back to indexDouglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West | Lex Fridman Podcast #296
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I think that some people are deliberately trying
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to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past
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in order to say there's nothing good,
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nothing you can hold on to, no one you should revere,
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you've got no heroes, the whole thing comes down,
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who's left standing, oh, we've also got this idea
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from the 20th century still about Marxism,
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and no, no, I will not have the entire landscape
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deracinated, and then the worst ideas tried again.
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The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray,
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author of The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity,
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and his most recent book, The War on the West,
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How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.
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He's a brilliant, fearless, and often controversial thinker
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who points out and pushes back against what he sees
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as the madness of our modern world.
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I should note that the use of the word Marxism
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and the West in this conversation refers primarily
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to cultural Marxism and the cultural values
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of Western civilization, respectively.
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This is in contrast to my previous conversation
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with Richard Wolff, where we focused on Marxism
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as primarily a critique of capitalism,
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and thus looking at it through the lens
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of economics and not culture.
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Nevertheless, these two episodes stand opposite
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of each other with very different perspectives
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on how we build a flourishing civilization together.
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I leave it to you, the listener, to think
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and to decide which is the better way.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Douglas Murray.
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You recently wrote the book titled The War on the West,
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which in part says that the values, ideas,
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and history of Western civilization are under attack.
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So let's start with the basics.
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Historically and today, what are the ideas
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that represent Western civilization?
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The good, the bad, the ugly.
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I actually don't get stuck on definitions,
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precisely because, as you know, once you get stuck
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on definitions, there's a possibility
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you'll never get off them.
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I'd say a few things.
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Firstly, obviously the Western tradition
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is a specific tradition, a specific tradition
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of ideas, culture, well known to be, perhaps,
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easily defined by the combination of Athens
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and Jerusalem, the world of the Bible,
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and the world of ancient Greece and, indeed, Rome.
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Effectively, it creates European civilization,
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which itself spawns the rest of the Western civilizations,
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America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others.
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But these are the main countries
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that we still refer to as the West.
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So there's a specific tradition
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and all the things that come from it.
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My shorthand cheat on this answer is to say,
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you know when you're not in it.
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So if you've ever been to Beijing, Shanghai,
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you know you're not in the West.
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Somewhere else, you know you're not in the West.
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When you're in Tokyo, you're somewhere extraordinary,
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but you know you're not in the West.
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Obviously, there are, let's say, borderline questions,
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like is Russia in the West,
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which I sort of leave open as a question.
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Well, if you were placed into Moscow blindfolded
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and you woke up and you couldn't hear the language,
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or maybe you didn't know what the language sounded like,
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would you guess you were in the West or not?
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I think I was somewhere near it.
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I mean, you know, it's also a question, doesn't it,
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whether it's European.
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And I think the answer to that is not really,
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although massively influenced by Europe,
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but, and times wanting to reach towards it,
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at times wanting to stay away,
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but a part of the West, possibly, yes.
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But anyway, it's a very specific tradition.
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It's one of a number of major traditions in the world,
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and because it's hard to define
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doesn't mean it doesn't exist, you know.
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Are there certain characteristics and qualities
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about the values and the ideas that define it?
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Is the type of rule, the type of governmental structure?
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I mean, the rule of law, property owning democracies,
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and much more, I mean, these are, of course,
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things that ended up being developed in America
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and then given back to much of the rest of the West.
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I'd say there are other,
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perhaps more controversial attributes
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I would give to the West.
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One is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world,
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which is not shared, of course, by every other culture.
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The late philosopher George Steiner
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who said he could never get out of his head
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the haunting fact that the boats
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only seemed to go out from Europe.
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You know, the explorers, the scholars, the linguists,
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the people who wanted to discover other civilizations,
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and indeed, even resurrect ancient civilizations
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and lost civilizations.
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These were scholars that were always coming from the West
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to discover this elsewhere.
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By contrast, you know, there were never boats
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coming from Egypt to help the Anglo Saxons
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discover the origins of their language and so on.
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So I think there is a sort of ravenous interest
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in the rest of the world,
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which can be said to be a Western.
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Attribute, although it, of course,
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also has, one should immediately preface it,
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some downsides and many criticisms
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that can be made of some of the consequences
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Because, of course, it's not entirely lacking
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So it's not just the scholars, it's also.
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The armies, and they're looking to gain access
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and control over resources elsewhere.
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And hence the imperial imperative.
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To conquer, to expand.
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Although that itself, of course, is a universal thing.
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I mean, no civilization, I think, that we know of
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doesn't try to gain ground from its neighbors where it can.
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The Western ability to go further faster
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certainly gave an advantage in that regard.
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Do some civilizations get a bit more excited
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by that kind of idea than others?
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Because you could say it's the Western civilization
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because the technological innovation was more efficient
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at doing that kind of thing.
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But maybe it wanted it more, too.
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Well, the Ottomans wanted it an awful lot
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and did very terribly well for many centuries,
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and one shouldn't forget that, as did others.
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I'd also say, by the way, and again,
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it's a very broad one, but it's worth throwing out there.
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I think self criticism is an important attribute
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of the Western mind, one that, as you know,
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is not common everywhere.
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Not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics
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So criticism is a negative sounding word.
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It could be self introspection, self analysis,
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And it can be what you need.
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And in the Western system, I'd argue that one of the
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advantages of the system of representative governance
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is that where there are problems in the system,
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you can attempt to sort them out by peaceable means.
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We listen to arguments, most famously in America
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in the late 20th century, the civil rights movement
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achieved its aims by force of moral argument
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and dissuaded the rest of the country
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that it had been wrong.
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That's not common in every society by any means.
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So I think there are certain attributes of the Western mind
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that you could say are, they're not entirely unique,
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but they are not as commonplace elsewhere.
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What about the emergence in hierarchies of asymmetry
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of power, most visible, most drastic in the form of slavery,
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Well, I mean, everyone in the world is slavery,
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so I don't regard it as being a Western,
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a unique Western sin.
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It's rather hard to think of a civilization in history
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that didn't have slavery of some kind.
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One of the oddities of the Western ignorance of our day
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is that people seem to imagine that our societies
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in the West were the only ones who ever engaged
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Alas, this isn't true.
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It's a sort of Rousseauian mistake,
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or at least one that's blossomed since Rousseau,
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that everybody else in the world was born
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into sort of Edenic innocence,
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and only we in the West had this sort of evil in us
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that caused us to do bad things to other people.
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Slavery was engaged in by everyone in the ancient world,
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of course, and through most of the modern world as well.
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Of course, there are 40 million slaves in the world today,
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so it's clearly not something that the species as a whole
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has a problem with.
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And that's more slaves, of course,
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than there were in the 19th century.
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And I'd say, on top of that, that the interesting thing
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about the Western mind as regards to slavery
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is that we were the civilization that did away with it.
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And by the way, the founding fathers of America,
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who today are lambasted routinely
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for being acquiescent in the slave trade,
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engaging in it, owning slaves.
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People almost don't even bother now to recognize the facts
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that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington,
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all wanted to see this trade done away with,
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couldn't hold the country together at the origins
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if they'd have made such an effort.
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And believed and hoped that it would be something
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that would be dealt with after their time.
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So the founding ideas had within them the notion
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that we should, as a people, get rid of this.
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The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence
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set up the conditions under which slavery
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will be impossible.
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All men are created equal.
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Once you've put that, that's a time bomb
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under the whole concept of slavery.
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That's ticking away, okay.
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And sure enough, it detonated in the next century.
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If we just step back and look at the human species,
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what does slavery teach you about human nature?
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The fact that slavery has appeared
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as a function of society throughout human history.
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There are two possibilities.
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One is it's what people think they can do
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when God's not watching.
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Another is it's what they can do
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if they think that God allows it.
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Really, really well put.
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And the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation,
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what does that mean?
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Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward in a way.
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There are people who get to work for free.
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It's economic in nature in some sense.
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Yes, but in order to do it,
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I mean, almost always there are some examples
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in the ancient world where this wasn't the case,
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but almost always it had to be a subjugated people
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or people that are regarded as different.
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One of the things actually I've tried to sort of inject
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into the discussion through this book among other things
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is a recognition that there were very major questions
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still going on in the 18th and early 19th century
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that were unresolved, which were one of the reasons
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why slavery was not as morally repugnant
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to people then as it is to us now.
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And that's the question of polygenesis and monogenesis.
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At the time of Thomas Jefferson,
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the founding fathers were thinking and working.
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They didn't know because nobody knew
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whether the human races were related or not.
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There were arguments, the monogenesis argument
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that we were all indeed from the same racial stock.
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Polygenesis argument was that we weren't.
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Black Africans, Ethiopians,
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they're often referred to at the time
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because they provided some of the first slaves,
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were different from white Europeans,
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simply not related in any way.
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And that makes it easier, of course.
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That makes it easier to enslave people
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if you think they're not your brother.
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Am I my brother's keeper?
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No, he's not your brother, and it's a very,
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it was a very troubling argument in the 18th, 19th century,
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also because there was a biblical question.
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It threw up a theological question, which was,
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I mean, people were literally debating this at the time.
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Was there also a black Adam and Eve?
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Was there, as it were, an Indian Adam and Eve,
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a Native American Adam and Eve?
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This was a serious theological debate
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because they didn't know the answer.
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People say that Darwin solved this.
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It wasn't just Darwin, of course,
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but by the late 19th century,
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the argument that we were not all related
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as human beings had suffered so many blows
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that you had to really be very, very ignorant,
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deliberately, willfully ignorant to ignore it by then.
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So it no longer was, after Darwin, a theological question.
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It became a moral question.
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It was already a moral question, but it clarified,
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Darwin clarifies it definitely,
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and then you're in this, as I say, in this situation
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of you're not subjugating some other people.
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You're subjugating your own kin,
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and that becomes morally unsustainable.
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So given that slavery in America
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is part of its history,
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how do we incorporate into the calculus of policy today,
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social discourse, what we learn in school?
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We can look at slavery in America.
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We can look at maybe more recent things,
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like in Europe, the other atrocities, the Holocaust.
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How do we incorporate that in terms of
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how we create policy, how we treat each other,
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all those kinds of things?
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What is the calculus of integrating the atrocities,
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the injustices of the past into the way we are today?
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That's a very complex question,
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because it's a moral question at this point,
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and a moral question long after the fact.
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I say at one point in the War on the West
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that the argument, for instance, on reparations now
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that goes on, and it's not a fringe argument anymore.
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Some people say, oh, you're pulling up this fringe argument.
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I mean, every contender for the Democratic nomination
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for the presidency in 2020 was willing to talk
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about the possibility of reparations.
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Some very eager that this country, America,
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goes through that entirely self destructive exercise.
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I say that there's a lot of problems with this,
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but if I could refine it down to one thing, I'd say this.
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It's no longer about a wealth transfer
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from one group of people who did something wrong
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to another group of people who were wronged.
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It would have been that, could have been that
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Today, it's not even the descendants of people
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who did something wrong giving money to people
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who were the descendants of people who were wronged.
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It's a wealth transfer from people who look like people
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who did a wrong thing in the past to another group
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of people who resemble people who were wronged.
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That's impossible to do, and I'm completely clear
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There is no way in which you could organize
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such a wealth transfer on moral or practical reasons.
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America is filled with people who have the same skin color
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as us, for instance, who have no connection
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to the slave trade and should not be made to pay money
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to people who have some connection.
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And then the country's also filled with ethnic minorities
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who have come after slavery who would not be due
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for any reimbursement, as it were.
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The problem with this is, though, is that there are,
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I'm perfectly open to the possibility
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that there are residual inequities
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that exist in American life
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and that the consequences of slavery
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could be one of the factors that result from this.
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The thing is, I don't think it's a single issue answer.
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I think it's a multidimensional issue,
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something like black underachievement in America.
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It's obviously a multidimensional issue.
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Much of the left and others wish to say it's not.
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It's only about racism.
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And they can't answer why Asians who've arrived
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more recently don't, for instance,
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get held down by white supremacy.
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But actually, I say white supremacy in quotes, obviously.
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But don't get held back by it, but actually flourish
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to the extent that Asian Americans
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have higher household earnings
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and higher household mean equity than,
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home equity and so on, than white Americans.
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So I don't think that on the merits the evidence is there
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that racism is the explanation for black,
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ongoing black underachievement in some sections
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of the black community in America.
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It's obviously a part of it.
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Could you say that even those things like fatherlessness
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and similar family breakdown issues
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are a longterm consequence of it?
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Possibly, but it's being often said
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it's being awfully generous to people's ability
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to make bad decisions.
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For instance, how many generations after the Holocaust
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would you allow people to claim that everything
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that went wrong in the Jewish community
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was as a result of the Holocaust?
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I mean, is there some kind of term limit on this?
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I would have thought so.
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And I think most people probably think that's over.
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I think the details matter there, but it's very difficult.
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You're in deep waters, yeah.
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Oh, I enjoy swimming out in the ocean,
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so although I'm terrified of what's lurking
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underneath in the darkness.
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You're right, you're right to be.
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Okay, it's really complicated calculus
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with the Holocaust and with slavery.
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So the argument in America is that there's deep
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institutional racism against African Americans
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that's rooted in slavery.
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And so however that calculus turns out,
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that calculation, it still persists in the culture,
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in the institutions, in the allocation of resources,
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in the way that we communicate, in subtle ways,
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in major ways, all that kind of stuff.
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How is it possible to win or lose that argument
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of how much institutional racism there is
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that's rooted in slavery?
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It's an unquantifiable argument.
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And I'd like to apply some shortcuts
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to some of this, the following.
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Are, for instance, all, let's take the EVV1
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that's most often cited.
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If a white person is walking down a street in America
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and they see a group of young black men
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coming towards them and it's late at night
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and they cross the road, is it because of slavery?
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Is it because of institutional racism?
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No, it's because they've made a calculus
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based not entirely on unfounded beliefs
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that given crime rates, it's possible
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that this group of people might be a group of people
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they don't want to meet late at night.
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That's an ugly fact, but as crime statistics
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in American cities after American cities bear out,
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it's not an entirely unreasonable one.
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It's not reasonable every time, obviously, obviously.
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But is it attributable to slavery?
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If you're in a city like Chicago
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where the homicide rates shot up in the last two years,
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albeit again, as always has to be remembered,
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mainly black on black gun violence and knife violence.
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Nevertheless, if you're in a city like Chicago
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and you make that calculus I've just suggested,
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the cliched one, the street late at night,
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there are other factors other than that.
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Factors other than a memory of slavery that kick in.
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And I'm afraid it's something which people
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don't want to particularly acknowledge in America
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for obvious reasons, because it's the ugliest
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damn debate in the world.
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But I was actually just writing in my column
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in New York Post today about a very interesting case
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that's sort of similar, which is the question
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of obesity in the US.
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As you know, America's the most overweight country
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America has, I think, 40% of the population is obese
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in medical ways, and the nearest next country
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is a long way down, that's New Zealand,
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at 30% of the population.
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So America's a long way ahead.
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Why during the coronavirus era when we know
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that obesity is the one clearest factor
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that's likely to lead to your hospitalization
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if you also get the virus?
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Why did almost no public health information
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in America focus on obesity?
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80% of the people who ended up hospitalized
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in America with coronavirus were obese.
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We locked the schools when there was no evidence
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that the coronavirus was deadly for children.
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We all wore cloth masks when there was
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a very little evidence that this was much use
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in stopping the spread of the virus.
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We had massive evidence about obesity being a problem,
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and we never addressed it.
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Is it just because we worried about fat people?
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No, it's actually because about fat shaming, as it were.
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No, it's also because to a great extent
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it's a racial issue in America as well.
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And actually I quoted this new publication
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from the University of Chicago, as it happens,
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which makes that claim explicit, says,
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the reasons why people have views that are negative
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about obesity is because of racism and slavery.
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This is what everything is drawn back to in America.
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Anything you want to stop, you say it's because of racism,
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it's because of slavery.
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How about it's actually because you mind
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the hospitals getting clogged up,
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you mind people dying,
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you mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying,
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and you'd like to say something about it.
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Once again, as in everything in America,
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it's cut off by some poorly educated academic
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saying it's about slavery.
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So we're really not, I mean, this requires
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a kind of form of brain surgery to perform it on a society,
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probably one that's not possible without killing the patient.
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And it's being done by people who are wearing mittens.
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So I'm sure that there's a few folks listening to this
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that are rolling their eyes and saying,
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here we go again, two white guys talking about
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the lack of institutional racism in America.
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First of all, what would you like to tell them?
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So our African American friends who are looking at this,
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and I've gotten the chance to talk to a bunch of them
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on Clubhouse recently.
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Clubhouse is this social app.
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And I really enjoy it.
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It's an absolute zoo of an app as far as I can see it.
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I personally love it because you get to talk to,
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as somebody who's an introvert and doesn't socialize much,
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I enjoy talking to people from all walks of life.
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So it gave me a chance to first of all practice
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Russian and Ukrainian, so I get the chance to do that.
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Then you get a chance to talk about Israel and Palestine
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with people who are from that part of the world.
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And you get to hear raw emotion of people from the ground
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where they start screaming, they start crying,
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they start being calm and collected and thoughtful.
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And this is as if you walked into a bar
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with custom picked regular folks, in quotes, regular folks.
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Just people that have, quote unquote, lived experiences.
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Real pain, real hope, real emotions, biases,
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and you get to listen to them go at it.
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With no, because it's an audio app,
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you're not allowed to start getting
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into a physical fist fight.
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So even though it really sounds like people want it.
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It sounds like it's happening, yeah.
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Yeah, and so you get to really listen to that feeling.
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And for example, it allows a white guy like me
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from another part of the world,
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coming from the former Soviet Union,
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to go into a room with a few hundred African Americans
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screaming about Joe Rogan using the N word.
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And I get to really listen.
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There's very different perspectives on that
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in the African American community,
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and it's fascinating to listen.
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So I don't get access to that by excellent books
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and articles written and so on.
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You get that real raw emotion.
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And I'm just saying, there's a few of those folks
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listening to this with that real raw emotion.
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And one argument they say is you, Douglas Murray,
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and you, Lex Freeman, don't have the right
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to talk about race and racism in America.
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It is our struggle.
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You are from a privileged class of people
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that don't know what it's like to be a black man
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or woman in America walking down the street.
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Can you steel man that case?
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First of all, fuck that.
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That's not, I think we need to define steel, steel manning.
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Okay, I know what steel manning is.
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I really resent that form of argumentation.
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I really resent it.
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I have the right to talk about whatever the hell I want,
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and no one's gonna stop me or try to intimidate me
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or tell me that I can't simply because of my skin color.
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And I think that if I said to somebody else
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the other way around, it would be equally reprehensible.
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If I said, shut up, you have no right
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to criticize anything that Douglas Murray says
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because you've not got my skin color.
link |
Okay, it's not an exact comparison, but seriously,
link |
is that a reasonable form of argument?
link |
You haven't been through everything
link |
I've been through in my life, therefore you can't comment.
link |
No, in that case, nobody can talk about anything.
link |
We might as well pack up, go home, and isolate ourselves.
link |
Strong words, but can you try to steel man the case,
link |
not in this particular situation,
link |
but there's people that have lived through something
link |
that can comment in a very specific way,
link |
like for example, Holocaust survivors.
link |
There is a sense in which, maybe a basic sense of civility
link |
when a Holocaust survivor is speaking about
link |
their experience of the Holocaust,
link |
then an intellectual from a very different part of the world
link |
is simply writing about nuanced geopolitics of World War II
link |
just should not interrupt the Holocaust survivor.
link |
We physically interrupt them
link |
if they're telling their stories.
link |
No, with words, with logic and reason
link |
that the experience of the Holocaust survivor
link |
somehow fundamentally has a deeper understanding
link |
of the humanity and the injustice of the.
link |
First of all, again, we're in even deeper waters now,
link |
but in terms of wanting to listen to another person
link |
who has experienced something, yes, yes.
link |
But not endlessly, not endlessly.
link |
I mean, there are some people who've written about,
link |
I mean, there are people who've written about the Holocaust
link |
who didn't experience the Holocaust
link |
and have written about it better than people who did.
link |
It's not this idea that the lived experience
link |
to use this terrible modern jargon
link |
as if there's another type.
link |
This idea that the lived experience
link |
has to triumph over everything else is not always correct.
link |
It can be correct in some circumstances.
link |
If you are sitting in a room with a Holocaust survivor
link |
and somebody who'd never heard about the Holocaust
link |
and wanted to kind of shoot out their views on it, yeah,
link |
one of those people should be heard more than the other,
link |
obviously, obviously.
link |
If there's somebody who's experienced racism firsthand
link |
and there's somebody else who has never experienced it,
link |
then obviously you'd want to hear from the person
link |
who has experienced it firsthand,
link |
if that is the discussion underway.
link |
I don't think that it's the case
link |
that that is endlessly the case.
link |
I'm also highly reluctant to concede
link |
that there are groups of people
link |
who by dint of their skin color or anything else
link |
get to dominate the microphone.
link |
Now, of course, we're literally both speaking
link |
to microphones at the moment, so there's an irony to this,
link |
but let's skate over the irony.
link |
What I mean is people saying,
link |
you don't have the right to speak,
link |
I have the right to take the microphone from you
link |
and speak because I know best.
link |
Fine, if you know best, we'll argue it out
link |
and someone will win, long or short term.
link |
But the almost aggressive tone
link |
in which this is now leveled, I don't like the sound of,
link |
nobody's experience is completely understandable
link |
by another human being, nobody's.
link |
And what many people are asking us to do at the moment,
link |
us collectively is, to fall for that thing,
link |
I think it was Camille Foster who said it first,
link |
but I've adopted in recent years,
link |
is to say you must spend an inordinate amount of your life
link |
trying to understand me personally,
link |
my lived experience, everything about me.
link |
You should dedicate your life to trying to do that.
link |
Simultaneously, you'll never understand me.
link |
This is not an attractive invitation.
link |
This is an unwinnable game.
link |
So if somebody has a legitimate
link |
and important point to make, they should make it
link |
and they'll win through whatever their character is
link |
or whatever their race.
link |
And by the way, there are plenty of white people
link |
who experience racism as well.
link |
There are plenty of white people who do and have done,
link |
and increasingly so, which is one of the things
link |
I write about in the War on the West.
link |
I mean, I would argue that today in America,
link |
the only group who are actually allowed
link |
to be consistently, vilely racist against the white people.
link |
If you say disgusting things about black people
link |
in America in 2022, you will be over.
link |
If you decide to talk about people's white tears,
link |
their white female tears, their white guilt,
link |
their white privilege, their white rage,
link |
and all these other pseudo pathologizing terms,
link |
you'll be just fine.
link |
You can be the chairman of the Joint Committee
link |
of the Staff, you can lecture at Yale University,
link |
absolutely fine, and the white people have to suck that up
link |
as if that's fine because there was racism
link |
in another direction in the past.
link |
So white people can have racism as well.
link |
Does that mean that I think that I have a right
link |
or other white people have a right to dominate the discourse
link |
by talking about their feelings of having been victims
link |
No, not particularly, because what does that get us?
link |
It gets us into an endless cycle of competitive victimhood.
link |
Am I saying that white people who've experienced violence
link |
have experienced historically anything like the violence
link |
that was perpetrated against black people
link |
in America historically?
link |
But what kind of competition do we want to enter here?
link |
And this is very, very important terrain now in America,
link |
because there's one other thing I have to throw in there,
link |
which is how do you work out the sincerity of the claim?
link |
How do you work out the sincerity of the claim being made?
link |
At one point in this latest book,
link |
I referred to a very useful bit in Nietzsche
link |
on the genealogy of morals,
link |
where, as you know, Nietzsche always has to be treated
link |
carefully, you know, when people say,
link |
I love Nietzsche, you have to say, which bits?
link |
So what exactly do you love about him?
link |
and a lot can be learned from the answer.
link |
But there are moments in Genealogy of Morals
link |
that were very useful for this book.
link |
One of them was the moment when Nietzsche uses a phrase
link |
that I've now stolen from myself, appropriated,
link |
where he refers to people who tear at wounds
link |
long since closed and then cry about the pain they feel.
link |
And Nietzsche says,
link |
I've never felt so much pain in my life
link |
as the pain they feel.
link |
Now, how do you know,
link |
how do you know whether the pain is real?
link |
I'm not saying you can never know, but it's hard.
link |
So when somebody says,
link |
I feel that my life hasn't gone that well
link |
and it's because of something that was done
link |
to my ancestors 200 years ago,
link |
maybe they do feel that.
link |
Maybe they're right to feel that.
link |
Maybe they're using it up.
link |
Maybe they're using it as their reason for failure in life.
link |
Maybe they're using it as their reason to not even try.
link |
Maybe they're using it as their reason
link |
to smoke weed all day.
link |
And who does know?
link |
How can you work that out?
link |
And that's why I come back to this thing of,
link |
who are we to constantly judge in this society
link |
other people who we don't know
link |
and attribute motives to them based on racial
link |
And as you write in this part,
link |
I like your cultural appropriation of Nietzsche
link |
and at the same time, canceling Nietzsche
link |
in the same set of sentences.
link |
But you write in this part about evil.
link |
No, I didn't cancel Nietzsche.
link |
Can't cancel Nietzsche, I was saying treat him carefully.
link |
Treat him carefully, fair enough.
link |
But you can judge a man's character
link |
by which parts of Nietzsche he quotes.
link |
That's fair enough, I think.
link |
I think when you meet people who do man and Superman
link |
a bit too much, you're in.
link |
Now you're pulling in even deeper water
link |
referencing Hitler here.
link |
So you write in this part of the book about evil.
link |
Quote, what is it that drives evil?
link |
Many things without doubt,
link |
but one of them is identified by several
link |
of the great philosophers is resentment.
link |
That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers
link |
for people who want to destroy.
link |
Colon, blaming someone else for having something
link |
you believe you deserve more.
link |
And you're saying this kind of resentment,
link |
we don't know as it surfaces whether it's genuine
link |
or if it's used to sort of play games of power
link |
to evil ends, can you speak to this?
link |
Because it's such a fascinating idea
link |
that one of the biggest drivers of evil
link |
in the world is resentment.
link |
Because if you look at, boy,
link |
if you look at human history, if you look at Hitler,
link |
so much of the propaganda, so much of the narrative
link |
was about resentment.
link |
So is that surface or is it level
link |
or is that deep, the resentment that drives evil?
link |
It can be any of the above.
link |
Let's first of all preface it, everybody has resentment.
link |
I use the term resentment which is sort of very similar
link |
to resentment, let's stick with resentment.
link |
So we don't sound too pretentious.
link |
Let me give you a quick example of somebody
link |
in our own day who has a form of resentment,
link |
Did you see Navalny's documentary, Putin's Palace?
link |
You remember the stuff about Putin
link |
as a young KGB officer in Germany?
link |
Remember the stuff about Putin and his first wife's
link |
resentment of one of his KGB colleagues
link |
who had an apartment that was a few meters bigger
link |
than the Putin's apartment?
link |
It's very interesting.
link |
And by the way, I'm not saying that, you know,
link |
Vladimir Putin became the man he has become
link |
and invaded Ukraine because he didn't have an apartment
link |
he liked in Berlin or Munich or wherever he was.
link |
There's distinct possibility.
link |
My point is that resentment is a factor in all human lives
link |
and we all feel it in our lives
link |
and it's something that has to be struggled against.
link |
Resentment is, in political terms, can be a deadly,
link |
I mean, it's an incredibly deep thing to draw upon.
link |
I mean, you mentioned Hitler.
link |
Obviously one of the things that Hitler
link |
played on was resentment, obviously.
link |
Almost every revolutionary does.
link |
I mean, the French revolutionaries did as well.
link |
And not without cause.
link |
It's a good reason to feel that Versailles
link |
was not listening to Paris in the 1780s
link |
and feel resentment for Marie Antoinette
link |
in her palace within the palace,
link |
ignoring the bread shortages in Paris.
link |
So resentment is a very, it's a very understandable thing
link |
and sometimes it's justifiable
link |
and it's also deadly to the person as it is to the society.
link |
It's an incredibly deep, deep sentiment.
link |
Somebody else has got something that you should have.
link |
And the problem about it is that it has the potential
link |
You can do it your whole life.
link |
And one of the ways I've sort of found myself
link |
explaining this to people is to say,
link |
it's also important to recognize that resentment
link |
is something that can cross absolutely every boundary.
link |
So for instance, it crosses all racial boundaries, obviously,
link |
and how it goes without saying.
link |
More interesting is it crosses all class boundaries
link |
and socioeconomic boundaries.
link |
And if I was to sort of simplify this thought,
link |
I would say, I guess that you and I
link |
and everybody watching knows or has known something
link |
or has known somebody in their lives
link |
who has almost nothing in worldly terms
link |
and is a generous person, a kindly person,
link |
a giving person, a happy person even, a cheerful person.
link |
And I think we probably have also,
link |
or many of us will have met people
link |
who seem to have everything
link |
and who are filled with resentment, filled with resentment.
link |
Somebody else has held them back from something.
link |
Their sister once did something,
link |
she got this and I should have got that.
link |
And on and on and on.
link |
It's a human trait.
link |
And one of the things that suggests to me
link |
is that we therefore have a choice in our lives about this.
link |
And this is something which we can do something about,
link |
not limitlessly, but for instance,
link |
I mean, there are very good reasons
link |
that some people in their lives might feel resentment.
link |
Let's say you're involved in a car crash
link |
and a friend fell asleep at the wheel
link |
and that's why you are spending the rest of your life
link |
It's a pertinent example of this
link |
in American politics at the moment.
link |
You would be justified in feeling resentment.
link |
And at some point you have to make a decision,
link |
which is, am I going to be that person or a different person?
link |
But even in that case, you're saying at the individual level
link |
and at the societal level is destructive to the mind,
link |
even when you're, quote unquote, justified.
link |
It rots you because the best you can do
link |
is to eke out your days unfulfilled.
link |
So the antidote, as you describe, is gratitude.
link |
Gratitude is the antidote to evil in a sense.
link |
Gratitude is the individual level and the societal level.
link |
Gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment.
link |
I quote in The War on the West,
link |
when I read it the first time a few years ago,
link |
I was absolutely floored by the brothers Karamazov.
link |
Not everything in it, by the way,
link |
and I won't get into it,
link |
but I have some very big structural criticisms
link |
Now you're just sweet talking to me
link |
because I'm a Dostoevsky fan, but I appreciate this.
link |
Well, we could get into what I see
link |
as being the structural flaws in the brothers Karamazov,
link |
Now I'm offended and triggered.
link |
Yeah, no, I mean, this is something coming out of Macbeth
link |
and saying, I didn't think it was much good.
link |
Yeah, there's structural flaws.
link |
Yeah, I thought the ending stank
link |
and the middle wasn't very good.
link |
No, when I read that novel,
link |
I was floored by a couple of things.
link |
One is, of course, at the moment
link |
where we realize the devil appears.
link |
The moment that Ivan says to his brother,
link |
you know he visits me,
link |
and you realize that he's talking about the devil,
link |
the whole novel goes into this totally different space.
link |
Anyway, it's even more
link |
than you've already realized the novel's about.
link |
And then when the conversation occurs between Ivan
link |
and the devil, I think he describes him
link |
as dressed in the French style
link |
of the early part of the 90th century.
link |
Very strange that the devil would be dressed like that,
link |
And if you remember that he's sort of cross legged
link |
and rather a vain figure,
link |
but the devil mentions in passing to Ivan
link |
that he says, I don't know why,
link |
gratitude is not an instinct that's been given to me.
link |
Yeah, you're not allowed.
link |
This is not, given the role of being the devil,
link |
this is not one of the things.
link |
Just not one of the things.
link |
And you think, and of course,
link |
only a genius of Dostoevsky's stature could,
link |
I mean, a lesser genius would have made a whole novel
link |
out of that insight.
link |
Only Dostoevsky can just throw it away
link |
because there's such an abundance of riches
link |
that he still has to get through,
link |
the structural problems aside.
link |
But the, but the, but the.
link |
The passive aggressive, the microaggression
link |
in this conversation is palpable.
link |
A little knife fight.
link |
No, but the reason I mention this is because of course,
link |
when I saw this, this is such a brilliant insight
link |
by Dostoevsky because why would gratitude
link |
not be a sentiment that the devil was capable of?
link |
The answer is of course that if the devil
link |
was capable of gratitude, he wouldn't be the devil.
link |
He'd be somebody else.
link |
He has to be incapable of gratitude.
link |
Do you think for Dostoevsky that was as strong of an insight
link |
Because I think that's a really powerful idea
link |
that with gratitude, you don't get the resentment
link |
that rots you from the core.
link |
Yes, I think it was one of the just endless things
link |
that he saw in us.
link |
And the way I put it is that, I mean,
link |
I also think of it in terms of the era of deconstruction,
link |
which is one of the things I'd like us to call
link |
the era that's now ending.
link |
The era of deconstruction was the era that started,
link |
let's say from the 60s onwards,
link |
and was originally an academic game
link |
that then spilled out into the wider culture,
link |
which was let's take everything apart.
link |
Let's pull it all apart.
link |
There are lots of problems with it.
link |
One is it's quite boring.
link |
You don't get an awful lot from it.
link |
You also have the problem of what children find
link |
when they try to do this with bicycles,
link |
which is they can take it apart quite easily,
link |
but they can't put it back together.
link |
And the era of taking things apart as a game
link |
is one we've lived through,
link |
and it's been highly destructive,
link |
but you can do it for quite a long time.
link |
I'm going to look at this society,
link |
and I'm going to take it apart by showing systemic problems.
link |
I'm going to, at the end of that, what have you got?
link |
What have you done?
link |
What have you achieved?
link |
We need to interrogate this.
link |
Okay, interrogate.
link |
By all means, ask questions,
link |
but interrogate as a deliberate hostility to this.
link |
I'm going to interrogate this thing and take it apart.
link |
And again, at the end of it, what have you got?
link |
Whether you're interrogating a text or a piece of music
link |
or an idea or a society, fine.
link |
Question, endlessly question.
link |
Yes, interrogate assumes it's all a criminal in a cell
link |
and it's guilty, and therefore it must be taken apart.
link |
And that's what we've been doing for decades in the West.
link |
And that's resentment.
link |
That's one byproduct of resentment.
link |
You can't build the thing, but you know how to take it apart.
link |
Is a little bit of resentment good?
link |
So you have that, I love Tom Waits,
link |
and he has a song where a little drop of,
link |
I like my Tom with a little drop of poison.
link |
Is it good to do that?
link |
Is it good to have a little bit of poison in your drink?
link |
Depends what the poison is,
link |
and it depends if you know not to have another drink.
link |
It might be the case, you find out, as some alcoholics do,
link |
that one was too many and 10 is not enough.
link |
So there's a natural, in this case,
link |
this kind of deconstruction is a slippery slope.
link |
It becomes an addiction, it becomes a drug,
link |
and you just can't stop.
link |
Well, you'd have to wean yourself off it
link |
and try to start creating again.
link |
You'd have to start trying to put things together again.
link |
Something I think might be in the throes of starting
link |
Well, speaking of taking things apart
link |
and not putting them together again,
link |
the idea of critical race theory.
link |
Can you, to me, explain, so I'm an engineer
link |
and have not been actually paying attention much,
link |
unfortunately, to these things.
link |
None of the people in your field were
link |
until it comes along and smacks you in the face.
link |
I've had that line of thinking from MIT.
link |
I said, well, surely whatever you folks are busy about
link |
yelling at each other for is a thing at Harvard and Yale.
link |
It's not going to.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
link |
People in the STEM subjects thought it's not coming for us.
link |
It can't come to us and bang.
link |
Well, it hasn't quite been a bang.
link |
Engineering is more safe than others.
link |
Yeah, so let's draw a line now
link |
between engineering and science.
link |
So I think engineering is,
link |
I'm sitting in a castle in the tallest tower
link |
with my pinky out drinking my martini saying, surely.
link |
The peasants below with their biology and their humanities
link |
will figure it all out.
link |
No, I'm just kidding.
link |
There's no pinky out.
link |
I drink vodka and I hang with the peasants.
link |
Okay, where is this?
link |
This metaphor has gone too far.
link |
Can you explain to this engineer
link |
what critical race theory is?
link |
Is it a term that's definable?
link |
Is there a tradition?
link |
Is there a history?
link |
What is good about it, what is bad about it?
link |
It is a tradition.
link |
It's a school of thought.
link |
It started in the law roughly in the 1970s
link |
in some of the American academy.
link |
It always aimed to be an activist philosophy.
link |
People deny that now,
link |
but as I cite in The War in the West,
link |
the foundational texts say as much.
link |
This is an activist academic study.
link |
We're not just looking at the law.
link |
We seek to change the law.
link |
And it's built out into all of the other disciplines.
link |
I think there's a reason for that, by the way,
link |
which is it happened at the time
link |
that the humanities and others in America
link |
were increasingly weak and didn't know what to do,
link |
and they needed more games to play or new games to play.
link |
The psychologists got bored.
link |
Yeah, I mean, well, they needed tenure.
link |
They needed something to do.
link |
And I mean, it's not an original observation.
link |
Plenty of people have made this,
link |
but I mean, Neil Ferguson said it some time ago,
link |
for instance, that in the last 50 years
link |
in American academia, certainly in humanities departments,
link |
when somebody dies out who's a great scholar in something,
link |
that's just not replaced by somebody of equal stature.
link |
They're replaced by somebody who does theory
link |
or critical race theory.
link |
They're replaced by somebody who does the modern games.
link |
Somebody dies out who's a great historian of, say,
link |
I don't know, it's the one that's on my mind,
link |
Russian history or Russian literature,
link |
and they're not replaced by a similar scholar.
link |
In his observation and in yours, is this a recent development?
link |
It's happened in the last few decades, for sure.
link |
Is it because we've gotten to the bottom
link |
of some of the biggest questions of history?
link |
No, it's because we're willing to forget the big questions.
link |
Because it's more fun to, big questions aren't as fun?
link |
No, partly it's, no, I should stress that partly isn't,
link |
this is in the weeds, but partly it's a result
link |
of the hyper specialization in academia.
link |
You know, if you said you'd like to write
link |
your dissertation on Hobbes,
link |
if you wanted to say something central
link |
to Kant's thought or Hegel's, I mean, that's not popular.
link |
What's popular is to take somebody way down the line
link |
from that, because there's a feeling
link |
that that's all been done.
link |
So you take something way, way, way down the line
link |
from that that's much less important,
link |
and then you sort of play with that.
link |
And I think most people, anyone who's watching
link |
who's been in a philosophy department
link |
or anything else in recent years will know that tendency.
link |
By the way, there's a very practical consequence of this.
link |
I saw this at the end of my friend Roger Scruton's life
link |
when he would occasionally, he didn't get tenure
link |
at universities, but he would occasionally be flown in
link |
even by his enemies to teach courses
link |
in various universities in basics of philosophy,
link |
because there was no one in the department able to do it.
link |
Like he would go in and teach for a semester,
link |
you know, Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer and others,
link |
because there was no one to do it,
link |
because they were all playing with the things
link |
way, way, way down the road from this.
link |
So that had already happened,
link |
and people were searching for new games to play,
link |
and the critical race theory stuff forced its way in,
link |
partly in the way that all of this
link |
that's now known as anti racism does,
link |
which is in a sort of bullying tone
link |
of saying if you don't follow this.
link |
It's the same way that all the things
link |
that are called studies,
link |
I think everything called studies in the humanities
link |
should be shut down.
link |
Because of the activist element.
link |
They're all activists, gay studies and queer studies,
link |
and nothing good has ever come from it.
link |
To push back, is it obvious that activism
link |
is a sign of a flaw in a discipline?
link |
It's a sign of the death of the discipline.
link |
It's a sign the discipline's over.
link |
But isn't it a good goal to have for discipline
link |
to enact change, positive change in the world?
link |
Or is that for politicians to do with the findings
link |
of science, not the scientists themselves?
link |
Why create an ideology and then set out
link |
to find disciplines that are weakly put together
link |
to try to back up your political ideology?
link |
So ideology should not be part of science or of humanities.
link |
Why would you, I mean, anyone could do it.
link |
You could decide to go in and be wildly right wing
link |
about something and only do things
link |
that prove your right wing ideas.
link |
Be fantastically antiacademic,
link |
fantastically anti science.
link |
It's an absurd way to mix up activism and academia.
link |
And it's absolutely rife.
link |
And Critical Race Theory is one of the ones
link |
that completely polluted the academy.
link |
Yeah, and there's been dark moments throughout history,
link |
both during World War II with both communism
link |
and Nazism, fascism that infiltrated science
link |
and then corrupted it.
link |
Yes, I mean, for instance, also,
link |
let's face it, in science, as in everything else,
link |
there are dark, difficult things.
link |
It's much better we know about them, face up to them
link |
and try to find a way socially to deal with them
link |
than that you leave them in the hands of some activist
link |
who wants to do stuff with them.
link |
Some of my best friends are activists.
link |
I'm just kidding, okay.
link |
None of my best friends are activists.
link |
That's how it should be.
link |
Well, I was kidding because I don't have any friends,
link |
No, I'm trying to gain some pity points.
link |
Okay, so to return.
link |
You have your clubhouse friends.
link |
Screaming away like deranged maniacs.
link |
Now, I'm anti clubhouse, by the way,
link |
because the only time I heard it was at Brett Weinstein one
link |
I don't know if you heard that, early in clubhouse.
link |
I was invited to clubhouse by various people.
link |
He was like, oh, this is a really great civilized way
link |
to hang out and talk with interesting people.
link |
And I downloaded the app and I got on one,
link |
because Brett Weinstein said,
link |
I'm doing this conversation and I listened
link |
and it was the maddest damn discussion I've ever heard.
link |
Was it something about biology?
link |
Something about, was it during COVID times?
link |
At some point, Brett said,
link |
I'm an evolutionary biologist.
link |
And somebody else started saying, you're a eugenicist.
link |
And he said, no, I'm an evolutionary biologist.
link |
And somebody said, that's the same thing.
link |
And it just went on like that.
link |
And Brett desperately tried to explain,
link |
that's not the same thing as being a eugenicist.
link |
And he lost the clubhouse room.
link |
They thought that was the same thing.
link |
He'd come, it horribly reminded me of a time some years ago
link |
when a British newspaper ran a sort of realizing
link |
that the only thing you can unite people on
link |
in sexual ethics is revulsion against pedophilia,
link |
ran an anti pedo campaign.
link |
And shortly after pediatricians offices
link |
were torched in North of England
link |
by a mob who hadn't read the whole sign.
link |
Yeah, well, to me, like I said,
link |
a little bit of poison is good for the town, so.
link |
Anyhow, sorry, I interrupted you
link |
with flattering you with their people on clubhouse.
link |
I have many, I have multiples of friends, yes.
link |
Okay, we didn't get to some of the ideas
link |
of critical race theory.
link |
What exactly is it?
link |
I'm actually in part asking this question quite genuinely.
link |
Yeah, it's an attempt to look at everything
link |
among other things through the lens of race
link |
and to add race into things where it may not be
link |
as a way of adding,
link |
I'm trying to give the most generous estimation,
link |
to add race in as a conversation
link |
in a place where it may not have been in the conversation.
link |
And that means history too?
link |
The history of racism.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all history.
link |
And to look at it through these particular lenses.
link |
I mean, there's a certain, like all these things,
link |
there's a certain logic in it.
link |
Like with feminist studies or something,
link |
I mean, is there a utility in looking back
link |
through undoubtedly male dominated histories
link |
and asking where the more silent female voice was?
link |
Yes, very interesting.
link |
Not endlessly interesting.
link |
And can't be put exactly on the same par as,
link |
but it has a utility.
link |
It's that endlessly, sorry to interrupt,
link |
that endlessly part that seems to get us
link |
into trouble a lot here.
link |
Well, because of this thing of where do you stop?
link |
And that's always, I talked about this in my last book
link |
in the manners of crowds.
link |
It's one of the big conundrums in activist movements
link |
and particularly in activist academia.
link |
Where would you stop?
link |
It's not clear because you've got a job in it.
link |
You've got a pension in it.
link |
You've got, your only esteem in society
link |
is in keeping this gig going.
link |
I mean, is there any likelihood?
link |
Have you ever, there's the old academic joke, isn't it?
link |
The end of every conference, the only thing everyone
link |
agrees on is that we must have another conference
link |
It's the one thing they always agree on.
link |
This conference is so great, we must have another one.
link |
Well, that's a criticism you could apply
link |
to a lot of disciplines.
link |
Civil engineering, bridge building.
link |
At a certain point, do we need any more bridges?
link |
Can we just fly everywhere?
link |
At the very least, you need to keep the bridges up.
link |
Sure, and they would, critical race theory folks
link |
would probably make the same argument.
link |
At the very least, we need to keep the racism out.
link |
We have to make sure we don't descend into the racism.
link |
It assumes all the time that we are living
link |
on the cusp of the return of the KKK.
link |
Which is totally wrong.
link |
I mean, it's a massive.
link |
You say that now, until the KKK armies march in.
link |
We don't always, we can't always predict the future.
link |
We can't always predict the future,
link |
and you can always say you should be careful,
link |
but you've also gotta be careful of people
link |
who've got their timing like totally, totally wrong,
link |
or their estimation of the society they're in.
link |
You mean like most of society before in the 1930s,
link |
when Hitler was, I mean, so many people got Hitler wrong.
link |
So maybe it was nice to have the alarmist thinking there.
link |
Beware of the man with the mustache.
link |
If only it was that easy.
link |
Not always a bob facial hair.
link |
I always say that, I mean, what.
link |
These two clean shaven chaps both say,
link |
one of the problems of everybody
link |
knowing a little bit about Nazism
link |
is that they think that they know where evil comes from
link |
and that it comes from like a German with a small mustache,
link |
getting people to goose step, for instance.
link |
And that's not correct.
link |
A much better understanding of it is,
link |
it can come from all number of directions
link |
and keep your antennae as good as you can.
link |
But once you end up in this society, which I would argue,
link |
certainly parts of America, where you're always in 1938,
link |
that's not healthy for a society either,
link |
where people are so primed and think they're so well trained
link |
because they spent a term in school
link |
learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust,
link |
think they're so well trained in Hitler spotting
link |
that they can do it all the time.
link |
Look at all these phrases we now have in our societies,
link |
You know, as I always say,
link |
if you hear the whistle, you're the dog.
link |
But people say, that's a dog whistle,
link |
as if they're highly trained anti Nazis.
link |
I mean, you know, there should be some humility in it.
link |
We should be careful, we should be wary for sure.
link |
And we should also be slightly humble
link |
in our inability to spot everything.
link |
If not significantly humble, right, so if we can,
link |
there's something funny, if not dark,
link |
about the activity of Hitler spotting,
link |
if I just may take an aside.
link |
But so critical race theory, how much racism,
link |
How much of it is in our world today?
link |
If we were thinking about this activity of Hitler spotting,
link |
and trying to steel man the case
link |
of if not critical race theory,
link |
but people who look for racism in our world,
link |
how much would you say?
link |
Well, it's a good thing to try to define.
link |
I would say that racism is the belief
link |
that other people are inferior to you.
link |
You could say, you could see a form of it
link |
where you thought people were superior to you.
link |
That could also happen, but more commonly,
link |
you see a group of people as being inferior to you
link |
simply by dint of the fact
link |
that they have a different racial background.
link |
And that's sort of the easiest way to define racism.
link |
As I say, I mean, there are types of racism,
link |
mainly antisemitism actually, perhaps it's the only one,
link |
which weirdly relies on a hatred of people
link |
who a certain type of person thinks are better than them.
link |
And that's a particular peculiarity,
link |
one of the peculiarities of antisemitism.
link |
Well, antisemitism somehow does both, right?
link |
Yes, one of the eternal fascinating things
link |
about antisemitism is it can do,
link |
it does everything at the same time.
link |
It's like a quantum racism.
link |
They're both superior and inferior.
link |
You know Vasily Grosman's Life and Fate?
link |
So in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
which a Persian friend of mine always said
link |
was one of only two great novels of the 20th century,
link |
she was a very harsh literary critic.
link |
What was the other one?
link |
Oh, The Leopard, obviously.
link |
The Leopard by Giuseppe Dallan Pedusa, yeah.
link |
She's definitely right on that one.
link |
Life and Fate is a...
link |
I'm learning so much today, yes.
link |
Life and Fate is an extraordinary book,
link |
mainly about, well, you know, Grosman was obviously
link |
Jewish himself, but he saw almost everything
link |
that he could have done in the Second World War.
link |
He saw Stalingrad, he was a journalist,
link |
and he wrote firsthand accounts of Stalingrad.
link |
He was also the first journalist into Treblinka,
link |
and his account, which you can read in one
link |
of the collections of his journalism,
link |
his account of walking into Treblinka
link |
is just one of the most devastating, haunting pieces
link |
of journalism or prose you can read.
link |
Anyhow, I mention him because Grosman,
link |
in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
which is about a 900 page novel,
link |
in the middle of it, which is about the dark axis
link |
around Stalingrad, he, well, at one point,
link |
he amazingly sort of goes into the minds
link |
of Earth Hitler and Stalin, and he says,
link |
Stalin, in his study, feels his counterpart
link |
in Berlin, and he says he feels very close
link |
to him at this moment.
link |
Wow, around Stalingrad, like leading up to the back.
link |
After Stalingrad, when the Germans are lost,
link |
he says he feels the closeness of Hitler.
link |
But Grosman, in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century,
link |
suddenly dedicates a chapter to anti semitism,
link |
and I've seen anti semitism as something
link |
I've always been very interested in,
link |
because I've always had an instinctive utter revulsion
link |
of it, and also partly because of having seen bits of it
link |
in the Middle East and elsewhere,
link |
but I mention this because Grosman,
link |
in the middle of Life and Fate, takes time out
link |
and does this like three page explanation,
link |
three page description of anti semitism,
link |
and it's extraordinary.
link |
I mean, the only thing I can think of
link |
that's equally good is Gregor von Retzori,
link |
who wrote a luridly titled, but brilliant set of novellas
link |
called The Confessions of an Anti Semite,
link |
and about pre First World War anti semitism
link |
in Eastern and Central Europe.
link |
Anyway, Grosman says, in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
that one of the extraordinary things about anti semitism
link |
is that it does everything at the same time,
link |
that the Jews get condemned in one place for being rich
link |
and in another for being poor,
link |
condemned in one place for assimilating
link |
and another for not assimilating,
link |
for assimilating too much and assimilating too little,
link |
for being too successful for not being successful enough.
link |
So I think it's the only racism that includes within it,
link |
a detestation, for the real anti semit,
link |
a detestation of people that the person may perceive
link |
to be better than them, correctly or otherwise.
link |
By the way, I'm embarrassed to say I have not read
link |
this one of two greatest novels
link |
of the 20th century, Life and Fate, Zhizny Sidba.
link |
And just to read off of Wikipedia,
link |
we see that Grosman, a Ukrainian Jew,
link |
became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper,
link |
Krasnaya Zvezda, having volunteered
link |
and been rejected from military service,
link |
he spent a thousand days in the front lines,
link |
roughly three of the four years of the conflict
link |
between the Germans and the Soviets,
link |
and the main themes covered in,
link |
how's it go, Life and Fate, I keep thinking Zhizny Sidba,
link |
is a theme on Jewish identity and the Holocaust,
link |
Grosman's idea of humanity and the human goodness,
link |
Stalin's distortion of reality and values,
link |
and science, life goes on, and reality of war.
link |
It's interesting, I need to definitely, definitely read it.
link |
I think you'll really get a lot from it.
link |
One of the other things, sorry, I'm raffling it,
link |
but one of the other things he does
link |
is that he has this extraordinary ability
link |
to talk about the absolute highest levels of the conflict
link |
and then zoom in, it's rather like the camera work
link |
they use in things like Lord of the Rings,
link |
where he zooms down and gets one person
link |
in the midst of all this, and you get on that.
link |
Or puts you in the study, too.
link |
So I personally have read and reread
link |
the William Shires, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
link |
who's another journalist who was there,
link |
but he does not do, interestingly enough,
link |
given such a large novel, kind of the definitive work,
link |
the definitive original work that goes
link |
to source materials on Hitler,
link |
he doesn't touch anti semitism really.
link |
Big thing to miss out.
link |
Well, he just says it very calmly and objectively
link |
as he does for most of the work,
link |
that this was the fact of life.
link |
There's a lot of cruelty throughout,
link |
but he doesn't get to.
link |
Well, one of the things is, of course,
link |
they lost the war because of anti semitism.
link |
I mean, that's one kind of important way to view it.
link |
It's how Andrew Roberts, another historian, said it,
link |
is that in the end, the Nazis lost the war
link |
because they were Nazis.
link |
It sounds almost too neat, but it's worth remembering
link |
that at the end of the war,
link |
when the Germans need to be transporting troops
link |
and they need to be transporting very basic supplies,
link |
Eichmann makes sure he gets the trains
link |
to transport the Jews right up to the end.
link |
Well, that's certainly a dark possibility.
link |
Anyhow, but to go back to racism in general.
link |
Racism in general, apart from anti semitism,
link |
relies on the perception that another group of people,
link |
a racial group, other than your own, are inferior to you.
link |
That's what I'd say is the easiest shorthand of racism.
link |
And of course, it's one of the stupidest things
link |
that our species is capable of.
link |
I mean, one of the stupidest,
link |
that you can look at a person and guess them
link |
in their entirety, in fact, because of their skin color.
link |
I mean, it's like, what a stupid idea that is,
link |
as well as being an evil one.
link |
But I would say that one of the,
link |
I think it's a dangerous thing in our era
link |
that there are bits of it coming back.
link |
That's why I say we do need sort of,
link |
we need our antennae working.
link |
We just don't need them to be overactive
link |
or underactive, you know.
link |
Now, the book is War in the West,
link |
but speaking of racism, racism towards different groups
link |
based on their skin color,
link |
you've said that there's a war on white people in the US.
link |
Would you say that's the case?
link |
Would you say that there is significant
link |
racism towards white people in the United States?
link |
I'd say that white people in the United States
link |
are the only people who are told
link |
that they have hereditary sin.
link |
And that's a big one, just to start with.
link |
Based strictly on the color of their skin.
link |
Based on their skin color.
link |
I mean, I would find it so repugnant if,
link |
and I hope everybody would join me in feeling this,
link |
I would feel it so repugnant
link |
if there were any school of thought in America today
link |
that had any grasp on the public attention
link |
that said that black people were born into evil
link |
because of something their ancestors had done.
link |
Like they had the mark of Cain upon them.
link |
I mean, I think it would be such a vicious way
link |
to try to demoralize a group of people
link |
and to tell them that the things they would be able
link |
to achieve in their lives are much lessened
link |
because they should spend significant portions
link |
of their lives trying to do something
link |
that they didn't do.
link |
Is there a difference?
link |
And the obvious point left unsaid,
link |
but let's say it, nobody in the public square says that.
link |
I mean, they're the maniacs at the far fringes,
link |
but nobody in the mainstream would dare to say that,
link |
or I think even think that about any group of people
link |
other than white people.
link |
And does this mean that white people are more likely
link |
or does this mean that white people are more disadvantaged
link |
than black people?
link |
No, and again, let's not make this a competition,
link |
but let's not get into, I just desperately urge people
link |
not to get into the idea of hereditary sin
link |
according to racial background.
link |
Is there something to be said about the feature aspect,
link |
sort of play devil's advocate,
link |
about the asymmetry of sort of accusations
link |
towards the majority?
link |
So because white, so it's easier to attack a majority.
link |
It is much easier, but is there something to be said
link |
about that being a useful function of society
link |
that you always attack, that the minority has
link |
disproportionate power to attack the majority
link |
so that you can always keep the majority in check?
link |
Well, it's a dangerous game to play, isn't it?
link |
It's a very dangerous game to play.
link |
That's a good summary of entirety of human civilization.
link |
Oh yeah, everything is dangerous.
link |
But it's a very dangerous game to play that.
link |
I wrote about this a bit in the Madness of Crowds
link |
when I was saying like gay rights people,
link |
the ones that still exist,
link |
the ones who don't have homes to go to,
link |
who want to beat up on straight people in a way,
link |
or want to make straight people feel like they're
link |
kind of unremarkable, uncool, you know, boring straights.
link |
So not like the magical pixie fairy dust gays.
link |
That's a bad idea to push that one.
link |
That's a bad idea.
link |
And some gays push that.
link |
Highly unwise, given the fact that about
link |
two to 3% of the population are actually gay,
link |
although now there's like an additional 20%
link |
who think they're like two spirit or something
link |
and all that bullshit, but they're just attention seekers.
link |
So let's not spend too much time on that.
link |
But equally, as I said in the Madness of Crowds,
link |
with the feminist movement,
link |
very unwise for half of the species
link |
to say that the other half of the species isn't needed.
link |
And there were always third and fourth wave feminists
link |
willing to make that nuts argument.
link |
Not first wave feminists.
link |
You didn't hear it in first wave feminists.
link |
You didn't hear it.
link |
Suffragette tended not to say we like the vote
link |
It would have been hard to have won everyone
link |
over to their side.
link |
Not least the men they needed to win over to their side.
link |
But you do get third and fourth wave feminists
link |
who say like, do we need men?
link |
Again, it's a bad idea.
link |
It's a bad idea tactically.
link |
What if men, Richard Wrangham, somebody from Harvard,
link |
describes that men are the originators of violence,
link |
physical violence in society.
link |
And he argues that actually the world would be better off.
link |
No, just a very cold calculus.
link |
If you get rid of men,
link |
there will be a lot less violence in society is his claim.
link |
But who says you need to get rid of violence in society?
link |
But shouldn't that at least be a discussion?
link |
The pros and cons.
link |
Have a debate, a panel discussion,
link |
violence, pros and cons.
link |
Well, that's the sort of thing, if I can say so,
link |
that some weak ass academic decides to do
link |
because he thinks that his area of Boston
link |
would be nicer or whatever.
link |
He might decide it's useful
link |
if he was living in Kiev today to have violent men.
link |
I mean, it might, if New York was invaded right now,
link |
I'd need some violent men around here.
link |
But it wouldn't be invaded if there's no violent men.
link |
Well, there's also, at least there's some level of threat
link |
that you ought to exude that puts people off.
link |
If I was in, you know, I'm very glad
link |
that the men and women of Ukraine are capable of
link |
and more than capable of fighting for their country
link |
and for their neighbors and their families and much more.
link |
But it's better that there was violence ready to unleash
link |
when violence was unleashed upon them
link |
than that the whole society had been told
link |
that they should identify as non binary.
link |
But at least it's a conversation to have.
link |
Isn't there aspect to the sort of the feminist movement
link |
that is correct in challenging the...
link |
Some forms of violence, domestic violence, for instance.
link |
Although women are capable of that as well.
link |
I'm learning about this.
link |
We're all learning about this at the moment.
link |
I can't help but watch the entirety of it go down
link |
in this beautiful mess that is human relations.
link |
But just to finish up that thought,
link |
it's very unwise for women to war against men
link |
as it would be for men to war against women.
link |
It's highly, highly unwise to war on a majority population.
link |
And in America, Britain and other Western countries,
link |
white people are still a majority.
link |
And so why would you tell the majority of their evil
link |
by dint of their skin color?
link |
And think that that would be a good way
link |
to keep them in check.
link |
I mean, I'm not guilty of anything because of my skin color.
link |
I'm not guilty of anything.
link |
My ancestors didn't do anything wrong.
link |
And even if they had,
link |
why would I be held responsible for it?
link |
So to go back to Nietzsche,
link |
is there some aspect to where,
link |
if we try to explain the forces at play here,
link |
is it the will to power playing itself out
link |
from individual human nature
link |
and from group behavior nature?
link |
Is there some elements to this
link |
which is the game we play as human beings
link |
is always when we have less power,
link |
we try to find ways to gain more power.
link |
That's certainly one.
link |
The desire to grab is,
link |
let me see if I can find a quote for you on that.
link |
The desire to grab that which we think we're owed
link |
and to do it often in the guise of justice.
link |
I mean, justice is one of the great terms of our age
link |
and one of the great bogus terms of our age.
link |
People forever talk about their search for justice.
link |
It's amazing how violent they can often be
link |
in their search for justice
link |
and how many rules they're willing to break
link |
so long as they can say they're after justice
link |
and how many norms they can trample
link |
so long as they can say it's in the name of justice.
link |
You can burn down buildings in the name of justice.
link |
Well, the majority groups throughout history,
link |
including those with white skin color
link |
have done the same in the name of justice.
link |
We come up with all kinds of sexy terms
link |
in our propaganda machines
link |
to sell whatever atrocities we'd like to commit.
link |
One of the quotes from Nietzsche that I liked
link |
and I quoted in this book.
link |
Careful, I'm judging you harshly.
link |
Nietzsche says that one of the dangers of men of resentment
link |
is they'll achieve their ultimate form of revenge,
link |
which is to turn happy people
link |
into unhappy people like themselves,
link |
to shove their misery in the faces of the happy
link |
so that in due course the happy,
link |
and this is quoting Nietzsche,
link |
start to be ashamed of their happiness
link |
and perhaps say to one another,
link |
it's a disgrace to be happy.
link |
There is too much misery.
link |
This is something to be averted.
link |
The sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too
link |
or make the healthy confuse themselves with the sick.
link |
Well, I think that again, there's a lot of that going on.
link |
How could I be happy when there is unhappiness in the world?
link |
Why should I not join the ranks of the unhappy?
link |
I think Dostoevsky has a book about that as well.
link |
Knows From Underground.
link |
This has been very Russian, Russian focus.
link |
I'm very pleased with another times,
link |
but Dostoevsky and Grossman and others have come in.
link |
I wasn't doing this as a sort of.
link |
Yeah, well, it's always good to plug the greats
link |
and get to know they're still relevant.
link |
Do you speak Russian by the way at all?
link |
I'm told it's a 10 year language basically
link |
to learn from scratch as my friends who have done it.
link |
Well, there's the language and then there's the personality
link |
behind the language and the personality.
link |
I feel like you already have.
link |
So you just need to know the surface details.
link |
In fact, the silence to be silent in the Russian language
link |
is something that's already important.
link |
Oh, I should, if we had a moment,
link |
I'd tell you my story about Stalin's birthplace.
link |
Should I tell you that?
link |
I once went to Gori where Stalin was born.
link |
I was there just after the Georgia war.
link |
And I went to the nomads land in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
link |
And I said, I really got to go to Gori also here
link |
because the shell had landed in Gori rather weirdly
link |
from the Russian side and Gori is where Stalin was born.
link |
And of course, Gori is in Georgia.
link |
And when we had the museum of Stalin's birthplace,
link |
they'd been trying to change for some years
link |
because it had been unadulteratedly pro Stalin for years.
link |
And the Georgian authorities,
link |
this is in Saakashvili's time,
link |
were trying to make it into a museum of Stalinism.
link |
And it was really tough.
link |
The only place I've seen which is similar
link |
is the house in Mexico City where Trotsky was killed.
link |
That also is that they're not quite sure to do.
link |
They don't want to say he's a bad guy
link |
because they think that people won't come anyhow.
link |
Stalin's house in Gori had changed
link |
from the museum of Stalin to the museum of Stalinism.
link |
There was this large Georgian woman with a pink pencil
link |
who just had clearly been doing the tour for 50 years
link |
and just pointed all the facts.
link |
She did that classic thing.
link |
I've also saw it once in North Korea
link |
where they sort of that sort of communist thing
link |
where they say, here is, this is 147 feet high
link |
They give you lots of facts.
link |
What does it matter?
link |
They always give you facts.
link |
This is Stalin's suitcase.
link |
It is 13 inches wide by, you know, this isn't.
link |
Anyhow, and this woman did all of this
link |
and it was all just wildly pro, not pro Stalin,
link |
just explaining Stalin's life.
link |
It was just a great local boy done good.
link |
They didn't mention the fact he killed
link |
more Georgians per capita than anyone else.
link |
Local boy done good.
link |
And we get to the end and before being taken to the gift shop
link |
where they sell red wine with Stalin's face on it
link |
and among other things, and a lighter with Stalin on it,
link |
they took you to a little room under the stairs
link |
and they said, this is a replica of interrogation cell
link |
to show, represent horror of what happened in Stalin time.
link |
As I said, there's no, no kind of thing.
link |
And I took the woman aside at the end.
link |
I discovered she'd said this to other journalists
link |
and visited before.
link |
I took her aside and said,
link |
what do you think about communist Stalin?
link |
And she said, let's say she'd obviously done this
link |
during communist times.
link |
She said, it's not my place to judge, that sort of thing.
link |
Which is an interesting comment in itself.
link |
I said, yeah, but he killed more Georgians than anyone
link |
and all that sort of thing.
link |
And she said, it's not my place to judge
link |
or to give my views and that sort of thing.
link |
And eventually I said, well, what do you feel about it?
link |
And she said, it was like a hurricane, it happened.
link |
That's interesting because if I may mention Clubhouse
link |
once again, I got a chance to talk to a few people
link |
from Mongolia, there's a woman from Mongolia
link |
and they talked about the fact
link |
that they deeply admire Stalin, love.
link |
She sounded, if I may, hopefully that's not crossing line.
link |
I think I'm representing her correctly in saying
link |
she admired him almost like, loved him.
link |
Like the way people love like Jesus, like a holy figure.
link |
Well, isn't that still the case in large parts of Russia?
link |
I mean, Stalin keeps on winning
link |
greatest Russian of all time.
link |
And that's perhaps, maybe there's a dip,
link |
but if we were to think about the long arc of history,
link |
perhaps that's going to go up and up and up and up.
link |
There's something about human memory
link |
that it just, you forget the details
link |
of the atrocities of the past and remember that.
link |
I mean, think of the number of people we talk about
link |
as historical heroes, Napoleon.
link |
I mean, British people don't talk about Napoleon as a hero,
link |
but the French, now you're, now you're on tricky ground.
link |
But no, but like the French, normally my Napoleon
link |
and there had many Admiral Aswit who was also
link |
an unbelievable brute and killed many people unnecessarily.
link |
And there are lots of figures from history
link |
that we sort of cover that over with.
link |
Can we mention Churchill briefly?
link |
Because he is one of the, you can make a case for him
link |
being one of the great representers
link |
or great figures historically of Western civilization.
link |
And then there's a lot of people from, not a lot.
link |
I know, I have like three friends
link |
and one of them happens to be from London.
link |
And they say that he's not a good person.
link |
So listen, this friend, we did not discuss.
link |
I just, this is an opinion poll of the three friends,
link |
but I do know that there's quite a bit, you know.
link |
There's a backlash going on at the moment.
link |
At the moment and in general, there's a spirit
link |
like reflecting on the darker sides
link |
of some of these historical figures,
link |
like challenging history through,
link |
it's not just critical race theory.
link |
It's challenging history through,
link |
well, are the people we think of as heroes,
link |
what are their flaws?
link |
And are they in fact villains that are convenient,
link |
sort of, we're there at the right time
link |
to accidentally do the right thing.
link |
I hope this isn't the representative fair summation
link |
of your friend in London's views.
link |
No, she's going to be quite mad at this,
link |
but I didn't say the name, so it could be any friend.
link |
It could be, it's like a girlfriend in Canada.
link |
You've given that away.
link |
Well, that's, of course I would not.
link |
I made that up completely.
link |
It's all, just like my girlfriend in Canada,
link |
she's completely a figment of my imagination.
link |
Nevertheless, Winston Churchill is somebody,
link |
I mean, just looking at reading
link |
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
link |
is an incredible figure that to me,
link |
so much of World War II is marked,
link |
leading up to the war is marked
link |
by stunning amounts of cowardice by political leaders,
link |
and it's fascinating to watch here
link |
this person clearly with a drinking and a smoking problem.
link |
I didn't understand why that's a negative.
link |
No, I didn't say, you see.
link |
Yeah, you throw it in as if it is.
link |
No, well, it's called humor.
link |
I'll explain it to you one day what that means,
link |
Explain dry humor.
link |
He stood up, he stood up to what we now see as evil
link |
when at the time it was not so obvious to see.
link |
You know, so that's just a fascinating figure
link |
of Western civilization.
link |
I'd love to get your comments.
link |
The real criticisms, I mean, smoking and drinking.
link |
The real criticisms of Churchill are quite easy to sum up,
link |
and I do so in the War on the West, actually.
link |
I say these are the things that they now use against him.
link |
Didn't do enough to avert the Bengal famine in 1943,
link |
That's been shot down by numerous historians,
link |
including Indian historians.
link |
In the middle of the war, in the middle of a world war,
link |
Churchill did what he could
link |
to get grain supplies diverted from Australia to Bengal.
link |
The famine was appalling.
link |
It was caused by a typhoon.
link |
It was not caused by Winston Churchill,
link |
and the idea that some, basically,
link |
Indian nationalist historians have pumped out
link |
in recent years, and just anti Churchill figures,
link |
that he actually wanted Indians to die
link |
is just total calumny.
link |
And when people claim, some people claim that,
link |
I mean, there was a few very ignorant scholars,
link |
nevertheless with some credentials,
link |
who claim that Churchill wanted the Indian population
link |
to basically be genocided.
link |
And it's complete nonsense,
link |
not least by the fact that during the period
link |
which in question Indian population boomed.
link |
So that's one of the main ones.
link |
Another one is that he had some views
link |
that we now had regarded as racist.
link |
He definitely regarded races
link |
as being of different characters,
link |
and that there were superior races,
link |
and the, as it were, the white European
link |
was a superior culture.
link |
He was born in Victorian England,
link |
so he had some Victorian attitudes.
link |
These are things in the negative side of the ledger,
link |
and as with all history,
link |
you should have a negative
link |
and a positive side of the ledger.
link |
Positive side of the ledger includes
link |
he almost certainly did more than any one human being
link |
to save the world from Nazism.
link |
So that should count as something.
link |
And one of the reasons I talk about Churchill
link |
in this regard is to stress that if you get,
link |
I'm not trying to stop anyone doing history at all.
link |
I don't think that the revisionism of recent years
link |
about Churchill or the founding fathers of America
link |
or anyone else is anything I want to stop.
link |
I find it interesting,
link |
find it interesting not least
link |
because it's so sloppy on occasions,
link |
but I find it interesting and it's important.
link |
And we should be able to see people in the round.
link |
But that includes recognizing
link |
the positive side of the ledger.
link |
And if you can't recognize that side,
link |
you're doing something else.
link |
You're doing something else.
link |
It's some form of politicking of a very particular kind.
link |
And I think it's the same thing with the founding fathers.
link |
There are some people, for instance,
link |
certainly since the 90s who have pushed
link |
the Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson story
link |
to show that Thomas Jefferson was some kind of brute.
link |
As a result, we see Jefferson's statue
link |
being removed from the council chamber
link |
of the city we're sitting in last November
link |
by council members who said that Thomas Jefferson
link |
no longer represents our values.
link |
If you can't recognize greatness of Thomas Jefferson
link |
and that he had flaws,
link |
I mean, that's not a grownup debate.
link |
And weigh them and weigh them in the context of the time.
link |
But let me sort of throw a curveball at you then.
link |
What about recognizing the positive
link |
and the negative of a fellow with nice facial hair
link |
I mean, I have a section in The War in the West,
link |
as you know, where I go for Karl Marx with some glee.
link |
So he seems to have gotten some popularity
link |
in the West recently.
link |
Not just recently, yeah.
link |
I mean, he's had a resurgence recently.
link |
Well, that's because whenever things are seen to go wrong,
link |
people reach for other options.
link |
And when, for instance, it's very hard
link |
for people to accumulate capital,
link |
it's not obvious that they're gonna become capitalists.
link |
And so one thing that happens is people say,
link |
let's look at the Marxism thing again,
link |
see if that's a viable goer.
link |
And my argument would simply be,
link |
point me to one place that's worked.
link |
Well, the argument from the Marxists
link |
or the Marxian economists is that
link |
we've only really tried it once, the Soviets tried it,
link |
and then there's a few people
link |
that kind of tried the Soviet thing.
link |
Well, they basically, it's an offshoot of the Soviet, yes.
link |
They tried it in Venezuela.
link |
So let's just quickly say,
link |
how did all these experiments go?
link |
Well, they failed in fascinating ways.
link |
They did, but they failed.
link |
We should stress, so grossly failed.
link |
So grossly failed that they threw millions
link |
and millions of people into completely thwarted lives
link |
that were much shorter than they should have been.
link |
Yeah, so the lesson to learn there,
link |
that you can learn several lessons.
link |
One is that anything that smells like Marxism
link |
is going to lead to a lot of problems.
link |
Now, another lesson could be,
link |
well, what is the fundamental idea that Marx had?
link |
He was criticizing capitalism and the flaws of capitalism.
link |
So is it possible to do better than capitalism?
link |
And that's, if you take that spirit, you start to wonder.
link |
That might actually become relevant in, I don't know,
link |
20, 30, 50 years when the machines start doing
link |
more and more of the labor, all those kinds of things.
link |
You start to ask questions.
link |
You finally might get to Marx's dream
link |
of what the average day would look like.
link |
Well, there's gonna be an awful lot
link |
of literary criticism then.
link |
If you remember, that's what Marx said
link |
that we would be doing in the evenings,
link |
the laborer in the evening.
link |
Well, he didn't know Twitter was a thing, or Netflix.
link |
So he would change.
link |
Are there things we could learn from Marx plausibly, possibly?
link |
I can't think of anything myself offhand.
link |
But to have a critique of capitalism
link |
isn't by any means a bad thing in this society.
link |
I'd rather that it was a critique of capitalism
link |
that showed how you improve capitalism,
link |
a critique of the free market that showed
link |
how people could get better access to the free market,
link |
how you could ensure, for instance,
link |
that young people get onto the property ladder,
link |
Those are constructive things.
link |
The people who say we must have Marxism,
link |
I mean, don't know what the hell they're talking about,
link |
because that never leads to any of those things.
link |
Haven't led in the past.
link |
It's never led in the past.
link |
And at some point, you've got to try to work out
link |
how many attempts you make at this damn philosophy
link |
before you realize that every attempt always
link |
leads to the same thing.
link |
I would say we could pretend that fascism has never
link |
been properly tried and that it was unfortunate what happened
link |
in Nazi Germany, but that wasn't real fascism.
link |
And Mussolini's fascism didn't go all that well,
link |
but it was a bit better.
link |
And maybe we could try a bit more Franco fascism.
link |
Nobody would have any time for this crap, nor should they.
link |
The people who try that are reviled, and quite rightly.
link |
So why do we tolerate it with the Marxism thing?
link |
And it's a great mystery to me,
link |
the way that people do tolerate it.
link |
Always, always in this stupid way of saying,
link |
we haven't done it yet.
link |
And if you keep trying the same recipe,
link |
and every time it comes out as shit,
link |
it's that the recipe is shit.
link |
Well, sort of, I'm trying to practice here
link |
by playing devil's advocate,
link |
practice the same idea that you mentioned,
link |
which is, when you say the word Marxism,
link |
should you throw out everything,
link |
or should you ask a question, is there good ideas here?
link |
And the same, it's the good,
link |
it's weighing the good and the bad,
link |
and being able to do so calmly and thoughtfully.
link |
You know the famous George Orwell comment
link |
on the style, in an argument with a Stalinist?
link |
That's one of my favorite quotes.
link |
George Orwell, in the early 40s,
link |
gets into an argument with a Stalinist.
link |
He's also a Marxist.
link |
And this is after the show trials, 37.
link |
This is when it's very clear
link |
what Marxism in the Russian form is.
link |
And this, Orwell is in the discussion with this Marxist,
link |
and it goes on and on,
link |
and eventually Orwell says,
link |
well, you know, what about the show trials,
link |
and what about what's happened in the Ukraine,
link |
and the famines, and much more,
link |
and the purges, and the purges, and the purges,
link |
and eventually the Stalinist says to Orwell
link |
what Orwell knows he's going to say all along,
link |
which is, he says,
link |
you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
link |
And Orwell says, where's the omelet?
link |
Oh, yeah, that's a good, that's a really good,
link |
because that's a...
link |
Look at this by this stage, okay?
link |
Where's my damn omelet?
link |
How many just messy, big, bloody, eggy piles
link |
have the Marxists created by now in country after country?
link |
Always next time they're going to produce the great omelet,
link |
but they never have, and they never will,
link |
because the whole thing is rotten from the start.
link |
But let me just also say one thing about,
link |
because of course Marx isn't as nice as he sounds,
link |
and that's one of the things that I try
link |
to highlight in the book is,
link |
if we're going to do this reductive thing
link |
of people in history and saying,
link |
well, they had views that were of their time,
link |
and we must therefore condemn them for them,
link |
say, fine, let's do the same thing with Marx.
link |
And there were things I quote in this book
link |
from Marx's letters, not least letters to Engels,
link |
and indeed in his published writings,
link |
in pieces he was writing for the American press
link |
the way he has horrible views on slavery
link |
and colonialism and much more.
link |
But the main thing is, I mean,
link |
the horrible things he says about black people
link |
and the constant use of the N word.
link |
In fact, when I was doing the audio book
link |
for the war in the West, I had to decide,
link |
will I read out the quotes from Marx or not?
link |
If I had read them out, I'd have been canceled
link |
because people would have just said,
link |
you've been using the N word so much in this passage.
link |
And I slightly thought of doing it
link |
so that I could say I was only quoting Marx
link |
to try to hit the point home.
link |
In the end, of course, I was sensible and decided not to,
link |
but Marx's letters are disgusting on these terms.
link |
Since I highlighted this in this book
link |
and some of the media picked it up
link |
and have popularized this thing
link |
I'm trying to put into the system,
link |
which is if you're gonna accuse Churchill of racism,
link |
if you're gonna accuse Jefferson of racism,
link |
Washington of racism, and so on, what about Marx?
link |
The two things that Marxists have said since this came out
link |
has been, first of all, why are you saying this about Marx?
link |
He was a man of his time, like everyone else.
link |
And the second thing they say is,
link |
we don't go to Marx for his horrible abhorrent views on race.
link |
So talking about mixed race people as gorillas and so on.
link |
We don't go to him for that.
link |
We go to him for his economic theories.
link |
I say, okay, well, we don't go to Thomas Jefferson
link |
for his views on slaves.
link |
We don't go to Churchill for the precise language
link |
he used that points in the 1910s about Indians.
link |
Or his health advice.
link |
Or his health advice.
link |
Actually, I do get him for that.
link |
That explains so much.
link |
But let's have some standards on this.
link |
And that's why I'm very suspicious of the fact
link |
that the people don't do this with Marx
link |
because I think what they're trying,
link |
what some people are trying to do,
link |
and this may sound conspiratorial,
link |
but I really don't think it is.
link |
I think that some people are deliberately trying
link |
to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past
link |
in order to say there's nothing good.
link |
Nothing you can hold on to.
link |
No one you should revere.
link |
You've got no heroes.
link |
The whole thing comes down.
link |
Who's left standing?
link |
Oh, we've also got this idea from the 20th century
link |
still about Marxism.
link |
Well, the 19th and 20th centuries.
link |
You will not have the entire landscape deracinated.
link |
And then the worst ideas tried again.
link |
So basically destroy all of history
link |
and the lessons learned from history
link |
and then start from scratch.
link |
And then it's completely any idea can work
link |
and then you could just take whatever.
link |
Well, and the thing is there are always some people
link |
with pre preferred ideas.
link |
And I mentioned this also with the postcolonialists.
link |
The postcolonialists were really interesting
link |
because when the European powers were moving
link |
from Africa and the Far East,
link |
postcolonial movements had one obvious move
link |
they could have done, which was to say,
link |
since the European powers have left,
link |
we will return to a pre colonial life,
link |
which in some of their places would have been returning
link |
to slave markets and slave ownership
link |
and slave selling and much more.
link |
But put that aside for a second.
link |
They could have said we have an indigenous culture
link |
which we will return to.
link |
Almost uniformly in the postcolonial era,
link |
you had figures like France Fanon,
link |
you had European intellectuals like Sartre,
link |
who said the Western powers are retreating
link |
from these countries and therefore we should institute
link |
in these countries what but Western Marxism.
link |
Well, it's not obvious to me that like the bad ideas
link |
will be the ones that emerge,
link |
but it's more likely the bad ideas would emerge
link |
in this kind of context when you erase history,
link |
when you erase tradition.
link |
When you erase history and you leave some ideas
link |
deliberately uninterrogated.
link |
I mean, as I say, find me one in a hundred
link |
American students who've heard of
link |
any of the communist despots of the 20th century.
link |
I mean, name recognition in,
link |
there was a poll done a few years ago in the UK
link |
and like name recognition among children,
link |
school children for Stalin, let alone Mao.
link |
I mean, Mao who kills more people than anyone,
link |
65 million Chinese, perhaps.
link |
How many students in America know what Mao was,
link |
who he was, where he was, nothing.
link |
Or the atrocities committed.
link |
Where the atrocities were committed.
link |
And I worry about that because it means
link |
that we might have learned one of the two lessons
link |
of the 20th century.
link |
We think we've learned one of the two lessons
link |
of the 20th century.
link |
We actually haven't learned that lesson.
link |
We've learned a little bit of it.
link |
And we've not learned the other one at all.
link |
Because that's why we still have people
link |
in American politics and elsewhere
link |
actually talking about collectivization and things.
link |
As if there's no problem with that.
link |
And as if it's perfectly obvious.
link |
And they could run it and they'd know
link |
exactly where to stop.
link |
What are the two lessons of the 20th century?
link |
Fascism and communism.
link |
I mean, I'm not exactly sure what exactly the lessons are.
link |
No, it's not clear.
link |
If the lessons were very clear,
link |
we'd be better at it.
link |
Well, one is your book broadly applied
link |
of madness of crowds.
link |
That's one lesson.
link |
Meaning like large crowds can display herd like behavior.
link |
Yes, be very suspicious of crowds.
link |
In general, I mean, you apply it in different,
link |
more to modern application.
link |
In a sense, but that's rooted in history,
link |
that crowds can, when humans get together,
link |
they can do some quite radically silly things.
link |
Elias Kaneti is very good on that, crowds and power.
link |
And Eric Hoffer, who is a sort of self taught, amazing,
link |
not to say autodidactic writer,
link |
the true believer and so on.
link |
He was extremely good on that.
link |
But the reason I mentioned the two things,
link |
no, I mean, we should have realized
link |
the two nightmares of the 20th century fascism and communism,
link |
that we should know how they came about.
link |
And we're interested in learning
link |
how one of them came about, fascism.
link |
And we know some of the lessons,
link |
like don't treat other people as less than you
link |
because of their race.
link |
That's one lesson.
link |
But we've done some good at learning that.
link |
But the second one, not to do communism again,
link |
not to do socialism, I think we're way away from knowing
link |
because we don't know how it happened.
link |
And the little temptations are still there always.
link |
Look at people saying,
link |
I'm gonna expropriate your property.
link |
If people do things they don't like,
link |
they will get, we can't wait to take your property.
link |
Well, there's a sense, there's an appealing sense.
link |
Okay, every ideology has an appealing narrative behind it
link |
that sells the ideology.
link |
So for socialism, for communism is that there's a,
link |
it seems unfair that the working class
link |
does all of this work and gets only a fraction of the output.
link |
It just seems unfair.
link |
So you wanna make it.
link |
If they do get a fraction of the output, yes.
link |
Yes, and so it seems to be more fair
link |
if we increase that.
link |
If the workers own all of the value of their output
link |
and things that are more fair seems to be a good thing.
link |
I'd say, well, yeah, I mean, fairness is,
link |
I like fairness as a term.
link |
No, I much prefer fairness
link |
because it's a much easier thing to try to work out.
link |
It's quite amorphous itself as a concept,
link |
but everyone can recognize it.
link |
So for instance, should the boss of the company
link |
earn a million times that of the lowest paid employee?
link |
Doesn't seem fair.
link |
Should they earn maybe five or 10 times
link |
the salary of the lowest employee?
link |
Yeah, possibly, that could be fair.
link |
There are certain sort of multiples
link |
which are within the bounds of reasonableness.
link |
I think actually that's the much bigger problem
link |
in capitalism at the moment as I see it
link |
is the not untrue perception
link |
that a tiny number of people accrue a lot of the benefits
link |
and that the bit in the middle
link |
has become increasingly squeezed
link |
and is at danger always of falling
link |
all the way down to the bottom.
link |
I mean, I think in the snakes and ladders
link |
of American capitalism, for instance,
link |
it's a correct perception to say
link |
that the snakes go down awfully far.
link |
If you tread on the snake,
link |
you can plummet an awfully long way in America.
link |
And the deal in the game was that the ladders took you high
link |
and there's a perception, and again,
link |
it's not entirely wrong that the ladder system
link |
on the board is kind of broken.
link |
So what you're saying is you're a Marxist.
link |
I'm not saying I'm a Marxist.
link |
You heard that here first in the out of context blog post
link |
you're going to write about this.
link |
I get to that, I get back to this point.
link |
The way to critique capitalism,
link |
if it's gone bad, is to get better capitalists.
link |
Free markets where they're not fair should be made fair.
link |
Never decide that the answer is the thing
link |
that has never produced any human flourishing, i.e. Marxism.
link |
So as you describe in The Madness of Crowds
link |
the herd like behavior of humans that gets us into trouble,
link |
you as an individual thinker and others listening to this,
link |
how can you, because all of us are mids crowds,
link |
we're influenced by the society that's around us,
link |
by the people that's around us.
link |
How can we think independently?
link |
How can we, if you're in the Soviet Union
link |
at the beginning of the 20th century,
link |
if you're in, I don't know, Nazi Germany
link |
at the end of the 30s or the 40s,
link |
how can you think independently?
link |
Given, first of all, that it's hard to think independently,
link |
just intellectually speaking,
link |
but also that it just becomes more and more dangerous.
link |
So the incentive to think independently
link |
under the uncertainty that's usually involved with thinking
link |
is, I mean, it's a silly thing to say,
link |
but on Twitter there is a cost to be paid
link |
for going against the crowd on any silly thing.
link |
We can even talk about, what is it?
link |
Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.
link |
There's a crowd that believes that that was unjustified.
link |
I forget what the crowd decided.
link |
Crowd split on that one.
link |
It's safe to have one opinion either way.
link |
Okay, it is, right.
link |
But there is, you put it very nicely,
link |
that there's clearly a calculus here
link |
and that you can measure, on Twitter in particular,
link |
you can measure kind of the crowd,
link |
a sense of where the crowd lays.
link |
I don't want to, this is not a legal discussion.
link |
I don't have my lawyer present.
link |
I don't even have a lawyer.
link |
The man in question is dead.
link |
But I think most people who are not just diehard fans
link |
would concede that Michael Jackson
link |
had a strange relationship with children
link |
and was almost certainly a pedophile.
link |
Is that, was that, did the crowd agree on that?
link |
No, the crowd hasn't agreed because he's too famous
link |
and we all love Thriller.
link |
So you said people who are not fans, I just don't.
link |
No, I'm a fan of Michael Jackson,
link |
but I think he was almost certainly a pedophile.
link |
And, but nobody wants to give up dancing to bad at weddings.
link |
So they just kind of added in.
link |
Seriously, it's a genius.
link |
Your law does not apply to Bill Cosby.
link |
Well, he wasn't, he was, of course,
link |
one of the most famous people in America.
link |
But maybe he wasn't regarded as talented.
link |
Oh, oh wow, there's depth to this calculation.
link |
There's a genius opt out in all cultures.
link |
There's a genius opt out in all cultures.
link |
Look at Lord Byron.
link |
Lord Byron shagged his sister.
link |
Doesn't affect his reputation.
link |
In fact, if anything, it kind of adds to it.
link |
But then again, this kind of war against the West,
link |
genius is actually makes you more likely,
link |
or no, to get canceled.
link |
So if you look at the genius of Thomas Jefferson, or...
link |
Well, yes, because if you haven't done anything remarkable,
link |
nobody will come looking for you passively, yeah.
link |
Oh, so genius can get you in trouble eventually.
link |
Sidle through life with nobody noticing.
link |
Be totally harmless and then die
link |
and hope you haven't used any carbon.
link |
But you were asking about how to survive
link |
the era of social media, as it were, and the crowds.
link |
And there's a very simple answer to that.
link |
Don't overrate the significance of the unreal world.
link |
Oh, come on, but this is still human psychology.
link |
Because you want to fit in.
link |
There's a, you want to...
link |
Because you like people, and you're just as a...
link |
Why not just like a small number of people
link |
and ignore the rest?
link |
Well, I mean, I actually like most people,
link |
and that isn't a general thing.
link |
I don't have detestation for most people at all.
link |
Most people I kind of enjoy speaking with and being with.
link |
But in terms of storing your sense of self worth
link |
in absolute strangers, big mistake.
link |
Yeah, well, me, that's...
link |
Listen, let's turn into a therapy session.
link |
Because for me, and I think I represent
link |
some number of population, is I'm pretty self critical.
link |
I'm looking for myself in the world.
link |
And there is a depth of connection
link |
with people on the internet.
link |
I mean, I have some...
link |
I think there's a shallowness of it.
link |
It's shallow connection.
link |
If you became very ill tomorrow, would any of them help?
link |
Good, that's a good test.
link |
Yeah, that's a good test.
link |
But then at the end of the day, yeah, you're right.
link |
Your very close friends would help, family would help.
link |
Yeah, and perhaps that's the only thing...
link |
You can't store significant amounts of trust,
link |
or faith, or belief, or self worth
link |
in places which will not return it to you.
link |
Okay, so let's talk about the more extreme case,
link |
When you talk about the things you talk about
link |
in the war on the West and madness of crowds,
link |
I mean, you're getting a lot of blowback, I'm sure.
link |
As for the listener, you just shrugged lightly.
link |
It was a zen like look on your face.
link |
All you need is Sam Harris to say
link |
that you're brilliant and you're happy.
link |
No, no, I love Sam.
link |
Deeply pleased when he flatters me, but I mean,
link |
and he's nice about me, but no, I don't just rely on Sam.
link |
No, I mean, why would I mind?
link |
I mean, maybe it's self selecting.
link |
If I didn't have the view I had about that,
link |
or whatever armory it is that I have on that,
link |
I wouldn't do what I did, maybe.
link |
I mean, have you been to some dark places psychologically
link |
because of the challenging ideas you explore?
link |
So like significant self doubt, just kind of...
link |
I can't say I've been unaffected by everything in my life.
link |
By any means, that would make me an automaton of some kind.
link |
There's definitely times I've got things wrong
link |
and regretted that.
link |
There's times I've...
link |
There was a period around the time I wrote my book,
link |
The Strange Death of Europe,
link |
which was a very, very dark time.
link |
And it wasn't because I was having a dark time in my life,
link |
but because of the book I was writing.
link |
Oh, because of the places you had to go
link |
in order to write that book.
link |
And, well, I was contemplating the end of a civilization.
link |
So occasionally now I have maybe slightly too pat
link |
at this stage, but sometimes readers come up to me
link |
in the street or whatever and say,
link |
you know, I love The Strange Death of Europe.
link |
And will say, you know, very depressing book to read,
link |
however, I would say, well, you should have tried
link |
But it was because, I mean, it has chunks of it,
link |
which I'm very proud of in particular
link |
about the death of religion, the death of God,
link |
the loss of meaning and the void.
link |
And that's difficult stuff to write about
link |
and to grapple with.
link |
And there is a sort of, I haven't reread that book
link |
since it came out,
link |
but I think there are passages in it
link |
which reveal what I was thinking very clearly
link |
in the poetry of it, as it were, as well as the detail.
link |
But, yeah, I can't say, I'm used to saying
link |
what I think and what I see.
link |
And if there's any pushback I've got from that,
link |
I'm completely consoled that I'm saying what I see
link |
That's your source of strength,
link |
is that you're always seeking the truth as best you see it.
link |
Well, I can't agree to go along with a lie
link |
if I've seen something with my own eyes.
link |
Do you ever, so speaking of Sam Harris,
link |
and I mentioned to you offline, a lot of people,
link |
I talk to a lot of smart people in my private life
link |
on this podcast, and a lot of them will reference you
link |
as their example of a very smart person.
link |
So given that compliment, do you ever worry
link |
that your sort of ego grows to a level
link |
where what you think is the truth is no longer the truth?
link |
Is this kind of, it blinds you?
link |
And also, on top of that,
link |
the fact that you stand against the crowd often,
link |
that there's part of it that appeals to you,
link |
that you like to point out the emperor has no clothes.
link |
I get a certain thrill from the friction.
link |
Yeah, that sometimes both your ego
link |
and the thrill of friction will get you
link |
to deviate from the truth and instead,
link |
just look for the friction.
link |
Could do, could do for sure.
link |
I try to keep alive to that.
link |
I mean, early in my career, I realized that, for instance,
link |
I didn't want to make enemies unnecessarily,
link |
any more than strictly necessary,
link |
because there was a very large number
link |
of already necessary enemies.
link |
And I remember once, I won't go into the details,
link |
but I already had one sort of thing I'd done that week,
link |
and then another thing came out,
link |
and I just thought, I can't, I can't do that.
link |
And I remember thinking, don't be the sort of person
link |
who's forever creating storms,
link |
and I tried to make sure I wasn't.
link |
And I think I've pretty much stuck to that.
link |
But to answer your question,
link |
well, the first thing is I'm as confident as I can be
link |
that I wouldn't fall into the trap you described.
link |
I mean, one is that I don't think of myself
link |
as a wildly intelligent person,
link |
partly because I'm very, very aware
link |
of the things I know nothing about.
link |
I mean, for instance, I have almost no knowledge
link |
of the details of finance or economic theory.
link |
I mean, the real details.
link |
I don't mean the big picture of the kind
link |
that we were just discussing earlier,
link |
but I have, if you put the periodic table in front of me,
link |
the periodic table in front of me,
link |
I would struggle to do more than a handful.
link |
I am very conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge.
link |
And where I have gaps or chasms,
link |
I tend to find that I have a disproportionate admiration
link |
for the people who know that stuff.
link |
Like I'm wildly impressed by people who understand money,
link |
really understand it, because I think,
link |
how the hell do you do that?
link |
And the same thing with biologists, medics,
link |
stuff I just know very little about.
link |
And that's a source of humility for you, just knowing that.
link |
Yes, I mean, I think, well, I can get on that stuff,
link |
but I mean, Jesus, if you got me on the general knowledge.
link |
I would say that thing, some years ago,
link |
there's a thing in the UK called University Challenge.
link |
And I was asked some years ago on to,
link |
there's a sort of psych celebrity,
link |
one of former students of the universities or colleges
link |
asked to go back for the Christmas special.
link |
And I was asked to be one of the people from my old college
link |
to go back and compete in the sort of celebrity alumni one.
link |
And the only thing I actually wanted to do,
link |
it was go discover the Louis Theroux
link |
had been to my college before my time.
link |
And he was on, he'd agreed to be on the team.
link |
And I thought, well, I'd love to meet Louis Theroux,
link |
that'd be great fun.
link |
And anyhow, and I said, well, I really don't want to do it.
link |
And they said, come on, you'd be great.
link |
I said, I wouldn't, I'd show myself up
link |
to be a total asshole and ignoramus.
link |
And as it was, I sat down my flat
link |
and I watched some past episodes of University Challenge.
link |
I realized I'd have just sat mute for the whole half hour.
link |
I just couldn't, the first question was about physics.
link |
And the second one was about, as it was,
link |
I watched the one and I could answer the first two
link |
or three questions of the one that actually went out
link |
because they made it a bit simpler.
link |
But I mean, I'm terribly conscious of the,
link |
and I said to the producers, I said, I can't go on
link |
because I mean, I just couldn't answer the questions.
link |
These unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer
link |
on a whole range of things.
link |
So I'm perfectly aware of my limitations and...
link |
You contemplate your limitations.
link |
Yeah, and they're forever before me, you know.
link |
They're not hard to find in every day.
link |
And then on top of that, I suppose, it's,
link |
in a way, you know that line from Rudyard Kipling's
link |
alternately brilliant and slightly nauseating poem, If?
link |
You just enjoy a good poem, can you?
link |
Well, no, it's not, I can enjoy a great poem.
link |
But I mean, a good poem.
link |
This is, you know, slightly off.
link |
But, well, it's up to you.
link |
This goes to your criticism of Dostoevsky.
link |
Take Douglas's criticism with a grain of salt, so.
link |
Maybe I've read it too many memorial services and things.
link |
But that line is a good piece of advice.
link |
If you can learn to meet triumph and disaster
link |
and greet these two imposters just the same.
link |
That's a good line.
link |
It's skipping off an amazing turn of line.
link |
But I do think that it's a very sensible thing
link |
to try to greet triumph and disaster
link |
and regard them as imposters and greet them just the same.
link |
And actually, anyone who knows me knows that I never,
link |
partly it's because I have a sort of belief in the old gods
link |
and that the moment that I thought
link |
that I was at the moment of triumph,
link |
the fates would hitch up their skirts
link |
and run at me at a million miles an hour.
link |
But it's also because, anyone who knows me knows
link |
I never have a moment when I say,
link |
that's just great.
link |
I feel totally fulfilled and victorious.
link |
I mean, it happened to me recently
link |
when the war in the West went straight to number one
link |
in the bestseller list.
link |
How long did that last in terms of your self satisfaction?
link |
Not even for a brief moment?
link |
When I first saw that it was selling,
link |
I had that moment of elation.
link |
I thought, good, I've done it, it's out.
link |
And I did have a moment of elation then, definitely.
link |
But it doesn't last, partly because I tell myself
link |
Because as you said, fate hitches up its skirt.
link |
I don't, this, you brits with your poetry,
link |
even when it's nauseating.
link |
As of 2022, this year, what's your final analysis
link |
of the political leadership and the human mind
link |
and the human being of Donald Trump?
link |
I sort of avoided this for years.
link |
Just talking about Trump.
link |
Tried to avoid talking about Trump for years.
link |
Same reason I tried to avoid writing about Brexit.
link |
Do you think that Trump, just sorry on a small tangent,
link |
do you think that Trump's story is over
link |
or are we just done with volume one?
link |
The people I know who know him say that he's running.
link |
And I think that in general, Republicans have to,
link |
do have a choice in front of them.
link |
A one friend put it to me recently, said,
link |
you've got to go in with your toughest fighter.
link |
And I understand that instinct and I also think
link |
it's a very dangerous instinct
link |
because what if your toughest fighter
link |
is also your biggest liability?
link |
What's the best way to get out the Democrat vote
link |
in 2024 than to have Donald Trump running?
link |
And the people that are doing the war in the West,
link |
they're pretty tough fighters.
link |
And I'm cautious about this because I know every way
link |
I tread it's dangerous, but let me just be frank.
link |
I'll tread as gracefully as I can.
link |
My Wellington boots, my galoshes.
link |
Here's the thing, I think everybody knows what Trump is.
link |
I think we all knew for years.
link |
And I feel sorry for the conservatives who had to pretend
link |
that he was something he wasn't.
link |
I felt sorry for the ones who had to pretend
link |
that for instance he was some devout Christian
link |
or a man of faith or a man of great integrity
link |
or all of these sorts of things.
link |
Because in the public eye for years,
link |
it'd be obvious that wasn't the case.
link |
But he has something extraordinary.
link |
One thing is a method of communication
link |
that you've just got to say was unbelievable.
link |
In one fundamental way that you can't look away
link |
I mean, I mean watching him clear everyone out of the way
link |
in 2016 was thrilling
link |
because those people needed clearing away.
link |
You know, I mean, it's just horrifying.
link |
What America is going to give us another Bush?
link |
What's so great about this family?
link |
America is going to give us another Clinton.
link |
We're going to get to choose any Clinton on the Bush.
link |
Mark Stein said, whatever, we'll just wait for the day
link |
the Clintons and the Bushes into marry
link |
and then we can really have a monarchy again.
link |
So I was very pleased to see him clear them away.
link |
I was very pleased to see him sort of raise
link |
some of the issues that needed raising.
link |
I thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air
link |
and I wished it wasn't him doing it.
link |
And then there was a question of him governing
link |
and it was just perfectly clear
link |
he didn't know how to govern.
link |
What he did have, however, what he does have
link |
is an incredible ability to fight.
link |
And some of the forces he was arraigned against
link |
were arraigned against him.
link |
My gosh, they would have taken down anyone else.
link |
I mean, they'd have probably done some similar BS
link |
against Ted Cruz if he, you know, or Marco Rubio.
link |
You know, they'd have said, some people admitted,
link |
they'd have accused all these people of racism
link |
and misogyny and everything else as well,
link |
just like they did Mitt Romney,
link |
just like they did John McCain.
link |
But Trump was the one ugly enough
link |
and bruisey enough to fight.
link |
And also a willingness or a lack of willingness
link |
to play sort of the civil game of politics.
link |
You know, at a party when politeness gets you in trouble.
link |
You show up and everybody's polite
link |
and you just out of momentum want to be being polite
link |
and all of a sudden you're on an island
link |
with Jeffrey Epstein and it gets you
link |
into a huge amount of trouble.
link |
But so Trump has these sort of extraordinary qualities,
link |
but I just, you know, look, he screwed up
link |
during his time in office because he didn't achieve
link |
as much as he should have done.
link |
And you could say that about every president,
link |
but I refuse to acknowledge that two years
link |
when he had both houses in the beginning,
link |
he just didn't know what levers to pull.
link |
You know, I mean, he was sitting in the office
link |
behind the Oval Office tweeting, watching the news.
link |
I'm sorry, that's not a president.
link |
And he couldn't fill and didn't fill positions
link |
because people knew, I mean,
link |
people who were very loyal to him,
link |
he would just, you know, he'd get them to do something loyal
link |
and then destroy them.
link |
And I think, and then we get onto the thing about,
link |
and here we get onto the, you know,
link |
what of course is very, very fractious terrain,
link |
but, you know, I covered the 2020 election
link |
and I was traveling all around the states
link |
and I went to Trump rally and all sorts of stuff.
link |
And I, I mean, I was in DC on election night
link |
and it got very ugly at one point
link |
in so called Black Lives Matter Plaza.
link |
When it looked like Trump might win,
link |
when Florida came in and got really,
link |
I could feel the air were very, very heated
link |
and like some Antifa people started getting into black lock
link |
and this sort of stuff.
link |
And I thought this town is gonna burn, you know,
link |
And in the aftermath of the vote,
link |
I was willing to hang around in Washington for a bit
link |
and then I saw what it was gonna drag on.
link |
And I saw some of his people and others and people told me
link |
they had great evidence of vote rigging
link |
and all this sort of thing.
link |
And I'm afraid I'm one of those people
link |
who doesn't believe that the evidence that they presented
link |
is good enough to justify the claim
link |
that he won the election.
link |
And I, and people say, have you seen 2000 mules
link |
and have you seen, look, the evidence isn't there,
link |
that the election was won by Donald Trump.
link |
And I think that what he did on January the 6th
link |
was unbelievably dangerous.
link |
And, you know, here it is possible for us to hold two ideas
link |
in our head at the same time.
link |
January the 6th was not nothing,
link |
nor was it an insurrection and attempt to stage a coup.
link |
And there's a vanishing number of people in the US.
link |
It was Eric Weinstein who said that the,
link |
it's like, this is the roof that you have to walk along.
link |
And like the sides are very steep
link |
if you fall off either side.
link |
Is there some sense, given the forces
link |
that are waging war in the West,
link |
you said this feeling, perhaps because of Antifa
link |
or something else, that this town is gonna burn
link |
and maybe a continued feeling that this town
link |
is going to burn with the January 6th events.
link |
Are you worried about the future of the United States
link |
in the coming years because of the feeling of escalation?
link |
Is that just a war of Twitter?
link |
Or is there a real brewing of something?
link |
And how, well, let me then respond to that.
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How, what is the hopeful?
link |
If you 10 years from now look back at the United States
link |
and say we turned it around, what would be the reason?
link |
What would be the ways, the mechanisms that we do so?
link |
Tell you, since I wrote this book,
link |
there are two things in particular
link |
that I've been really pleased that a specific type
link |
of specialist has approached me on
link |
to say that things I've written about
link |
actually have more application than I realized.
link |
One is the gratitude issue.
link |
A number of people have approached me
link |
who have gone through AA, Alcoholics Anonymous.
link |
They sometimes say, have you ever been to AA?
link |
And that's a bit of a personal question.
link |
But they say, but the reason they ask it is because they say,
link |
well, because if you go to drug rehabilitation
link |
or Alcoholics Anonymous, Norm Macdonald said,
link |
it doesn't sound very anonymous.
link |
You stand up in a room, you say your name
link |
and you tell everyone the worst things you've ever done.
link |
Sounds the opposite of anonymous.
link |
Anyhow, but they say, look,
link |
because if you go to these things,
link |
apparently you're asked to, as part of your recovery,
link |
say what you're grateful for,
link |
like list what you're grateful for.
link |
I didn't know that by the way, until the book was out.
link |
And so that turned out to have more application
link |
The other thing though, is that I say
link |
that it's absolutely crucial in America
link |
that we try to find things that we agree on.
link |
And a couple of times since the book came out,
link |
I've been approached by people who are marriage counselors.
link |
But we've also said, have you ever been
link |
through marriage counseling?
link |
And again, that's a very personal question.
link |
Stop asking me personal questions.
link |
No, but they said, and I said, well, why?
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Because this is one of the things that we do
link |
in couples therapy, is try to find things you agree on.
link |
And I think this is very important in America.
link |
And it's made much harder by the fact,
link |
and I've said this many times,
link |
but forgive me if I'm repeating myself,
link |
but it's made much harder by the fact
link |
that having different opinions is very last century.
link |
Now we all have different facts,
link |
or at least the two sides have different facts.
link |
One half of the country roughly,
link |
or let's say 40%, 30%, whatever you want to put it,
link |
with a tired minority in the middle.
link |
One segment of the country believes
link |
that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election
link |
and that the Russians interfered
link |
and got Donald Trump into power.
link |
Another half of the country believes
link |
that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
link |
If you can't agree on who wins elections,
link |
it's very hard to see what you agree on as a country.
link |
That's one of the reasons I mind the war
link |
on American history and Western history,
link |
is one of the things you have to agree on
link |
is at least some attitude towards your past.
link |
You don't have to agree on everything.
link |
But the public square has to have public heroes
link |
who are agreed to be heroes to some extent,
link |
If you don't have that,
link |
if actually you think for instance,
link |
half the country thinks the founding fathers
link |
the other half thinks they were absolutely rotten,
link |
If half the country basically thinks
link |
it would have been better if Columbus
link |
had taken a different turn, never found America,
link |
gone back home and said, I don't know, nothing out there,
link |
that would have been better.
link |
And the other half's pretty glad in the end
link |
that we've got America.
link |
You've got to agree on something.
link |
And I just see in America,
link |
I do think we've got to try to find things to agree on,
link |
like a reasonable attitude towards the past.
link |
That's why that matters.
link |
And again, I stress, I'm not trying to say
link |
that everything in the American past was good.
link |
God knows that wouldn't stand up to a second of scrutiny
link |
But nor was it all bad.
link |
This wasn't a country formed in sin
link |
and in an eradicable sin.
link |
It wasn't founded in 1619
link |
in order to make the country wicked
link |
and incapable of escaping that wickedness.
link |
These are things that will matter enormously
link |
in the years ahead,
link |
because if you can't agree on anything,
link |
including who your heroes are,
link |
the whole thing is just one massive division
link |
and we'll see what I think we're already seeing,
link |
which is people basically going to states
link |
where it's more like the life they want to live.
link |
And some people say to me, well, that's okay.
link |
And the genius of the founding is that it allows for that.
link |
That's possible, but it's also,
link |
it eradicates part of what has been American public life,
link |
which is the ability to look at each other
link |
and discuss face to face.
link |
And I see things like this bomb placed under America
link |
the other week with the Supreme Court League,
link |
the draft league as being just a further example of that.
link |
I'm very, very worried about it in America.
link |
And because if America screws up everything,
link |
everything else in the world goes.
link |
Yeah, there's the degree to which America is still
link |
the beacon of these ideas on which the country was founded
link |
and has been able to live out in better and better forms,
link |
sort of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles
link |
And with the desire to improve.
link |
An imperfect union.
link |
Yeah, well, as I generally have hope that people want
link |
to sort of, in terms of gratitude,
link |
people are aware of how good it feels to be grateful.
link |
It's a better life psychologically.
link |
The resentment is a thing that destroys you from within.
link |
So I just feel that people will long for that
link |
and will find that.
link |
And that's the American way.
link |
Some of the division that we reveal now has to do
link |
with new technologies like social media.
link |
That kind of is a small kind of deviation
link |
from the path we're on because it's a new,
link |
we've got a new toy, just like nuclear weapons.
link |
Yeah, which are relatively new.
link |
But we need to find reasonable attitudes
link |
towards these things.
link |
And that's why I say it matters how you and my feedback
link |
on social media, because we're all going through it
link |
Yeah, we're learning.
link |
And we're learning.
link |
And we've got to learn how to do this without going mad.
link |
I say this, it was my minimalist call to friends
link |
in this era was the main job is not to go insane.
link |
And yeah, like walk towards sanity.
link |
Because I'm sure there's a Hunter S. Thompson quote
link |
in there, like insanity on the weekends
link |
can be at least fun.
link |
Okay, do you have advice for young people
link |
that just put down their TikTok and are listening
link |
to this podcast in high school and college
link |
about how to have a career, how to have a life
link |
they can be proud of?
link |
It's a very broad question.
link |
But of course, I mean, I can give specific advice
link |
to people who want to be writers and so on,
link |
but that's a bit niche, maybe.
link |
Well, writers will be very interesting,
link |
sorry to interrupt.
link |
Also how to put your ideas down on paper
link |
and think through the ideas, develop them
link |
and have the guts to go to a large audience,
link |
especially when the ideas are sort of controversial
link |
or dangerous or difficult.
link |
Well, the main thing to do is to read.
link |
When I was a schoolboy, I'd ever have a book in my pocket,
link |
the side pocket of my jacket, only side pocket,
link |
And that wasn't just because I was swatish in some way,
link |
but because I discovered probably at some point
link |
in my early teens, I discovered something.
link |
I wrote about this once.
link |
I discovered that books were dangerous,
link |
which was a thrilling discovery.
link |
I discovered that they could contain anything.
link |
And also people didn't know what you were reading.
link |
I remember I get far too young an age,
link |
I read The Doors of Perception of Aldous Huxley,
link |
and I didn't make head or tail of it probably,
link |
but I knew that it was about something really interesting
link |
And I thought constantly when I read poetry
link |
or read history, I think I was just constantly thrilled
link |
and wanted to know more.
link |
And if you wanna become a writer, you have to be a reader.
link |
You have to read the best stuff.
link |
And obviously people disagree or agree on what that is,
link |
and you'll find the people that really impress you.
link |
But I know that I just came across certain writers
link |
who just knocked me off my feet.
link |
And when you find those people, read everything
link |
and cling on to them and find other people like that,
link |
find other writers like that, people that are connected
link |
by history or scholarship or circles or whatever.
link |
For you, was it fiction or nonfiction?
link |
Is there a particular books that you just remember
link |
or just give you pause?
link |
Well, I remember that the first book
link |
that absolutely threw me was the Lord of the Flies
link |
of William Golding, which used to be a signed text
link |
and everyone's a bit snotty about because it's so popular.
link |
But I was thrown because I think it was the first adult book
link |
I read in that I had been used to the world
link |
of children's literature of everything ends up fine
link |
in the end, the lost all get found.
link |
And this was the first book I read where that's not the case
link |
the world turns out differently.
link |
And I remember for days afterwards,
link |
I was just in a state of shock.
link |
I couldn't believe what I'd just discovered
link |
and partly because I sort of intuited it must be true.
link |
And of course, that is not to say that the Lord of the Flies
link |
lots of scholarship on what children do in this situation
link |
of being on the island when they do congregate and anyhow.
link |
But yes, that was a sort of introduction to the adult world
link |
and it was shocking and thrilling and I wanted more of it.
link |
And it was dangerous.
link |
And then of course, when I became interested in sex,
link |
let alone when I realized I was gay,
link |
I realized books were a very, very good way to learn
link |
And that was even more dangerous in a way.
link |
And I thought, I mean, nobody knows what I know.
link |
You discovered sex, that was an invention in books?
link |
No, what I mean is, nobody, no, no, no, no.
link |
What I mean is that one of the things that gay people have
link |
when they're growing up is that
link |
you have this terribly big secret
link |
and you don't think the world will ever know,
link |
you hope the world will never know.
link |
And it's been called by one psychologist,
link |
the little boy with a big secret.
link |
And so if you discover that other people
link |
have the same secret, there's a sort of,
link |
thank God for that.
link |
But I mean, that's just a version
link |
of what everybody gets in reading in a way,
link |
which is the thrill of discovery
link |
that somebody else thought something you thought
link |
only you'd thought.
link |
I mean, one of the greatest thrills in all of literature
link |
is when a voice comes from across the centuries
link |
and seems to leave a handprint, you know.
link |
And makes you feel a little bit less alone
link |
because somebody else feels,
link |
sees the world the same way, is the same way.
link |
That's what C.S. Lewis is said to have said,
link |
we read to know we're not alone.
link |
But we don't only read to know we're not alone,
link |
we read to become other people.
link |
I mean, I think I saw in books
link |
a version of the life I wanted to live
link |
and then I decided to live it.
link |
And I'm fortunate enough to have done so.
link |
I wanted to live in the world of ideas
link |
and books and debate.
link |
I wanted to live in the debates of my time, you know.
link |
And I remember when, like a lot of people,
link |
I read Auden when I was young.
link |
And, you know, certain lines obviously stuck with me.
link |
But that poem of his which everybody, you know,
link |
knows and which he hated, September the 1st, 1939,
link |
I remember certain lines in that just like whacked me.
link |
What's that one, you know, sitting on a dive
link |
and for a second or three, degraded and alone,
link |
at the end of a low, dishonest decade.
link |
Of course, there's a problem with that line,
link |
which is you kind of want to be living
link |
at the end of a low, dishonest decade as well.
link |
It sounds sort of cool in a way.
link |
You know, you're the only person who sees it.
link |
But, so yeah, anyhow, that's the diversion.
link |
But the point is, if you want to be a writer,
link |
you've got to be a reader.
link |
And apart from anything else,
link |
you discover the lilt of language
link |
and the things you can do.
link |
And I've read people who, and I still do,
link |
I think, my God, I didn't know, how did you do that?
link |
In fact, books for me now, and articles and other things,
link |
fall into two categories.
link |
One is, I know how you did that.
link |
And the other is, I don't know how you did that.
link |
And the best feeling as a writer
link |
is when you do the second one.
link |
And it happens occasionally in my writing life.
link |
Will you almost like return to something you've written
link |
or like right after you write it?
link |
No, the moment you write it.
link |
You wonder, how did I do that?
link |
That's the most, I've never said that before.
link |
That's the happiest thing in writing.
link |
Very occasionally, it sounds,
link |
but I've occasionally finished something.
link |
Funny enough, it happened some years ago
link |
in a long piece I wrote about the artist, Basquiat.
link |
I finished the piece and I gasped.
link |
I didn't know, because that's also a thing with writing,
link |
is you, it's not, sometimes people say you need to write
link |
in order to know what you think.
link |
That's not quite true.
link |
Sometimes that's a very bad piece of advice
link |
for some writers who don't know what they think
link |
and it's not gonna become clearer
link |
if they just start typing.
link |
But sometimes it is true that you,
link |
there's a thought that's just waiting there
link |
and a clarity that comes across
link |
and suddenly the sentence emerges in your brain.
link |
And by the time you typed it, you just go, yes.
link |
That's the greatest feeling as a writer.
link |
Almost like it came from somewhere else.
link |
That's what Bakunin says about what's the moment.
link |
It's Tom Stoppard's favorite quote
link |
about Bakunin saying what happens in the moment
link |
where the writer's pen, when he pauses,
link |
where does he go in that moment?
link |
That's so interesting.
link |
Because I think the answer to that question
link |
will help us explain consciousness
link |
and all those other weird things about the human mind.
link |
So that was advice for writers.
link |
I didn't really give any advice for people in general.
link |
Is that, oh, you wanna give health advice?
link |
To your channel, Churchill?
link |
No, I don't wanna give health advice.
link |
Because you implied that Churchill
link |
was one of your early guides in that aspect.
link |
So when you discovered your sexuality,
link |
let me ask about love.
link |
Far too personal of a question to ask a Brit.
link |
But what was that like?
link |
And broadly speaking, what's the role of love
link |
in the human condition?
link |
And for you personally, discovering that you were
link |
and maybe telling the world that you were gay.
link |
I'm very perilously personal.
link |
I do actually have a sort of rule
link |
that I don't talk about in my personal life.
link |
Rules are meant to be broken.
link |
Okay, well I'll break it a little bit.
link |
One of the ways in which growing up
link |
and realizing you're gay differs from growing up
link |
and being straight is that it's almost inevitable
link |
that your first passions will be unrequited.
link |
Oh wow, I never thought about that, yeah.
link |
Now that's not to say, there's plenty of unrequited love
</