Tim Sandefur, vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, said on Jan. 15 that ‘Milton was making these arguments in the 17th century about freedom of speech and individual rights.’ The statement came during an interview on The Liberty Exchange podcast, where Sandefur discussed his book You Don’t Own Me and themes of individualism in historical and cultural contexts. The conversation addressed how early thinkers shaped concepts of liberty that continue to inform debates on self-reliance and government roles, according to The Liberty Exchange podcast.
The topic is significant because it connects foundational ideas from Enlightenment thinkers to ongoing discussions about personal responsibility, liberty, and the role of government in American society. Historical analyses show these ideas directly influenced the First Amendment protections for freedom of speech and the press, which were designed to safeguard personal expression against state control. Academic reviews of founding documents confirm the integration of responsibility with liberty in early American political thought, according to Liberty Fund.
Sandefur said, ‘Milton was very anti-monarchical, and he was very much an individualist. Milton was making these arguments in the 17th century about freedom of speech and individual rights. A free person can’t expect other people to provide for him.’
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that households headed by individuals with higher levels of personal responsibility metrics such as workforce participation and education attainment experience lower poverty rates and greater economic mobility. National longitudinal studies show that states with policies promoting self-reliance report stronger family stability and reduced dependence on public assistance programs compared with those emphasizing redistribution. These patterns reflect broader trends in how individual agency affects socioeconomic outcomes across the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Sandefur is a constitutional litigator and author who has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on issues of individual rights and limited government. He directs the Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation at Goldwater Institute, focusing on defending economic liberty and free speech. Sandefur has written multiple books exploring themes of individualism and the American founding, including You Don’t Own Me, according to Goldwater Institute.
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FULL, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT
Leyla Gulen: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Grand Canyon Times podcast. I’m your host, Layla Golan. In this episode, we welcome our guest, Tim Fer. Tim is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Sheriff Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, where he also holds the Duncan Chair in constitutional government.
He’s a leading constitutional scholar and litigator whose work focuses on protecting individual liberty, property rights, and free speech. He has written widely on constitutional history and the principles of limited government and his legal advocacy continues to shape national conversations about freedom and the rule of law, including today’s conversation.
Tim, welcome. Thank you for having me. So you’ve just released your new book. You Don’t Own Me Individualism and The Culture of Liberty is the title. What was the inspiration for writing this book?
Tim Sandefur: Well, you know, when Leslie Gore, the singer who sang the famous [00:01:00] 1960s song, you Don’t Own Me, when she died some years ago, that inspired me to write an article just about the theme of.
You don’t own me in popular culture. ’cause it’s her song, of course, uses that famous phrase and, and there’s many other musicians who have covered that song. But you find that phrase popping up in a lot of outlets. My, the, my favorite example is in the classic Sidney Poitier film. Guess who’s coming to, to dinner?
Oh, that’s great. Yeah. And there’s this, you know, that’s a, it’s a very interesting movie when you reflect that it’s actually not about race at all. Right? The story is that it, it’s was made in the mid 1960s, and the story is about a white girl and a black boy who fall in love with each other, and they go to visit her parents.
And the, the parents are shocked, but it, they’re not so much shocked by the, the race thing is by the. Age thing. I mean, they’re sharp by the race, but the, the tension in the story is really about age. It’s [00:02:00] about the older generation having a problem with interracial marriage and the younger generation not.
And so the tension in the movie is actually not about race primarily. It’s primarily about age. And the climactic scene is when Sidney Poitier finally gets the guts to stand up to his own father. And he says, in this climactic speech, you don’t own me and I have the right to make decisions for myself.
And so anyway, the, the essay that I wrote kind of inspired me to reflect on the, these ideas as, as manifested in music and poetry and literature throughout American history and throughout the history of the world really.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah, indeed. And you had also mentioned, you know, from music to film and poetry of John Milton Star Trek novels of Zora Neil Hurston.
Yeah. You know, I, I’m interested to know why you picked those particular examples.
Tim Sandefur: Well, you know. I’ve always been a Star Trek fan from way back, I mean, since I was 10 years old, so that one came naturally. But Zor Neil Hurston, you know, she was kind of a new discovery for [00:03:00] me, and it was largely by accident.
I was po I was paging through the, the available audio books and I came across their eyes were watching God, and I was like, what the heck? You know, I’ve heard the title before. That was all I knew about it, and so I listened to the, the audiobook and I only. A few chapters in. I was so interested. I got the hard copy, the only novel I’ve ever read where when I reached the last line, I flipped over the book and started reading it again from the beginning.
It just, what a marvelous, magnificent novel at the, the her use of language is. So. Beautiful and or I just love it. Anyway, a lot of her history and her own autobiography, her own career is about this issue of liberation and, and personal self-assertion in a world that really obviously was very much against that.
I mean, she grew up a, a black woman in the segregated. And moved to New York during the Harlem Renaissance. I mean, she was very much part of the whole [00:04:00] era of Langston Hughes and WEB Du Bois, and these people are friends of hers, and yet she took a very different view of things than they did, right. Du Bois joined the Communist Party.
Langston Hughes was a communist. A lot of these people were drawn to. Very left wing political identities because they thought that capitalism effectively equated to racism. And that was a view she rejected. She was very strongly an individualist. She refused to write what she called race propaganda and which, you know, du Bois embraced the idea of race propaganda.
He, his view was black novelists should write about. The race problem, they should focus their attention on the race problem. And that’s why you end up with books like Native Son and Black Boy. And Hurston refused to write that way, and as a result, she got kind of excommunicated from the black literary world during her day.
She was shunned, effectively. Richard Wright. Repudiated her and others would have nothing to do with her. [00:05:00] And she was basically like, you know, fine nuts to you. I’m gonna go do my own thing. And so she wrote several other novels, including some really underappreciated ones. Her final novel. The last one she completed was called Sara of the Suwanee, and it’s a novel that focuses on white characters.
Very, very few black writers at that time were writing novels about white characters, and it’s really a lovely novel that I suspect was inspired by Gun with the Wind. I, I suspect that that was kind of her, her model for writing this novel about this. Difficult love affair between these two white characters.
And it results in this marvelous, climactic moment when the, the, the wife in the story decides to throw off the idea that, you know, uh, because of her roots, she’s doomed to be a particular way and she’s asserts herself as an individual. And so this theme of individualism, and I’m not, I have the right to decide how to direct my own life, really [00:06:00] comes through in a lot of her writings.
Leyla Gulen: Very interesting and, and I appreciate that you don’t limit this individualism of creativity to the screen or the written work, but it’s also extended to the draft table. So, so you mentioned architecture as well.
Tim Sandefur: Yeah. As
Leyla Gulen: a, a medium for which to express one’s individualism. That’s right.
Tim Sandefur: I how so? I have a, a chapter about Louis Sullivan, who was Frank Lloyd Wright’s teacher.
He was the guy who, who Wright studied under and, and unfortunately the story of Louis Sullivan is a real tragedy. He was the, the father of the skyscraper, the great champion of the idea of the tall building, beginning at the, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Relatively few of Sullivan’s buildings still around there.
Many of them are very famous. There’s the, the Carson Perry Scott building in Chicago, which is now the world’s most beautiful target, and, and he built the Chicago [00:07:00] Auditorium building, which I was, I had the good fortune a couple years ago to take, to get a tour of the auditorium building, which is.
Breathtakingly beautiful. The first building, at the time, it was the largest building in America. It was. It was the briefly, the tallest building in America. It was the first building in Chicago to be lit by electric light. And Sullivan’s style is this gorgeous, ornate, and yet modern, right? It’s like, it’s kind of getting away from Victorian style into this.
Beautifully elaborate style that he called organic architecture. That’s where Frank Lloyd Wright got the term organic architecture, and Sullivan was the supreme individualist in many ways. He was the model for Ayn Rand’s character, Howard Rourke, and the novel The Fountainhead. Mm-hmm. A lot of people think that, that it was Wright who was the inspiration, and that’s partly true, but it was also Sullivan who wrote a marvelous autobiography called.
The autobiography of an idea. And Sullivan championed the idea of getting away from [00:08:00] classical boring Greco-Roman architecture like you see in capitol buildings. And he hated that stuff ’cause he said, that’s not, that’s not American architecture. It’s not new world architecture. That’s the architecture of old world dictatorships and, and monarchies.
What he said, what we need in America is a democratic architecture that reflects the vibrant, creative spirit of a free people who assert their individuality. And that’s what he created in. And, you know, toward the end of his life, he suffered from being kind of shunned by the architectural community that was obsessed with Greco-Roman columns and, and the usual sort of thing.
And he ended up becoming an a bankrupt alcoholic. It ruined his life. But toward the end of his life, he designed a series of banks. In these small, out of the way Midwestern towns. And a few years ago I had the good fortune to visit the bank that he built in Owatonna, Minnesota. And now there’s no reason in the world to go to Owatonna, [00:09:00] Minnesota unless you want to see this bank and which is kind of a mecca for architecture nerds like myself, and I would call it the most beautiful building in America.
It is amazing when you walk through this door into this. Gorgeous cathedral of greens and red, well, dark reds, right? It’s got this autumnal quality, these incredibly elaborate 19 hundreds chandeliers or electro leers as they were called ’cause they were electric light and yeah, you have to see it to believe it.
So I wanted to write a little bit about Sullivan and his his call for us to throw off the architecture of the old old world and embrace an architecture that speaks to human beings and is not authoritarian. Not just hyper traditional like a fe, like just recently, the Trump administration recently issued an order saying that all federal buildings have to be built in the style of like Greco-Roman temples and all this sort of stuff.
And it’s like this is not an American architecture, an American [00:10:00] architecture. If we really want to have buildings that are built on the un-American architectural style that speak of American values, it should be Louis Sullivan. Frank Lloyd Wright. Those are the people who designed a buildings that reflect de individualist democratic values.
Leyla Gulen: Oh, that’s fascinating. I, I love the way you’ve described Sullivan’s work, and now I think everybody who’s listening to this is going to wanna look up that bank to at least see some images online. How do you spell the name of the town?
Tim Sandefur: O-W-A-T-O. A, but that was just the first of a half dozen of what are known as the Jewel Box banks, and they’re called the Jewel box banks for a couple reasons.
First is ’cause they actually resembled jewel boxes. And secondly, because it’s such an apt term for how these were small banks in these little communities that were very proud of their banks. Right. This was a early 20th century America. Was made up of these small towns who were proud of their productivity and their, and the fact that they were [00:11:00] the backbone of this incredible industrial and agricultural revolution of the 20th century.
So you go into this bank in Owatonna and it’s got these murals on the walls, but instead of depicting like, you know, the rise of the Roman Republic or something like that, the murals are of cows. Because they’re so proud of, of their, their agricultural roots and it’s really a, a wonderful experience. So that’s what you should look up Louis, Sullivan, Jewelbox Banks, just Google that and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Leyla Gulen: Oh, that’s fantastic. Well, I appreciate that, Tim. So, so how would you say that the idea, I mean, you alluded to it. When you referenced the current administration, but how has the idea of individual liberty evolved over time? So, you know, from from Milton’s era to today’s pop culture and what do you think has driven those changes?
Tim Sandefur: Wow. Now that’s a great question and, and to answer it. To do justice to. It would take a long time. So I’ll try and be brief. I’ll start with, you mentioned John Milton a couple times. So Milton is my favorite [00:12:00] Christian Libertarian. He’s a 17th century poet. He’s most famous for his book length poem, paradise Lost, which by the way, he dictated because he was blind as a bat when he wrote it.
So the entire 300 page poem, he recited just. Invented it in his mind and recited it to a secretary who wrote it down. And that’s what an what an incredible achievement. And so, and he was also a, a very active guy in politics. He was a part, he was a partic, participated in the English Civil War that overthrew the King of England and had him executed in fact and replaced temporarily with a republic.
Milton was very anti monarchical and he was very much an individualist. He said, you know, the, what we associate with the ideas of the American founding fathers, Milton was making these arguments in the 17th century about freedom of speech and individual rights. But of course, he also allied that with responsibility that, you know, our, a free person ha can’t, can’t expect other people to, you know, provide for him.
So a free [00:13:00] person also has the responsibility of pulling himself up. And by his own boot bootstraps, he might say. And he believed very much in a, in a, a moral foundation to society. You can’t ju it’s not about just doing whatever you want. In fact, he said that attitude, that licentious attitude is more suited to adic.
TAship paradoxically and, and what he said was, only good men desire liberty. The rest desire, not liberty, but license, which have no greater scope than under monarchies and tyrannies. What he meant by that was that tyrants love to be surrounded by people who don’t care about morality and people who don’t care about morality.
Love to be, love to, to serve tyrants because tyrants can get them out of trouble. Right. Bail ’em outta jail or whatever it might be. And so he thought that tyranny and, and immorality went hand in hand. Anyway, flash forward to the 19th century. What you see in America, especially in the 19th century, is the widening.
[00:14:00] Of the American founding Father’s vision to more and more people who had previously been excluded. ’cause the ideas of John Milton or John Locke, you know, the American founding fathers. These, that’s what we know as classical liberalism, individual rights, limited government constitutional checks and balances.
The the sort of thing that, that our. Political system depends upon, but that was still largely confined to European white males, of course, until the, the 19th century when the, the, you might say that the dawn started to break for, for other people also the end of slavery, the rise of the women’s rights movements.
But even so by the, by about 1920, you still have a society that’s very rural that. Believes in a a, a pretty rigid hierarchy, a rigid social hierarchy, and most of all, that has no real concept of privacy. You know, we, we tend to look back at the good old days and forget that everybody in the old days was constantly up in each other’s business.
You [00:15:00] couldn’t do anything that you weren’t being, you know, monitored and watched by your neighbors and be afraid. There’s a great line in a Willa Kard novel. I can’t, I think it was My Antonia, which was published in 19. 13, I think. And she’s, she, she describes the small town that she grew up and she looks around her at, at at, at all these little houses and she thinks to herself that the people in these houses are so afraid of what their neighbors are going to think about everything that they do, that they don’t really have freedom.
And she says they lived like the mice in their kitchens scurrying over the surfaces of things in the dark.
Leyla Gulen: Oh,
Tim Sandefur: which is such a beautiful phrase. Oh my God. It’s now the, that begins to change in about 1920. In the nine, in 1920, you have this, the America’s first generation gap opens up because you have the revolutionary new technologies, the automobile, the rail, the, the radio, the airplane, all these sorts of things to start transforming American society in the [00:16:00] 1920 census is the first time that more Americans live off the farm than.
On the farm. Mm. Which is a real milestone. America be, is becoming more urban, more modern. And the idea of it ain’t nobody’s business if I do, starts to really get off the ground at that time. And of course we. Often think of that as a 1960s phenomenon of it’s none of your business. This is my life. Leave me alone.
And that which is a very precious part of American culture. It really is. It’s something that we take for granted that if I want to live my life, it ain’t nobody else’s business. If I do, that’s not something that you find in a lot of societies, and we’ve come to depend on it. And this country would suffer tremendously if that attitude ever went away.
Yeah, so I, I see the, there you go. There’s 400 years as quickly as I could do it. I see the spread of the idea of you don’t own me as beginning with, you know, the, the, the classical [00:17:00] liberal hierarchical system we all know of from. Milton and Jefferson and and so forth and gradually broadening to include more and more people and to develop a very precious cultural attitude in America that I have the right to live my life the way I want to.
As long as I’m not harming other people. And other people are perfectly free to judge how I live and make their and you. If they don’t want to hang around me, that’s perfectly fine, but I still have the right to live my life, my own way. That’s a very precious and rare thing.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah, most certainly is. And in your book you say, quote, individual self sovereignty has not only unleashed unprecedented economic and political progress, it has also given rise to a new kind of culture, one that celebrates autonomy and the freedom to make one’s own choices.
So, so that I think compliments what you just said. I’m wanna go, I think myself
Tim Sandefur: as a real western kind of idea. Like we in Arizona, you know, this should be something that we think of right [00:18:00] away, that in the American imagination we associate freedom with the West. I think it’s very revealing that in the American idiom we always speak about going.
Back east and out west, we never say we’re, I’m going back west or I’m going out east, because we have built into our psyche this idea of moving toward the west and getting freer and freer as you go, as you head toward the sunset and. That, that’s why I have a chapter in the book where I talk about westerns and my, my favorite Western novelist, Elmer Kelton, whom I, I’m telling you now, the best novelist you’ve never heard of.
He was rated the greatest writer of westerns. By the Western Writers of of America Association, and he wrote about a half dozen real masterpieces of the Western novel. I would particularly single out the day the Cowboys quit, which is this just a magnificent story about a a, a inspired by a real life event about a [00:19:00] strike among cowboys and the, the idea of freedom that’s into a film yet.
You know, you know that he really is, it’s a sad thing. Only one of his novels has ever been made into a movie, and that is Good Old Boys, which was filmed in I think the early nineties and stars, I think starring Tommy Lee Jones, uh, who is, who himself a big fan of Kelton, and I think was probably the reason why that movie got made.
It’s not as good as the book. Of course. What’s great about that novel is so, so the story takes place in the very early 20th century. It’s like 1910, I think. And the story concerns two brothers, one of whom is a cowboy and one is a farmer. And when the cowboy brother is visiting the farmer just to make a family visit, he accidentally breaks his leg and is, as a result, forced to stay on the farm.
And this gives Kelton this opportunity to, to create this metaphor. On one hand, you have the cowboy who is the symbol of independence. Riding off in the sunset, doesn’t have to [00:20:00] worry about today or tomorrow. He can, you know, mix his life as he goes. Has no strings attached kind of life, which is very attractive and and romantic.
And on the other hand, the farmer and the farmer, he’s got a lot of responsibilities. He can’t go off riding off into the sunset when he wants to. He is got a family to care for, but on the other hand, that means he’s got a legacy. He’s laying down roots. He’s gonna build the next generation. When the cowboy’s not.
And so the tension between them, these characters as symbols of different ways of, of investing your life allows Kelton to make this beautiful commentary about the West and about freedom and how do you devote your, your time. I remember when I was in college, I had a friend said to, you know, he said, you know, I think of freedom.
I think of it as being like a marble on top of a basketball. You can go any direction you want to, but as soon as you go in a direction. Now you are, you’re kind of stuck going in that direction. And that I think we all [00:21:00] face that in our lives, that you’re free to make choices, but you aren’t free to undo your old choices.
And so that creates a kind of a dilemma for all of us. And this novel really reflects on that. So it wasn’t what a masterpiece, very highly recomme.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Even if you’re not a fan of westerns, I think it sounds like a fascinating read, but I have to ask you this. With the advent of artificial intelligence and chat, GPT is the idea of individual liberty and creativity at risk.
Tim Sandefur: Hmm. Wow. That’s a great question. That is a great question. No, I don’t think. I would say that yes, in a, but not in the way that people are thinking. I don’t think that technology necessarily. Threatens our freedom. If anything, technology, historically speaking has always broadened our freedom, the the risk.
I think people want to say that to be free, you have to have a great deal of autonomy, and [00:22:00] that means self-reliance. And that means you have to know how to do a lot of things. And if you don’t know how to do a lot of things, then you become less free. And so as we become more technologically advanced, people become more vulnerable, and therefore they become less free.
And that’s been a, a fear. For a very long time as technology has advanced, but I, I’m not really so concerned about that. The fact that I don’t know how to, you know, whittle a quill pen out of a a out of a goose quill, and that does not threaten my freedom significantly. I, it’s not a real concern. Okay? So I’m, I’m not worried about that.
But as far as what AI’s gonna do to people, I do worry about that. I do worry that it is. It’s going to have an effect on how people think of themselves and what they take seriously. Now, I’m a lawyer, so I, I’ve run into AI problems all the time where, where you read these news stories about these other lawyers, I’d never do this, but read about these other lawyers who are using AI to write their briefs and then they get in trouble.
’cause it turns out the AI hasn’t, has made [00:23:00] stuff up that isn’t true. And then you get in all sorts of trouble with the judge for that. It’s every week this happens. Wow. I, it mystifies me. ’cause why in the world would. It’s not that hard. You sit down, you write your brief. Why do you need to rely on ai? Just if you have your own, you don’t need the artificial stuff, right?
Yeah. So, I don’t know, but of books to draw
Leyla Gulen: from, right? Yeah. Case, case law, and, and there are lawyers. Do your work.
Tim Sandefur: Sure, sure. I It’s true. It’s a tool like any other tool. And you know, I have a, I have a friend who’s a professor and he says, you know, he, he remembers when calculators came in and math teachers were all freaked out that.
The students weren’t gonna learn math ’cause they were gonna, and, and what the professors learned to do was to teach the kids how to use the calculator, incorporate it into the, into the lesson. Sure. I, I, I can see that. On the other hand, it. It does mystify me that people would want the AI to do the stuff that technology is supposed to enable us to do, right?
I want the, I want, I want the machine to [00:24:00] go plow the earth and till the soil so that I can write poetry. I don’t want a computer that’s gonna write the poetry for me. Why would I want that? That’s the fun part. Why do, why do we have a machine that’s doing the farm part? That’s the part I can’t comprehend.
Leyla Gulen: Well, and I think they’ve even come out with, well, personalities that are AI generated that you could have sworn was a real person. Oh yeah. Or a whole album of music that was completely fabricated by ai and people bought into it. They thought this came from an actual human being. And listen to this, it sounds great.
So, yeah, it’s gonna be harder and harder, I think to decipher what’s real, what came from a human brain versus a machine.
Tim Sandefur: And you know, this goes back to, we were talking, I mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright. This was a thing that was a real fixation for him in the 1910s and 1920s was there were architects who were very afraid of what.
Machinery said about humanity, was it going to destroy our creativity? And so what they did was they designed an [00:25:00] architecture called arts and crafts, where the craftsman style of architecture, which was a conscious rejection of the machine, build out a wood, do it all by hand. You know, even wooden pegs instead of nails of possible things like that.
And they built some beautiful houses, a famous gamble house in Southern California, for example. Oh yes. Yeah. But, and then on the other hand there were the, the people like Laier. Who is the, the Swiss architect who said that the, the A house is a machine for living. We should embrace the machine and be as much like machines as possible.
And Wright said, no. What you wanna do is you want to have the human and the machine together. You have the machine to liberate the human being, to be as human as possible. And. The I. The same is true in all artistic endeavors. I do, of course, I think there are gonna be bad artists who just don’t do any work and the computer does it for them and everything, but it’s impossible to predict what the.
What this new technology is going to free us to do and to create and I, it would be foolish even to try to imagine what it’s going to, to [00:26:00] enable us to do, to empower us to do as long as we watch our Ps and Qs.
Leyla Gulen: Sure. Yeah, indeed. Well, that’s a good message and, and I have so many other questions for you, but I do wanna switch gears here for just a moment.
You know, we often celebrate individual freedom, but at the same time, there. Is growing social pressure to conform in many respects, especially online. Yeah. Do you think that our modern culture is becoming less tolerant of true individuality?
Tim Sandefur: Huh. Well, I mentioned earlier how we developed this attitude of it ain’t nobody else’s business of you do, and got away from a culture where everybody was always monitoring each other, like Willa Cather wrote about.
And I think what we’re seeing is we’re seeing a return in some ways to just that where you’re terrified of what your neighbors are gonna think about something. And there’s this, like you said, this pressure to conform that spreads from the online world into the real world a lot of the time, even though people, I think they overestimate [00:27:00] dramatically.
How many people even care about what goes on online?
Leyla Gulen: Yeah,
Tim Sandefur: right. You know, when you look at the statistics, the number of people are actually on Twitter, for instance, is a vanishingly small number of people. So you know, we should, we ought to get out more as they say. But yes, there definitely is that pressure.
What we need is individuals who are willing to stand up and, and speak their minds, but have a mind to speak. I think that’s the real problem, is, you know, with. People not knowing the full implications of what they’re talking about or hearing online. And they pass rumors along without delving or they, they don’t know the basic structure of how our government works.
And so they panic about something when they really shouldn’t. They shouldn’t, or they don’t react sharply when they should and that sort of thing. So it’s, it’s a deep, I think the ignorance feeds the online pressure frenzy that’s going on. Yeah. And the solution to that is to. [00:28:00] You know, open a real book, learn about what’s really going on and what has gone on historically, and then have the courage to stand up for your convictions.
You know, if a lot of the time this stuff about, oh, I don’t wanna be canceled, it turns out that you didn’t wanna be the friends of those people anyway, so who cares? You know? And I, so I, on one hand, it is true, we have this. Cancellation frenzy, which can be a, a serious problem. But on the other hand, we also have a lot of people who need to have more guts to be stand by themselves, if that’s what the, what the circumstances require.
Leyla Gulen: Well, it, it’s interesting when you look at some of these social media reels of people stopping someone on the street to ask them a question about a Yeah. A candidate, for instance, and, and. Who do you support? And they say, I support this person. And they say, well, why? What are the policies? And they can’t even answer that question.
They have no idea. Yeah, because they’ve just been following along blindly to the loudest, sometimes the loudest minority. And it just makes sense to them, but [00:29:00] they really don’t understand what’s at stake or what they truly do stand for. Yeah. And what they’re against. That’s even scarier. They’re against some somebody or something else without really understanding that those particular views are for.
What they stand for. I mean, it just, it, it, it’s unbelievable how, no question. But that would take a lot of effort for people to crack open a book and educate themselves. But, but we have to, and we’re getting away from that.
Tim Sandefur: And what they do is they substitute for cracking open a book. What they substitute for it is just sort of a, a, a gut notion about what.
People like us are like, you know, like, right. Or you might, you might call it an attitude of decency. Well, it’s, that’s just an indecent thing to believe or to say, or to, instead of ask, actually asking, well, what are the merits of this thing? Is this really right or wrong? Instead, it becomes, you know, oh, well people like us just don’t vote that way, or don’t talk about that sort of thing, or don’t believe this, or don’t drive this kind of car, or don’t, you know, et cetera.[00:30:00]
That is no substitute for thought, but you know, I, I think unfortunately our culture very much rewards the knee jerk, the emotional, the outraged, and goes around searching for, for more outrage to feed itself upon on both sides. This is not aimed at left or right. Both sides practice this. They’re, they’re eager to find ways to be offended and to promote that offense and to make the, if, if at all possible, to portray the other side as insane when they’re not really.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Yeah. It, yeah. We, we can’t be cattle, you know, just all blindly going in the same direction as everyone else. We really, but
Tim Sandefur: these are human drives and always have been in our, our technology isn’t, I don’t think it’s that, that the technology is, is making this happen. It’s just that it makes it, it accentuates it because it enables it to happen more quickly, and so it sort of becomes a feedback effect.
You get offended, then they get offended and you get offended at that, and it just accentuates each other much more rapidly than it ever did in pre, for previous generations.
Leyla Gulen: Absolutely. Well, [00:31:00] finally, Tim, what do you hope readers and listeners, I mean, you’ve done a beautiful job outlining it in this conversation, but what do you hope that they take away from you Don’t own me, and the importance of personal freedom in their own lives?
You
Tim Sandefur: know, I’ve written books about the legal. Aspects of freedom, the constitutional aspects of freedom, the history of freedom, and things like that. I wanted to do something to talk about the culture and the art, that that both celebrates freedom and also that is a, is made possible by freedom, and I wanted to see if I could reach to people’s.
Emotions and say, you know, you should be really happy about the fact that you live in a, in a world where this kind of beautiful culture of individualism is possible. Individualism is, is attacked from left and right all the time. We’re constantly told that individualism is a bad thing and we need to overcome our individualism and care about society as a whole and all this sort of stuff.
And the reality is actually that individualism is a precious. [00:32:00] Cultural treasure that we all ought to celebrate, that we all ought to participate in. And that means in, in music and art and sculpture, as well as in the day-to-day arguments about politics and, and law. We ought to really appreciate individualism, celebrate the individual.
For the individual’s sake, because that’s where the joy and suffering occurs, is at the individual level. That’s where life happens. And if you’re constantly working on this sort of, you know, meta level and, and you’re, the, the macro level concerns about society as a whole and all this sort of thing. No.
What, what? Appreciate the individuals around you. And the art and culture that that attitude of freedom has made possible. It’s a beautiful thing
Leyla Gulen: well put. Where can people find your book and your other books?
Tim Sandefur: You can all find, find ’em all on Amazon and my, this book is published by the Cato Institute.
They also have it on their website. I understand Amazon’s running a little BA [00:33:00] backlog because of various, you know, supply chain problems, as they say nowadays. So if you want to get a copy right away, you can get it from Cato’s website and, and wherever fine books are sold and you know that fine books are sold there if they sell my book.
Leyla Gulen: That’s right indeed. The first one in the lineup as a matter of fact. And if people would like to follow you, where should they find you?
Tim Sandefur: You can find me on, I’m on the Twitter even after having complained about it. And I, I also have a substack and then you can find out more about the work that we at the Goldwater Institute do every day to, to defend freedom.
In Arizona and in states across the country@goldwaterinstitute.org. Perfect. Tim Sandifer,
Leyla Gulen: thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.
