Hey, everybody.
What you're about to see is the first video I ever saw from YouTube channel PragerU.
It's called "Rockefeller: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived."
He was America's first billionaire—and he gave half of it away!
For most of it, the guy speaking, Burt Folsom, wants to get one big idea into your head:
J.D. Rockefeller was a really good guy. Like, in every way.
Rockefeller didn't spoil his kids. He was devoutly religious and gave a lot to charity.
He was an honest person who worked for the everyman and treated his laborers well.
He was so good, in fact, that the fortune he accrued- accounting for inflation, the whopping sum of 367 billion dollars-
was not the aim of his life, but just a byproduct of his goodness.
That he made so much of it himself was a byproduct.
Toward the end of the video, Burt Folsom says this:
Folsom: So if he did so much good during his life,
why is he most commonly remembered today as the paradigm of a greedy capitalist?
The answer to that question, I'm afraid, has much more to do with our educational system
than with Rockefeller himself. Maybe it's time to take a fresh look at both.
What does he mean by that? We should reconsider the way we think about Rockefeller
and rethink our educational practices in general.
Is there some contingent of historians out there who make it their life's work to defame John D. Rockefeller?
Well...
Maybe?
I mean, it doesn't sound like a thing,
he doesn't provide any citations, and it's certainly not the way I learned about the guy, but...
You know, maybe.
Though even if there is this bad cult of historians, there's no way that's really what he's talking about, right?
That's not why someone clicks on a five-minute PragerU video,
to get an incredibly sparse, uninformative biography of J.D. Rockefeller.
No, Folsom is defending unregulated capitalism.
Rockefeller was the embodiment of that system;
Rockefeller was very good;
therefore, the system was very good.
And it doesn't take long to realize that this is a pretty weird defense,
one that doesn't really add up.
Nobody who critiques capitalism, or the unregulated capitalism of America's past,
really cares about how good a person J.D. Rockefeller was specifically.
He was just a small part of a bigger trend,
part of a time when a few people were able to get richer than almost anyone has in the course of history.
For many people, the era he represented was one of abject poverty,
of child labor, of dangerous working conditions and long hours.
His business, Standard Oil, was deemed overly monopolistic and detrimental to the American economy.
It was broken up by Teddy Roosevelt and the Sherman Antitrust Act.
And in a time today when wealth disparity is hitting ridiculous highs,
when there are a few dozen people walking around with almost as much money as John D. Rockefeller had,
the question is not "Was he a good guy?"
The question is "Should anybody be allowed to have what he had?
What Carnegie or Vanderbilt had? What Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk have?"
That is the question, and it's one that goes totally unanswered in this defense.
And so, on first blush, we might reject this video out of hand.
It doesn't address anyone's actual issues with anything, or really make sense.
But I don't think that's true.
I think it does make sense. I don't think it's a good argument, but it makes sense.
We can understand it.
In fact, the sort of rhetoric at play here goes to the heart of PragerU. It defines much of its work.
And in order to explain what this video is doing and why it's doing what it's doing,
we're gonna need to talk about the ideological and moral frameworks underpinning a few videos on this channel.
So that's what this video is gonna be. Hope-- hope you enjoy.
Okay, let's start here by looking at one of the most fundamental claims that this channel wants to make.
And we can see that claim presented very clearly in a video called "What Matters Most in Life."
I'm going to talk to you about the most important thing you will ever have.
In it, the man himself- Dennis Prager!-
tries to figure out what the most essentially good thing a person can have is.
First he suggests money, then love, then happiness.
But none of these answers totally work for him.
Finally he comes to the answer he thinks is correct.
Without further ado:
Prager: Drum roll, please...
Good values.
Values, plain and simple. Good beliefs that you ought to live by. That's the most good thing a person can have.
Within Prager's logic, these things are definitionally more important than anything else in life,
and they're things which naturally come into conflict with our feelings.
Prager: A value is something you think is more important than anything else.
Prager: More important than money, more important even than love, and even more important than happiness.
Prager: And above all, values are what you consider to be more important than your feelings.
And Prager thinks that there are many of these values.
Not murdering is a value; not stealing, not cheating on tests,
thinking human beings are more sacred than animals is a value.
Eating healthy is a value.
It seems like there's a pretty long and extensive list out there.
Now, at first glance, this seems like a really common-sense perspective.
After all, values are a good thing to have.
If you ask any person why murdering is wrong, they'll give you a funny look.
Murdering is bad because it's bad! You shouldn't murder. What are you talking about?
But here I want to suggest that this position, common-sense as it may seem,
is actually really weird, and jumps headfirst into some problematic philosophical territory.
So the most important thing we should notice is that, given this perspective,
it's almost impossible to figure out why what's right is right, and what's wrong, wrong.
See, Prager does think that following these values will lead to having more happiness in your life.
He makes that very clear.
Without the thing I will tell you about, there would be little happiness in the world.
But it's important to understand that the purpose of following these values is not to increase your happiness,
or even the happiness of others. Remember what he said:
values are definitionally more important than anything else, happiness included.
But this line of thinking demands the question: "What makes them good, then?"
"Why are they important?"
And to that question, there is no clear answer.
In this video, Prager seems to imply that these values just evidence themselves.
Stealing is bad because it's bad. That's it.
But then it's like, how did he know stealing was bad?
Where did he find that out? Does he just have to say what he thinks is right and wrong, and hope you believe him?
That's not much of a moral theory.
It can't explain anything, and it comes off like these values are totally random
and don't have any relationship to who humans are, or what we want out of life and society.
So in another video by Prager called "If There Is No God, Murder Isn't Wrong"-
yeah, can you- can you guess where that one's going?
Prager: Only if there is a God who says murder is wrong, is murder wrong!
- we can see that, on some level, he's speaking directly to this issue.
He states here that what's good isn't good for no reason, that it doesn't evidence itself.
It's good because God said it was good. That's why the morals we have are objective.
But here's the thing:
even if there is a God, I don't think he would resolve this problem nearly as well as Prager seems to think he would.
And to explain why I say that, I think it'll be helpful to take a trip in our time machine,
back to the formation of Western philosophy itself.
In one of his short plays, titled "Euthyphro", Plato writes a conversation
between Socrates, a sort of author insert character,
and a total bro named Euthyphro.
Socrates, being a bit of a bro himself, asks Euthyphro a question:
"What is holy?"
And after a bit of prodding, Euthyphro responds:
"What is holy is that which all of the gods approve of."
You may notice this is exactly what Dennis Prager thinks.
But Socrates isn't happy with this answer, and he says, paraphrased:
Well, look, let's think about two cases.
In the first case, you're right. Gods are the ultimate source for holiness.
But if that's true, then there really is no reason why what's holy is holy.
They said they approved of something, but they couldn't have possibly had a reason for that approval,
because nothing was holy until they said so.
They could have easily said murdering was holy. That would have made just as much sense from their perspective.
Now, in the second case, the gods may still tell us what's holy,
but they had some reason for approving what they approved of.
Well, okay, you know, that makes sense.
But if that's true, then we're kind of just back at square one, aren't we?
If some moral law existed for the gods to base morality on, then clearly what's right and wrong
wasn't decided by the gods, and we have to look somewhere else to find it.
Okay, let's get out of our time machine.
Maybe that point was a bit complicated, and I'll link to Euthyphro in the description if you're interested
but the point I want to make is a simple one:
God or no God, if Prager really believes in this value theory,
one that is totally ungrounded in human experience or nature,
then all he's really doing is saying stuff.
"These are the characteristics you should have,
these are the characteristics you shouldn't have,
and I think that's true because it sounds right.
And at the end of the day,
morality is based on my arbitrary whims, or on the arbitrary whims of a god.
Now, all of this may seem unimportant on some level. I mean, on a day to day basis,
I don't really care why you don't murder people, so long as you don't murder them.
But when we begin to look at different videos, what we find is that the philosophy presented up here
isn't some passing, inconsequential belief.
The problems really start when we see how frequently PragerU uses this same loopy logic,
this same stipulation of ungrounded values,
to suggest or imply some really bad claims about how society should run,
and about how we should interact with society.
Sometimes these claims are overt, and sometimes they're buried in subtext.
To start off, let's look at a pretty clear example: a video called "Who Killed the Liberal Arts?"
Here's a tragedy, in its way, on the level of King Lear or Hamlet.
In the video, Heather Mac Donald talks about UCLA's English major requirements,
and takes severe issue with the fact that they don't require a Shakespeare course there.
In her view, courses in things like post-colonial or queer studies, or the dreaded "critical theory"-
Mac Donald: Critical theory.
- should be done away with.
That movement seeks to infuse the humanities curriculum with the characteristic academic traits of our time:
narcissism,
an obsession with victimhood,
and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to identity and class politics.
First and foremost, the purpose of a liberal arts education is to develop an appreciation of the old masters.
Anything else does students a disservice.
It doesn't take much, looking at this video, to see how neatly it fits in with Prager's ethical philosophy:
Learning the Canon of Western art is an inherently good thing to do. It grants access to the beautiful and the sublime,
I guess.
But it's also posed here as an instrument, one that can engender other values,
namely, wisdom.
Mac Donald: Lost in this political posturing is the only true justification for the humanities: to provide knowledge.
Knowledge leading, one hopes, to the most important acquisition of all: wisdom.
The same simply cannot be said of these newfangled classes, ones that seek to question our culture,
challenge the assumptions that we take to various texts, and, yeah, sometimes contest the position of the Western Canon.
I like the classics a fair bit.
I think that learning them can be really helpful, and impact the way you think.
As it turns out, UCLA agrees. To get an English degree there,
you have to take a literature course before 1500, between 1500 and 1700,
between 1700 and 1850, and between 1850 and the present.
I'm not concerned here with the goodness or importance of the classics;
rather, what's interesting to me is how the dichotomy that Mac Donald establishes in this video
between the good classes on canonical works and the bad classes on critical theory
really gets at the arbitrary way that values are deployed by PragerU.
To see what I mean by that, let's talk about Euthyphro again.
Please don't hate me.
So what is this play about? Like, in the broadest possible sense?
Well, I would answer this:
Euthyphro is about skepticism.
In the work, Euthyphro brings up a moral theory that makes a whole lot of common sense-
it's natural, if you believe in a god or gods, to think that those beings provide the foundation for morality-
and Socrates just spends the entire play being like, "I don't know about that!"
"I'm not sure if you're right about that, Euthyphro! Mmm!"
That's what he spends the whole play doing.
He doesn't suggest a good moral theory, or even try to.
No, Socrates is the ultimate skeptic. His only job is to ask "How do you know what you think you know?"
Plato is, of course, foundational to the ideologies of Western civilization,
and we can see his skepticism extending itself throughout the Canon.
Look at Descartes, who starts his most famous work by freaking out and saying "If I doubt everything, then what can I possibly say is true?"
Or look at Shakespeare, the guy she's so worried about protecting.
What's one of his best plays about? A guy who questions his own sanity, and questions the worthwhileness of living itself,
who sees the ghost of his dead father and thinks,
"Ugh, how do I know it's him, though?"
And there is no sharp divide between critical theory and the works of the old masters.
They are, in some sense, working on the same skeptical project,
questioning things we take for granted, the role of our culture,
the way we create meaning and knowledge, how language functions.
Like Socrates, they don't take Euthyphro at his word.
But Mac Donald isn't really invested in these works, is she— what makes them interesting or groundbreaking?
And that's because she doesn't have to be invested.
From her perspective, what makes classics worthwhile isn't anything about them, or what they were trying to say.
Shakespeare is good for the same reason that murdering is bad.
It just is the way it is for no good reason.
And in that logic, Mac Donald renders him a fangless writer of flowery prose.
Her goal isn't to advocate for Shakespeare, but to end the skeptical project that he represents.
Or— okay.
Let's move on and look at a really interesting video called "Fix Yourself,"
by a guy named...
Jordan Peter-sahn?
Tell me in the comments if I'm mispronouncing his name, I've never seen THIS guy before.
So in this video, Peterson wants to give some advice.
Peterson: Blaming others for your problems is a complete waste of time.
When you do that, you don't learn anything. You can't grow, and you can't mature.
If you want to be happy, you should try to fix the various things about your life that aren't working.
You should look into yourself, find the values that you should be living by but aren't, and start living by those values.
Peterson: Try this: Stop doing what you know to be wrong. Stop today.
Now, if you squint your eyes at this video,
you might think that it's not really suggesting policy or presenting a moral theory.
Yes, he's invoking the same value language that Prager did, but it's advice he's giving here, not ethics.
He's telling us how to be happy, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.
But there are two moments that I think we should pay attention to.
In the first, he talks about a hypothetical activist who throws a brick into an innocent person's window.
What has he done, other than to bring harm to people who have nothing to do with his real problems?
This activist, he thinks, is doing both himself and the world around him a disservice,
causing guilt for himself and pain for others.
In the second, he says this:
The proper way to fix the world isn't to fix the world.
There's no reason to assume that you're even up to such a task, but you can fix yourself.
There's no reason to assume that you would be up to the task.
Hmm.
Why is he talking about political engagement in a video
that's about how to be happier and take responsibility for your life?
Well, I think it's cuz he wants to make a covert little argument here.
The first claim of the argument is similar to what Prager says: good values are what we should aim for in life.
He even echoes Prager's lack of concern for where these values come from, or why we should follow them.
Don't waste time asking how you know that what you're doing is wrong.
Peterson: Inopportune questioning can confuse without enlightening.
The conclusion takes this belief one step further:
Considering how important the personal acquisition of values is,
all other considerations about social injustice or problems should be put on the back burner by most people.
The average person just might not be capable of making the world a better place,
and if they try to, their activism will probably be misdirected anyway.
Look, society right now is such that almost anybody can attain certain values and become a better person,
so our efforts should be focused almost exclusively on that.
This is one weird idea you can get in your head if you run too far with what Prager said.
If you think that far and away the most important thing in life is to personally attain a set of values,
then what good is it to try to better the world?
And this argument is...
It's kind of awful, isn't it?
It advises complacency in the face of badness,
suggests that we shouldn't try to fix things that Jordan Peterson might agree need fixing.
Like, it's not just our society that Peterson is implying we shouldn't be trying to change,
it's most societies, past or present.
How could the Founding Fathers possibly justify declaring independence from England?
Those guys weren't perfect.
Some of them literally owned people.
And certainly they had the ability to make their lives better.
I mean, they were super rich, and the British weren't that oppressive.
But those were the people who saw it as their place to start America,
a place I think Peterson likes.
And they did it by throwing an innocent man's tea into some water, and by hurting some people.
What I'm trying to say is, of course people should try to better themselves.
The Founding Fathers should not have owned slaves.
But the idea that you can't fix yourself while trying to fix the world,
that those two processes are mutually exclusive,
just seems like a way to ensure that nothing bad ever gets better.
Let's introduce one last video, called "The Key to Unhappiness."
Here, Dennis Prager wants to talk about values again.
This time, it's the value he thinks is most important:
gratitude.
Prager: It's gratitude.
Prager: You can't be a happy person if you aren't grateful, and you can't be a good person if you aren't grateful.
In moments where we're grateful, we're happy; ungrateful, unhappy.
You get the idea.
Really, this video is pretty run-of-the-mill and uninteresting—
that is, except for one line that Dennis Prager says right at the end.
Prager: Next time you want to assess any social policy, ask this question first:
Prager: Will this policy increase or decrease gratitude among people?
Prager: You will then know whether it is something that will bring more goodness and happiness to the world, or less.
Here, the notion that this might just be an advice video,
one with a message as simple as "count your blessings," is just thrown out the window.
Prager is now explicitly suggesting policy based on his value ethics:
the government should design policy around the engendering of gratitude.
So, there are a few obvious problems with this.
First, Prager says the government should make policy that increases gratitude
because people are happiest when we're grateful.
But do you know when we're really happiest?
When we're happy.
Why have this unnecessary middleman, gratitude, be our primary concern?
There are tons of things that make people happy:
a delicioso authentic pizza! A fun game amongst your peers!
Gratitude may be one way,
but if it's happiness we're after, why not just design the government around that?
But the more serious problem is that, if we demanded that every law created more gratitude,
the government might not be able to do things that, like, everyone agrees it should be able to do.
Does the protection of free speech increase gratitude,
or should the government try to make us feel grateful for the little speech we do have?
Do laws against murder increase gratitude,
or should the government insist that we try to save our own lives, and be grateful for the opportunity?
I know this sounds silly,
but that's because, when you take a random nice thing and try to extrapolate it into sweeping, systematic policy,
it becomes unclear what those sweeping policies would look like, or if anybody would be okay with them.
How would the government behave if gratitude were its first priority?
I don't know, nobody's been wacky enough to try it yet. Your guess is as good as mine.
And so, Prager's point just comes off as arbitrary here.
Why design the government around this thing? I don't know.
It's a value. And like any other value, it requires no evidence, and he has no real reason for saying it.
... Well, I don't know if that last part is fair.
I think he might have his reasons.
Here's how I was going to end this video; I thought it was pretty clever.
I would start by being like,
"So, looking at all this, this series of arguments, we can sort of piece together
what went into the first video we talked about, "Rockefeller: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived"."
Then I would do a little recap, you know, get everybody back up to speed.
"We start off with a single faulty, but common-sense, claim:
What is right is what conforms with various inherently good values.
But because many videos from PragerU proceed from and corroborate this claim,
they go to some very strange places.
And the natural conclusion is here,
with a defense of unregulated capitalism by means of Nice Dude J.D. Rockefeller."
Now, and this is my favorite part,
I would frame that video in terms of all the PragerU stuff we saw before.
"Heather Mac Donald says: to unreflectively lionize and appreciate the classics is what produces good values.
Anything else does students a disservice.
It is the loving duty we owe those writers, artists, and thinkers whose works made our world possible.
Well, enter Rockefeller, a man who, whatever else you want to say about him, shaped the modern world.
Maybe we should teach him a little like we teach Shakespeare.
Jordan Peterson says: if you want to take responsibility for your life and do good,
your best bet is to focus on yourself, and not the various ways that society might be flawed.
The proper way to fix the world isn't to fix the world.
There's no reason to assume that you're even up to such a task. But you can fix yourself.
You'll do no one any harm by doing so.
Well, of course this applies to J.D. Rockefeller and the systems he represents.
Why are you so worried about who this rich guy was? About what he had?
You'd be much better off if you focused on your own attainment of values,
rather than on the billionaires who rule our economy and shape our culture.
Dennis Prager says: we should use policy to make people as grateful as possible.
Well, we don't have to look too hard to find that policy: turn-of-the-century America!
That's the time when Rockefeller lived, the most grateful man in the world.
And if he wasn't able to own what he owned,
he would have never been able to be so great, so charitable, so austere, even though he didn't have to be, so...
grateful.
And at the end of the day, considering PragerU's logic,
they are trapped into the belief that the only evidence necessary to prove a society is good
is that it can produce a man with good values, a man like J.D. Rockefeller.
It's not a smart thing to say;
it's a bad conclusion based on bad premises, but there it is.
It makes sense."
And I was gonna end it, you know, basically with that.
With the idea that they were trapped into making this video somehow,
that it's just where you end up when you believe things like PragerU does.
Do you buy it?
Like...
Do you buy the idea that all the positions I have talked about in this video can be traced back to this whole...
"values" thing?
I don't know if I buy it.
I'm usually hesitant to say that people are arguing in bad faith, that they don't really care what they're saying
so long as they get you to believe what they want you to believe.
I don't like thinking that, and I especially don't like saying it in videos.
But when I look at all of this PragerU stuff, it just keeps coming to my mind, over and over again.
Like, does Dennis Prager really think that the government should be arranged around engendering as much gratitude as possible?
I don't think so. He hasn't thought about that claim to its natural conclusion
No, the whole reason he's saying that is because he thinks lefties are brats who aren't happy enough with what they have.
He hates the idea of government interference or welfare.
And so he has to come up with something
I don't know, those things make us less grateful?
Does Jordan Peterson really think that people are better off if they focus on their own values and don't try to fix society?
I don't think so. This is a guy who loves to go onstage and talk about his politics!
In this very video, he's giving an opinion that he probably thinks will help the world somehow.
No, he's saying this because he wants the SJWs to stop whining about how the world could be a better place.
He doesn't just want to say that, though.
And so he claims that we should focus more on ourselves,
and he implies that we should leave the society stuff to Jordan Peterson.
Does Burt Folsom really believe that Rockefeller's goodness should convince us
that the history of unregulated capitalism was a happy one?
I don't think so, you know? That's preposterous.
It's like saying we should remember a criminal justice system fondly because one murderer was found guilty.
No, he just wants people to stop complaining about wealth disparity, to stop thinking that the system should be changed.
It was good before, he promises.
And because it's hard to make unregulated capitalism look pretty,
he has to justify it with obscure and esoteric evidence:
Rockefeller was nice, I guess.
I'd like to end this video with one note.
In 1913, the United Mine Workers of America
presented a list of demands to the major coal companies.
They wanted things like recognition for their union, for the companies to follow safety laws,
for them to stick to an eight-hour workday. You know, things like that.
The companies rejected these demands, and so a group of Colorado miners
working on one of John D. Rockefeller's coal fields went on strike.
As a result, the American military, with the help of mine guards,
rained down machine-gun bullets on the tent colonies where the strikers and their families were living.
At the end of it, an estimated 25 people had died, including eleven children who had suffocated in the flames
The man leading the strike, Lewis Tychus, was found dead with a bullet in his back.
This event quickly came to be known as the Ludlow massacre.
Later on, when J.D. Rockefeller gave his testimony on it,
he said that even if he had known that his men were perpetrating these atrocities,
he'd have done nothing to prevent them from doing so.
Prager: People who murder feel like murdering, and they do what they feel
rather than live by the value of preserving human life.
Big Joel: So, that was that for that video.
Thank you guys for watching. This was some new territory for me.
It was way more political, and I showed my face the whole time, and I don't know how to focus a camera for some reason.
Anyway, now it's time for my Patreon Question of the Video!
QueerGirlAudrey asks: "Hi Big Joel!
Which Joel has been the most inspiring to you? Mine would have to be Billy Joel, other than you, of course! Yours truly, Audrey.
Cut this sign-off out if you don't want it there, by the way. It's kind of weird tbh."
I don't think this answer will be much of a surprise to the true fans of Big Joel,
because it's the protagonist of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel!
The best protagonist of all time, in the best film of all time.
Anyway, that's all for now. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe,
and if you just want me to have more money, or if you want to have less money,
be sure to give me some of that money on Patreon.
See you next time.
Gotta keep yourself hydrated!
American Clear.
Mmm.
It's amazing. I highly recommend it.
Back to the video!
Now, in the second case-
