How Buddhist Insights Strengthen Liberalism

Ancient philosophy can show us why liberalism matters, why it works, and why being liberal is a better way to live.

Last fall, I had the extraordinary opportunity to travel to Delhi, India, to give a talk to young Indian liberals. The topic was the connection between Buddhist philosophy and liberalism. If you’re a regular reader of my work, or listen to my podcast, you’ll know this connection has been central to my work for some time. I believe that Buddhist ideas give us important tools for understanding not just why we ought to be liberals, but why liberalism is the best political system for make the world better.

Here’s the video recording of my talk. And if you scroll down, you’ll find a transcript you can read instead.

And here’s the transcript version of the talk:

Transcript

I am talking about the relationship between Buddhism and liberalism today. I'm not going to try to convince you of the truth of Buddhism in any metaphysical sense, but rather I want to make the claim that Buddhist philosophy, and specifically Buddhist ethics, can help us understand the core ideas of liberalism and help us to defend liberalism.

And further, that Buddhist insights can help us understand why illiberalism is appealing to so many people and why it, I think, necessarily leads to suffering. Liberalism creates suffering for the illiberal themselves and then for society when they try to impose illiberal systems or values on it.

And then finally, I think Buddhist insights and some ideas from Buddhist practice can help us be better liberals by strengthening our commitment to liberal principles and also can help us thrive, be happier, be more content within a liberal society.

I'll give a very brief overview of Buddhist ethics to give some context to the rest of the talk.

The Buddha was a rough contemporary of the pre-Socratic Greeks, and he set out to solve the problem of suffering, or the Pali word is dukkha, which gets translated in English as suffering, but a better translation is something more like unease, dis-ease, discontentment, stress, feeling the word, the origin of the word is actually a wheel that rubs. So there's just something that's slightly off and uncomfortable.

And the story goes that he was raised a wealthy prince. There's different versions of it. And his family kept all of the bad things in the world from him. And then he was out in the town, in the city, and saw, witnessed old age, sickness, and death for the first time, and realized that these are inevitabilities.

All of us will grow old.

All of us will get sick.

All of us will eventually die.

And that this was a cause for suffering in the lives of the people who experienced it, and in the lives of the people who anticipate experiencing it. And so he set out. He left his family, ran off into the countryside to try to solve this problem. And specifically, what he wanted to find was a happiness that was deathless. This is a happiness that wouldn't end.

But importantly, I think this part's really critical for the relationship to liberalism, a happiness that didn't require struggling with others, and a happiness that caused no one any harm. It's not happiness at the expense of others.

And the answer that he arrived at, which is framed in the way that a physician might diagnose and then cure an ailment, was the Four Noble Truths.

The first one is the diagnosis that life contains this kind of suffering. It's not that life is nothing but this kind of suffering, but rather that it's a constant feature of just being the human experience.

The second is the cause. So what causes the ailment? And he identified it as ignorance of the fundamentally impermanent nature of all phenomena, including ourselves. Everything is always in a state of change. Everything is the result of causes. and if those causes go away, then the thing itself will go away or will change. Nothing lasts forever.

But the cause of our suffering then is that we don't accept that truth. We're either ignorant of it or we refuse to accept it, and so instead we engage in clinging. We hold on to this, everything in it, Like, the people in our lives, the possessions that we have, the status that we have, the very identity that we have is impermanent. We'll lose it at some point, or it will change from its current state. But we cling to it as if it were permanent. And that clinging causes suffering and discontentment, because in the back of our minds, we know this is going to go away. Or aversion. We don't like the way this other thing is, and we push that away from us. We refuse to acknowledge, we refuse to accept.

The third noble truth is that it is possible to undo these causes. That suffering can be cured by, if we've identified the causes, if we take away the causes, then we'll take away the suffering. And then the fourth noble truth is the prescription. It's the course of treatment, which is the eightfold path, which is a method to cultivate the perspectives and the virtues and the skillfulness needed to achieve it.

The Eightfold Path is right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

That word “right” can sometimes better be described as “skillful.” It's doing these things well in the right way, in a way that is conducive to happiness, is wholesome instead of unwholesome.

Finally, to tie this further into liberalism, Buddhist practice doesn't begin by just understanding this. I can describe impermanence to you, but that's not enough to end the suffering because we have these ingrained habits of mind and perspective, and it's something, it takes a lot of effort to really understand and undo the clinging, grasping, and ignorance.

But we need space for that. The goal is to stop harming ourselves, to stop harming others, and so we start with a set of precepts, of ethical rules, that essentially don't do these things. At the very least, just knock this stuff off, and that will then give you space to develop the understanding, the practice, and so on.

And the first two of these are really important for liberalism. The first is to” refrain from killing or harming others,” all sentient beings. The second one sometimes gets translated as “refrain from stealing,” but it's more accurately “don't take what is not freely given to you.”

Then there’s “refrain from harmful sensual misconduct.” So this can be sexual misconduct, but other forms of this would be harmful hedonism. 

“Refrain from wrong speech.” This is harmful divisive dishonest speech and finally refrain from intoxicants and the reason intoxicants is because There's a story in the early Pali canon of a monk who was given the choice by a villager to either go kill an animal, sleep with the villager’s wife, or drink alcohol and the monk thinking about it says well the one that seems the least bad is I'll drink some alcohol. And so he got really drunk and while he was drunk he killed an animal and slept with the neighbor's wife. And so that it is “don't take intoxicants that cause heedlessness that would cause you to basically forget about all of the other precepts.”

That's kind of the broad overview of Buddhism and then there are methods for meditative practices, shifts in perspective, behaviors to kind of bring you along this path.

What does this have to do with liberalism? Well, if we take a step back, the Eightfold Path points to two things. One is non-harm. We can't end suffering if we are inflicting it, on ourselves and on others.

You might say, “Well, I just really enjoy hurting people, right?” Or I enjoy stealing. These things don't seem to cause me suffering. And the argument is that being virtuous, being ethical, brings a degree of peace. If we are unethical, if we're dishonest, we're constantly worried that someone's going to find out about those lies. If we are harmful to others, we're constantly worried that that's going to come back on us. And that worry, that anxiety, makes it harder to have the mental space to cultivate virtues in a better, stronger, more wholesome perspective. And so we need to just stop that stuff, like the easy stuff. Stop killing. Stop stealing. Stop being dishonest and divisive, and so on, to give ourselves space to then develop further.

And then the Eightfold Path points to recognizing and accepting impermanence. Because ultimately, the source of this suffering is that we are insisting, consciously or unconsciously, that the world and our nature be something that they cannot be. We're demanding a reality that is, that contradicts the actual state of reality.

Liberalism, to give a rough definition of it, is respect for rights and equal dignity of others. So not placing your interests above, yourself above, but we all are on an equal moral level and acting that way. That's non-harm, right? That's not killing, that's refraining from stealing, and so on.

And then liberalism is diversity and dynamism. A liberal society is an open society. An open society means, open is the opposite of grasping or clinging. It's a society where we're going to let people be, and let them be themselves, let them discover themselves, let them try things.

Buddhism began in this kind of radical act of self-authorship and experiments in living. 'Cause he said, "I had this one life, but I'm going to drop out, as many ascetics did in ancient India, I'm going to kind of drop out of society and go off and try. And he tried a whole bunch of things. He was not the only person out there trying to solve this problem of suffering. And there were people who thought the way to do it was extreme self-mortification. So they'd starve themselves and beat themselves and inflict suffering, and that somehow that would clear it out. And he tried that, and it didn't work. There are other people who argue that the way to end suffering is to just indulge in all of the pleasures of life. That didn't work. And so he, but that finding that other path required breaking from trying things new that weren't what everyone else was doing.

And a society that enables that, because all of us are different, is going to be one that is diverse. All of us have different interests, different preferences. We like different kinds of music. We have different visions of how we want our lives to play out, and a liberal society enables us to pursue those, and that results in diversity. But it's also going to be dynamic.

Diversity is a snapshot in time. At any given moment we can say, like what are the interests of the people in this room right now? But if we regathered in a year the same people and I asked what your interests were, it would be different. You might have shifted to something else, you might have discovered something new.

An open society is one that is diverse and constantly changing. And that's impermanence.

And I should note that this is both social and economic liberalism, represented by these two principles. Social liberalism, we kind of just talked about, right? Like, people are free to pursue, to self-author, to choose their own lives and live them how they see fit, and to find others who they share those interests with. 

But economic liberalism fits this bill too. What is a market? What is a market economy? A market economy is one where we respect the rights of others in the form of property rights, where we respect that second precept. If I sell you something and I sell it to you mutually have agreed to this exchange, then we each have taken something from the other that was freely given. We each freely gave up the money for the product or service. And markets are tremendously diverse and dynamic. Markets work because each person is producing different kinds of goods that meet the different preferences of different people. And an open market is one where you can enter in and you can come up with new products, or new ways of doing things, or new services. And you might discover a better way to do it that completely replaces the old-- innovation, technological change. Or it might just be tastes and preferences. 

There are musical genres that top the charts for a decade, and now no one really listens to them anymore. And that's not that music is more innovative. I think the best music objectively was released when I was in high school. But it would be hard to say there's progress in music. It's just preferences change. And that's great.

And so a market-- and then what a market does is so if understanding non-harm and impermanence is how we create happiness for ourselves or undo suffering, markets achieve happiness for a much larger number of people. And undo suffering, raise people out of poverty, solve medical problems, and so on, by harnessing those powers of non-harm, property rights and exchange, and diversity and dynamism in the form of innovation. They create prosperity by acknowledging these two facts of reality and taking advantage of that.

I wanna note here, it might be tempting to say, but Buddhists aren't capitalists. (audience laughing) Buddhist monks, at least in the Pali tradition that I have the most affinity for and am most familiar with, the early Buddhism, and then kind of exists now in the Theravada tradition of say Sri Lanka, are prohibited from touching money or accepting money, and they go, they get their food by begging. take their alms bowl out and wander around the village and accept food from the villagers. They're certainly not market participants and merchants and so on. 

But it's important to note that those rules apply to monks. Buddhism doesn't tell everyone to be a monk. Buddhists at the time, people who joined, who listened to the teachings of the Buddha when he was still alive were not monks. And the early texts are filled with dialogues with lay practitioners. And those rules don't apply.

In fact, the fifth of the Eightfold Path is right livelihood. So it acknowledges that we have to earn a living somehow. And the texts are full of examples of the Buddha talking to merchants, wealthy householders, and he never tells them it's wrong to earn a living, or to be rich. In fact, there's one of the suttas, which are these early dialogue texts, mentions being wealthy as like a reward for good past deeds, not as something that's like inherently bad.

What right livelihood means is that if you're going to be a participant in the markets, if you're going to accumulate wealth, it needs to be done in an ethical way. You shouldn’t get rich by harming people. And there's a list that shows up sometimes where there's prohibited stuff. Like, don't sell weapons. Don't sell intoxicants that cause heedlessness. Don't sell slaves. Avoid harmful activities, which is perfectly compatible with being good market actors.

But monks take a vow of poverty. They're not allowed to own anything but their alms bowl and I think it says two robes. But there's nothing that says that a wealthy person has to give up all of their wealth. The guidelines that show up in the text look something more like, one version of it, is you take a quarter of your wealth and use it for your own enjoyment. You take half of it and invest it in the work, so reinvest it into your business, your dealings, and take a quarter of it and put it away for bad times. There's another version that shows up which is more, take a quarter of it and enjoy it. Take a quarter of it and use it for the benefit of your family. A quarter of it goes to kind of benefiting the world and the servants. And then the final is to give it to the monks. So again, this is just, these comport with kind of an ethical use of wealth. If you're tremendously wealthy, supporting charity is better than not, or other ways that help others.

So liberalism then, if liberalism is just non-harm and impermanence at this kind of social level, market level, then liberalism is good because it better comports with the reality of an impermanent world. world and It works because Recognizing accepting and embracing impermanence and non-harm are the path to happiness and liberalism is Doing that at the social and economic levels And So the eightfold path by helping us to understand and accept impermanence makes us more content and happy within liberalism's dynamic and diverse world.

So illiberalism then. Illiberalism is the insistence on permanence in social and economic patterns. So if impermanence is inevitable, and if diversity and dynamism are inevitable at the social level, then a system that denies those will necessarily fail. Illiberalism is clinging, insistence on permanence, and it's aversion to change.

So in a Buddhist context, if the three poisons, as they're called, the three sources of suffering are clinging, aversion, and ignorance of impermanence, illiberalism is clinging, aversion, and ignorance or refusal to accept impermanence. And that leads to suffering. People in liberal regimes generally do not do as well as people in liberal and open societies.

There's philosopher Robert Nozick’s idea of liberty upsets patterns. And what he meant is imagine a lot of socialism is we can have a patterned distribution of wealth. Or a lot of extreme versions of social conservatism is we can have a patterned society: This is the hierarchy. These are the people who are going to be on top. These are the traditional roles, different categories are gonna play within this, it's a pattern that we can sketch out.

And what Nozick said is, pick any pattern you want. So, I'll use his Wilt Chamberlain famous example. Wilt Chamberlain was the best basketball player in the world at the time Nozick was writing his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. And he said, imagine that you think the ultimate, like the most just distribution of wealth is everyone has the same amount. And so we wave a wand and we make that the case. Everybody has $10, including Wilt Chamberlain.

Now we introduce liberty into the system. People want to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball. He's very, very good at it. It's a lot of fun to watch him play it. And Wilt says, you know, there's a lot of people who want to watch me play basketball. I'm going to charge $1 to see me play.

Everyone's got their $10. And 100 people say, I would love to see you play basketball. It would make me happy. I am more than happy to give you $1. Well now Wilt has $110 and 100 people have $9. And so we no longer have our pattern. We had our perfectly just pattern distribution. But as soon as we introduced liberty and people began to act upon it, and it acted in ways where every single person in those exchanges thought they were better off because of them. They thought that getting to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball was worth more than $1 to them. And Wilt felt that getting the $1 was worth more than whatever cost there were to him playing basketball. That pattern's been upset because of liberty.

And that will happen no matter what pattern. Traditional gender roles say, well, if people are free, there's going to be some people who say, “I don't want to live that role. I want to try something else. I'm happier doing this other thing.” And now the pattern's gone.

But committing then to those patterns, so insisting on this permanence, clinging to the everybody has $10, or clinging to the traditional gender roles, then creates suffering. It creates suffering for the people who are, now they can't get to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball, or now they can't live the life they wanted because they're forced into this other role. But it also can create suffering for the illiberal doing the clinging because even the most authoritarian regime is dynamic in some way.

Even the most authoritarian regime, that ruler is constantly worried that they might get overthrown, that things might change. The people at the top of the hierarchy are worried that their status might decline, and so they're constantly on the lookout for anything that might threaten, which is a source of constant anxiety. That all sounds bad.

So why then is illiberalism appealing? Everywhere we see people insisting upon it. There's a question up on the board [pointing at board of submitted audience questions] about if liberalism's so great, why isn't everybody a liberal?

Illiberalism is a habit of thought and perspective. And it's a habit that forms because first, it is easier to be reactive than accepting. If there's something you don't like, our inclination is to try to end it, to try to push it away. Because we don't like it, right? Accepting something you don't like means that thing you don't like is still there. So we have to, it is more challenging. Reaction is more tempting than acceptance.

If we like something, we want it to last. I'm at the top of the hierarchy in the current situation. That's pretty great. Or I'm financially doing very well in the current situation. That's great, I don't want that to go away. I mean, that's perfectly understandable. Or if we don't like something, we want it to stop.

But then what we do, because we're suffering when that thing changes or when that thing persists longer than we'd like it to, is we blame the suffering caused by our own clinging and aversion, not on the fact of our clinging and aversion, but rather on the fact of the change or the presence of the difference.

So if I get angry about something, you know, one of the Buddhist practices with anger is if you're angry, which is this intense and uncomfortable, it's not pleasurable to be angry, is to take a moment and look, we tend to think that the anger is being caused by, This person cut me off in traffic, which seems to happen a lot in Delhi. But the anger lasts longer than the being cut off. That happens instantly and it's done, right? But the anger, and sometimes we just sit there and we feed that anger. You're like, as soon as the anger starts to subside, you're like, oh, I remember when that guy cut me off. And then you just keep giving fuel to it. And that guy's no longer, hey, he doesn't know who you are. He's gone, right? You're never going to see him again. But you keep feeding this. And so the suffering from that is caused by your reaction as opposed to the thing itself.

And then the leader, the populist leader, the illiberal leader, the socialist, so on, comes along and rather than saying, "Hey, in an open and free society, people are going to do things that you don't like. They're going to live lifestyles that you wouldn't choose or perhaps even make you uncomfortable. Or a market economy is going to bring all these benefits, but it also might mean that your business goes under because someone else comes up with something else. Or competition, or the product you were selling, we've had an innovation and nobody wants your thing. Or tastes change. You were making this kind of music and now the kids want this kind of music. And it's easier to see those, you know, when you lose your business, that feels very acute and real to you versus kind of the broader prosperity that the whole system brings.

So the illiberal leader comes along, or the illiberal ideology, you come across it in some corner of the internet, and it promises to stop it. It tells you the reason you're suffering is not because of your reaction to the liberalism, that you could choose to stop. You don't have to react that way. But rather, it's the liberalism itself. That's the problem. Elect me, change the system, pass these regulations, reorder the economy, and I'll put a stop to, I'll make the world permanent again. Or I'll take it back to the way you wanted it to be, and then I will fix it that way. Dynamism will end, diversity will end, we'll have uniformity and stasis, and you'll be happy.

And that's a pretty good pitch. You want to believe that's true because that seems like an easy fix, versus the liberal who has a harder time making their pitch.

 There was a television show 20 years ago in the United States that was very popular called The West Wing. It was about a presidential administration and it was a Democratic presidential administration. And I remember watching it, it was a very good show, and thinking you really couldn't make a libertarian West Wing. And the reason you couldn't do that is because every episode is structured around, there's the president, and people bust into his office, and there's these problems in the world. And then over the course of 42 minutes, because of commercials, he has come up-- he and his staff have come up with some policy that has solved it. It's very exciting and dramatic. and there's a victory at the end.

Whereas if it were a libertarian, he would just say, I can't do anything about that. Or, yes, that's a problem, but leave it alone and the market or emergent orders will fix it. And that would make for a very dull television show.

And it also makes for a harder pitch because if people are feeling that suffering right now, the pitch of actual liberalism sounds like, “Great, you should get over it, and if you let the system work, it will better you in the long term,” and is a much harder pitch than “I will make this thing stop.”

Of course, it doesn't work, for all the reasons we discussed, which just compounds the suffering, but then you just blame, well, we didn't do enough illiberalism, right? Or I was angry at these guys, but now it turns out I need to be angry at these guys too.

Fortunately, I think, Buddhism gives us some ways to circumvent this cycle. And one way to think about that is to think of liberalism as a perspective, it's a way that we see the world. Ethics in general is a way that we see the world. It is to live well, to live ethically, to live morally, requires understanding these rules. There are moral rules and so on, but it also requires seeing situations in the right way with the right perspective.

So it might be that you have all of the right moral rules in your head and you're committed to following them, but you simply don't notice the situations where they apply. You might not notice that other people are suffering because you're lost in your own world, or you might tell yourself a story about how this isn't actually suffering.

There's a study, there's a paper that came out years ago about philosophy professors in the US. And the question was, are professional moral philosophers, so people who have a PhD in moral philosophy and have dedicated their career to moral philosophy, are they actually more moral than anyone else? And so the way they set up this experiment was they went to a philosophers conference, moral philosophy, and they set up a table with, I think it was donuts or cookies or something like that, and they put up a sign that said if you want one of these, if you want a donut, it's 25 cents. Please put 25 cents into this bin.

And it's wrong to steal is a fairly uncontroversial moral rule, right? And they tested how many donuts disappeared over the course of the day and how many coins were in the bin at the end. And ran this elsewhere and it turned out moral philosophers, if I remember the results correctly, it's not just that they were no more moral than anyone else, but they were slightly less moral. Not hugely less moral, but enough that you could measure it.

The reason was because one of the things that a lifetime of training in moral philosophy allows you to do is, given the situation, you can probably come up with some pretty compelling reasons why actually taking the donut is okay in this instance. You're better at reasoning your way to the conclusion that you want versus just kind of feeling it, that it's wrong to take the donut and not give the 25 cents.

So, one of the things that Buddhism offers, one of the techniques that it has, is this idea that there are barriers to cultivating this perspective: the hindrances. The hindrances are sensory desire, ill will, sloth or torpor (you're really tired, in meditative practice, you just fall asleep), restlessness and worry, and then doubt. Doubt being you're not convinced that you're on the right path, that this is worth doing, and so on.

And Buddhism offers a set of perspectives, values, attitudes to overcome some of these. And these are called the sublime attitudes. There's four of them. There's goodwill, there's compassion, there's empathetic joy (which is that feeling of delight in someone else's delight), and equanimity ( not flying off the handle, not overreacting to things).

And I think we can look at illiberalism in the context of these four. Populist illiberal reactionary movements tend to be grounded in ill will. I don't like those people over there, I don't like those people. Those people have the wrong religion. Those people have the wrong skin color. Those people speak a language I don't understand. They want something different than me. And you just stew in ill will towards everybody but your narrow group.

Compassion, they tend to be low on compassion because compassion is recognizing and wanting to end the suffering of others. but a lot of illiberalism is, I'm mad at these guys and I want them to hurt. You know, there's the rise of Donald Trump in the US, a lot of attempts to try to figure out why this is and why he's so appealing, because he's boorish, he's not very smart, his policies are all over the place, but he has an appeal. And part of that appeal is he hates the people I hate and he wants to hurt the people that I hate. And if he said that if he's elected, he will hurt the people that I want to hurt. This is not a position of compassion.

Empathetic joy, the opposite of empathetic joy is jealousy, is envy, is like I see this person over there happy and I resent that. or it makes me uncomfortable, versus that feeling, I think that the easiest way to explain it or the version of it is if you see someone you love, if you're a parent, then your child, or someone in your family succeed at something. you're watching them accomplish, they're competing in a sport and doing very well, or they've produced something, or had some accomplishment, you feel delight in that, and it's not a delight of ownership, it's not like I'm happy because that's my kid that did that, and therefore it reflects well on me or something. is genuinely an empathetic joy. You are happy for them. Because they are happy, it is making you happy.

And that's really challenging for an illiberal in a liberal society, because a lot of the happiness that you see in a liberal society is diverse. It is people who are able to go off and live the life that they always wanted, It's not the life that you would have chosen. And so you resent them. Their happiness can't be authentic because it's not the kind I would have chosen or it somehow is harmful or I'm just mad about it.

And then equanimity.Politics gets people pretty angry. And anger can be appropriate. There are times when anger can be righteous and good when you see injustices in the world, being blase about them, just kind of detached, it doesn't matter, is not the right approach. But politics encourages us to get overly angry and then to encourage anger and feed the anger and hold on like the guy who cut you off. That's basically all of politics for a lot of people is just what's something I can be angry about now.

What's fortunate is that one of the insights of Buddhism is that these sublime attitudes are trainable. We can get better at them. You can cultivate these feelings. There are meditative practices, metta meditation, as an example where you create in yourself the feeling of goodwill, the wish of goodwill, which is not I love everybody. That's unrealistic. It would be weird to love everybody equally. It's fine to love your own children or your parents more than some random person on the street. But it's goodwill. It's wanting everybody to be happy, to find happiness, Even bad people, right? Wishing bad things upon bad people is not healthy. It doesn't cause the bad things to happen, first off. And so it's just stewing in negativity.

But a bad person, you can wish them happiness because you can say, their badness is causing suffering for them, even if they're not aware of it. And they are caught up in clinging and aversion and ignorance, and I have goodwill for them in the sense that I wish that they could find happiness. And so you can meditate and cultivate these feelings, and bring these feelings to mind, sit there and kind of wish goodwill to people, to the world, to everyone, and practice, because one of the really important insights is that much of the way we view the world, much of our values are habits.

If you spend all your time angry, it's easier to be angry. And you will just, your natural reaction is to get angry. But if you spend your time trying to cultivate goodwill and compassion and empathetic joy such that you're experiencing what it's like to have those feelings, it's easier to have those feelings. And it's much more pleasurable. Metta meditation feels really good. And so we can shift that.

That's one of the ways that if feelings of ill will and resentment are causes of a liberalism, then we can kind of strengthen our commitment to liberalism and in a way that feels awfully nice and makes us happier.

To sum up, Buddhism gives us a path and some tools, so concepts, understanding, practices, that do three things simultaneously. The first is it makes us better liberal citizens. We have a deeper commitment to these foundational principles, non-harm, dynamism, diversity, of a liberal society. 

And the deeper our commitment, then, this is the second thing, the stronger our liberalism, because we will be less inclined to deviate from it if we really are committed to it. We'll be less willing to give in to illiberalism in those moments where something happens that really upsets us.

And it helps us, these insights help us to love living in a liberal society even more. That as you internalize these things, as you find ways to feel goodwill towards diverse others, to gain empathetic joy from seeing that this amazing pluralistic society where everybody has wildly different interests and loves and desires and so on, but they all are able through the prosperity that markets generate, through the freedom that social liberalism affords us, through the experimentation that results from this, people trying out different ways to live, and you can say, "I would never want that lifestyle, "but man, it's amazing that that person can find "that level of happiness doing that thing."

If the world is necessarily going to be dynamic and diverse, if we can take delight in that as opposed to just grimacing and tolerating it, then we'll be less likely to run away from liberalism, but we'll also just be happier in the world as it is around us.

So again, if Buddhism is correct in these core insights, then an ethical person, someone who relates to others in the correct way, has the correct values, who lives a flourishing life will be a liberal.

And a genuinely liberal person, someone who understands these principles of liberalism and embraces them, will be an ethical one.

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