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.
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No one you should revere.
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You've got no heroes.
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The whole thing comes down.
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Who's left standing?
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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 Badness of Crowds,
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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 of economics
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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,
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to think 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,
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once you get stuck on definitions,
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there's a possibility 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,
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a specific tradition of ideas, culture,
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well known to be perhaps easily defined
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by the combination of Athens and Jerusalem,
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the world of the Bible,
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and the world of ancient Greece and indeed Rome.
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It effectively creates European civilization,
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which itself spawns the rest
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of the Western civilizations, America, Canada,
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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, somewhere else.
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You know you're not in the West.
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When you're in Tokyo, 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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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, getting closer.
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I mean, you know, Tulsa asks the question,
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doesn't he, 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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I mean, it's one of a number of major traditions
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in the world 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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Yes, 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 were 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, perhaps more controversial
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attributes 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 only seemed to go out
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from Europe, the explorers, the scholars, the linguists,
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that 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, they were never boats coming from Egypt
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to help the Anglo Saxons discover the origins
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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, which can be said to be a Western.
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Attributal load, of course,
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also has a bunch of immediately preface it,
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some downsides and many criticisms
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that could be made of some of the consequences
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of that interest because, of course,
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it's not entirely lacking in self interest.
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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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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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With the 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
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was more efficient at doing that kind of thing.
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But maybe you wanted it more, too.
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Well, the Ottomans wanted it, it's an awful lot
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and did very terribly well for many centuries.
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One shouldn't forget that as did others.
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I'd also say, by the way,
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and again, it's a very broad one,
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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
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vociferous critics to become rich.
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So, you know, 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, you know?
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And in the Western system,
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I'd argue that one of the advantages
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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.
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The civil rights movement achieved its aims
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by force of moral argument
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and persuaded 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
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of the Western mind that you could say are,
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they're not entirely unique,
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but they are not as commonplace elsewhere.
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What about the emergence and hierarchies
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of asymmetry of power, most visible,
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most drastic in the form of slavery, for example?
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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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the unique Western sin.
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It's rather hard to think of a civilization
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in history 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
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that our societies in the West
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were the only ones who ever engaged in any vices.
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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
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was born 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
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that the species as a whole has a problem with.
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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,
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that the interesting thing about the Western mind,
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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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There's not, people almost don't even bother now
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to recognize the facts that Thomas Jefferson,
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George Washington all wanted to see this trade
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done away with, couldn't hold the country together
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at the origins 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
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the notion 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 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 is 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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There's economic in nature in some sense.
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Yes, but in order to do it, I mean, almost always,
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there are some examples in the ancient world
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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 regard it as different.
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One of the things, actually,
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I've tried to sort of inject into the discussion
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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,
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which were one of the reasons why slavery
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was not as morally repugnant to people then
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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, they were often referred to
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at the time 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.
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it was a very troubling argument in the 18th and 19th century
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also because there was a biblical question.
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It threw up a theological question,
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which was, 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, was it an Indian Adam and Eve,
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the Native American Adam and Eve?
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I mean, this was a serious theological debate
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because they didn't know the answer.
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And I mean, 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,
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but it clarified, Darwin clarifies it, definitely.
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And then you're in this, as I say in this situation,
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if 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 is part of its history,
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how do we incorporate it 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 how we create policy,
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how we treat each other, 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 in 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
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this fringe argument, it really isn't.
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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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I'm very eager that this country, America, goes through that
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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 out on 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 200 years ago.
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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 who
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were the descendants of people who were wronged.
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It's a wealth transfer from people
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who look like people who did a wrong thing in the past
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to another group of people who resemble people who were wronged.
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That's impossible to do.
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I'm completely clear about this.
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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
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have same skin color as us, for instance, who
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have no connection to the slave trade
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and should not be made to pay money to people
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who have some connection.
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And then the country is also filled
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with ethnic minorities who have come after slavery who would not
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be due 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 that
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exist in American life 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, something
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like Blackhunter achievement 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 have arrived more
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recently don't, for instance, get held down
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by white supremacy.
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But actually, I say white supremacy in quotes,
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obviously, but don't get held back by it,
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but actually flourish to the extent
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that Asian Americans have higher household earnings
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and higher household mean equity than home equity
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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 ongoing Blackhunter
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achievement in some sections 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 long term consequence of it?
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Possibly, but 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
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after the Holocaust would you allow people
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to claim that everything 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.
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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
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lurking underneath in the darkness.
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You're right to be.
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OK, 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
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deep institutional racism against African Americans that's
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rooted in slavery.
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And so however that calculus turns out,
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that calculation, it still persists.
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In the culture, in the institutions,
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in the allocation of resources, in the way
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that we communicate in subtle ways, in major ways,
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all that kind of stuff.
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How is it possible to win or lose
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that argument of how much institutional racism there
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is 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 to some of this
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For instance, let's take the EVV1 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 coming towards them
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and it's late at night and they cross the road,
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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 based not entirely
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on unfounded beliefs that given crime rates,
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it's possible 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 crime statistics in American cities
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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.
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But is it attributable to slavery?
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If you're in a city like Chicago where the homicide rates shot
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up in the last two years, albeit again, as always
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has to be remembered, mainly black on black gun
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violence and knife violence, nevertheless,
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if you're in a city like Chicago and you make that calculus,
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I've just suggested the cliched one,
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the street late at night, there are other factors
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other than a memory of slavery that kick in.
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And I'm afraid it's something which people don't
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want to particularly acknowledge in America for obvious reasons
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because it's the ugliest damn debate in the world.
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But I was actually just writing in my column in New York Post
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today about a very interesting case that's similar, which
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is the question 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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And the nearest next country is a long way down.
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That's New Zealand, a 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 that obesity
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is the one clearest factor that's likely to lead
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to your hospitalization if you also get the virus?
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Why did almost no public health information in America
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80% of the people who ended up hospitalized in America
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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 very little evidence
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that this was much use 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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Why 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, which
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makes that claim explicit.
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It says, the reasons why people have views
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that are negative about obesity is because of racism
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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
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it's because of racism, it's because of slavery.
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How about it's actually because you mind the hospitals
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getting clogged up, 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 is in everything in America,
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it's cut off by some poorly educated academic saying
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it's about slavery.
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So we're really not.
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I mean, this requires a kind of form of brain
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surgery to perform it on a society, probably one that's not
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possible without killing the patient.
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And it's being done by people who are wearing like 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
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about 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 a chance to talk to a bunch of them
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on Clubhouse recently.
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Clubhouse is the social app.
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Yeah, yeah, I know.
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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.
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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 Russian
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and Ukrainian to 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 into a physical fistfight.
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So even though it really sounds like people want it.
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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 survey 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 sort of excellent books
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and articles 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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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
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to be a black man or woman in America
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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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Okay, that's not, I think we need to define steel,
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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 to criticize anything
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that Douglas Murray says because you've not got my skin color.
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Okay, it's not an exact comparison,
link |
but seriously, 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 me on that 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 speaking
link |
about their experience of the Holocaust,
link |
then an intellectual from a very different part of the world
link |
that's simply writing about nuanced geopolitics
link |
of World War II just should not interrupt
link |
the Holocaust survivor.
link |
We physically interrupt them
link |
if they're telling their stories.
link |
With logic and reason,
link |
that the experience of the Holocaust survivors
link |
somehow fundamentally has a deeper understanding
link |
of the humanity and the injustice of the...
link |
First of all, again, we're 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 that.
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,
link |
yeah, one of those people should be heard
link |
more than the other, 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 who by dint
link |
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,
link |
so there's an irony to this,
link |
but let's skate over the irony.
link |
What I mean is people saying you don't have the right
link |
to speak, I have the right to take the microphone
link |
from you 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 it 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 and important point
link |
to make, they should make it and they will win through
link |
whatever their character is 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 from the war on the West.
link |
I mean, I would argue that today in America,
link |
the only group who are actually allowed to be consistently
link |
vilely racist against the white people.
link |
If you say discussing things about black people in America
link |
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 could be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
link |
You could lecture at Yale University, absolutely fine.
link |
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
link |
of having been the victims of racism?
link |
No, not particularly, because what does that get us?
link |
It gets us into an endless cycle
link |
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 in America,
link |
historically, obviously not.
link |
But what kind of competition do we want to enter here?
link |
And this is very, very important to reign 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 refer to a very useful bit in Nietzsche
link |
and the genealogy of morals where, as you know,
link |
Nietzsche always has to be treated carefully
link |
when people say, I love Nietzsche, you know, which bits?
link |
What exactly do you love about him?
link |
But he, a lot can be learned from the answer.
link |
But there are moments in genealogy of morals
link |
that are very useful for this book.
link |
One of them was the moment when Nietzsche used a phrase
link |
that I've now stolen for myself, appropriated,
link |
you might say, where he refers to people
link |
who tear at wounds long since closed
link |
and then cry about the pain they feel.
link |
Now, 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, I feel that my life
link |
hasn't gone that well and it's because of something
link |
that was done to my ancestors 200 years ago,
link |
maybe they do feel that.
link |
Maybe they're right to feel that.
link |
Maybe they're making 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 to smoke weed all day.
link |
I don't know, 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 |
or other characteristics?
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 |
Well, I can't cancel Nietzsche, I was saying.
link |
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 |
Fair enough, I think.
link |
I think when you meet people who do man and Superman
link |
a bit too much, you're in there.
link |
Now you're pulling in even deeper water
link |
referencing Hitler here.
link |
Okay, 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
link |
by several of the great philosophers is resentment.
link |
That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers
link |
of people who want to destroy colon,
link |
blaming someone else for having something you believe
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 to evil ends.
link |
Can you speak to this?
link |
Because it's such a fascinating idea that one of the biggest
link |
drivers of evil in the world is resentment.
link |
Because if you look at, boy, if you look at human history,
link |
if you look at Hitler, so much of the propaganda,
link |
so much of the narrative was about resentment.
link |
So is that surface or is it level or is that deep?
link |
The resentment that drives people?
link |
It can be any of the above.
link |
Let's first of all preface it, everybody has resentment.
link |
I used the term, raison de mort,
link |
which is sort of very similar to resentment,
link |
let's stick with resentment.
link |
So we don't sound too pretentious.
link |
Let me give you a quick example of somebody in our own day
link |
who has a form of resentment, Vladimir Putin.
link |
Did you see Navalny's documentary, Putin's Palace?
link |
You remember the stuff about Putin as a young KGB officer
link |
in Germany, remember the stuff about Putin,
link |
his first wife's 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 |
Yeah, 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 everywhere.
link |
But it's just 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 played on
link |
was resentment, obviously.
link |
Almost every revolutionary does.
link |
I mean, the French revolutionaries did as well.
link |
And we're 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 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 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,
link |
obviously is 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 somebody
link |
in their lives 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 would have met people
link |
who seem to have everything and who are filled
link |
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 is
link |
that we therefore have a choice in our lives about this.
link |
This is something which we can do something about,
link |
But for instance, 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 in American politics
link |
You would be justified in feeling resentment.
link |
And at some point you have to make a decision which is,
link |
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 that 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 |
So gratitude is the individual level
link |
and the societal level.
link |
Gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment.
link |
I quote in The War on the West this,
link |
but 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 |
when I won't get into it,
link |
but I have some very big structural criticisms of the novel.
link |
Now you're just sweet talking to me
link |
because I'm a Dostoyevsky fan, but I appreciate this.
link |
Well, we could get into what I see as big structural flaws
link |
in the brothers Karamazov, but anyway.
link |
Now I'm offended and triggered.
link |
Yeah, no, I mean, this is 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 |
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 Yvan says to his brother,
link |
you know he visits me and you realize that
link |
he's talking about the devil,
link |
the whole novel goes into this totally different space.
link |
Anyway, it's even more than you've already
link |
realized the novel's about.
link |
And then when the conversation occurs
link |
between Yvan and the devil, remember,
link |
I think he describes him as dressed in the French style
link |
of the early part of the 90th century.
link |
Very strange that the devil will be dressed like that,
link |
And if you remember that he's sort of crossed the legs
link |
and rather a bane figure.
link |
But the devil mentions impassing to Yvan
link |
that he says, I don't know why gratitude
link |
is not an interesting thing that's being given to me.
link |
And you're not allowed,
link |
this is not, given the role of being the devil,
link |
this is not one of the things.
link |
It's not one of the things.
link |
And you think, and of course,
link |
only a genius of Dostoevsky's stature could,
link |
I mean, the lesser genius would have made
link |
a whole novel 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 the structural problems
link |
on the side, but the passive aggressive nature,
link |
the microaggression in this conversation is palpable.
link |
A little knife fight, okay?
link |
No, but the reason I mentioned it is because of course,
link |
when I saw it, 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,
link |
that if the devil was capable of gratitude,
link |
he wouldn't be the devil, he'd be somebody else.
link |
He has to be incapable of gratitude.
link |
Do you think for Dostoevsky,
link |
that was as strong of an insight as it is for you?
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 |
And 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
link |
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, 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, you know, that, I love Tom Waits,
link |
and he has a song where a little drop,
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 on 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, 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
link |
about yelling at each other for is a thing
link |
at Harvard and Yale.
link |
It's not going to be.
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, I'm not sure.
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, I'm sitting in a castle
link |
in the tallest tower with my pinky out drinking
link |
my martini saying, surely the peasants below
link |
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, whereas 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?
link |
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 |
and some of the American Academy.
link |
It spilled out, it always aimed to be an activist philosophy.
link |
People deny that now, but as I cite in the war on the West
link |
and 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 spilled 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 psychologist got bored.
link |
Yeah, I mean, well, they needed tenure
link |
and 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 this 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 as a great scholar or 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 once in 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,
link |
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 are as fun.
link |
No, partly it's a, partly it's,
link |
no, I should stress that partly isn't,
link |
this is in the weeds, but partly it's a result
link |
of hyper specialization in academia.
link |
You know, if you said you'd like to
link |
write your dissertation on Hobbes.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
If you wanted to, if you,
link |
something central to Kant's thought or Hegel or something,
link |
I mean, that's not popular.
link |
That 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 being 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, he would occasionally,
link |
he didn't get tenure at universities,
link |
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 that are called studies,
link |
I think everything called studies
link |
and the humanities should be shut down.
link |
Because of the activist element.
link |
It's an act, they're all activists.
link |
Gay studies and queer studies,
link |
nothing good has ever come from it, nothing good.
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 that 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 too, is that that's for politicians
link |
to do with the findings of science?
link |
I mean, why create an ideology
link |
and then set out to find disciplines
link |
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 right.
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 for during World War II with both communism
link |
and Nazism, fascism, that infiltrated science,
link |
and then they've corrupted it.
link |
Yes, I mean, for instance, also, let's face it,
link |
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 |
And 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 |
but okay, 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 |
No, I'm anti clubhouse, by the way,
link |
because at the only time I heard it
link |
was that Brett Weinstein won when he did that.
link |
And I don't know if you heard that early in clubhouse.
link |
I was invited to clubhouse with various people.
link |
He said, 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 night
link |
and because Brett Weinstein said,
link |
you know, I'm doing this conversation
link |
and I listened and it was the maddest damn discussion
link |
Was it something about biology?
link |
Something about, was it COVID times or that?
link |
At some point, Brett said I'm an evolutionary biologist
link |
and somebody else started saying, you're a eugenicist.
link |
And he said, no, I'm an evil eugenicist.
link |
And I 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,
link |
realizing 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 were torched
link |
in north of England by a mob who hadn't read the whole sign.
link |
Well, to me, like I said,
link |
a little bit of poison is good for the town.
link |
Anyhow, sorry, I interrupted you with flattering you
link |
with people on clubhouse.
link |
I have many, I have multiples of friends, yes.
link |
We didn't get to some of the ideas of critical race theory.
link |
What exactly is it?
link |
I'm actually in part asking this question quite genuinely.
link |
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 in a place
link |
where it may not have been in the conversation.
link |
And that means history too?
link |
The history of racism.
link |
And to look at it through these particular lenses.
link |
I mean, there's a certain,
link |
like all these things, 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 whether the more silent female voice was,
link |
yes, very interesting, 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 that,
link |
endlessly part that seems to get us into trouble or like it.
link |
Well, because of this thing of where do you stop?
link |
And that's always a, I talked about this in my last book
link |
in The Manors 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 |
Well, I mean, is there any likelihood?
link |
Have you ever, there's the old academic joke, isn't it?
link |
That, you know, the end of every conference,
link |
the only thing everyone agrees on is
link |
that we must have another conference like this one.
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 |
Of course, civil engineering, bridge building.
link |
At a certain point, do we need any more bridges?
link |
Can we just fly everywhere?
link |
Well, at the very least,
link |
you need to keep the bridges up.
link |
Sure, and they would, critical race theory,
link |
folks would probably make the same argument
link |
that 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 got to be careful of people
link |
who've got their timing like totally, totally wrong
link |
or the 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 |
Well, beware of the man with the mustache.
link |
If only it was that easy.
link |
It's not always a biofacial here.
link |
I always say that, I mean, one of the very often is
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 moustache
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
link |
which I would argue certainly parts of America
link |
where you're always in 1938,
link |
that's not healthy for a society either.
link |
Where people are so primed
link |
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, if you hear the whistle,
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
link |
that 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.
link |
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 it aside.
link |
But so critical race theory, how much racism,
link |
How much of it is in our world today?
link |
If we're thinking about this activity of Hitler spotting,
link |
how, and trying to steal 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
link |
where you thought people were superior to you.
link |
That could also happen, but more commonly is
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 |
I mean, mainly antisemitism actually,
link |
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 |
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 |
You're both superior and inferior.
link |
Do you know Varsity Grossman's Life and Fate?
link |
So in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
which a Persian friend of mine said was one
link |
of only two great novels of the 20th century.
link |
She was very harsh, literally, critic.
link |
What was the other one?
link |
Oh, The Leopard, obviously.
link |
The Leopard, of Giuseppe Delan, producer, 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,
link |
Grossman was obviously Jewish himself.
link |
He saw almost everything that he could have done
link |
in the Second World War.
link |
He saw Stalingrad, you know, the journalist.
link |
And he wrote first hand accounts of Stalingrad.
link |
He was also the first journalist into Treblinka.
link |
And his account, which you can read him
link |
on 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 mentioned him because Grossman
link |
at the beginning, in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
which is about 900 page novel, in the middle of it,
link |
which is about the dark axis around Stalingrad.
link |
He, at one point, he amazingly sort of goes
link |
into the minds of Earth Hitler and Stalin.
link |
He says he says Stalin in his study feels his counterpart
link |
in Berlin and he says he feels very close to him
link |
Wow, around Stalingrad, like leading up to the back.
link |
After Stalingrad, when the Germans have lost,
link |
he says he feels the closeness of Hitler.
link |
But Grossman, in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century,
link |
suddenly dedicates a chapter to antisemitism.
link |
And I've seen antisemitism is 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 mentioned this because Grossman
link |
in the middle of Life and Fate takes time out
link |
and does this like three page explanation,
link |
three page description of antisemitism.
link |
And it's extraordinary, I mean, it's the only thing
link |
I can think of that's equally good
link |
is Gregor von Retzordi, who wrote a luridly titled
link |
but brilliant set of novellas called
link |
Confessions of an Antisemite and about pre First World War
link |
antisemitism in Eastern and Central Europe.
link |
Anyway, Grossman says in the middle of Life and Fate
link |
that one of the extraordinary things about antisemitism
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 it's, I think it's the only racism
link |
that includes within it, a detestation
link |
for the real antisemite, a detestation of people
link |
that the person may perceive to be better than them,
link |
correctly or otherwise.
link |
By the way, I'm embarrassed to say I have not read
link |
this one of two greatest novels of the 20th century,
link |
Life and Fate, the Zhizniy Sejba
link |
and just to read off of Wikipedia of a city,
link |
Grossman, Ukrainian Jew became a correspondent
link |
for the Soviet military paper Krasnaya Zvezda,
link |
having volunteered and been rejected for 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 Zhizniy Sejba
link |
is a theme on Jewish identity in the Holocaust,
link |
Grossman's idea of humanity and the human goodness,
link |
Stalin's distortion of reality
link |
and values and science like goes on in reality of war.
link |
I need to definitely.
link |
You need to read it.
link |
I think you'll really get a lot from it.
link |
One of the other things, sorry, one reference,
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 |
It's rather like the camera work they use
link |
and things like Lord of the Rings,
link |
where he zooms down and then gets one person
link |
in the midst of all this and you get on there.
link |
We'll put you in the study too.
link |
So I personally have read and reread
link |
the William Shire's Rise and Fall with the Reich,
link |
who's another journalist who was there,
link |
but he does not do it.
link |
Interestingly enough, given such a large novel,
link |
kind of the definitive work on the original work
link |
that goes to source materials on Hitler,
link |
he doesn't touch antisemitism 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 |
he lost the war because of antisemitism.
link |
I mean, that's one quite important way to view it,
link |
is how Andrew Roberts and other historians say it,
link |
is that in the end, the Nazis lost the war
link |
because they were Nazis.
link |
It sounds almost too neat,
link |
but it's worth remembering 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 |
But to go back to racism in general,
link |
racism in general, apart from antisemitism,
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 the, 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 or underactive.
link |
Now the book is war on the West,
link |
but speaking of racism,
link |
racism towards different groups based on their skin color,
link |
you've said that there's a war on white people in the West.
link |
Would you say that's the case?
link |
Would you say that there are significant racism
link |
towards white people in the United States?
link |
I'd say that the 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 their skin color.
link |
I mean, I would find it so repugnant
link |
if, and I hope everybody would join me in feeling this,
link |
I would feel 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 cane 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 atone for something 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 and 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
link |
are more disadvantaged than black people know?
link |
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 |
to sort of play devil's advocate,
link |
about the asymmetry of sort of accusations
link |
towards the majority?
link |
So because white...
link |
Much 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,
link |
that the minority has disproportionate power
link |
to attack the majority
link |
so that you can always keep the majority in check?
link |
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 bit in the matters 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, boring straights.
link |
So not like the magical pixie fairy dust gaze.
link |
That's a bad idea to push that one.
link |
That's a bad idea, 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,
link |
but they're just a tenancy
link |
because they don't spend too much time on that.
link |
But equally, as I said in the matters 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 Suffragette tended not to say,
link |
we'd like the vote and men a scum.
link |
It would be hard to have won everyone 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 who say like,
link |
do we need men or men are all X?
link |
Again, it's a bad idea.
link |
It's a bad idea tactically.
link |
What if men, Richard Rangham, 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 would be a lot less violence in society is his claim.
link |
But who says you need to get rid of violence in society?
link |
Well, that's, but shouldn't that at least be a discussion?
link |
Well, I'm very happy with the discussion.
link |
Have a debate, a panel discussion, violence, pros and cons.
link |
Well, that's the sort of thing,
link |
as if I can say so,
link |
the Sunday we cast 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 if he was living in Kiev today
link |
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, that's the cause of argument.
link |
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,
link |
I'm very glad that the men and women of Ukraine
link |
are capable of and more than capable of fighting
link |
for their country and for their neighbors
link |
and their families and much more.
link |
But it's better that, that there was violence ready
link |
to unleash 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 always 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 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
link |
that they're evil by dint of their skin color
link |
and think that that would be a good way 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 answers didn't do anything wrong.
link |
And even if they had, why would I be held responsible for it?
link |
So to go back to Nietzsche,
link |
is there some aspect to where if we try to explain
link |
the forces of play here,
link |
is it the will to power playing itself out
link |
from individual human nature 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 |
and 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 to sell
link |
whatever atrocities we'd like to commit.
link |
One of the quotes from Nietzsche that I liked
link |
and I quoted in this.
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 |
For 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 there again, there's a lot of that going on.
link |
How could I be happy
link |
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 |
Sure, notes from underground.
link |
This has been very Russian, Russian focus.
link |
I'm very pleased with it a number of times,
link |
but Dostoevsky and Grossman and others have come in.
link |
This is very, I wasn't like doing this as a sort of.
link |
Yeah, well, it's always good to plug the greats
link |
and good 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
link |
and then there's the personality behind the language
link |
and the personality I feel like you already have.
link |
So you just need to know the surface details.
link |
In fact, the silence to be silent
link |
in the Russian language
link |
is something that's already important.
link |
Oh, if we had a moment,
link |
I told you my story about Stalin's birthplace.
link |
Should I tell you that?
link |
I once went to Gory where Stalin was born.
link |
I was there just after the Georgia war.
link |
I went to the No Man's Land in South Ossetia, Kasia.
link |
And I said, I really got to go to Gory also here
link |
because the shell had landed in Gory rather weirdly
link |
from the Russian side
link |
and Gory is where Stalin was born.
link |
And of course, Gory is in Georgia.
link |
And I only 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 Shakhashvili'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 Gory 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 had just clearly been doing the tour for like 50 years.
link |
And he just pointed all the facts.
link |
And she did that classic thing.
link |
I 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 |
I give you lots of facts, I don't care.
link |
Why does it matter?
link |
They always give you facts.
link |
This is Stalin's suitcase.
link |
It is 13 inches wide by, you know,
link |
And this woman did all of this
link |
and it was all just wildly pro,
link |
well, not pro science, just explaining the science lives.
link |
It was just a great local boy, done good.
link |
They didn't mention the fact he killed more Georgians
link |
per capita than anyone else.
link |
And we get to the end.
link |
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.
link |
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,
link |
and I took the woman aside at the end.
link |
I discovered she'd said this to other journalists
link |
and visited before, I took her aside and said,
link |
I said, what do you think about comrade 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, you know, sort of thing.
link |
We had an interesting comment in itself.
link |
I said, yeah, but he killed more Georgians than anyone,
link |
you know, and all that sort of thing.
link |
And she says, it's not my place to judge
link |
or to give my views and that sort of thing.
link |
And the venture said, but what do you feel about it?
link |
And she said, it was like a hurricane.
link |
It happened, that's interesting
link |
because if I may mention Clubhouse once again,
link |
I got a chance to talk to a few people from Mongolia.
link |
There's a woman from Mongolia
link |
and they talked about the fact
link |
that they deeply admire Stalin, love.
link |
She, she sounded, if I may,
link |
hopefully that's not crossing the line.
link |
I think I'm representing her correctly
link |
and saying she admired him almost like,
link |
like loved him, like the way people love,
link |
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 just you forget the details
link |
of the atrocities of the past and remember the,
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 |
Now, now you're, now you're.
link |
You didn't think that the Stiyosky, now again.
link |
Now you're on a tricky ground.
link |
But no, but like the French are enormous in my Napoleon
link |
and there hadn't many admiral aspects to you.
link |
It was also an unbelievable brute
link |
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 could make a case for him
link |
being one of the great representatives
link |
or great figures historically of the 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 a, not a good person.
link |
So listen, this friend would 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 backcash 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 who think of us heroes,
link |
what are their flaws and are they villains
link |
that are convenient sort of,
link |
we're there at the right time
link |
to accidentally do the right thing.
link |
I hope this isn't the representative of fair estimation
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 my 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 the drinking
link |
and a smoking problem,
link |
Well, 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 |
I haven't explained drawing him.
link |
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, I'm smoking and drinking.
link |
The real criticisms of Churchill are quite easy to sum up,
link |
and I do so in the war in the West,
link |
I say these are the things that they now use against him.
link |
Didn't do enough to revert the Bengal famine in 1943,
link |
for instance, that's been shot down by numerous historians,
link |
including Indian historians,
link |
in the middle of the war,
link |
in the middle of a World War Churchill did what he could
link |
to get grain supplies diverted from Australia to Bengal.
link |
The famine was appalling, it was caused by a typhoon,
link |
it was not caused by Winston Churchill,
link |
and the idea that some, basically Indian nationalists,
link |
historians have pumped out in recent years,
link |
and just anti Churchill figures,
link |
that he actually wanted Indians to die as his,
link |
just a total calumny.
link |
And when people claim, some people claim that,
link |
I mean, there was a few fairly ignorant scholars,
link |
we know the less with some credentials,
link |
who claim that Churchill wanted the Indian population
link |
to basically be genocided, 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 regard as racist.
link |
He definitely regarded racism as being of different characters,
link |
and that there were superior races,
link |
and as it were, the white European 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 and a positive side of the ledger.
link |
The positive side of the ledger includes he almost certainly
link |
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 Merrick
link |
or anyone else is anything I want to stop.
link |
I find it interesting, I find it interesting,
link |
not least 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 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, it's not history.
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, certainly since the 90s
link |
who have pushed the Sally Hemmings 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 |
the city was 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 grown up 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 and the negative
link |
of a fellow with nice facial hair called Karl Marx?
link |
I mean, I have a section in the War on the West
link |
as you know where I go for Karl Marx with some glee.
link |
So he seems to have gotten, you know,
link |
some popularity in the West recently.
link |
Not just recently, yeah.
link |
I mean, he's had a resurgence recently.
link |
Yes, 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,
link |
it's very hard 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 Marxist
link |
or the Marxian economists is that we've only really tried it
link |
once the Soviets tried it.
link |
And then if there's a few people
link |
that kind of tried the Soviet thing.
link |
Well, they basically, it's an offshoot of the Soviet,
link |
yes, they've tried it.
link |
They've tried it in Venezuela.
link |
So let's just quickly say, how did all these experiments go?
link |
They did not, well, they failed in fascinating ways.
link |
They did, but they failed.
link |
And we should stress, so grossly failed,
link |
so grossly failed,
link |
that they threw millions and millions of people
link |
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,
link |
you start to wonder,
link |
that might actually become relevant in,
link |
I don't know, 20, 30, 50 years
link |
when the machines start doing more and more
link |
of the labor, all those kinds of things.
link |
You start to ask questions.
link |
I finally might get to Marx's dream
link |
of what the average day would look like.
link |
Well, there's going to 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 labor 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?
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 the 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
link |
that showed how people could get better access
link |
to the free market, how you could ensure, for instance,
link |
that young people get onto the property ladder,
link |
Those are constructive things.
link |
So 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
link |
always leads to the same thing.
link |
I would say we could pretend that fascism
link |
has never been properly tried
link |
and that it was unfortunate what happened in Nazi Germany.
link |
But, you know, that wasn't real fascism
link |
and in Mussolini's fascism, you know,
link |
didn't go all that well, but it was, you know, a bit better.
link |
And maybe we could try a bit more Franco fascism.
link |
Nobody would have any time for this crap,
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 the recipes shit.
link |
Well, sort of, I'm trying to practice here
link |
by playing devil's advocate, practice the same idea
link |
that you mentioned, which is when you say the word Marxism,
link |
should you throw out everything
link |
or should you ask a question?
link |
Is there good ideas here?
link |
And the same, it's the good, it's weighing the good
link |
and the bad and being able to do so calmly and thoughtfully.
link |
You know, do 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 gets into an argument
link |
with a Stalinist who's obviously a Marxist.
link |
And the, it's after the show trials, 37.
link |
This is when it's very clear what Marxism
link |
in the Russian form is.
link |
And this Orwell is in the discussion with this Marxist
link |
and it goes on and on and eventually Orwell says,
link |
well, you know, what about the show trials
link |
and what about what's happened in Ukraine
link |
and the famines and much more and the purges
link |
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, you can't make an omelette
link |
without breaking eggs.
link |
And Orwell says, where's the omelette?
link |
Oh yeah, that's a good, that's a really good,
link |
Look at this by this stage, okay?
link |
Where's my damn omelette?
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
link |
the great omelette, but they never have
link |
and they never will because the whole thing
link |
is rotten from the start.
link |
But let me just also say one thing about that,
link |
because of course Marx isn't as nice as he sounds.
link |
And that's one of the things that I try to highlight
link |
in the book is if we're going to do this reductive thing
link |
of people in history and saying, well,
link |
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 are things I quote in this book
link |
from Marx's letters, not least letters to Engels.
link |
And indeed in his published writings,
link |
he was writing for the American press in the 1950s.
link |
The way he shares 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 audiobook
link |
for the Warner 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 going to accuse Churchill of racism,
link |
if you're going to 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
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 |
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 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
link |
from the 20th century still about Marxism.
link |
Well, the 19th and 20th centuries.
link |
And no, no, I will not have the entire landscape
link |
deracinated 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 preprepared 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 precolonial 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 almost uniformly
link |
in the postcolonial era.
link |
You had figures like France Fanon.
link |
You had European intellectuals like Satra
link |
who said the Western powers are retreating
link |
from these countries and therefore we should
link |
institute in these countries what but Western Marxism?
link |
Well, it's not obvious to me that like the bad ideas
link |
would be the ones that emerge,
link |
but it's more likely that the bad ideas
link |
would emerge in this kind of context
link |
when you erase history.
link |
When you erase tradition.
link |
When you erase history
link |
and you leave some ideas deliberately uninterrogated.
link |
I mean, as I say, find me one in 100 American students
link |
who've heard of any of the communist despots
link |
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
link |
than anyone 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 |
Or. And I worry about that
link |
because it means that we might have learned one
link |
of the two lessons 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 and they could run it
link |
and they'd know exactly where to start.
link |
What are the two lessons of the 20th century?
link |
Fascism and communism.
link |
I mean, I'm not exactly sure
link |
what exactly the lessons are.
link |
No, it's not clear.
link |
The lessons were very clear that 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 heard like behavior.
link |
Be very suspicious of crowd.
link |
In general, I mean, you apply it in different,
link |
more to modern application in a sense,
link |
but that's rooted in history that crowds can,
link |
when humans get together,
link |
they can do some quite radically silly things.
link |
Elias Canetti is very good on that.
link |
And Eric Hoffa, who was a sort of self taught,
link |
amazing, not 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 thing though,
link |
I mean, we should have realized that the two nightmares
link |
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 like,
link |
don't treat other people as less than you
link |
because of their race.
link |
That's one lesson.
link |
But when we've done some good at learning that,
link |
but the second one, not to do communism again,
link |
not to do socialism.
link |
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 the 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 does all of this work
link |
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 |
And so it seems to be more fair if we increase that.
link |
If the workers own all of the value of their output
link |
and well, the things that are more fair
link |
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 |
should the boss of the company earn a million times
link |
that of the lowest paid employee, it doesn't seem fair.
link |
Should they earn maybe five or 10 times?
link |
The salary of the lowest, right?
link |
That could be fair.
link |
There are certain sort of multiples
link |
which are within the bounds of,
link |
you know, reasonableness.
link |
I think actually that's the,
link |
that's the much bigger problem in capitalism
link |
at the moment as I see it,
link |
is the not untrue perception
link |
that a tiny number of people get a lot of the,
link |
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
link |
and ladders of American capitalism,
link |
for instance, 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.
link |
And again, it's not entirely wrong
link |
that the ladders system 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,
link |
in the out of context blog post,
link |
you're going to write about this.
link |
I get to that, I get practice point it.
link |
The way to critique capitalism
link |
if it's gone bad is to get better capital.
link |
Free markets where they're not fair should be made fair.
link |
Never decide that the answer is
link |
the thing that has never produced any human flourishing,
link |
So as you describe in the madness of crowds,
link |
the herd like behavior of humans,
link |
that gets us into trouble,
link |
you as an individual thinker
link |
and others listening to this,
link |
how can you, because all of us are midst 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, you know,
link |
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 there's,
link |
it just becomes more and more dangerous.
link |
So the incentive to think independently
link |
under the uncertainty that's usually involved
link |
with thinking is, I mean, it's a silly thing to say,
link |
but on Twitter, there's a cost to be paid for.
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 |
You know, there's a crowd that believes
link |
that that was unjustified.
link |
I forget what the crowd decided,
link |
The crowd split on that one, it's safe to have one opinion
link |
Okay, it is, right.
link |
But there's a, you put it very nicely,
link |
that there's clearly a calculus here
link |
and that you can measure on Twitter,
link |
and particularly 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 |
where 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 die hard 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
link |
because he's too famous 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, it's fine.
link |
Seriously, is your law not applied 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, wow, there's depth to this calculation.
link |
Oh yeah, there's a genius opt out in all cultures.
link |
There's a genius opt out in all cultures.
link |
Look at Lord Byron, 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, there's kind of war against the West.
link |
Geniuses 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,
link |
remarkable nobody will come looking for you
link |
possibly, possibly, yeah.
link |
Also, genius can get you in trouble eventually.
link |
Sidel through life and nobody noticing.
link |
Be totally harmless and then die
link |
and hope you haven't used any carbon.
link |
But you were asking about,
link |
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, there's a, you wanna...
link |
Because you're, you like people, and you're just 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 this isn't a general thing.
link |
I don't have detestation for most people at all.
link |
Most people I can't really enjoy speaking with
link |
But in terms of storing your sense of self worth
link |
in absolute strangers, big mistake.
link |
Yeah, well, me, that's, let's turn it 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 |
On the internet? No.
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 |
And perhaps that's the only thing...
link |
You can't store significant amounts of trust
link |
or faith or belief or self worth in places
link |
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 in the war,
link |
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 |
With a zen like look on your face.
link |
So you don't... All you need is Sam Harris to say
link |
that you're brilliant and you're happy.
link |
I'm deeply pleased when he flatters me.
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 |
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 automator of some kind.
link |
There's definitely times I've got things wrong 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, which was 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 place you had to go in order to write?
link |
And well, I was contemplating the end of a civilization.
link |
So occasionally now I have maybe slightly too pat at this stage,
link |
but sometimes readers come up to me in the street
link |
or whatever and say, you know,
link |
I love The Strange Death of Europe.
link |
And we'll say, you know,
link |
it's a very depressing book to read, however.
link |
And I would say, well, you should have tried writing it.
link |
But it was because I mean, I was...
link |
It has chunks of it 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 and to grapple with.
link |
And there is a sort of...
link |
I haven't reread that book 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...
link |
I'm used to saying 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 with my own eyes.
link |
That's your source of strength 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 |
So speaking of Sam Harris, and I mentioned to you offline,
link |
a lot of people...
link |
I talk to a lot of smart people in my private life on this podcast,
link |
and a lot of them will reference you as their example of a very smart person.
link |
So given that compliment,
link |
do you ever worry that your sort of ego grows to a level
link |
where you're not what you think is the truth is no longer the truth?
link |
Is this kind of...
link |
And also, on top of that, the fact that you stand against the crowd often,
link |
that there's part of it that appeals to you 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 and the thrill of friction
link |
will get you to deviate from the truth and instead just look for the friction.
link |
Could do for sure.
link |
I try to keep alive to that.
link |
Early in my career, I realized that, for instance, I didn't want to make enemies unnecessarily,
link |
any more than strictly necessary, because there was a very large number of already necessary enemies.
link |
And I remember one, so I won't get into the details, but I already had one sort of thing I'd done,
link |
and then another thing came out, and I just thought, I can't, I can't do it.
link |
And I remember thinking, don't be the sort of person who's forever creating storms.
link |
And I tried to make sure I wasn't, and I think I pretty much stuck to that.
link |
But to answer your question, well, the first thing is I'm as confident as I can be
link |
that I wouldn't fall into the trap you described for two reasons.
link |
I mean, one is that I don't think of myself as a wildly intelligent person.
link |
Partly because I'm very, very aware of the things I know nothing about.
link |
I mean, for instance, I have almost no knowledge of the details of finance or economic theory.
link |
I mean, the real details, I don't mean the big picture of the kind that we were just discussing earlier.
link |
But I have, if you put the periodic table in front of me, 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, I tend to find I have a disproportionate admiration
link |
for the people who know that stuff.
link |
Like, I'm wildly impressed by people who understand money, really understand it.
link |
They don't think, well, how the hell do you do that?
link |
And the same thing with biologists, medics, 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'm okay on that stuff, but Jesus, if you've got me on the general knowledge,
link |
I would say that some years ago, there's a thing in the UK called University Challenge.
link |
And I was asked some years ago, there's a sort of like celebrity 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 to go back and compete in the sort of celebrity alumni one.
link |
And the only thing I actually wanted to do it was go discover that Louis Theroux 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 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.
link |
I'd show myself up to be a total asshole and ignorant ramus.
link |
And as it was, I sat down my flat and I watched some past episodes of University Challenge.
link |
I realized I just sat and mute for the whole hour.
link |
I just couldn't know the first question was about physics and the second one was about as it was.
link |
I watched the the one and I could answer the first two or three questions of the one that actually went out because they made it a bit simpler.
link |
But but I mean, I'm terribly conscious of the and I said to the producers, I said, I can't go on because I mean, I just couldn't answer the questions.
link |
These unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer a whole range of things.
link |
So I'm perfectly aware of my limitations.
link |
And you can't to play your limitations.
link |
And they're forever before me.
link |
You know, they're not hard to find in every day.
link |
And and then on top of that, I suppose it's in a way, you know, that line from Rudyard Kipfing's
link |
alternatively brilliant and slightly nauseating poem F.
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, site you off.
link |
But wait, this is this is this goes to your criticism of Dostoevsky.
link |
Take, take, take, take Douglas's criticism with a grain of salt.
link |
So maybe I've heard it read at too many memorial services and things.
link |
But that line of it's a good piece of rice.
link |
If you can learn to meet triumph and disaster and meet these greet these two impostors just
link |
That's a good line.
link |
A good line as it's keeping off an amazing turn of line.
link |
But I do think that it's a very sensible thing to try to greet triumph and disaster and
link |
regard them as imposters and greet them just the same.
link |
And actually, anyone who knows me knows that I never partly it's because I have a sort of
link |
belief in the old gods.
link |
And at the moment that I thought that I was at the moment of triumph, the fates would
link |
hitch up their skirts and run at me at a million miles an hour.
link |
But it's also because I gen anyone who knows me knows.
link |
I never have a moment when I say that's just great.
link |
I feel totally fulfilled and victorious.
link |
I mean, it happened to me recently when the war in the West went straight in a number
link |
one in the best out of this.
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, I had that moment of relation.
link |
And I did have a moment of relation then.
link |
But it doesn't last partly because I tell myself it mustn't last.
link |
Because as you said, fate hitches up its skirt.
link |
You brits with your poetry, even when it's nauseating.
link |
As of 2022, this year, what's your final analysis of the political leadership and the
link |
human mind and the human being of Donald Trump?
link |
I sort of avoided this for years.
link |
Just talking about Trump.
link |
I tried to avoid talking about Trump for years.
link |
It's the same reason I tried to avoid writing about Brexit.
link |
Do you think the Trump, just sorry on a small tangent, do you think the Trump story is over?
link |
Are we just done with volume one?
link |
I've no idea the people I know who know him say that he's running.
link |
And I think that in general, Republicans have to do have a choice in front of them.
link |
And one friend put it to me recently said, you've got to go in with your toughest fighter.
link |
And I understand that instinct.
link |
And I also think it's a very dangerous instinct.
link |
Because what if your toughest fighter is also your biggest liability?
link |
What's the best way to get out the Democrat voter than 2024 than to have Donald Trump running?
link |
And the people that are doing the war in the West are pretty tough fighters.
link |
And I'm cautious about this because I know every way I tread is dangerous.
link |
But let me just be frank.
link |
I'll tread gracefully.
link |
I'll tread as gracefully as I can in my Wellington boots.
link |
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 that he was something he wasn't.
link |
I felt sorry for the ones who had to pretend that, for instance, he was a devout Christian
link |
or a man of faith or a man of great integrity or all of these sorts of things.
link |
Because in the public eye for years, it would be obvious that wasn't the case.
link |
But he has something extraordinary.
link |
Well, one thing is a method of communication that you've just got to say is was unbelievable.
link |
In one fundamental way that you can't look away for some reason.
link |
I mean, I mean, watching him clear everyone out of the way in 2016 was thrilling
link |
because those people needed clearing away.
link |
You know, it's just horrifying 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 the Clinton's on the bushes into
link |
Mary 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 some of the issues that needed raising.
link |
I thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air and I wished it wasn't him doing it.
link |
And then there was a question of him governing and it was just perfectly clear.
link |
He didn't know how to govern.
link |
What he did have, however, what he does have is an incredible ability to fight.
link |
And some of the forces he was arraigned against or were arraigned against him.
link |
My gosh, they would have taken down anyone else.
link |
I mean, if they'd have probably done some similar BS against Ted Cruz if he, you know,
link |
or Marco Rubio, you know, they'd have said, as some people admitted,
link |
they'd have accused all these people of racism and misogyny and everything else as well,
link |
just like they did Mitt Romney, just like they did John McCain.
link |
But Trump was the one ugly enough and bruisy enough to fight.
link |
And also a willingness or a lack of willingness to play sort of the civil game of politics,
link |
sort of, you know, at a party when like politeness gets you in trouble.
link |
You show up and everybody's polite and you just out of momentum want to be being polite.
link |
And all of a sudden you're on an island with Jeffrey Epstein and it gets you 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 during his time in office
link |
because he didn't achieve as much as he should have done.
link |
You could say that about every president, but I refuse to acknowledge that two years
link |
when he had both houses in the first beginning, he just didn't know what leave us to pull.
link |
You know, I mean, he was sitting in the office behind the Oval Office tweeting, watching the news.
link |
Sorry, that's not a president.
link |
And he couldn't fill and didn't fill positions because people knew, I mean, people who were very loyal to him,
link |
he would just, you know, he'd get them to do something loyal and then destroy them.
link |
And I think, and then we get onto the thing about, and here we get onto the, you know,
link |
what of course is very, very fractious terrain, but, you know, I covered the 2020 election
link |
and I was traveling all around the States and I went to Trump rally and all sorts of stuff.
link |
And I, I mean, I was in D.C. on election night and went and it got very ugly at one point
link |
in so called Black Lives Matter Plaza.
link |
When it looked like Trump might win 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 Block and this sort of stuff.
link |
And I thought, this town's going to burn, you know, if Trump wins.
link |
And in the aftermath of the vote, I was willing to hang around and watching for a bit.
link |
And then I saw it was going to drag on.
link |
And I saw some of his people and others and people told me 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 who doesn't believe that the evidence that they presented
link |
is good enough to justify the claim that he won the election.
link |
And I, and people say, have you seen 2000 meals?
link |
And have you seen anything?
link |
Look, the evidence isn't there that the election was won by Donald Trump.
link |
And I think that what he did on January the 6th was unbelievably dangerous.
link |
And, you know, here it is possible for us to hold two ideas in our head at the same time.
link |
January the 6th was not nothing, nor was it an insurrection, an attempt to stage a coup.
link |
And there's a vanishing number of people in the U.S.
link |
Or as Eric Weinstein said, it's like, this is the roof that you have to walk along.
link |
And like the sides are very steep if you fall off either side.
link |
Is there some sense, given the forces that are waging war in the West,
link |
you said this feeling perhaps because of Antifa or something else that this town is going to burn
link |
and maybe a continued feeling that this town is going to burn with the January 6th events.
link |
Are you worried about the future of the United States in the coming years
link |
because of the feeling of escalation?
link |
Is that just a war of Twitter or is there a real brewing of something?
link |
And how, well, let me then respond to that.
link |
How, what is the hopeful?
link |
If you 10 years from now look back at the United States and say we turned it around,
link |
what would be the reason, what would be the ways, the mechanisms that we do so?
link |
Tell you, since I wrote this book, there are two things in particular
link |
that I've been really pleased that a specific type of specialist has approached me on
link |
to say that things I've written about actually have more application than I realized.
link |
One is the gratitude issue.
link |
A number of people have approached me who have gone through AA or Alcoholics Anonymous.
link |
They sometimes say, have you ever been to AA?
link |
And that's a bit 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 or Alcoholics Anonymous,
link |
Norm McDonald says, it doesn't sound very anonymous.
link |
You stand up in a room, you say your name and you tell everyone the worst things you've ever done.
link |
Sounds the opposite of anonymous.
link |
Anyhow, but they say, look, because if you go to these things,
link |
apparently you're asked to as part of your recovery, 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 it turned out to have more application than I knew.
link |
The other thing though is that I say 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 |
By the way, we've also said, we've been through marriage counseling again, that's a very personal question.
link |
Stop asking me personal questions.
link |
Because this is one of the things that we do in couples therapy is try to find things you agree on.
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And I think this is very important in America.
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And it's made much harder by the fact, and I said this many times,
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but forgive me if I'm repeating myself,
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but it's made much harder by the fact that having different opinions is very last century.
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Now we all have different facts, or at least the two sides have different facts.
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One half of the country, roughly, or let's say 40%, 30%, whatever you want to put it,
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with a tired minority in the middle.
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One segment of the country believes that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election
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and that the Russians interfered and got Donald Trump into power.
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Another half of the country believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
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If you can't agree on who wins elections, it's very hard to see what you agree on as a country.
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That's one of the reasons I mind the war on American history and Western history is,
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one of the things you have to agree on is at least some attitude towards your past.
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You don't have to go on everything.
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But like, the public square has to have public heroes who are agreed to be heroes to some extent,
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warts and all. If you don't have that, if actually you think, for instance,
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like half the country thinks founding fathers were pretty good,
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the other half thinks they were absolutely rotten racists and so on.
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If half the country basically thinks it would have been better if Columbus had taken a different turn,
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never found America, gone back home and said, I don't know, nothing out of there,
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that would have been better.
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And the other half's pretty glad in the end that we've got America.
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You know, you've got to agree on something.
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And I just see in America, so I do think we've got to try to find things to agree on,
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like a reasonable attitude towards the past.
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That's why that matters.
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And again, I stress, I'm not trying to say that everything in the American past was good.
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God knows that wouldn't stand up to a second scrutiny or self scrutiny.
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But nor was it all bad.
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This wasn't a country formed in sin and in a radical sin.
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It wasn't founded in 1619 in order to make the country wicked and incapable of escaping that wickedness.
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You know, these are things that will matter enormously in the years ahead,
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because if you can't agree on anything, including who your heroes are,
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like the whole thing is just one massive division and we'll see what I think we're already seeing,
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which is people basically going to states where it's more like the life they want to live.
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And some people say to me, well, that's okay.
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And the genius of the founding is that it allows for that.
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That's possible, but it's also, it eradicates part of what has been American public life,
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which is the ability to look at each other and discuss face to face.
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And I see things like this bomb place under America the other week with the Supreme Court League,
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the draft league as being just a further example of that.
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I'm very, very worried about it in America.
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And because if America screws up everything, everything else in the world goes.
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Yeah, there's the degree to which America is still the beacon of these ideas on which the country was founded
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and has been able to live out in better and better forms,
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sort of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles versus like.
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And with the desire to improve an imperfect union.
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Well, I generally have hope that people want to sort of, in terms of gratitude,
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people are aware of how good it feels to be grateful.
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It's a better life psychologically.
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The resentment is a thing that destroys you from within.
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So I just feel that people will long for that and will find that.
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And that's the America way.
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Some of the division that we reveal now has to do with new technologies like social media.
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That kind of is a small kind of deviation from the path we're on because it's a new, we've got a new toy.
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Just like nuclear weapons.
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Yeah, which is relatively new.
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But we need to find reasonable attitudes towards these things.
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And that's why I say like it matters how you and I feed back on social media
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because we're all going through it to some extent.
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And we're learning.
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And we've got to learn how to do this without going mad.
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I say this as my minimalist call to friends in this era was the main job is not to go insane.
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And like walk towards sanity.
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Cause you know, I'm sure there's a hunter as Thompson quote in there and like the insanity and the weekends can be at least fun.
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Do you have advice for young people that just put down their Tik Tok and are listening to this podcast in high school and college
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about how to have a career or how to have a life that can be part of.
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So April question, but of course, I mean, I can give specific advice for people who want to be writers and so on.
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But that's a bit niche.
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Maybe the writers will be very interesting.
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Sorry to interrupt.
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Also how to put your ideas down on paper and ideas, develop them and have the guts to go to a large audience.
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Especially when the ideas are sort of controversial or dangerous or difficult.
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Well, the main thing to do is to read.
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When I was a schoolboy, I've ever have a book in my pocket, the side pocket of my jacket on his side pocket and would read.
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And that wasn't just because I swatish in some way, but because I discovered probably at some point in my early teens,
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I discovered something I read about this one.
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I discovered that books were dangerous, which was a thrilling discovery.
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I discovered they could contain anything.
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And also people didn't know what you were reading.
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I remember I get far too young an age.
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I read the Doors of Perception of Aldous Huxley and I didn't make head or tail of it probably.
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But I knew that it was about something really interesting and dangerous.
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And I thought constantly when I read poetry or read history, I was just constantly thrilled and wanted to know more.
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And if you want to become a writer, you have to be a reader.
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You have to read the best stuff.
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And obviously people disagree or agree on what that is and you'll find the people that really impress you.
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But I know that I just came across certain writers who just knocked me off my feet.
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And when you find those people, read everything and cling on to them and find other people like that.
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Find other writers like that where people are connected by history or scholarship or circles or whatever.
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For you, was it fiction or nonfiction?
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Is there a particular books that you just remember or just give you pause?
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Well, I remember that the first book that absolutely threw me was The Lord of the Flies by William Golden,
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which used to be a signed text and everyone's a bit snotty about because it's so popular.
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But I was thrown because I think it was the first adult book I read in that I had been used to the world of children's literature,
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of everything ends up fine in the end, the lost all get found, you know.
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And this was the first book I read where that's not the case, where the world turns out differently.
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And I remember for days afterwards, I was just in a state of shock.
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I couldn't believe what I'd just discovered.
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And partly because I sort of intuited it must be true.
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And of course, that is not to say that The Lord of the Flies, there's lots of scholarship on what children do in this situation
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of being on the island or when they do congregate.
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But yes, that was a sort of introduction to the adult world.
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And it was shocking and thrilling and I wanted more of it.
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And it was dangerous.
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And then, of course, when I became interested in sex, the moment I realized I was gay,
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I realized books were a very, very good way to learn about what I was.
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And that was even more dangerous in a way.
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And I thought, I mean, nobody knows what I know.
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You discovered sex, that was an invention in books.
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No, what I mean is that one of the things that gay people have when they're growing up is that you have this terribly big secret
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and you don't think the world will ever know.
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You hope the world will never know.
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And it's been called by one psychologist, the little boy with a big secret.
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And so if you discover that other people have the same secret, there's a sort of, thank God for that.
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But I mean, that's just a version of what everybody gets in reading in a way,
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which is the thrill of discovery that somebody else thought something you thought only you'd thought.
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I mean, one of the greatest thrill in all of literature is when a voice comes across the centuries
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and seems to leave a handprint, you know.
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It makes you feel a little bit less alone because somebody else feels he's the world the same way, is the same way.
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That's what C.S. Lewis said to have said.
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We read to know we're not alone.
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But we don't only read to know we're not alone, we read to become other people.
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I mean, I think I saw in books the version of the life I wanted to live and then I decided to live it.
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And I'm fortunate enough to have done so.
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I wanted to live in the world of ideas and books and debate and I wanted to live in the debates of my time, you know.
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And I remember when, like a lot of people, I read Ordon when I was young and, you know, certain lines obviously stuck with me.
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But that poem of his which everybody, you know, knows and which he hated, September 1st, 1939.
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I remember certain lines in that just like whacked me.
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I was sitting on a dive for a second to be degraded and alone at the end of a low dishonest decade.
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Of course, there's a problem with that line, which is you kind of want to be living at the end of a low dishonest decade as well.
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It sounds sort of cool in a way.
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You know, you're the only person who sees it.
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So yeah, anyhow, that's the diversion.
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But the point is, if you want to be a writer, you've got to be a reader.
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And apart from anything else, you discover the lilt of language and the things you can do.
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And I've read people who, and I still do, who I think, my God, I didn't know.
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How did you do that?
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In fact, books for me now and articles and other things fall into two categories.
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One is, I know how you did that.
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And the other is, I don't know how you did that.
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And the best feeling as a writer is when you do the second one.
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And it happens occasionally in my writing life.
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Were you almost like returned to something you've written or like right after you?
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No, the moment you write it.
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You wonder, how did I do that?
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That's the most, I've never said that before.
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That's the happiest thing in writing.
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Very occasionally, this sounds, but I mean, I've occasionally finished something.
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Funny enough, it happened some years ago in a long piece I wrote about the artist Basquiat.
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I finished the piece and I gasped.
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Because that's also a thing with writing is you, you, you, it's not, sometimes people say you need to write
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in order to know what you think.
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That's not quite true.
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Sometimes you, that's a very bad piece of advice for some writers who don't know what they think.
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And it's not going to become clearer if they just start typing.
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Sometimes it is true that you, there's a thought that's just waiting there and a clarity that comes across
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and suddenly the sentence emerges in your brain.
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And by the time you've typed it, you, you just go, yes.
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That's the greatest feeling of the writing.
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Almost like it came from somewhere else.
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That's what a Bakunin says about, you know, what's the moment is Tom Stoppard's favorite quote about,
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you know, Bakunin saying what happened to the moment where the writer's pen when he pauses,
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where does he go in that moment?
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That's so interesting.
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That's, that's all, because I think the answer to that question will help us explain consciousness
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and all those other weird things about the human mind.
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Yeah. So that was advice for writers.
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I didn't really give any advice to people in general, but
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Is that, oh, you want to give health advice?
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To channel a Churchill and
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No, I don't give health advice.
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Clearly, because you imply that Churchill was one of your early guides in that aspect.
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So when you discovered your sexuality, let me ask about love.
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Of course, far too personal of a question to ask a Brit, but what was that like?
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And broadly speaking, what's the role of love in the human condition?
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And for you personally, discovering that you were and maybe telling the world that you were gay.
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Very perilously personal. I do actually have a sort of rule that I don't talk about my personal life.
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Rules are meant to be broken.
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Okay. I'll break it a little bit.
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The, the, one of the ways in which growing up and rising your gay differs from growing up and being straight is that it's almost inevitable that your first passions will be unrequited.
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Oh, wow. I never thought about that. Yeah.
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Now that's not to say, I mean, you know, there's plenty of unrequited love among young men for young women, young women for young men.
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There's plenty of, you know, that, but it's almost inevitable if you're gay that your first, you know, passions will be totally unrequited because the odds are that the personal question will not be gay.
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So the experience of love is mostly heartbreak.
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Is heartbreak and disappointment.
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That heartbreak can be beautiful too.
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Of course. Well, again, it comes back to the thing of if you're a writer or something because you can always do something with it.
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That's why all writers are sort of not to be trusted.
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I didn't trust you the moment you walked in here.
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No, I mean, it's a famous problem with writers because you always think, well, I could use that.
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It's dangerous. It's a dangerous thing and all writers should be aware of it.
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It's almost like a drug, right?
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No, it's not like a drug.
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It's the fear that all things, even the greatest suffering, it could be material.
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What's the danger in that exactly?
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That seeing the material in the human experience, you don't experience it fully?
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You don't experience it fully and you might be using it.
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I had a friend who wrote a poem about a friend who died in a motorcycle accident in Sydney in the 60s.
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And he said he knew the moment he was told that his friend was dead, a tiny bit of him thought I could use this for a poem.
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And he did and the poem was wonderful, but there's always a slight guilt for writers of, am I going to use that?
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Anyhow, that's a diversion.
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Life is full of guilty pleasures and I think that's one of them because if you feel that guilt, really, what you're doing is you're capturing that moment
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and you're going to impact the lives of many, many people by writing about that moment
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because it's going to stimulate something that resonates with those people because they had similar kinds of memories
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about a loss and a passion towards somebody that they had to lose.
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Yes, but there is a good sign.
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More obvious perhaps problem is reporting from war zones or bad places and wanting to find bad stories because it's useful.
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There is a definite guilt you get from that sort of thing, like the worse the situation, the more useful.
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Anyhow, no, so that's sort of the only difference that happens from growing up in gay.
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And it means that most, certainly in my generation, most gay men came to sexual or romantic maturity later.
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And there's lots of explanations of that maybe being one of the reasons for perceived or otherwise promiscuity among gay men,
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which is, I think, more easily persuaded by the fact that gay men behaved like men would if women were men.
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That's one explanation.
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But it's both a feature and a bug that you come to sexual flourishing later in life.
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That could be seen as a, in the trajectory of human life, that could be a positive or a negative.
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But what's broadly speaking is the role of love in the human condition, Douglas?
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Well, it's the nearest thing we have to finding the point.
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What is the point? What's the meaning of life? Let's go there.
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So what's the meaning? It's a hard one, of course. Where is the meaning? It's slightly easier.
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And I'd say that everyone can find that. You gravitate towards the places you find meaning.
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Now, there's a conservative answer to this, which is quite useful, and it's certainly more useful than any others,
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because the conservative answer is find meaning where people have found it before, which is a very, very good answer.
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If your ancestors have found meaning in a place of worship or a particular canon of work,
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or go there because it's been proven by time to be able to give you the goods.
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Much more sensible than saying, hey, I don't know, discover new ways of meaning.
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But love is probably the nearest thing we can have to the divine on Earth.
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And of course, the problem of what type of love we mean is an issue.
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Well, that goes to the fact that you don't like definitions anyway.
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I do like definitions. I just think they need to be pinned down, but let's not go there at the moment because it's...
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Doesn't that pin down love at the moment?
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Well, no, because as you know, I mean, because of the different varieties of love
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and the fact that we have one word for it in our culture and that it means an awful lot of things and we don't delineate it well.
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But let's say human love with the greatest fulfillment in sexual... fulfillment in sexual love with another person
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is probably the greatest intimation you can have of what might otherwise only be superseded by divine love.
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And it's the sense that all young lovers have, which is that they've just walked through the low door in the garden and found themselves in bliss.
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And that this is... there's a beautiful, beautiful poem of... can I read it to you?
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I'll try to find it. There's a beautiful poem of Philip Larkin, which slightly says what I'm trying not to duck your question by referring to other people.
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Maybe that's the best way to answer the question, is to read a poem.
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So there's a poem by Philip Larkin called High Windows, which is remarkable because he came to sexual...
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He was straight, he had a rather unhappy sex life, but he came to sexual fruition in the 40s and 50s and all the hell that involved.
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And he took what I regard as being a really remarkable and important view on the sexual revolution in the 60s,
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which is that most people of his generation, most older people, resented the young.
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They resented the freedom they had, and actually they pretended the freedom was terrible, and it was always getting likely to...
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And Philip Larkin, rather surprisingly, he was a very conservative person, took a different view.
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And he says it in his poem, and the opening of the poem is, he says,
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When I see a couple of kids, and guess he's fucking her, and she's taking pills or wearing a diaphragm.
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I know this is paradise. Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives.
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Bonds and gestures pushed to one side like an outdated combine harvester,
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and everyone young going down the long slide to happiness endlessly.
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I wonder if anyone looked at me 40 years back and thought,
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that will be the life, no God anymore, or sweating in the dark about hell and that,
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or having to hide what you think of the priest.
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He and his lot will all go down the long slide like free, bloody birds.
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And immediately, rather than words, comes the thought of high windows,
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the sun comprehending glass, and beyond it the deep blue air,
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that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
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The divine, he found it.
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He found it in seeing a couple of young kids,
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and knowing that one of them was wearing a diaphragm.
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First of all, it's very counterintuitive.
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But secondly, this is the point that sex had been so tied up with misery.
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I mean, people don't remember this now when they talk about the past.
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I mean, one of my favorite books, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday,
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descriptions of what it was like trying to have sex in pre First World War Vienna.
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All the men ended up going to female prostitutes.
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So many of them got syphilis.
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And this was their first experience of sex.
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It was so goddamn awful, and they were stuck with it all their lives.
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And there's lots of stuff that's gone better in our ascension.
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That's one of them.
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But you ask about love.
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Yes, I do think that love is basically the thing that gives us the best glimpse of the divine.
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And by the way, liberating sex doesn't buy you love.
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I mean, it throws in an entirely, it threw in another set of problems.
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If there's any meaning on top of all of that is we like to find problems and solve that as a human species.
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And sometimes we even create problems.
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Douglas, thank you for highlighting all the problems of human civilization
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and giving us a glimmer of hope for the future.
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This is an incredible conversation.
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Thank you for talking today.
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It's a huge honor.
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It's very kind of you to say that.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Douglas Murray himself.
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Disagreement is not oppression.
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Argument is not assault.
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Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence.
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The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.
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Thank you for listening.
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I hope to see you next time.