In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, host Russell Brand is joined by comedian Neil Oliver to discuss the legacy media's ongoing advocacy of war, and the gaffes that go with it, including Joe Biden's latest gaffe, the Trump slip-up, and Hillary Clinton and John Barracken's awkward handshake that lasts forever. Plus, a look at what's going on in the rest of the world, and why you should be worried about what's happening in the world. Stay free with Russell Brand. Stay free, you waffling, you little wafflers. You're not going to want to miss this one. - Russell Brand Stay free. If you want to know how propaganda works, then you need to tune in to the old RUMBLE CHAT, where you can watch propaganda in real-time, and get to the bottom of what's being reported by the establishment media. We'll be showing you some of Biden's most awkward moments, and some of Hillary Clinton's awkward handshakes, and we'll show you what's really going on behind-the-scenes at the Democratic National Convention. Enjoy! - Stay Free, You Waffling! - The Rambling Waffler - Neil Oliver Stay Free. (featuring Gareth Roy, Gareth Roy and Gareth Roy) - Stay free! . This episode was brought to you by Vevolution, a production of Gimlet Media. , and edited by . . and produced by and . We'd, produced by . , and edited, produced, produced and produced, edited, and mixed by , produced, and edited and produced and mixed, and produced in London, and produced, by . . . and with the help of . . , and , edited by . , , with the assistance of , including , from , the excellent , is dedicated to the excellent Gareth Roy & , our good friend, , as well as , to which you can be reached at . . Thank you for your support is appreciated. Thank you so much! , we really appreciate all the love, love, support, and all your support and appreciation, and thanks to , thank you for all the support we can t wait to have you out there. and all the good work you all do, and your support, we really really do appreciate it.
00:00:23.000We've got a fantastic take on the legacy media's ongoing advocacy for war Where continually they platform people, pundits I suppose you'd say, with military industrial complex ties without mentioning them.
00:00:39.000They bring people out and go, this person used to work for the Obama administration, he's a diplomat and an expert on bringing about peace.
00:00:46.000Then with investigation you discover they've got ties to Boeing or Raytheon or Lockheed Martin.
00:00:51.000In short, the legacy media are showcasing People with MIC, Military Industrial Complex ties, and you're presenting them as experts.
00:01:00.000No wonder war is escalating when you take the opinions of people that benefit from war and present it as news.
00:01:07.000What is the function of the legacy media?
00:01:36.000For the first 15 minutes, we're going to be on YouTube, OK?
00:01:40.000But then, and this, by the way, is water, not vodka.
00:01:42.000Just to clarify, Highland Springs are not running freely with vodka.
00:01:47.000Unless Putin is pushing his agenda even that far by making the Highlands themselves full of extremely powerful, I would say, ethanol laden drinks.
00:02:16.000There was a fantastic speech that Trump did, beautiful speech, beautiful speech, where he accidentally said that Viktor Orban was the leader of Turkey instead of Hungary.
00:02:25.000Of course it's Erdogan, isn't it, is the leader of Turkey.
00:02:29.000Now MSNBC fall upon this Ravenous and hungry.
00:02:34.000They show their hands with stories like this.
00:03:06.000It's extraordinary to see Hillary again.
00:03:08.000I ain't watched all of it yet, but if you want to watch it, let me know, because we've got a whole host, a wide and maddening variety of options.
00:03:16.000We'll start, though, by showing you MSNBC reporting on Trump.
00:03:20.000We're at 5,000 at the moment on the Rumble stream.
00:03:23.000If we get to 20,000, you can choose what you want to see marched out here.
00:03:27.000Do you want to see Gareth Roy as usual?
00:03:29.000Or do you want to see... I mean, you've seen a dog.
00:03:30.000I don't know what else we can drag out here for you.
00:03:32.000I don't know who we can present to you people.
00:03:34.000Let's have a look at the Trump slip-up, but then let's see how it's reported on.
00:05:00.000Look at how they even say, oh, if Biden did this, they'd be falling upon it, while they themselves never report.
00:05:06.000Like, will they later on on MSNBC cover the moment where Joe Biden does a 20 minute handshake with a scientist that looks like he's about to push her over the edge?
00:05:22.000Maybe the leader of Hungary has visited.
00:05:24.000And if that were Joe Biden, they'd be running wall-to-wall on certain networks with medical experts describing what was happening here and why he needed help and why he should probably step off the stage.
00:05:36.000They're actually sort of meta-commenting on what they themselves do.
00:05:43.000And with the first newscaster, when she talks about autocrats, you know that Joe Biden has personally enabled the sale of weapons to 57% of the world's autocracies.
00:05:57.000You know, when Trump was doing arms deals with Saudi Arabia, Biden said he would make Saudi Arabia a pariah, and yet they sell more arms than Trump sold to Saudi Arabia.
00:06:10.000So, actually, when it comes to it, they can't criticise Trump on policy because, hey, what about the wall?
00:06:27.000He's a fantastic British commentator, Scottish specifically, I think you're going to enjoy seeing him.
00:06:32.000If you have questions for Neil, post them in the chat right now.
00:06:36.000Let's have a look at Trump's speech and what they don't report on the legacy media.
00:06:40.000We're trying to, as best as we can, give you some kind of balance so we can come together.
00:06:44.000Because believe you me, unless we find ways of unifying, unless we find ways of being diverse but unified, decentralized but unified, they've already won.
00:07:26.000He runs it strong with crime and everything else.
00:07:29.000He runs it strong and he doesn't let terrorists into his country.
00:07:33.000They said, what do you recommend for Joe Biden if you could tell him anything?
00:07:37.000I tell him to resign and let Trump become president because nobody ran Let me know, are the liberal mainstream media hypocritical when it comes to their coverage of Trump?
00:07:55.000The most relevant part of the speech wasn't covered.
00:07:58.000This is talking about Trump's personality in relationship to war and Hillary Clinton's claim that Trump's personality in and of itself was a creator of conflict.
00:08:07.000A little bit later, we'll show you Hillary Clinton In an extraordinary showdown with a heckler.
00:08:43.000I was the first one in, I think they say 76 years.
00:08:48.000Now with this Omnicrisis escalating the potential for Iran to become involved in the conflict with yet more funding going to Ukraine, perpetuating the war with Russia, with escalating tensions with China, whose personality is better suited to bringing about peace?
00:09:05.000Do you think it's Trump or do you think it's this guy?
00:09:08.000Now to give Joe Biden his credit, he certainly shake hands well, but It may be a little bit too long.
00:09:15.000Tell me if you think he overdoes it with his handshake and tell me, like, I want you to say now at the point where you think he should have let go of the hand.
00:10:07.000Press the red button if you want to become an AwakendWonder and support our work so that we can continue to develop and grow this movement.
00:10:13.000Here on Stay Free, we point out the problem.
00:10:16.000There, with the AwakendWonder community and locals, we are moving towards solutions.
00:10:21.000Joe Biden, on stage, is still shaking hands!
00:10:24.000For treatments, strengthening our nation's public health, including the fight to end the opioid epidemic.
00:10:30.000And this is where we've now entered an extraordinary time, I believe, where everything has become politicised.
00:10:38.000We got some fantastic reporting for you on excess deaths, which I can't talk about while we're still on YouTube.
00:10:44.000Some revelatory stuff that if you were someone that was sceptical around the pandemic and the way that it was being handled, you are going to be verified.
00:10:52.000You are going to be given the data you require to seal this conversation once And for all.
00:10:58.000But I feel that Covid and vaccines were politicised from the beginning.
00:11:02.000Do you think that it was science that determined the behaviour during lockdown and the policy during lockdown?
00:11:10.000Press P if you think that it was politics.
00:11:13.000Have a look at this from our man Biden, claiming that it was science.
00:11:18.000No, starting on day one, in the middle of the pandemic, we vaccinated a nation The greatest operational effort ever undertaken by this country.
00:11:38.000It was highly political in the end, wasn't it?
00:11:40.000I feel that people were getting boosters for political reasons.
00:11:43.000I'm still on YouTube, so let's be careful.
00:11:44.000People were wearing masks for political reasons because the science tells a very different story.
00:11:50.000Whether it's natural immunity, whether it's the lack of clinical trials on transplants, I've just got to be careful because we're on YouTube.
00:11:57.000I can't say everything I want to say on this platform.
00:12:41.000The WHO are on the very precipice of being able to impose a global treaty that will mean your country, if it's a member of the WHO, will have to give 5% of its health budget to the WHO And that your country will have to obey their legislation when it comes to masks, lockdowns, vaccines in the event, and some would say the inevitable event, of another pandemic.
00:13:06.000Here is the WHO Director General complaining that the spread of misinformation undermines faith in our institutions.
00:13:13.000But what's really undermining the faith in institutions?
00:13:16.000Is it misinformation or is it corruption?
00:13:23.000We saw a lack of coordination between nations and between health actors and the politicization of science and the undermining of faith in our institutions from the spread of misinformation.
00:13:42.000Whether it's in the Rumble chat right now or in the Awakened Wonder Locals chat, there's naught but the letter C raining down endlessly.
00:13:51.000What vitamin you need, though, is vitamin D, not C, although, you know, that would perhaps be a little too scientific for the WHO.
00:13:59.000How are you feeling about this WHO treaty?
00:14:02.000Do you want to grant more power to Unelected globalist bodies, yes or no?
00:14:07.000You know where the WHO gets their funding.
00:14:09.000Press Y if you think that the WHO should plan, oh excuse me, I don't know why the word plan came out of my mouth, in the next pandemic, should be able to impose their legislation.
00:14:57.000Let me know in your country, wherever you are in North America, is there any resistance to this treaty?
00:15:03.000Anything been learned from the last few years?
00:15:05.000Now, before we have a look at Hillary Clinton at Columbia University dealing with a protester on the basis of Biden's $100 billion military funding bundle, which is exacerbating, I would argue, death and destruction on an unprecedented scale, let me know what you want to see when we come off YouTube.
00:15:25.000The skyrocketing demand for panic rooms.
00:15:44.000How do you feel about this Hillary Clinton showing match?
00:15:46.000We just started to watch this and let me know too if you want to see, I'm wondering whether we should go straight to Neil Oliver or whether or not we should show our here's the news.
00:15:55.000But I'll ask you that in a little second.
00:15:57.000I just want to make sure you guys are in absolute control of what we're doing.
00:16:00.000I would say the Institute of Global Politics, even as a name, tells you a little too much
00:16:13.000What you want is regionalised, decentralised politics, federalism, maximum amount of democracy, not an elite establishment march, decentralising power and introducing authoritarianism wherever possible by introducing crisis wherever possible so people are in a total state of fear and dread and unable to think straight.
00:16:31.000I'm not sorry. You sit down and we're gonna let other people talk.
00:16:46.000A leading civil rights organizer This is a clearly warmongering speech.
00:16:53.000President Joe Biden is calling for $100 billion of funding for Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine, and we're supposed to just bundle these together and pretend like we're going to rush to World War III, and we're all just going to let Hillary Rodham Clinton sit here.
00:17:40.000P for protester, H for Hillary in the chat.
00:17:44.000And do you remember being given a vote on how to escalate and fund the military-industrial complex and their clear agenda?
00:17:52.000P if you were a protester, H if you were Hillary.
00:18:10.000There is so much pee in the chat that the Democrats will tell you that it's raining down on Donald Trump from a Russian sex worker and try and create a hoax out of it!
00:18:21.000You are disrupting everybody else's opportunity to speak.
00:20:45.000Oh no, you're not getting away with that!
00:20:49.000Team America, though some of us do like actually America as a matter of fact and our ability to have ongoing bombing raids over... And some of us, every person on this stage... You have to stop right now.
00:21:08.000Will you please just let us discuss Uganda?
00:21:10.000Every person on this stage has risked their life, their income, their reputation.
00:21:18.000Will you please just let us discuss Uganda?
00:21:21.000I mean, Uganda is an interesting nation, but plainly, this is not the way the conversation's going.
00:22:03.000OK, listen, you lot want to see the myocarditis clip.
00:22:06.000Of course you want to see the myocarditis clip.
00:22:09.000We're going to have to leave YouTube to do that.
00:22:12.000And straight after that, we're going to talk to our dear, beloved friend, Neil Oliver, who's a fantastic pundit, truth teller.
00:22:19.000He's got some fantastic perspectives that you are going to want to hear.
00:22:22.000So if you're watching this on YouTube right now, there's a link In fact, that young man, we should find that guy because he would love this video and I don't think he'll be shouting throughout here because I agree.
00:23:04.000We're gone, guys, see you later, YouTube.
00:23:06.000We have to wait a while, because if I accidentally say something that WHO wouldn't like, we get in a lot of trouble, so get over here right now.
00:23:14.000We're gonna talk about Dr. Drew, discussing recent American Heart Association journal reports, 50% of young men with myocarditis after jab had permanent, Can I say it yet?
00:23:41.000And the problem is that we're waging war around the world.
00:23:44.000We're waging war against one another when if we were smart, Just for a second!
00:23:50.000We would recognize we have more in common with one another than we do with the establishment elites that pull the strings, guide, govern, and control us.
00:24:01.000Okay, let's have a look at Dr. Drew on myocarditis, which apparently is a side effect of a certain little very popular injection that had a good PR campaign not long ago.
00:24:12.000They saved lives in the Middle East and in this country safe rooms are now becoming popular.
00:24:58.000That means that we don't know what percentage are going to be disabled by this as they get older, are going to develop heart failure, or are going to need cardiac transplants, some of them.
00:25:26.000And I think, put your legal head on for a second, that universities are going to be in big trouble for having mandated young people to get that vaccine.
00:25:33.000Because people are going to get sick and they're going to have long-term consequences and they should sue those schools for having forced them to take a medical intervention.
00:25:40.000There you go, just another aspect of this unfolding drama that seems to lead more and more to censorship and centralized control.
00:25:50.000Hey guys, let's do a post right now on X and let people there know that Neil Oliver from GB News is about to join us.
00:25:57.000And the first question I want to ask Neil is this.
00:26:01.000Is the crisis that we're confronting so big that we can't even face it?
00:26:08.000Let them know on X. Give them a still of the two of us together.
00:26:11.000And those of you that are watching us now in Rumble or in our locals community, please welcome from GB News, my new friend and potential sort of doppelganger cousin in a pastoral wonderland, Neil Oliver.
00:26:39.000Yeah, well, what it is, Russell, as we're at a point of crisis.
00:26:42.000You've got a lovely little in Scottish accent.
00:26:44.000Neil, mate, can you tell us, why do you think people are unable to appropriately respond to what seems to be a kind of omnicrisis, an all immersive, total surrounding Nightmare.
00:27:02.000I think, in essence, it's too big for a lot of people to contemplate.
00:27:07.000I think to embrace the scale of the problem involves people being prepared to set aside the way they've perceived the world, the way they've understood the relationship with the state, the way they've understood the role of science and the obligations that the institutions have towards us, that symbiotic relationship that's supposed to be there.
00:27:31.000And because it's too much, many, many people who have a great deal of a sense of self invested in, you know, that they believe that they understand, they believe they've read enough, they believe they're in control of the facts and the data, and to contemplate that they might have had it wrong, that they might have been duped, fooled, tricked.
00:27:51.000is too much and you know there's there are well there's historical not exactly historical precedent but when it came to uh when the when the ships of the of europe were encountering the new world and it's partly apocryphal but the story goes that when say columbus's ships appeared in the americas or when captain cook's endeavor arrived in australia there were there are various stories that circulate that the the indigenous people didn't even look up At the arrival of these enormous ships.
00:28:22.000Now, it all comes really from a diary entry by Joseph Banks, probably Cook's botanist.
00:28:28.000But nonetheless, the idea that's pushed is that it was too much for them to take on, and so they simply pretended that the ships weren't there.
00:28:35.000Now, apocryphal or not, I think it's illustrative Of the idea that sometimes something is too big for people to be willing to comprehend it.
00:28:44.000And I think perhaps counter to the way you might think, it's the cleverest people, the people who consider themselves the most educated and the most experienced and the wisest, that struggle to allow for the possibility that they might have to rethink their understanding of society, even of reality.
00:29:01.000Yes, it's an incredible invitation and a terrifying one to have a personal awakening induced of that scale, Neil.
00:29:11.000And I love your use of that, albeit potentially apocryphal tale, that what's appearing on the horizon of our life is so inconceivably large, so extraordinary and represents such a disruption.
00:29:24.000Now, unless you're a sort of a cynical and sceptical person, and I know many of our awakened wonders and many of our friends in the Rumble Chat are, You know, my default position towards authority, Neil, is I don't trust authority.
00:29:36.000That meant that, for a while, I was considered sort of a left-wing person, because I don't trust authority and my natural alliances used to be on the left.
00:29:44.000It seems now that a lot of people think I'm a conspiracy theorist or a right-wing, but really, my position hasn't changed.
00:29:51.000Now, I had a conversation with Jordan Peterson the other day, which will be available on Locals in a couple of days, actually, and you'll love it.
00:29:58.000And I talked about, you know, this is obviously a very well-worn idea, Um, the idea that in a secular or post-religious order, the role of God or the organizing principle is taken by the state.
00:30:12.000So to sort of disavow the state becomes a kind of heresy.
00:30:16.000Earlier we showed a clip where we talked about the politicization of COVID, wearing masks, being a badge of honor, getting booster shots, all Almost like some kind of pharmaceutical communion, like some ongoing doubling down on your allegiance to a particular ideology.
00:30:33.000Do you think that part of the reason people can't have a real reckoning around the pandemic era and what it has revealed, authoritarianism, a desire for surveillance, a tendency towards censorship, a plain Do you think it's because a kind of religious sense has been grafted onto the public political consciousness, Neil?
00:30:59.000I think experience of looking back at the last few hundred years seems to suggest that in doing away with God, in doing away with religiosity and ridiculing and setting aside faith in the West, has not been helpful.
00:31:20.000And I think it's demonstrable by the fact that Into the space left behind by religion is pulled some other zombie, parasitic replacement for faith in the transcendent.
00:31:36.000You know, I think it's undeniable that many people, perhaps most people, have a sense of the transcendent, however they might express it.
00:31:44.000You know, the thirst that from the soul doth rise, doth ask a drink divine, said the poet.
00:31:49.000And where true religion is taken away, something else takes its place.
00:31:52.000And I think we saw during the Covid debacle, I think we saw a religiosity around the way all of it was pushed.
00:32:00.000And so you had a dress code, you had people having to wear face masks because that was part of the appearance that enabled people to demonstrate that they were good people.
00:32:11.000I am wearing a mask because I am one of the good guys.
00:32:14.000When it came to the products that were pushed as vaccines, it was almost like taking communion.
00:32:21.000It was like an ersatz, Eucharist, where people didn't just take the vaccine, they wanted to be seen to take those products.
00:32:29.000And so they were posting pictures of themselves receiving the injection and showing their vaccination cards and all of the rest of it.
00:32:35.000There were good scientists and bad scientists, which is a replacement for the priests and the heretics, But there was undoubtedly a religiosity about it, and I think it demonstrated that in the absence of faith, in the absence of religion, something else, something less worthy and something ultimately less helpful gets pulled into the void.
00:32:57.000It seems to me at least significant that one component of it is an ongoing demonstration of allegiance.
00:33:04.000I've noted with interest this rising fear in our culture.
00:33:09.000Fear, anger, desire, primal emotions, a tendency to throw onto the other the kind of shadow qualities of every individual.
00:33:20.000It's extraordinary to see a kind of what seems to be a sort of a scent of evil.
00:33:27.000It appears too that the kind of comfortable idea that our culture, the sort of we of the West, are the good guys, seems to be under question.
00:33:38.000Neil, I understand that, you know, that you and I share an opinion that potentially even history itself has been mistold.
00:33:46.000Even recent events, This might seem a little highfalutin and even a little fudge, but because of the potential that at the end of the Second World War significant numbers of Nazi scientists took roles within NASA, for example, is it possible that somehow there is a kind of a ghost of evil, transcendent of nation, moving from territory to territory?
00:34:09.000I mean, is this what globalism really is?
00:34:12.000Corporate elites Alliances that transcend either religion, corporate affiliation, national affiliation, and other examples of that through history are kind of... I don't want to get into the realm of conspiracy theory, certainly not on the basis of anything other than economic interests and interests of dominion, but do you feel that that's a possibility?
00:34:36.000That we are no longer on the side of righteousness, potentially because we're being marshaled by forces that are I have over the last few years begun to open myself up to the possibility that
00:34:52.000Well, as you say, since perhaps the end of the Second World War.
00:34:55.000I think if we were, if the West were the good guys, I've begun to question whether or not we still are.
00:35:04.000And I think possibly our goodness began to wane in the years following the end of the Second World War.
00:35:10.000I think to some extent it might have been because it was an open goal.
00:35:13.000You know, America in particular, but the West, had an opportunity to be predominant.
00:35:19.000And I think there was a temptation that came with that to exploit opportunities to make money.
00:35:24.000I think the rest of the 20th century and the prosecution of one war after another,
00:35:29.000I think when I look at it now, I contemplate the possibility that it was increasingly
00:35:33.000because it was the opportunity for profit that was driving a lot of that.
00:35:38.000We talk all the time about the military-industrial complex.
00:35:43.000I've even begun to wonder at the extent to which we're told the truth about exactly who won the war and how.
00:35:52.000You know, you talk about Operation Paperclip when the Americans uplifted a lot of Nazi scientists and transplanted them into the United States, and a lot of those people took up positions of influence in esteemed universities and other places of influence.
00:36:09.000I'm minded of that, you know, the line from The Usual Suspects, the thing about, you know, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was persuading the world he didn't exist.
00:36:16.000I do wonder at the extent to which some of the evil that was there in the 30s and the 40s just managed to disappear out of sight without actually being expunged or cleared away once and for all.
00:36:29.000I think to some extent it has been there ever since.
00:36:34.000But it's part of that Coming to terms with the possibility that you might have to re-engineer your understanding of the world around you is to contemplate that, you know, perhaps that notion that the West, the United States, are and have always been the good guys.
00:36:52.000I think that's definitely under question now and it's very uncomfortable.
00:36:57.000I share the discomfort in having to go through that and once again I say I think that's why so many people won't even begin to take one step onto that kind of staircase of disbelief and begin to contemplate the possibility that the way they've understood and perceived the world might need a radical rethink.
00:37:14.000Yeah, because that staircase of disbelief, I wonder if it's an ascendancy like Ezekiel or a descent like the dude with the harp, you know, who goes Orpheus.
00:37:27.000You know, because what I feel, Neil, is that in a way we have to start considering a completely different understanding of reality.
00:37:38.000Seems that individualism Rationalism, materialism, progressivism.
00:37:45.000And I don't actually just mean cultural progressivism in terms of different forms of identity.
00:37:50.000I mean the idea that there is a teleology for humanity.
00:37:55.000That we are wealthier than our grandparents and you've got this new gadgetry.
00:38:01.000It seems to me that something is being obscured from us.
00:38:10.000Some hidden mystery that might yet unify us?
00:38:14.000Is it as simple as the fact that we've become detached from our anthropological conditions as creatures that might live harmonised in localised tribes rather than gathered together corralled in herds of 30 million, 300 million, 60 million with a centralised Dictatorial authoritarian government dispatching medicines and fake news and keeping us dumb and sugared up and screen-fed and fat.
00:38:44.000You know, do you feel sometimes that there needs to be a philosophical shift that's difficult, obviously, to contemplate from within the limited position we now find ourselves?
00:38:55.000Because this ascent or descent that you're referring to He said, you know, how do we, you know, how does the unenlightened mind become enlightened, Neil?
00:39:06.000I think, to some extent, I think part of the problem is that as a species, I think we are forgetful and I think we have a tendency to a kind of, you know, cultural Alzheimer's.
00:39:19.000I don't think our collective memory goes back very far, you know, maybe just a few generations.
00:39:26.000And beyond that, we're dependent upon the history books or the accounts of history.
00:39:30.000And, you know, the whole, all the caveats about history being written by the victors always applies there.
00:39:36.000And so I think we're a forgetful species.
00:39:39.000You know, Henri Bergson, the philosopher, said it's the function of the brain to enable us not to remember, but to forget.
00:39:45.000I think we are always in the process as individuals and collectively of forgetting what actually happened.
00:39:51.000And so I think we need periodically to be reminded or to remind each other of what really matters and when you look back through history you can see you can note the appearance time and time again of particularly bright lights who sought one way or another to say the same thing you know and I'm talking here about people like Jesus Christ or about the Buddha or even about even about someone like Mahatma Gandhi who tended to stress the importance the inviolability of the individual
00:40:23.000And that ultimately everything comes back to us having faith in ourselves as individuals.
00:40:30.000And part of that is being prepared to take responsibility for what we each can do and the change that we can each affect.
00:40:44.000And you see society reminding itself of that over and over again.
00:40:49.000You know, in 1215, when Magna Carta was written in England, it wasn't actually coming up with anything new.
00:40:57.000On the contrary, it was restating Ideas and truths that had come from a time immemorial, and it centred on the importance of the individual.
00:41:07.000And that's why it restated the idea that every man from the king down to the to the lowliest commoner was entitled to trial by jury, because a trial by a jury of your peers was regarded as being the way in which the guilt or innocence of an individual.
00:41:25.000That wasn't the only thing being tested.
00:41:30.000And it's why what was enshrined in trial by jury in Magna Carta was that it ultimately came down to the individual.
00:41:37.000So that rather than majority verdicts in the original juries, if you had someone being tried and let's say 11 of the 12 said guilty, but one man, one person said not guilty, then the judgment of that jury was not guilty.
00:41:54.000So that it enshrined in the importance of trial by jury that ultimately it was the it was the conscience of the individual that carried the weight.
00:42:04.000Now, that's a fundamentally important concept.
00:42:07.000You see it again in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence in the United States.
00:42:14.000It's careful, the founding fathers were careful once again to remind themselves and the society they were trying to build that it's not about the majority necessarily.
00:42:25.000Ultimately, it's about the individual conscience.
00:42:29.000It's the thinking individual that makes all the difference.
00:42:33.000That's why there is a danger, actually, in allowing always for a majority verdict or waiting for a democratic decision, as we've been tricked as a population into a consensus of false belief that the majority is always right.
00:42:49.000Because if the last three years have shown us anything at all, it's that on the contrary, it's often, possibly always, a minority, a determined, honest, passionate minority that is actually able to stand in the face of the majority and say, this is wrong.
00:44:04.000Sometimes I think, I love Jesus Christ, but I sometimes think it is the utility of Christianity that allowed its ascendancy, particularly, you know, in a post-Constantine sense when it became the religion of the state, shall we say, of the Empire.
00:44:23.000And perhaps a comparable thing might be true of democracy.
00:44:27.000That whilst in a sense, when organizing a small community, what principles are available to you?
00:44:34.000Benign dictatorship, wise elders, elders that are in a position of service
00:44:40.000that lead through sacrifice and selflessness.
00:44:43.000That can of course take place in a decentralized and localized model that would certainly be more in tune
00:44:50.000with how we live for tens of thousands of years and wow, perhaps a hell of a lot longer
00:44:55.000if some commentators and let's say radical historians is to be believed.
00:45:01.000And when it comes to democracy, as with Christianity, I wonder if it somehow serves as an edifice behind which corruption can operate, i.e.
00:45:10.000what kind of democracy can you have in a centralised nation of 300 million people?
00:45:17.000As we've seen in the last few election cycles in America, you've just got 50% or just under of the population agitated and infuriated.
00:45:27.000It seems like the process of centralisation itself, which is of course entirely at odds and absolutely opposite to the power of the individual, is a big part of the problem.
00:45:38.000I wonder if you consider, Neil, that democracy is anything but democratic.
00:45:45.000It's a kind of I say again, the powers that be have managed to generate a consensus of false belief.
00:45:59.000We think we understand what democracy is, but it's been reduced to us believing that it's a vote, a single vote, every four or five years.
00:46:11.000And that is actually, it's almost the antithesis of democracy.
00:46:15.000And I say again, it comes back to acknowledging and respecting the power of the individual, the one in the face of the many.
00:46:27.000You know, this idea that the majority has to be believed and that the majority has to get its way every time can also be quite pernicious.
00:46:39.000And that's why, you know, I think it is worth repeating that, you know, the idea for many people, the idea of trial by jury, it sounds quite Esoteric or a side issue in a way because of the way we've been taught to think of jury trial.
00:46:55.000The fact remains that 90 odd percent of jury trials now are by magistrates court.
00:47:04.000And even where they are, a majority verdict now is taken as being the decision of the jury.
00:47:11.000But in its original It was always deferring to the individual.
00:47:17.000So as I say, one against eleven would still have been the vote that carried for that jury.
00:47:22.000And it's because it emphasises and stresses that ultimately it's individual conscience that makes all of the difference.
00:47:31.000When you talk about the way in which Christianity and it becoming an edifice behind which corruption might hide, I would say that sadly, for hundreds of years, I think, Christ's Christianity has been negated and traduced in many ways.
00:47:49.000I think what is often offered up as Christianity now would not really be what Jesus Christ meant when he preached, say, the Sermon on the Mount.
00:48:02.000How much of that do we actually see around us right now?
00:48:06.000You know, when so much of what we're hearing coming out of when people are commenting on the Middle East is about the justification for vengeance, an escalation of the violence, you know, a prioritising of one group's children over another.
00:48:22.000You know, how much of that sits comfortably, you know, with the kind of language that's there enshrined in the Sermon on the Mount, you know, about, you know, blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy and blessed are the peacekeepers, you know, and blessed are those who stand up for righteousness for righteousness' sake.
00:48:39.000You know, you're not really seeing a lot of that enacted around us at the moment, and it's greatly to our loss.
00:48:46.000You know, I think a lot of people out there who are supposed faith leaders for the Christian faith, the best thing they could do would be to convert to Christianity, you know, and actually begin to think again about what Christianity actually means.
00:49:04.000But yes, I think the most important thing I would say is that people feel powerless, and understandably so, but the way in which you can begin to turn that back or push back against that feeling of hopelessness is to respect and remember the power that each of us has as individuals, and that it comes with a great deal of personal responsibility.
00:49:29.000And as well as a lot of people maybe not wanting to contemplate the enormity of the problem that we face, turning their backs on it rather than confront it, I think a lot of people also prefer not to contemplate the responsibility of being grown up Independent individuals who take responsibility for their actions.
00:49:51.000That's curious that you equate that to a kind of infantilisation, that an unwillingness to take that first step onto the staircase, an inability to see the galleon of corruption on the horizon, might be because we have Had our personal autonomy reduced to the degree where we are treated like, and to a degree even feel like, children?
00:50:16.000The amount of parentalism that you might note in what passes as neoliberal democratic discourse these days, I'm referring to some of the clips we watched earlier of Hillary Clinton being confronted by a protester who was saying, you know, like, you're advocating for escalating war and violence and ultimately death, and the kind of Haughty, supercilious, condemnatory tones that are deployed reveal that the role of the populace, the populare, is now not a participant in an awakened community in which your value as an individual and your contribution to the community and your responsibility are all activated values.
00:50:58.000You are essentially a consumer I envisage sometimes, Neil, a kind of like a sort of a tube of glucose going up one nostril, a kind of a drip filled with Pfizer's latest product going into the arm.
00:51:25.000Have we become like lambs to the slaughter, Neil?
00:51:28.000Unable to take the kind of individual responsibility that's clearly required.
00:51:34.000There's a really good book that I refer to all the time.
00:51:36.000It's Eric Hoffer's True Believer, written in the 1950s.
00:51:44.000He had a hard physical life, Eric Hoffer, before he became a writer.
00:51:48.000He'd been around the block and he'd seen some stuff.
00:51:52.000He pointed out that, in truth, freedom is more than a lot of people actually want.
00:52:01.000In reality, what a lot of people want, even if the thought wouldn't necessarily crystallise as clearly, and they might not say it out loud even if it did, is that what they want is freedom from freedom.
00:52:14.000That many, many people are happier in reality being told what to do.
00:52:18.000You know, you talk about an infantilising and conversely there's a desire to look to a leader and to look to someone, something paternal or maternal, to take away that personal responsibility and just tell you what to do.
00:52:34.000A lot of people have an instinct to be led.
00:52:39.000And they really just want freedom from freedom, because freedom can be an onerous responsibility.
00:52:47.000And yes, we tell each other that we live in a materialist society or a consumerist society, and we've also given each other, I would say, a completely false idea of what happiness is.
00:53:04.000You know, people have increasingly been led to believe that happiness is abundance.
00:53:09.000You know, some is good, more is better, and too much is just right.
00:53:13.000That the more stuff you can acquire, the more food you can eat, the more white goods you can have, the more mobile phones, the more cars, and all of the rest of it is the route to happiness.
00:53:24.000And that is the antithesis of happiness, really.
00:53:28.000You know, so many people out there want medicated, they want to be given a pill to take away their dissatisfaction and they tell themselves that they're depressed and that they need all sorts of medical help because they're not happy.
00:53:44.000And it's because we've been miseducated about what happiness actually is.
00:53:49.000You know, and that's a really serious consideration.
00:53:52.000You know, I would say that happiness should really be something that we notice because it stands out in comparison to the rest of the texture of daily life that comes with ups and downs and sadness and challenge and adversity and all of the rest of it.
00:54:06.000And the moments when the sun unexpectedly or not breaks through the clouds, that's happiness.
00:54:12.000And that's how you can appreciate being happy, but it's only one of the textures of being human and alive.
00:54:18.000And you know, Francis Hutcheson, the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University during the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1750s and 60s, and he preached that That happiness was not just some random gift from God.
00:54:31.000It didn't fall from heaven-like manna onto the fortunate.
00:54:34.000On the contrary, it was to be worked for.
00:54:37.000He said that by dedicating all of your strength and all of your effort to making those around you happier, That the collateral benefit that you would enjoy would be that you would experience happiness by making, by working so hard to make other people happy.
00:54:52.000And, you know, one of his students was John Witherspoon, who was invited eventually to become the second president of what is Princeton University.
00:55:02.000And he was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, and there's room for the possibility that the line about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness came from John Witherspoon's Education at the Hands of Francis Hutchison.
00:55:20.000And once you embrace that idea, that happiness is actually to be pursued actively with every fibre of your being, in the form of working for other people's improvement, and the improvement of other people's circumstances, that that's what makes you happy.
00:55:39.000Then that turns on its head the materialist, consumerist idea of what it is to be happy.
00:55:46.000You know, we've been given a very one-dimensional, shallow to the point of almost being invisible and irrelevant, an idea of happiness.
00:55:58.000You know, happiness is a product of something much richer that it takes in the rest of human experience.
00:56:04.000Neil, I love your analysis that the pursuit of happiness rather than the destination of happiness might have been the key part of that valuable enshrined idiom and part of deep American history and culture.
00:56:21.000It's like being in a magnesium bath of wisdom.
00:56:24.000I can only imagine how lovely it would be to actually be in a magnesium bath of wisdom With you while you espouse this gentle lilting philosophy.
00:56:33.000Neil, it's so kind of you to have joined us today.
00:56:48.000And his new book, we'll post a link to this, Hauntings.
00:56:51.000A book of ghosts and where I find them across 25 eerie British locations is out now and I'm going to work my way through those 25 locations.
00:57:00.000Neil, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:57:01.000I hope we get another opportunity to speak again soon because it's, for me, extremely soothing.
00:57:24.000Hey, on tomorrow's show, we're going to be joined by presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy
00:57:30.000for a fantastic conversation in which he reveals sort of how he's deeply feeling about this race,
00:57:37.000how it's going, about the sort of propagandist forces infiltrating the Republican system,
00:57:42.000about how campaign finance is in the--
00:57:45.000If you want to be a member of our AwakendWonder community, you get access to early interviews like the one with Vivek and the one with Jordan Peterson that's going to take the top of your head, clean off and fill your mind with all sorts of extraordinary questions from archetypes to global symbols.
00:58:08.000It's well worth joining locals just to get that in advance as well as being part of the Beautiful conversation with the likes of Victoria Rose and Claude and Janice Sixx and Miles Driver, a whole beautiful gang.
00:58:20.000If you want to become an Awakened Wonder, if you're interested in moving from criticizing the problem, attacking the establishment and its many evident and obvious flaws, to creating new communities, new systems, finding ways where people that are so opposed to one another that it might cause war can find things to agree on, Find ways to love one another and unite.
00:58:40.000Become an awakened wonder right now, like Flying Amazons.
00:58:44.000Flying Amazons, they've taken the first step on the ascendancy staircase like Ezekiel.
00:58:50.000Georgia May One, Anita B Deep, Selvaggio, they're all members of our community now.
00:58:57.000As you know, the ongoing global conflicts continue to escalate and in particular the conflagration between Israel and Palestine is devastating, particularly for people that are personally involved, but for all humanity.
00:59:13.000How would you feel if you were to discover that on legacy media you're being given apparently Expert opinion by people who have a vested interest in increasing the sales of weapons.
00:59:26.000Increasingly, MSNBC, CNN and the like bring out people with strong financial ties to Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin and ask them, should we continue to have wars?
00:59:37.000Should we continue to kill each other?