Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote- named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. As classical liberals, we talk a lot about the importance of civil society, and today I want to talk about how we actually do that and what it looks like. It functions we say and we think is the norms in the community and the safety net, which uphold individuals and catch you when you fall. But does investing and engaging, what does it look like? What do we mean when we say that? 

I'm excited to welcome Rachel Ferguson back to the podcast today. It's March 3rd, 2025. She is, here's a list of things, director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University in Chicago. She is an affiliate scholar with the Acton Institute and she's the board president of Love the Lou, which is a neighborhood stabilization project, which is part of what we're going to be talking about today. She's also been on the podcast before and she's the author of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, which is a great book. We talked about it on the podcast and you should check it out on your own. Welcome back. I'm excited to have you.

Rachel Ferguson 

I'm so excited to be back, Juliette. I love The Great Antidote.

Juliette Sellgren (1:35)

Always feels good. So new first question since you've been on before, which is what is one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self?

Rachel Ferguson (1:47)

One piece of advice that I would give to my younger self would be to, gosh, this is such a cliched phrase, trust the process, but I think that there is anxiety that people can feel about whether they're making the right decision or whether they think of it as doing God's will or whatever it might be. The truth is that I think in life you just sort of have to do and then guidance will come and what happened for me, I changed majors four times before I landed on philosophy, but the woman who was my mentor in philosophy was amazing and she was a perfect fit. She'd written things for Cato. I mean, she was just awesome and guided me into graduate school. I didn't really know what I was doing, but she guided me through and I ended up studying under an amazing person and just as you go through life, you find the way and by trying things and figuring out what works and what doesn't work. And so I guess mostly just to not feel anxious about the plan or having everything laid out perfectly because that's just not really how life works. Things come to you and the things that resonate with your calling will sort of emerge and things that don't will go by the wayside. And so yeah, just relax.

Juliette Sellgren (3:15)

What you said was great because I think kind of a common theme when we're thinking about my generation, everyone is freaking out. Everyone's freaking out all the time. I feel like no matter what's happening, people are kind of freaking out. And I don't know if that's just my generation, but it seems to be kind of characterized as this is the moment, but also our generation is specifically having a problem with this. But the way that you put it was great and kind of different from how I've heard it, where you need to act without doing something. There's basically no way forward. And obviously being okay with the uncertainty and the anxiety is part of it, but unless you kind of do something not just to mitigate it but just acting in general, go on a walk or something.

Rachel Ferguson (4:09)

Well, it's actually, let me relate it to our shared love of entrepreneurialism in markets, which is you take risks and you understand that failure is probably a part of it. And so Megan McCardle wrote that great book, something about failing up?

Juliette Sellgren 

The Up Side of Down.

Rachel Ferguson (4:31)

The Upside of Down. And it's a really great insight because something I've been learning is that when you look at the contrast with an honor shame society, there's such a fear of failure because then you're dishonored. And so there can be such anxiety associated with the idea that you tried something and ended up not being the thing for you where we can appreciate being in a different sort of society with a different set of virtues, right? Honor and shame are not so much our focus as much as sort of honesty and productivity. [Deirdre] McCloskey talks about this with the different virtues from the different sort of phases of society and commercial societies have. I think that wonderful element where you can feel like, okay, I tried it and it wasn't for me. No big deal. Let's move on to the next thing. Or maybe I learned a little bit on the way or I networked with some great people and so nothing's wasted.

Juliette Sellgren 

Have we lost that do you think?

Rachel Ferguson (5:28)

The really high levels of anxiety are, I think it's a really important topic to discuss, but I think it's more complicated than we might think. I think that a lot is going on. We talk a lot about our phones and the anxiety. We're constantly feeling by looking at everyone's quote, perfect life. They only post those things. They don't post the other, fell down the stairs yesterday…

Juliette Sellgren 

Also, I fell down the stairs yesterday, envy that…

Rachel Ferguson 

Right? Then take a selfie of yourself at the bottom of the steps, probably not, right?

Juliette Sellgren 

My cutest moment.

Rachel Ferguson (6:08)

I think that's very real, but I also think that there's a lot of other social factors going into it. And this kind of relates to what we're talking about with social capital and the role of civil society in building social capital. I mean, one of the huge changes that we've experienced is a change in family structure. And so growing up with smaller families, fewer people to draw upon less organic ways of joining different groups to have a social life where before you might've just gone to church or you might've just right, you just had a bunch of cousins or whatever, and now we have to be intentional to make things happen, which is pretty hard. It's a pretty challenging thing. And so there's a lot going on and just shifting in modernity that I think is challenging and we're seeing anxiety as a kind of symptom of not exactly knowing how to navigate this stuff.

Juliette Sellgren (7:05)

I love that because honestly, I think something that's been kind of complicated is that we want to be really decisive and say “we know,” but the truth is we know in a lot of realms that we don't and that we're not going to know. And so saying, sure, it's technology, and we can focus on that and we focus on this other thing, we can focus on all the factors or all the symptoms. Even the one thing that's never been said is in part it's a civil society issue, and that's kind of important to acknowledge. 

On the one hand, we don't necessarily know and we'll never actually fully really know what to do, but saying, oh, technology bad, when at the same time we know it's brought so much good, we wouldn't even be able to be talking right now if not for that doesn't mean doesn't have his drawbacks. But exploring other avenues is really important because odds are, we don't have the full explanation, but also blaming technology doesn't seem to have an easy solution, whereas civil society, I feel like a lot of the time is the answer. Maybe that's just me, and maybe that's just us, but I feel like that's really nice because it gives us a different way of thinking about it and looking at it and then acting. I mean, it gives more opportunities to act and you are doing that and a lot of people are doing that.

Rachel Ferguson (8:34)

And just to jump in with a little bit of cultural analysis, I love that we live in a scientific society and we're so blessed with all of our advancements, truly, I'm so grateful for them, but I think it's really important not to become, I call it scientistic as opposed to scientific. What's the difference? Well, when you're scientific, you sort of treat science. It's always the solution. And I think when it comes to social science, we can often become sort of mechanistic in our view of human life. And so we think that there's always a mechanism that's causing something or a mechanism that can solve something when in fact, sometimes the things that is both causing or solving a problem is an organic thing. It's not a mechanistic thing. And so if we talk about something like family structure for instance, I mean that's an organic shift and it may admit have an organic solution, and so we have to get out of this idea that there's some push button solution or even that the problem itself is sort of mono causal. So I think most problems are multi causal, and that means that you're going to have also a variety of solutions. And so you have to have a holistic kind of view of the human person in order to really address things well.

Juliette Sellgren (9:56)

So let's talk about that. We've been talking about civil society and we talk about it a lot, but I feel like it's kind of worth defining both just actually definitionally, but also what does that look like? Not even just what should it look like and what does it do, but what is the reality on the ground of what civil society is like now?

Rachel Ferguson (10:25)

So I define it probably very sloppily, but excuse my cat’s tail there in picture, I define it as basically all of our voluntary exchanges that we make that aren't about buying and selling. And so it's not the state, right? Because that's enforced and it's not the market because that's buying and selling. Some people want to include the market in civil society because it is exchange and civil society is exchange too. But I do think it's worth thinking about the difference between the market, which at least admits of impersonal exchange and civil society, which is necessarily relational. So I don't need to know the cashier at the grocery store, but if I'm going to start a club or something like that, I need to actually have relationships with you. And that's a wonderful thing about the market is that you can benefit from each other even though it's an impersonal connection. How great. There's only so many people you can know and love. I think it's like 150.

Juliette Sellgren (11:29)

150, you can have five to seven family close members, 15 actual friends in the social psychology definition, and then 150 total acquaintances. That's not a lot.

Rachel Ferguson (11:46)

And then I think at 500 or something, it gets to, I recognize your face, something like that. I mean, we're limited. We're limited. We're embodied beings, we're spatiotemporal beings. And it's very important to take that into account when you think of natural scale. So natural scale is the idea of what is the size of something that makes it function well. And so markets are amazing because you can go global and they can function really well at a very high level of participants, but civil society institutions aren't like that because of our embodiment, because they're relational, they're necessarily constrained. And so you have to have real genuine communities. And no, it can't be the global community. What a weird term. What in the world is the global community? There's no unity between everyone on the whole entire globe. And so we use these words community, but we don't mean it because I may have a sense of solidarity with somebody for something we have in common, but I've never met them in my life.

And so yeah, thinking more deeply about, okay, what is involved in the arena of life where we're making volunteer exchanges, but we're not buying and selling. And Elizabeth Anderson, who's a great thinker, she's a democratic theorist. She definitely disagrees with us in many ways on free markets, but she takes markets seriously. She's one of the only philosophers who really understands Hayek and takes them seriously. I think she's been on EconTalk several times, but she makes this distinction between something transactional and something that's a gift. And in civil society we're exchanging things, but it's in a sort of gift reciprocity kind of way as opposed to a mechanistic transaction kind of way. I think that's an important distinction. And of course, most fundamentally, the most fundamental form of civil society is the family. There's no getting around it. [Friedrich] Hayek knew it and understood it because that's the basic unit of society is the family. And so you start there, but yeah, the clubs, the churches, the AA meetings, the community gardens, I mean, you could just go on and on.

Juliette Sellgren (14:07)

Yeah, I mean it's crazy to me, and I say that a lot, but it seems kind of evident if you look at what, when totalitarian dictators arise, what do they go after first? It's always a family. Sure, they're beefing with the churches, but to a certain extent, the church is a big enough entity, at least historically and in whatever region that they have to gradually encroach upon those liberties. I mean, obviously in terms of individual practicing things, they crack down, but in terms of sheer power, there's more resistance there. They go into breaking up families first, almost always. And that makes a lot of sense. And so it's kind of, I don't know, off-putting to be like, wow, they know it and we say it, and then do we act like we know it? I don't know.

Rachel Ferguson (15:05)

People often forget that we talk about John Locke's Second Treatise of Government where he goes through his arguments about property and the legislature and all of that, but we forget that he wrote a first treatise of government, and it was on paternal government, it was on parenting. 

Juliette Sellgren 

I didn't even know that.

Rachel Ferguson (15:22)

Yeah, that's the first treatise. And part of his point there is that the king, I mean, it's actually a fantastic point, which is that the king is not your father. The nation is not your family. He's saying your family is your family and your father is your father. But adults don't answer to their father anymore. I mean, you could love your father and respect him, but you don't have to do what he says. And so even if the king were your father, you wouldn't have to necessarily do what he said because adults don't have to do what other people say, but he's not, and a nation isn't a family. And that's a really important distinction where you go all the way back to the utopian thinkers, look at Plato and Plato's Republic, and he's going to say, oh, we're just like a family, and all the people of this age are going to treat everybody of this age as their children. And Aristotle comes along and says, man, I'd rather be somebody's real cousin in the real world than be a son in Plato's world because what the love is going to be totally watered down. You've got a hundred parents and a hundred kids. What is that? What sort of fatherhood is that or sonship is that?

Juliette Sellgren (16:28)

Well, and also it seems kind of naive a little bit because inevitably you have favorites. I mean, the emergence of your preferences and who gets along the fact that we're all different in some sort of way means that not everyone can get along in the same way, even within a family, even within a community where you decide everyone's going to be equal in everybody else's eyes, every single person's evaluation of their relationships are going to be different, even if it's arguably the same relationship. So yeah, you said community and you poked at the global community, but honestly, I'm going to ask you a really silly question, which is like, what do you mean by community?

Rachel Ferguson (17:15)

That's a good question. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up those numbers where you see sort of the limitedness of our human relationships. And I don't know that I have a pithy definition for community, but I do want to use the term in that organic sense, a group of people who know one another well, I do think really great, really great piece by John Paul II, otherwise known as Karol Wojtyla. He wrote a piece called an Analysis of the Verb to Use, and he makes the between persons and objects. Persons are to be loved, objects are to be used. You can use a person, but you have to also love them. It doesn't mean we can't get good things from each other, but we have to treat you as a person. But he says love really grows through shared projects. And I always return to this, love grows through shared projects.

And so your family project is your household, right? That's a major project. We've got to make this household function, we've got to get these kids, we've got to turn these kids into functioning citizens and so forth, and human beings and communities are built around a shared project. What do we have in common? How are we rowing in the same direction in which we are actually involved with one another in achieving this end? And so I'm not saying communities can't be more or less shallow. They can't. So you can have a community that has a shared project. You're part of the Breast Cancer Society or something. These may not be your best friends. It's somewhat transactional, but you do have this common goal of setting up the fun run or whatever it is that you want to do that's fairly shallow, but it's meaningful. And then you can go much deeper when you look at something like a spiritual community because in a spiritual community, it's more holistic. We have a shared project, not just of helping others like the breast cancer group, but also of developing a relationship with God ourselves and going deeper in our own spiritual lives. So because it's a more holistic goal, then it's going to create a closeness that's much more holistic as well. And so it's going to be a deeper community than the other.

Juliette Sellgren (19:31)

I always think, this is kind of funny because obviously I think universities count as communities to a certain extent, especially depending if it's fully a commuter school, maybe not, right? There are contextual differences, but UVA, they're always like, dear UVA community. And I'm like, yes, except I couldn't recognize 75% of the, if not more. I mean, there are 17,000 undergrads. And so that is in a way, goal oriented, but also college is kind of a holistic thing, not to the same extent that I think religious organizations are, but it is a community, but it's kind of a community that is stretched to a huge extent because within that you need actual communities, otherwise it doesn't function.

Rachel Ferguson (20:24)

Yeah, I was going to say too, the university is a medieval institution. We have to remember this, right? That's why you have faculty governance and the masters’ hoods and all of that. It's all left over from the Cambridge and Oxford, what is it, 900 or something or a thousand ad that these institutions are being founded. And so even though they have to run economically, so they have to be run a business to some extent, they really are a community in a very deep historical sense. And you have this connection with even the alumni. You have this connection with the history of this institution. But I will say that in practice, your sense of community is certainly going to come from your smaller groups. So for instance, you are an econ grad student, is that right?

Juliette Sellgren 

I'm an undergrad still.

Rachel Ferguson (21:14)

Undergrad. You're still an undergrad. Yeah, that's right. I know. So you're an econ undergrad. My guess is that there's a certain sense of togetherness among maybe the study groups or certain faculty and students. Maybe you guys have certain clubs that you're a part of. I know at Concordia Chicago, there's a strong sense of solidarity on the sports teams. There's also a strong sense of solidarity among the church work students, et cetera, because they have a lot more in common than just being a member of Concordia University of Chicago. And I can tell you it's a much smaller school, and there is a strong sense of community because of that where you feel like, I really know a lot of people, and I have a sense of it's a very humane sort of sized campus. You can walk from one end to the other in just a few minutes, and it definitely makes a difference.

So I think one thing that our mechanistic or our scientific mindset can fail to take into account is this concept of natural scale. And I always use the example of the Alton Giant. So I live in St. Louis and right across the river in Alton, Illinois was the tallest man who ever lived on record. How tall? I can't remember his name. It was Robert something. How tall was, but Robert something. He was like eight foot 11. Yeah. Yeah. He was so tall. He was twice the size of his own father. I mean he was just absolutely gargantuan and he had to wear braces on his legs because at that height, his body, even though he was proportional, his body was sort of getting crushed under his weight. And he wasn't a heavy guy. He was a skinny guy, but proportionality wasn't the issue. He wasn't the right size for a human being. And so it was putting so much stress on his legs that he had to wear braces all the time on his legs in order to shore up his bones. And then eventually, sadly, this was in the early 20th century, and so the braces ended up scraping against his skin, causing an infection, and he died. But you can think of lots of cases where something becomes dysfunctional when it goes out of scale.

Juliette Sellgren (23:28)

And so I can say that UVA is a community, but the truth is if I really want to a sense of community, I need to join a club, have a sport, be a part, spend time with my professors, start to actually participate in a much smaller sense of community.

Yeah. Wait, okay. So then I want to ask another kind of, not annoying, but weirdly conceptual vague question, what is then the relationship between communities and institutions?

Rachel Ferguson (23:59)

Well, that's a big question, but I would say it's reciprocal.

So you're not going to create powerful institutions without powerful community, but communities are going to crumble and die if they don't have institutions to support them. And I can think of, I mean, let's take a really interesting cases like William F. Buckley, the conservative guy, you know him. He started National Review and William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman and all these guys are hanging out and they're seeing what they're up against, culturally one might say. And with regard to economic ideas, and they decide to start a bunch of stuff, they start the Philadelphia Society and they start ISI [Intercollegiate Study Institute], and they just start and they start National Review. And so they create these institutions that then in turn engender community. And so now to this very day, you have various communities that are formed around these institutions, and then the institutions survive according to the way that the community goes. And so sometimes the magazine or the institution may sort of veer off in a different direction because the community takes it in a different direction and you go, oh, that wasn't what it used to be, right? Or it sticks to its mission or whatever. And so I think there's a snowball effect between the two. That's really important.

Juliette Sellgren (25:26)

I like that. Okay, so let's go to ground level. What is Love the Lou? How did you get involved with it? How does it relate to what we're talking about?

Rachel Ferguson (25:39)

It totally relates. So Love the Lou is a neighborhood stabilization organization. And the reason I use that term is because in discussions about poverty and economic development, one of the things that I really like to emphasize is the idea of stabilizing a block, a neighborhood block. And this comes from Robert Lupton. Actually, there's many think John Perkins from the Christian Community Development Association, Robert Lupton has book Toxic Charity. They're both doing this. So moving on to a block, finding the leaders, right? Finding and empowering the grassroots leaders and trying to create a whole environment of improvement going on in that block where particularly the young people are being empowered first. So Frederick Douglass talks about this, it's a lot easier to raise a healthy young person than to fix someone who's broken later. And it doesn't mean that you give up on adults, but that you make sure to sort of start with the young people.

And so if you can get the young people building the community gardens, working in the wood shop, doing small machines with lawnmowers, learning how to start a business, running the farmer's market, right? Learning how to market, learning how to sell themselves, et cetera, then slowly over time, there's just a sense that changes on the street. And the thing that people don't understand about poverty in America is that it's really about isolation. It's not necessarily about their not being enough stuff or enough cash or something. That's really not the issue, at least here in the United States. It's about social isolation. So if you read in my book, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, I talk about the highways, the urban renewal, the perverse centers of welfare state, the redlining, et cetera. And what do you see? You see communities including families that are blown apart by terrible federal policy that is trying to socially engineer them from above.

And what they actually end up doing is undermining decades and decades and decades of institutional investment that was made in the black community and that was paying off, which we see in the amazing drop in the poverty level, even before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It's just absolutely amazing. And so all of that to say, when we think about social isolation, we realize that a kid living on an inner city block often really can't even go one neighborhood over because that's a different gang territory. They may not be safe there. So what does that mean? That means you can't even cross through that neighborhood perhaps to get to a job or get to somewhere else. And so you end up having such a constrained little world of this four to six block area that is your whole life. And you and I who are middle income people are thinking, oh my gosh, there's a school over there. There's an opportunity over there. There's people who want to pay for your college. And to that kid, you might as well be talking about Afghanistan. It just is so far away. And so if you're going to stabilize the block, once again, it's taking that embodiment into account, come onto the block. Because when that kid is walking down the street and sees the community gardens and he goes, what's going on here? And you go, Hey, do you want to make some money? You can be in charge of the cucumbers.

Then the kid's like, oh, well, I could actually do this. It's right here. It's right here where I am. And then when you've got a church coming in to rehab an old house, and who does the old house go to? It goes to one of the indigenous leaders who already lives on the street. And so what's the idea? People are being empowered, people are gaining assets, people are gaining employment skills, and it's all happening on the same block. And then you get network effects. So one kid wants to get a driver's license. Now everybody wants to get a driver's license. That's really hard to do when you've got one parent who's working three jobs and another parent who's in prison. But if you have a neighborhood stabilization effort, then you have people who are in a very holistic and relational long-term way, investing in people's lives such that you can teach a few kids how to drive a car and get 'em up there to get their license and figure out how to pay for insurance and that kind of stuff.

And so it's really contending with the fact once again, that there isn't probably a mechanistic solution to this social isolation. In fact, it was our mechanistic mindset, capital, progressive, central planning mindsets that got us into this in the first place. And my line that I always use here is that the state can create problems that the state cannot solve. And it really goes back to the conservative insight that institutions are very hard to build and they're very easy to tear down. And so if you want to blow up a neighborhood by driving a highway right through the middle of it and scatter everybody to the four winds, including the black church and the black school and the fraternal society and all of the social capital that had been built there, now everybody's scattered and isolated again in the second ghetto. And so what do you have to do?

You have to go back to the solution that was working in the first place, which is the rebuilding of social capital. But you have to do that in a way that is not, you don't become the central planner. So you come in and you are empowering the people with the local knowledge. It's very Hayekian in this sense, who has the local knowledge, the neighbors themselves, and guess what else? They have credibility from the neighborhood. Do you have credibility? No, you're an outsider and I don't trust you for one minute. And so you can over time build trust in a neighborhood, but the real goal is to hand everything over to the neighbors themselves because they have the solution for their neighborhood. Not you, but you have the networks. You are not socially isolated. That's the difference. And so you can bring in networks in terms of capitalization, employment and other issues like that, and empower the indigenous leaders to really make the difference.

Juliette Sellgren (32:16)

I love it. I love every minute of that.

Rachel Ferguson 

It's amazing. Everyone's invited to Love the Lou for a tour. If you're ever,

Juliette Sellgren 

I would love to come over the summer.

Rachel Ferguson 

Absolutely.

Juliette Sellgren (32:28)

Okay, there. We'll figure it out later. So when we were talking about this on the podcast, you referred it as true charity. And I think something I've been having a lot of conversations with people about recently is that like, oh, well you can't do X or Y. It's not charitable. Why would you take that away government wise or this or that or something else? And kind of this idea of you have resources, why don't you give them, or why are you upset about taxes? Because you have money and someone else, and true. And there is kind of this libertarian argument of I know where I want to put my money and if I want to give it great, if I don't, great, whatever. And what you were just saying about where the solution to the problem comes from and keeping it local, how do you distinguish and what does true charity mean versus government giving? Obviously there's a central planner aspect, but money is money.

Rachel Ferguson (33:48)

Yeah. So first credit where credit is due; the term true charity is actually an organization in southwest Missouri. Check it out online. True Charity is so fantastic. I am a True Charity ambassador, but I did that. They're not paying me. I did it. I think they're amazing. True Charity is coming up with extremely practical ways to change toxic charity, frankly, into really dignifying and empowering forms of charity. So what do we mean by that? And I think you're right. I think it goes deeper than just, well, I get to decide where my money goes. There's something deeper there. And we know that because private charity can be just as toxic as government support. Let's look at ourselves for a minute. Just because it's voluntary doesn't mean we're doing a good job. It's like, don't just love the poor with your hearts. Love them with your minds too. Think it through. And so what they do is they appeal to the work of Marvin Olasky. Are you familiar with him? He wrote the book, the Tragedy of American Compassion.

Juliette Sellgren 

I have not read the book, but I've heard the name.

Rachel Ferguson (34:56)

It's truly worth reading. It just came out with its 30th anniversary edition. And Marvin Olasky is now the news and global editor at Christianity Today. He's a real genuine journalist. He goes and literally sleeps in homeless shelters and figures out what's really going on with various models and interviews people and all of that. And what Olasky does is he goes back and he looks at the way the charity was historically done, and he compares it with how he believes it went wrong. And what he finds, he calls the seven marks of compassion, the seven marks of compassion, and they're just A through G, which makes it easy to remember A, B, C, D, E, F, G. So A is affiliation. What does this mean? This means if I'm helping someone who's in a troubled spot and I just swoop in and give them something, I may have literally just helped them to become more isolated from the people who they're naturally affiliated with, whether that's a family member or a church community or a neighborhood or whatever.

I've swooped in from the outside, provided this thing for them, and now they have even less of a relationship. What if I were to get to know somebody just enough to say, Hey, does your mom know where you are? This happened just the other day, a pastor emailed me. He had been to the True Charity training that we hosted at Concordia, and he said, oh my gosh, Rachel, he said, A woman walked into the Friday night youth meeting asking for bus money. Young woman, clearly troubled, and he was going into his pocket to hand her the bus money, and then he stopped himself. He had been at the training and he goes, Hey, what's going on with your family? And she goes, well, I'm too ashamed to call my mom. And he says, can we just call her right now?

Did they, so they call her mom, and of course her mom is like, oh, thank you so much. I didn't know where she was. Okay. And so her mom comes and picks her up. Now, if he had given her the bus money, she'd probably just be in the same exact position tomorrow that she was in today, right? I mean, she would've gotten to where she needed to go that night, but there's nothing transformative. But by reconnecting her with her family, there's at least the possibility of something much deeper happening with her. So I think one of the things we have to think about is the way, not just the state, but we in our own private efforts, end up undermining organic community through the way that we help others. And then I'll go through the others real fast. B is for bonding. So that's getting to know people well enough that you can know.

For instance, maybe they really have burned all their bridges with their affiliations, but they do have a hard skill. And with a little help, you could get them a job or something like that, but you're never going to know that if they're just walking through the soup kitchen line because you don't even know their name. So you have to get to know people. C is categorization. So what's the difference between somebody who needs immediate relief that happens? You can have a natural disaster, or you have people who are genuinely helpless, elderly shut-ins or something. What's the difference between them and somebody who needs development? And so the person who needs development, you need to actually have a much deeper investment in, because you've got to kind of get them from here to there is for employment or exchange. So you're always looking for ways to treat a person as though they have something to offer.

Okay, so if I just hand you something I've told you that you're helpless now, it could be that you're not particularly helpless. You're in a tough spot, but that doesn't mean you're helpless. In old days, in Olasky goes over this history. If there was, for instance, a guy who came to get food, who was a person who was perfectly able, they would go send him to chop firewood for the widow, the elderly widow, and then once he'd done that, he had earned his meal, so then he could come back and get the hot meal. But no, I'm not just going to hand you a hot meal when you're a perfectly capable person. I'm going to treat you like someone who's able to purchase it. Even if you don't have money, you can purchase it with your labor. And so what we have to remember is that work is part of what it is to be human.

I mean, I know we always think of work as like, oh, work is a four letter word, just want to relax. But the truth is, nobody who's unemployed for a really long period of time feels good. That's actually one of the most depressing situations to be in. And so instead, what we want to do is honor the dignity of people and their ability to contribute. And what you find is that that is inspiring to them. So hey, maybe I can do more. Maybe I can get going on my own. And then he goes on to talk about the importance of freedom, which of course we appreciate. And then she is for God, because many of these charitable communities are religious and they are spiritual in nature, and they are inspired by the idea that people are made in the image of God and that we need to do everything we can to help them to flourish.

Juliette Sellgren (40:09)

I'm in love every minute of this. The last thing you said I think is really important because it's the seed from which the other ones kind of develop. Without that, how do you have an image that you're moving towards? How do you realize that? And I think that's really important. I think that's also kind of part of the problem. How do you believe in people if you don't see their potential and where that comes from, where the value comes from?

Rachel Ferguson (40:48)

I also think that if we're too fatalistic about human beings, we can believe that if they didn't get the right things in childhood, I mean Aristotle believed this, right? If they didn't get the right things in childhood, they're kind of a hopeless case. And what we found through things like drug recovery and those sorts of programs is miracles can happen. I mean, human beings can really be transformed and back into who they were truly meant to be before the wound, before the trauma, before whatever it might be. And so I do think that spiritual perspective is really important because it gives you hope all the time. And I think if we were to be without it, we could kind of justify saying, you know what? Just let 'em go, right? You're never going to solve it. And I hate to say this, I'm going to burst a couple of people's bubbles, but some of our great heroes were atheists, and they were hopeless in this regard. I had a long before he died, I had a long lunch with Walter Williams, and we argued about this over lunch, and he's like, just give up. I mean, he had kind of a hopeless attitude towards these inner city communities because it's true that family structure had crumbled, and it's true that there were high levels of crime, and it's true that the education system wasn't working. And so he was thinking, Ew, idealistic weirdos just let it go. And we kind of sparred.

But I have Lucas, who's the founder of Love the Lou sitting right next to me, and Lucas is like, William, we're doing it. We're doing it. Come down to Enright Boulevard and meet our youth. They're going to school and getting jobs when their older brothers and cousins went to jail and got murdered in the streets. They've got a completely different life ahead of them. Is every problem of their solved? Of course not. But it's a totally different trajectory. And in a generation or two, that whole block could be a completely different kind of place, and hopefully the blocks around it, because there's a natural spread of these ideas as you begin to see a spark of hope. But it does take a certain kind of delusional optimism to get started, and that really comes from our faith.

Juliette Sellgren (43:09):

Yeah. I also love the idea that it's by block. It's a margin. Love the idea of the margin. Yeah. There you go. Marginal. Yeah. There's a reason why we think that matters, because at the end of the day, it always does. So that I really love what I was going to kind of ask to begin to wrap up here. You kind of led me right into it, but it's just a vegetable garden. There are definitely people who, even if they want to believe, right? Even if they're not like atheists or cynics or anything, it's just a vegetable garden. What can it do? And so I don't know, how do you talk to people about that? How do you address that, given that you've seen it and engaged with it and are such a huge advocate of stuff like this, it seems kind of infeasible and impossible, and yet it works. So how do you talk about that?

Rachel Ferguson (44:07)

Yeah. I actually think you're addressing a really important challenge, which is that civil society is not as easy to talk about as the market of the state, because number one, you're gathering a lot of disparate things together. All of the voluntary things we do that aren't buying and selling. And so you're kind of putting them into one pile, but also you're describing a kind of social capital involves a kind of social evolution. This is why I love Hayek so much. He just gets it. He gets it.

Juliette Sellgren 

He really liked Biology, that's why.

Rachel Ferguson (44:39)

Yes. Right? And so the Scottish Enlightenment guys have this emphasis on custom and tradition. He's getting it from them. He's getting these ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment. And so it is harder to explain. So as usual, Juliette, we in the Liberty movement have to explain counterintuitive ideas to people, and it's the opposite of what it seems like. And the same with civil society where you go, no, it's not. It's not even about the vegetable garden. It doesn't even have to be a vegetable garden. It doesn't matter what it is. The point is that it's a shared project. So it goes back to the idea that you build love through a shared project. Once you have something that you're doing together, now you're relating to one another. And one problem with socially isolated neighborhoods is the low level of trust. We see this exact issue in international economics.

If you have institutions that kind of don't exist or are highly dysfunctional or corrupt, you can't trust each other because if something goes wrong, you don't have an institution to fall back on. Your enemy will just bribe the court or something like that. Bribe the judge. And so what happens? People can't take risks together. They can't enter into that deal, that creative endeavor that they would've entered into together if they'd had a little bit of backing from the institutions. Well just apply that to the domestic case. Our destabilized neighborhoods are in the exact same positions. Their institutions have crumbled. The family is really a mess. The churches have been very much weakened by the destruction of the family, actually, I think. But then you also have even enforcement of crime and all of that is really in bad shape. The education system is in bad shape.

So what do you have to do? You have to start from zero, right? You have to start from, I don't want to say zero, because these neighborhoods have wonderful assets. So you do want to take advantage of assets. Yeah, no, but I mean, there's so much talent and great ideas, and in some cases, there's really cool history like Enright Boulevard where Love the Lou works is really close to where Chuck Berry was born, and Tina Turner was discovered there. There's lots you could do with it. It's a really interesting neighborhood. So I don't mean that people have nothing, I don't mean that they have assets, but we know that the normal institutional environment that you're operating in is so weakened by all of the terrible policies that we put into place in the sixties. And so all of that to say that community garden is really about rebuilding the trust. And that can take, I mean, Robert Lupton says it takes eight to 10 years to stabilize a block, and that is being totally dedicated to that project for eight to 10 years. Six of those years approximately will be spent just proving that you're trustworthy. And what does that mean? That means your van gets stolen, and then you don't leave, and then your van gets stolen again, and you still don't leave.

You have to show like, I'm staying. I love you and I'm staying, and I'm dedicated to this project, and I'll suffer the things that you suffer. I will suffer with you. And when somebody gets murdered on the corner at 3:00 AM you can come and I will pray with you. Let me tell you, the employment office run by the United States government cannot pray with you at 3:00 AM in the morning when somebody got murdered on the corner. That's not the kind of love that you can get, but that is what you need. And so building up that sense of I have someplace to go. We have one another, and we can actually do things and accomplish things together. That's really what it's about. But it is hard to explain because it's an organic process. It's not a mechanistic process, and that's what makes it hard for people to get through their heads.

Juliette Sellgren (48:36)

But what's so funny is it's so human. The way you just explained it applies to every single relationship any single person has. I was literally explaining, I used a different analogy, but equivalent of stealing the van to my friend the other day. She did something like slighted us just a little bit. It was very minor. And also no one died on a street corner. It was nothing. My van didn't get stolen. But friends are there, even if you steal their van, and hopefully you're working towards maybe next time I'll just steal your hairbrush and give it back, and hopefully someday I'll never steal your van. But friendship and trust and community actually seems really to be working towards not just individual improvement, but group improvement in this way, and acknowledging that you're going to fall down, you're going to steal a van because sometimes you just do. Or if that's something you've always done, part of learning not to do that is doing it and then realizing maybe not, but it still happens. Our defenses, false stuff. And so it really humanizes this problem in a way that I don't think other conversations about this and other narratives surrounding this sort of stuff does. So thank you.

Rachel Ferguson (49:55)

And let me just add one thing on the ceiling, the van thing. I also don't want to give people the impression that you sort of have to have no boundaries at all. And so I'm not saying that the indigenous leaders sold the van. Somebody sold the van. But the point is that Lucas stayed. He didn't move his family away just because his van got stolen a couple of times by somebody. But I will tell you this, they did kick the drug dealers out. They did. I mean, it was Ms. Sharon. The volunteers came down and Ms. Sharon said, tear the front, tear that porch off of that house where the drug dealers hang out, tear it down, get rid of it. They took steps to make it an unwelcome place for the people who were going to undermine the growth that was occurring. Does that mean we don't care about those people?

No. It means that those people weren't ready to be a part of the shared project. So there's some amount of discernment that it takes to say, okay, we can move forward with these more stable community members. Lots of grace for people to mess up. There may be people who really just aren't on board. They need to go. And that doesn't mean we're not ready to welcome them with open arms the minute they hit the wall and they decide they want to live a different way, Hey, come on in. But I want to make it clear, sometimes you do have to leave people behind. It's not so idealistic. And I'll just tell quickly this story story where Bob Lupton came and spoke. I invited him to come and speak in St. Louis, and this passionate 1970s hippie nun got up and she was yelling at him saying, not every community member gets to stay.

You send some people away with vouchers and yada, yada, yada. And she was saying that he was doing something wrong. He was making a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor or something like this. And he said, that's absolutely right, that not everybody got to stay. And I am not ashamed of that has nothing to do with what they deserve. In some cosmic moral sense. It has to do with moving the shared project forward. You have to be able to do it. And if you're going to come in here and blow it up, you can't be here. And so that's okay, and we love you and come back when you're ready, but you're not ready right now. So anyway, I just wanted to clarify that.

Juliette Sellgren (52:13)

No, no, that's really important. I mean, play down someone who maybe runs over your dog and doesn't apologize, probably doesn't really need, they should feel bad. There is a boundary. But I love it. I feel like we've really hit on something. It might just be me, but I definitely, I've enjoyed this so much. I have one last question for you, but thank you so much for sharing this and for talking to me about this. I've enjoyed it. I know my listeners will as well. So here's my last question.

Rachel Ferguson

Okay.

Juliette Sellgren (52:48)

What is one thing that you are currently working on to improve yourself or your skills?

Rachel Ferguson (52:54)

Oh, wow. What a great question. I'm a spiritual formation nerd. My favorite author is Dallas Willard, who sort of popularized the spiritual disciplines. And so silence, solitude, silent retreats, that sort of thing. But one of the ones that I never got into was fasting. It just wasn't something that anybody in my community was doing and so forth. Well, I've learned so much more about it, and not only the spiritual benefits, but the health benefits and understanding how fasting shows us that the physical realm isn't the only reality, right? There's power to be drawn upon beyond that realm. So anyway, I am working on that. So I'm learning to fast. I've done a couple of ones, and then I did a three day recently, and of course, Lent is coming up, and so I'll be doing some fasting. Then I'll be fasting through social media for Lent. And so yeah, I think that it's really profound to just sort of clear your mind completely with a long-term fast and be able to hear the still small voice. I'll put it that way.

Juliette Sellgren 

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.