Why Traditional Values Are the Foundation of Success | Dennis Prager - Radio Host & PragerU Founder
Here are the top 10 key takeaways from Dennis Prager's compelling case for why biblical wisdom and traditional values form the essential foundation for both personal success and societal flourishing.
1. Wisdom trumps knowledge and good intentions
Wisdom stands infinitely more important than knowledge, IQ, or good intentions. Without wisdom, no good can be accomplished. People with good intentions supported history's greatest mass murderers like Stalin and Mao. The number of Westerners who supported these tyrants with pure intentions was substantial.
A fool represents the opposite of a wise person. These are the true polarities in human nature. If you rely solely on your heart or conscience, your chances of doing good remain very small. You need wisdom as your foundation.
The five books of the Torah contain more wisdom than anywhere else in human history. This wisdom provides the essential guidance needed to navigate life properly. Without this foundation, even well-intentioned actions can lead to catastrophic results.
2. Conscience alone is unreliable for moral guidance
Every Nazi had a conscience, every communist had a conscience, and every murderer in prison has a conscience. The vast majority of human consciences prove worthless unless designed by transcendent moral values. For most people, we shape our conscience to align with what we're already doing.
Murderers typically don't lose sleep at night. The only people truly racked by guilty conscience are good people, and they're not that numerous. You have to be a well-educated secular fool to believe conscience alone is sufficient for moral behavior.
A handful of people might find their conscience sufficient to make them good. However, for the vast majority, we need a higher moral source than internal feelings. This is why biblical wisdom provides such crucial guidance for ethical living.
3. Gratitude serves as the foundation of goodness and happiness
There exists no kind ingrate on Earth, and there are no mean grateful people. Gratitude is the mother of the two biggest things in life: goodness and happiness. You cannot be good and you cannot be happy if you're not grateful.
This explains why God becomes upset with the Israelites in the Bible. After being freed from slavery in Egypt, their first response was to complain about the food and ask to return to bondage. This demonstrates how people don't naturally yearn for freedom but rather to be taken care of.
The biblical account of Jewish ingratitude actually supports the Torah's divine authorship. No people would voluntarily depict themselves so negatively in their own holy book unless it reflected divine truth. This honesty about human nature provides crucial wisdom about the importance of cultivating gratitude.
4. Faith must be grounded in reason to be authentic
Faith that doesn't make sense cannot be believed. If something appears irrational, it shouldn't be accepted as truth. This approach might seem radical among believers, but it represents the only authentic path to genuine faith.
Secular people actually believe in more irrational things than religious people. No religious person believes men can give birth, yet millions of secular people accept this obvious falsehood. The pursuit of truth and wisdom are essentially synonymous endeavors.
The name Israel itself means "struggle with God," indicating that questioning and arguing with the divine is built into the foundation of biblical faith. Abraham, the first monotheist, extensively argued with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This struggle represents a healthy aspect of genuine belief.
5. God's existence matters less than God's necessity
Arguing for God's necessity proves far more persuasive than arguing for God's existence. Believing God exists doesn't necessarily change behavior, but understanding God's necessity transforms how we live. The question "Why is God necessary?" changes everything about moral conduct.
God serves as a judge who watches and evaluates our behavior. This awareness influences decisions in ways that conscience alone cannot. When faced with moral choices, the knowledge that God observes our actions provides powerful motivation for ethical behavior.
Consider the practical example of damaging someone's car in a parking lot. Most people don't leave notes when they think they can escape unnoticed. However, believing God watches creates accountability that transcends human observation and legal consequences.
6. The greatest miracle is existence itself
The ultimate miracle isn't biblical events like parting seas or multiplying loaves. The greatest miracle is that we exist at all, that the universe exists, and that we can communicate with each other. If someone doesn't recognize existence as miraculous, they don't understand biblical faith.
Even if God never performed any biblical miracles, belief would remain justified based on the miracle of existence alone. The fact that anything exists rather than nothing represents an incomprehensible wonder that points toward divine creation.
This perspective shifts focus from seeking supernatural signs to appreciating the extraordinary nature of ordinary existence. The Hebrew phrase warns against relying on miracles because the fundamental miracle surrounds us constantly in the form of life itself.
7. Post-biblical society has no hope for sustaining freedom
Elite universities represent moral wastelands filled with spectacularly unhappy people who aren't having children, getting married, or building civilization. These institutions demonstrate what happens when society abandons biblical foundations. The more elite the university, the more support exists for groups like Hamas.
Freedom of speech is not a left-wing value but a liberal value. Without biblical grounding, freedom will be abolished because secular ideologies cannot sustain the principles that created Western civilization. Current trends toward removing parental authority mirror how Nazism and communism began.
Society continues down destructive paths like removing healthy breasts from girls who claim to be boys. There is no hope for a post-biblical West because secular institutions lack the wisdom necessary to maintain moral order and human flourishing.
8. Different roles for men and women reflect divine design
The Torah emphasizes that the most important division in the human race is between male and female. This represents the only division that truly matters, as God created humans specifically as male and female from the very beginning. Color divisions aren't even noted in biblical text.
Religious roles necessarily reflect this male-female distinction, which explains why only men serve as priests. This isn't about secular roles, where practical considerations should determine who does what. When wives earn more than husbands, families naturally adapt their arrangements accordingly.
Preserving male-female distinctions in religious contexts maintains divine order. No religion that has ordained women has thrived, suggesting this principle serves an important function in maintaining religious vitality and traditional structure.
9. Educational institutions lack wisdom despite accumulating knowledge
Universities represent the most radically secular and simultaneously the stupidest of all institutions. Since the 1970s, they've promoted moral confusion about fundamental issues like the differences between men and women, freedom versus tyranny, and basic biological reality.
Academic institutions once claimed men and women were basically the same. Today they've progressed to claiming that thinking you're a woman actually makes you a woman. This represents a progression of idiocy that becomes more detached from reality over time.
These institutions taught moral equivalence between America and the Soviet Union, treating the conflict as competing superpowers rather than freedom versus tyranny. Such fundamental moral blindness demonstrates why formal education cannot replace wisdom derived from biblical sources.
10. Biblical wisdom transforms lives regardless of faith background
The rational approach to biblical interpretation has brought countless people to faith, including Jews to Judaism and Christians to church. The effectiveness comes from focusing on necessity rather than existence arguments. When people understand why they need biblical wisdom, transformation follows naturally.
Reading detailed analysis of concepts like ingratitude makes it impossible to remain ungrateful. Explaining the Ten Commandments reveals practical wisdom that applies universally. For example, the commandment to honor parents doesn't require love but demands respect, which protects society from tyranny.
The books work regardless of which volume you start with because wisdom permeates all five books equally. The target audience is universal - someone who has never heard of the Bible should find these explanations compelling and life-changing.