Juno News - October 06, 2020


Political ‘designers’ are trying to tell you how to live


Episode Stats

Length

24 minutes

Words per Minute

175.36069

Word Count

4,238

Sentence Count

3

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the Andrew Lawton Show
00:00:05.600 you've no doubt heard of liberal versus conservative left versus right
00:00:12.680 globalist populist all of these great divides that exist in Canadian and international politics
00:00:18.960 there's a new one that you might not be as familiar with that's being put forth in a book
00:00:23.120 by the great Brian Lee Crowley gardeners versus designers understanding the great fault line
00:00:29.060 in Canadian politics Brian it's good to talk to you thanks very much for coming on today and
00:00:33.460 congrats on the new book oh thanks so much Andrew it's always great to be on the show
00:00:37.100 so this dichotomy that you put forward what is it well look it comes from an experience I don't
00:00:45.140 know if any of your audience have had the same experience but I kept listening to all these
00:00:50.020 people tell me about what a terrible place Canada was that it's full of racists it's full of homophobes
00:00:57.000 it's it's full of genocidal maniacs and I began to say but but this doesn't correspond to my own
00:01:07.240 experience of Canada and it doesn't correspond I think for example to the to the fact that something
00:01:13.240 like 40% of the population of of our great urban areas in Canada are actually people born in another
00:01:19.560 country they chose Canada they came here because they had lots of choices they could have gone to
00:01:23.800 many places but they chose Canada and surely they didn't choose Canada because it's a terrible place
00:01:29.880 and so I began to ask myself so what is what is really behind this and how can we begin to
00:01:36.360 understand what a great place Canada is and really that's what my book is about my book is about what
00:01:40.600 a great place Canada is well we shouldn't be what the Canada is not a problem to be fixed
00:01:46.440 Canada is instead a rich inheritance to be joined to enjoy that and and that's gets us to this idea
00:01:54.200 of gardeners versus designers because my view is that what the designers want the people who really
00:02:00.280 want the top-down model they want to be able to tell us how to live they want to be able to organize
00:02:06.360 our cities they want to tell us how to get our health care they want to you know just organize our lives
00:02:12.920 how to get day care you name it they've always got a program they've always got a way to fix what's
00:02:18.440 wrong with Canada and what I wanted to do in the book was to say well actually every time we let the
00:02:23.560 designers have their way they tell us how they're going to fix Canada it actually turns out to be a
00:02:29.160 pretty big mess and the alternative is not to do nothing the alternative is to elect Canadians through
00:02:38.120 their own experiences their own knowledge their own understanding of their own circumstances of
00:02:42.440 themselves about what's important to them about what's important to their family they solve their
00:02:47.000 own problems in a way that's pretty impressive and what we need to do is we need to support these
00:02:52.280 grassroots uh solutions to our problems rather than the top-down ones and that's the opposition I'm
00:02:58.680 talking about between gardeners and designers one of the things that I found when I was reading
00:03:04.200 through it there's almost a similar parallel to some of the ideas you see in foreign policy and
00:03:09.640 international relations discussions of people on one side that want to view the world the way it
00:03:14.200 is and work within that and then the uh you know cursed idealists on the other side that are so focused
00:03:20.040 on this abstract vision and I don't know if that was something that you thought of when you were
00:03:24.040 formulating this but it does seem like there is that contrast between on one hand the people that
00:03:29.480 sort of refuse to look at how the country is and are trying to make it into something else yes I think
00:03:35.240 there's a lot of truth to that Andrew and in fact uh you know the people who uh are enamored of uh
00:03:41.480 you know the united nations as uh you know the great hope for democracy the same organization that
00:03:47.240 just elected uh uh what was it Iran and Russia and China to the human rights council as if these are
00:03:53.880 people who are going to defend human rights around the world at the time when they're abusing them uh
00:03:59.000 without apology at home I I you know one of the reasons why I think genuine democrats are rather
00:04:08.120 concerned about this creeping internationalization you know that uh we take our lead from the UN and
00:04:14.360 other you know the the IMF and uh you know the uh World Economic Forum and so on uh is because um
00:04:22.280 you know these idealistic organizations uh are very far from the real world that we inhabit and uh
00:04:31.960 only democracies I think are uh able to defend democracy we can't look to non-democratic countries
00:04:38.440 to uh to defend our interests do you see the gardeners and designers as falling strictly on what we
00:04:45.240 would understand as left-right lines no I don't think so uh in fact you know it's one of the reasons
00:04:51.480 I wrote the book I said you know we we don't think very well about these things uh and in fact uh
00:04:57.640 part of what I'm saying is that um at the moment uh designers seem to be in the ascendant you know
00:05:03.800 the the kind of progressives the people who you know every day they're they're tweeting you know
00:05:09.480 Canada should be ashamed about x uh and we have a plan to fix Canada uh uh and um I I I think the the
00:05:19.720 the the gardeners have kind of almost forgotten uh what it is that's so great about uh about
00:05:27.320 Canada how it became one of the most attractive societies in the world uh they uh need to be
00:05:33.000 reminded what it is that made Canada great and how we can harness you know the the intelligence of
00:05:40.600 Canadians there and their knowledge about themselves and their communities in a way that makes Canada an
00:05:46.200 even better place uh I I don't think there's any political party that really gets this yet but
00:05:52.200 it's true that there are probably more people in the conservative party that are going to read about
00:05:56.760 gardeners and say gee yeah he's articulating something that I feel but I've never been able
00:06:01.720 to put into words uh but you know the fact of the matter is that for uh a hundred years the liberal
00:06:08.680 party was a gardener's party no doubt about it Sir Wilfred Lorre was a gardener of the first water
00:06:13.640 uh so the the the liberal party has forgotten its gardener roots uh and I think uh both the liberals
00:06:20.920 and the Tories need to be reminded that there is an alternative to the top-down program Canada is a
00:06:26.920 problem to be fixed you mentioned in that uh response their knowledge and one of the arguments
00:06:33.160 that I found really unique and I hadn't actually considered it in the book was how you equated freedom
00:06:39.160 to knowledge and specifically in the context of freedom to pursue to explore to experiment as being
00:06:46.200 really the direct path to knowledge and I don't think a lot of people traditionally view liberty in
00:06:51.480 those terms I think people and for good reason look at freedom as a means and as an end unto itself
00:06:57.000 but you're saying there's something more fundamental to that about true human progress well yeah I mean
00:07:03.320 without getting into a a a technical discussion you know the fact of the matter is that um uh if if
00:07:11.080 we act on mistaken ideas you know if we're wrong about how things work when we exercise our freedom
00:07:19.160 you know we make mistakes we get things wrong and so uh the the the truly free person is always seeking
00:07:27.960 the most up-to-date the most effective the most real the most uh proven knowledge on which to act
00:07:35.240 right uh and so the question then becomes free people have a tremendous interest in having the most
00:07:42.520 knowledge available uh you know the the the best knowledge about how to provide health care how to
00:07:48.520 provide day care how to provide prescription drugs how to uh you know how to get an education all the
00:07:54.920 things that make up our lives uh in order to be effective in exercising our freedom we want to
00:08:00.760 have the most knowledge possible with which to exercise that freedom and you know part of the
00:08:05.880 argument of the book is that people at the very top you know the people designing all these fabulous
00:08:11.800 programs that are going to fix all our problems they're the most ignorant people in society they're
00:08:16.280 ignorant about our lives they're ignorant about because every one of us is unique you know we are not a
00:08:21.720 statistic uh statistics take a take away from us everything that makes us an individual and makes
00:08:28.600 us this abstract number and you know because people at the top have to be guided by statistics because
00:08:35.080 they can't possibly know andrew lawton's life and brian crowley's life and joe smith's life and jane smith
00:08:40.920 like uh you know only you and i have the knowledge about who we are about what we want about what's
00:08:48.280 important to us in our communities and so when we let people at the top tell us how to act we're
00:08:53.800 actually less free and we're actually acting on less information than when we can make our own
00:08:59.160 decisions for ourselves that's a key part of the book and your chapter on identity which i think
00:09:04.920 needs to be required reading in every high school across the country by the way really expresses that
00:09:10.440 well you talk about how most people cannot be reduced down to the identity group of whatever it is
00:09:16.840 you know a woman identity uh lgbt identity a racial identity and so on but there does seem to be in the
00:09:23.720 designers this idea of pushing that as being really the trump card more important than however anyone else
00:09:30.280 identifies yes well uh you know you you can't assign in my view you can't assign a person to a group
00:09:40.440 like okay your skin is black therefore you're black and that's now we know everything that matters
00:09:46.840 about you because you're black yeah but the fact of the matter is if you get into the mind of someone
00:09:52.520 who's black or someone who's female or someone who's chinese or something pick your identity group it
00:09:56.840 doesn't matter as soon as you get inside their mind you realize they're not reducible to a single
00:10:02.200 dimension they are complex people they have ideas they have things that are important to them they have
00:10:08.280 objectives in their lives they they have different people that they care about some sometimes they're
00:10:13.240 workers sometimes they're trade unionists sometimes they're mortgage holders there's a zillion things
00:10:18.520 that make up every individual and when we reduce them to membership in a group it's always the designer
00:10:26.200 to say ah you see i've found the one thing that we need to know about this person in order to help them
00:10:32.040 or fix them or you know uh bring in a program that will make their lives better and uh the the argument
00:10:39.640 i'm making in the book is the only thing you need to know about a person is what's in their head
00:10:45.160 it's what they want it's what's important to them the color of their skin you know the ethnic group
00:10:50.680 their their their origin whether they're an immigrant or native these are all they're not irrelevant
00:10:57.000 but they're small things compared to what's in our heads and only we know what's important to us as
00:11:04.200 individuals and lest anyone think this is a theoretical problem i i would point out that
00:11:09.560 there are a great many hiring practices as you note in the book and we see this especially in the
00:11:13.880 canadian government that are based on that idea of what we would call identity politics so it's not
00:11:19.960 just a theoretical issue you're raising here but one that we're seeing in practice and probably
00:11:25.160 increasingly so absolutely and part of the argument i make in the book is uh it's it's just math you
00:11:33.160 know if you genuinely wanted to say well uh all employers must have uh workforces that are
00:11:40.200 representative of the population by which they mean all the groups that they can identify that they think
00:11:44.680 are important you mentioned lgbtq etc etc um there is nobody and no country no company no group no
00:11:53.400 organization including the federal government that has a workforce large enough that it could be truly
00:11:58.520 representative in that sense and as soon as we start focusing on group membership in things like uh
00:12:05.400 how you know the the employees you have rather than the competence and the knowledge of the people
00:12:10.600 themselves we move away from meritocracy and uh uh you know picking the best person for the job which i
00:12:18.040 still think is one of the one of the one of the gardener institutions that we've developed you know
00:12:23.400 we are a society in which people get ahead not because of who they are who they know but be
00:12:28.520 uh but because of what they know uh if we allow that to be you know shunted aside in favor of oh let's
00:12:35.880 make sure every group is represented in every workforce it will be a tremendous loss to canadian society
00:12:41.400 when you look at choices and freedom i i have to point out this line that jumped out in the book
00:12:49.400 the state does not protect your choices it protects you the chooser what does that distinction mean why
00:12:56.200 is that so important well uh i i i guess the the the thing to remember is that what makes your life
00:13:05.320 what makes my life what makes the life of every human being is the choices that we make this this is how
00:13:10.760 we make our lives this is how we make our character uh this is how we make our profession this is how we
00:13:17.240 choose our mate you know everything about our life is what we choose for ourselves and the important thing
00:13:25.880 therefore is to protect our ability to choose not to say gee you know if you knew as much as i know uh i'm
00:13:34.840 i'm the great uh you know minister of x or you know i'm i'm the head of statistics canada if only
00:13:41.160 you knew what i knew you would make the right choice but we you see that's exactly what we can't do in a
00:13:46.920 society of free people is we can't let people at the top say we know more than you do so we're we will
00:13:52.360 make choices on your behalf so the important thing is not uh the role of government is not to make
00:14:01.800 choices for us because we're too ignorant to make our own choices the role of government is to make
00:14:07.560 sure that nobody interferes with our ability to make our own choices that's when we get to live our
00:14:12.760 best life according to our own understanding our own lights uh what we care about and who we know
00:14:19.720 and that's especially timely in the last eight months where we've been subjected to some people
00:14:24.760 would argue for good reason others would argue not so much rule by experts yeah well i mean one of the
00:14:32.040 themes of the book is that uh we defer way too much to experts uh uh you know this is again part of the
00:14:38.520 designer uh idea that you know we we at the center we in government we advise by the most important
00:14:47.160 experts in the world know far more than you do so please you know just be quiet and let us tell you
00:14:52.680 what to do uh and i i in the book i talk about covet as a as an example of well you know how realistic
00:15:00.600 is this idea that experts are going to fix things for us and i i i look at you know all of your
00:15:08.520 listeners andrew will remember that at the beginning of covid uh you know the idea that we would close
00:15:13.720 the border was nonsense lit then we closed the border no no wearing masks according to the experts
00:15:19.960 won't make any difference now we're all wearing masks uh and the list goes on and on and on
00:15:25.800 of experts well experts learn too uh experts don't know everything in fact experts
00:15:33.560 mostly know the past they know well yes okay we have historical knowledge of what happened in
00:15:40.280 other pandemics etc but every bug is different uh every circumstance is different and now uh you
00:15:47.480 know we're we're deep into covet and there the expert advice is changing every day and different
00:15:54.520 countries have different experts offering different advice the idea that there is some
00:15:58.680 some kind of expert consensus driven by science that gives one answer that we should all uh capitulate to
00:16:05.720 is absolute rubbish do you think that the designers are so integrated in the canadian bureaucracy
00:16:14.920 in academia and other institutions perhaps in the media that there really
00:16:19.320 is not an easy path forward to reclaim the gardener mentality
00:16:24.600 well the thing that gives me hope andrew is that you know no matter how much uh designers claim that
00:16:32.920 they're acting on the best knowledge uh thanks to the best expert advice the fact of the matter is
00:16:38.520 that most of the time they get it wrong and they make mistakes and those mistakes ramify you know they
00:16:45.720 multiply you know uh just think about uh the ontario government and its attempt to bring in a a green
00:16:52.680 economy and how they ruined the uh the electricity system and that had huge knock-on effects on employment
00:16:59.800 etc etc and now the federal government is trying to reproduce that the the it would be hard to defeat
00:17:08.520 the designer mentality uh if designers got it right and their solutions worked fortunately they often
00:17:16.360 don't get it right in fact most of the time they don't get it right you know our circumstances evolve
00:17:21.720 and even if they got it right when they brought it in their program soon is outdated and based on
00:17:26.040 uh outmoded information uh whereas gardeners are always able to be at the cutting edge because
00:17:32.920 they're always asking people to use their own knowledge you know you what you and i know about
00:17:39.000 our lives is always more up to date than anybody else can know about us uh and so when you know
00:17:45.640 gardeners say no let's let's rely on what people say they want let's rely on their own efforts let's
00:17:52.440 encourage them let's give them support and making their own choices uh the outcomes are better uh
00:17:59.160 and i think that um uh as we move into an era of uh you know designer dominance in our in our politics
00:18:09.560 it's a bit like margaret thatcher uh uh used to say you know yeah you know socialism is okay uh uh
00:18:16.360 spending other people's money is okay except eventually you run out of other people's money
00:18:20.360 eventually you run out of other people's money and uh people start saying well wait a minute
00:18:25.000 you're taking a lot of my money to provide programs that don't actually work very well for me and that's
00:18:30.920 when you start to get the pushback do you see populism as being an inherent byproduct of this gardener
00:18:37.320 approach uh no i think populism is an inherent outcome of the designer approach uh you know really
00:18:44.600 that is that populism is a reaction against designerism uh it's a reaction against the
00:18:53.000 mentality that says uh you know i'm at the top of the political food chain i'm really smart i've been
00:19:00.680 to a fancy university i have a big phd i hire the best experts and i'm telling you what's good for you
00:19:08.040 and if you don't like it well you're obviously are an ignorant redneck and your opinion can be
00:19:13.880 completely dismissed this drives people crazy andrew uh it's it's the basket of deplorables mentality
00:19:21.800 and uh i i think that uh populism is an inevitable outcome of a designer dominated political era when
00:19:31.400 people say i'm sick and tired of politicians telling me that what i know about my own life
00:19:37.560 doesn't matter is unimportant is ignorant and in fact is embarrassing so i guess with that being said
00:19:45.080 do you think that the designer uh realm is going to collapse on its own or do you think there is a
00:19:51.640 response of sorts that's needed to steer things back into the gardener column well you know look i think
00:20:00.520 that it's inevitable that people come to realize that designerism doesn't work but i also think
00:20:07.000 that it's amazing how hard it is and how much work it takes to make something inevitable happen it
00:20:14.440 doesn't just happen by itself yeah people will still keep trying to ram the uh the square peg into the
00:20:19.000 round hole yeah people have to make a decision that no look we tried this doesn't work uh move on uh
00:20:28.040 you know making the inevitable happen is a big effort you got to push that rock up the hill
00:20:31.560 uh and uh it may well be that uh uh i i remember talking to one uh former politician the other day
00:20:41.320 and she said well you know the problem is that it seems that the designers uh uh always win uh at
00:20:47.960 election time and i think well uh i i i i've heard people say this but then you know think about i
00:20:55.960 i mentioned the ontario government you know the kathleen wind government you know they were kind of
00:21:00.120 designers par excellence uh and finally people said no this is not working and they were out on their
00:21:08.520 ear so sometimes you have to let these things run their course uh but you have to keep reminding
00:21:13.720 people what the alternative is so that when they understand that this has run its course and it
00:21:18.440 doesn't work they say oh wait a minute wasn't there an alternative here so i part of the part of the
00:21:23.720 purpose of the book is to keep these intellectual tools sharp and available to the population so that
00:21:32.440 when people say yeah boy this really doesn't work they say oh wait a minute but there was an
00:21:38.600 alternative and and and that alternative is there easily available within reach so that we can put
00:21:45.320 it to work and people will realize that it actually works for canadian and i guess the one thing i would
00:21:52.200 end with here is asking you if you were to put forward a road map that you were going to share with
00:21:58.360 all of the political leaders of canada and i guess you have to some extent done it in the book but
00:22:02.520 something more tangible uh because we know i don't think they are always reading uh reading the books
00:22:07.320 they need to uh what would be the approach that you would recommend that would really help write
00:22:12.200 the course if it is not as you mentioned earlier strictly a left-right divide between these two
00:22:17.720 schools yeah well i i i think that politicians um uh need constantly to draw a contrast between
00:22:27.560 you know these these arrogant politicians you know telling us what a terrible place canada is
00:22:35.080 and how they have the the expertise that's going to fix it and to contrast that with the experience
00:22:41.480 that canadians have every day of what a fine country this is and how pleased they are uh uh to to
00:22:48.600 be here how many of us came from other countries is uh to to be here because this is the best place in
00:22:54.120 the world to be and i think if we keep reminding people compare your experience compare your day-to-day life
00:23:02.920 compare what you see around you and what people say to you about living in canada compare that
00:23:08.840 with what the politicians are telling you and soon you'll realize that the politicians live
00:23:14.520 in a world of abstraction which has nothing to do with the life of canadians and it's the life of
00:23:20.440 canadians and what they love and what they care about and what you know motivates them that should
00:23:26.520 drive the politics of this country i think if we if we were able to communicate that message to
00:23:31.880 people to be proud of being canadian not to be ashamed uh i i think you would find that canadians
00:23:37.880 would vibrate very strongly with that message the book is gardeners versus designers understanding the
00:23:45.160 great fault line in canadian politics the author dr brian lee crowley joining me on the line brian
00:23:51.240 thank you so much fantastic book i really appreciate you taking the time to share a bit about it
00:23:55.480 thanks so much andrew i really enjoyed it thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the
00:24:00.040 program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news