Rep. Dan Crenshaw: We’ve Sidelined Personal Responsibility

Healthcare, and this is a healthcare issue obviously, is so complicated and there's so many levels to it. But I mean, I think one of them that we really have to address is diet and obesity. There's a giant problem with diet and obesity in this country, healthy food, eating the proper food. You know, I had a friend who said, they were talking about people who do drugs and people who drink and maybe they shouldn't get access to the same healthcare and maybe that's a good incentive to stop people from drinking and doing drugs. I said, yeah, what about people who do fat? What about people who are fat? Like, you're going to use the same logic with them because you can't fat shame. So can you tell, hey fatso, you can't get the same healthcare that a healthy person does. Well, if you got a healthy person who likes to drink and they run and they jog but they do like to drink and they occasionally smoke a cigarette, are they healthier than someone who's morbidly obese? Yes, they are. So what we have a problem is people who don't self-care. We have a giant problem with that. People who don't take the necessary steps personally. Now is this because of education? Is it because of ignorance? Is it because of a lack of awareness of the consequences of a non-healthy diet or eating poor foods or consuming large amounts of alcohol or tobacco products? I don't know what it is, but that is a massive part of our healthcare system is people who are not doing the proper things to their own body in terms of eating nutritious foods, hopefully that they can afford in terms of exercise, which is free for everybody. There's a lot of things you can do that are free to take care of your body. Yeah, I agree. I think it's indicative of a problem in our culture where we've started to sideline this notion of personal responsibility. Chapter 7 in my book, I forgot, I got to talk about my book. For two, available now. We're available now. Order from your local bookstore because they need more help than Amazon. Did you read the audiobook version of it? Yeah. Good. Thank you. 14 hours. Very important. I enjoyed that. Some other dork is reading for you. I'd be very upset. Yeah, no, I was very much against that. And so yeah, we got it done. Chapter 7 is called a sense of duty. And part of the deal when our founders wrote out the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and built the framework for this free society that we live in, where governments roll is to protect your rights. That's fundamentally the government's role. You have God-given rights. And these are life, liberty, property. Effectively speaking, life, liberty, and property. In the Declaration, Jefferson wrote the pursuit of happiness. And they choose these words really carefully. Now, part of the exchange there is a necessity for citizens to live with a sense of duty and to live as a citizen, this idea of citizenship and to do what is right, to do what is good. It's hard for me to imagine that people are just so uneducated that they don't know that they're unhealthy. I think they know it. The problem is that they don't care. That's a problem. And you're getting at that problem. I don't know if that's true. I don't think it's that they don't care. I think they have no discipline. I don't think it's that they don't care. Well, what's the difference? Well, there's a difference is they've never been taught to push themselves. There's a lot of people. Look, it's just so easy to get by. I wrote my book. That's one of the reasons why I love the title of your book. Fortitude is what people need. And also, they need to understand that there's a great value in doing difficult things. And this society... That's chapter... What chapter is that? Chapter eight. Is it? Well... The name of the chapter is called Do Something Hard. Good for you. Well, listen, man. That's true. Look, you're a Navy SEAL, man. You know it. You get it. You live it. This is what we need. We need more people who understand that I know it's hard to get up. I know it's hard to do things. I know it. It's hard for me too, but I still do them. And you should do them too. It should be something that we encourage everyone to do. And that we all talk about. And that we all praise each other for. And we all get excited about accomplishing these things. And taking care of your physical body. Taking care of your meat vehicle. If everybody just did that, we would have... Healthcare costs in this country would be radically decreased. Well, that's a fact. Right, yeah. That's a fact. That's an absolute fact. If more people had discipline, and more people just went out and took care of themselves, and then had discipline to not overeat, and had discipline to try to choose the right foods, and to make a meal plan, write things down. I mean, it can be done. We're not talking about breathing underwater. We're talking about things that can be done by the average person. Well, I don't think the notion of personal responsibility is talked about enough as... It's almost... Conservatives talk about it all the time. That's one of the things I appreciate about conservatives. But it's kind of used against us a lot, right? It's almost like we're accused of being immoral, and unfeeling, and uncaring. When we say, you know, in this whole like, just tell everybody to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and whatever. And not that we even use that term. But the point is that it's actually important, and I don't think conservatives have done a good enough job over time explaining why it's so important. And personal responsibility, as a foundation of our culture, it's important because it leads to empowerment. It gives us the agency to control our own destiny. If you're constantly in victimhood, if you're constantly being told that you can't control your own destiny, well, that's fundamentally disempowering. And that's a terrible psychological state to be in. And the other thing I tell people is that is a fundamental American attribute. There's some interesting polling out there. I don't know, I forget the numbers, right? But I always have them in a speech that I give. And when you ask people, what's the exact question? It's like, do you have or do things that happen to you, are they within your control or outside your control? It's something like that. In Germany, the answer was overwhelmingly things are happening to them outside of their control. Right? Like, do you understand what I'm saying? In America, when the same question was asked, it was like, 30% or 40% of people said yes, versus in Germany, it was like 50% or 60%. So it's a pretty market difference. And that's a uniquely American thing that we believe we are in control of our own destiny. We tend to overwhelmingly say more than European countries, that if we work hard and play by the rules and do what's right, that we will get ahead, that we will find that opportunity. And I think the world recognizes that too. When you go around the world and you ask people, where would you rather be if you could immigrate right now, what's your number one destination? Well, it's the US of A, like overwhelmingly. Second place is Canada and Germany at like 6% of respondents. The USA is like 21% of respondents. So second place isn't even close. And so for all of the left wing anger and always saying how bad it is and how nothing works here and everybody's just in crisis all the time. Obviously, we're in a crisis technically right now, of course. But this rhetoric was prevalent before all this. For all of that commentary, it just isn't true. And then the reason they use crisis language, the reason they tell you you're going to die in 10 years, climate change, the reason they're always telling you that corporations are taking advantage of you and the 1% has just got you under their boot and all of this. It's very victimizing language. And there's a reason behind it because they want very, very extreme policies put into place. And you can't justify revolutionizing the whole system unless you convince people that the system is so bad and so corrupt that it needs to be revolutionized. And what's that's created is a real undermining of this notion of personal responsibility because you have to tell people they're victims if you're going to convince them that they need you to save them. And when you undermine personal responsibility, you disempower people. And fundamentally, to me, that's what socialism does because you're telling people each to their need, each to their ability. What you're telling people is that they don't have to work that hard, that they deserve, they have rights to all of these other services from other people. It's their right and we should distribute that accordingly. Everybody's perfectly equal. What that does is it removes agency from people and it's truly a disempowering thing. And we've seen this throughout history. Just talked to Venezuelans and Cubans and they're so happy when they get here. They're so happy because they just want to work hard and move up. And they're just so excited about this meritocracy that we've built into our culture. Well, Cubans are such a great example that my friend Andrew Schultz, who's a hilarious comedian, has a great bit about how communist Cubans come to America. And the moment they step foot on soil, they become Republicans. It's really hilarious. And it's true. And they do appreciate that aspect of this country. I think one of the things that you said earlier is that we live in the best time ever in history. And I agree with that. The consequences of it being such a great time are it's far easier to get by, because it's far easier to get by. People look for things to be more difficult than they actually are. They look for things to be more stacked against them than they actually are. They look for more of a woe is me standpoint. When you find people that actually have a real difficult life, they don't look for things to be hard. They find hard things everywhere they look. And oftentimes you find that those people that have a real struggle, there's a great documentary called Happy People by Werner Herzog. And it's about people who live in Siberia. And it is a brutal, difficult existence in extreme cold. But these people are overwhelmingly happy. I mean, it is a really crazy documentary because their physical and their struggle just for existence, just to survive, is so difficult that they've found this sort of perfect vibration of existence where they're in the wilderness. They're out there trapping and hunting and fishing and farming and gathering up enough food to survive in the extreme winters. And it really shows you that human beings need difficult tasks. We need things to be tough to do. And we need to actually go out there and do them to have a feeling of satisfaction and have a feeling of personal responsibility and the fact that you've actually done the things that you needed to do in order to survive. It's built into us. Yeah, it really is. And this is why I wrote a whole chapter on this. Do something hard is a real deep dive into the benefits of suffering. Yes. And I distinguish between just going through something hard, like getting blown up in the face, like, yeah, that's suffering, but it's not self-imposed. I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. I'm not saying you need to get blown up in the face and lose an eye to have this sort of spiritual awakening and how good it feels to go through something hard. But you should habitually move into a self-imposed suffering. You were about to say something. No, I wasn't. No. But just by virtue, you're a SEAL. And SEALs, people that are special operators, people that have gone through, just whether it's military or first responders, really difficult physical tasks to get to where you are. Just that alone creates character, creates a different kind of person. And the type of people that gravitate towards those endeavors, they're special people. They are. But I didn't write this book for them. And I wrote it for everybody. And what I point out is, listen, SEALs have our hard thing. And it's BUDS, which is an acronym. It stands for Basic Underwater Demolition Slash SEAL Training. It's six months of hell. And it pushes you beyond limits you ever thought you had, Hell Week especially. And when you're done with that, when you come away from Hell Week, there really is this sort of spiritual awakening. It's that you have higher confidence. You feel prepared for anything. Even in some of the worst situations, you can think to yourself, well, it's not quite Hell Week, is it? And so you're able to have a much more perspective. We're lacking in perspective quite a bit also. Chapter two is called Perspective from Darkness. And I point this fact out that too many of us have gotten so comfortable. We've removed suffering from our life to such an extraordinary degree. And that's not a bad thing. Okay. That's an element of the modern times that we live in. And I'm happy we live there. But the reality is that my ancestors were struggling through Texas, trying to find water on a daily basis. And in my life, I'm complaining because when I'm at 30,000 feet flying through the air, the Wi-Fi isn't as fast as I'd like it to be. So we have very different complaints. And it's good to every once in a while just think, you know what? I have it pretty damn good. And to remind yourself of that, again, the Do Something Hard chapter is, one, it's a deep dive into the psychological literature, which I just enjoy doing. There's a lot to back this up, whether it's modern psychology, the history of stoicism, or the Bible. All of these texts, these ancient pieces of wisdom that have been around for a very long time, they all talk about this. They'll talk about the value of suffering, the value of enduring and hardship and how this builds character and how this actually quite literally makes you stronger. And both a metaphysical sense and a psychological sense and a physical sense, actually go into the science of it as well, and how the changes in your brain, what exercise does, what hardship actually does both physically and metaphysically. Like there's real benefits to this, but you have to do it. And it doesn't have to be Joe Rogan's life. Okay, I wonder if a lot of people look at your life and they're like, that guy is too productive for me. And it's just too intimidating. And maybe that's so, but don't compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. I think that was, it's not a Jordan Peterson. That might be a Jordan Peterson chapter. I think it is. I think I just quoted that. But the point is, these things are true because they're true. That's why Jordan Peterson says that, because it's true. Like I don't pretend like I'm the first one to come up with these ideas. I'm just trying to put them into language that people can understand and use my life experiences to bolster those lessons. But it just has to be harder than what you did yesterday. And maybe it's physical, but not everybody can do physical things. Maybe it's hard for you to finish a project at home. Just do that. Maybe take a cold shower. And just so you can like kind of, you feel tougher the rest of the day because you're like, you know what? I just sat in 10 minutes of icy cold water. I didn't do that the day before, but I did it today. And now I feel a little bit more like a badass. Like, you know, and I feel like more like a badass than I did yesterday. It's small things. It's the self-imposed suffering is so important for our lives. Like me, for me, it's usually physical, right? Like I want to do this challenge of a workout. You know, like that kind of keeps me sharp. Or maybe it's like running for Congress or something. Like, I don't know. Like we all have something and I'm just saying you have to find that and make it habitual. It can't just be once either because seals can get soft too. Yes. We all know that, you know, we know who those guys are. And it's because they stopped listening to the lessons from Buds and to this value of self-imposed suffering.