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The Expert Podcast brings you firsthand narratives from experts across diverse industries, including private investigators, general contractors and builders, insurance agencies, vehicle specialists, lawyers, and many others.
There's no doubt there's a whole lot going on these days with culture, society, politics, the economy. All kinds of things are an upheaval that happen in ways that we've not seen in a long time. But it's not that it's never happened before. Today, we're going to do a quick book review. This book is called Liberty. It's by uh Everett Dean Watson. Uh Everett Dean Martin, I'm sorry. Everett Dean Martin. This book was written in 1930, almost a hundred years ago. But if you read this book and you look at all the different um citations and quotes and descriptions, it's almost like it could be happening today.
What we're facing today, if we think or facing anything, is nothing new. We're not special in terms of culture, society that people haven't dealt with this before. It's not the end of the world as we know it. This has happened hundreds of times in history. Even a hundred years ago, which may seem like a long time ago, but it's not that far in terms of human history. The same exact things have happened.
In fact, let's take a look at a couple quotes just from one page. This is the front page of chapter 4. A few quotes of note. It says, and the book is called liberty. It's about freedom. It's about how humans interact with each other and the best way to create a society. Liberty is always resistance to those who want to interfere. So, think about that. Whatever side of a political spectrum you're on or social uh opinions or even cultural or even business, what you consider liberty, somebody else is calling interference. And what you are calling interference from another person, they believe is liberty. In fact, they call it that. Right? somebody's going to call you fascist or you call them Marxist or who knows what, right? It's just whatever side of the coin you're on.
Another quote, one man's freedom is another man's slavery. That's a cliche. It's a little oversimplified, but everybody who believes that they're being enslaved or restricted or controlled, the other person is saying, "We want freedom. We want democracy." Who's imposing that? Why is that the case? Well, let's look at the next line. The meaning of liberty is only so far as people can agree what's considered right and wrong. So liberty is subjective. When you think about it, you would think that it's black or white. It's, you know, clear-cut. It's not. Liberty is only relevant based on what people agree on is right or wrong.
Now, most people agree that, for example, murder is illegal and you shouldn't have the liberty or freedom to do that. So, that's pretty clear because most people agree on that. However, there are some people who believe that you should be able to kill somebody if um under certain conditions. For example, the state believes in capital punishment. Okay. There are some people that believe that you can defend yourself and kill another person. Okay. There's an exception. What about can you murder somebody if you think they're going to do something wrong? It's a gray area, but there's some people who believe that if you think the person is evil, but they haven't done anything, you can kill them. So that's considered right and wrong is the core of all this.
And the last takeaway just from this one page is what people allow themselves and one another. When I mean by allow like what do you give permission for yourself and for other people to do depends on their culture and philosophy. So what you give permission for yourself to do and what you give permission for other people to do depends shouldn't be depend on anything but it depends on culture and philosophy. So if your culture says you can't do this, you'll prevent yourself from doing it and you're going to try to prevent somebody else from doing it even if their philosophy doesn't agree. Think of all the rules and laws that you don't agree with that you don't think should be um real. It dep it's contingent on your philosophy.
So again, this was written 100 years ago. You can find it on used book sites like thrift books uh or goodread some of the other uh used book sites. Uh it's an excellent read. If you read it, it'll give a lot of insight into what's happening now. And one benefit from reading this version is it's written after these things happen. So it's almost like you going into the future. Right now many people are confused. Why is this happening? Why is culture the way it is? Why are people so stupid? Why are people being so mean? Whatever you think about culture today, there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of conflict. And people wonder what it's going to be like in 5 or 10 years.
Well, this will tell you because this was written five or 10 years after the last time this happened. So, you can kind of read the punchline, the ending of this story to see how it all plays out. And this is not exclusive to this one book. You can read a lot of old books written 100, 150 years ago, 80 years ago and get insight into things that presumably are confusing today because of the fact that this has happened before. So use history as a tool. Use history as a valuable resource for you to get an idea of what you can expect years down the road.
Thank you for watching another episode of Actual Human Advisory on Describe TV. Remember, we have live one-on-one consultation appointments available at actualhum.com where you can book a one-on-one undivided attention live call with a licensed investigator, a licensed insurance broker, a licensed mortgage broker, real estate broker. Uh I'm also a certified real estate title examiner, a certified civil court mediator along with having developed and started over 15 businesses, several of which were sold for millions of dollars. So if you do have questions in any of those categories, you can arrange a one-on-one live video consultation. Use the link below and we'll see you on the next