In this episode, I sit down with Douglas Murray, an author and political commentator, to discuss the collapse of grand narratives on the left and right, and the potential for the resultant explanatory and motivational void to be filled by more radical ideological ideas. And the dangers posed by the mutual recrimination that all too frequently characterizes relationships across the left-right divide. This episode is brought to you by Green Chef, the first USDA certified meal kit company, which is where I think you should be at if you're looking for a healthy meal kit meal. Go to GreenChef.org/JBP90 to get $90 off your first order of Green Chef meal kits, and use code JBP90 for 15% off the total total for the suite, which makes it $25 in total. Self-Authorizing is a suite of exercises that my dad spent over 30 years developing that helps people organize their thoughts and map out a life plan with steps so they know where they want to go and end up. I ve found it immensely helpful in avoiding futures I don t want, particularly when it comes to avoiding ones I don't want, and I m looking forward to discussing some of the things I do want to do with it again. Enjoy this week's episode and I hope you have an okay week. -J.B. -Michaela Music: Fair Weather Fans by Nordgroove, courtesy of Zapsplat, produced and edited by Kevin McLeod and produced by Ian Dorsch Books: The Madness of the Madness Crowd, written by Douglas Murray The Madness Crowd by Sam Harris Harris Harris, Sam Harris, and Andrew Sullivan Art: "The Madness Crowd: Race and Identity" by David Fincher, edited by James Rook & Michaela Peterson of The Madness Of The Madness Crawl, edited and produced . (The Madness Crowd , edited by Rachel Ward is out now! and , written by Alex Blumberg Thank you to David Fennell for the excellent cover art by , , and from the excellent work by in the Madness Codd by . . . and the amazing . , thanks to , the excellent , with thanks to the wonderful , & on the excellent and beautiful edition of , including .
00:01:50.780The video version will be available tomorrow, Monday, January 25th, 2021, on the Jordan Peterson YouTube channel.
00:01:57.860This episode is brought to you by Green Chef.
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00:03:08.200I've found it immensely helpful in avoiding futures I don't want, particularly when I was younger and more foolish, but also now.
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00:03:49.780Enjoy this episode, and I hope you have an okay week.
00:03:55.480I have the great good fortune on this January 15th, 2021, of talking to Mr. Douglas Murray, the author of The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity.
00:04:21.840Douglas and I met a couple of years ago and got along quite remarkably well.
00:04:27.760I think Douglas was gracious enough to mediate a discussion that I had with Sam Harris in what was the Olympic Stadium in London, if I remember correctly.
00:04:41.360And we haven't, we've talked a little bit since then, but it's been a couple of years, eh?
00:04:45.440So I've just been reviewing The Madness of Crowds this week.
00:04:48.780Again, I read it when it first came out, but I was looking at it again.
00:04:52.200I'm looking forward to discussing a whole variety of things with you, some associated with the book and some not.
00:04:59.060But let's start with the book, at least some of the themes of the book, if you don't mind.
00:05:03.780You talked about, you started by talking about the collapse of grand narratives, and that's a theme that's very interesting to me.
00:05:13.460And I have a hypothesis that I'd like to run by you and see what you think.
00:05:19.060I've been talking to a friend of mine here, and we've been hypothesizing that maybe there are two large-scale grand political narratives with an archetypal or mythological basis.
00:05:35.380So that would be the bright future that we're all headed to.
00:05:40.160And different versions of that would be put forth by the right and the left.
00:05:44.180But what the hook is, is that something better awaits us, and there are certain strategies that we could use to attain that.
00:05:51.960And if that fails, then we have something like the infidel, which is us versus them.
00:05:57.600And so one of the things that struck me when I was reading your book was that it isn't obvious that we have a promised land narrative that's functional in the West anymore.
00:06:08.460Partly, I think, perversely, because things have improved so much on the material front that it's not really even obvious how we could extend our mastery of the material world to produce a better future.
00:06:23.960You know, we've plucked all the low-hanging fruit.
00:06:26.880And so that, for most people, I mean, I know inequality exists.
00:06:31.000I know there's relative poverty, but there's no straightforward solutions for those either, or even solutions that necessarily would appeal to the imagination.
00:06:38.920And so maybe we're stuck with some variant of the infidel, which is not a very, which is certainly not a grand narrative that's designed to bring about peace.
00:06:48.680I don't know what you think about that, but I'd also like your take on grand narratives as such and why you think they've collapsed.
00:06:55.900Well, first of all, it's really, really good to see you, Jonathan.
00:07:21.120Yes, it's been on my mind for a long time.
00:07:24.400I've written around this subject in a couple of books now that the oddity of the position of Western man at this point is that he and she lack a grand narrative, lack an overarching explanation of what on earth we're doing here.
00:07:40.160And I think you and I probably have the same experience that when we were allowed to still congregate in public spaces.
00:07:48.400Whenever you address anything around this issue, the hall fell silent.
00:07:53.920You know, I've noticed for years that there's all sorts of minutiae that our societies are exceptionally good at talking about.
00:08:03.920But we've become not only poor at talking about, but apparently uninterested in the most important questions of all, such as what exactly we meant to be doing with our lives.
00:08:19.080What are we meant to be doing with our time?
00:08:22.000We all know we've got a finite amount of time.
00:08:24.380So how should we occupy that time well?
00:08:27.300Well, it's funny because I would say in the past, to some degree, that question was answered for us by deprivation.
00:08:36.220You know, it was obvious what we were lacking.
00:08:39.040And so when it's obvious what you're lacking, when you're hungry, when you're truly hungry, there's no question about what you should do.
00:08:46.120And if you're freezing and if you're overheated and all of those things, the desirable future manifests itself automatically in front of you.
00:08:54.940And in some sense, we've been deprived of deprivation and are suffering from an enemy of prosperity.
00:09:04.520And I think for some people, a form of boredom and yes, too much time on their hands and much more.
00:09:15.980There are different ways of circling around the same answer to the problem.
00:09:20.480But it's been very striking to me for a long time that particularly in political terms, the left has been really quite interested in this gap.
00:09:33.640It's recognized the size of it and has sought to fill it.
00:09:39.820In recent years, as I said, the beginning of the matters of crowds, the most obvious way of filling it is with the horrible, dysfunctional and retributive replacement religion, which is identity politics, intersectionalism and all of this.
00:09:58.180As I point out, it's in some ways a curiosity, perhaps also an inevitability that let's say the respectable right at any rate has been pretty uninterested in answering these questions and hasn't even nodded to their absence.
00:10:16.580The right has in our lifetimes been very interested in issues of economics.
00:10:20.800And that's, of course, crucial, as you alluded to earlier.
00:10:24.660I mean, if the economics are going well, you know, a lot of other things go well as well.
00:10:29.720When they go bad, absolutely everything goes bad.
00:10:33.520So in some ways, it's understandable that the right has been interested in economic questions.
00:10:38.100But it has left the identity, as I said, I repeat the sort of respectable bit of the right, has basically left identity and meaning questions to say, well, you know, find the meaning of things where you will.
00:10:59.140But doesn't seek to address these questions.
00:11:01.720Well, maybe it's partly because the collapse of religious belief hasn't been as thorough on the right as it has been on the left.
00:11:09.700And so there's still more people who are oriented in the conservative direction who have some at least some vestiges of their traditional religious belief.
00:11:18.780But, you know, well, and I would say, too, though, that it isn't the left that's being concerned with questions of identity precisely.
00:11:28.560This is definitely the case in the United States.
00:11:30.580It's I think it's true in Britain and Canada, too, that it's the radical left because the moderate left.
00:11:37.600I have a friend in L.A. who's been working on messaging for the Democratic Party.
00:11:43.200He's been doing that pro bono as part of an independent group of Hollywood writers who've produced about a billion dollars worth of advertisements.
00:11:51.360They've been attempting to craft a centrist Democrat message.
00:11:58.180Well, and the reason they've been doing that is because the the radical left has a narrative.
00:12:04.780And regardless of what you might think about it, it has motivating power.
00:12:09.580And in the absence of any other narrative, it tends to dominate.
00:12:14.560And the problem with generating a centrist narrative is that it tends to be incremental and incremental narratives tend not to have much persuasive power.
00:12:23.740And so you might say that what's happened is that there's still a subset of people who for whom for one reason or another, and that might be race or gender or sexual identity or any of those things.
00:12:34.720Any any minority status that would bring about it, a felt sense of alienation, that the narrative is clear, which is to either restructure society so that alienation disappears or to.
00:12:48.100Well, that is the narrative is to restructure society so that that alienation disappears.
00:12:53.140And yes, and even though that may not be a narrative that works for everyone, the fact that nobody can construct one that's more compelling leaves a terrible void in the middle.
00:13:03.920And it isn't obvious at all how that can be solved.
00:13:08.100Well, by the way, also, we get back to one of the problems that always exists for people on the right or certainly for small C conservatives, which is that they always end up fighting the next battle they're going to lose precisely because of this phenomenon that the left and the radical left advances ideas.
00:13:25.280The right doesn't know conservatives don't know how to defend things such as precedent, tradition, just doing things the way you've always done them and recognizing that there's a virtue in that.
00:13:41.160Well, it isn't it isn't it isn't that easy to sell a story that's that's well, things are pretty damn good and try not to do anything stupid to muck it up.
00:13:51.360Again, the reason for that is that there's no real direction in it.
00:13:55.200And that's especially true for people who aren't fully ensconced within the society and feeling that they have an integral role to play.
00:14:03.060So it doesn't work for conservatism doesn't work for felt outsiders.
00:14:06.440Yes, it looks a lot of things self-satisfied.
00:14:12.740I think it's one of the reasons why a certain radical young person rejects a conservative narrative because they say it only works if things are going well for you.
00:14:22.500I mean, again, I would dispute that, but but it's it's a tendency people have.
00:14:26.420Yeah. The other issue, though, on this is that conservatives in general, it's part of the conservative mind, are resentful of and distrustful of people coming along with grand narratives.
00:14:43.540This is this is this is obviously a Burkean insight, why Burke takes a view he does of the events in France and writes about in the reflections.
00:14:55.160It's it's the most common trend throughout conservative thought is a suspicion of thought, a suspicion of thinking and of philosophy and of grand ideas,
00:15:04.960precisely because of an innate recognition that such ideas can go so very badly.
00:15:10.980Yes, it leaves. And I've always thought that this is a this is a both it's mainly seen as a disadvantage of conservatism.
00:15:20.980In fact, of course, it can be a very distinct advantage, but it only works as an advantage if things are going very badly wrong in whatever the utopian grand narrative project is that's being proposed.
00:15:37.240You know, it's only when everything goes badly wrong with the utopianism that people realize the virtues of the conservative system.
00:15:45.820You know, it's only after the French Revolution, you know, it's only after the French Revolution, when you when you've got the famines because you've killed all the people who know what to do.
00:15:53.240It's only after the Russian Revolution, when everyone's starving because the Bolsheviks don't know how to do the most basic things in food production,
00:16:02.000that people start to realize the virtue of the kind of conservatism that I'm describing.
00:16:08.780But until that moment of total collapse, utopian radical left is always going to be at a distinct advantage.
00:16:14.640He's got a he's got a sexier product to sell.
00:16:18.080Well, the other problem is, of course, and this has to do, I think, with the way people are wired biologically with regards to their emotional responses,
00:16:26.320is that if everything is going well, everything that's going well is invisible.
00:16:32.660Yes, because we're so we're so threats, we habituate to anything that's predictable and we're very sensitive to threat.
00:16:39.880So even when many things are going well, we're going to pay attention to those things that aren't and we're not going to pay attention to everything that that is working to maintain,
00:16:49.360say, this amazing infrastructure around us, which a conservative would say, well, it's very unlikely that this degree of stability and wealth can exist,
00:16:57.520let alone be maintained, and we should be very careful with it.
00:17:00.560But, but that's that it's a hard to keep the impulse going for that narrative, because it isn't that isn't how we work emotionally, partly because it's not efficient to constantly be grateful for things that are predictable.
00:17:19.040Now, that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that the grand narrative that's put forth by the left and you talk about this, particularly in terms of, let's say, identity politics and intersectionality.
00:17:31.980Identity politics seems to be predicated on the idea that certain.
00:17:37.400Certain rather arbitrarily selected features of individuals constitute the core element of their identity.
00:17:44.120identity. I've never been sure exactly why it's those.
00:17:48.900It's the particular elements that are concentrated on race, sexuality, gender, sexual proclivity, say, why those tend to be the hallmark.
00:17:56.720And maybe it's maybe it's because there you think it's reasonable to posit that it's because.
00:18:03.960The leftists look at groups that have, in fact, experienced some degree of prejudice or alienation in the past and and then and then make that.
00:18:14.120Make whatever it was that produced the alienation, the central characteristic of their identity.
00:18:18.720Yes. And well, there's that. And there's also the other one, which is the illusion that you can do very much about it.
00:18:25.020I mean, in our age and obviously the issues I write about in matters of crowds, the presumption seems to be and the selection seems to be something around the idea of there's something you can do about it.
00:18:38.740Now, by the way, this is a very confused narrative because it both says that there are, as I say in the book, there are hardware issues and software issues.
00:18:46.960And it pretends that the software issues are hardware and the hardware issues can be software.
00:18:51.180And it doesn't really know what to do. For instance, it says that sexuality is definitely hardware, whereas sex is software.
00:18:58.220That just doesn't run as a simultaneous program. And it says, well, we don't really know what race is.
00:19:05.620And it gets into a hell of a lot of trouble and dodges it on race.
00:19:10.180It says that the only the only thing people are legitimately born into as an identity is being trans.
00:19:16.320And so all of this is incredibly messily ill thought out.
00:19:20.480But I have wondered whether it has something to do with this thing of you can do something about it, because if you selected height, which is obviously one of the other ones you could do, which has a profound impact on people's lives.
00:19:35.960Yes. There's just there's just at some point you have to come across the thing that there's nothing you can do about it.
00:19:42.140And I would have thought that the age would be grown up enough or could be grown up enough to recognize that that is the issue on a set of identity questions as well.
00:19:53.780But, you know, when a famous pop star says, as he did recently, that he'd like to be a mummy by the age of 35, the age treats him as the people doing Monty Python's Life of Brian and say, well, where's the fetus going to gestate?
00:20:12.140In a bucket? In a box? In a box? In other words, the age wouldn't simply keep saying, oh, yes, that's possible. That's plausible.
00:20:24.640So it's deeply confused. I'm trying to analyze it is in some way adding adding confusion to it.
00:20:32.740I simply I'm simply struck by the fact that that there are a number of very major issues that occur in people's lives that are ducked by the age.
00:20:42.720I don't know why they've ducked them other than and this is this is the best approximation I can do is that they've chosen the ones they've chosen because that they know that they will cause maximal annoyance to conservatives,
00:20:56.860that they have the best chance of breaking down some of the most reliable structures that we still have in our society and that they baffle and confound people.
00:21:07.460Well, it could be it could be simpler than that, though, and maybe less in some sense, less conspiratorial is that the identity politics identity politics coalesces around any group where there's sufficient where there's a sufficient number of people with at least one thing in common who do,
00:21:24.280in fact, feel alienated and resentful about the general culture for for for for valid and invalid reasons.
00:21:32.220And so it's a crapshoot in some sense. It doesn't matter if there's consistency in category structure across the different categories of identity politics.
00:21:40.900All that matters is that enough people will coalesce around each term.
00:21:44.800And I think that's reasonable because many, many terms have been generated like ageism, for example, although we haven't seen we haven't seen much of a politic of identity.
00:21:54.280Politics emerge around age, but that's probably because it didn't coalesce.
00:21:58.520You know, you could think about it as a Darwinian process in some sense is that there's 100 terms of alienation and 10 of them generate enough social attention to become viable sociological and political phenomena.
00:22:13.580And and they continue to breed, but that's because they breed whenever there's enough people to garner enough attention.
00:22:20.320Now, the problem I have with that, and this is something else I wanted to talk to you about in detail, is that because I've been thinking about this for a long time, is.
00:22:29.900The notion of identity that lurks at the bottom of this, because I think part of the problem with the identity politics grand narrative is that.
00:22:38.980Partly because of its incoherence, it doesn't offer anything that that looks like a real solution.
00:22:43.500So, well, and that's partly because of its it has its definition of what constitutes identity seems to me to be almost incomprehensibly shallow, especially for social constructivists.
00:22:56.840So, so the idea, I don't think I'm parodying this, that the central idea seems to be that identity is something that you define yourself.
00:23:06.300And it's a consequence of your lived experience.
00:23:08.880And so no one has any right to state anything about your identity other than you, because they don't have access to your own subjective experiences.
00:23:16.980And look, I don't, I don't want to, I wouldn't want to make the claim that there's no, there's nothing in that, because there is a domain of subjective experience that's unique.
00:23:27.940And like pain, for example, and there's no doubt that it's real and, and that it's vital and important.
00:23:34.540But the problem with that seems to me to be is that identity isn't only a consequence of your subjective experience.
00:23:42.120In fact, it's not even a label for your subjective experience.
00:23:46.440Identity seems to me to be a, a handbag of tools that you employ to make your way in the natural and social world.
00:23:54.880So it's more like a pragmatic, it's something more pragmatic.
00:23:59.560It's like the role you might play if you were playing a game with other people.
00:24:03.720And you can pick your role, you can pick your role, but it has to be part of the game.
00:24:08.820And that means that people have to accept you as a player, and that there are certain functions that you have to undertake when you fulfill that role.
00:24:16.480And that's actually beneficial to you, right?
00:24:18.600Because partly what you want from an identity is a set of guidelines for how it is that you should act in the world.
00:24:25.360And the problem with a lot of these newer categories, and I think trans is a good example of that, is that even if the category was accepted as valid on the grounds of its proposed validity, which is the felt sense of being a man if you're a woman or being a woman if you're a man, it isn't obvious what that buys you.
00:24:47.920You know, and I just interviewed, I just interviewed Abigail Schreier, who wrote Irreversible Damage, and she talks about some of the consequences.
00:24:59.320Now, obviously, her book is quite controversial.
00:25:02.480In fact, I was terrified to even talk to her, to be honest.
00:25:06.140She's a very brave person, and I've had a fair bit of that beat out of me, I'm afraid.
00:25:10.260But it isn't obvious, it's obvious that adopting the identity of trans and then pursuing that down the medical alteration route carries with it some vicious consequences.
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00:29:17.540I noticed when I was interviewing various trans people for the madness of crowds.
00:29:21.960I noticed that it provides a path of what you're going to do.
00:29:27.120And this was one of the things I noticed sort of early about that question, was it seemed to be an explanation of a kind.
00:29:35.480For instance, you feel slightly alien in the world.
00:29:41.540It will be solved in this manner, and there's a place you can go.
00:29:45.260And, well, all of us at some level and some people throughout their lives feel great disjunction with the world that we find ourselves in.
00:29:55.680It isn't at all clear to me that there is any answer whatsoever to that.
00:29:59.960No, it's a permanent existential problem, right?
00:30:02.980That's man against society, essentially.
00:30:05.360And we're all crushed and formed by society to our detriment and to our benefit.
00:30:10.200Yes, and not just what society does to us, but our experience of life with or without society, to the extent that we can study man outside of society.
00:30:21.080It's what Kierkegaard and others keep going around.
00:30:23.680What it is that we cannot know, what it is we intuit about our condition in the world, which we still can find no way of expressing or finding our way to.
00:30:33.520There are great mysteries about ourselves, which we intuit and we cannot answer.
00:30:41.340And obviously, it's what philosophy continually returns to.
00:30:47.700It's what religion attempts to answer.
00:30:51.880These are the deep questions of humankind.
00:30:55.260It's why all of this constantly crosses against, it goes across, for instance, aesthetics, because our senses, our late friend Roger Scruton, often described better than anyone.
00:31:10.940Our sense of beauty is so important because it gives us a sense of that thing we know and we know we cannot approach.
00:31:19.480Something which is telling us something from a realm which we know we cannot access or can never access fully.
00:31:28.660These are central aspects of being a human being.
00:31:33.340And one of them, as I say, is the sense, which exists in all our lives at some point, and for some people, semi-permanently, that the world is totally unknowable to them.
00:31:50.820And therefore, they are highly vulnerable to anything that comes along and says, this is the answer.
00:31:56.900And I know, well, you point out in your book, this is something quite interesting that supports this line of reasoning, which is you talk about the stripping of a particular identity from someone if they evince the wrong political platform.
00:32:14.120So Peter Thiel, for example, can't be gay because he's a Republican and Kanye West can't be black because he came out in favor of Trump.
00:32:23.900And that does argue, the fact that that occurs, that stripping of the identity occurs, does indicate that the identity has a function and a purpose, right?
00:32:53.660Now, the question is how tenable it is.
00:32:56.220And the fundamental flaw that I see in identity politics is that even though it's predicated on the idea, at least, it's simultaneously predicated on the idea that identity is a social construct and that it's a felt sense.
00:33:16.640And it is, in fact, a social construct with biological root.
00:33:22.400The fact that it's a social construct means that it's something that is by necessity negotiated with others, not imposed upon them by fiat.
00:33:30.640And it has to be negotiated with others because otherwise they won't play with you.
00:33:35.800This is one of the reasons why, to an extent, I think I say somewhere in the book that trying to find the exact methodology of the prevailing ideology of our era is, to a great extent, like trying to find meaning in the entrails of a chicken.
00:33:52.140And we do just keep coming across the same set of unexplainable, inexplicable, contradictory, self-contradictory, ill-thought-out ideas.
00:34:04.340The most obvious one I say somewhere is, and a number of other people have pointed this out now as well, is you must understand me.
00:34:14.160Indeed, your primary role in the world almost is to understand me if I'm in the right set of categories.
00:34:21.500And simultaneously, you will never understand me.
00:34:24.980Now, I mean, as I say, I think actually it's fairly obvious that if you can never understand where somebody else is coming from, then there's no point in discourse.
00:34:37.880There's no point in speaking with other people or of reading or of learning.
00:34:42.440We just, we are in solitude, all in our solitudes.
00:34:53.640If we can't understand each other, there's no recourse except for force.
00:34:58.480And this is why it worries me so much when I hear this done by, particularly by identity politics, people in relation to race, and particularly, obviously, to do with it if you happen to be black, is if people say, you can never understand my experience.
00:35:13.880But if a person who is not black can never understand the person who is, then we're in a hell of a lot of trouble.
00:35:23.160We have to work hard at trying to understand each other, including each other's historic pain, including each other's current situations.
00:35:31.380But we have to keep open the possibility that we can and will try to understand each other and to speak across these alleged vast divides, which I don't think are remotely as big a divide, if they are a divide, as the various, as I say, people who believe this ethos of our time claim.
00:35:52.100But this is the one that worries me, but this is profoundly anti-human, apart from anything else.
00:35:57.820Because if you say, sign up, be a part of one of these groups, and then you've got this sort of, as I say, party manifesto set out, it completely ignores what most of us find to be our experience, I think, if we're honest as human beings, which is that we like to be able to absorb.
00:36:15.320We like to be able to understand. We like stories. We like to hear about people who are not like us.
00:36:22.700From the very beginning, we read stories about people who have no connection with our current.
00:36:30.020Why do children across the world read about princesses and princes and all sorts of other people who are nothing like in the state they are?
00:36:39.520Because we like to hear other people's stories. It's not just that they're architects.
00:36:43.780We want to find out about other people.
00:36:45.960We don't just want the experience that we happen to have been or been born into.
00:36:50.320That's because that broadens our identities.
00:37:42.520And it's one of the reasons why my ears have been particularly pricked in recent years by a certain retributive, rebarbative, deliberately callous discussion of certain groups of people, certain types of voters, and much more.
00:38:04.460A gleeful, willful desire not to even bother to try to understand their pain, which is, of course, as far as I can see it, nothing more than an expression of assumed, generally, vengeance.
00:38:21.560Well, that brings us to another, okay, so let's, let's dive into that a bit, obviously, at least to some degree, you're referring to what happened in the United States with regards to Trump voters.
00:38:34.000And that's basically half the population.
00:38:36.500Yeah, well, let's, let's start there, because that's a good rat's nest to try to investigate.
00:38:41.020So what I see and have seen happening in the West, but particularly in the United States in recent years, is the beginnings of something that resembles an out of control, positive feedback loop.
00:38:57.120And a positive feedback loop, you know this, but I'll just outline it quickly.
00:39:01.660A positive feedback loop loop occurs when the inputs of a system and the outputs are the same.
00:39:06.980And so you hear this when you hear feedback at a rock concert, when a microphone gets too close to a speaker, because the microphone picks up the speaker noise and then transmits it to the speaker and then runs it through the microphone, amplifying it each time until the whole system goes out of control, essentially.
00:39:24.620And a lot of forms of psychopathology are positive feedback loops, like depression.
00:39:30.760When you get depressed, your mood goes down, and then you start to isolate yourself and get estranged from the people that you love and your friends.
00:39:38.940And that makes you more depressed, and that makes you more estranged.
00:39:41.940And then you start not going to work, and that alienates you and makes your depression worse.
00:39:46.180And you spin downwards, and positive feedback loops can erupt in societies, too.
00:39:53.360And you get that in societies that are in permanent feuds, which is part of the reason that the state has to exercise a monopoly on violence.
00:40:01.060It's to stop vengeful retribution from spiling out of control.
00:40:06.900And what I see happening right now is that the right and the left are engaged in a process of positive feedback, where one hits the other, and the other hits back slightly harder.
00:40:19.920And then, well, I don't have to belabor the point.
00:40:24.140And I think that if you're temperamentally inclined to be on the right, you point to the left and you say, well, they started it.
00:40:30.720And if you're temperamentally inclined to be on the left, you point to the right and say, well, they started it.
00:40:35.320And here's how they're contributing to it.
00:40:39.080And you can point to innumerable examples.
00:40:43.040And where it all started is a rather arbitrary choice on your part.
00:40:49.100The question for me is how to dampen it down.
00:40:51.880And conservatives have a real problem at the moment, I believe, because of what happened with Trump in recent weeks.
00:40:58.040And so let me tell you what I understand, and you tell me what you think.
00:41:02.380OK, I mean, I regarded Trump as a reaction to Clinton, essentially, and to her playing identity politics.
00:41:10.640And I believe that Trump didn't win so much as Hillary lost.
00:41:14.220And she lost because a sizable proportion of her base, the working class white males, basically, who were traditionally Democrat, when push came to shove, choosing between her and Trump, chose Trump, mostly as an up yours to the Democrats.
00:41:31.780And so I don't see Trump, Trump's a symptom, although he's also a causal agent.
00:41:38.480Now, unfortunately, what's occurred in the last couple of weeks has made things unbelievably complicated, because it does look like Trump went down the rabbit hole of the stolen election narrative and has caused a substantial amount of grief and misery as a consequence of that.
00:41:55.740And so, well, so I'd like your opinion about all that, and then we can discuss what might be done about that from the conservative perspective or indeed, period.
00:42:07.720Yes, I would agree with what you just said.
00:42:11.460I was in the States for a month and a bit more before the election, traveling around, covering it.
00:42:18.320And I hadn't been to the U.S. for a couple of years as it happened.
00:42:21.400I travel a lot, as you know, in normal times, but I hadn't been to the U.S. for a couple of years.
00:42:26.980And I was horrified by the fact that just normal discourse seemed to be impossible across political divides.
00:42:35.240All dinner tables erupted in exactly the fashion that you would expect.
00:42:43.820Everyone stuck in their own positive feedback loops.
00:42:48.040But you did this first, but your side did that.
00:42:52.140And as you say, you could start from anywhere, but that was the nature of it.
00:42:57.440There was something else, by the way, which was, I mean, my fairest estimation of the critique that the left has of the right is that they hate the right for allowing Trump to happen.
00:43:09.760And that isn't such a bad reason to dislike the right at the moment.