In this episode, Russell Brand sits down with Martin Goury, author of The Revolt of the Public and The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, to discuss his new book and how he came to understand the dynamics of power in the modern world. They discuss how the media landscape has changed in the post-internet age, and why the relationship between centralised authority and the public has shifted in a way that hasn t been seen before. They also discuss how social media plays a role in shaping our understanding of power dynamics, and the role it plays in shaping the way we think about them. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. Additional editing was done by Annie-Rose Strasser. The show was mixed by Matthew Boll. It was produced by Matt Knost and Alex Blumberg. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. Additional music was provided by Joseph McDade and Mark Phillips, with additional mixing and mastering by Matthew Keyser. Music in this episode was written, produced, and mixed by Daniel Borenstein and Matthew Boll, and additional engineering by Matt Newell. Stay Free with Russell Brand is a production of Gimlet Media and is produced by Daniel Newell, and produced by Rachel Ward, with assistance from Matthew Bolland, and Rachel Ward. of the excellent production team at The New York Public Library for the National Museum of American Modernism and the Center for American History, New York City, and The Center for Creative Commons and the New York Magazine, and New York University Press, and Harvard University Press. You can expect weekly episodes of Stay Free With Russell Brand on Mondays, Wednesdays at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time, Wednesday nights at 9/5, Thursday nights at 7/6th and Saturday nights at 8/5/9/7/9, and on Saturday nights @ 9/6/9th/10/day at 5/7th/Saturday nights at 3/19th/Day, and on Tuesday nights at 6/6 Join us on Rumble, Subscribe to stay free with Stay Free in the future? by becoming a Friend of the Future? by clicking here. Thanks for listening to Stay Free? and Good Morning by Russell Brand? , Good Morning, by Riley and Good Day, by Good Day by Good Morning? by , and Good Luck?
00:00:44.000so In this video, you're going to see the King Crab.
00:01:13.000In this video, you're going to see the future.
00:01:24.000Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand, an in-depth conversation with free thinkers who awaken us to the glorious world around us.
00:01:31.000Previously I've spoken to Rick Rubin, Tim Robbins, Vandana Shiva, Maya, Graham Hancock.
00:01:36.000These are all available right now on Rumble or by downloading the podcast.
00:01:40.000You can do that using the link in the description.
00:01:42.000Joining me for this episode is Martin Goury, a former CIA analyst and author.
00:01:47.000He's done a great deal of research into power and the transformation of the media environment and how that's shaped the entire discourse of the modern world.
00:01:55.000He's the author of The Revolt of the Public and The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.
00:02:00.000I think Martin Goury, from his unique position as a former CIA insider, has understood the dynamics of contemporary power better than almost anyone else maybe.
00:02:10.000Someone like Adam Curtis is close to understanding how fundamental the changes we're currently experiencing are.
00:02:16.000The reason that previous terminology is redundant, the most obvious example being left versus right.
00:02:22.000Why don't these terms make sense anymore?
00:02:24.000Why is it that there feels like an attempt to assert power in unprecedented ways?
00:02:29.000Why are we experiencing more censorship, more calls for people to carry digital ID?
00:02:34.000Why is authoritarianism being masked, particularly in liberal clothing?
00:02:39.000Martin, thank you so much for joining me on Stay Free.
00:02:41.000Martin Goury, I think, has a unique take on this, and I think that from his work in this book,
00:02:46.000we can get a different understanding on why our world is the way it is today.
00:02:51.000I'm extremely excited about this interview.
00:03:04.000This is a pretty unique interview for me.
00:03:07.000I've actually read the book, book which is a rare achievement.
00:03:13.000That's pretty unique for me too that people have read the book when they interview me.
00:03:17.000Yes, I make a point of going into my interviews based purely on trust, blind faith, ignorance, but today I'm actually prepared and the reason I'm prepared is because we were speaking to Michael Schellenberger and he mentioned your name in your book.
00:03:35.000Rick Rubin, the legendary hip-hop producer, came on the show a little while ago and he sent me a diagnostic tool, a breakdown of why the relationship between centralised authority and the public has shifted in the post-internet age.
00:03:54.000it offered a series of suggestions of how this would likely play out.
00:03:59.000I was astonished that something that sounded so avant-garde and anti-establishment
00:04:05.000had been written by a man who had worked at the establishment's heart,
00:04:10.000and so that our audience knows this, you are a former CIA operative.
00:04:14.000Can you tell me how you have come to this position?
00:04:19.000Please tell us a little bit about your experience with the CIA.
00:04:22.000Please can you even touch upon the way that it seems that the deep state is embedded within social media now.
00:04:27.000One of the revelations of the Twitter files and we'll get into the sort of broader ideas discussed in your book and your work elsewhere about how even our terminology around left and right and our understanding of power dynamics is breaking down.
00:04:41.000But first I'd love to get a little biographical understanding of how you've come from being a CIA operative To being what appears to me to be an anti-establishment author, even though I know there are things about the establishment that you revere and respect.
00:04:54.000Yeah, first of all, to clarify, I was not a CAA operative.
00:04:58.000I was a, which I'm not sure what that means, honestly, but it sounds like I'm going around with a gun in my hand and sexy ladies on my arm.
00:07:34.000So here I was looking at this along with my my compadres in CIA and The first thought we had was, okay, what's authoritative in this massive?
00:08:22.000So The information that was flooding the system, you could see behind that tidal wave as different countries digitized at different rates, ever increasing levels of
00:08:56.000And I'm not sure we were listened to as properly as we should have been.
00:09:00.000So when I left the government, my little mission to myself was, what would you have done if you had been in there and you were to do the analysis of this phenomenon and explain why these changes are happening in terms of the information environment?
00:09:18.000And by then, you know, because we were told always was, you know, the joke was, okay, you have these bloggers.
00:09:27.000So secret police comes knocking on their door.
00:09:32.000I mean, I must have heard that joke 10 times.
00:09:34.000So okay, no, so he didn't couldn't hit them with a laptop.
00:09:36.000So the fact was, if you look at a country like Egypt, the bloggers had like a little you know, protests there. And it was a charade. These were
00:09:47.000all educated people. They didn't know what they're doing. About 20 people, there were like 20
00:09:50.000cops for every blogger. After I left government, we got the Arab Spring. And the Arab Spring was
00:09:57.000like the initial detonation of this massive global explosion that continued for at least 10
00:10:02.000years and is still going on in many ways of the public just kind of spilling out on the streets and
00:10:07.000changing the environment in ways that country after country after country is very characteristic.
00:10:14.000In other words, they are very similar traits of how the country behave, the
00:10:33.000Or Hong Kong, the pro-democracy protesters there, you can see these very clear characteristics.
00:10:42.000And the book is essentially an attempt to reconcile the fact that this new actor in
00:10:47.000the political stage, the public, is now possibly the protagonist, possibly a protester.
00:10:53.000Certainly it is one of the strongest forces that all political alignments have to deal with, and that there is a conflict from the people who have been established in the old 20th century institutions.
00:11:08.000That word has become so worn down, right?
00:11:11.000So my interpretation of what an elite is, and there are clear definitions of who the public is and who the elites are in the book, We can go over those if you want to.
00:11:20.000But the elites, to be brief, are people who manage the great institutions that make modern life possible.
00:11:35.000All the way along, all these institutions, much like the public has a characteristic way of being, all these institutions have a very characteristic 20th century way of being.
00:11:46.000they are credentialed. You win your way there by going to school, knowing people,
00:11:53.000there's a great deal of status is invested. So you have these elites who have this set
00:12:00.000of very hierarchical values colliding with this public that is network on the internet.
00:12:05.000And it's very asymmetrical, very asymmetrical.
00:12:09.000And if you want a quick rundown of, you know, like for the first 10 years of 2011, when Arab Spring broke out till the pandemic, the public was in the ascendant.
00:12:24.000Let me tell you, if you follow the sales of my book, the elites never picked up that it was even a situation until Brexit, first of all, but then Trump.
00:12:35.000Trump was the gigantic detonation that woke up the elites.
00:12:39.000So between 2016 and 2020, the elites embarked on what you might consider a reaction, kind of like the reactionary movement that was imposed on Europe after the fall of the French Revolution and Napoleon.
00:12:55.000They want to go back to the 20th century.
00:12:58.000They want to go back to, you know, when we say things, you have to listen to us.
00:13:02.000And if you say things that are different, it's disinformation.
00:13:05.000And I think with the pandemic, The elites gained the upper hand.
00:13:16.000The elite modality is, we are the experts, we know, you should listen to us, you should never listen to anybody else.
00:13:23.000That made sense in the 20th century because there was nobody else talking.
00:13:27.000We couldn't even talk back to them, right?
00:13:29.000So the worst you could do was yell at your television set, which I sometimes did, but there was no way to communicate or to put out in public your opinion of these elite players.
00:13:43.000Now, of course, that world is over, but the elites want to clamp down and say, no, no, we are the people who know.
00:13:50.000A pandemic I think even the public wanted the elites to know, please, we're scared, help us.
00:13:57.000And that began a process that spread, if you look at Twitter files, that spread from health to politics.
00:14:06.000Because now the Russians are interfering and you don't want people to vote on false information.
00:14:41.000And it was remarkable for me to see how the entire bureaucracy of the United States, I mean, I was in CIA, and I'll tell you when I was in it, One of the things that was almost like a religion with us was you did not have a political life inside.
00:14:57.000You just did not have a political life.
00:14:59.000You didn't even have a policy life, all right?
00:15:02.000You weren't even supposed to say, this policy of the president is a great thing.
00:15:15.000But you didn't say it's good or bad, right?
00:15:18.000So the idea of all these people from intelligence getting together and putting together a manifesto saying that the idea that there's this laptop from Hunter Biden, this is a Russian manipulation, this is a Russian hack.
00:15:33.000Many things are happening now that has never happened before, that never happened before.
00:15:36.000And I think, I think it's an attempt that the elites trying to in every, every political action triggers that reaction.
00:15:46.000We're in a reactionary moment across the world, but very powerfully in America, I think right now.
00:15:53.000The term public, as you use it, as I understand from your book, is taken from Walter Lippmann's definition as a group that coalesce around a particular issue.
00:16:03.000So the public could be talking about a hockey game or they could be talking about anti-establishment policy.
00:16:10.000It's fascinating to learn that during your time in the CIA, words like therefore and so were extracted from the discourse and you were encouraged simply to deal in That was actually the CIA mandate by law, or at least by regulation.
00:16:32.000That was actually the CIA mandate by law, or at least by regulation.
00:16:37.000CIA is not supposed to be dealing in policy, it deals in facts.
00:16:42.000Well, perhaps one of the many metastasizations that has occurred as a result of this radically
00:16:49.000shifting dynamic that you beautifully articulated as a kind of information tsunami and the evident
00:16:56.000seismic connotations of that is that these agencies have lost perhaps their apolitical
00:17:03.000status and have become instruments of power in a more conventional manner.
00:17:09.000What interests me a great deal, Martin, is the dissolution and evaporation of what seemed to be quite reliable taxonomies even 20 years ago, although there has always been a strand of public discourse that has been the centralised establishment are ultimately one entity, the distinction between left and right is meaningless.
00:17:34.000but now we are seeing a kind of mobilization and a kind of interconnection between those two apparently
00:17:43.000formally polarized worlds that demonstrates that there is no real difference.
00:17:48.000Just examples, recent examples, Bernie Sanders right in on Fox News
00:17:53.000yesterday, Chomsky saying that Trump is one of the only anti-war advocates
00:17:59.000and if what we're seeing as you describe is the redundancy of those terms and you call for the
00:18:06.000introduction of the idea of the center versus the boundary or periphery
00:18:11.000that we are seeing that the establishment is able to assert control
00:18:18.000Even under all of these neologisms, there is still a kind of primal and archetypal resource that we can return to, i.e.
00:18:29.000the palette of emotions that human beings feel.
00:18:32.000And it seems like the pandemic was a great opportunity to utilize fear.
00:18:38.000To assert control when we look at the results of the pandemic, lockdown, introduction of digital ID, crushing of dissent, introduction of government control via the agencies we've discussed into presumed private spaces and the cooperation between spaces that we would never have assumed cooperation would be likely.
00:18:58.000So, in your book, whilst you continually recognise that you ain't claiming to be Nosferatu, it seems that in terms of just information, there are trends that are emerging.
00:19:09.000Do you imagine, Martin, that we are going to see attempts to assert centralised control and ways to advance globalism?
00:19:24.000Given that much of what you said was, I wish I could have written down and said what I was starting to recognise when I was at the CIA, what is it that you're saying now, given that even in the post-Trump, post-Brexit era, we are beginning to see new movements from centralised authority?
00:19:42.000Yeah, I'll give you the sort of slightly negative view and then I'll transition because I think, for example, I'm looking at something very positively right now, which is what you do.
00:19:56.000What concerns me, despite my youthful good looks, I am not a young man, all right?
00:20:03.000I have grandchildren, young grandchildren, and I grew up in an America that was an adventure.
00:20:18.000Many, many weeks and months where I forget that, okay?
00:20:21.000It was never to me, if it was anything, it was an advantage.
00:20:25.000The girls liked it, right, for some mysterious reason.
00:20:27.000So, my entire history, personal history in the United States, and I was not a particularly ambitious person, I mean, This country gave me so many opportunities, and I have had so much fun just being alive as an American.
00:22:28.000Well, yeah, I'm looking at Russell Brand, all right?
00:22:32.000You, and I'll tell you what, I'm looking at Russell Brand, and since this is this weird Zoom thing, I'm looking at me too on the screen, all right?
00:22:40.000And I'm looking at two people who have gotten to where they are by not following the pattern of the 20th century, all right?
00:22:47.000You would never be doing what you're doing right now in the 20th century.
00:22:51.000You just don't, you don't look like Walter Cronkite.
00:22:54.000You don't sound remotely like Walter Cronkite.
00:22:57.000You don't have the background that is necessary.
00:24:20.000You can't use state power or corporate wealth or your control of the mainstream media to drag me in by saying, if you use these words or have these opinions, somehow bad things are going to happen to you.
00:24:37.000That, I don't want my grandchildren to grow up in that America.
00:24:43.000And I don't think centralizing is, to me, I'm not the most brilliant person around, but I can't imagine how that can be done in what is virtually an infinite information sphere.
00:24:54.000I mean, for human purposes, it's infinite.
00:24:59.000You can't put, you know, fact checkers on every little corner of it and make sure that everybody says the right thing.
00:25:06.000In the absence of the potential for controlling it or regulating it meaningfully, it's likely, I would say, that we will see the assertion of unreasonable power and an increase in censorship, an increase in the smearing of dissenting voices.
00:25:22.000And I think that what you're referring to with the utilization of progressivism is an attempt at asserting control with a moral aesthetic rather than a kind of blunt, boot-in-the-face Orwellian feel.
00:25:44.000And it seems that the only, well not the only, a way of neutralizing this threat of ongoing control and censorship is to accept now that there are indeed, curiously given the nature of much of the rhetoric emerging from those circles, there is true diversity of opinion.
00:26:03.000There is a requirement for real democracy that is decentralized.
00:26:08.000Now I know that you have a lot of respect for many of the institutions that Benefit from the ability to implement control, generate and extract profit.
00:26:22.000I'm talking about the corporate and governmental institutions that appear to have aligned during the pandemic period in conjunction with conventional media and indeed, evidently, social media.
00:26:33.000It seems that they have a convergence of interests that is sufficient to negate the necessity for conspiracy.
00:26:44.000In order to oppose that, it seems that a new vision needs to be put forward.
00:26:48.000One of the things you talk about a lot in the book is that the periphery doesn't have an alternative vision.
00:26:53.000When I've talked around these subjects, particularly with Adam Curtis, he said that the Arab Spring was a demonstration for the potential of change and even revolution.
00:27:03.000But when it came to the crunch, they didn't have an alternative idea to implement at the level of government.
00:27:09.000A similar thing could perhaps be said of Podemos and Syriza, although they were, sort of broadly speaking, socialist ideals when it came to their encounter with centralised bureaucracy in the form of the EU, both melted into the kind of centralised and establishment powers that had preceded them.
00:27:25.000What, therefore, do you imagine, based on the information that you have access to, and I understand it's quite a lot and it's growing, do you think needs to be the kind of vision that we present?
00:28:19.000Identity is the orthodoxy of the elites of the establishment, but if you really analyze identity, it's not an ideology.
00:28:25.000It's kind of like a conflict generation machine, a perpetual conflict machine.
00:28:32.000And the public can't oppose It's ideology that we say the working class would have opposed a very clear Marxist ideology in the 19th or 20th century for structural reasons.
00:28:47.000The crowd in Tahrir Square that overthrew Hosni Mubarak was composed of many many many different strands of political opinion all the way from very agnostic
00:29:07.000socialistic types to the Muslim Brotherhood youth.
00:29:12.000The older guys in Muslim Brotherhood stood aloof, but the youth showed up, and in between every other kind of person.
00:29:18.000They were unified, as is the public unified, every time by what they were against.
00:29:24.000And they were against Hosni Mubarak, right?
00:29:27.000But if you had gone into Tahrir Square and said, what should follow Hosni Mubarak, they would start fighting among themselves.
00:29:34.000And the same was true of the, you know, I mentioned Podemos.
00:29:37.000Podemos was a tiny little, you know, subset of the indignados.
00:29:41.000And the initial indignados manifesto said we are apolitical.
00:29:46.000We are not this and we are not that, all right?
00:29:49.000And that's basically where the public has stood, like sort of beyond politics.
00:29:54.000But beyond politics, unfortunately, means that all you can be is against.
00:29:57.000And if you are forever against and never present an alternative, you fall into the pitfall
00:30:05.000of what I call nihilism, which is the belief that destruction is a form of progress.
00:30:10.000Now, if you were to say, what are we to oppose to this?
00:30:15.000I mean, we have to assume, coming from Cuba, I can tell you this, it's very easy for me
00:30:21.000to say, democracy is better than anything else.
00:30:24.000And in fact, in the world, almost every human being, even the people who don't actually act on it, will use those words to say democracy.
00:30:31.000I mean, if you read the North Korean constitution, tears will come to your eyes that it's such a democratic constitution, right?
00:30:39.000Of course, not much happens along those lines, but You have to at least pretend to be democratic.
00:30:46.000That may seem hypocritical or fraudulent, but in fact it's not.
00:30:52.000It means that the only game in town is democracy.
00:30:58.000So we are hobbling along with a democracy in the 21st century, where the public moves at the speed of light on the internet, that is moving, basically it's immobile.
00:31:10.000A democracy that is encased in these immobile pyramids, these hierarchies for the 21st century.
00:31:17.000So what we obviously need to do is start thinking in terms of how can we move these 20th century hierarchies into something that more resembles You know, Amazon, right?
00:33:18.000In a sense, it feels like our government agencies are still being fueled by the anti-democratic movements of the last century, state communism, fascism, in ways that are Opaque, this kind of corporatist and undemocratic version of democracy that most of us live within are in a sense, it seems to me at least, in attempts to manage outcomes.
00:33:51.000Regardless of who you vote for, regardless of what happens, these elite interests will be able to continue unperturbed.
00:33:58.000When you talk about the fact that public power is now networked, it seems that there are clues in the idea that that word encompasses, that networked power is part of the solution.
00:34:13.000It's interesting that you say that the successes in big tech, these unprecedented power systems,
00:34:21.000are perhaps somehow examples for how state power could evolve,
00:34:27.000when it seems, at least it's not something I've considered enough,
00:34:30.000that they are monopolistic, profiteering.
00:34:37.000I really take your point that they elicit a lot of trust for all of the complaining that we do on this channel about
00:34:50.000Amazon do deliver my packages on time.
00:34:53.000They do make a fairly decent amount of TV and certainly they curate a lot of great entertainment.
00:34:59.000The fact is, in terms of utility, they're succeeding and there must be something in that.
00:35:04.000But just yesterday we spoke to Christian Smalls, the leader of the first Amazon union, and you only have to Listen to him for a while to see what the invisible cost of that expertise is.
00:35:16.000And similarly with Apple, with their friction-free, beautifully designed product, we know that elsewhere people toil to capture those resources.
00:35:27.000Part of, I believe, what's happening is beyond even the advances of the industrial age and down to the project of secularism itself.
00:35:37.000But we're pretending That we are not spiritual beings, that we are pretending that we are not beings that require purpose, meaning, connection, ideas that are difficult to articulate and certainly difficult to bring to the area of policy.
00:35:58.000This is why I think it's very interesting and important that you say that democracy is the only game in town.
00:36:04.000That ultimately we have to abdicate from the idea that we know what's best and the idea that there is one universal best for everybody and perhaps look at What type of reform these giant central organisations are going to be required to make?
00:36:23.000Sometimes it seems like such a behemoth of a task that we're afraid to undertake it.
00:36:27.000But regularly with the subjects we report on, it's pretty clear That if you were to end lobbying, it's pretty clear that if you were to break down the military-industrial complex, if you were to demonopolise the big tech space in particular, if you were to end people in congressional and political positions owning stocks and shares in the industries that they're supposed to regulate
00:36:50.000There are changes that could be made pretty quickly that would restore public trust and would create the opportunity for real democracy, even at the seemingly unmanageable scale of great nations, that change could be instantiated.
00:37:05.000But I wonder if, you know, it seems that when you were talking about the ability to interact with Amazon through a credit card, that we could be interacting with democratic institutions in a similarly direct way.
00:37:53.000So the things that people are interested in, the issues that people are interested in versus what the political players are interested in, are going to rise to the top, as they do on Reddit, you know, where everybody, the things that people want to talk about the most become the most talked about, you know, versus now, part of what happens to the public is they're saying, you know, please help me with inflation.
00:38:14.000Please, you know, I think immigration is out of hand.
00:38:19.000And when they look up, the person says, well, you're probably a racist.
00:38:22.000And by the way, global warming, right?
00:38:31.000And this doesn't even mean necessarily, of course, that if you're a Republican hearing this upswell of opinions, you'd have to Accepted necessarily, but you would know you would have a data point of okay.
00:38:44.000Our people are saying these are the most important issue.
00:39:34.000You know, if you ever want to know what a newspaper was, a newspaper in the 20th century, as I said, in my venerable old age, I can tell you I was there, okay?
00:39:45.000Newspapers were elites talking to elites.
00:40:07.000And I will say, you actually put your finger on something that I note, but don't Analyze much because I don't know how you would number one.
00:40:16.000I'm certainly be the last one to be able to do it, which is the spiritual dimension.
00:40:22.000I think part of the anger is because much of the people the public that actually pours into the street.
00:40:30.000Obviously, there's always a disproportionate number of young people to do this, right?
00:40:36.000And when you look at that, Late millennial and Zoomer generation.
00:40:44.000These are people who have stopped going to church, come from families that are not in good shape, I mean, statistically.
00:40:53.000And their communities, you know, these are people who may be moving around.
00:40:57.000They're not necessarily embedded in a single community.
00:41:19.000Politics is not a place where you find meaning.
00:41:22.000So they, all these, when you look at the people in the streets in the Indignados or, you know, the autonomous zones in Seattle, you know, these are all over YouTube, right?
00:41:35.000And they just beam with this joy of transfiguration.
00:41:41.000Well, everybody here has changed everything.
00:41:46.000There's a brief moment of moral perfection and meaningfulness, then it of course dissolves into chaos and then the police come and everybody scrambles away, but you cannot put the burden of meaning on politics and therefore The anger multiplies.
00:42:03.000It's like, well, we tried and we failed.
00:42:08.000You're never going to be able to get a kind of a, you know, meaning of life from any kind of political process.
00:42:15.000So I think bringing up the spiritual aspect of it, the things that used to give us meaning, church, religion, a family, settled families, settled communities, that's a trick.
00:42:36.000The reason I mention secularism is because, of course, in its most rudimentary form, it is the extraction of the separation of church and state.
00:42:45.000But perhaps more philosophically, it's the idea that something neutral is taking place that doesn't access the transcendent or the hysteria The religious and spiritual, you know, ecstasy, hysteria, transcendence, all of the things that we can associate with spirituality, as well as duty, service, connection, meaning, purpose.
00:43:58.000So I feel that something interesting happened at the advent of the union movement in your country, America, that That there was a sort of a moment where populism appeared like it was going to be a kind of a democratic movement.
00:44:14.000Someone came on here once and talked to us about that.
00:44:16.000And like that now populism has become a kind of dirty word affiliated with, you know, extremism and a kind of a byword for all forms of prejudice.
00:44:28.000I'm beginning to feel that what has to be understood and appreciated, demonstrated and brought about is precisely what you've said, Martin.
00:44:37.000That instead of saying, you know, this is what you need.
00:44:41.000I mean, then there can be a discourse and persuasion is always going to be part of leadership.
00:44:45.000But we can't anymore have a politics that is, as you say, this is what you should care
00:44:50.000about, particularly when there is so little trust, particularly when ultimately we know
00:44:54.000that the policies in the particular areas that you cited aren't likely to meaningfully
00:45:00.000alter even the conditions that they can claim to pertain to.
00:45:05.000So what I feel is that, you know, throughout your book you're talking about this tension
00:45:10.000between centralised authority and the peripheral voices that we assume to be the public, which
00:45:15.000are of course amorphous and of course numerous.
00:45:20.000It seems to me that what is required is the opportunity to say, you in your community may want to run it this way, very traditional, very orthodox.
00:45:29.000You should be allowed to, if that's what you democratically want to do.
00:45:33.000You're entitled, by virtue of the land and population, to this amount of resource.
00:45:39.000You, I mean, it's difficult to not do it geographically in terms of, you know, practically.
00:45:43.000And as you say, we're dealing now with everywhere people.
00:45:46.000We're dealing with constant migration.
00:45:49.000I don't mean international migration, I simply mean movement.
00:45:53.000It's bloody hard, but I guess as well, Martin, isn't it important when you talk about this spirit of adventure that you enjoyed as a young man, that we are intrepid, that we are bold, that we move forward with a vision, even if that vision is, we're going to I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
00:46:09.000and we have to accept that what you want is diverse, is sometimes conflicting.
00:46:14.000If you in this area want to live this way, we're going to have to allow it.
00:46:18.000If you in this area want to live this way, we're going to have to allow it.
00:46:21.000This idea of trying to create a unipolar world, you know, and I believe even the current war is to some
00:46:28.000I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
00:46:30.000It seems to me like unwinnable and likely to bring about a true dystopia.
00:46:38.000Yeah, I have said oftentimes that we, one effect of the internet has been to fracture the public.
00:46:49.000By the way, that's the way the public really was.
00:46:54.000The mass audience that I, when I was a young person, I was part of that mass audience, we all seemed to have the same tastes.
00:47:00.000And it was just wonderful because, you know, the entertainment industry and mass production could all Pitch to our taste, which was remarkably similar.
00:47:09.000Of course, we had no voice in the matter.
00:47:12.000We chose between the products and the shows or whatever that were given to us, which are very few.
00:47:17.000And suddenly, when the Internet came, we got a voice.
00:47:20.000It turns out, no, actually, we're very fractured, and we're becoming increasingly fractured.
00:47:25.000And I think I have been an advocate of the idea that government policy, national policy, should not be one size fits all, because when you do that, you're inviting a revolt.
00:47:38.000You're basically, at least 50% of the people, probably more, are going to say, that doesn't suit me, all right?
00:47:45.000And you should tailor your policies so that they can be implemented much more locally, because you're right.
00:47:50.000We are localities tend to be far more civil and far more homogeneous.
00:47:56.000And maybe over here we're conservative and we're not going to interfere a lot.
00:48:00.000Maybe over here we're very liberal and we're going to have all kinds of programs to save the world.
00:48:32.000I mean, there are many of the issues we have to deal with.
00:48:35.000are issues that in an older era in Victorian England would have been called moral, all right?
00:48:42.000Would have been called issues of self-control, self-assessment, self-presentation, right?
00:48:53.000Issues that, number one, do you want to scream when you can just talk?
00:49:00.000Number two, Are you going to be afraid of the consequences of your words, even though they are the words that really express your opinion?
00:49:10.000There are all kinds of decisions that one makes along questions like that, that are in some sense social, that's the word we love to use, rather than moral, and in some sense political.
00:49:21.000But they're really boiled down to who am I as a human being?
00:49:25.000What kind of value do I have as a human being?
00:49:27.000And I think You know, if you are tailoring your words because you're afraid, and if you are backing off from the struggle or opposite, you become some kind of member of a war band that seeks out enemies and virtually attacks them and destroys them, and there's lots of people who do that.
00:49:50.000You're being destructive and you're being cowardly.
00:49:53.000And we just need to teach the manners of the internet, right?
00:49:57.000I mean, the old people like Shaw, the old Victorian and post-Victorian Brits were great about this.
00:50:06.000Everybody makes fun of the Victorians.
00:50:16.000The guy who had risen in this career, one of the great prime ministers of Britain, one of the great towering figures in the world. His diaries are one gigantic
00:50:25.000anxiety question about, am I good enough? Am I good enough? He was religious. Am I
00:50:47.000So, I mean, there is a little uncomfortable because I'm not a moral preacher.
00:50:51.000I'm not particularly religious, you know.
00:50:54.000But unfortunately, all these questions lead back to what I consider to be a very, very moral posture.
00:51:02.000And the last word on that I would say is, if you're an elite, it is morally incumbent on you to convey the fact That you are not an oracle, that you can't see the future, that there are questions that are too complex for the human race to understand fully, all right?
00:51:19.000And to pretend that you know what's going to happen 50 years from now, to pretend that you know that this is the only policy that's going to fix some, you know, solve some problem that then doesn't happen.
00:51:32.000You're going to be sowing distrust and your institution is going to be hemorrhaging that much more authority.
00:51:38.000So you have to be able to convey the will to move forward.
00:51:42.000By understanding it in a scientific way, which means we're not certain.
00:51:56.000That never has happened in history, ever.
00:51:58.000You try this, you try that, and something works, all right?
00:52:01.000And our elites need to change their 20th century rhetoric, which is very utopian, very, we can fix everything if you give me enough power, enough science, and enough money.
00:52:17.000And it's interesting, Martin, how often you return to ideas that, in my lexicon at least, are spiritual.
00:52:24.000And I just want to allude to two ideas that are, given that your book, in a sense, offers a transcendent lens to view what's regarded often as a sort of a quite narrow polemic between old, atrophying ideas, what we once regarded as left and right, So, individualism and materialism as derived from sort of post-enlightenment rationalism, the idea that the rights of the individual, which I do obviously believe are sacred, the rights of the individual have somehow become this desiccated and isolated idea that is serviced through consumerism, that your function is to fulfill yourself through your screen, and that even your emotional requirements are kind of conducted in a virtual way.
00:53:07.000I've come to understand, whilst I'm sure I err frequently, that morality is about what I do, not what I believe you should do.
00:53:18.000My morality is how do I treat people, and as much as possible it oughtn't be abstract.
00:53:23.000It wouldn't be, well, you know, when we've got this utopia, it should be, you know, how am I driving today?
00:53:28.000How am I speaking to the people I work with?
00:53:30.000How am I treating my wife and my children?
00:53:32.000The reality of my moral and ethical conduct, which often in my fanciful allusions to great change and utopia.
00:53:44.000I also recognize that the necessity for continuing acknowledgement of personal fallibility, that there is no end point, that there is, you know, as Christ indicated, the Messiah has to be found within you, that there is no external source of salvation that's going to become available, that it's not going to be resolved externally.
00:54:07.000And also this idea of, part of the problem I believe that we're encountering is because, excuse me, beyond the, you know, sort of limited dynamic of parliamentary or congressional politics.
00:54:17.000There is a unchallenged idea that underwrites much of what we're doing, progressivism.
00:54:26.000But whether we're on the left or the right, we kind of, in the same way that you believe that, you know, the ideal, the ideologies of the last century were going to, oh, we're going to solve all your problems through this ideal or that ideal.
00:54:38.000Many of us believe that technology You know, like, there are sort of technological utopianists, if that's a term, that still say, no, no, we can solve this, we'll just go to Mars, this will happen, AI will solve this problem.
00:54:50.000But I also, like, you know, Gandhi said, like, you know, like, obviously it kind of been later than the early 1940s, that We are too obsessed with trinkets.
00:55:13.000how vehemently he opposed the separation that took place after British occupation, believing
00:55:19.000that there was a way for Muslims and Hindus and other Indian religions that are obviously
00:55:25.000of less significance when it comes to scale and size, must find a way to cooperate. And
00:55:30.000that India oughtn't just replace the power structures that the British had implemented
00:55:35.000with new elites. And it seemed that that had happened. So it seems to me that what's required
00:55:39.000is a kind of a reckoning, an inventory about where we're going and what our vision is,
00:55:43.000an acceptance of our shortcomings and a kind of understanding that, as you say repeatedly
00:55:47.000in your book, the old idea, that's gone now.
00:55:50.000To assert centralized control in the way that you could a century ago is going to have a high cost in blood.
00:55:57.000And the dissolution, just the nihilistic Destruction of these institutions also leaves us with a landscape that's difficult to contemplate.
00:56:09.000Somehow, from the thesis and antithesis, some kind of synthesis must be born.
00:56:14.000And that can only be born through conversation.
00:56:16.000So it seems to me that one of the subjects we've talked about and talked around a lot, the kind of cultural conflict and the inability to accept differences, whether that's wokeism or anti-wokeism, That must be benefiting the elites.
00:56:30.000That must be benefiting them, because in order for their stasis to be maintained, their supremacy to be maintained, you cannot have mobilization of ideas through these currently opposing cultural forces.
00:56:44.000Well, I mean, I think the elites, if you looked at what it was like to be an elite in the 20th century, it was a good life.
00:57:01.000If you look at his personal history, you know, he has made such things that are so weird and false.
00:57:10.000And I mean, he was guilty of borrowing other people's speeches a couple of times, not once.
00:57:16.000has been guilty of inventing his own path and being caught at it several this would have destroyed me would have destroyed probably you um But he's a protected creature.
00:57:26.000And this man just kind of, from his 30s on, he just kind of rode this wagon that got him to the Senate for 30 years and to the vice presidency.
00:58:45.000And then he turns out to be, you know, Emmanuel Macron, another guy, just like the other guys, you know?
00:58:50.000So what you, the only way you are sure that this is not one of them is these weird political mutants that say outrageous things.
00:58:59.000Like if you are, Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro or people like that.
00:59:04.000So we have to now, somehow or another, the public has to assert itself to elect an elite or to select an elite class that is not necessarily chosen for its bizarreness because that's kind of like a token that, you know, the way Trump talked No elite ever talks like that.
00:59:44.000You need to You need to aspire higher than that, I think.
00:59:49.000In the absence of real legitimate change, people will accept novelty and peculiarity, these chimeras, these odd emergent things that ultimately have the same sets of interests and aren't meaningfully going to change the lives of ordinary people.
01:00:05.000It's interesting what you say about new elites, and I know you talk in the book about how the current elites aren't able to handle the new dynamic, and I suppose then that is why, you know, the magnates of this century, where it was once the Carnegie's and the Rockefeller's, now it's Facebook, Google.
01:00:26.000I love the bit where you talk about even the clues in their monikers that there would never have been a moment where they have easy names like Yahoo and Google and Facebook and Google would never have called itself the International Search Engine Corporation.
01:00:43.000Even that linguistic change is an indication of something.
01:00:48.000I've got a lot from this conversation, Martin.
01:00:52.000Still, I guess when I talk to you, I realize that I still must have some crazy ambition, because I feel like I'm trying to pull something out of you, that you know something that I need.
01:01:15.000Well, I mean, I think at a certain moment, and I kind of halfway have studied this but not in depth enough to give you some very definite answers, but I think a certain moment the media became
01:01:34.000Uh, just like we're talking about the young generation being conformistic, the media became kind of like monolithic.
01:01:41.000And don't question where the trigger was, right?
01:02:33.000So somehow, if you were in the slightest bit pro-Russian, You got kicked out of your job or something, because it was kind of like, if you didn't want to vaccinate, you got kicked out.
01:02:42.000Suddenly, this became an identity issue.
01:02:46.000And I think the media was responsible for that.
01:02:48.000I think it was, there's this phenomenon that's going on with the media where it suddenly becomes monolithic around the subject.
01:02:55.000It doesn't particularly, it's discourse narrowing is a technical term for that, where There used to be 100 subjects that were discussed.
01:03:06.000Now there's like three, and one of them is way up here.
01:03:09.000And if you look at it, everything is really about the same thing.
01:03:13.000That has not continued with the war, but in the background, in terms of attention.
01:03:19.000But in terms of opinion, yeah, I think it still is.
01:03:26.000You rarely hear any other than one point of view.
01:03:32.000We've been having this conversation and we stream it live to our membership community so the public or at least our community have been present during this and I sometimes feel like I should be incorporating their questions but they are communicating with each other.
01:03:46.000Hello those of you that are there, it's lovely to see you.
01:03:50.000In a sense, the dynamic that you're describing is taking place even now.
01:03:54.000Now, admittedly, this is an elective community that is created primarily around the content that we make, but it seems to me that there is going to be more of this.
01:04:03.000That if there are a set of ideals around which people can kind of like, I guess like what you're talking about is there is now opportunity to canvas.
01:04:11.000You know, the fact is, is that the elite establishment are not interested in serving the public.
01:04:16.000You could not have that that interest and be in the elite is an anathema, it's antithetical
01:05:03.000Illuminated Soul says, what exactly is democracy?
01:05:05.000The word democracy isn't mentioned a single time in the Declaration of Independence.
01:05:10.000Have you got anything to say to that particular inquiry?
01:05:13.000Do you think that's just a semantic thing?
01:05:16.000No, I don't think democracy was in the mind of the founders.
01:05:21.000I don't think it was mentioned in the Constitution either.
01:05:26.000The system that was set up by the founders and the framers of the United States of America, and by the way, how fortunate is this country to have had such a A lot of geniuses.
01:05:40.000To number one, break us apart from the mother country, sorry about that.
01:05:45.000But number two, frame us a constitution that has served us so well for 250 years, whatever it's been.
01:05:56.000So democracy we evolved into, and this is why I'm actually halfway optimistic, because The original system that was set up was a gentleman's republic, all right?
01:06:10.000These were people who had property and were of course male and were white and so forth.
01:06:18.000Somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century, that system was deeply reformed.
01:06:23.000Between the 19th and 20th century, affluence was a new thing.
01:06:36.000And there was this need for a system that incorporated all these tens of millions of people who had just literally just entered history, all right?
01:06:44.000And they created this mass system, right?
01:06:47.000We had mass political parties, mass movements, you had mass production, and people were stovepiped into these mass systems.
01:06:55.000It seems very undemocratic today, and it was very undemocratic, but they were incorporated into the system.
01:07:01.000That hierarchical system of the 20th century was actually, in its day, A reform, because it included more people than just a whole bunch of white gentlemen, all right?
01:07:47.000Martin, thank you so much for joining me for this incredible conversation.
01:07:51.000And you're every bit as wonderful as I imagined you might be.
01:07:53.000Having read your material, I know that it's something that I will continue to study and learn from.
01:07:59.000I really appreciate you giving us your time and I hope we have the opportunity to communicate again, so thank you.
01:08:05.000Well, I would love to do that, and if I ever get back to Britain, which I love to be in and haven't been in way too long, I think 2019 was the last time, I'll look you up.
01:08:13.000We do this event called Community, where we bring together people like Vandana Shiva and Wim Hof up here.
01:08:18.000If you're in the UK in July, and we could certainly help to facilitate that if it's something that you would like, Hay On Wire, the border between Wales and England, we do this event.
01:08:28.000Where people come and share ideas and we create community and try to create symposia for discussion.
01:08:34.000It would be wonderful if you were available to join us there.
01:08:50.000That was, of course, Martin Goury, writer of The Revolt of the Public.
01:08:54.000There's a link in the description to any information you might need about him and how you can follow him and stuff.
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