DoctorOz: The Building Blocks of Society: YOU!

We are summarizing insights shared at the ARC forum last month and I'm using the metaphor of a tree. Now the first video argued that the roots are healed with a better story and the trunk is all about the social fabric that wraps around that truth. That's all strengthened when we realize that freedom should be used to assume responsibility to take care of each other. That's the whole point of the freedom. This video is about the branches that break off from that trunk and many of the speakers backstage highlighted that the building block of society's branches, wait for it, that's right, it's you. Individuals are the building block of functional families and in turn those families come together to create healthy communities and then they become big nations and that's how the whole world's created. Now together we can tilt the world towards heaven. Neil Ferguson reminds us that the role of responsible citizens is in creating our own associations, our own linkages. The top filmmaker of the summer, Eduardo Verastegui, bluntly shared that society is judged by how we take care of our children and he's upset about it. He made a movie about child trafficking. Andrew Hastie offered that resilience is found at the level of the family and Warren Farrell, who's famous for this, discussed a crisis faced by boys. Then Erica Commissar came out and did the exact same thing for mothering. Helena Morrissey offered that balanced governance is more than just hiring more women. Altogether they show us the branches coming off that big tree that we are trying to build at the Arc Forum. Quickly, the elevator speech of the brilliant lecture you just gave. Well, liberal democracy faces some very serious threats today from illiberal democracy and from autocracy. It faces a grave threat from within. Three quarters of Democrats and three quarters of Republicans think democracy in America is in danger. And of course, we face the threat from an axis of ill will. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. But maybe the biggest problem is our own inner degeneration, the weakness of our institutions, of our public finances, of our market economies. And my recommendation is only we, the responsible citizens, can fix this. We can't expect government or politicians to do it. We have to create our own associations, our own new institutions, and ARC is a very good example of what I was talking about. Eduardo, I waited four years for this movie to come out because no one would release it, distribute it. Now you're the number one film around the world. What's the main message? Why go into the arc? Freedom. Freedom. Freedom without responsibilities is not freedom. How can we have a free world when the most important, the most important persons in the world are children? Children are sacred. How can we expect freedom if those children are kidnapped? There's more slaves today than when slavery was, you know, was legal. And half of those slaves are children. They are the future decision makers. What kind of decisions are they going to make in the future if we adults, we are not assuming the responsibilities that we need to assume by protecting these children who are our children? I follow this universal principle. Your children are my children and I give my life for them. And that's what I'm doing with this movie. Movies can move people. Movies can detonate a movement. And that's what we did with Sound of Freedom. It's not anymore a movie. Sound of Freedom is a movement that is looking to eradicate child trafficking in the world. God bless you. God bless you, hermano. I think we need to be resilient, the Anglosphere, the US, the UK, Australia. And that means energy security, supply chain security. We need to be able to take a punch and prevail in a strategic contest or a war, God forbid. But more importantly, we need to be resilient at the lowest possible level, which is the family. And I think what we've heard today from other panellists is that we're having a crisis in the West, teen suicides up, mental health, lack of social trust. And we've really got to work on building our families and our local communities. And that's where national strength will come from. Great message for someone who led in the military. Thank you. Well, the boy crisis resides more than in any other place where dads do not reside. Boys are suffering today without the guidance of the boundary enforcement that men tend to bring to the family table, without any either men or families understanding the value of dad-style parenting, and how it differs from mom-style parenting, so that moms and dads can do checks and balance parenting to raise their children, both with the discipline, the boundary enforcement, the bonding that dads create with rough housing and many things. And we don't know why dads are needed. Dads don't know that they are needed. They don't know the value of their contribution. We need to let men know that they are needed, and not just as human wallets, but as fathers, as loving people, not just to kill and be killed, but to love and be loved. You said that children need the men's time more than their dime, and you highlighted rough housing as something that's wise to do. I've never heard an advocation for rough housing, although most dads want to do it, and most moms are worried about it. Yes, usually dads want a rough house, and moms are going, oh my god, I feel like I have only one more child to monitor. But we don't realize that the rough housing creates bonds with the kids, and it's like giving the kids a treat, but then saying if you're too rough with your sibling, you're going to get no more rough housing, so the kids learn to be empathetic to their siblings' needs. And the data is there to show that rough housing with boundary enforcement and love leads to children being more empathetic than they would be without it. Brilliant presentation. Cheryl. So mothering is really important work. It's been deprioritized around the world, but particularly in America, and it's critical. Mothers are biologically important for children in terms of regulating their emotions, buffering them from stress, and really helping them to learn to get on in the world socially. So what we're seeing is an incredible uptick in the epidemic of mental illness in children and adolescents because we're really not taking the first three years of life as critically as it is. The first three years is what we call a critical period of brain development and attachment security, basically lays down the foundation for mental health later on. And if we really don't respect that period of time and have mothers and fathers, particularly mothers, as present as possible physically and emotionally, we're really not setting our children up for success later on. Why do you think we've missed the boat on this? It seems so self-evident. Your presentation had lots of data, lots of clear action steps. Don't wake the kids up at 6 a.m., set boundaries, make sure you give folks enough time off from work and more than most people would have anticipated. It hasn't sunk in. Because we've told young mothers in particular, but young men, too, that parenting is boring, parenting is not modern, parenting is not important work, particularly women. Young women are taught to think about their lives in terms of careers only and not in terms of a life. And so we really have to recreate the narrative or reinvent the narrative, which is that we want young people to think about having a life, a well-rounded life with healthy children that they've spent the most important thing with, which is time, and that your careers are important, too, and you can have everything in life, you just can't have it all at the same time. Give me 90 seconds of the elevator speech version of that beautiful seminar you just had. So good governance is key to running a good company, that having a diverse board is vital, but having just more women on it isn't enough, that you need to actually have a board that's effective, that asks questions, that is not corrupt, that really believes in what it's doing, and that means good people on the board. So have we gotten the benefit that we hoped we'd be placing in the case of the UK, up to 40 percent of the boards being women? No, I think we've gone somewhere to shaking up the boardroom, but there's a long way to go before we can really claim that we have great governance.