Curiosity & American Capitalism
2021-05-31 · Guest: Frank Buckley (Professor at George Mason University) · 52:28
The decline of curiosity in modern America
Bob Zadek interviews Professor F.H. (Frank) Buckley about his book, Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life. They discuss the decline of curiosity in modern America, the rise of cancel culture and censorship, the “epidemic of loneliness,” and how curiosity serves as a foundation for both morality and entrepreneurial risk-taking.
Topics: Curiosity, Cancel Culture, Censorship, Polarization, Morality, Risk-taking, Education, US Senate, F.H. Buckley
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Frank Buckley
Introduction [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Yes, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show. We are this morning, and always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning.
There is so much going on in America today, and perhaps in the world, but our focus is America, that is deeply troubling. And the issues that I find troubling seem to have just sprung up. And they each—each of the troubling circumstances, the events—seem to be somewhat unrelated to each other. And I tried, but I couldn’t find a unifying commonality between all of these troubling events. I’m talking, of course, about wokeism—we all know what that is. We know about the increased sensitivity to fear and risk. There is so much fear in our country: fear that our children cannot play alone, they cannot go out unsupervised. We are afraid of each other on the virus. We are actually encouraged by our government to squeal on each other and report bad behavior. That has become part of the official message from our government to its citizens, which doesn’t have a good result on citizens’ relationship to each other.
We have censorship, which, other than perhaps pornography, which is not much in the news these days but was at one time, perhaps a half a century ago, but other than that, there never was a serious discussion of censorship. Now we have book publishers refusing to publish certain books. We have TV programs that will not carry certain content. We have, of course, Facebook, Twitter, social media, et al., doing their own, in quotes, “censorship.” It’s not censorship because it’s not the government, but it sort of feels the same. We have polarization. We have racism, even though actual racism is profoundly on the decline—not if you watch the media.
So we have all of these troubling social and political events all happening kind of at the same time. And I couldn’t figure out whether they had something in common, whether these were 12 or 10 isolated events that just happened to be at the same time. And I’ll say I couldn’t figure it out—that’s past tense. Now I can figure it out, compliments of our guest this morning, Frank Buckley. Frank, a frequent guest on my show, has just written a book which doesn’t seem to be a political book, but it teaches so much about what is going on in these troubling circumstances. Frank’s book is called Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life. It’s not a how-to-do-it book. It’s not a self-help book. It kind of is, but really is not. It is a book about, as the title says, curiosity, which means, if you go one notch down, risk-taking, welcoming the unknown, wondering about the unknown, whether there’s something that you don’t know, which if you did know it, it would make you better—a better person, a wiser person.
I’ve never known one could write a book about curiosity. And not only has Frank written this book, but in the book, when one reads it, one finds there is a unifying factor going on—that all of these troubling events and circumstances of our times do have one common factor. And the common factor can be found in the 200-odd pages of Frank’s book. Rather than me explain anymore, I’m delighted to welcome back to the show Frank Buckley. Frank is a professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law. He’s a senior editor at The American Spectator, writes frequently for that. He’s also a columnist for the New York Post, and he has written extensively for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, U.S. News, National Review, The American Conservative—yes, and there is much more. Frank has written a fascinating series of books, kind of unrelated, all eminently readable. And each time Frank writes a book, the second the book hits the streets, as they say, I can’t wait to invite Frank to my show. Frank first visited us way back in, well, perhaps not way back, in 2015 when he wrote a still, still readable book—I still remember my interview with Frank. The book was called The Once and Future King, and Frank taught me and us about the merits of a parliamentary system, which I still remember and still have learned a great deal about from Frank’s book. So Frank, thank you once again, first of all for the book—profound thanks for that—and for agreeing to be on the show this morning.
Frank Buckley: Well, thank you for having me. It’s great to be with you again.
The Decline of Curiosity [02:31]
Bob Zadek: So Frank, curiosity. Now, I have found in your book, upon reading it, I have found as I turned page after page, the answers to so much of, or the explanation of, what is going on today and, most importantly, why it is going on. So first, as we drill down in the book, tell us about curiosity and why the feeling, the activity of being curious, is so important and why its decline, in your opinion, in American life today has been the fertile ground for so much of what I mentioned in the introduction of going on in America.
Frank Buckley: Well, two questions. The first is why is it so important? And I think the answer is if you think about any of the people you admire, or any of the great advances in science, in business, literature, whatever, there was somebody curious behind it. And the next question is, well, why is this particularly an issue right now? And the point is, you know, by nature we’re curious. So why do you have to write about it? Okay, if we’re by nature curious, just let it happen, right? It’s like breathing. You don’t have to have a manual on breathing.
Well, the point about curiosity and why it’s important today is because there’s never been, I think, in America, such an effort to silence people, dissenters. Well, at least since, you know, the witch trials in Salem in the 1600s. But and maybe we’re a little bit like that today. I mean, we’ve got a culture that tells us not only that you have to stay inside because of COVID, but also that there are received thoughts that you’re to adopt. And if you depart from them, then you’re a racist and you deserve to be canceled. You shouldn’t be listened to, you should be off the air. And and that’s going to make people incurious, right? It’s going to make us hemmed in on ourselves. It’ll mean that we won’t want to open up to other people because that’s dangerous, right? You’ll reveal a confidence, but the confidences are the sorts of things that get you canceled. So not only it is the case that it’s natural, but it’s also the case that it needs to be encouraged in America in 2021.
Cancel Culture and the Silencing of Dissent [03:52]
Bob Zadek: And you know, Frank, I one of the first eureka moments I had in reading the book is that when one is curious, one is just wondering about is there something to be learned? Is there knowledge out there that if I can find it, I will learn something and be better? And maybe what you will learn is that something is a bad idea. So it’s not a question of learning about something equals indoctrination. No, learning about something tells one, once you use your rational mind, this is a good idea, or this is a bad idea. And learning about something will make you more adverse and to avoid bad ideas. So what is strange about what is going on today—and let’s take, for example, cancel culture, which means preventing individuals, institutions from sharing what they believe to be information, making it available to the public at large. Rather than allowing the public at large to be exposed to it so they can decide it’s a bad idea or not, the cancel culture says, “No, the information will not be made available ab initio, so we don’t get to be curious about this idea.” So isn’t the cancel culture anti-curiosity? And remember, Frank, you have said to us in the very outset and throughout every page of your book that curiosity is what drives human development. So is it fair to say, or am I taking too much liberty, that the cancel culture, the wokeism, is as anti-curiosity as a movement can be?
Frank Buckley: Well, absolutely right. And by the way, you began by talking about wonder. And Aristotle said philosophy begins in wonder. So if you have an attitude of wonder at the world, that impels you to follow your curiosity and seek answers. But that doesn’t work when the very idea of looking at what’s out there can be dangerous, right? So curiosity is something you want to avoid in 1984. And we’re far closer to 1984, to George Orwell’s dystopia, than I think at any time since the creation of the country 250 years ago.
And that should be especially concerning to people with an interest in liberty. Why? Because if you’re not curious, what’s the point of liberty, right? If you’re not curious, you can be told what to do and you won’t complain, right? And liberty won’t matter to you. So if liberty does matter to you, it means that you’re willing to strike out and ask questions without having to worry about the consequences. And and that doesn’t, I think, describe America in an age of cancel culture.
Bob Zadek: And you know, Frank, I often have said to my friends, perhaps even to guests on the show, that I find when someone expresses an opinion, I almost universally find someone’s opinion to be kind of boring. I mean, who cares? However, the reason you think that what you do, the reason you have formed your opinion, is fascinating to me. Because from that reasoning, I can learn something. If you state an opinion, I will never learn something from it. If you tell me how you got there, show me the proof, let me see the geometric, the geometry proof of that you’re right. That’s persuasive. And without curiosity, you simply accept in a disinterested way what somebody tells you, just as you have said. You just accept it as gospel without any curiosity: how’d you get there? Or more succinctly, why? It’s the “why” that your book is written about. And in all the wonderful stories you have told in your book about all the great men and women that you cite beautifully in the book, all of them use the word “why” often in their brains, and that is why we have the quality of life we have today. So to me, the subtext of your book is urging people to ask why.
Frank Buckley: Absolutely, and providing hints as to how to do it. And and you’re right, what I do is I take examples of people who made great discoveries, who struck out to something novel, who quitted, who took the off-ramp and left the beaten trail. And and so what these stories tell you is in the end how you can make yourself curious, or what to do if you if you want to be a curious person. And there are all sorts of different things, there are all sorts of different stories. People have been curious in different ways. There’s no single way of saying, “Right, I’m going to be curious, you know, that’s it.” No, in fact, there are different ways in which curiosity expresses itself. And these were the stories I told in the book.
The Epidemic of Loneliness [05:41]
Bob Zadek: In your book and in our conversations, you use the phrase that captured my attention: the “epidemic of loneliness” in describing a bit of American life today. And of course, it resonates closely with all of us because of the experience of having governmentally imposed loneliness through the lockdown during the virus. Tell us about the epidemic of loneliness and, to stick to the medical metaphor, what are the adverse consequences both to the individual and, more importantly at least for this show, society at large? Tell me why it was—why you used this high-drama medical term, “epidemic of loneliness.”
Frank Buckley: Yeah, it’s not in the DSM bible of psychologists, but I think it does belong there. The way in which we’ve turned ourselves incurious by simply focusing on a very narrow set of issues. And I’ll give you one example. I was on a call-in program that’ll go nameless, presenting my book. And and what the callers, the people who called in, wanted to talk about was not my book, but the January 6th, quote, “insurrection,” unquote. And I, you know, I answered it as best I could. But the point is, there are some people for whom the only thing that matters is basically, you know, a very narrow set of political issues. And that’s absolutely deadening, okay? I mean, you know, if if you want to be curious, you have to break out from the received learning, the list of the narrow topics you’re supposed to think about. And that it’s okay to do that, right?
And and if you try to do that, you know what? You’re going to make people angry, like I made people angry, okay? Um, you know, they tweeted afterwards, “Why is this person allowed to be on television?” Okay. And it’s just, you know, it’s it’s a kind of madness. It produces, I think, a real loneliness, okay, for the people who are excluded from the conversation. And you know, that all the people who voted for Trump, for example. And even for, you know, the the the kingdom of the blessed, the people with the correct thoughts. If all you get to talk about is basically that one issue, you don’t have to talk, right? You know what the issue is, you know what the answer is. Um, and it just, you know, it just makes it dangerous.
Let’s talk about friendship for a moment. You know, why is friendship important? Well, it’s a basic human good. And if you don’t have it, you’re missing something in life. And the next question is, what is friendship like in America today? I mean, friendship depends upon revealed confidences, okay, where you you confess something about yourself which might be turned against you. You don’t know, you just toss something out, right? You let something emerge and you don’t know much about it. It could be good, it could be bad, but it could be used, you know, conceivably it could be used against you. And it’s dangerous to do that now. And of course, it’s extremely dangerous to tell a joke. Right? So the kinds of friendships you might have made in the past, you don’t make anymore, right? And and so you get this friendless society where suicides are up, where a majority of Americans apparently describe themselves as unhappy. That’s not a way to live. But that’s America 2021.
Bob Zadek: And that is driven by fear, as I—as we said earlier in the show. The fear and curiosity, of course, are adverse to each other. If we are taught not to be curious but to be afraid of other points of view, to avoid them like a communicable disease. So if you are on the left, being exposed to any opinions on the right, or vice versa, the fear is by those who are preventing it, you will catch the disease of a broadened worldview. So just like the pandemic kept everybody isolated lest they pass on to one another the disease, if that was going to happen medically, the censorship today, the wokeism, the cancel, is the same thing. It is a quarantine of ideas so that we do not catch somebody else’s progressivism or catch somebody else’s freedom or catch somebody else’s openness, because that will cause you—or the fear is you will leave the reservation. So that’s another message in your book, Frank, that those people who would—who want their point of view to prevail are afraid that you will, if you leave the quarantine, you will be susceptible to the disease of another idea. And that’s what I found to be the unifying factor in your book, which is why a book about curiosity, a mental—a state of mind—is quite a—is a profound political book as well. And you you draw lots of parallels in the book to what’s going on in political life today. So the book, strangely enough, is almost a Trojan horse. It is a political book which has as its introduction and its premise a state of mind.
Ideology as a Mental Shortcut [08:01]
Frank Buckley: And the state of mind that I’m opposing is is a form of sociopathy, right? I mean, a sociopath is someone who doesn’t need other people. And that’s the message we’re conveying. I mean, in a lot of colleges right now, students are encouraged or told how to report on their professors, right? So an idle comment, a joke, whatever it is, is the sort of thing that can trigger a student and all of a sudden you’re you’re you’re up on charges. And what you may be charged with is a sort of thing which was innocuous 10 years back. I mean, part of the idea of cancel culture is what you’re talking about are is a shifting set of misstatements, of bad thoughts, right? And so, you know, what was absolutely innocuous 10 years ago or 10 months ago or 10 days ago, you know, can turn out quickly to be absolutely toxic. I mean, it’s getting to the point where you want to have your tape recorder on whenever you talk to somebody else so that you have an accurate record of what was said. Okay. And, you know, if anybody thinks that that’s a good idea, then what you’ve done is you’ve described a purely sociopathic society. And that’s the idea of the book. The the idea of the book is to say, “Stuff it,” okay? You know, get out there and do your thing and enjoy it and don’t let the censors get you down.
Bob Zadek: And in your book, where you write about with wonderful anecdotes—and by the way, just as an aside to our listeners out there, when I read the book, it is replete with fascinating stories about great men and women over history. And I found myself as I turned every page—and I was reading a paper book, yes, a paper book—I yearned for links. I wished every paragraph had a link because each story you told, Frank, made me curious—yes, curious—about the subject of the story, the object of the story, and I wanted to immediately put down the book and learn about the subject of that paragraph. And I could have been—if the book were online and I were—and it was linked, it was hyperlinked, I would be found myself deep into the net, link to link to link to link, because every story you told made me more curious, and then I became more curious and on and on and on. So the book is its own little Wikipedia, all wrapped into one. And I thank you for that. It just made me feel smarter, on the one hand, in reading it, and B, it made me feel unsmart that I didn’t know all this stuff until I read it. So it’s a great—it’s a great intellectual exercise. The book is just magnificent, Frank, so thank you so much for that.
Curiosity as the Foundation of Morality [09:36]
Bob Zadek: Now, when it’s about—the book is about curiosity, and curiosity to me, I guess, has a subtext or baked into the meaning of curiosity is openness. Curiosity means you want to learn more stuff. And why would you want to learn? Because perhaps you will become smarter and you might even, perish forfend, change your mind about something, or take an opinion you have and learn that it has to be more nuanced, which means being open to learn that you might be wrong. You might have thought something was the case and it’s not. And it seems as people behave, that is so scary to learn you were wrong about something. And the best way to not feel have that unpleasant feeling that you were wrong is just stop learning. And Frank, when I thought about is curiosity, which means changing one’s mind about something, I wondered about—and you and I have spoken about this—I flashed to the United States Senate, which has been called sometime accurately and sometime sarcastically, the world’s greatest deliberative body. Deliberative body, which means it’s 100 senators who sit around and try to persuade each other to do or not to do something. Persuade, which means each senator is trying to persuade his or her colleagues to change their mind, to come over to that senator’s side. And then, Frank, and I’d like your opinion on this and how it relates to curiosity, I tried to find one example that I could think about where a senator, or perhaps a member of the House, but let’s focus on the Senate, where a senator changed his or her mind as a direct result of the deliberation, where some senator said, “You know, I thought we had to close our borders, but maybe it’s a good idea to open them,” or “The minimum wage perhaps is counterproductive and maybe it ought to be eliminated or reduced, not increased.” Some—or abortion, whether abortion is a constitutionally protected right. Big issues. When has anybody—and I couldn’t find any example in my memory of a senator changing their mind. And that means that there has never been deliberation.
Frank Buckley: Well, I can think of examples where senators changed their mind. Civil rights would be one example. I think a classic example would be after Pearl Harbor when Senator Vandenberg, a Republican isolationist, decided, “Right, forget isolationism, we’re at war.” Okay, but he changed his mind because of circumstances and not because he was persuaded by other people. And and you’re right, the point is the Senate is not a deliberative body in that sense, in the sense, for example, that Parliament in England can be that. I mean, there was a classic moment in May 1940 when the Chamberlain government fell and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. And and what got that going was a series of speeches in Parliament in which Chamberlain was ripped apart, with the result that about 70 members of the of the majority Tory party decided not to support the government, right? They had been persuaded by a series of devastating speeches. So that can happen where there’s real deliberation, but any deliberation in Washington happens offstage. It might happen, but you’ll not know about it.
Deliberation in the US Senate [13:01]
Bob Zadek: So that would mean that what the Senate needs is more curiosity. If they were just more curious and less baked into a point of view, it would operate more in its designed role. And more specifically, Frank, and when I read the book about curiosity, I had this train of thought and I couldn’t wait to be on the show with you and pose this question to you. One starts with, let’s say, no opinion on any political issue. And then one acquires an opinion, which means you change your mind from no opinion to an opinion. Now, I suppose early on that opinion is a softly held opinion, you just acquired it like a minute ago, and therefore you might, through curiosity and examination, change your mind as you learn more about an issue. And therefore opinions become—are fragile to begin with and get baked in over time. Is there a dynamic when an opinion gets formed so that it never will be changed, or can opinions always be changed and it’s a question of how persuasive the changer is?
Frank Buckley: That’s happening all the time right now. There are a couple of reasons for it. One reason is simply partisanship. I mean, when you’re taught that not only are you right, but the other side is poisonous, then you have absolutely no responsibility to listen to the other side. In fact, listening to the other side is dangerous, you should just cut them out entirely. And you also have the growth of ideologies, you know, for example, ideologies surrounding, well, for example, the 1619 Project of the New York Times, which would have it that we are irredeemably a racist society. Okay, so an ideology is like a mental shortcut. It’s like a key that’s supposed to unlock all doors. And when you buy into an ideology, what you’re doing is you’re avoiding the need to look at conflicting evidence. To do that, you’d have to have some curiosity. But the great thing about an ideology is it’s like a mental trash folder. It sends, you know, contradictory facts into a folder where you don’t have to pay attention to them.
So there are those things going on and, you know, and they’re unfortunate. And going back to what we said a moment ago about the sociopathy of what’s going on, a big part of curiosity is curiosity about other people and how they’re affected. So if you don’t care about how other people will be affected by a policy because you’re a pure ideologue, you know, that’s fine, but you’re incurious, okay? And and that’s why I wanted to make the argument that it seemed to me curiosity was the foundation of a good part of our morality. Because our morality is about how other people fare, how we treat other people. What are the consequences of our action upon other people? Well, to think about that, you have to be curious, right? And that’s, you know, fundamental to our morality. So the deeply incurious person is also a deeply immoral person, right? And that incuriosity is the root of all evil in many ways. There’s also the incuriosity about your own motives. I mean, there are all these self-righteous people nowadays, okay? It would be good if they had a moment of self-reflection where they thought they might be self-deceived about their nobility, because a lot of the angry protests right now, a lot of the sense of justified hatred that’s out there, particularly on the left, is from people who really don’t look very carefully into their motives or question their own behavior, right? And that also is basic to the idea of morality. So, you know, again, incuriosity is the root of all evil—that’s a pretty good argument for curiosity.
Risk-Taking and Entrepreneurship [16:26]
Bob Zadek: And what’s happening in—as I said, your book answered for me or helped me understand a lot of what’s troubling me in society today: the wokeism, fear, censorship, and polarization. And it is all driven—it seems to me that those who would advocate censorship, cancel culture, and polarization, that demonstrates to me that they are fearful of having their ideas tested by having their subjects being exposed to another point of view, because a test on the merits, those who would have censorship fear they would lose the argument. If you believed your point of view on any issue was the right one, you would invite anybody to whom you’re trying to persuade to prove that this idea is right, just expose yourself to the other side and you will see there’s no argument, it’s a vacuous—the other side is a vacuous argument. But instead, there is this fear lest it be discovered the emperor has no clothes and the idea you’re advocating doesn’t have any merit. So the wokeism, the polarization is, in effect, the statement is, “Don’t—we forbid you to hear the other side because it is so bad that there’s no benefit whatever.” And it’s the fear of the mind working that invites censorship. Those who are censors, the mind, or the mind of their subject, is something which they are afraid of. They don’t want that mind to be turned on.
Frank Buckley: You’re making the point, the correct point, that a lot of moral disagreements are really factual disagreements in disguise. For example, since you mentioned it, the minimum wage. Okay, so, you know, if people say that, “Oh, we can set a minimum wage and it won’t do anything about unemployment,” what that comes down to is not so much a moral as a factual argument. And if you have all the facts, you have all the evidence, you know, then hopefully the moral disagreement would disappear and we’d be on the same page. So refusing to look at the facts is a—as you say—is a way of bolstering your own ideology, but it’s also an example of incuriosity.
And I mean, it’s, you know, this is one of the ways in which morally we’d be improved with more curiosity. And curiosity is simply another way of saying if people who resort to what has been called voting shortcuts—a voting shortcut is we don’t have time to study all of the issues, we simply have lives to lead and we could not be expected, nor would anybody expect us, to do deep dive into issues. So you rely upon voting shortcuts. It might be the race of the person you’re voting for. It might be their background. It might be their political party. You look for a shortcut and you will say, “Well, I will presume as a shortcut that if it is a Democrat, more likely than not I am aligned with that person’s point of view and he is the better representative for me.” So there’s voting shortcuts, but when the shortcut eliminates any intellectual activity, that’s like outsourcing your brain into somebody else. And outsourcing your brain, how can you have any humanness if you have outsourced your brain to somebody else?
Frank Buckley: Well, it’s partly about trying to get to good answers that satisfy people after the facts are weighed. But I’m also talking about a sociopathic state where you don’t care about the other person. Um, I guess I’m more concerned about that even than getting the facts right. Because we’re such a sorry—such a sorry place right now in America in being so quickly able, for example, to label somebody you disagree with as a racist or a bigot. There’s so much of that. And and that just seems to me purely evil. Excuse me. [Coughs] Whoo, allergies. To me, only one person in a thousand is a bore, and he’s interesting for that reason. And so, what I did in the book is I described a whole bunch of, I think, really interesting people. And I talked about what made them interesting, right? They were interesting because they wanted to know about other people, or they were creative. [Coughs] Sorry about that. You know, all the things that make you a curious person are things that make you a better person, more open to other people. And that ultimately is why it matters so much.
It also is the case, by the way, that you ask the most profound questions of all, which is: why are we here? And what’s the point of living? Why should we bother living? Right? Camus said the only philosophical question is suicide. I think he meant curiosity, all right? Why are we at all interested in religion except we’re curious about what happens after death? So that Pascal said people who don’t want to ask that question, he thought, were monsters of incuriosity. In other words, the instinct to curiosity underlines our sense of ethics, our sense of religion, and our sense of connectivity to other people. Even, you know, even people you think you’re in love with. I mean, how do you know you’re in love? You know you’re in love because you’re curious about the other person. And when you read stories and novels about couples and you find that one person is curious about the other, but the other person is not curious about his better half, then one person’s in love and not the other person. It’s a test of curiosity. Right? That’s why it’s so fascinating.
The Impact of Safetyism on Children [18:51]
Bob Zadek: So curiosity, your book—and I got that from the book—in your book, curiosity, as I said earlier, which to me was a book about political dynamics, was also, as you have just said and it came out in the book, a book about interaction among people. If one is curious, it is per se you recognize there are other people as well as ideas from whom you can learn. You might learn something is bad—it doesn’t mean you will adopt a different point of view—but without curiosity about what’s going on in somebody else’s brain, what makes them tick, without that curiosity, it’s a moral statement. It means you kind of don’t care about other people. And that’s an unpleasant way to live.
So in many ways, your book is a sociological, as you have said, statement as well as a political statement as well as an intellectual statement about the operation—the healthy operation of the mind. And that is why your book, in its very readable couple of hundred pages, offers so many lessons to individuals. And just by reading the book, forget the endless links you’ll want to do to follow the threads that Frank invites you to follow, the book itself will just almost make you discover how wonderful it is to be exposed to other people and to their minds. It’s like a whole world that you’re invited to enter if you have been avoiding it by either being closed down by your own behavior or because you’re closed down by even worse and more sinister the operations of government. Because as I said at the outset, so much of policy today and the laws today and the compulsion imposed by society, so much prevents you from being exposed to ideas. That is so contrary to our founding ethos.
And Frank, you and I have talked about this in the past, that the founders, in their profound respect for the freedom of conscience, which to them was the freedom to think whatever they wish without it being monitored or altered by government—although the word “conscience” or “consciousness” is not in the founding documents, it was a driving force to protect that freedom. And we have squandered that freedom today. We are denying freedom of conscience, which was one of the founding principles of our country.
Frank Buckley: You’re right. And of course, conscience refers to more than simply religion; it involves, you know, your thoughts about all the different ways of living your life. And sadly, we’ve moved away from that kind of liberalism, that old-fashioned liberalism which was based on tolerance of different kinds of opinions. I also wanted to make the point, by the way, about risk-taking and how that is intrinsically admirable. I tell a story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which is really two stories. Okay, in one version of a story, this idiot kid trades a cow for a beanstalk. Okay, so what a dummy. The other version of a story, which is the real one, is this was a great thing to do, Jack. You got this beanstalk and you climbed up and there was a pot of gold or whatever up there. So the moral of the story is take risks, and particularly for young people, that’s really, really important. I mean, Jack was an entrepreneur and it paid off. And entrepreneurs are the kinds of people who take risks and gamble on uncertainties.
The high-tech economy is a good example of that. You go back to the late ’70s and, you know, nobody at that point knows whether personal computers will take off. Xerox doesn’t think they will. But you got this guy called Steve Jobs and he’s tootling away in his basement or his garage with this little box. Okay, and he’s got this idea. And he has no idea if there’s going to be a demand, and he has no idea how to fill it if there is a demand. So it’s a pure crapshoot, right? And so he launches his company called Apple, and the securities regulators in Massachusetts say, “No, no, you can’t sell your shares in Massachusetts because this is too risky.” And they were absolutely right; it was too risky. Okay, but the regulators didn’t exactly protect the people of Massachusetts with that decision. Every great new exploration, discovery, entrepreneurial act of creation begins with the curiosity about the unknown. When I say unknown, I mean it’s not even probabilistic. It’s not like there was this certain probability that Apple would work. No, pure crapshoot, right? And that’s the nature of all of these kinds of really creative, wonderful business decisions. So, you know, behind all of that are some really heroic people who are making those kinds of gambles. And it might have been an inventor, it might have been the kind of explorer who opened up the West, the first people to reach California. All of these people were entrepreneurs in their way, and behind all of that was this great curiosity: what’s out there?
Bob Zadek: And what’s really strange as we sort of run out of time, regretfully, Frank, is that that curiosity, that risk-taking, is being taught out of younger school children today in all of the ways that they are being protected, whether it’s protected from physical harm—wear helmets when you ride your scooter—to being protected from ideas that might frighten them. But protecting somebody from ideas is to sentence them to an intellectual death at an early age. It’s to give them a fourth-grade lobotomy by making them afraid of ideas, not expose them to ideas so they can figure out good ideas from bad ideas. And it’s that fear of risk-taking—and I’m so glad you mentioned that because it’s an important part of your book—that teaches us a lot about what is going on today, in this case, in the case of education.
And Frank, that is why I found your book—it didn’t appear to be the goal, if it was, it was very subliminal—it didn’t appear to be the goal, but it explained to me so much of what is happening that I find discouraging and somewhat scary in public life today. So your book invites people, it tickles their curiosity, it does that in the extreme. It is a petri dish for curiosity and it helps us understand so much of what without the book I couldn’t understand. So your book is a valuable tool. It will satisfy so much, Frank, curiosity out there that I must thank you again for writing the book and commend it to all of my listeners out there. It is a must-read, it is a delight. Warning: it is infectious. You will be putting in—in your brain links and you will want to learn so much more from the references of Frank’s books. So Frank, thank you so much for the book. You’ve taught me and our audience so much about what is going on with a beautifully written 200-page book.
This is Bob Zadek. I’ve been speaking with Frank Buckley. Frank has written Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life, a must-read and if you’ve enjoyed this morning’s interview, please check us out on iTunes or whatever podcast you listen to and tell us whether you liked it or not and offer suggestions as always for future shows. Thank you so much to Frank and thank you to my friends out there. I will of course be back again next Sunday. Have a good balance of the Memorial Day weekend.