including film things. They wind up seeing you saw murder. You saw massive graffiti. You certainly saw borders. There were borders put up. They kept cops from coming in. They kept a lot of people from coming in. Beat up journalists. The beat up journalists, they took over private property. So they appropriated private property. These are not buildings they built. They didn't make a deal. They didn't barter. They didn't have some sort of a beautiful, mutually beneficial agreement with these people that own these buildings. No, fuck you. They took them over. They took them over and started spray painting shit all over them. It's crazy. And it shows you your childlike idea of what you can do that's better. You don't really understand that the founding fathers really did put into place all these checks and balances to keep someone from abusing power. And as much as Trump would like to overcome all that, you see time and time again, he's a great example in many ways of how this system really is beautifully engineered from 300 fucking years ago. Because the founders didn't understand the problem of human nature, which is people want power and they want to hurt other people very often. And you still need government in order to do things, but there better be broad scale agreement on the things you want to do or a small majority of people can really hurt a huge minority of people, right? This is what they call tyranny of the mob, right? They're much afraid of this. And that's stuff that is worth remembering. The tearing down that system because you want to build something more beautiful, if it looks like Chazz or Chop, that ain't a thing. What's this idealistic, they have blinders on, they have this narrow tunnel vision view of what they think this utopian future could be. I think they think that human beings are going to be fundamentally transformed by a different system. So they look at the problems. One of the biggest problems we have in American politics is the myopia with which we look at the United States. So when you're dating somebody, it's very easy to see all the problems with the person you're dating. When you're married to someone, it's certainly easy for my wife to see all the problems with me and there are plenty. But when she looks at all the other people, then she's like, okay, well, he's less flawed than the others, right? When you look at the United States, it's very easy to see all the different flaws in the United States because of course they exist. This is a society filled with humans, 330 million of them. But when you look abroad and you look at other examples of civilizations over time, and then you look back at the United States, you think maybe the system isn't quite that bad because the fact is that for all the problems we got, the biggest problems that humanity faces and has faced are not happening in the United States. They're happening everywhere else. China right now is shipping Uyghur Muslims on trains after shaving their heads to concentration camps where they are being forcibly sterilized. There are actual problems on planet Earth. That is not to say there aren't problems in the United States, but they are not the same in terms of degree and they are not the same in terms of scope. And to pretend that the system of the United States needs to be ripped down from the inside and that if you build a beautiful new system, you will shape humanity such that we are all saints and no sinners, you're out of your mind.