American Thought Leaders - Is EU Censorship Coming to America?—Here's What You Need to Know: David Thunder

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

What will be the impact of the European Union’s sweeping new rules for Big Tech, not just on Europe, but also on America?“The issue with this legislation is that there are extremely vague categories such as misinformation and hate speech that are very, very difficult to define in law … so this opens the door to a form of arbitrary bureaucratic power over the platforms,” says David Thunder.He’s a political philosopher and a research fellow at the Institute for Culture & Society at the University of Navarra.“They can also declare an emergency. And in the event of declaring an emergency, require the platforms to take special measures to counteract the emergency,” says Mr. Thunder. “So it can become part of a war machine, in a sense.”Mr. Thunder is the author of “Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

What's most troubling about this legislation is that there are extremely vague categories such as misinformation and hate speech that are very very difficult to define in law. So this opens the door to a form of arbitrary bureaucratic power over the platforms. What will be the impact of the European Union's sweeping new rules for big tech? Not just on Europe, but also on America? They can also declare an emergency, and in the event of declaring an emergency, require the platforms to take special measures to counteract the emergency. In this episode, I sit down with David Thunder, a political philosopher and research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society

at the University of Navarra. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. David Thunder, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you. It's great to be here, Jan. Why don't we just jump right into it? What is this Digital Services Act? Well, the Digital Services Act is a piece of legislation that just went through the European Parliament recently, and it actually is concerned with the regulation of online platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and so on. It covers a broad range of issues, including child pornography, transparency of terms and conditions,

and the sort of standardisation of the regulations across the European Union that affect these platforms. But from my point of view, what's most troubling about this legislation is its treatment of, basically it's introduced a form of disinformation because it gives the European Commission oversight over these platforms and they can actually undertake a kind of review of the platform's policies and regulations over the previous year and if the platform has not been in compliance with their requirements, these platforms can be fined a massive amount, billions and billions of dollars.

You know, that is obviously of great, great concern to those platforms, but also could be a great concern to people who use these platforms. We're talking about these very large ones that have, you know, become a kind of infrastructure, in fact, for a lot of people the world over. Exactly. They've become a kind of a digital town square or a global digital town square, you might say, in which really much of the news and commentary

that happens in the world gets filtered through these platforms. So even though they're private platforms, they act as public forums. And that's a very important point to make, that they do have a public function in our democracies. And so any form of oversight of these platforms by, say, the European Commission is something that I think people who care about democracy should be concerned about. And, of course, nobody would object to them taking down child pornography.

That's not the issue. The issue with this legislation is that there are extremely vague categories such as misinformation and hate speech that are very, very difficult to define in law that the auditors of Twitter or other platforms, the people who are auditing them on a regular basis, have to take these categories into account and decide whether the platforms have sufficiently enforced rules against disinformation and hate speech. And if they haven't, they'll be heavily fined and they could even be suspended from operating in the European Union eventually. But these categories are nowhere defined in law in a clear way. So this opens the door to a form of arbitrary bureaucratic power over the platforms. You know, there's one of the features, and I actually forget the term,

what they're called, but essentially the system employs the equivalent of what we know as fact-checkers, right? Fact-checker organizations. Yes, basically they employ, they will end up employing a small army of what they call trusted flaggers. And the trusted flaggers are not exactly fact checkers. They're supposed to identify illegal content on the platforms. And these trusted flaggers are nominated, and trusted flagging organizations are nominated by the digital coordinators of each member state. So there is some outsourcing of the work to the member states,

but fundamentally when the oversight is going to come from the central power, which would be the European Commission, and whoever it nominates to do this oversight, this work of oversight. So I think that's when really, you know, when we're going to see the impact, the full impact. But not just then, but before that, because really these platforms have to anticipate that they're going to be reviewed. And so when these trusted flaggers flag content, these platforms like Twitter or YouTube, really, they can either take down the content

or they can decide to keep it up and give some reason for keeping it up. But if they're consistently ignoring the advice or the recommendations of the trusted flaggers, that will come up in the annual review, in the periodic review by the commission. And then the commission will probably say to them, why are you ignoring our recommendations? So there'll be that kind of conversation. And so it is a kind of mechanism for pressuring the social media companies to comply with the policies of the European Commission. And I would emphasize again that in European law, there is no clear definition of disinformation, nor is there any clear definition of hate speech. So these two categories are going to be, are inherently expansive, they're inherently vague, and they're obviously put in the hands of the European Commission, can be used to advance whatever their political opinions are about these matters. David, so these flaggers, trusted flaggers,

I mean, essentially, they have the ability to take down content, assuming that the platform is reciprocating. And you can sort of imagine a situation, given the extreme nature of the fines that one of these platforms could get, they may err on the side of self-censorship. Self-censorship in the sense that they will just agree with those flaggers, whoever they may be. So effectively, they're working like one of these fact-checkers, and then if they don't comply, then they'll get audited and they might get this massive fine.

Do I understand this correctly? Yes, that's basically... I agree with that. I yes that's basically that's basically i agree with that i think that's the most likely outcome um because it really is a massive fine that they'd be facing i believe it's up to seven six or seven percent of their annual turnover i found it shocking the amount that they could be fined so yes yes, they will anticipate and they will take, let's say, defensive measures because that's just good business strategy. Otherwise, they can be sunk in massive fines at the end of whatever that review period is. So what is the impact beyond Europe? Well, that's a good question.

I mean, in principle, I don't know if it's practical for a social media company to completely separate the visibility of, say, tweets or posts in one region and in another and whether the for example the twitter experience or the x experience would be completely different if you're living in europe than if you're living in the united states i mean i'm not a legal expert but i would imagine that um one one of the obvious impacts is just the uh the sheer cost for the social media companies of having to put in place an infrastructure to be constantly responding to these trusted flaggers, a kind of a regulatory infrastructure. So it's going to be a burden, I think, a burden on the platforms, not to mention that they will be paying fees to the European Union for this service.

So certainly there'll be an extra cost for the platforms. For the end user, it's hard to say. It would be up to the companies to decide whether they're going to sort of standardize their policies across the world or whether they could, you know, have a Twitter experience, X experience, you know, TikTok experience for, say, the United States and another one for Europe. Europe would be a more censored experience in this case. But I'm speculating because I'm not sure exactly how the social media companies will respond to these regulations. I mean, and basically, so you're arguing that it does do certain valuable things that are highly defined, for example, you know, restrict child pornography, which I think maybe not 100%, but just about everybody would agree is a really good thing. And but that is

something that's very finely defined. And then that also incorporates these very broad areas. Yeah, I mean, you know, one example was the use of algorithms that could be potentially manipulative. Part of the legislation requires social media companies to be more transparent about how they use people's personal data in designing their feed and their experience of the particular platform. So I think that's a pretty good idea. It's a pretty neat idea, actually, to bring in more transparency, more respect for privacy. And the example you gave of child pornography, I mean, who's in favour of child pornography? I mean, really? So, and I'm sure there are lots of innocuous parts of the legislation because it's a very long piece of legislation, as I discovered when I waded through it. But there are key points, sort of pressure points. As I said, the disinformation issue, the hate speech issue, which is inherently expansionist. They can also declare an emergency, and in the event of declaring an emergency,

require the platforms to take special measures to counteract the emergency. Now, what could that mean? We can imagine what it would mean. They're not very specific, but presumably it means if they think that there's an emergency pandemic, you know, an emergency because of a pandemic, or it could be because of a war, say the Russia-Ukraine war, where they could decide, well, you know, you've got to start censoring propaganda coming from the other side for example right so it can become part of a war machine in a sense um but but again it's the vagueness and the open-endedness of these emergency powers it's just not clear exactly how they will use them and what power they'll give them over these platforms so as a piece of law any lawyer should be aghast at a piece of law like this, a piece of legislation like this, because it gives vague, very vague powers to an unelected organ of governance, namely the European Commission. I want to talk a little bit about how I came to know you.

And of course, you're one of these folks who has been, let's say, a voice of reason and a voice of thoughtfulness during the pandemic, or at least for some portion of it. So give me a little bit of background on how you came to this and, you know, what happened when you first saw something was wrong with the pandemic response. Yes, I mean, basically, I was living in Spain. I've been living in Spain for over 10 years. And I was one of the first cases of COVID myself, actually, because it was February 2020 late February 2020 when I when I came down with COVID I never really tested for it but I lost my sense of smell and I had all the classic symptoms of COVID and it was dreadful and I was out of action for about a month

and had a cough for about six months I mean mean, I wasn't hospitalized, thank God, and I got over it. But in the course of those months, the Spanish government ordered people to not only stay at home, but not even go for a walk, not even go to the park, not even walk their kids outdoors. People were allowed to walk their dogs, but not their kids. Crazy stuff. Crazy stuff was happening. And I knew as soon as they said you couldn't take a walk,

you could only go to the supermarket, but not take a walk for any other reason. I knew that this was made up. This stuff was just made up and it was just made up on the hoof by people who were panicking and wanted to make a power grab and make people feel like they were doing something um and i was extremely worried about the as i saw this these draconian measures you know being

applied all over the world i knew i knew from an early stage that this was going to lead to chaos and it was going to cause far more harm than good. As a student of social sciences, I was aware that any dramatic large-scale social intervention is going to have inherently unpredictable and chaotic consequences that are very difficult to control. And the experience of the pandemic has proved that this principle is true because of all the knock-on effects of paralyzing people's lives and isolating people and shutting down businesses. And from early on in the pandemic, I was aware that this was going to happen. I keep coming across this theme again and again as I speak to people who became aware very early in the pandemic that something was really amiss. And in your case, this is in the

social sciences. Is this a principle that every social scientist would know, or is this something that was more focused in your particular area of discourse or of interest? very large social experiments like Russian communism or like Stalinism or national socialism in Germany, you know, should be aware or even the city planning movement to the United States in the 50s and 60s should be aware that these interventions historically have been disastrous. Well, so what happened? I think what happened is essentially that fear and panic kicked in on one side. I think there was genuine fear in the population. And there were people who were well placed in government circles to understand the problem, to begin to understand the problem, who reinforced that fear and perpetuated that fear. And it became a kind of a self reinforcing cycle of fear and more aggressive interventions and more fear, because every time you lock down the population, people think this must be Armageddon.

When you lock people down, an authority, a public authority locks people down, they receive the signal that there is a really dramatic problem here that they need to respond to. And it turned out that the authorities were mistaken. It was a serious problem, but it was not a problem on the scale that would justify locking people in their homes. And as we know, countries that did not do that, like Sweden,

came out much better than many of their neighbors that did lock down. So there really is no evidence that lockdowns worked in the medium to long term to stem the spread of disease. It's just it's not realistic. Human beings are not like that. They have to get on with their lives. They have to make a living. They have to go to work and they have to, and they have to socialize at some point. So that was unavoidable. You know, this is exactly what I was thinking about when you were talking about these emergency powers for extra censorship or whatever that are granted by this new DSA law? Yeah. I mean, in a way, it's a kind of a rationalization that they offer for these powers, because

I guess their idea is that somehow them controlling the flow of information on the internet is vital to managing public emergencies. And that in itself is a very questionable premise. And, you know, it's a very self-serving premise as well for a government. Whenever a government wants to make the case for having more power, we should be very suspicious. And you would think, in fact, that during an emergency, you would want a more open

internet and a more open flow of information so that vital information that is concealed or that is not easy to access can actually come to the fore. You would not think the opposite, that in fact, shutting down information is the best thing you can do to manage an emergency. It's astonishing, isn't it, what happened? Well, why don't we do this? Why don't you just give me a sense of a bit of your background and then let's bring it up to what you're actually studying currently, which is, I guess, highly relevant to this discussion. I'm a political philosopher and I'm interested in,

I've studied issues connected with the ethics of citizenship, what it means to be a good citizen and, and some of the obstacles to being a good citizen, some of the corrupting let's say influences of political institutions and practices. And in my later career, I've kind of turned towards the institutions of democracy and I've focused a lot on the conditions under which democratic political institutions

can contribute towards the all-round flourishing of their participants, basically so that citizens can live more satisfying and rounded human lives under these political institutions. So that's kind of where my research is at at the moment, and I'm particularly interested in the decentralization of political institutions and the principle of federalism, which is a very, very cherished and familiar principle in the United States.

So it's the federalism in the United States that actually allowed for different approaches to the pandemic. As we know, for example, Florida basically broke the lockdowns very early on, basically within a month. there's other states that stayed locked down for a very, very long time. And of course, completely different approaches to various types of mandates, including mask mandates and vaccine mandates, and even messaging around the pandemic as well, which provided this sort of, as it's described, laboratory of democracy scenario where we can look back and say, okay, which approaches were better, which worked, which didn't, and so forth. I deeply appreciate this approach.

This is very different from my home country of Canada, of course, where everything is much more centralized. Yeah, I think this point about experimentation and about sort of laboratory of democracy is fundamental. Because if you centralize a political system too much, then what happens is that you deprive yourself of basically invaluable knowledge and understanding of public policy. Because if you only impose one policy across a region, then you'll never really know for sure whether that was the best policy or the optimal policy because you don't have a control group.

You don't have a kind of a parallel universe, if you will, where a different policy was applied. And so the federal system allows for these kinds of experiments in democracy and in public policy to run in different directions so that observers can then understand their outcome better. So I am not American, but I lived in America for many, many years for, you know, for at least 10 years. And I have to say that I'm very attached to the principle, the federal principle. And I think it is extremely important to preserve it so that power remains as dispersed as possible. And I would further say that the federal principle should be applied within states, intra-state, so that municipalities and boroughs and counties

can have as much autonomy as they can over their own affairs. I think that's really fundamental for democracy to work well. I want to touch on something that we discussed a little bit offline, which applies both to this DSA law and also just this general topic we're discussing here. We live in a world where we're told that we need experts to mediate our understanding of the world because the world has become so complex. And this pandemic response, if anything, if one of the sort of silver linings of it has been to show us that that approach doesn't seem like it's going to work very well,

given a lot of poor decision-making that was made by people who were experts, and then the doubling down on failed policy and so forth. This has been a feature of the pandemic. Something we discussed earlier was the very idea that one group of people, or a small group of people, or these fact-checkers or flaggers or whatever could actually have the level of understanding to decide what is true and what is false. That itself is a serious question. But here's the thing. I feel like we've been conditioned a little bit to believe that that might be possible, but you argue differently. So tell me about that. Yeah, I mean, basically, this has to do with how both scientific and

political knowledge and moral knowledge, how it actually works. We have to understand that, in fact, in order to get to the truth, in order to understand what's going on in the world, we actually have to engage in a back and forth in an argument with other people. And we have to be able to examine the evidence openly. And the evidence that's presented has to be contestable by other people, like in a court of law in a way kind of adversarial you could think of it in an adversarial way um you know i'm held accountable by other people for what i say because they can challenge me right but if we set aside an anointed group of people and we say those people they have the truth will protect what they say, it cannot be challenged, then we're undermining the very basis for rational discourse,

which is the ability to be challenged by others. And of course, the notion that there is an anointed class of people is like something out of a sci-fi novel or something. It's absolutely, utterly implausible um and i think it's made its way into popular ideology and the the reason it's it has such an appeal is because it makes the world very tidy because then instead of having to grapple with complexity and contradiction i can just be fed the truth by an expert. And that makes me feel kind of comfortable. It can make me feel comfortable. It doesn't make me feel comfortable personally. It makes you feel uncomfortable to be fed ideas constantly by an expert class.

But I can understand how that could psychologically be reassuring to think that these people have the truth. The NIH, the CDC, it's kind of crazy to think that a doctor who's outside the CDC should not have standing to criticize the CDC or challenge its ideas. I mean, it doesn't make any sense from a scientific or rational point of view. No, absolutely. And, you know, it's a, are we in this kind of a moment where, this moment where so many of us—I'm thinking back to Hannah Arendt's writings right now—are we in a moment where we're poised to accept some technocratic rule? It's not just a matter of there being this impetus for that kind of power structure in itself, but that we're more maybe interested in it than we have been in the past. Yeah, I mean, I think there are very famous thinkers, Alexei de Tocqueville you know who who wrote his famous wonderful volume called Democracy

in America and he predicted he was very prescient he predicted that you know modern governments in promising people security and comfort could become effectively what he called soft despots right softly despotic despotic meaning that instead of relying on you know the police uh coming to your home and you know knocking your door and rounding you up they would just get compliance through by regulating the hell out of people's lives and um so that you know people's initiative and creativity would be destroyed by having to go through bureaucratic hurdles for everything they did um and so hyper regulation of people's lives by the state um i think in a way can really enervate them or it can really kind of reduce their energy and it can reduce their creativity and it can convert them into it can infantilize them. And so I think technocracy in itself can feed on itself by creating habits of compliance with minute rules, complicated rules.

And in some ways, I think people, I agree, people seem to be more open to technocratic control of their lives. But there are other people who are resisting and pushing back and we shouldn't forget that there are pretty strong resistance movements in places like the united kingdom um and uh peaceful resistance movements uh and and so and populist movements as well that are you know anti-establishment and anti-technocracy. So it's not all doom and gloom. There are some signs of resistance to these kinds of tendencies in democracy.

So absolutely, I wholly agree with you. One of the things that this whole pandemic has exposed to me and has been a topic of many shows, or at least one of the topics of many shows I've done, has been just this realization that I've had that some of us are easily propagandized. And we can come to believe things which are, when you sit down and really think about it for a moment, wrong. But yet we can pick up through it being in the popular culture and being pushed out through, let's say, social media and media or many, many mechanisms at once. We can come to believe things which, upon reflection, don't really make a ton of sense. And so we live in a society where some portion of us, and sometimes without even knowing at all, believe in things which another portion of the population doesn't.

And so the idea is you want people to have a common set of knowledge, a common set of facts. You can't have alternative facts. Facts are facts, right? But that's not where we are today. Yeah. I mean, all of that is inherently anti-philosophical. It's anti-reflection. It's anti-thinking.

It's anti-freedom to present people with a very rigid worldview that they should accept on faith, essentially, because it's unchallenged and it's sort of authoritative, right? So we should accept it. What you're talking about points also to the fact that our societies are quite polarized and divided, and that there is disagreement over fundamental issues that affect how we live together, that affect how we run our society, how we regulate our society. And so the prospects of creating a feasible political system that we can all inhabit together seem pretty poor. And here I think decentralization plays a really critical role. Not only territorial decentralization, but also things like school vouchers, so that people can select the kind of school they want to go to and want their children to attend, to have some control over the social world. So I would argue that because,

precisely because our society is so diverse, because there's so much disagreement and conflict moral cultural religious um precisely for that reason we should try to facilitate people to organize and to um you know join communities that broadly speaking can agree on fundamental issues concerned with how they live together. And so, yes, of course you need an overarching constitution and some kind of a regulatory framework. But I would argue that that regulatory framework that is like an umbrella within which all these communities can exist should be minimalist. It should go to the bare minimum of non-aggression,

some kind of rules against criminal conduct some rules about public order uh so that communities can then develop their own life in their own way and they don't all have to be celebrating a gay way of life and they don't all have to be against a gay way of life i mean i i i i you know in a way we have to understand that it's a practical issue it's a practical problem it's not about deciding what the best most ideal society is going to be it's about how do we get these people as they are to be able to you know uh interact with each other engage in a common market you know pass each other in the street um that's not going to happen if we think that all of the important moral and cultural issues have to be settled for everyone in a state. It's just not going to happen.

It'll only polarize the population and it'll accelerate the demise of that society. Well, I mean, inherently, some people would be forced to take on a set of values, right, in this type of context. It would end up being that either a majority or um a powerful political faction which may be just a strong minority or a powerful minority

would end up dictating the terms of our common life in a way that goes completely against the will and the interests and the opinions of the rest of the society. And they would feel trapped. And when people feel trapped, they become resentful, bitter, angry. And it's a recipe for an unstable society. Inherently unstable and explosive. So, you know, people get complacent about democracy, about Western democracy, and they think, oh, well, we don't see bombings in the street. But I think that's a mistaken attitude because ultimately underneath the veneer of peace and respect,

you know, there can be a lot of tension and resentment. And if you allow it to bubble, you know, to just sort of develop over time, there will come a time when it explodes. And democracy relies on mutual respect and on recognition of the legitimacy of our shared institutions and so if those institutions become polarized or only are perceived to represent the ideological or economic interests of a special class of people then many citizens will just switch off and will defect.

And they'll reluctantly go along with what they're told to do until they see an opportunity to overturn those institutions. I mean, that sounds dramatic to say it that way, but I do think, and I would say the United States is on course for a form of dismemberment if these issues are, if there's a, if people attempt to resolve these issues at the federal level, it's a recipe for dismembering the United States. So, okay, well, why don't we, why don't we look at, what do you see as a as a solution here well i think the solution is um there's no completely satisfactory solution because politics is very messy and because you know living and sharing public spaces is inherently a messy kind of process when people have different opinions and so on but having said that there are ways to mitigate the pathological effects of political partisanship and let's say division and polarization and one of those ways that have been recognized by scholars of what's called polycentricity,

which just means lots of different... It just means basically decentralised governance, is to decentralise power and allow communities to run their own affairs in their own way and have a very strongly protected right of exit and right of mobility so that essentially citizens can vote with their feet so to speak and they can move to communities that are more amenable to their outlook on life and and so if people wanted to, maybe that's an example

that's been discussed or cited by a lot of people. Apparently, a lot of people have moved to Florida during and after the pandemic. And you can bring that down to a smaller scale and you can even bring it down

to the level of municipalities and counties to some extent. you can actually have different rules for different regions and different governments. And I know people think this sounds very radical probably, but honestly, I think we're up against fairly radical problems now. And so we need to start to open our mind to radical solutions, such as decentralization. Well indeed you know if you read my good friend Roger Simon who's also you know our editor-at-large at Epoch Times he has a

new book out called American Refugees which is precisely about this phenomenon of people migrating from blue states to red states and just a lot of the kind of phenomena associated with that. Yes, in terms of people finding their life meaningful and worth living, it's very important how their social environment is structured. I mean, the people you hang out with with the people you cross paths with and the kinds of activities you engage in social activities are fundamentally important for your self-development for how you view yourself and how you move in the world how you navigate the world and so it's not just geographic decentralization. It's also allowing civil associations

or let's say allowing civil society organizations such as educational institutions to have maximum autonomy to be able to cultivate a shared way of life without being constantly micromanaged and constantly in a way hyper regulated by overseeing powers i'm not saying they should be i'm not an anarchist and i'm not saying that that you know universities should have zero regulation by say the. But I'm saying that in terms of ideology,

in terms of philosophy, universities should have a lot of freedom, in my opinion, to develop their own research programs, their own educational programs. And then citizens should be free to go there or not go there, as the case may be

so that there's a kind of a market effect as well you know that people choose what kind of education they want for themselves and their children and this can be applied to many different sectors of social life so so yeah i think the freedom of civil society is a fundamental part of federalism. Yeah, I mean, here in America, a lot of people that I speak with, a lot of people who are here on the show will say that the educational system, especially higher education, is irrevocably lost, has been caught up in this woke Marxist ideology, so to speak. And it's very, very difficult to have an education. So there's this whole parallel,

I don't know if you call it economy, but parallel set of institutions which are trying to form in this process. And a lot of people don't think that the existing institutions can even be reformed because they're so saturated with, ideologically saturated with this view of the world. Yeah, I mean, I think if you were to look at it positively, then people should see this as an opportunity. Because in a sense, if those institutions were not quite so saturated then there'd be less of an incentive to set up alternative vibrant new fresh

institutions sometimes starting from scratch even though it's even though it's not just not a satisfactory response and whereas i think trying to set up independent institutions that are not stuck in these patterns of wokeness can be a huge service to society and can open a new path of discovery and a new path of development for many, many citizens. So I like to see this in a positive light and kind of think, you know, if we see pathologies in our institutions, then maybe it means we need to, you know, bring up fresh shoots, fresh life, and grow that from small to big, starting small, obviously. But it can be very exciting as well to start up new ventures. So David, it's interesting, you have a book that you've

written actually about citizenship and the importance of it and I guess the meaning of it, the meaning it can bring to people. Here in the US, one of the regulars on this show is Victor Davis Hanson, whose book, The Dying Citizen is chronicling how that role almost in society is actually dying out. Yeah, I mean, I think uh we are living in a time when there is a kind of retreat by many people into the private sphere into the sphere of family and entertainment and away from the public sphere the sphere of politics and public engagement whether it be at the local level or at the national level.

And so taking an interest in public affairs and engaging with a public spirit in public affairs is fundamentally important for the future of democracy. But I argue in my book also that caring about the common good, caring about the good of my neighbourhood, of my city, is actually something that makes me a better person as well. It actually helps me develop virtues like justice and magnanimity, helps me become a more great souledouled person, as someone

who looks outward towards my society and helps it become better. You know, on the one hand, we see a lot of people that are very, you know, disillusioned and wondering whether there's any point of participating in the political process, right? On the other hand, there's been a huge increased interest in, for example, school boards, very much a local, you know, political office, political role. And, you know, this actually has had some profound impact on school districts across the United States recently. Yeah, I think it's so important that people do not have contempt. They should not have contempt for citizenship at a very local level. engagement with, you know, if you're in a university, in the governance of your university or of any civil society organization, or even, you know, good governance in a business even. These are all ways in which, in my view, we can, you know, practice good citizenship to the benefit of everyone.

Any final thoughts as we finish? Sometimes people can become discouraged and disheartened because it seems like so many things are going in the wrong direction. And I like to say that, and I say this for myself as well, that we only get one life to live. And, you know, even if you live under a very problematic government, there are so many good things that we can do with our life for the people around us, including building institutions, but also just in our neighborhood,

in our family, among our friends, that the meaning of our life does not turn on our success at changing the whole world. I think that's just a fundamental, very important point. The meaning of our lives comes from the way we live our day-to-day life and touch the lives of those around us, not whether we change the whole world. I mean, I could almost have to say that to myself as a mantra, because I think the ideological atmosphere is very much tends to encourage us to think we have to change everything or we've failed. Whereas maybe just making small changes can be very meaningful in itself.

Well, David Thunder, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. I've enjoyed the conversation. Thank you all for joining David Thunder and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.