To be fair, the people I've seen object to open borders on "cultural harm" grounds usually believe that long-term there would be tremendous material economic harms proceeding from the cultural harms. The argument seems to go like this (let's see if I can pass the ITT for this argument I don't personally accept):
1. Modern prosperity, aka the Great Enrichment, depends on civilizational features historically specific to Western culture and to Western population groups. Some immigration opponents take these to be ideological features; some include attributes of the immigrants themselves as people, such as population average IQ or conscientiousness.
2. Sufficiently high levels of "the wrong kind" of immigration would fatally undermine these pillars of civilization in developed nations.
3. The resultant collapse of economic growth, innovation, and/or social order would produce enormous long-term social welfare costs that would outweigh the short-term benefits of better labor market matching.
This would have been a stronger dialogue if Pericles had taken something like this line.
I view the upside (more low skill labor that can't do much value added work and will never pay for itself) lower then Bryan and the downside (civilizational collapse, or even just a significant slowing of progress and lower quality of life) higher then Bryan.
I don't think I could convince Bryan otherwise. He has a deontological attachment to open borders (as well as a long standing professional branding), and I don't think he could evaluate the evidence in an unbiased way.
I find this line of argument reasonable, and is one of several reasons I don't favor open borders. I recommend the book "The WEIRDest People in the World" for an accounting of how unusual westerners are in their mindset. I think it would be easy to undermine what makes us so prosperous. It may happen from within anyway, but why speed it up?
And I will recommend in turn _The Guarded Gate_ as a historical illustration of how these exact same fears were commonly raised a hundred years ago about supposedly unassimilable immigrant groups like Italians, Greeks, and Jews, who we now know to be as high productivity and as "WEIRD" as anyone else.
To the fossil fuel analogy, note that the immigration question is relatively short term too in the same sense: the worldwide demographic transition means that the flow of immigrants cannot be endless and will likely slow tremendously by 2100 no matter what.
One important difference between those who immigrated to the US a hundred or more years ago and the current influx of migrants is that the former came here with no reason to expect that they and their dependents would be given free healthcare, housing, and other necessities at taxpayer expense. Which brings to mind Milton Friedman's comment that a welfare state with open borders is a no-go.
WEIRD isn't about "fear", it's just pointing out the cultural and personality features that are unique to westerners (which includes Italians, Greeks and Jews, BTW).
I suppose migration can and would stop once all countries basically ceased to exist and the whole world was culturally and economically uniform. I don't think that would be a positive outcome for those of us who are doing well at the moment.
The point is that those same cultural and personality features were thought, by the Leading Minds of Science (tm) of the early 20th century, to be specific to "Nordics" and inaccessible to the supposedly inferior "Mediterranean" types. Why should I find Henrich any more credible than Madison Grant?
I'll observe further that this argument parallels structurally (though the underlying empirical questions are very, very different) an argument Alex Epstein criticizes in Fossil Future, namely: yes, burning fossil fuels is great for short-term economic prosperity, but the long-term catastrophic effects of climate change make it a net economic negative. The sets of people making these two arguments are so distinct ideologically and subculturally as to be almost disjoint, which may make the parallel less noticeable.
To be fair, there is a difference with fossil fuels in that they *will* eventually go out of favor when real viable alternatives become available. We don't need to burn them forever. The argument is whether we should suffer immediate and large opportunity cost by forcing them out of favor too early. And a related question is whether it's even realistic to expect the entire world (or a significant portion of it) to voluntarily leave cheap energy in the ground anyway.
>Socrates: Perhaps you’re right. Imagine, however, that my detractors admitted that I had no bad effects on any particular student, but still claimed that I was shaking the foundation of Greek society.
>
>Pericles: A strange position, I agree.
>
>Socrates: Yes. If my teachings are noxious, the harms should at least be visible in my immediate vicinity. Then we could extrapolate to the aggregate damage.
I'm pretty sure Garrett Jones would advise Pericles to retort "sure, but suppose your teachings made your students much better people, but much worse parents. A strange hypothetical, I admit, but run with it. One could have a coherent anti-Socrates position despite conceding that your students are made much better off by your teaching. They'd do this by saying your students are wise and graceful, but they raise mentally disturbed misanthropes. This is analogous to immigration. The one-off benefits to both migrants and their receiving communities are immense. But this is because the immigrants are heavily selected for being peaceful, productive, and cooperative. Even if we grant that all this filtering is due to the strenuousness of the journey and not at all due to the immigration filtering system you want to abolish, we have good reason to believe their children and grandchildren will revert to the mean of their ancestral country. Since this mean is more violent, more criminal, less trusting, and less productive than their immigrant descendants, we should discount the gains from open borders. With a sufficiently low time-preference, which I hope you agree our policymakers should ideally have, and something like a society-level o-ring model of economic productivity - a more aggressive assumption but not a totally unsupported one - this downside effect plausibly outweighs the initial gain from immigration."
I'm curious what your/Socrates' response would be.
This hasn't been my experience at all. Every single time I deal with the genetic underclass I come away with a lower and less tolerant opinion of them.
As experience with different immigrant groups can vary, rather than go through every single example I will give a more universal example of "if you just met those people." After all, when people say that inclusion breeds tolerance it was this group everyone has in mind.
I grew up not knowing any black people. There might literally have been zero in my town or school. The first black person I can even remember was the one kid in my high school.
Back when I didn't know any black people I used to have an at least neutral and probably even hopeful and sympathetic view of them. They are like Will Smith on Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I accepted the basic narrative about everything that had happened to them and how they were working hard to integrate into society. I didn't know anything about black crime or whatever, there were no black people around me, and if I heard about it maybe I would blame the war on drugs or something.
Then I moved to Baltimore as an adult, a majority black city. I was around black people all the time. I got a lot of exposure.
I hated it. It basically turned me into a Klan member. Meeting these people face to face dramatically lowered my opinion of them.
Even the white underclass was better to deal with than them. We had a white trash neighborhood near us and it never caused anywhere near as many problem as black people traveling in on the light rail to do crimes.
Even black people that had middle class jobs and weren't literal hood rats weren't much better to deal with. They were always worse to deal with than a white equivalent. It seemed like every single one worked for the government.
Finding out from Charles Murray that they were genetically doomed to be as such made me slightly more sympathetic (its not their fault), but also not wanting them to be around because they were doomed and couldn't be fixed.
I've always assumed the the Swedish experience with Arabs is functionally equivalent to my experience with blacks. The people in Oslo probably feel a lot like how I felt in Baltimore.
Based on living patterns and property values, I assume that my experience is statistically valid and not just anecdotal.
Few groups are as bad as blacks, but I could give other examples. I just don't buy this "familiarity will cause respect" line. It will cause respect if the person deserves respect. If they don't, it will cause contempt.
Actually mirrors my experience. I was completely race neutral and actually sympathetic to blacks because i lived in absolute majority white country and never ever interacted with a black person
And immigrants which had derogatory name "black" were from Caucasus ( Armenians, Georgians). And i had very positive experience with them .
But moving to US and living there quickly made me realize the truth of inequality between people.
But i must also point out that in- group variance matters a lot too. High caste indians in US are not the same as average street peddler or bus driver in Mumbai.
Currently Jewish communities are leaving Sweden and Norway at a rapid clip and Jews are emigrating from France at a slower but large rate because of anti-semitism of recent immigrants. How does that fit your model?
Such an objection, I think, would go to this exchange:
**Socrates: Face-to-face, immigrants are alright?
Pericles: I suppose.**
While the majority of immigrants are "alright" (or much better than alright!) face-to-face, some of them definitely are not. Yes, this is true of natives as well. But the above exchange shows that the dialogue doesn't really address attempts to exclude specifically harmful (one could say "not value-aligned with the receiving country") immigrants while allowing non-harmful immigrants in. This is, charitably, what the current system attempts to do -- albeit with a higher barrier than there should be to prove oneself non-harmful.
(Full disclosure: I personally support making immigration easier, but not full open borders.)
I mean, I think the real problem is lack of enforcement of the laws on the books and social pressure to continue the lack of enforcement. The immigrants who perpetrate grooming gangs or rape during holidays or antisemitic attacks are breaking the law - and yet they do not appear to be vigorously pursued to the fullest extent of the actual laws already on the books. That, to me, is the problem, not the immigration itself.
Good points. Active and vigorous law enforcement would mitigate these issues. Follow-up questions:
1. Would an Open Borders system allow for deportation as punishment for a duly convicted and sentenced criminal? Prisoners, I think it is understood, do not contribute in a utilitarian sense to a country's wellbeing; they in fact require a lot of resources to guard.
2. More fundamentally, there does seem to be a limit on the extent to which police can enforce the law on a population that doesn't like the law, without becoming totalitarian. Thus, if you want to maintain a limited government (with a respect for Fourth-Amendment-esque principles), while also keeping basic civil order, you need a population where most -- not all, but most -- of the population acquieses and follows the law voluntarily, seeing the law as overall good (albeit inconvenient at times). Thus, bringing in a substantial population that doesn't like the law as written is likely to result in either decreased law and order, or a requirement for more aggressive, less-privacy-respecting policing.
Put differently, self-government in the population puts a cap on order and freedom. If self-government decreases, you will get less order (more violence), less freedom (more aggressive police), or a mix of both. To be clear: not all immigrants are bad at self-government and respecting the law! But some, as demonstrated vividly in the examples you give, are, and I think it is reasonable to try to block those people from immigrating.
I think that deportation should absolutely be a punishment, but also a "you can't come back".
I don't know the statistics on immigrants and law abiding ness. And I think it's even more complicated when you try to grapple with the illegal immigrant communities. That being said, the relative law-abidingness of immigrant populations does seem like something an open boarders advocate would have to grapple with.
I don't know if I agree that we should pre-emptively block people, other than convicted criminals (though I would argue you have to make exceptions for political criminals who are convicted for political disagreement rather than what most people would consider a crime).
I think most of the arguments presented by Socrates here suffise only for giving immigrants the status of foreign residents ("metics" in ancient Athens) rather than citizens.
In present day these arguments basically lead to the situation in Emirates where there's a great influx of immigrant workers (to Dubai for example), some stay there for a long term and live there with their families, but few get citizenship.
So, this is not so much a case for open borders than for generous influx of migrant work + not necessarilly generous policies of granting citizenship.
The funny thing is, that as soon as you change the subject from open borders to wealth redistribution, Bryan Caplan will change seamlessly from the role of Socrates to that of Pericles. He's a utilitarian consequentialist, so he'd start out with a utilitarian consequentialist defence of reducing tax and spend, and then as soon as I pointed out the obvious point that a dollar has more marginal utility to a homeless person than it does to Elon Musk, he'd start waffling on about vague and unproven "cultural harms" or whatever the equivalent of that is for slashing the state.
Re the Hell-hole argument: neither participant in that dialog considers the possibility that the Hell-holes from which immigrants are fleeing may be awful to live in because of innate deficiencies of intellect and/or innate perverse propensities that are far more common among the inhabitants of those countries than among Greeks.
William Bell: "the Hell-holes from which immigrants are fleeing may be awful to live in because of innate deficiencies of intellect and/or innate perverse propensities that are far more common among the inhabitants of those countries than among Greeks."
I think that's an important question. Why is it that certain groups are unable to create prosperity? Is it is pure bad luck (natural disasters, unkind weather, etc)? Or is it cultural -- they follow some ideology that is harmful, bad social mores, etc.? If the latter, then they bring those bad bits into the host country. Check out the "no-go" parts of Paris and Brussels to see what I mean.
Open borders would be an unmitigated disaster for India, as an example. Hindus within India would be decimated, as they have been in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In their book The Bell Curve, initially published in 1994 and now available for free online, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein noted that if age and IQ are controlled for the much-lamented disparity between the mean income and mean net worth of US residents of European descent and that of US residents of predominantly sub-Saharan descent almost entirely disappears. https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-bell-curve.pdf
Foreign places are not "hellholes" because they are full of wild boars, while Athens is magically not. The big reason why the quality of life in inhabited places varies is... people.
To be fair, the people I've seen object to open borders on "cultural harm" grounds usually believe that long-term there would be tremendous material economic harms proceeding from the cultural harms. The argument seems to go like this (let's see if I can pass the ITT for this argument I don't personally accept):
1. Modern prosperity, aka the Great Enrichment, depends on civilizational features historically specific to Western culture and to Western population groups. Some immigration opponents take these to be ideological features; some include attributes of the immigrants themselves as people, such as population average IQ or conscientiousness.
2. Sufficiently high levels of "the wrong kind" of immigration would fatally undermine these pillars of civilization in developed nations.
3. The resultant collapse of economic growth, innovation, and/or social order would produce enormous long-term social welfare costs that would outweigh the short-term benefits of better labor market matching.
This would have been a stronger dialogue if Pericles had taken something like this line.
More or less.
I view the upside (more low skill labor that can't do much value added work and will never pay for itself) lower then Bryan and the downside (civilizational collapse, or even just a significant slowing of progress and lower quality of life) higher then Bryan.
I don't think I could convince Bryan otherwise. He has a deontological attachment to open borders (as well as a long standing professional branding), and I don't think he could evaluate the evidence in an unbiased way.
I find this line of argument reasonable, and is one of several reasons I don't favor open borders. I recommend the book "The WEIRDest People in the World" for an accounting of how unusual westerners are in their mindset. I think it would be easy to undermine what makes us so prosperous. It may happen from within anyway, but why speed it up?
And I will recommend in turn _The Guarded Gate_ as a historical illustration of how these exact same fears were commonly raised a hundred years ago about supposedly unassimilable immigrant groups like Italians, Greeks, and Jews, who we now know to be as high productivity and as "WEIRD" as anyone else.
To the fossil fuel analogy, note that the immigration question is relatively short term too in the same sense: the worldwide demographic transition means that the flow of immigrants cannot be endless and will likely slow tremendously by 2100 no matter what.
One important difference between those who immigrated to the US a hundred or more years ago and the current influx of migrants is that the former came here with no reason to expect that they and their dependents would be given free healthcare, housing, and other necessities at taxpayer expense. Which brings to mind Milton Friedman's comment that a welfare state with open borders is a no-go.
WEIRD isn't about "fear", it's just pointing out the cultural and personality features that are unique to westerners (which includes Italians, Greeks and Jews, BTW).
I suppose migration can and would stop once all countries basically ceased to exist and the whole world was culturally and economically uniform. I don't think that would be a positive outcome for those of us who are doing well at the moment.
The point is that those same cultural and personality features were thought, by the Leading Minds of Science (tm) of the early 20th century, to be specific to "Nordics" and inaccessible to the supposedly inferior "Mediterranean" types. Why should I find Henrich any more credible than Madison Grant?
You know Charles Murray addressed this criticism about the early 20th century directely in the bell curve. The answer to your question is out there.
I'll observe further that this argument parallels structurally (though the underlying empirical questions are very, very different) an argument Alex Epstein criticizes in Fossil Future, namely: yes, burning fossil fuels is great for short-term economic prosperity, but the long-term catastrophic effects of climate change make it a net economic negative. The sets of people making these two arguments are so distinct ideologically and subculturally as to be almost disjoint, which may make the parallel less noticeable.
To be fair, there is a difference with fossil fuels in that they *will* eventually go out of favor when real viable alternatives become available. We don't need to burn them forever. The argument is whether we should suffer immediate and large opportunity cost by forcing them out of favor too early. And a related question is whether it's even realistic to expect the entire world (or a significant portion of it) to voluntarily leave cheap energy in the ground anyway.
>Socrates: Perhaps you’re right. Imagine, however, that my detractors admitted that I had no bad effects on any particular student, but still claimed that I was shaking the foundation of Greek society.
>
>Pericles: A strange position, I agree.
>
>Socrates: Yes. If my teachings are noxious, the harms should at least be visible in my immediate vicinity. Then we could extrapolate to the aggregate damage.
I'm pretty sure Garrett Jones would advise Pericles to retort "sure, but suppose your teachings made your students much better people, but much worse parents. A strange hypothetical, I admit, but run with it. One could have a coherent anti-Socrates position despite conceding that your students are made much better off by your teaching. They'd do this by saying your students are wise and graceful, but they raise mentally disturbed misanthropes. This is analogous to immigration. The one-off benefits to both migrants and their receiving communities are immense. But this is because the immigrants are heavily selected for being peaceful, productive, and cooperative. Even if we grant that all this filtering is due to the strenuousness of the journey and not at all due to the immigration filtering system you want to abolish, we have good reason to believe their children and grandchildren will revert to the mean of their ancestral country. Since this mean is more violent, more criminal, less trusting, and less productive than their immigrant descendants, we should discount the gains from open borders. With a sufficiently low time-preference, which I hope you agree our policymakers should ideally have, and something like a society-level o-ring model of economic productivity - a more aggressive assumption but not a totally unsupported one - this downside effect plausibly outweighs the initial gain from immigration."
I'm curious what your/Socrates' response would be.
"Socrates: Face-to-face, immigrants are alright?"
This hasn't been my experience at all. Every single time I deal with the genetic underclass I come away with a lower and less tolerant opinion of them.
As experience with different immigrant groups can vary, rather than go through every single example I will give a more universal example of "if you just met those people." After all, when people say that inclusion breeds tolerance it was this group everyone has in mind.
I grew up not knowing any black people. There might literally have been zero in my town or school. The first black person I can even remember was the one kid in my high school.
Back when I didn't know any black people I used to have an at least neutral and probably even hopeful and sympathetic view of them. They are like Will Smith on Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I accepted the basic narrative about everything that had happened to them and how they were working hard to integrate into society. I didn't know anything about black crime or whatever, there were no black people around me, and if I heard about it maybe I would blame the war on drugs or something.
Then I moved to Baltimore as an adult, a majority black city. I was around black people all the time. I got a lot of exposure.
I hated it. It basically turned me into a Klan member. Meeting these people face to face dramatically lowered my opinion of them.
Even the white underclass was better to deal with than them. We had a white trash neighborhood near us and it never caused anywhere near as many problem as black people traveling in on the light rail to do crimes.
Even black people that had middle class jobs and weren't literal hood rats weren't much better to deal with. They were always worse to deal with than a white equivalent. It seemed like every single one worked for the government.
Finding out from Charles Murray that they were genetically doomed to be as such made me slightly more sympathetic (its not their fault), but also not wanting them to be around because they were doomed and couldn't be fixed.
I've always assumed the the Swedish experience with Arabs is functionally equivalent to my experience with blacks. The people in Oslo probably feel a lot like how I felt in Baltimore.
Based on living patterns and property values, I assume that my experience is statistically valid and not just anecdotal.
Few groups are as bad as blacks, but I could give other examples. I just don't buy this "familiarity will cause respect" line. It will cause respect if the person deserves respect. If they don't, it will cause contempt.
Actually mirrors my experience. I was completely race neutral and actually sympathetic to blacks because i lived in absolute majority white country and never ever interacted with a black person
And immigrants which had derogatory name "black" were from Caucasus ( Armenians, Georgians). And i had very positive experience with them .
But moving to US and living there quickly made me realize the truth of inequality between people.
But i must also point out that in- group variance matters a lot too. High caste indians in US are not the same as average street peddler or bus driver in Mumbai.
"I do not know why do you ignore these studies and articles to come to your conclusions"
The racist studies and facts are more accurate than the anti-racist studies and "facts".
Therefore, I believe the racist ones because its a more accurate view of the world.
Currently Jewish communities are leaving Sweden and Norway at a rapid clip and Jews are emigrating from France at a slower but large rate because of anti-semitism of recent immigrants. How does that fit your model?
I should have said violent anti-semitism.
Such an objection, I think, would go to this exchange:
**Socrates: Face-to-face, immigrants are alright?
Pericles: I suppose.**
While the majority of immigrants are "alright" (or much better than alright!) face-to-face, some of them definitely are not. Yes, this is true of natives as well. But the above exchange shows that the dialogue doesn't really address attempts to exclude specifically harmful (one could say "not value-aligned with the receiving country") immigrants while allowing non-harmful immigrants in. This is, charitably, what the current system attempts to do -- albeit with a higher barrier than there should be to prove oneself non-harmful.
(Full disclosure: I personally support making immigration easier, but not full open borders.)
I mean, I think the real problem is lack of enforcement of the laws on the books and social pressure to continue the lack of enforcement. The immigrants who perpetrate grooming gangs or rape during holidays or antisemitic attacks are breaking the law - and yet they do not appear to be vigorously pursued to the fullest extent of the actual laws already on the books. That, to me, is the problem, not the immigration itself.
Good points. Active and vigorous law enforcement would mitigate these issues. Follow-up questions:
1. Would an Open Borders system allow for deportation as punishment for a duly convicted and sentenced criminal? Prisoners, I think it is understood, do not contribute in a utilitarian sense to a country's wellbeing; they in fact require a lot of resources to guard.
2. More fundamentally, there does seem to be a limit on the extent to which police can enforce the law on a population that doesn't like the law, without becoming totalitarian. Thus, if you want to maintain a limited government (with a respect for Fourth-Amendment-esque principles), while also keeping basic civil order, you need a population where most -- not all, but most -- of the population acquieses and follows the law voluntarily, seeing the law as overall good (albeit inconvenient at times). Thus, bringing in a substantial population that doesn't like the law as written is likely to result in either decreased law and order, or a requirement for more aggressive, less-privacy-respecting policing.
Put differently, self-government in the population puts a cap on order and freedom. If self-government decreases, you will get less order (more violence), less freedom (more aggressive police), or a mix of both. To be clear: not all immigrants are bad at self-government and respecting the law! But some, as demonstrated vividly in the examples you give, are, and I think it is reasonable to try to block those people from immigrating.
I think that deportation should absolutely be a punishment, but also a "you can't come back".
I don't know the statistics on immigrants and law abiding ness. And I think it's even more complicated when you try to grapple with the illegal immigrant communities. That being said, the relative law-abidingness of immigrant populations does seem like something an open boarders advocate would have to grapple with.
I don't know if I agree that we should pre-emptively block people, other than convicted criminals (though I would argue you have to make exceptions for political criminals who are convicted for political disagreement rather than what most people would consider a crime).
I think most of the arguments presented by Socrates here suffise only for giving immigrants the status of foreign residents ("metics" in ancient Athens) rather than citizens.
In present day these arguments basically lead to the situation in Emirates where there's a great influx of immigrant workers (to Dubai for example), some stay there for a long term and live there with their families, but few get citizenship.
So, this is not so much a case for open borders than for generous influx of migrant work + not necessarilly generous policies of granting citizenship.
This type of reasoning really is persuasive. A great dialogue.
This article is great!!
The funny thing is, that as soon as you change the subject from open borders to wealth redistribution, Bryan Caplan will change seamlessly from the role of Socrates to that of Pericles. He's a utilitarian consequentialist, so he'd start out with a utilitarian consequentialist defence of reducing tax and spend, and then as soon as I pointed out the obvious point that a dollar has more marginal utility to a homeless person than it does to Elon Musk, he'd start waffling on about vague and unproven "cultural harms" or whatever the equivalent of that is for slashing the state.
He's a moderate deontologist I'm the realm of Michael Huemer. He has frequently criticized utilitarianism
Re the Hell-hole argument: neither participant in that dialog considers the possibility that the Hell-holes from which immigrants are fleeing may be awful to live in because of innate deficiencies of intellect and/or innate perverse propensities that are far more common among the inhabitants of those countries than among Greeks.
Recommended reading: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/facing-reality-charles-murray/1138379266
William Bell: "the Hell-holes from which immigrants are fleeing may be awful to live in because of innate deficiencies of intellect and/or innate perverse propensities that are far more common among the inhabitants of those countries than among Greeks."
I think that's an important question. Why is it that certain groups are unable to create prosperity? Is it is pure bad luck (natural disasters, unkind weather, etc)? Or is it cultural -- they follow some ideology that is harmful, bad social mores, etc.? If the latter, then they bring those bad bits into the host country. Check out the "no-go" parts of Paris and Brussels to see what I mean.
Open borders would be an unmitigated disaster for India, as an example. Hindus within India would be decimated, as they have been in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In their book The Bell Curve, initially published in 1994 and now available for free online, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein noted that if age and IQ are controlled for the much-lamented disparity between the mean income and mean net worth of US residents of European descent and that of US residents of predominantly sub-Saharan descent almost entirely disappears. https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-bell-curve.pdf
William Bell, thank you, sir, for the link to The Bell Curve.
Foreign places are not "hellholes" because they are full of wild boars, while Athens is magically not. The big reason why the quality of life in inhabited places varies is... people.
Great conversation! Precisely the type of banter that alarmed the conservatives to the point they made Socrates drink hemlock!
Exactly! Socrates drank hemlock due to his stand against the remnants of the Thirty Tyrants and their fight to maintain privileges.
Facing reality.
Speak your peace?
Bryan, the next step is to make a rap battle on YouTube.
Love this Bryan. Thanks for being on the cutting edge and pushing the dialogue of more open borders. You're doing amazing work.