Lesson Three | Freedom and Equality

the decorous independence says something that you don't really find in the ancient world it says all men are created equal and yet they are so obviously different aren't they in America we like sports and in sports they keep score and you find out whose equal and who's not and you find it out release what does equality mean then in what way or respect is it true that all men are created equal what does it mean equal but what does it mean all men are created equal win obviously by the way they are not like you look around the table I'm old you're young boys and girls large and small younger and older you're just a baby aren't you yes precocious sophomore is old Christian here so so we're not equal right what does it men all men are created equal what do they mean equal dignity as human beings even though they might be endowed with different degrees so Hitler and Churchill for example have equal dignity yes yeah I wonder what does dignity mean it it references the nature of man as having a right to exist in some respect at least insofar as being in like the body that you are mm-hmm okay compare children and dogs the most important comparison by the way in the entire academic world key to understanding all nature is to compare children and dogs I don't like cats I don't but children and dogs right and what is it about the children and the dogs you can raise them just about the same way when they're young but then some point the children start speaking and somehow they've picked up on how people act and how people interact they talk yeah the specific thing they do see in my family the children grown now and we had these two boxers and they're really great one of them's a three-legged dog and he's the happiest dog we ever had and the dogs are everywhere wherever we are so you guys are all coming over to my house for dinner and you will find that you'll be dining with the dogs and when we were raising the kids the dogs were always there and after about a year and a half the kids started talking and the dogs never did and they they'd all heard exactly the same things right so this talking Aristotle says that the gift of speech which is identical he claims to reason or rationality they are the same thing the argument is when you are talking you are thinking to yourself you are thinking out loud and when you are thinking you are talking to yourself it's the same thing now somehow this capacity we have that makes us human there's some respect in which we are all created equal and where I think that is is this phenomenon of the dogs and the kids dogs at various times in their lives are greatly preferable to children right but they're not the same kind of thing else they would say so and they never do right last night the dogs were talking to us as dogs talking right and Aristotle says animals use their voices to indicate pleasure and pain people speak to distinguish the just from the unjust right this whole thing is a statement of the just and the unjust and it depends on this simple point this is what all men are created equal means you are the King of England and you ride in a golden carriage and everybody salutes you and all fear you but you know when you were a year-and-a-half old you started doing something that no animal has ever done and no one taught you to do that you just started doing it and it wasn't because you were born royal it's because you were born human and so were we it just means that and they think what that allows our kids like to say cow they have an English mother they English say that word very well but it's just a sound right cow cow cow why not plop flat whack you know why not a million things are a cow cow what's that got to do with that thing out in the field everyone different from everyone else right and they can just look at a two-dimensional picture of a cow and identify it and then you can take it out in the field and show them a bunch of animals and they'll point out what you wants the cow but that means before they can they're old enough to even go outside by themselves their whole universe gets populated by all of the things that it's in ours planets stars worms bees everything they can get all of that right and they can get all that by the time they're three years old and then by the time they're five years old for sure they can start identifying the sounds they make with marks on a page and then they're reading and then the next thing you know they're reading Shakespeare and then they can do numbers because numbers are just the same kind of symbols except for quantities and once you can do the basic math you're on your way to quantum mechanics every human being can do that every single one and no other creature has ever done that and born in this gift you see that we can speak and therefore see that thing and that thing is the same kind of thing and it doesn't make any difference if it's your kid or somebody else's you can't treat it like a dog because it is not a dog and no king can treat it like a because it is not a dog to him either because it's not a dog see once the ground is laid for that then of course Thomas Jefferson can write in the last serious letter he wrote some are not born with saddles on their backs nor others booted and spurred to ride them by the grace of God the King can rightly put a harness on the horses that pull his carriage but he can't do that to people unless they volunteer you see that's a tremendous philosophic proposition and the ultimate source of human freedom and this by the way is the greatest political statement of that in all history you [Music]

Channel: Hillsdale College

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Keywords: hillsdale, college, larry p arnn, constitution, freedom, class, online course, online, free, liberty, equality, declaration, founders, history

Id: iP97Xi-srnc

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019