Lions vs. Scavengers: The Values That Built the West | 5-Minute Videos | PragerU

The West is in a war for its survival. That war is playing out both at a civilizational and personal level. Ben Shapiro sees this as a war between lions and scavengers. The lions want to defend civilization and the scavengers want to destroy it.

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Transcript:

Lions vs. Scavengers: The Values That Built the West

Presented by @BenShapiro

The West is in a war for its survival.

That war is playing out simultaneously at a civilizational level and in every human heart. It is a war between the lion and the scavenger.

The lion is the part of each of us that prizes freedom, responsibility, and achievement. It knows that there are rules to success and failure; that we are creative beings with autonomy and power, and that freedom comes with an equal measure of obligation.

The scavenger, by contrast, is the part of us that believes that society — from top to bottom — is rigged, that powerful forces, not individuals, dictate outcomes. That personal failures are a result of a Great Conspiracy. And that rage, including violence, is the only response to this corrupt system.

We all wake up each morning and must decide: will we be lions, or scavengers? Will we take ownership of our problems and work to solve them, or will we blame others for our failures and wallow in resentment?

The values of the lion animate Western Civilization, and provide its founding principles:

(1) free minds, because human beings are made in the image of God, with the power to choose and innovate;

(2) free markets, because we are autonomous creative beings who fairly earn what our labor produces;

(3) public virtue, because virtue and duty — and the institutions that support them — give order to the exercise of liberty; and

(4) equal rights before the law, because otherwise justice is impossible.

America was founded to be a civilization of lions.

And then there are other civilizations: civilizations rooted in grievance and anger, in conspiratorialism and barbarism. Those civilizations revel in a sense of victimhood; they blame their own failings on Western civilization. They see the world as a zero-sum game, in which they are deprived of their proper share thanks to the abuse of power by the West.

The scavenger is motivated by envy: what Adam Smith, the great eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, defines as “that passion which views — with malignant dislike — the superiority of those who are really entitled to all the superiority they possess.”

In modern speak, if your neighbor has a nicer car or house, he didn’t earn it.

There are many types of scavenger civilizations.

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