Mary Ruwart - Healing Our World | Hn 263

**Adam Haman** (0:07)
Hello, hello, welcome to Haman Nature, I am Adam Haman. And I'm ever so pleased to be joined by Dr. Mary Ruwart.
Mary is a biomedical researcher and a very well-known libertarian author and activist. And I'm just tickled pink to have you here, Mary. Welcome to Haman Nature.

**Mary Ruwart** (0:24)
Well, I'm glad to be here, Adam. So thank you.

**Adam Haman** (0:28)
I ran into Mary a couple of weeks ago now at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, and that was just a delight. You gave a very interesting talk on how we're all going to be able to live forever, healthily and happily, and I'm excited about that.
But before we get there, I want to talk to you about your books. I was a little late to the party. I ran into your book Healing Our World in 2003, which I think was the third edition. Did that come out in 92 originally?

**Mary Ruwart** (1:06)
Yes. The latest edition is, I think it's 2016

**Adam Haman** (1:12)
Oh, wow.

**Mary Ruwart** (1:13)
Yeah. I keep changing the subtitle for every edition and the cover so that you can tell which one you have.

**Adam Haman** (1:21)
Oh, that's smart. I like the age of aggression is, I guess, number three, edition three. You also wrote this year book, Short Answers to Tough Questions for Libertarians Out on the Move when normies are asking them those annoying questions. How would things work? I thought that was great also. I think that was 2012
But I was just blown over by Healing Our World, so I want to ask you how it came into existence, what niche did you think you were lacking? Because I definitely thought it was different from other things I had read. I came up, I guess it was Ayn Rand that opened the door for me.

**Mary Ruwart** (2:06)
Same here.

**Adam Haman** (2:08)
Excellent.
I didn't know what I was until I read her work, and even though she hated the word libertarian, I'm like, no, you're a libertarian lady. So I read everything she had to read, and then I started branching out. But she was just all about the individual, individual rights, creating an argument about natural rights. We get these things according to our nature and the nature of the universe, and I'm down with all that. But I wasn't hearing a lot of voices with your tone, just talking about how it actually makes the world a better place, not just selfishly for us. And so, please, anything that comes to mind about why you wrote this, what you thought you were doing, and how it was received, I'd love to hear it.

**Mary Ruwart** (2:58)
Well, actually, it was kind of an interesting journey because I was reading about our foreign policy. And of course, what I read told me that almost everything that we do, we, meaning the United States government, of course, but unfortunately, we get tagged with that. So everything we did was like just the opposite of what we quote, should be doing if we want to have a peaceful and prosperous world.
And when I read that, something, something changed. And, and, and I, I just experienced a knowing.
Some might call it revelation if, if you're thinking of it in a, I guess, in a more spiritual way. And I understood connections that I had never understood before. You kind of mentioned one that if we want a peaceful and prosperous world, we need the libertarian ethic or something very, very close to that. And I had been raised Catholic, went to Catholic school for 11 years. So I saw all of this as the political expression of loving your neighbor, which I thought was a very practical philosophy actually. I think loving one's neighbor is something that is not just for them.
It's for you too, because it will put you in a more positive, optimistic state of being. And I think it's an elevation of consciousness if you want to think of it that way. And so is the libertarian ethic, because I've had a lot of libertarians say, oh, I wish I had never found out about this because I've lost all my friends and family over it because they don't agree with me. And so when I asked them, well, if you could turn back the clock, would you want to not know? And none of them say yes, because it's not just about making the world a better place, it's about elevating our consciousness. And so anyhow, all this came together in a way, it was not in English, it was kind of, I can't even describe how it was, but I had a big smile on my face for about a week because I realized that if we don't blow ourselves up first, we're probably going to end up having a libertarian world because that brings us the peace and prosperity that all of us really pretty much want. Because even people who are aggressors, they do it because they think they're going to have peace and plenty, that's gonna profit them somehow. But in fact, what I recognized is that, and this is actually meeting some people who were manipulating the public into believing that things like socialism is good and because they manipulated the public, it was very interesting because they felt they weren't feeling too happy, at least not that I could see. So I asked one of them, what would you need to do to feel happy? And he said, I think I'd have to feel connected to humankind and I don't. And of course, how can you feel connected when you're busy aggressing against people? It creates separation. So you can see there were a lot of things that came together. I'm abbreviating it obviously. But I tried to do a video, but it just didn't. It wasn't enough. So I ended up writing a book for the first time. I'd never written a book before. It would take me a year. It took me five. I had my sister, Marty, who really helped me with the editing and made sure she understood what I was trying to do, even though I couldn't articulate it initially.