“America used to be the shining city on the hill, and now it’s declining rather rapidly. I was in Europe last year talking to a number of people, and I said, ‘What do you think about America?’ And the answer I got was, ’We think you’ve lost your minds.' And that was very concerning to them, because if America goes, what happens to everybody else?”
Dr. Ben Carson is a renowned neurosurgeon, former U.S. presidential candidate, and author of, most recently, “The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family.”
Watch the video:
“The family is where you derive your identity. And we’ve already had the example with the breakup of the black family, and you see the violence that has ensued. The murder rates in our inner cities are so high. People don’t respect other people’s lives. A lot of that has to do with the missing father, and now, that’s spread to the rest of our society as well,” says Dr. Carson.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Dr. Ben Carson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Dr. Ben Carson: It’s wonderful to be with you. I always enjoy being with people who are logical.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you. I just learned that when you were doing your surgery on the conjoined twins, it was a 31-hour surgery. How does a person even do that?
Dr. Carson: It’s like being in the jungle with a hungry tiger. You’re not going to go to sleep and you’re not going to relax until you get out of it. The time actually goes by very quickly, because you are so intent on what you’re doing. I do remember the first set of conjoined twins. After the operation, I was sitting in my office talking to one of the other surgeons, and we both fell asleep in mid-sentence, and then woke up three hours later. We were so tired.
Mr. Jekielek: You were literally running on adrenaline.
Dr. Carson: No question about it, and you’re also praying for wisdom. You’re just hoping that you'll be able to figure things out as you go whenever you’re in uncharted territory, but you have a sense of what needs to be done. We have many more advantages now than they did in the olden days. The imaging has advanced enormously and now that we’re able to couple that imaging with things like AI and robotics. It’s going to greatly reduce the complications in complex surgery.
Mr. Jekielek: Is this a much more common surgery today?
Dr. Carson: It is still vanishingly rare, but the techniques have evolved and certainly make it less complex than it was before.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned prayer was an important part of what you did. I don’t think everybody would say that.
Dr. Carson: Certainly not a lot of people in the scientific realm. Some of them denigrate prayer and the people who pray. When you look at the human brain, it is extremely complex in the way that it is put together. Even if you believe in natural selection, which says that the things that work stay, and the things that don’t work disappear, you would have to have so many millions of consecutive things that work, without any reversal. It’s just not practical to think that way.
The way they solve that dilemma is by saying, “If you have enough time, billions and billions of years, at some point you will get the sequences that are necessary in order to create life.” But that’s like saying if you blow a tornado through a junkyard enough times over a long, long period of time, at the end of one of those tornadoes will be a 747 jet that’s ready to fly. I just don’t think that is possible.
Mr. Jekielek: We will be talking about the importance of the family. The faith you are talking about is very important. Back in the day a lot of people believed that natural selection was the way evolution happened, but that is obviously not the whole story. There is a certain faith in this theory among some people who clearly didn’t understand how it worked.
Dr. Carson: There have been a lot of struggles on this issue. There have been a lot of strong arguments in both directions. I was once engaged in a public argument about faith and God in the scientific arena, and there was a famous atheist on the other side. At the end, I said, “You win the debate, because you have convinced me that you came from a monkey and I came from God.
Mr. Jekielek: That is very amusing. The proper evolutionary biologist would say, “No, Dr. Carson, it’s not a monkey. It’s our common ancestor.” Let’s go back to the topic of overcoming the cultural war on the American family. The premise is simple—if you grow up in a nuclear family, statistically, you are set up for success.
Dr. Carson: No question about it. Both the conservative think tanks and the liberal think tanks both come to that conclusion. Children raised in that environment do better academically and career-wise. There is less incidence of teen pregnancy, alcoholism, and mental disorders. You’re firing on all cylinders. There’s really no controversy about that.
The question is, what do we do with that information? Do we enact policies that promote traditional nuclear families? Do we try to denigrate them? It seems that Hollywood has taken the latter approach. You can’t look at any series these days and get very far into it before the alternative to the traditional family is presented, not only as acceptable, but as preferable.
There is now a reluctance to form traditional relationships. People are not getting married or they’re getting married much later, and that’s having an impact on our population. The babies per woman now is down to 1.6. It requires 2.1 just to maintain the population. Some on the Left say that’s the reason that we should open our borders and let everybody in. But we need to have a more orderly process.
Mr. Jekielek: To not be at 2.1 to keep the population at maintenance level feels almost nihilistic. It’s like we don’t believe in ourselves enough to reproduce the population.
Dr. Carson: We don’t think into the future. We just think about now and say, “I want this now. This is what works for me now.” The double income, no kids couple is the new American dream. Sure, you have more money to lavish on yourselves, but what happens when you’re 85-years-old? Who is around that really cares about you? Those are all important questions that sometimes people think about when it’s already too late.
Mr. Jekielek: We recently had an episode where we talked about Yuri Bezmanov’s interviews back in the 1980s. He was a KGB defector that explained the Soviet Union’s plan for the demoralization of America. It was about how to influence a society to not believe in itself. This lack of belief in ourselves as a society feels like a bipartisan thing.
Dr. Carson: Those who want to fundamentally change us into a Marxist or communist country don’t care whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, they just want to manipulate you. As it says in my book, on January 10, 1963, Congressman Herlong of Florida read “Communism’s 45 Goals’' into the Congressional Record. That was over 60 years ago, and you can see all of these things happening in America today.
Some of the goals were as follows; infiltrate the public school system and teacher unions to indoctrinate the children, infiltrate the news media and Hollywood so that you can manipulate the population, drive wedges between parents and children and denigrate the status of the family, and make sexual perversion normal, natural, and healthy. You can go right down the list and see that this is all happening today.
America used to be the shiny city on the hill and now it’s declining rather rapidly. I was in Europe last year talking to a number of people and asked them, “What do you think about this?” They said, “We’re going to have to change the way we think about America. We think that you have lost your mind.” It was very concerning to them because if America goes, what happens to everybody else?
Mr. Jekielek: This term comes from Ronald Reagan. We are still the shining city on the hill compared to many places in the world today. It’s Americans that make America what it is. Many came for the freedom and opportunity that still exists, relatively speaking. So many people are coming through the southern border because they’re looking for opportunity.
Dr. Carson: No question about it. But if you’re stuck in the desert and a jalopy comes by that you can get on and get out of the desert, you'll take it. It doesn’t have to be a Rolls Royce. But if you can have the Rolls Royce, which we used to have, why not take it and why not cultivate that? There’s no question that we have deteriorated and that we’re going downhill, but we’re still a lot better than most other places.
If you were born in this country you have already hit the lottery. That’s one of the reasons we should study those things that made us into a great nation. We should not be throwing those things away and thinking that we’re just always going to be a great nation. It doesn’t work that way.
If you look at the cycle of prosperity and despair in nations historically, we’re near the end of that cycle. But we don’t want to be near the end of the cycle. Why can’t we learn from what people have done before? Why do we have to go down the same path? Our Founding Fathers studied every government that ever existed in the world.
One thing that became clear to them is that all governments tend to move in the same direction. It doesn’t matter how lofty their goals are in the beginning. They also move toward growth, infiltration, and then domination. It doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, it means that that’s just what they do.
A lion is not a bad animal because it kills gazelles and eats them. That’s what lions do. Our forefathers worked very hard to give us a system that would not lead to that end, but they knew it was going to be difficult. When Ben Franklin was asked if we have a monarchy or a republic, he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Right now, we’re as close to losing it as we have ever been. We have a department of justice that is blatant in their bias and the way they treat different groups of people. We have elections that are questioned by half of the society and we don’t make any attempt to make them transparent. Those are the seeds that can grow into discontent and cause very serious problems. Historically, that is when bad things happen to countries.
Mr. Jekielek: You said that with governments, there is growth, infiltration, and then domination. I imagine bureaucracy would be a part of that. Can you explain how this works?
Dr. Carson: In the way our country was designed, the government was there for some pretty specific things. It was for the protection of the people and to provide some basic necessities for a functional society, but it wasn’t to be involved in the day-to-day running of your life. That was supposed to be up to you. When Alexis de Tocqueville came to study our nation, he was very impressed with this environment that fostered innovation and entrepreneurship.
That environment is severely affected in a negative way when you have the government butt into everything. A good example would be the government’s desire to have everybody drive electric vehicles, without having the infrastructure that is necessary, and without having figured out what to do with all of those dead batteries. What is that going to do to the environment?
This is what you need to do. The thing that made us great in the industrial area is that we let market forces determine what was going to survive and what was going to thrive and what was going to be defeated. People are incentivized to do well monetarily. But they’re not going to work hard to establish those things if there’s no benefit to themselves and their family.
Mr. Jekielek: You were quite the innovator in the field of neurosurgery. In the last few years we have seen a lot of changes in the medical schools.
Dr. Carson: The DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] philosophy that has invaded some of the medical schools is of some concern. One of the medical schools in California who adopted DEI policies early on has a situation where a large number of their people are unable to pass the national medical board exams. Is that the person that you want to operate on you or your child? There is a certain body of knowledge that is absolutely critical to do the job appropriately.
You don’t want an airline pilot who knows 90 percent of what needs to be done. That doesn’t work if you need to have complex surgery done. In the past, we have been a meritocracy. There’s no question that in the past certain segments of our society did not have exposure to the kind of education that would allow you to excel in certain areas. That has largely been corrected, although it’s not 100 percent.
I was a first year medical student and did poorly on the first set of comprehensive exams. My counselor told me to drop out of medical school. He said, “You’re not cut out for medicine and you’re just going to hurt yourself and other people.” There was definitely no DEI then. I prayed for wisdom and asked myself, “What kind of courses have you always done well at?”
I realized that I did really well in courses where I did a lot of reading. I struggled in courses where I had to listen to a lot of boring lectures, because I don’t get anything out of boring lectures. Some people get a lot out of them, but I got nothing out of them and was wasting six hours a day. I made the executive decision to spend that six hours a day reading.
After that, the rest of medical school was a snap. Different people learn in different ways and some of the medical schools have discovered that. Many years later when I was back at my medical school as the commencement speaker, I was looking for my old counselor. I was going to tell him that he wasn’t cut out to be a counselor.
Mr. Jekielek: People definitely have different learning styles.
Dr. Carson: Some people are very visual in their learning and I am visual as well. I learned to take everything that I needed to know for a test and put it on a flashcard. I would carry these flashcards around in my pocket. During my second year in medical school I was living with my brother who was in the school of engineering and he even knew all the bacteria and what they were sensitive to, because I always had these cards in my pocket.
Mr. Jekielek: You knew that this was something that you could do. Concerning this whole realm of demoralization, as a society, we don’t believe in ourselves enough. In your book, you write quite a lot about race. In American history, there was a viewpoint that black Americans were not cut out for certain things. Obviously, you prove that to be just the opposite.
Dr. Carson: Yes. There was a time when people didn’t believe that a black person could be a nuclear physicist or an airplane pilot. Obviously, no one believes that anymore. There had to be a time when that door was busted down because it wasn’t going to be opened voluntarily. But that was decades ago and what needed to be proven has been proven. The only people who think that way now are Neanderthals, and there aren’t a whole lot of them left around, so that takes care of itself.
Look at the progress that has been made just in my lifetime. I remember when I was six-years-old going down to Tennessee and there were all these white-only and colored-only signs. People were explaining what that meant and why you needed to pay attention. In that same lifetime, you have black generals and admirals and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and heads of foundations and university presidents. We’ve had a black president of the United States. To say that it’s the same and hasn’t changed is craziness. We have made enormous progress and continue to make progress to this very day.
Mr. Jekielek: What can we do to believe in ourselves more?
Dr. Carson: John Adams, our second president, famously said that our Constitution was designed for moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for the government of any other people. What we can do is get back to our roots. Our founding document, The Declaration of Independence, says that our rights come from our creator, not from government. We need to get back to the belief system that took us from a ragtag bunch of militiamen to the pinnacle of the world in record time.
It was because of the things that we believed in. Our Judeo-Christian values taught us to love our neighbor and not to cancel our neighbor if they have a different yard sign. In prior times, if it was harvest time and one of your neighbors broke his leg, everybody else harvested his crops, no questions asked. They didn’t want to know what his religion was or what his political affiliation was.
They said, “This is my neighbor and they need my help,” and that made America into a very strong nation. That’s what we need to get back to, instead of allowing ourselves to be manipulated on the basis of race, age, income, gender, religion, or place. We have allowed wedges to be driven in between us and it’s destroying our society.
But here is the bigger picture that I talk about in the book. The United States of America stands in the way of worldwide Marxism. We can’t be overcome militarily. Therefore, they need to destroy us from within. That’s why all this effort is focused on the essential element of our foundation, the family. If you destroy that, you destroy the passing on of values.
When you don’t have values passed on, you get what we’re seeing on some of these college campuses. They don’t know their own history which gives you your identity upon which your beliefs are based. If you don’t know those things, you’re like a leaf blowing in the wind. Whatever the social breeze is that’s coming along, you get caught up in it and have no idea what you’re talking about. These students have no idea that Hamas, who they’re advocating for, would sooner cut their head off than turn the light on.
Mr. Jekielek: There is a multi-faceted assault on the family. I’ve been watching communist China for a very long time. With the Cultural Revolution they were probably the most effective group at eliminating cultural traditions. But they chose not to eliminate military strategy. But somehow, people still gravitate to the family unit very much in China.
Dr. Carson: The family is where you derive your identity. We’ve already had the example of the breakup of the black family and you see the violence that has ensued. The murder rates in our inner cities are so high. People don’t respect other people’s lives. A lot of that has to do with the missing fathers. Now, that has spread to the rest of our society as well.
Mr. Jekielek: Was the black family particularly susceptible or was it targeted? How did that happen?
Dr. Carson: The black family did very well throughout slavery and the Jim Crow era. The family worked together at that point. Then along came Lyndon Johnson and the War on Poverty and policies that did not foster family development. If you were getting aid for living expenses and you got a raise, your rent went up. If you brought someone into the home who had another income, your rent went up. There were other things that pushed the man out of the family. The more babies you had out of wedlock, the more money you got. There were these crazy policies.
Mr. Jekielek: Clearly, they weren’t designed to work like that.
Dr. Carson: I don’t know and I wonder. Lyndon Johnson was caught on tape saying, “If we give these black people these things, we'll have their vote for the next 200 years.” It was all politically driven. It wasn’t because they were compassionate individuals. But the bottom line is that it caused dysfunctional families to develop where there had been very strong families before. You can see the result of that. Now, that same phenomenon has spread to the rest of our society. We’re seeing a very rapid disintegration of traditional nuclear families and a concomitant decline in our nation.
Mr. Jekielek: It seems like people are becoming more interested in having large families again. Please tell us about this.
Dr. Carson: I hope that is right, but I haven’t seen too much of it yet. But every time I encounter somebody who has more than two children, I congratulate them and thank them for what they’re doing for our society. It’s vitally important. The other things that are proliferating are the Christian-based schools, the private schools, and the home school groups. They are growing at a terrific rate. Since 2020, the number of homeschoolers has doubled and it’s still accelerating. And the private schools, particularly the faith-based private schools, have very long waiting lists of people trying to get in.
Parents realize what is going on in our schools. They understand that what is being taught there is not reflective of traditional American values. The schools denigrate traditional American values. They say, “That’s elitist.” They put some kind of ism on it. People on the Left seize upon the bad and the ugly and just emphasize that in the curriculum.
Then you get a whole generation of young people who don’t like our country, who think that we are the source of all evil, and who can easily be recruited to do things that are harmful to us. This is a problem. Vladimir Lenin said, “Give me your children to teach for four years and the seed that I sow will never be uprooted.” They understand how important it is to get to the children early on.
That’s why at American Cornerstone Institute, we instituted the Little Patriots learning program, which is internet-based and completely free of charge. It teaches our K-5 children the values that established this country. We have to be there early on during their formative years. The Marxists understand this very well and they’ve taken tremendous advantage of it.
We’re seeing the results of that over and over again. We’re seeing the results of what they’re doing in our schools. Covid was a great blessing to us in the sense that it opened our eyes to what is happening in our schools. We are responding and I don’t think it’s too late.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the silver linings of the Covid era is that there are many people interested in these faith-based schools who aren’t particularly religious themselves.
Dr. Carson: Yes, absolutely. I was talking to the headmaster of one of the schools just this week. He said that there are many people who don’t come from a Christian background, but they recognize the value of traditional education. Actually, these schools don’t spend all their time talking about the Bible. They teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Mr. Jekielek: They also teach how to think vs. what to think.
Dr. Carson: Right.
Mr. Jekielek: The current rhetoric about the religious schools is that you’re being indoctrinated there and you’re told what to think. Actually, they are teaching critical thinking and the ability to figure things out for yourself based on reason and logic.
Dr. Carson: And then to ask the right questions. In 1958, Edward Lewis Schempp filed a lawsuit against one of the counties in Pennsylvania, because at the beginning of the school day, they required the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and a Bible reading. The school district and even the state said that all a parent has to do is send a note asking that their child be exempted from that if they don’t want that to happen. But that wasn’t good enough for him, and it ended up in the Supreme Court in 1963. At that time they ruled that it was unconstitutional to have mandatory prayer or Bible reading in schools.
It then continued to morph to today when there can be no support whatsoever for anything religious in the public setting. Think about how illogical that is in a country whose founding document says that our rights come from our Creator. The Pledge of Allegiance says that we are one nation under God. Our coins and dollars say, “In God we trust.” It makes no sense whatsoever. It was obviously never the intent of the Founders that we should completely separate God and religion from everything. Their intention was that the Church would not rule the State, and the State would not rule the Church.
Mr. Jekielek: This was started by competing religious groups that wanted to make sure that no one religious group would become the dominant.
Dr. Carson: That was happening in the Thirteen Colonies. You had people who said, “No Catholics here,” or “No Puritans here.” It was a mess. This 1958 lawsuit was done for the right purposes, but it morphed into something that was never the intent.
Mr. Jekielek: But the bigger challenge is, how do you make a society work?
Dr. Carson: You have to have the rule of law. If your diverse culture does not fit into the rule of law of the society, then it has to go. Because you can’t accommodate things that are at opposite ends of spectrums. Some of the Sharia laws, particularly the way that they treat women, are not compatible with our laws and our culture. We should not change our culture and laws in order to accommodate that. If that’s what you believe, then you should go somewhere where they believe that.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s one thing if you believe in something, but it’s another thing if you’re demanding that others accept it. Those are two different things.
Dr. Carson: You hit on one of the key things that is going on in our society today. That is, there are those who want to take what is abnormal and make everybody else conform to that as if it’s normal. I believe that God loves everybody. But I don’t believe that it was intended that men have sex with men, and that women have sex with women. For those who want to do that, they’re welcome to do it.
But to say, “This is the norm, and everybody should conform to it,” does not make any sense. What they should be doing is making sure that the norm recognizes that there are things that are not consistent with the norm, and that we need to learn how to tolerate those things. That’s what you do. You don’t take everything and turn it upside down.
Mr. Jekielek: This is a society that was designed to help people of different faiths function together, even though we might want our faith to be the norm. But in America you can’t impose your view on others.
Dr. Carson: Yes, and you shouldn’t be able to. It is a fear, because in America we tend to be very reactionary. We don’t do long-term planning. We just react to what’s going on. I fear that there may be a severe reaction to this leftward tilt and that we may start trying to legislate morality. We just have to be very vigilant and make sure that we don’t go down that path.
Mr. Jekielek: How do we deal with morality? You’ve been arguing that we need a shared morality. It’s not just Christianity that has those ideas.
Dr. Carson: You can go to the darkest jungle of Borneo and look at a thief. What does he do? He waits until nighttime when nobody can see him, so he must know what’s wrong without having read the Ten Commandments or anything. There are certain things that we just inherently know are the wrong things to do and the right things to do. You have to have laws. You have to have a basic code of morality. When everybody becomes their own definition of morality, then you’ve got a problem.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re concerned that we’re going to legislate morality. What do you mean by that?
Dr. Carson: For instance, we may start saying that you’re required to attend church. Those kinds of things have happened historically. We just have to watch ourselves and make sure that we don’t do that. We need to allow people to make choices. The thing about a free society is you can live the way you want to live as long as that is not impinging upon someone else’s freedom to live the way they want to live.
You don’t have the right to turn your stereo up at 2 a.m. and blast out the neighborhood. That’s just not right. You’ve got to have rules against things like that. But I don’t want to rule against what you can listen to. You can listen to anything you want in the privacy of your home.
Mr. Jekielek: The crux of all this is figuring out where we affect each other as human beings. I’m imposing a little bit on you and you’re imposing a little bit on me, potentially. I could impose on you greatly, and then really infringe upon you. The system that the American founders created makes sense of all of this.
Dr. Carson: But where do you initially learn to be reasonable about that? In your family. That’s where you learn that there are other people. There are other opinions. People have property and you learn how to respect it. All those things come through family.
Mr. Jekielek: Also in large families, you can’t be too overly self-centered.
Dr. Carson: Correct.
Mr. Jekielek: Traditionally, people say that an only child is spoiled. That’s not universally true, but it probably does have a tendency to ring true in a lot of circumstances. Do we need to have these larger family units to learn to cope with people? Also, people from large families have much more of a natural inclination to be helpful.
Dr. Carson: We can incentivize people to have children. They’ve been doing things in Australia that would incentivize family formation.
Mr. Jekielek: Hungary has had mixed success with certain pro-family policies. We need to figure out why people in our current time would want a large family, because it’s so rare.
Dr. Carson: If you talk to people who come from large families, they love it. They love their family structure, their siblings, and the interactions that they have, so there must be something really good about it. I’ve seldom met anybody from a large family who wasn’t delighted to have been from a large family.
Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, how can we work our way out of this?
Dr. Carson: I hope it’s only a phase that we’re going through. I hope people will look back in the future and say they temporarily lost their minds and they forgot about the things that made them into a great nation and particularly about the fundamental things like family structure. We need to understand that there’s been a lot of technological things that have impinged upon family relationships. You have children who spend a lot more time with their iPhone or with their computer than they do with their family. Parents need to be aware of the impact that has.
You have to be aware of your responsibilities as a parent today because children are impacted by so many more things than they used to be. A lot of people like to say nothing is really any different than it ever has been. It’s a lot different. The things that 10-year-olds know now will blow your mind. These are things that we weren’t exposed to until we were adults.
In order to really reestablish a family, it has to be high on your priority list. You have to make a concerted effort, like having dinner together. If you’re going to have children looking at television, watch it with them and discuss what you just saw. That’s what I did with my kids when they were little. I didn’t say, “You can’t watch this and you can’t watch that.”
I said, “Let’s watch it together and let’s talk about it.” Then they will have a good understanding of what is happening to the society that they live in and how to insulate themselves and how to be effective in a society like that. It has to be deliberate. It’s not natural like it once was in the old days when you and your family lived out on the farm in the plains of Nebraska. It’s very different now.
Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Ben Carson, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on the show.
Dr. Carson: It was wonderful to be here. I look forward to the next time.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Ben Carson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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