4.8 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2022
⏱️ 68 minutes
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This lecture was given on February 10, 2022 at the University of South Carolina. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: J. Budziszewski (Ph.D. Yale, 1981) is a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. His main area of research is the natural moral law, and he is most well known for his work on moral self-deception, “the revenge of conscience,” what happens when we tell ourselves that we don't know what we really do know. However, he has written about all sorts of things such as moral character, family and sexuality, religion and public life, toleration and liberty, and the unraveling of our common culture. The most recent of his thirteen books are Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law and Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics, both from Cambridge University Press, as well as On the Meaning of Sex, from Intercollegiate Studies Institute. His book for students, How to Stay Christian in College has sold several hundred thousand copies. He also maintains a personal website and blog, The Underground Thomist. Married for more than 45 years, Dr. Budziszewski has several children and a clutch of grandchildren.
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| 0:00.0 | This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute. |
| 0:04.0 | For more talks like this, visit us at Tamistic Institute.org. |
| 0:08.0 | Are people happy? |
| 0:13.0 | You know, it's difficult even to know whether they think they are. |
| 0:18.0 | The Harris Poll Survey of American Happiness, reporting in 2017, |
| 0:23.6 | on whether people call themselves happy, reported low numbers. |
| 0:27.6 | 33% called themselves happy, but on the other hand, |
| 0:33.6 | the Gallup poll reporting in 2020 and whether people say they are quote unquote satisfied with their personal life reported very high numbers, about 90%. Well, what's going on here? The difference is not because people suddenly became happier between 2017 and 2020. |
| 0:57.0 | The Gallup percentage, as a matter of fact, was almost as high in 2017 as it was in 2020. |
| 1:04.0 | It's because of how the question was asked. |
| 1:07.0 | It was because how the question was phrased. |
| 1:10.0 | And there are so many things, so many ways to tweak this. |
| 1:13.1 | If you say, are you satisfied? |
| 1:14.1 | They say one thing. |
| 1:15.1 | They say one thing. |
| 1:16.1 | If you say, are you happy? |
| 1:18.1 | They say one thing. |
| 1:19.1 | You say, are you happy about this? |
| 1:21.1 | They will say another thing. |
| 1:22.1 | If you say, are you having a good time? |
| 1:24.1 | They'll say one thing. |
| 1:25.1 | If you say, are you having a good life? They'll say something |
... |
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