Kind: captions
Language: en
i think that some people are
deliberately trying to completely clear
the cultural landscape of our past in
order to say there's nothing good
nothing you can hold on to no one you
should revere you've got no heroes the
whole thing comes down who's left
standing oh we've also got this idea
from the 20th century still about
marxism
and no
no
you will not have the entire landscape
deracinated
and then the worst ideas tried again
the following is a conversation with
douglas murray author of the madness of
crowds gender race and identity and his
most recent book the war on the west how
to prevail in the age of unreason
he's a brilliant fearless and often
controversial thinker who points out and
pushes back against what he sees as the
madness of our modern world
i should note that the use of the word
marxism and the west in this
conversation refers primarily to
cultural marxism and the cultural values
of western civilization respectively
this is in contrast to my previous
conversation with richard wolff where we
focused on marxism as primarily a
critique of capitalism and thus looking
at it through the lens of economics and
not culture
nevertheless these two episodes stand
opposite of each other with very
different perspectives on how we build a
flourishing civilization together
i leave it to you the listener to think
and to decide
which is the better way
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's douglas
murray
you recently wrote the book titled the
war on the west
which in part says that the values ideas
and history of western civilization are
under attack so let's start with the
basics historically and today what are
the ideas
that represent western civilization the
good the bad the ugly i actually don't
get stuck on um
definitions precisely because as you
know once you get stuck on definitions
there's a possibility you'll never get
off yes
um
i'd say a few things firstly obviously
the western tradition is a specific
tradition this specific tradition of
ideas culture
well known to be perhaps easily defined
by the combination of athens and
jerusalem
the world of the bible
and the world of ancient greece and and
indeed rome
uh
effectively creates west it creates
european civilization which itself
spawns the rest of the western
civilizations america canada australia
new zealand and others
but these are the main countries that we
still refer to as the west um so there's
a specific tradition and all the things
that come from it
uh
my shorthand cheat on this answer is to
say um you know when you're not in it
so if you've ever been to beijing
shanghai
you know you're not in the west
somewhere else you know you're not in
the west
when you're in tokyo
somewhere extraordinary but you know
you're not in the west uh obviously
there are
um let's say borderline questions like
it's russia in the west
um
which i sort of leave open as a question
um
possibly if you were placed into moscow
blindfolded and you woke up
and you couldn't hear the language or
maybe you didn't know what the language
sounded like would you would you guess
you were in the west uh or not i think i
was somewhere near it
think getting closer
i mean you know it's it's this is what
tulsa asks the question doesn't it
whether it's european
and i think the answer to that is
not really although massively influenced
by europe but
um and times wanting to reach towards it
at times wanting to stay away but
um but a part of the west possibly yes
um
but anyway it's a very specific
tradition it's it's it's one of the
number of
major traditions in the world and um
because it's hard to define doesn't mean
it doesn't exist you know
are there certain characteristics and
qualities about the values and the ideas
that define it is
is the type of rule the type of
governmental structure yes
i mean the rule of law uh property
owning democracies um
and much more i mean these are of course
things that were ended up being
developed in america and uh then given
back to much of the rest of the west
um
i'd say there are other
um
perhaps more controversial attributes i
would give to the west one is a ravenous
interest in the rest of the world
which is not shared of course by every
other culture um
the late uh philosopher george steiner
who said he could never get out of his
head the haunting fact that the boats
only seemed to go out from europe
you know they didn't the explorers the
the the the scholars the linguist that
the people who wanted to discover
other civilizations and indeed even
resurrect ancient civilizations and lost
civilizations these were scholars that
were always coming from the west to
discover this elsewhere by contrast you
know there were never boats coming from
egypt to help the anglo-saxons discover
the origins of their language and so on
so i think there is a sort of ravenous
interest in the rest of the world which
can be said to be a western attribute
although it of course also has one
should immediately preface it some
downsides and many criticisms that can
be made up on the consequences of that
interest
um because of course it's not entirely
lacking in self-interest
so it's not just the scholars it's also
the armies the armies and they're
looking to gain access and control over
resources elsewhere markets and enhance
the imperial
imperative exactly to conquer to expand
although that itself of course is a
universal thing i mean no uh
no um
the civilization i think that we know of
doesn't try to gain ground from its
neighbors where can it withstand ability
to go further faster um
certainly gave an advantage in that
regard do some civilizations get
a bit more excited by that kind of idea
than others possible it's possible
because it you could say it's the
western
civilization because the technological
innovation was more
um efficient yeah doing that kind of
thing absolutely but maybe he wanted it
more too
well the ottomans wanted it an awful lot
and did very terribly well
for many centuries and shouldn't forget
that
um
as did others um
i'd also say by the way and again it's a
it's a very broad one but it's worth
throwing out i think self-criticism
um
is
an important attribute of the western
mind
uh one that as you know is not common
everywhere
not all societies allow even their most
vociferous critics to become rich
so you know criticism is a negative
sounding word it could be
self-introspection
self-analysis
self-reflection and it can be what you
need
you know and in the western system i'd
argue that one of the advantages of the
system of representative governance is
that
where there are problems in the system
you can
um attempt to sort them out by peaceable
means
um
we listened to arguments i mean most
famously in america in the late 20th
century the civil rights movement
achieved its aims
by force of moral argument
and persuaded the rest of the country
that it had been wrong
um that's not common in every society by
any means
so i think there are certain attributes
of the western mind that you could say
are um
they're not entirely unique but they are
not as commonplace elsewhere
what about the emergence in hierarchies
of asymmetry of power
most
visible most drastic in the form of
slavery for example
well i mean everyone in the world is
slavery so i don't regard it as being a
western the unique western sin
it's rather hard to think of a
civilization in history that didn't have
slavery of some kind one of the oddities
of the western ignorance of our day
is that people seem to imagine that our
societies in the west were the only ones
who ever engaged in any vices
alas this isn't true it's a sort of
russoian mistake
or at least one that's blossomed since
rousseau that uh everybody else in the
world was born into sort of udanic
innocence and only we in the west had
this sort of evil in us that caused us
to do bad things to other people
slavery was engaging by everyone in the
ancient world of course and and through
most of the modern world as well of
course there are 40 million slaves in
the world today so it's clearly not
something that the species as a whole
has a problem with
um that's more slaves of course than
there were in the 19th century
um
and i'd say
on top of that that you know the
interesting thing about the western mind
as regards to slavery is that we were
the civilization that did away with it
and and by the way the the founding
fathers of america who today are
lambasted routinely
for being
acquiescent in the slave trade um
engaging in it
owning slaves um
there's not people almost don't even
bother now to recognize the facts that
thomas jefferson george washington all
wanted to see this trade done away with
couldn't hold the country together at
the origins if they'd have made such an
effort
and believed and hoped that it would be
something that would be dealt with after
their time
so the founding ideas had within them
the notion that we should as a people
get rid of this the opening lines of the
declaration of independence
set up the conditions
under which slavery will be impossible
all men are created equal
once you once you've put that that's
like that's a time bomb
under the under the whole concept of
slavery
that's ticking away
okay and sure enough it detonated
in the next century if we just step back
and look at our
the human species
what does slavery teach you about human
nature
the fact that slavery
uh
has appeared
as a function of society throughout
human history there are two
possibilities um
one is
it's
what people think they can do when god's
not watching
another is it's what they can do if they
think that god allows it
really really well put
and um
the fact that they want to do this kind
of subjugation
what does that mean
well i mean it's pretty straightforward
in a way um
there are people who get to work for
free
there's economic in nature in some in
some states yes but in order to do it i
mean almost always uh there are dif
there are some examples in the ancient
world where this wasn't the case but
almost always it had to be a subjugated
people or people regarded as different
one of the things actually i've tried to
sort of inject into the
discussion through this book among other
things is is a recognition that
there was there were very major
questions still going on in the 18th and
early 19th century the one resolved
which were one of the
reasons why slavery was not as morally
repugnant to people then as it was to us
now as it is to us now and that's the
question of polygenesis and monogenesis
um
at the time of thomas jefferson the
founding fathers were were thinking and
working
they didn't know
because nobody knew
whether the human races were related or
not um
the there was there were arguments the
monogenesis argument that that we were
all indeed from the same racial stock
apollogenesis argument was that we
weren't we were
you know black africans ethiopians
they were often referred to at the time
um
because they provided some of the first
slaves um were different from white
europeans simply not related in any way
and that makes it easier of course that
makes it easier to enslave people if you
think they're not your brother
am i my brother's keeper no he's not
your brother
uh
and
there's
it's it's a it's a very
it was a very troubling argument in the
in the 18th and 19th century also
because there was a biblical question it
threw up it threw up a theological
question which was
i mean
people were literally debating this at
the time
um
was there also a black adam and eve
was there as it were in india now adam
and eve the native american adam and eve
i mean this was a serious theological
debate
because they didn't know the answer and
it i mean people say that darwin
um
solved this it wasn't just darwin of
course but
by the late 19th century the argument
that we were not
all related
as human beings had suffered so many
blows that
you had to really be very very ignorant
deliberately willfully ignorant to
ignore it by that so it no longer was
after darwin a theological question it
became a moral question it was already a
moral question but it clarified darwin
clarifies it definitely and then you're
in the same in a situation of you're not
subjugating some other people you're
subjugating your own
kin
and and
that becomes morally unsustainable
so
given that slavery in america is part
is part of its history
how do we incorporate into the calculus
of
um
policy today
social discourse
what we learn in school
we can look at slavery in america we
could look at maybe more recent things
like uh in europe the
other atrocities the holocaust
how do we incorporate that in terms of
how we create policy how we treat each
other all those kinds of things
what is the calculus of integrating the
atrocities the injustices of the past
into the way we are today
that's a very complex question because
it's a it's a moral question at this
point
and a moral question long after the fact
um
i say at one point in the war in the
west that the argument for instance on a
reparations now that goes on and it's
not a not a fringe argument anymore some
people say oh you're pulling up this
fringe argument it really isn't i mean
every contender for the democratic
nomination
for the
the presidency in 2020 was willing to
talk about the
possibility of reparations some very
eager
that this country america
goes through that
entirely self-destructive exercise
um
i say that there's a there's a lot of
problems with this but if i refine it
down to one thing i'd say this
um it's no longer about a wealth
transfer from one group of people who
did something wrong to another group of
people who were wronged
it would have been it would have been
that could have been that 200 years ago
today it's not even the descendants of
people who did something wrong giving
money to people who were the descendants
of people who were wronged
it's a wealth transfer from people who
look like people who did a wrong thing
in the past to another group of people
who resemble people who were wronged
that's impossible to do i'm
completely clear about this
there is no
way
in which you could organize such a
wealth transfer
uh on moral or practical reasons america
is filled with people who are
um
have the same skin color as us for
instance who have no connection to the
slave trade and should not be
made to pay money
to people who have some connection
and then the country is also filled with
ethnic minorities who have come after
slavery who would not be
um
due for any
reimbursement as it were
the problem the problem with this is
though is that
there are
i'm perfectly open to the possibility
that there are
um residual inequities that exist in
american life
and that's and that the consequences of
slavery could be one of the factors that
resulted from this
the thing is i don't think it's it's a
um
i don't think it's a single issue answer
i think it's a multi-dimensional issue
something like black underachievement in
america is obviously a multi-dimensional
issue
much of the left and others wish to say
it's not it's only about racism
and they can't answer why
asians who've arrived more recently
don't for instance get held down by
white supremacy but actually i say white
supremacy in
quotes obviously yeah but don't get held
back by it but actually flourish to the
extent that asian americans uh have a
higher household earnings and higher
house household mean um
uh
uh equity than
home equity and so on than than white
americans
uh so i don't think that on the merits
the evidence is there that you know
racism is the explanation for black
ongoing black underachievement in some
sections of the black community in
america
it's obviously a part of it could you
say that even those things like
fatherlessness and
similar family breakdown issues
are a long-term consequence of it
possibly but it's it's being awfully
generous to people's
ability to make bad decisions
for instance how many generations of the
holocaust would you allow
people to claim that everything that
went wrong
in the jewish community was as a result
of the holocaust
i mean is there some kind of term limit
on this i would have thought so
and i think most people probably think
that's over
i think the details matter they're the
and
um but it's very difficult
oh i enjoy swimming out in the ocean so
although i'm terrified of what's lurking
underneath in the darkness you're right
you're right to me
um okay it's really complicated calculus
with the holocaust of
so the argument in america is that
there are
there's deep institutional racism
against african americans that's rooted
in slavery
and
so however that calculus turns out that
calculation it still persists
in the culture and the institutions
in the allocation of resources in the
way that we communicate in in this in
subtle ways in major ways all that kind
of stuff
um how is it possible to win or lose
that argument of how much institutional
racism there is that's rooted in
in slavery is it a winnable it's it's an
unquantifiable argument
um and i'd i'd
i'd like to apply some shortcuts to some
of this the following
are for instance all
um
let's take the the one that's most often
often cited
if a white person is walking down a
street in america and they see a group
of young black men coming towards them
and it's late at night and they cross
the road is it because of slavery
is it because of institutional racism
no it's because they've made a calculus
based
not entirely
on
um unfounded
beliefs that
given crime rates
it's possible that
this group of people might be a group of
people they don't want to meet late at
night
that's
an ugly fact but
as crime statistics in american cities
after american cities bear out
um
it's not an entirely unreasonable one
it's not reasonable every time obviously
obviously
but is it attributable to slavery
that's a stretch
if you're in a
city like chicago where the homicide
rates
shot up in the last two years
albeit again as has always has to be
remembered mainly black on black uh gun
violence and knife violence
nevertheless if you're in a city like
chicago
and you make that calculus i've just
suggested the the the the cliched one
the street late at night
there are other factors other than a
memory of slavery
that kick in
um
and i'm afraid it's uh
it's something which people don't want
to particularly acknowledge in america
for obvious reasons because it's the
ugliest damn debate in the world
but i was actually just writing the what
in my column in new york post today
about a
a very interesting case it sort of
similar which is the
the um question of obesity in the us
as you know um america is the most
overweight country in the world
uh america has i think um 40 of the
population is
obese
in medical ways and the nearest next
country is a long way down that's new
zealand at 30 percent of the population
so america is a long way ahead
why during the cronovirus era when we
know that obesity
is the one clearest factor that's likely
to lead to your hospitalization if you
also get the virus
why did almost no public health
information in america focus on obesity
80 percent of the people who ended up
hospitalized in america from with
coronavirus were obese
we locked the schools when there was no
evidence that the coronavirus was deadly
for children
we all wore cloth masks when there was a
very little evidence this was
much use in stopping the spread of the
virus
we had massive evidence about obesity
being a problem and we never addressed
it why is it just because we worried
about fat people no it's actually
because about fat shaming as well no
it's also because to a great extent it's
a racial issue in america as well and
actually i quoted this new publication
from the universe university of chicago
as it happens which makes that claim
explicit says the reasons why people are
have views that are negative about
obesity is because of racism and slavery
this is what everything is drawn back to
america anything you want to stop you
say it's because of racism it's because
of slavery how about
it's actually because
you mind
the hospitals getting clogged up you
mind people dying your mind ethnic
minorities disproportionately dying
and you'd like to say something about it
once again as in everything in america
it's cut off by some
poorly educated academic saying it's
about slavery
so we're really not i mean this requires
a kind of form of brain surgery to
perform it on a society probably one
that's not possible without killing the
patient
and
it's being done by people who
are wearing like
mittens
so i'm sure that there's a few folks
listening to this
that are rolling their eyes and saying
here we go again two white guys
talking about
the lack of
institutional racism in america
first of all what's your
what would you like to tell them
so
our african-american friends who are
looking at this and i've gotten a chance
to talk to a bunch of them on clubhouse
recently clubhouse is the social app
yeah yeah i know and i really enjoy an
absolute zoo of an app as far as i can
see it i personally love it because you
get to talk to as somebody who's an
introvert and doesn't socialize much i
enjoy talking to
people from all walks of life
so it got gave me a chance to first of
all practice russian and ukrainian to
get the chance to do that then you get a
chance to talk about israel and
palestine with people who are
uh from
that part of the world and you get to
hear raw emotion of people from the
ground where they start screaming
they start crying they start being calm
and collected and thoughtful and
this is as if you walked into a bar
with custom picked regular folks
in quotes regular folks just people that
have
quote lived experiences
real pain real hope real emotions biases
and you get to listen to them go at it
with no
because it's an audio app you're not
allowed to start getting into a physical
fist fight
so even though it really sounds sounds
like people want like it's happening
yeah and so you get to really listen to
that feeling and for example it allows a
white guy like me
from another part of the world coming
from
uh the former soviet union to go into a
room
with a few hundred uh african americans
screaming about
joe rogan using the n-word oh yeah and i
get to really listen there's very
different perspectives on that in the
african-american community and it's
fascinating to listen so i don't get
access to that by sort of excellent
books and articles and so on you get
that real raw emotion and i'm just
saying there's a few of those folks
listening to this
with that real raw emotion and they one
argument they say
is you
douglas murray and you lex freeman don't
have the right
to talk about race and racism in america
it is our struggle you are from a
privileged class of people that don't
don't know what it's like
to be a black man or woman in america
walking down the street
can you steal man that case
first of all fuck that
okay that's not listen i think we need
to define steel
steel manic okay can you try i know what
this is um
i really resent that form of
argumentation sure i really resent it
i have the right to talk about whatever
the hell i want
and no one's gonna stop me or try to
intimidate me yeah or tell me that i
can't simply because of my skin color
and i think that if i said to somebody
else the other way around it would be
equally reprehensible
if i said shut up you have no right to
criticize anything that douglas murray
says because you've not got my skin
color
okay it's not an exact comparison but
seriously is that a is that a reasonable
form of argument
uh you haven't been through everything
i've been through in my life therefore
you can't comment no in that case nobody
can talk about anything we might as well
pack up go home and isolate ourselves
strong words but can you try to steal me
on the case not in this particular
situation but there's
people
that have lived through something
that can comment in a very specific way
like for example holocaust survivors yes
there is a sense in which maybe a basic
sense of civility
when a holocaust survivor is speaking
about their experience of the holocaust
then
an intellectual
from a very different part of the world
that's simply writing about
uh nuanced geopolitics of world war ii
just
should not interrupt the holocaust
survivor we physically interrupt them if
they're telling their stories
with logic
and reason that the experience of the
holocaust survivor somehow fundamentally
has a deeper understanding of the
humanity
and the injustice of the first of all
again when even deeper water is now but
in terms of wanting to listen to another
person who has experienced something yes
yes
but not endlessly
not endlessly
i mean there are some people who've
written about i mean there are people
who've written about the holocaust who
didn't experience the holocaust and have
written about it better than people who
did
it's it's not
this this this idea that the lived
experience to use this terrible modern
jargon as if there's another type
this this this idea that the lived
experience has to triumph over
everything else is is not always correct
it can be correct in some circumstances
if you are sitting in a room with a
holocaust survivor and somebody who'd
never heard about the holocaust and
wanted to kind of you know shoot out
their views on it
yeah one of those people should be heard
more than the other obviously obviously
if there's somebody who's experienced
racism first hand and there's somebody
else who has never experienced it
then obviously you'd want to hear from
the person who has experienced it
firsthand if that is the discussion
underway
i i don't think that it's the case that
that is endlessly the case
i'm also
highly reluctant to concede
that there are groups of people who by
didn't of their skin color or anything
else
get to dominate the microphone now of
course we're literally both speaking to
microphones at the moment so there's an
irony to this but let's skate over the
irony
what i mean is people saying you don't
have the right to speak i have the right
to take the microphone from you and
speak because i know best
fine
if you know best we'll argue it out
and someone will win
long or short term
but the
the um
the the almost aggressive tone in which
this is now leveled i don't like the
sound of
nobody's experience is completely
understandable by another human being
nobody's
and what many people are asking us to do
at the moment us collectively is
to fall for that thing i think it was
camille faster who said it first but
i've um adopted it in recent years is to
say you must spend an inordinate amount
of your life trying to understand me
personally my lived experience
everything about me you should dedicate
your life to trying to do that
simultaneously you'll never understand
me
this is not an attractive invitation
this is this is a an unwinnable game
so if somebody if somebody has a
legitimate
um
and an important point to make they
should make it and they will win through
whatever their character is whatever
their race and by the way there are
plenty of white people who experience
racism as well there are plenty of white
people who do
and have done and increasingly so which
is one of the things i write about from
the war in the west i mean i i would
argue that today in america the only
group you're actually allowed to be
consistently
vilely racist against the white people
if you say disgusting things about black
people in america in 2022 you will be
over you will be over
if you decide to talk about people's
white tears their white female tears
their white guilt their white privilege
their white rage and all these other
pseudo-pathologizing
you'll be just fine you could be the
chairman of joint use of staff
you could lecture at yale university
absolutely fine and the white people
have to suck that up
as if that's fine because there was
racism in another direction in the past
so white people can have racism as well
does that mean that i think that i have
a right or other white people have a
right to dominate the discourse by
talking about their feelings of having
been victim victims of racism no not
particularly because what does that get
us it gets us into an endless cycle of
competitive victimhood am i saying that
white people who've experienced violence
have experienced historically anything
like the violence that was perpetrated
against black people in america
historically obviously not but
you know
what kind of competition do we want to
enter here
and
this is very very important terrain now
in america because there's one other
thing i have to throw in there which is
how do you work out the sincerity of the
claim
how do you work out the sincerity of the
claim being made
at one point uh in my book in this
latest book i referred to
a very useful bit in them in nature and
genealogy of morals
where as you know nietzsche always has
to be treated carefully you know when
people say um i love nietzsche
which bits
[Laughter]
what exactly do you love about him
but um
a lot and a lot can be learned from the
answer
uh but there are moments in junior area
tomorrow that was very useful for this
book
one of them was the moment when
nietzsche uses a phrase that i've now
stolen for myself appropriated you might
say
um
where um where he refers to people who
who tear at wounds long since closed and
then cry about the pain they feel
now
how do you know
how do you know whether the pain is real
how do you know
i'm not saying you can never know
but it's hard so when somebody says i
feel that my life hasn't gone that well
and it's because of something that was
done to my ancestors 200 years ago
maybe they do feel that
maybe they're right to feel that
maybe they're making it up
maybe they're using it as their reason
for failure in life
maybe they're using it as their reason
to not even try
maybe they're using it as their reason
to
smoke weed all day
i don't know
and who does know how can you work that
out
and that's why i come back to this thing
of who are we
to constantly judge in this society
other people who we don't know
and attribute motives to them based on
on racial or other characteristics
and as you write in this part
[Laughter]
i like your uh pro cultural
appropriation of nietzsche
uh and at the same time canceling uh
nietzsche
um in the same set of sentences but you
write in this part about evil
no i didn't cancel nietzsche
wow can't cancel nature like i'm saying
i'm saying treat him carefully to him
carefully fair enough
but you can judge
a man's character by which parts of
nietzsche he um
he quotes fair enough
i think when you meet people who do man
and superman a bit too much
now you're pulling in even deeper water
referencing hitler here
okay
so you write in this part of the book
about evil
uh
quote what is it that drives
evil
many things without doubt but one of
them is identified by several of the
great philosophers is resentment
that sentiment is one of the greatest
drivers for people who want to destroy
colon blaming someone else for having
something you believe you deserve more
and you're saying
this kind of resentment
we don't know
as it surfaces whether it's genuine or
if it's
uh used to sort of play games of power
to evil ends
um
can you speak to this
to this this because it's just a
fascinating idea
that
one of the biggest drivers of evil in
the
world is resentment because if you look
at
boy if you look at human history if you
look at hitler
uh so much of the propaganda so much of
the narrative was about resentment
does that surface there's a level or is
that deep there is that computer it can
be any of the above
let's first of all preface it everybody
has resentment
i mean i just i use the term horizontal
which is thought very similar to present
let's stick with resentment
so we don't sound too pretentious
um
the
let me give you a quick example of
somebody in our own day who has who has
a form of resentment vladimir putin
did you see navalny's documentary
putin's palace
yes yeah
you remember the stuff about uh putin as
a young kgb officer in germany
from the stuff about putin his first
wife's resentment of one of his kgb
colleagues who had a an apartment that
was a few meters bigger than the putin's
apartment
yeah it's very interesting and by the
way i'm not saying that
you know vladimir putin became the man
he has become and invaded ukraine
because he didn't have an apartment he
liked him but in berlin or munich
wherever he was this is a distinct
possibility my point is
my point is is that
is that
resentment is a factor in all human
lives and we all feel it in
in our lives and it's
it's something it has to be struggled
against
resentment is in political terms can be
a deadly i mean it's an incredibly deep
thing to draw upon
and you mentioned hitler obviously one
of the things that hitler
played on was resentment obviously
uh
almost every revolution he does
i mean the french revolutionaries did as
well and we're not without cause
uh there's a good reason to feel that
versailles was not listening to paris
in the 1780s
and feel resentment for um
marie antoinette in her palace within
the palace
ignoring the bread shortages
in paris
um
so resentment is is a very
it's a very understandable thing and
sometimes it's justifiable and it's also
deadly to the person as it is to the
society
it's an incredibly deep deep sentiment
somebody else is um got something that
you should have
and the
the problem about it is that it's it has
the potential to be endless
um you can do it your whole life
and one of the ways i've
sort of
sort of found myself explaining this to
people is to say
it's also important to recognize that
resentment is something that can cross
absolutely every boundary
so for instance
it crosses all racial boundaries
obviously and i go without saying
more interesting is it crosses all class
boundaries and socioeconomic boundaries
and if i was to sort of simplify this
thought i would say
i guess that you and i
and everybody watching
knows or has known somebody in their
lives
who has
almost nothing in worldly terms
and is a generous person a kindly person
a giving person
a happy person even a cheerful person
and
i think we probably have also or many of
us would have met people who seem to
have everything
and who are filled with resentment
filled with resentment somebody else has
held them back from something their
sister once did something they said she
shouldn't she got this i should have got
that
and and on and on and on
it's a human trait
and
what one of the things that suggests to
me is that we therefore have a choice in
our lives about this this is something
which we can do something about not
limitlessly
but for instance
i mean there are very good reasons that
some people in their lives might feel
resentment
let's say you're involved in a car crash
and a friend
fell asleep at the wheel and that's why
you are spending the rest of your life
in a wheelchair that's a pertinent
example of this in american politics at
the moment
um
you would be justified in feeling
resentment
and at some point you have to make a
decision which is am i going to be that
person
or a different person
but even in that case you're saying at
the individual level and that societal
level is destructive to the mind even
when you're quote-unquote justified it
drops you it rots you because
the best you can do
is to eke out your days unfulfilled
so the antidote as you describe is
gratitude yes
gratitude is the antidote to
evil in a sense
so gratitude is the individual level
into societal level gratitude is
certainly the answer to resentment
i um
i quote in the war in the west this this
when i read it
first time a few years ago i was
absolutely flawed by um
the brothers karamazov uh
not everything in it by the way i won't
get into it but i have i have some very
big structural criticisms of the novel
now now you're just sweet talking to me
because i'm a does the esky fan but i
appreciate this
oh okay
well we could get into what i see as the
structural flaws in the brothers
carrying out anyway um now i'm i'm
offended and triggered yeah no i mean
this
is coming out of macbeth and saying i
didn't think it was much good yeah
there's structural flaws yeah i thought
the ending stank yeah middle wasn't very
good no
um when i read that that novel i was i
was flawed by a couple of things one is
one is of course at the moment where we
realize the devil appears
the moment that ivan says to his brother
you you know he visits me and you
realize that he's talking about the
devil whole novel goes into this
totally different space
anyway this is even more than you've
already realized the novels about
and then when the conversation occurs
between the van and the devil remember i
think he says describes him as dressed
as a french friend it's redressed in the
french style
of the uh early part of the 19th century
very strange the devil will be dressed
like that but sort of
um
and and and if you remember that he and
he's sort of cross-legged and rather a
bane figure
but but the devil mentions impassing
to ivan that um
he says i don't know why
gratitude is not a
uh
an instinct that's been given to me
and um yeah you're not allowed this is
not
uh given the role of being the devil
this is not one of the things there's no
other thing and you think and of course
only a genius of dostoevsky's stature
could i mean a lesser genius would have
made a whole novel out of that insight
only dostoevsky can just throw it away
because it's such an abundance of riches
that he still has to get through
the structural problems aside but the
the
the uh the passive aggressive
the the micro aggression in this
conversation
a little knife fight okay no yeah but
but the reason i mentioned this because
of course when i saw it
this this is such a brilliant insight by
darcy because
why why would why would gratitude not be
a sentiment the devil was capable of the
answer is of course
that if the devil was capable of
gratitude he wouldn't be the devil
he'd be somebody else
he has to be incapable of gratitude
do you think for dostoevsky that was as
strong as an insight as as it is for you
because i think that's a really powerful
idea
that
with gratitude
you you don't get the resentment that
rots you from the core
yes i think it was one of the just
endless things that he saw in us
and
and the way i put it is that i mean i
also think it in think of it in terms of
the the era of deconstruction which is
one of the things i'd like us to call
the era that's now ending
the era of deconstruction
was the era that started let's say from
the 60s onwards
and was
originally an academic game that then
spilled out into the wider culture which
was
let's take everything apart let's pull
it all apart
um there are lots of problems with it
one is it's quite boring
you don't get an awful lot from it
uh
you also have the problem of what
children find when they try to do this
with bicycles which is they can take it
apart quite easily but they can't put it
back together
um
and the era of of
taking things apart as a game
is one we've lived through and it's been
highly destructive
but you can do it for quite a long time
i'm going to look at this society and
i'm going to take it apart by showing
systemic problems i'm going to
at the end of that what have you got
what have you done what have you
achieved
we need to interrogate this okay
interrogate by all means ask questions
but interrogate there's a deliberate his
hostility to this
i'm going to interrogate this thing and
take it apart and again at the end of it
what have you got
whether you're interrogating a text or a
piece of music
or an idea or a society fine
question endlessly question yes
interrogate
assumes it's all um
a criminal in a cell
and it's guilty
and therefore it must be taken apart
and that's what we've been doing for
decades in the west
and that's resentment that's one
by-product of resentment
you can't build the thing but you know
how to take it apart
is a little bit of resentment
good so you have
you know that i love tom waits and he
has a song where uh a little drop of i
like my town with a little drop of
poison
is it good to do that
is it good to have a little bit of
poison in your drink
depends what poison is and it depends if
you know not to have another drink
it might be the case you find out some
alcoholics do that one was
too many and 10 is not enough
so there's a natural
in this case
this kind of deconstruction is a
slippery slope it becomes an addiction
it becomes a drug and you just can't
stop well you have you'd have to wean
yourself off it and try to start
creating again
okay you'd have to start trying to put
things together again
um
[Music]
something
[Music]
i think might be in the throes of
starting as it happens
well
speaking of
taking things apart and not putting them
together again
the idea of critical race theory
[Music]
um can you to me explain so i'm an
engineer
and have not been actually paying
attention much unfortunately to the
these things none of the people in your
field were until it comes along and
smacks you in the face i you know i i've
had that line of thinking and you know
from mit
i i said well surely whatever you folks
are busy about yelling at each other for
is is a thing at harvard and yale
it's not going to yeah yeah of course
yes people in the stem subjects thought
it's not coming for us it can't come to
us and bang
well it's
you know it hasn't quite been banged
engineering is more safe than others
yeah uh so not so let's draw a line now
between engineering and science
so
i think engineering is uh i'm uh sitting
in a castle in the tallest tower with
with my pinky out drinking my martinis
saying surely uh the the peasants below
with their biology and their humanities
we'll
figure it all out no i'm just kidding
there's no there's no pinky out i drink
vodka
and i hang with the peasants okay where
is this this metaphor has gone too far
uh
can you explain
uh to this engineer what critical race
theory is is it a a term that's
definable is there tradition is there a
history what is good about it what is
bad about it is it is a tradition it is
a history as a school of thought it
started in the law uh roughly in the
1970s and some of the american academy
uh it's spilled out it always aimed to
be an activist philosophy people deny
that now but as i cite him in the war in
the west and the foundational texts say
as much this isn't this is an activist
academic study
we're not just looking at at the law we
seek to change the law
and it's built out into all of the other
disciplines i think there's a reason for
that by the way which is it happened at
the time that the humanities and others
in america were increasingly weak and
didn't know what to do and they needed
more games to play on new games to play
the psychologists got bored yeah i mean
that
well they needed tenure and they needed
they needed something to do and i mean
it's not an original observation plenty
of people have made this but i mean neil
ferguson said this some time ago for
instance that
in the last
50 years in american academia certainly
in humanities departments when some
when somebody dies out as a great
scholar and something that's just not
replaced by somebody of equal stature
they're replaced by somebody who does
theory
or
critical race theory they're replaced by
somebody who does the modern games
somebody dies out who's a great
historian off say i don't know it's the
ones on my mind um
russian history or russian literature
and they're not replaced by a similar um
scholar his in his observation in in
yours is this a recent development it's
happened the last few decades for sure
and it's sped up did is it because we've
gotten to the bottom of some of the
biggest questions of history no it's uh
because we're willing to forget the big
questions
because it's more fun to big questions
aren't as fun no partly it's partly no i
should stress apparently isn't it this
is in the weeds but partly as a result
of the hype of specialization in
academia
um
you know if you if you said you'd like
to
write your dissertation on hobbs
uh if you wanted to e
if you
something central to cancer thought or
or hegel or something i mean that's not
popular
that what's popular is to take somebody
way down the line from that because
there's a feeling that that's all been
done
so you take something way way way down
the line from that that's much less
important and then you sort of play with
that
and i think most people anyone who's
watching who's been in a philosophy
department or anything else in recent
years will know that
tendency by the way there's a very
practical consequence of this i saw this
at the end of my friend roger scrutin's
life when he um he would occasionally he
didn't get tenure at universities but he
would occasionally be flown in even by
his enemies
to teach courses in various universities
in basics of philosophy because there
was no one in the department able to do
it
like
he would he would he would go in and
teach for a semester
you know
hegel and kant and schopenhauer and
others because
there was no one to do it because they
were all playing with things way way way
down the road from this
so that had already happened
and people were searching for new games
to play and the critical race theory
stuff forced its way in
partly in the way that all of this
that's now known as anti-racism does
which is in a sort of bullying tone of
saying if you don't follow this the same
way that
all the things that are called studies
i think everything called studies in the
humanities should be shut down
because of the activist it's an
accomplishment they're all activists
gay studies and queer studies
um
nothing good has ever come from it
nothing good to push back is it is it
obvious that activism is a sign
of a flaw in a discipline so is isn't it
a sign of the death of the discipline
it's a sign that discipline's over
but isn't it a good goal to have for
discipline to enact change positive
change in the world
or is that to is that that's for
politicians to do with the findings of
of science i mean not why create an
ideology and then set out to find
disciplines that have weakly put
together to try to back up your
political ideology so ideology should
not be part of
of uh of science or of no i mean
humanities why would you
i mean anyone could do it
you could decide to go in and be
wildly right-wing about something and
only do things that prove your
right-wing ideas
be fantastically anti-academic
fantastically andy science fantastic
it's an absurd way to to mix up activism
and and
and and academia and it's absolutely
rife and critical race theory is one of
the ones that completely polluted the
academy
yeah and there's been uh dark moments
throughout history both for during world
war ii with both communism and uh nazism
fascism that
um infiltrated science
and then corrupted it yes i mean for
instance also let's face it
this in science as in everything else
there are dark difficult things
it's much better we know about them face
up to them and try to find a way
socially to deal with them
than that you leave them in the hands of
some activist
who wants to do stuff with them
some of my best friends are activists
i'm just kidding okay yeah none of my
best friends are activists that's how it
should be
well i was kidding because i don't have
any friends but okay all right
now i'm that's not true i'm trying to
get gain some um
pity points okay uh so to return i have
your clubhouse friend
screaming away like deranged maniacs
now i've got anti-clubhouse by the way
because the only time i heard it was
that brett weinstein one when
he did that i didn't if you heard that
early in clubhouse i was invited to
clubhouse by various people who said oh
this is a really great civilized way to
hang out and talk with interest
interesting people and i like downloaded
the app and i got one night because
brett weinstein said um you know i'm
doing this conversation and i listened
and it was
the maddest damn discussion i've ever
heard was there something about biology
something about
was it
uncovered times all that at some point
brett said i'm an um
i'm an evolutionary biologist
and somebody else that is saying you're
a eugenicist
and he said no i'm an evil evil issue in
my honesty and sometimes that's the same
thing
and it just went on like that and brett
desperately tried to explain
that's not the same thing as being
eugenicist and he lost the clubhouse
room
they thought that was the same thing
he'd come it horribly reminded me of a
time some years ago in a british
newspaper ran a sort of
realizing that the only thing you can
unite people on in sexual ethics is
revulsion against pedophilia ran an
antipedo campaign and uh shortly after
um
pediatricians offices were torched in
north of england by a mob who hadn't
read the whole sign
yeah
well to me
um like i said a little bit of poison is
good for the town so anyhow sorry i
interrupted you with flattering you
there people on clubhouse i have many i
have i have
of multiples of friends yes
um
okay
we didn't get to some of the ideas of uh
critical race theory what what exactly
uh is it i'm actually in part asking
this question quite genuinely yeah it's
it's an attempt to look at everything
among other things through the lens of
race
and to add race into things where it may
not be
as a way of adding i'm trying to give
the most generous
estimation
to add race in as a conversation in a
place where it may not have been in the
conversation
um
and that means history too the history
oh sure racism yeah yeah yeah
all history
and to look at it through these
particular lenses
um
i mean there's a certain
like all these things there's a certain
logic in it like
like with feminist studies or something
i mean is is there a utility in looking
back through undoubtedly male dominated
histories and asking where the
the more silent female voice was yes
very interesting
not endlessly interesting and can't be
put exactly on the same
par as
but
it has a utility
um it's that endlessly sorry to
interrupt that endlessly part that seems
to get us into trouble
because of this thing of where do you
stop and that's
that's
that's always a
i looked talked about this in my last
book in the manners of crowds
it's one of the big conundrums in
activist movements and particularly in
activist academia where would you stop
it's not clear because you've got a job
in it
you've got a pension in it
you've got
your only esteem in society is in
keeping this gig going
why i mean is is there any likelihood
have you ever it's the old academic joke
isn't it that you know the end of every
conference the only thing everyone
agrees on is that we must have another
conference like this one
so one thing they always agree on this
conference has been so great we must
have another one well that's the
criticism you could apply to a lot of
disciplines of course civil engineering
bridge building
at a certain point do we need any more
bridges can we just fly everywhere
you know
so at the very least you need to keep
the bridges up
sure and they would uh critical race
theory folks would probably make the
same argument at the very least we need
to keep the racism out
uh we'll have to make sure we don't
descend into uh the racism it assumes
all the time that we are living on the
cusp of the return of the kkk right
which is totally wrong
i mean it's a massive you say that now
until the kkk armies march in we don't
always we can't always predict the
future we can't always predict future
and
you you can always
say you should be careful but
you've also got to be careful of people
who've got their timing like totally
totally wrong or their estimation of
society they're in you mean like most
of society before in the 1930s
when hitler was i mean so many people
got hitler wrong
i'm sure they did and so most people
some
maybe it was nice to have the alarmist
thinking there well beware of the man
with a mustache
if only it was that easy
um
it's not always above facial hair i mean
i always say that i mean what what
very often is these two clean shaven
chaps both say
one of the problems of everybody knowing
a little bit about nazism
is that they
think that they know
where evil comes from and that it comes
from like a german with a small
moustache
getting people to goosestep for instance
and that's not correct
a much better understanding of it is it
can come from
all number of directions
and keep your antennae as good as you
can
but
once you end up in this society which i
would argue certainly parts of america
where you're always in 1938
that's not healthy for a society either
where where people are so primed and
think they're so well trained because
they
spent
a term in school learning about the
second world war in the holocaust think
they're so well trained in hitler
spotting
that they can do it all the time look at
all these phrases we now have in our
societies like dog whistle
you know as i always say if you hear the
whistle you're the dog
but people say
that that's a dog whistle as if they're
highly trained anti-nazis
i mean you know there should be some
humility in it we should we should be
careful we should be wary for sure
and we should also be slightly humble
in our inability to
to spot everything if not significantly
humble
right
so if we can
um
there's something
um
funny if not dark about the
the activity of hitler spotting
if i just may take it aside but uh so
critical race theory how much racism
what is racism
how much of it is in our world today
if we were thinking about this activity
of hitler's plotting
how um
and trying to steal man the case of if
not critical race theory but people who
who look for racism in our world
how much would you say well let's it's a
good thing to try to define i would say
that
racism is the
the belief that other people are
inferior to you you could say you could
see a form where you thought people were
superior to you that could also happen
but more commonly
you see a group of people as being
inferior to you simply by dent with the
fact that they have a different
racial background
and um
that's sort of the easiest way to define
racism
uh
as i say i mean there are types of
racism i mean mainly anti-semitism
actually perhaps it's the only one
which weirdly
relies on on a hatred of people who
a certain type of person thinks thinks
are better than them
and that's a particular peculiarity one
of the peculiarities of anti-semitism
well anti-semitism somehow does both
right yes well one of the eternal
fascinating things about anti-semitism
it can do it does everything at the same
time
it's like a quantum racism yes they're
both superior and inferior you know that
you do you know um
vastly grossman's life and fate
so in the middle of life and fate um
which a persian friend of mine said was
one of only two great novels of the 20th
century she was very harsh literally
critic
what was the other one oh the leopard
obviously
the leopard the leopard of giuseppe de
la producer yeah okay did she definitely
write on that one uh life and fate is is
learning so much today yes life and fate
is a um
is uh an extraordinary book
mainly about
well you know grossman was a um
uh
obviously jewish himself but he uh
he he saw
uh almost everything that he could have
done in the second voice he saw
stalingrad
who was a journalist and he
he wrote first-hand the account of
stunning groudon he he was also the
first journalist interviewed into
blinker
and his account which you can read in
one of the collections of his journalism
his account of walking into treblinka is
just one of the most devastating
haunting pieces of journalism or prose
you can read anyhow i mentioned him
because grossman at the beginning in the
middle of life and fate which is about
sort of a 900-page novel
um
in the middle of it which is about the
dark axis around stalingrad
uh
he way at one point he amazingly sort of
goes into the minds of earth hitler and
stalin and
he says he says stalin in his study
feels
his counterpart but then he says he
feels very close to him at this moment
wow around stalingrad like leading up to
after stalingrad when the germans have
lost he says he feels closeness of
hitler
but grossman in the middle of life and
fate slap bang at the worst hours of the
20th century
suddenly dedicates a chapter to
anti-semitism
and i've seen anti-semitism something
i've always been very interested in uh
because i've always had
the instinctive utter revulsion of it
and um
uh also partly because of having seen
bits of it
in the middle east and elsewhere but uh
i mentioned this because grossman in the
middle of life
has takes time out and does this like
three-page explanation
three-page description of anti-semitism
and it's extraordinary i mean it's the
only thing i can think of that's equally
good is um
uh
um
gregor von retz sorry uh um
who who
wrote a luridly titled but um brilliant
set of novels called the confessions of
an anti-semite
and about pre-war pre-first world war
anti-semitism in eastern and central
europe anyway
grossman says
in the middle of life and fate the the
the the one of the extraordinary things
about anti-semitism is that it does
everything at the same time
the jews get condemned in one place for
being rich and in another for being poor
condemned in one place for assimilating
in another for not assimilating
assimilating too much and assimilating
too little
for being too successful for not being
successful enough so it's i think it's
the only racism that includes within it
a detestation for the real anti-semite
a detestation of people that the person
may perceive to be better than them
correctly or otherwise by the way um i'm
embarrassed to say i have not read this
one of two greatest novels of the 20th
essentially life in faith jesus
and just to read off of wikipedia we see
a gross many ukrainian jew became a
correspondent for the soviet military
paper krasnod
having volunteered and been rejected for
military service he spent a thousand
days in the front lines roughly three of
the four years of the conflict between
the germans and the soviets and the main
themes covered in
uh
how's it go life and fate i keep
thinking
is a theme on jewish identity in the
holocaust grossman's idea of humanity
and the human goodness stalin's
distortion of reality and values
and uh science like goes on in reality
of war it's interest i need to
definitely you need to read it you'll i
think you'll really get a lot from it
it's
one of the other things the one
reference but one of the other things he
does is that he he has this
extraordinary ability to to talk about
the
the absolute highest levels of the
conflict and then zoom in it's rather
like the camera work they use and things
like lord of the rings
where he zooms down and then gets one
person in the midst of all this and you
get you you get on there what puts you
in the study too so i i personally
have read and reread the william shires
the rise and fall of the third reich
who's another journalist
who was there
but he does not do it interestingly
enough given such a large
novel kind of the definitive work on his
definitive original work that goes to
source materials and on hitler he
doesn't
uh touch anti-semitism really
same thing to miss out well he just says
it
very calmly and objectively as he does
for most the work that this was
the fact
of
life there's a lot of cruelty throughout
but he doesn't get to well
one of the things is because they lost
the war because of
you anti-semitism
i mean that's one quite important way to
to view this andrew roberts another
historian said is that you know in the
end the nazis lost the war because they
were nazis
oh it sounds almost too neat but it's
it's worth remembering that you know
at the end of the war when the germans
need to be transporting troops and they
need to be transporting very basic
supplies
eichmann makes sure he gets the trains
to transport the jews
right up to the end
well that's that's certainly a dark
that's a dark possibility you know
anyhow but to go back to racism in
general racism in general apart from
anti-semitism relies on
the the
um perception that another group of
people a racial group other than your
own are inferior to you that that's what
i'd say is the easiest shorthand of
racism and of course
it's
one of the stupidest things that our
species is capable of
i mean one of the stupidest that you can
look at a person and
guess them
in their entirety in fact
because of their skin color i mean it's
like
what a stupid idea that is
as well as being an evil one but the the
the
i would say that one of the
i think it's a dangerous thing in our
era that there are bits of it coming
back that's why i say we do need sort of
we need our antennae working
we just don't need them to be over
active or under active you know
now the book is war in the west
but speaking of racism racism towards
different groups based on their skin
color you've said that there's a war on
white people yes
would you say that's the case would you
say that there are significant
racism towards white people in the
united states i'd say that the white
people in the united states are the only
people who are told that they have
hereditary sin
and that's a big one just to start with
based strictly based on their skin color
i mean i would find it so repugnant
if and i hope everybody would join me in
feeling this i would feel so repugnant
if there were any school of thought in
america today that had any
um
grasp on the public
attention
that said that black people were born
into evil because of something their
ancestors had done
like they had the mark of cain upon them
i mean i think it would be such a
vicious way to try to demoralize
a group of people
and to tell them that
the the things they would be able to
achieve in their lives are much lessened
because they should spend
significant portions of their lives
trying to atone for something they
didn't do
is there a difference
and then and the following point the
obvious point left unsaid but let's say
it
nobody
in the public square
says that i mean they're the maniacs of
the far fringes but nobody
in the mainstream would dare to say that
or i think even think that about any
group of people other than white people
and
does this mean that white people are
more disadvantaged than black people
know and again let's not make this a
competition but
let's not get into i just desperately
urge people not to get into the idea of
hereditary sin according to racial
background
is there something to be said about the
feature aspect to sort of play devil's
advocate
about
the asymmetry
of um sort of accusations towards the
majority so yes because
so much easier to attack a majority it
is much easier but is there something to
be said about that being a useful
function of society that you always
attack
um that the minority has
disproportionate power to attack the
majority so that you can always keep the
majority in check well
it's a dangerous game to play isn't it i
think
it's very dangerous
that's a good summary of entirety of
human civilization well yeah
everything's dangerous um
but it's a very dangerous game to play
that i wrote about this bit in the
matters of crowds when i was saying like
gay rights people the ones that still
exist the ones who don't have homes to
go to
uh who
want to beat up on straight people in a
way
or want to make straight people feel
like they're
kind of unremarkable uncool
you know
boring straights
so boring
so not not like the magical pixie fairy
dust gaze
um that's a bad idea to push that one
that's a bad idea and some gays push
that
highly unwise
given the fact that about
two to three percent of the population
are actually gay although now there's
like a additional 20 who think they're
like two spirit or something and
all that bullshit but they're just
attention seekers so let's not spend too
much time on that
but
equally as i've said i said the man of
the crowd is with
with the feminist movement very unwise
for half of the species to say that the
other half of the species isn't needed
and there were always third and fourth
wave feminists willing to make that nuts
argument
uh
not first way famous you didn't hear it
in first wave feminism you didn't hear
suffragette tended not to say
we'd like the vote and men
are scum
it would've been hard to have won
everyone over to their side not least
the men they needed to win over their
side
but you do get third and fourth wave
feminists who say like you know do we
need men
or men are all ex again it's a bad idea
it's a bad idea tactically
what if men
richard wrangham
somebody from harvard
uh describes that men
are the originators of violence physical
violence in society
and he argues that actually the world
would be better off
no just a very cold
calculus if you get rid of men there
would be a lot less violence in society
is
his claim but who says you need to get
rid of violence in society well that's
but shouldn't that at least be a
discussion
all right
have a debate on a panel discussion
violence pros and cons well that's the
sort of thing if i can say so that
something weak ass academic decides to
do because he thinks that his area of
boston would be nicer or whatever
um he might decide it's useful if he was
living in kiev today
to have violent men
i mean it might
if if um if new york was invaded right
now i'd need some violent men around
here
but it wouldn't be invaded
if there's no violent men
well that's the argos argument there's
there's also at least there's some level
of
threat
that you ought to exude that puts people
off
if i was in
you know i'm very glad that the men and
women of ukraine are capable of and
more than capable of fighting for their
country
and for their neighbors and their
families and much more but
like it's better that that there was
violence ready to unleash when violence
was unleashed upon them than that the
whole society had been told that they
should identify as non-binary
but at least it's a conversation to have
isn't there
uh
is there aspect to the sort of the
feminist movement that is correct
uh you know in challenging the
some forms of violence domestic violence
for instance
although women are capable of that as
well
i'm learning about this we're always
learning about this in the moment
i can't help but watch the entirety of
it go down in this beautiful mess that
is human relations okay but just to
finish that thought it's
it's very unwise for women to war
against men
as it would be for men to war against
women it's highly highly unwise to war
on a majority population and in america
britain and other western countries
white people are still a majority
and so why would you tell the majority
that they're evil by dint of their skin
color
and think that that would be a good way
to keep them in check
i mean i'm not guilty of anything
because of my skin color i'm not guilty
of anything my ancestors didn't do
anything wrong
and even if they had why would i be held
responsible for it
so uh to go back to nietzsche
is there some aspect to where if we try
to explain the forces of play here is it
the will to power playing itself out
from individual human nature and from
group behavior nature
is there some elements to this which is
the game we play as human beings
is always when we have less power we try
to find ways to gain more power that's
certainly one um the desire to to grab
is
let me see if i find a quote for you on
that
the desire to grab
that which we think we're owed
and to do it
often in the guise of um
justice
i mean
justice is one of the great terms of our
age and one of the very great bogus
terms of our age
people forever talk about their search
for justice it's amazing how violent
they can often be in their search for
justice and how many rules they're
willing to break so long as they can say
they're after justice and how many norms
they can trample so long as they can say
it's in the name of justice you can burn
down buildings in the name of justice
well the the majority groups throughout
history including those with white skin
color have done the same in the name of
justice we we came up with all kinds of
sexy terms in our propaganda machines to
sell whatever atrocities we'd like to
commit
one of the one of the quotes of uh from
nietzsche that i liked and i quoted in
this careful i'm judging you harshly
yeah of course
um
anita says that one of the dangers of
men of resentment is they'll achieve
their ultimate form of revenge
which is to turn happy people into
unhappy people like themselves to shove
their misery in the faces of the happy
so that in due course the happy and this
is quoting each other start to be
ashamed of their happiness and perhaps
say to one another it's a disgrace to be
happy there is too much misery
this is something to be averted for the
sick says nietzsche must not make the
healthy sick to or make the healthy
confuse themselves with the sick
well
i think there again there's a lot of
that going on how could i be happy when
there is unhappiness in the world why
should i not join the ranks of the
unhappy
i think dostoevsky has a book about that
as well sure knows from underground um
okay
this has been very russian russian
focused i'm very pleased with the number
of times but doctor asking grossman and
others have come in this is right i
wasn't
doing this as a sort of um yeah well
it's always good to plug the greats um
and good to know they're still relevant
do you speak russian by the way at all
which i did i'm told it's a ten-year
language basically to learn from scratch
as well my friends who have done it well
there's the language and then there's
the personality behind the language and
the personality i feel like you already
have
so you just need to know the surface
details
[Laughter]
okay uh in fact the silence to be
silent in the russian language is
something that's already important oh i
should if we had a moment i'd tell you
my story about stalin's birthplace
should i tell you that no i once went to
gory where stalin was born
have you been no experience i was ages
after the georgia war
and i went to enter the no man's land in
south ossetia and
kazia
and
i said
i really gotta go to gory or somehow
because the shell had landed in gory
rather weirdly from the russian side and
gory is where son was born
and of course gore is in georgia
and uh um let me have the museum of
stalin's birthplace they've been trying
to change for some years
because it had been
unadulteratedly pro-stalin for years
and the georgian authorities this is in
uh um
his time were trying to make it into a
museum of stalinism
and it was really tough
the only place i've seen which is
similar is the house in mexico city
where trotsky was killed
that also is like they're not quite sure
what to do they
they don't want to say he's a bad guy
because they think that people won't
come anywhere
um
stalin's house and glory had changed
from the museum of star to museum of
silence and there was this
large georgian woman with a pink pencil
who just had clearly been doing the tour
for like 50 years
and he just pointed all the fast and she
did that classic thing i've also saw it
once in north korea where they they're
sort of that sort of communist thing
where they say here is this is 147 feet
high by 13 feet deep that gives you lots
of fashion i don't care yeah why does it
matter um they always give you facts
yeah
this is stalin's suitcase it is uh 13
inches wide by you know it isn't
anyhow and uh this woman did all of this
and it was all just wildly pro well not
pro signs just to explain the science
lives it was just a great local boy done
good
uh they didn't mention the fact he
killed more georgian spaghetti than
anyone else
and we get get to the end and before
being taken to the gift shop where they
sell red wine with stalin's face on it
and among other things
and a lighter for styling on it
uh
they uh they took you to a little room
under the stairs and they said this is a
replica of interrogation cell to show uh
uh represent horror of what happened in
stalin time uh now gift shop
there's no kind of night and i took the
woman aside at the end i discovered
she'd said this to other journalists and
visited before i took her outside and
said i said what do you think about
commerce darling
and she said um let's say she'd
obviously done this
during communist times
she said
it's not my
place to judge you know sort of thing
which is an interesting comment in
itself i said yeah but he killed more
georgians and everyone you know and all
that sort of thing
and she said it's not my place to judge
or to give my views and those sort of
things and
the franchise ever what do you feel
about it and she said um
it was like a hurricane
it happened
[Music]
that's interesting because uh if i may
mention clubhouse once again
i gotten a chance to talk to a few
people from mongolia
there's a woman from mongolia and they
talked about the fact that they deeply
admire stalin love she she sounded if i
may hopefully that's not crossing line i
think i'm representing her correctly and
saying
she admired him almost like
um
like loved them like the way people love
like
like a like jesus like a holy figure
well isn't that still the case in large
parts of russia yeah i mean he keeps
stalin keeps on winning greatest russian
of all time
and and that's perhaps maybe there's a
dip but if we were to think about the
long arc of history perhaps that's going
to go
up and up and up and up as yeah there's
something about human memory
that it just you forget the details of
the atrocities of the past and remember
that i mean think of the number of
people we talk about as historical
heroes napoleon yeah i mean
british people don't talk about opponent
as a hero but the french
yeah
exactly the culture now you're no you
didn't think that dostoevsky now again
tricky ground but everybody like the the
the french
enormously napoleon and uh they had many
animal aspects it was also
unbelievable brute and um killed many
people unnecessarily
and um there are lots of figures from
history that we sort of cover that over
with
yeah yeah
can we mention churchill briefly because
he is one of the
um
you could make a case for him being one
of the
great representers or great figures
historically of the western civilization
yes and then there's a lot of people
uh from not a lot
i know i have like three friends and one
one of them happens to be from london
and they they say that he's a a uh um
not a good person
so listen this friend would not discuss
i just this is an opinion poll of the
three friends but i do know that there's
quite a bit you know there's a backlash
going on at the moment at the moment and
in general there's a spirit like
reflecting on on the darker sides of
some of these historical figures like
challenging history through
it's it's not just critical race theory
it's it's it's challenging
history through well
are
the people we
think of as heroes
what are their flaws and are they in
fact villains that are
convenient um
sort of uh we're there at the
right time
to accidentally do the right thing
accidentally
i hope this isn't the
representative
fair estimation of your friend in
london's views no she's going to be
quite mad at this but i didn't say the
name so it could be any friends it could
be but we know it's a she canada
well see i i uh i've given that away
well that's with of course i would not
um i made that up completely it's it's
all
just like my girlfriend in canada she's
completely a figment of my imagination
nevertheless
winston churchill uh is somebody i mean
just looking at
reading the rise and fall of the third
reich is an incredible figure that um
that to me
so much of world war ii is marked
leading up to the wars marked by
stunning amounts of cowardice by
political leaders
and
it's fascinating to watch hear
this
person clearly with the drinking and a
smoking problem
i don't understand why that's a negative
no i didn't say you see yeah you throw
it in as if it is no well it's it's
called humor i'll explain it to you one
day what that means but
he still explained dry him
he stood up
he stood up to what we now see as evil
when at the time it was not so obvious
to see
um
[Music]
you know so that that's that's just a
fascinating figure of western
civilization i'd love to get your
comments the real criticisms i mean it's
making you drinking the real christians
of of church are quite easy to to sum up
and i do so in the war on the west side
so i say these are the things they now
use against him uh didn't do enough to
avert the bengal famine in 1943 for
instance that's been shot down by
numerous historians including indian
historians uh in the middle of the war
in the middle of a world war churchill
did what he could to get grain supplies
diverted
um from australia to into bengal
the famine was appalling it was caused
by a typhoon it was not caused by
winston churchill um and the idea that
some
basically indian nationalist historians
have pumped out in recent years
and just
anti-churchill figures that
he actually wanted indians to die is his
just total calumny
and when people claim some people claim
that i mean there are a few very
ignorant scholars nevertheless with some
credentials
who claimed that churchill wanted the
indian population to like basically be
genocided and it's complete nonsense not
least by the fact that during the period
which in question the indian population
boomed
um
so
that that's one of the main ones
another one is that he had um some views
that we now have regarded as racist he
definitely regarded races as being of
different characters
um and that there were superior races
and
the the as it were the white european
was a superior culture
he was born in victorian england
so he had some victorian attitudes
um
these are things in the negative side of
the ledger and as with all history you
should have a negative and a positive
side of the ledger positive side of the
ledger includes he almost certainly did
more than any one human being to save
the world from nazism
so that should counter something
and one of the reasons i talk about
churchill in this regard is this is to
stress that
if you get
i'm not trying to stop anyone doing
history
at all i don't think the revisionism of
recent years about churchill or the
founding fathers of america or anyone
else is
anything i want to stop i find it
interesting i find interesting not least
because it's so sloppy on occasions but
i find it interesting it's important and
we should be able to see people in the
round
but
that includes recognizing the positive
side of the ledger
and if you can't recognize that side
you're doing something else you're doing
something else it's not history
it's um some form of politicking of a
very particular kind
and i think it's the same thing with the
founding fathers
there are some people for instance
certainly since the 90s who have pushed
the sally hemmings thomas jefferson
story to show that thomas jefferson was
some kind of brute as a result um
you know we see
jefferson statue being removed from the
council chamber the city was sitting in
last november by council members who
said that thomas jefferson no longer
represents our values if you can't if
you can't recognize greatness of thomas
jefferson and that he had flaws
i mean
that's not a grown-up debate
and weigh them and weigh them in the
context of the time
but let me sort of throw a curveball uh
a curveball at you then
uh what about recognizing the positive
and the negative of a fella with nice
facial hair called karl marx
sure
sure i mean i i i have a section in the
war in the west as you know where i go
for karl marx with some glee
so he seems to have gotten uh
you know some popularity in in the west
recently
um not just recently yeah i mean he's
had a resurgence recently yes resurgence
well that's because that's because
whenever whenever things are seen to go
wrong people reach for other
options
and when for instance it's very hard for
people to accumulate capital it's not
obvious they're going to become
capitalists
and so one thing that happens is people
say let's look at the marxism thing
again see if that's a viable goer
and my argument would simply be
point me to one place that's worked
well the argument from the
marxist or the
marxian economists is that
we've only really tried it once the
soviets tried it and then if there's a
few people that kind of tried the soviet
thing cuba tried it
well they they basically it's an
offshoot of this show they tried soviet
yes they've tried it tried it in
venezuela
yes yes yes so but let's just let's just
quickly say
how did all these experiments go
they they did not well they failed in
fascinating ways they did but they
failed yes they said and
we should stress so grossly failed
so grossly failed that they threw
millions and millions of people
into completely thwarted lives that were
much shorter than they should have been
yeah so the the lesson to learn there
that you can learn several lessons one
is that anything that smells like
marxism is going to lead
to a lot of problems
now
another lesson could be well what is the
fundamental idea that marx had
he was criticizing capitalism
and the flaws of capitalism so is it
possible to do better than capitalism
and that's if you take that spirit you
start to wonder that might actually
become relevant in i don't know 20 30 50
years
when uh the qual the uh
the machines start doing more and more
of the labor all those kinds of things
you start to ask questions if i finally
might get to marx's dream of what the
average day would look like yes
what yeah well there's gonna be an awful
lot of literary criticism then
if you remember that
said that we would be doing in the
evenings the labor in the evening well
he didn't know twitter was a thing or
netflix so he would he would change
are there things we could learn from
marx
plausibly possibly i can't think of
anything myself off hand but um
to have a critique of capitalism isn't
by any means a bad thing in the society
i'd rather that it was a critique of
capitalism that showed how you improve
capitalism a critique of a free market
that showed how people could get better
better access to the free market how you
could ensure for instance that young
people get onto the property ladder
things like that those are constructive
things so people who say we must have
marxism i mean don't know what the hell
they're talking about
because that never leads to any of those
things haven't led in the past
it's never led in the past and at some
point you've got just you've got to try
to work out how many tri how many
attempts you make at this damn
philosophy before you realize that every
attempt always leads to the same thing i
mean we could pretend that fascism has
never been properly tried
and that it was unfortunate what
happened in nazi germany but you know
that wasn't real fascism and
in mussolini's fascism you know didn't
go all that well but it was you know a
bit better and maybe we could try a bit
more franco fascism
nobody would have any time for this crap
nor should they the people who try that
are reviled and quite rightly so why do
we tolerate it with the marxism thing
and
it's a great mystery to me the way that
people do tolerate it always always in
this stupid way of saying we haven't
done it yet and if you keep trying the
same recipe and every time it comes out
as shit
it's the recipe's shit well sort of i'm
trying to practice here by playing
devil's advocate practice the same idea
that you mentioned which is
when you say the word marxism should you
throw out everything or should you ask a
question is there good ideas here
and the same it's the good it's weighing
the good and the bad and being able to
do so calmly and thoughtfully sure um
you know do you know the famous george
orwell uh
comment on the style in an argument with
a stalinist
do you know
that's one of my favorite quotes
george orwell in the early 40s gets into
an argument with a um a stylist
he's obviously a marxist
and the um uh this is after the show
trials 37
uh this is this is
when it's very clear what
marxism in the russian form is
and this uh uh all well is in the
discussion with this this marxist and it
goes on and on and eventually eventually
orwell says well you know what about the
show trials and he does and what about
what's happened in ukraine and
and
then the famines and and much more and
the purges and the purges and the purges
and eventually the
stalinist says oh well what oil knows
he's going to say all along which is he
says you can't make an omelet without
breaking eggs
and orwell says
where's the omelette
oh yeah so it's a good that's a really
good because
look at this by this stage okay how many
where's my damn omelette how many
just messy big bloody eggy piles
have the marxists created by now in
country after country
yeah always next time they're going to
produce the great omelet
but they never have and they never will
because the whole thing is rotten from
the start
but let me just also say one thing about
that because of course marx isn't as
nice as he sounds
and that's one of the things that i i
try to highlight in the book is if we're
going to do this reductive thing of
people in history and saying well they
had views that were of their time
and we must therefore condemn them for
them saying fine let's do the same thing
with marx and there are things i quote
in this book from marx's letters not
least letters to engels and
indeed in his published writings in pa
pieces he was writing for the american
press uh in the 1850s
uh
the way he has horrible views on slavery
and and um colonialism and much more
but the main thing is i mean the
horrible things he says about uh black
people and the constant use of the
n-word in fact when i was doing the
audio book for the war the west i had to
decide
will i read out the quotes from marks or
not if i had read them out i'd have been
cancelled because people would have just
said
you've been using the n-word so much in
this passage and you know this is and i
slightly thought of doing it so that i
could say i was only quoting marks
to try to hit the point home in the end
of course i was sensible and decided not
to but marx's letters are disgusting on
these terms since i highlighted this in
this book and some of the media picked
it up
um
and um
and have popularized this thing i'm
trying to put into the system which is
if you're going to accuse church of
racism if you're going to choose accuse
jefferson of racism washington of racism
and so on what about marx the two things
that marxists have said since this came
out has been first of all why are you
saying this about marx he was a man of
his time
like everyone else and the second thing
they say is we don't go to marx for his
horrible abhorrent views on race so
talking about mixed-race people with
guerrillas and so on
we don't go to him for that we go to him
for his economic theories i say okay
well we don't go to thomas jefferson for
his views on slaves
we don't go to churchill
for his
the precise language he used that points
in the 1910s about indians or his health
advice or his health advice
actually i do get him for that
but that explains so much but
let's have some standards on this and
that's why that's why i'm very
suspicious of the fact that the people
don't do this with marx because i think
what they're trying to what some people
are trying to do and this isn't this may
sound conspiratorial but i really don't
think it is i think that some people are
deliberately trying to completely clear
the cultural landscape of our past in
order to say there's nothing good
nothing you can hold on to no one you
should revere you've got no heroes the
whole thing comes down who's left
standing oh we've also got this idea
from the 20th century still about
marxism
or the 19th and 20th centuries
and no no
you you will not have the entire
landscape deracinated
and then the worst ideas tried again
so basically destroy all of history and
the lessons learned from history and
then start from scratch and then then
it's completely any idea can work and
then you could just take whatever well
and the thing is there are always some
people with pre-preferred ideas and i
mentioned this also with the
post-colonialists the post-colonialists
were really interesting
because when the european powers were
removing were removing from africa in
the far east
post-colonial movements had one obvious
move they could have done which was to
say
since the european powers have left we
will return to a pre-colonial life which
in some other places would have been
returning to slave markets and slave
ownership and slave selling and much
more but put that aside for a second
they could have said we have an
indigenous culture which we will return
to
almost uniformly in the post-colonial
era you had figures like franz fanon you
had european intellectuals like sartre
who said
the western powers are retreating from
these countries and therefore we should
institute in these countries what but
western marxism
well it's not obvious to me that like
the bad ideas would be the ones that
emerge but it's more likely the bad
ideas would emerge in this kind of
context when you erase history
when you're raised when you raise
history and you leave some ideas
deliberately
uninterrogated
i mean
as i say
find me
one in a hundred american students
who've heard of
and any of the communist despots of the
20th century
i mean name recognition in there was a
poll done a few years ago in the in the
uk and like name recognition among
children school children for
stalin let alone mao
i mean mao who kills more people than
anyone
65 million chinese perhaps
how many
students in america know what mao was
who he was
where he was nothing or the atrocities
committed where the atrocities were
committed oh don't worry about that
because it mean it means that we might
have learned one of the two lessons of
the 20th century we we think we've
learned one of the of the two lessons of
the 20th century we actually haven't
learned that lesson we've learned a
little bit of it and we've not learned
the other one at all because that's why
we still have people in american
politics and elsewhere actually talking
about collectivization and things
as if there's no problem with that and
as if it's perfectly obvious and they
could run it and they'd know exactly
where to start what are the two lessons
of the 20th century fascism and
communism
oh
yeah
i mean i'm not exactly sure what the
exactly the lessons are
no it's not clear if the lessons were
very clear that we'd be better at it
well one is your book broadly applied of
the madness of crowds
that's one lesson well
so
meaning like
large crowds can display herd-like
behavior yes be very suspicious of crowd
yeah in general i mean you apply it in
different more to modern application
yeah in a sense but
it's
that that's rooted in history that
crowds can when when humans get together
they can do some uh quite radically
silly things elias canetti is very good
on that crowd some power
um
and eric hoffer who is a sort of
self-taught
amazing
um
not the ultra didactic writer
the true believer and so on he was
extremely good on that
but the reason i mentioned the two
things no i mean we should have realized
the two nightmares of the 20th century
fascism and communism
that we should we should know how they
came about and we're interested in
learning how one of them came about
fascism and we know some of the lessons
like
don't treat other people as less than
you because of their race
that's one lesson
but when we've
we've done some good at learning that
um but the second one not to do
communism again not to do socialism
i i think we're
way away from knowing because we don't
know how it happened
and the and the little temptations are
still there always look at people saying
i'm going to expropriate your property
if people do things they don't like say
well we can't wait to take your property
well there's a sense there's an
appealing sense
okay every ideology has an appealing
narrative behind it
that sells the ideology so for socialism
for communism is that there's a
it seems unfair that the working class
does all of this work
and gets only a fraction
of the output it just seems unfair
so you want to make they do get a
fraction of that but yes
yes and so
it seems to be more fair if we increase
that if the workers own
um all all of the value of their output
and
well the things that are more fair seems
to be
a good thing i'd say well yeah i mean
fairness is is
i like fairness as well
no i much prefer fairness because it's a
much easier thing to
try to work out it's quite amorphous
itself for the concept but everyone can
recognize it
so for instance
um
should the boss of the company
earn
a million times that of the lowest paid
employee doesn't seem fair
should they earn
maybe five or ten times the
the salary of the lowest yeah possibly
that that could be fair
there are certain sort of multiples
which are within
the bounds of
you know
reasonableness
i i think actually that's the
that's the much bigger problem in
capitalism at the moment as i see it is
is the is the
not untrue perception that a tiny number
of people get a lot of the accrue a lot
of the
benefits
and that
the
the the bit in the middle
has become increasingly squeezed and is
a danger always of falling all the way
down to the bottom i mean i think in the
snakes and ladders of american
capitalism for instance it's
it's a correct perception to say that
the snakes go down awfully far
if you tread on the snake
you can plummet an awfully long way in
america
and the deal in the game was that the
ladders took you
high and there's a perception and again
it's not entirely wrong
that the ladders system on the board is
kind of broken
so what you're saying is you're
a marxist i'm douglas i'm a marxist you
heard that here first in the uh in in
the
out of context blog post you're going to
write about this
i can practice point the way to critique
capitalism if it's gone bad is to get
better capital yes free markets where
they're not fair should be made fair
never
decide that the answer is the thing that
has never produced any human flourishing
i.e marxism
so as you describe in the madness of
crowds the herd-like behavior of humans
that gets us into trouble
uh
you as an individual thinker and others
listening to this how can you because
all of us are mid crowds we're
influenced by the society that's around
us by the people that's around us how
can we think independently
how can we
you know if you're
in um
in this in the soviet union at the
beginning of the 20th century
if you're in
i don't know nazi germany
at the end of the 30s or 40s how can you
think independently
given
first of all
that it's hard to think independently
just intellectually speaking but also
that there's
it's just becomes more and more
dangerous so the incentive to think
independently
under the uncertainty uh that's usually
involved with thinking is
i mean it's a silly thing to say but on
twitter there's a cost to be paid for
yes for going against the crowd on any
silly thing we can even talk about you
know
uh what is it will smith slapping chris
rock
you know there's a crowd that believes
that uh that was unjustified or
something i forget what the crowd
decided but i don't crowd split on that
when it's safe to have one opinion
either way okay it is right but there is
you put it very nicely that there's
clearly a calculus here and that you can
measure on twitter in particular you can
measure kind of the crowd a sense of
where the crowd lays michael jackson
well oh boy
i don't want to uh this is not this is
not a legal discussion where i have
lawyer i don't have my lawyer
i don't even have a lawyer the man in
question is dead but i think most people
who are not just die hard fans would
concede that michael jackson had a
strange relationship with children yes
and
uh
was almost certainly a pedophile
is that was that did the crowd agree on
that uh no the crowd hasn't agreed
because he's too famous and we all love
thriller
yeah we do so you said people who are
not fans i just don't no i'm a fan of
michael jackson but i think he was
almost certainly a pedophile
and
uh but i bet nobody wants to give up
dancing to bad at weddings so
uh they just kind of add it in it's
fine seriously it's it's it's you're
like geniuses apply to uh bill cosby
oh that's well he wasn't he he was of
course
one of the most famous people in america
but maybe he wasn't regarded as talented
oh wow there's there's depth to this oh
yeah there's a genius opt out in all
cultures
there's a genius opt out in all cultures
look at lord byron lord byron shagged
his sister
doesn't affect his reputation in fact if
anything it kind of adds to it
but then again this kind of
war against the west
geniuses actually
makes you more likely or no to get
cancelled
so if you look at the genius of thomas
jefferson
or well yes because if you haven't done
anything remarkable nobody will come
looking for you pastor obviously yeah
societal genius can get you into trouble
with your life okay sidle through life
with nobody noticing be totally harmless
and then and then die and hope you
haven't used any carbon
um
uh but but you were asking about you
were asking about how to survive
the the era of social media as it were
and the crowds yeah and and there's a
very simple answer to that
don't um don't over
rate the significance of the unreal
world
oh come on but this is still human
psychology because you want to fit in
there's a you want to why
because you're
you like people and you're this is why
not just like a small number of people
and ignore the rest yeah that's
that's what i do
well i mean i actually like most people
i'm not isn't a general thing i don't
have detestation for most people at all
most people like calculate enjoy
speaking with and being with
but
um
in terms of storing your sense of
self-worth in absolute strangers big
mistake
yeah well me that's this and now let's
turn into a therapy session because for
me and i think i represent some number
of population is i'm pretty
self-critical i'm looking for myself in
the world
and
uh there is a depth of connection with
people on the internet
i mean have seen the shallowness of it
it's shallow connection interesting i
put it this way if you um
if you became very ill tomorrow
would any of them help on the internet
no no no good that's a good test yeah
it's a good test but then at the end of
the day
yeah you're right you're very close
friends with help family would help yeah
yeah and perhaps that's the only thing
you can't start you can't store
um
significant amounts of of trust or faith
or belief or self-worth
in places which will not return it to
you
okay so let's talk about the more
extreme case the harsher case when you
talk about the things you
talk about in the war
uh on the west
and madness of crowds i mean you're
getting a lot of blowback i'm sure
uh
as uh for the listener you just shrugged
lightly
with a zen light look on your face
um so you don't
all you need is sam harris to say
that you're brilliant and you're happy
i know it's i'm i'm very i love sam yeah
i'm deeply pleased when he flanders me
but i mean i'm and it's nice about me
but no i don't just rely on that
no i mean i
i don't why would i mind if apart from
it i mean maybe it's self-selecting
if i didn't have the view i had about
that or the whatever armory it is that i
have on that i wouldn't do what i did
maybe
i mean have you been to some dark places
psychologically because of the
challenging ideas to explore
some like significant self-doubt just
kind of um i can't say i've been
unaffected by about everything in my
life by any means that would make me a
an automaton of some kind
um
there's definitely times i've got things
wrong and regretted that
uh there's times i've
there have there was a period around the
time i wrote
my book the strange death of europe
which
uh
it was very very dark time
and
it wasn't because i was having a dark
time in my life but because of the book
i was writing
oh because of the places you had to go
in order to write yeah book and um well
i was contemplating the end of a
civilization so
occasionally it's now i have maybe
slightly too pat at this stage but
sometimes
readers come up to me in the street or
whatever and say you know i love the
strange death of europe
and will say you know a very depressing
book to read however and i would say
well you should have tried writing it
um
but it was because i mean i was
it was it's it has chunks of it which
i'm very proud of in particular about
um
uh the death of religion the death of
god the the loss of meaning and um the
the void
and uh that's difficult stuff to write
about and to grapple with
and there is a sort of i haven't reread
that book um since it came out but
um
i think there are passages in it which
reveal what i was thinking very clearly
in the poetry of it as it were as well
as the
the detail
um
but
yeah i i can't say
i'm used
i'm used to
saying what i think and what i see
and if there's any pushback i've got
from that
i'm completely controlled that i'm
saying what i see with my own eyes
that's your source of strength is that
you're always seeking
the truth as best you see it well i
can't agree to go along with
a lie if i've seen something with my own
eyes
do you ever so speaking of sam harris
and i mentioned to you offline a lot of
people
i talk to a lot of smart people in my
private life on this podcast and a lot
of them will reference you as a
as their example of a very smart person
so given that
a compliment
um do you ever worry that
your sort of ego grows to a level where
you're not
what you think is the truth is no longer
the truth this is kind of um
it blinds you
and also on top of that the fact that
you stand against the crowd often
that there's part of it that appeals to
you that
you like to point out the emperor has no
clothes i get a certain thrill from the
friction yeah
that sometimes
both your ego and the thrill of friction
will get you to uh deviate from the
truth and instead just look for the
friction could do
could do for sure
um i try to keep alive to that
i mean i try
early in my career i realized that for
instance
i didn't want to
to make on enemies unnecessarily
any more than strictly necessary because
there was a very large number of already
necessary enemies
and i remember once i went into the
details but i already had one sort of
thing i'd done that way and then another
thing came out i just thought i can't i
can't do it
and i remember thinking don't be the
sort of person who's forever creating
storms
and i'm trying to make sure i wasn't and
i think i've pretty much
stuck to that
but to answer your question um
well the first thing is i'm i'm
as confident that i can be that um i
wouldn't fall into the trap you
described two reasons
i mean one is that i don't think of
myself as a wildly intelligent person
um partly because i'm very very aware of
things i know nothing about
i mean for instance i have an
almost no
knowledge of the details of finance
uh or
economic theory
um
i mean the the real details i don't mean
the big picture of the kind that we were
just discussing earlier but
uh i have
if you put the um
periodic table in front of me
i would struggle
to do more than um
a handful
yeah
i
am
very conscious of
huge gaps in my knowledge and where i
have gaps
or chasms
i tend to find i have a disproportionate
admiration for the people who know that
stuff
like i'm wildly impressed by people who
understand money really understand it
you know i think how the hell do you do
that
and the same thing with biologists
medics stuff i just
know very little about and that's the
source of humility for you just knowing
that yes i mean i think well i'm sure
that stuff but
jesus if you got me under general
knowledge i'd say that thing some years
ago there's a thing in universe in the
uk called university challenge
and my uh i was asked some years ago on
to there's a sort of like celebrity one
of former students of the universities
or colleges asked to go back for the
christmas special and um 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 and the
only reason i actually wanted to do it
was i discovered that louis theroux had
been to my college before my time and he
was on he'd agreed to be on the team and
i thought i'd love to meet louie through
that would be great fun
and uh anyhow and i said well i really
don't want to do it and they said come
on you'd be great i said i wouldn't i'd
show myself i'd be a total asshole and
ignoramus and uh as it was i sat down
my flat and i watched some past episodes
of university challenge
and i realized i'd have just sat and
mute
for the whole half hour
um i just couldn't i mean the first
question was about physics and the
second one was about uh as it was i
watched the
the one and i could answer the first two
or three questions
of the one that actually went out
because they they made it a bit simpler
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 these
unbelievably smart students seem to be
able to answer a whole range of things
so i'm perfectly aware of my
limitations and um
you contemplate your limitations
yeah and they're forever before me you
know
not hard to find in every day and and
then on top of that i suppose it's um
and in a way you know that line from
rudyard kipling's
um
alternately
brilliant and slightly nauseating poem f
there's a there's a line you just enjoy
a good bond can you well no it's
not it's not i can enjoy a great poem
yes but i mean
a good poem yeah this is
you know slightly off but
this is this is this goes to your
criticism of dostoevsky
take take take uh douglas's criticism
with a grain of salt so
maybe i've heard it read at too many
memorial services and things sure but uh
that line of
is a good piece of rice
if you can learn to meet triumph and
disaster and meet these greek these two
imposters just the same yeah that's a
good line it's a good line as it's
kicking off and then he's an amazing
turn of line but i do think that it's a
very sensible thing to try to greet
uh um
triumphant disaster and regard them as
imposters and greet them just the same
and actually anyone who knows me knows
that
i never
partly it's because i have a sort of
belief in the old gods and at the moment
that i thought that i was at the moment
of triumph the fates would hitch up
their skirts and run at me at a million
miles an hour
um
but it's also because i gen anyone who
knows me knows i never have a moment
when i say
um
that's just great i feel
totally
fulfilled and
victorious i mean it happened to me
recently when the war in the west went
straight in and number one in the
bestseller list how long did that last
in terms of your self-satisfied didn't
happen
not even for a brief moment no
when i first saw that it was selling
i had that moment of relation i thought
good
i've done it it's out
and i did have a moment of elation then
definitely
but it doesn't last partly because i
tell myself it mustn't last
because as you said fate
hitches up its skirt
is it is that skirts i don't this you
you brits with your with your poetry
even when it's nauseating
as of 2022 this year
what's your final analysis of the
political leadership in the human
mind and the human being of
donald trump
i sort of avoided this for years
just talking about trump i tried to
avoid talking about trump for years same
reason i tried to avoid writing about
brexit do you think that trump just
sorry in a small tangent do you think
the trump story
is uh over are we just done with volume
one i have no idea the people i know who
know him said he's running
and
and i think that in in general
republicans have to
do have a choice in front of them
uh
one friend put it to me recently said
you've got to go in with your toughest
fighter
and
i understand that instinct
and i also think it's very dangerous
instinct because what is your toughest
fight is also your biggest liability
um what's the best way to get out the
democrat vote than 2024 than to have
donald trump running and the people that
are doing the war in the west are pretty
tough
fighters
they are and um
i'm cautious about this because i know
every way i tread it's dangerous but let
me just
just be tread gracefully i'll try it as
gracefully as i can
my wellington boots
i am i galoshes uh
i here's here's the thing
uh i think everybody knows what trump is
i think we all knew for years
and i feel sorry for the conservatives
who had to pretend that he was
something he wasn't i felt sorry for the
ones who had to
pretend that for instance he was a some
devout christian or
a man of faith or a man of great
integrity or
uh all of these sorts of things because
i'm not in the public eye for years i've
been obvious that wasn't the case
but but
he has something extraordinary
one thing is a method of me
communication that you've just got to
say is
was unbelievable
you know in one fundamental way that you
can't look away for some reason
i mean we
i
i've been watching him clear everyone
out of the way in 2016. it was thrilling
because those people needed clearing
away
you know sam is just horrified what
america is going to give us another bush
what's so great about this family
um
america is going to give us another
clinton we're going to get to choose
randy clinton on the bush
mark stein said whatever we'll just wait
for the day the clintons and the bushes
in to marry and then we can really have
a monarchy again
um
so
i i i was very pleased to see him clear
them away i was very clear to him please
see him
sort of
raise some of the issues that needed
raising i thought it was a sort of
breath of fresh air and i wished it
wasn't him doing it
um
and then there was a question of him
governing and it was just perfectly
clear he didn't know how to govern
he what he did have however what he does
have is an incredible ability to fight
and some of the forces he was arraigned
against were arraigned against him my
gosh they would have taken down anyone
else
i mean
if they'd have probably done some
similar bs against ted cruz if he you
know or
marco rubio you know they'd have said
some of some people admitted they'd have
they'd have accused all these people of
racism and misogyny and everything else
as well just so they'd admit romney just
said they did john mccain
um but
trump was the one ugly enough and bruisy
enough to fight
and also a willingness
or a lack of willingness
to play sort of
the civil
yes game of politics sort of you know at
a party
when um
like politeness gets you in trouble yeah
you show up and everybody's polite and
you just out of momentum want to be
being polite and all of a sudden you're
on an island with jeffrey epstein and uh
it gets you into a huge amount of
trouble but so trump has these sort of
extraordinary qualities but i just you
know look he he he screwed up uh during
his time in office because he didn't
achieve as much as he should have done
now you could say about every president
but i refuse to acknowledge that two
years when he had both houses in the
first the beginning he just didn't know
what levers to pull
you know i mean he was sitting in the
office behind the oval office tweeting
watching the news
sorry that's not a president
and um
he couldn't fill and didn't fill
positions because people knew i mean
people who were very loyal to him
he would just
you know he'd get them to do something
loyal and then destroy them
yeah and i i think and then we get onto
the thing about and here we get on to
the you know what of course is very very
fractious terrain but
you know i covered the 2020 election and
i was traveling all around the states
and i went to trump rally and
and all sorts of stuff and
i i mean i was in dc on election night
and
um when and it got very ugly at one
point um in so-called black lives matter
plaza
when it looked like trump might win when
florida came in and got really i could
feel the air well very very heated and
like some antifa people started getting
into black lock and this sort of stuff
and i thought this town's going to burn
you know if trump wins
and
in the aftermath of the vote
i was willing to hang around and
watching for a bit and then i thought it
was going to drag on
and i saw some of his people and others
and people told me they had great
evidence of vote rigging and all this
sort of thing
and i'm afraid i'm one of those people
who
doesn't believe that the evidence they
presented is good enough to justify the
claim that he won the election
and
i and people say have you seen 2 000
mules and have you seen anything look
the evidence isn't there that the the
election was won by donald trump yeah
and i think that what he did on january
the 6th was
unbelievably dangerous
and you know here it is possible for us
to hold two ideas in our head at the
same time january 6 was not nothing
nor was it an insurrection an attempt to
stage a coup
and
there's a vanishing number of people in
the u.s or as eric weinstein said that
the it's like
this is the the roof that you have to
walk along and like
the sides are very steep
yeah if you fall off either side
is there some sense
given the forces
that are waging war in the west
he said this feeling
perhaps because of antifa or something
else that this town is going to burn and
maybe a continued feeling that this town
is going to burn with the january 6th
events
are you worried
about
the future of the united states in the
coming years
because of the the the feeling of
escalation
is that just
a war of twitter or is there it's real
is there a real brewing of something oh
it's real
and how
well let me then respond to that how
what is the hopeful if you
if you 10 years from now look back
at the united states and say we turned
it around
what would be the reason what would be
the ways the mechanisms that we do so
tell you um
since i since i wrote this book there
are two things in particular that
i've been really pleased
that a specific type of specialist has
approached me on
to say that
things i've written about actually have
more application than i realized
one is um the gratitude issue a number
of people have approached me who have
gone through
a.a
more alcoholics anonymous they sometimes
say have you ever been to aaa and that's
a
personal question
um
they say but the reason they ask it is
because they say well because if you go
to drug rehabilitation or alcohol
anonymous
um
uh
mcdonald's it doesn't sound very
anonymous you stand up in a room you say
your name and you tell everyone the
worst things you've ever done
that's the opposite of anonymous anyhow
but they say uh look because if you go
to these things apparently you're asked
to as part of your recovery yeah
say what you're grateful for like list
what you're grateful for i didn't know
that by the way until until until the
book was out and so it turned out to
have more application than i knew the
other thing though is that i say that
it's absolutely crucial in america that
we try to find things that we agree on
and a couple of times since the book
came out i've been approached by people
with marriage counsellors
um but if you've also said i mean you've
ever been through marriage counseling
again that's a very personal question
stop asking me personal questions
no but they then they said and i said
why well because this is
this is one of the things that we do
in couples therapy
is
try to find things you agree on
and
i think this is very important in
america
and it's made much harder by the fact
and i've said this many times but
forgive me if i'm repeating myself but
it's made much harder by the fact that
having different opinions is very last
century
now we all have different facts or at
least the two sides have different facts
one half of the country roughly or let's
say 40 30 whatever you want to put it
with a you know tired minority in the
middle
um
one segment of the country believes that
hillary clinton won the 2016 election
and that the russians interfered and got
donald trump into power
another half of the country believes
that donald trump won the 2020 election
if you can't agree on who wins elections
it's very hard to see who you what you
agree on as a country that's one of the
reasons i mind the war on american
history and western history is
one of the things you have to agree on
is at least some attitude towards your
past you don't have to go on everything
like the public square has to have
public heroes who are agreed to be
heroes to some extent
warts and all
um if you don't have that if actually
you think friends like half the country
thinks founding fathers were pretty good
the other half thinks they were
absolutely rotten racists and so on if
half the country basically thinks it
would have been better if columbus had
taken a different turn never found
america gone back home and said i know
nothing out there that would have been
better and the other house pretty glad
in the end that we've got america
um
you know you've got to agree on
something
and i just see in america so i do think
we've got to try to find things we're
going like a reasonable attitude towards
the past that's why that matters i and
again i stress i'm not trying to say
that everything in the american past was
good god knows that wouldn't stand up to
a second scrutiny yourself scrutiny but
nor was it all bad this wasn't a country
formed in sin
and in an eradicable sin it wasn't
founded in 1619 in order to make the
country wicked and incapable of escaping
that wickedness you know these are
things that will matter enormously in
the years ahead because if you can't
agree on anything including who your
heroes are
like the whole thing is just one massive
division and we'll see what i think
we're already seeing which is people
basically going to states where it's
more like the life they want to live
and some people say to me well that's
okay and the genius of the founding is
that it allows for that
that's possible but it's also
it eradicates
part of what has been american public
life which is the ability to look at
each other and discuss face to face
and i see things like this bomb placed
on america the other week with the
supreme court league the draft league
as being just a further example of that
i'm very very worried about it in
america and and because
if america screws up everything
everything else in the world goes
yeah there's the degree to which america
is still the beacon
of these ideas on on which
the c the country was founded and it's
been able to
live out in better and better forms
sort of live out the actual ideals of
the founding principles versus
with the desire to improve yeah
constantly an imperfect union
yeah well as i generally have hope that
people want
to sort of
in terms of gratitude people are aware
of how good it feels to be grateful
um
it's a better life psychologically the
resentment is a thing that destroys you
from within so i just
feel that people will um long for that
and will find that that's that's the
american way some of the division that
we reveal now has to do with new
technologies like social media
that kind of
is a small kind of deviation from the
path we're on because it's a new we got
a new toy just like nuclear weapons yeah
which is relatively new um
but
we need to find reasonable attitudes
towards these things and i that's why i
say like it matters how you and my
feedback on social media because we
might we're all going through it to some
extent we're learning and we're learning
and we've got to learn how to do this
without going mad you know i say this as
my minimalist
call to friends in this era was
the main job is not to go insane
yeah
[Laughter]
yeah
and uh yeah like walk towards
uh because you know
i'm sure there's a hunter thompson quote
in there like
insanity and the weekends can be at
least fun okay
do you have advice for young people
uh
that just put down their tick tock and
are listening to this podcast in high
school and college about how to have a
career how to have a life they can be
part of
so april question but uh
of course it i mean i can give specific
advice for people who want to be writers
and so on but that's a bit niche maybe
um
the writers will be very interesting
sorry to interrupt also how to put your
ideas down on paper and so the ideas
develop them
and have the guts to
to go to a large audience
especially when the ideas are sort of
controversial or dangerous or difficult
well the main thing to do is to breed
when i was a school boy i'd ever have a
book in my pocket
um
side pocket in my jacket or inside
pocket and would read and
um
that wasn't
just because i was swotish in some way
but because i discovered
probably at some point in my early teens
i discovered something i wrote about
this one
i discovered that books
were dangerous
which was a thrilling discovery yeah
i discovered that they could contain
anything
and also people didn't know what you
were reading
i remember i get far too young in age i
read the doors of perception of aldous
huxley
um
and um
i i
didn't make head or tail of it probably
but i knew that it was about something
really interesting and dangerous
and i thought
constantly when i read poetry or read
history
i was just constantly um
thrilled and wanted to know more
and
and well if you want to become a writer
you have to be a reader
um
you have to read the best stuff
um and and you know obviously people
disagree or agree on what that is and
you'll find the people that really
impress you
but i know i just came across certain
writers who just
knocked me off my feet
um
and
when you find those people like read
everything
and
cling on to them and find other people
like that find other writers like that
or people are connected
by history or
scholarship or circles or whatever
for you was it fiction or non-fiction is
there particular books that you just
remember
or just give you pause well i remember
that the first book that absolutely
threw me was the lord of the flies
of william golding which used to be a
signed text and everyone's a bit snotty
about because it's so popular
um 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 of
everything ends up fine in the end the
lost all get found
you know and this was the first book i
read where that's not the case
the world turns out differently and i
remember
for days afterwards i was just in a
state of shock
i
couldn't believe
what i'd just discovered
and partly because i sort of intuited it
must be true
and of course that's not to say that the
lord's like there's lots of scholarship
on
what children do in the situation of
being on the island when they do
congregate and anyhow
but yes that was a sort of introduction
to the adult world and it was shocking
and thrilling and um and i wanted more
of it
um it was dangerous and it was dangerous
and then of course when i became
interested in sex let alone when i was
gay
i realized books were a very very good
way to learn about what i was
and that was even more dangerous in a
way and i thought i mean nobody knows
what i know
and
he discovered sex that was an invention
in books you just what do you mean no
what i mean nobody no no 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 and
you don't think the world will ever know
you hope the world will never know
and
um
it's been called by one psychologist the
little boy with a big secret
and um so if you discover that other
people have the same secret there's a
sort of
thank god for that
um but i mean that's just a version of
what everybody gets in reading in a way
which is the thrill of discovery that um
somebody else thought something you
thought only you'd thought i mean
one of the greatest one of the greatest
thrills in all of literature is when a
voice comes from across the centuries
and seems to leave a handprint you know
it makes you feel a little bit less
alone because somebody else feels yeah
sees the world the same way is the same
way that's what c.s lewis says it says
said to have said
we read to know we're not alone
um but we don't only read no not alone
we read to become other people
um
i mean i think i saw in books the
version of the life i wanted to live and
then i decided to live it
and for i'm fortunate enough to have
done so
um
i wanted to live in the world of ideas
and um books and debate and
i wanted to live in the debates of my
time you know
and i remember i remember when um
like a lot of people i read alden when i
was young
and uh
you know certain lines obviously stuck
with me but i that poem of his which
everybody you know
knows on which he hated uh september the
1st 1939
i remember certain lines in that just
like whacked me
um what's that one sitting on a dive for
the second street degrading it alone of
the
at the end of a low dishonest decade
because 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 it sounds sort of cool in a way you
know you're the only person who sees it
but um so yeah anyhow that's a diversion
but the point is if you want to be a
writer you've got to be a reader
apart from anything else you discover
the the lilt of language and the
the things you can do and i i've read
people who and i still do who i think my
god i didn't how did you do that in fact
books books for me now and articles and
other things fall into two categories
one is i know how you did that
uh and the other is i don't know how you
did that
and
the and the best feeling as a writer is
when you do the second one
and i've and it happens occasionally in
my writing life will you almost like
return to something you've written or
like right after you no the moment you
write it you wonder how did i do that
yes
that's that's the most i've never said
that before that's the happiest thing in
writing yeah
very occasionally it sounds but i mean
i've occasionally
finished something
funny enough it happened some years ago
in a long piece i wrote about the artist
basquiat
um
uh
i i finished the piece and i gasped
i didn't know because because that's
also a thing with writing is you
you you it's not sometimes people say
you need to write in order to know what
you think that's not quite true
sometimes you that's a very bad piece of
advice for some writers who don't know
what they think and it's not going to
become clearer if they just start typing
[Laughter]
very hard yeah sometimes it is true that
you
there's a thought that's just
waiting there and a clarity that comes
across and suddenly the sentence emerges
in your brain and by the time you typed
it you you just go
yes
that's the greatest feeling of the
writing almost like it came from
somewhere else that's that's what um uh
um bucunin
says about you know what's the moment is
tom stoppard's favorite quote about you
know pecune is saying what happened to
the moment where the right to other
writers pen when he pauses where does he
go in that moment
um
yeah
that's so interesting
that's that's so because i think the
answer to that question
will help us explain consciousness and
all those other weird things about the
human mind yes so that was advice for
writers i didn't really give any advice
for people in general but um is that oh
you want to give health advice no to
your channel a churchill and no i don't
give health advice
clearly
because you implied that churchill was
one of your early guides in that aspect
so when you discovered your sexuality
let me ask about love
um
two pers far too personal of a question
to ask a brit but
um
what was that like and broadly speaking
what's the role of love in the human
condition
sex and love
and for you personally
discovering that you were and maybe
telling the world that you were
gay
i'm very perilously personal i do
actually have a sort of rule that i
don't talk about my personal life but uh
oh rules are meant to be broken okay
i'll break it a little bit um
the
uh the the one of the ways in which
growing up and rising you're gay differs
from going up and being straight
is that it's almost inevitable
that your first passions will be
unrequited
oh wow i never thought about that
yeah now that's not to say i mean
you know there's plenty of unrequited
love among young men for young women
young women of young men plenty of yeah
we know that but it's almost inevitable
if you're gay that your first uh
you know
passions will be totally unrequited
because the odds are
that the person in question will not be
gay so the experience of love is mostly
heartbreak it's heartbreak
and disappointment that heartbreak can
be beautiful too of course well as again
it comes back to the thing is if you're
a writer or something because you can
always do something with it
that's why all writers are sort of not
to be trusted
i i i didn't trust you the moment you
walked in here
no i mean it's a famous problem with the
writers because you always think i could
use uh
it's dangerous it's a dangerous thing
and all right it's almost like a drug
right uh no it's it's not like a drug
it's it's uh the fear that all
things even the greatest suffering um it
could be material
what's that what's the danger in that
exactly that seeing the material in the
human experience you don't experience it
fully you don't experience it fully and
you might be using it
i had a friend who wrote a poem about a
friend who died in a motorcycle accident
in sydney in the 60s and he said he knew
the moment he was told that his friend's
death a tiny bit of him thought i could
use this for poem
and he did and the poem was wonderful
but there's always that slight guilt for
writers of
am i going to use that
anyhow that's a divergence 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 and you're going to impact
the lives of many many people
by writing about that moment because
it's going to stimulate something that
resonates with those people because they
had similar kinds of memories about a
yes and a passion towards somebody that
they had to lose so
don't you know yes but there is a good
sign maybe perhaps the more obvious
perhaps problem is um
reporting from war zones or bad places
and wanting to find bad stories because
it's useful and there's there is a
definite guilt you get from that sort of
thing like the worse the situation the
more useful and anyhow um
no so that's that's sort of the only
difference that happens from growing up
being gay and it means that
most
certainly in my generation most gay men
[Music]
came to
sexual or romantic maturity later and
there's lots of explanations of that um
maybe being one of the reasons for
perceived or otherwise promiscuity among
gay men
which is i think more easily persuaded
by the fact that
gay men behave like
men would if women were men
that's that's one explanation but it it
it's both a feature and a bug that you
come to
sexual flourishing later in life that
could be seen as a yeah
in the trajectory of human life that
could be a positive or negative yeah but
what's broadly speaking is the role of
love in the human condition douglas
well it's the nearest thing we have to
finding the point
what what is the point what's what's the
meaning of life let's go there so what's
the meaning is a hard one of course
where is the meaning is slightly easier
um and i'd say that everyone can find
that
um you gravitate towards the places you
find meaning
now there's a conservative answer to
this which is quite useful and it's
certainly more useful than any others
because the conservative answer is find
meaning where people have found it
before
which is a very very good answer yeah
if if your ancestors are found meaning
in a place of worship or a particular
canon of work
go there
because it's been proven by time
to be able to give you the goods
um
much more sensible than saying hey i
don't know discover new ways of meaning
um uh but
love is
um
love is probably the nearest thing we
can have
to the divine
um on earth and of course the problem of
what exactly
what type of love we mean is a
is an issue well that goes to the fact
that you don't like uh definitions
anyway i do like definitions i just
think they need to be pinned down
but let's not
let's not go there at
the moment because it's
uh does not pin down love at the moment
well
no because as you know i mean because of
the different varieties of love 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 yeah
well but
let's say
human love
with the greatest fulfillment in um
uh sexual
fulfillment in sexual love with another
person
is um
probably the greatest intimation you can
have of
what um
might otherwise only be superseded by
divine
love um
and it's the
um
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 place
and that this is
there's a beautiful beautiful poem of
can i read it to you yes please
um i'll try to find there's a beautiful
poem of philip larkins
which slightly says
what i'm
i'm i'm trying not to dock your question
by referring to other people but
maybe that's the best way to answer the
question could be used to read
we read a poem
so there's a poem by um philip larkin
called high windows
which is um
which is remarkable because
he
um became sexual he was straight but he
he and had a rather unhappy sex life but
he um
uh
came to sexual fiction in the 40s and 15
with all the hell that involved
and um
he took us he took what i remember
regarding as being a really remarkable
and important view on the sexual
revolution in the sixties which is the
most people of his generation older
people resented the young
um
they resented the freedom they had and
actually they pretended the freedom was
terrible and it was always getting
likely to and laughing rather
surprisingly a very conservative person
took a different view and he says it in
his poem and the opening of a poem is he
says
when i see a couple of kids and guess
he's fucking her and she's taking pills
or wearing a diaphragm
i know this is paradise everyone old has
dreamed of all their lives
bonds and gestures pushed to one side
like an outdated combine harvester and
everyone young going down the long slide
to happiness endlessly
i wonder if anyone looked at me 40 years
back and thought
that'll be the life no god anymore or
sweating in the dark about hell and that
or having to hide what you think of the
priest he and his lot will all go down
the long slide like free bloody birds
and immediately rather than words comes
the thought of high windows
the sun comprehending glass
and beyond it the deep blue air
that shows nothing and is nowhere and is
endless
the divine
he found it
he found it in seeing a couple of young
kids
and knowing that one of them was wearing
a diaphragm
do you see what i mean it's first of all
it's very counterintuitive but secondly
this is the point that
sex had been so
tied up with misery
i mean people don't remember this now
when they talk about
the past i mean that's one of my
favorite books stefan zweig's the world
of yesterday
including the descriptions of what it
was like trying to have sex in pre-first
world war vienna you know all the men
ended up going to female prostitutes you
know so many of them got syphilis and
this was their first experience of sex
it was so goddamn awful and they were
stuck with it all their lives i know
so there's lots of stuff that's gone
better in our last century and that's
one of them
but you ask about love yes i do think
that love is basically um
the the thing that gives us the best
glimpse of the divine
and by the way sex
liberating sex
doesn't buy you
um
love no
i mean it throws in an entirely
it
it threw in another set of problems
um if if there's any meaning on top of
all that is we like to
uh find problems and solve that as a
human species and sometimes we even
create problems
douglas thank you for highlighting all
the problems of human civilization
and giving us a glimmer of hope for the
future this is an incredible
conversation
thank you for talking today it's a huge
honor thank you it's very kind of you to
say that thank you
thanks for listening to this
conversation with douglas murray to
support this podcast please check out
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let me leave you with some words from
douglas murray himself
this agreement is not oppression
argument is not assault
words
even provocative and repugnant ones are
not
violence the answer to speech we do not
like is
more speech
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you