The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 152. Radical Ideology and the Nihilistic Void ｜ Douglas Murray

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00:01:11.300 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:01:14.080 I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:01:15.680 For episode 3 of season 4, Douglas Murray came on.

00:01:19.960 Douglas Murray is an author and political commentator.

00:01:22.820 Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson discuss the collapse of grand narratives on the left and the right alike.

00:01:29.320 The potential for the resultant explanatory and motivational void to be filled by more radical ideological ideas.

00:01:36.860 And the dangers posed by the mutual recrimination that all too frequently characterizes relationships across the left-right divide.

00:01:44.720 Can you tell those are dad's words and not mine?

00:01:48.280 Fantastic episode.

00:01:49.760 I hope you enjoy it.

00:01:50.780 The video version will be available tomorrow, Monday, January 25th, 2021, on the Jordan Peterson YouTube channel.

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00:03:49.780 Enjoy this episode, and I hope you have an okay week.

00:03:55.480 I 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.

00:04:21.840 Douglas and I met a couple of years ago and got along quite remarkably well.

00:04:27.760 I 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.

00:04:41.360 And we haven't, we've talked a little bit since then, but it's been a couple of years, eh?

00:04:45.440 So I've just been reviewing The Madness of Crowds this week.

00:04:48.780 Again, I read it when it first came out, but I was looking at it again.

00:04:52.200 I'm looking forward to discussing a whole variety of things with you, some associated with the book and some not.

00:04:59.060 But let's start with the book, at least some of the themes of the book, if you don't mind.

00:05:03.780 You talked about, you started by talking about the collapse of grand narratives, and that's a theme that's very interesting to me.

00:05:13.460 And I have a hypothesis that I'd like to run by you and see what you think.

00:05:19.060 I'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.

00:05:31.920 And one would be the promised land.

00:05:35.380 So that would be the bright future that we're all headed to.

00:05:40.160 And different versions of that would be put forth by the right and the left.

00:05:44.180 But what the hook is, is that something better awaits us, and there are certain strategies that we could use to attain that.

00:05:51.960 And if that fails, then we have something like the infidel, which is us versus them. 1.00

00:05:57.600 And 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.

00:06:08.460 Partly, 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.

00:06:23.960 You know, we've plucked all the low-hanging fruit.

00:06:26.880 And so that, for most people, I mean, I know inequality exists.

00:06:31.000 I know there's relative poverty, but there's no straightforward solutions for those either, or even solutions that necessarily would appeal to the imagination.

00:06:38.920 And 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. 0.75

00:06:48.680 I 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.

00:06:55.900 Well, first of all, it's really, really good to see you, Jonathan.

00:06:59.500 Thank you.

00:06:59.960 I can't tell you what a pleasure it is.

00:07:02.580 And I've missed you, as very many people have.

00:07:07.000 So it's really wonderful to see you.

00:07:09.060 I appreciate that.

00:07:10.140 I've missed being around, believe me, and all the things that I was engaged in.

00:07:14.920 Hopefully that'll start up again with this as part of it.

00:07:17.960 I really hope so.

00:07:21.120 Yes, it's been on my mind for a long time.

00:07:24.400 I'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.

00:07:40.160 And I think you and I probably have the same experience that when we were allowed to still congregate in public spaces.

00:07:48.400 Whenever you address anything around this issue, the hall fell silent.

00:07:53.920 You know, I've noticed for years that there's all sorts of minutiae that our societies are exceptionally good at talking about.

00:08:03.920 But 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.

00:08:19.080 What are we meant to be doing with our time?

00:08:22.000 We all know we've got a finite amount of time.

00:08:24.380 So how should we occupy that time well?

00:08:27.300 Well, it's funny because I would say in the past, to some degree, that question was answered for us by deprivation.

00:08:36.220 You know, it was obvious what we were lacking.

00:08:39.040 And 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.

00:08:45.380 You should eat.

00:08:46.120 And if you're freezing and if you're overheated and all of those things, the desirable future manifests itself automatically in front of you.

00:08:54.940 And in some sense, we've been deprived of deprivation and are suffering from an enemy of prosperity.

00:09:03.860 Yes.

00:09:04.520 And I think for some people, a form of boredom and yes, too much time on their hands and much more.

00:09:15.980 There are different ways of circling around the same answer to the problem.

00:09:20.480 But 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.

00:09:33.640 It's recognized the size of it and has sought to fill it.

00:09:39.820 In 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.

00:09:58.180 As 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.

00:10:16.580 The right has in our lifetimes been very interested in issues of economics.

00:10:20.800 And that's, of course, crucial, as you alluded to earlier.

00:10:24.660 I mean, if the economics are going well, you know, a lot of other things go well as well.

00:10:29.720 When they go bad, absolutely everything goes bad.

00:10:33.520 So in some ways, it's understandable that the right has been interested in economic questions.

00:10:38.100 But 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.

00:10:55.740 If you come across it, great.

00:10:57.580 We couldn't be happier for you.

00:10:59.140 But doesn't seek to address these questions.

00:11:01.720 Well, 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.

00:11:09.700 And 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.

00:11:18.780 But, you know, well, and I would say, too, though, that it isn't the left that's being concerned with questions of identity precisely.

00:11:27.000 I would say more.

00:11:28.560 This is definitely the case in the United States.

00:11:30.580 It's I think it's true in Britain and Canada, too, that it's the radical left because the moderate left.

00:11:37.600 I have a friend in L.A. who's been working on messaging for the Democratic Party.

00:11:43.200 He'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.

00:11:51.360 They've been attempting to craft a centrist Democrat message.

00:11:55.880 And it's quite difficult because.

00:11:58.180 Well, and the reason they've been doing that is because the the radical left has a narrative.

00:12:04.780 And regardless of what you might think about it, it has motivating power.

00:12:09.580 And in the absence of any other narrative, it tends to dominate.

00:12:14.560 And the problem with generating a centrist narrative is that it tends to be incremental and incremental narratives tend not to have much persuasive power.

00:12:23.740 And 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.

00:12:34.720 Any 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. 0.53

00:12:48.100 Well, that is the narrative is to restructure society so that that alienation disappears.

00:12:53.140 And 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.

00:13:03.920 And it isn't obvious at all how that can be solved.

00:13:07.320 Yes.

00:13:08.100 Well, 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.

00:13:25.280 The 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.

00:13:41.160 Well, 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.

00:13:51.360 Again, the reason for that is that there's no real direction in it.

00:13:55.200 And that's especially true for people who aren't fully ensconced within the society and feeling that they have an integral role to play.

00:14:03.060 So it doesn't work for conservatism doesn't work for felt outsiders.

00:14:06.440 Yes, it looks a lot of things self-satisfied.

00:14:12.740 I 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.

00:14:22.500 I mean, again, I would dispute that, but but it's it's a tendency people have.

00:14:26.420 Yeah. 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.

00:14:43.540 This 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.

00:14:55.160 It'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,

00:15:04.960 precisely because of an innate recognition that such ideas can go so very badly.

00:15:10.980 Yes, it leaves. And I've always thought that this is a this is a both it's mainly seen as a disadvantage of conservatism.

00:15:20.980 In 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.

00:15:37.240 You know, it's only when everything goes badly wrong with the utopianism that people realize the virtues of the conservative system.

00:15:45.820 You 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.

00:15:53.240 It'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, 0.89

00:16:02.000 that people start to realize the virtue of the kind of conservatism that I'm describing.

00:16:08.780 But until that moment of total collapse, utopian radical left is always going to be at a distinct advantage.

00:16:14.640 He's got a he's got a sexier product to sell.

00:16:18.080 Well, 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,

00:16:26.320 is that if everything is going well, everything that's going well is invisible.

00:16:32.660 Yes, because we're so we're so threats, we habituate to anything that's predictable and we're very sensitive to threat.

00:16:39.880 So 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,

00:16:49.360 say, this amazing infrastructure around us, which a conservative would say, well, it's very unlikely that this degree of stability and wealth can exist,

00:16:57.520 let alone be maintained, and we should be very careful with it.

00:17:00.560 But, 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.

00:17:16.280 It takes too much mental energy.

00:17:19.040 Now, 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.

00:17:31.980 Identity politics seems to be predicated on the idea that certain.

00:17:37.400 Certain rather arbitrarily selected features of individuals constitute the core element of their identity.

00:17:44.120 identity. I've never been sure exactly why it's those.

00:17:48.900 It's the particular elements that are concentrated on race, sexuality, gender, sexual proclivity, say, why those tend to be the hallmark.

00:17:56.720 And maybe it's maybe it's because there you think it's reasonable to posit that it's because.

00:18:03.960 The 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.

00:18:14.120 Make whatever it was that produced the alienation, the central characteristic of their identity.

00:18:18.720 Yes. And well, there's that. And there's also the other one, which is the illusion that you can do very much about it.

00:18:25.020 I 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.

00:18:38.740 Now, 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.

00:18:46.960 And it pretends that the software issues are hardware and the hardware issues can be software.

00:18:51.180 And it doesn't really know what to do. For instance, it says that sexuality is definitely hardware, whereas sex is software.

00:18:58.220 That just doesn't run as a simultaneous program. And it says, well, we don't really know what race is.

00:19:05.620 And it gets into a hell of a lot of trouble and dodges it on race.

00:19:10.180 It says that the only the only thing people are legitimately born into as an identity is being trans.

00:19:16.320 And so all of this is incredibly messily ill thought out.

00:19:20.480 But 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.

00:19:34.320 Yes, or attractiveness.

00:19:35.960 Yes. 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.

00:19:42.140 And 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.

00:19:53.780 But, 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?

00:20:12.140 In 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.

00:20:24.640 So it's deeply confused. I'm trying to analyze it is in some way adding adding confusion to it.

00:20:32.740 I 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.

00:20:42.720 I 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,

00:20:56.860 that 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.

00:21:07.460 Well, 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,

00:21:24.280 in fact, feel alienated and resentful about the general culture for for for for valid and invalid reasons.

00:21:32.220 And 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.

00:21:40.900 All that matters is that enough people will coalesce around each term.

00:21:44.800 And 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.

00:21:54.280 Politics emerge around age, but that's probably because it didn't coalesce.

00:21:58.520 You 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.

00:22:13.580 And and they continue to breed, but that's because they breed whenever there's enough people to garner enough attention.

00:22:20.320 Now, 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.

00:22:29.900 The 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.

00:22:38.980 Partly because of its incoherence, it doesn't offer anything that that looks like a real solution.

00:22:43.500 So, 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.

00:22:56.840 So, 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.

00:23:06.300 And it's a consequence of your lived experience.

00:23:08.880 And 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.

00:23:16.980 And 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.

00:23:27.940 And like pain, for example, and there's no doubt that it's real and, and that it's vital and important.

00:23:34.540 But the problem with that seems to me to be is that identity isn't only a consequence of your subjective experience.

00:23:42.120 In fact, it's not even a label for your subjective experience.

00:23:46.440 Identity seems to me to be a, a handbag of tools that you employ to make your way in the natural and social world.

00:23:54.880 So it's more like a pragmatic, it's something more pragmatic.

00:23:59.560 It's like the role you might play if you were playing a game with other people.

00:24:03.720 And you can pick your role, you can pick your role, but it has to be part of the game.

00:24:08.820 And 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.

00:24:16.480 And that's actually beneficial to you, right?

00:24:18.600 Because partly what you want from an identity is a set of guidelines for how it is that you should act in the world.

00:24:25.360 And 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.

00:24:47.920 You know, and I just interviewed, I just interviewed Abigail Schreier, who wrote Irreversible Damage, and she talks about some of the consequences.

00:24:59.320 Now, obviously, her book is quite controversial.

00:25:02.480 In fact, I was terrified to even talk to her, to be honest.

00:25:06.140 She's a very brave person, and I've had a fair bit of that beat out of me, I'm afraid.

00:25:10.260 But 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. 0.95

00:25:22.880 Oh, yeah.

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00:29:05.700 Yeah.

00:29:06.480 So let's talk about identity.

00:29:08.840 Yes, I agree.

00:29:11.760 It does.

00:29:12.820 It provides you with a path.

00:29:15.480 That's one thing that I've noticed.

00:29:17.540 I noticed when I was interviewing various trans people for the madness of crowds. 1.00

00:29:21.960 I noticed that it provides a path of what you're going to do.

00:29:27.120 And this was one of the things I noticed sort of early about that question, was it seemed to be an explanation of a kind.

00:29:35.480 For instance, you feel slightly alien in the world.

00:29:41.540 It will be solved in this manner, and there's a place you can go.

00:29:45.260 And, well, all of us at some level and some people throughout their lives feel great disjunction with the world that we find ourselves in.

00:29:55.680 It isn't at all clear to me that there is any answer whatsoever to that.

00:29:59.960 No, it's a permanent existential problem, right?

00:30:02.980 That's man against society, essentially.

00:30:05.360 And we're all crushed and formed by society to our detriment and to our benefit.

00:30:10.200 Yes, 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.

00:30:21.080 It's what Kierkegaard and others keep going around.

00:30:23.680 What 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.

00:30:33.520 There are great mysteries about ourselves, which we intuit and we cannot answer.

00:30:41.340 And obviously, it's what philosophy continually returns to.

00:30:47.700 It's what religion attempts to answer.

00:30:51.880 These are the deep questions of humankind.

00:30:55.260 It'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.

00:31:10.940 Our sense of beauty is so important because it gives us a sense of that thing we know and we know we cannot approach.

00:31:19.480 Something which is telling us something from a realm which we know we cannot access or can never access fully.

00:31:28.660 These are central aspects of being a human being.

00:31:33.340 And 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.

00:31:50.820 And therefore, they are highly vulnerable to anything that comes along and says, this is the answer.

00:31:56.900 And 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.

00:32:14.120 So 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.

00:32:23.900 And 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?

00:32:37.320 So it's a way of being.

00:32:39.020 It has a platform.

00:32:40.200 It has a party manifesto.

00:32:44.200 It's something to sign up to.

00:32:47.300 Yeah.

00:32:47.620 And in the absence of nothing or in the absence of anything else, it might be better than nothing.

00:32:52.900 Absolutely.

00:32:53.660 Now, the question is how tenable it is.

00:32:56.220 And 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.

00:33:15.260 And it can't be both of those.

00:33:16.640 And it is, in fact, a social construct with biological root.

00:33:22.400 The 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.

00:33:30.640 And it has to be negotiated with others because otherwise they won't play with you.

00:33:35.800 This 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.

00:33:52.140 And we do just keep coming across the same set of unexplainable, inexplicable, contradictory, self-contradictory, ill-thought-out ideas.

00:34:04.340 The 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.

00:34:14.160 Indeed, your primary role in the world almost is to understand me if I'm in the right set of categories.

00:34:21.500 And simultaneously, you will never understand me.

00:34:24.980 Now, 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.

00:34:37.880 There's no point in speaking with other people or of reading or of learning.

00:34:42.440 We just, we are in solitude, all in our solitudes.

00:34:46.400 That's a Hobbesian state.

00:34:47.940 That's a state of war.

00:34:50.020 Absolutely.

00:34:50.460 When conversation ceases, war emerges.

00:34:53.340 Exactly.

00:34:53.640 If we can't understand each other, there's no recourse except for force.

00:34:58.480 And 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.

00:35:13.880 But 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. 0.77

00:35:21.600 Step back from that.

00:35:23.160 We have to work hard at trying to understand each other, including each other's historic pain, including each other's current situations.

00:35:31.380 But 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.

00:35:52.100 But this is the one that worries me, but this is profoundly anti-human, apart from anything else.

00:35:57.820 Because 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.

00:36:15.320 We like to be able to understand. We like stories. We like to hear about people who are not like us.

00:36:22.700 From the very beginning, we read stories about people who have no connection with our current.

00:36:30.020 Why 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?

00:36:39.520 Because we like to hear other people's stories. It's not just that they're architects.

00:36:43.780 We want to find out about other people.

00:36:45.960 We don't just want the experience that we happen to have been or been born into.

00:36:50.320 That's because that broadens our identities.

00:36:54.740 Yes.

00:36:55.460 It gives us more tools to use in the world, and we're obviously very good at that.

00:37:01.080 And it is a matter of throwing your hands up in despair if you say that that's impossible.

00:37:06.280 It's difficult.

00:37:07.760 I mean, we're each a solitude in some sense for multiple reasons, for maybe multiple intersectional reasons for that matter.

00:37:15.460 Yes.

00:37:15.740 But that doesn't mean that communication is impossible or that it should be forgone unless you want the alternative.

00:37:22.420 And the alternative is conflict, combat.

00:37:25.560 Yes.

00:37:26.200 Yes.

00:37:27.000 If I can't understand you, you're nothing like me.

00:37:30.460 And there's no way that we can negotiate any peaceful way to occupy the same space.

00:37:35.200 That's right.

00:37:35.620 And so maybe that's the catastrophe you're after, but it's not an optimal outcome.

00:37:41.320 No.

00:37:42.520 And 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. 0.98

00:38:04.460 A 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.

00:38:21.560 Well, 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.

00:38:34.000 And that's basically half the population.

00:38:36.500 Yeah, well, let's, let's start there, because that's a good rat's nest to try to investigate.

00:38:41.020 So 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.

00:38:57.120 And a positive feedback loop, you know this, but I'll just outline it quickly.

00:39:01.660 A positive feedback loop loop occurs when the inputs of a system and the outputs are the same.

00:39:06.980 And 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.

00:39:24.620 And a lot of forms of psychopathology are positive feedback loops, like depression.

00:39:30.760 When 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.

00:39:38.940 And that makes you more depressed, and that makes you more estranged.

00:39:41.940 And then you start not going to work, and that alienates you and makes your depression worse.

00:39:46.180 And you spin downwards, and positive feedback loops can erupt in societies, too.

00:39:53.360 And 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.

00:40:01.060 It's to stop vengeful retribution from spiling out of control.

00:40:05.960 It's a real danger.

00:40:06.900 And 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.

00:40:19.920 And then, well, I don't have to belabor the point.

00:40:24.140 And 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.

00:40:30.720 And if you're temperamentally inclined to be on the left, you point to the right and say, well, they started it.

00:40:35.320 And here's how they're contributing to it.

00:40:39.080 And you can point to innumerable examples.

00:40:43.040 And where it all started is a rather arbitrary choice on your part.

00:40:49.100 The question for me is how to dampen it down.

00:40:51.880 And conservatives have a real problem at the moment, I believe, because of what happened with Trump in recent weeks.

00:40:58.040 And so let me tell you what I understand, and you tell me what you think.

00:41:02.380 OK, I mean, I regarded Trump as a reaction to Clinton, essentially, and to her playing identity politics.

00:41:10.640 And I believe that Trump didn't win so much as Hillary lost.

00:41:14.220 And 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.

00:41:31.780 And so I don't see Trump, Trump's a symptom, although he's also a causal agent.

00:41:38.480 Now, 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.

00:41:55.740 And 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.

00:42:07.720 Yes, I would agree with what you just said.

00:42:11.460 I was in the States for a month and a bit more before the election, traveling around, covering it.

00:42:18.320 And I hadn't been to the U.S. for a couple of years as it happened.

00:42:21.400 I travel a lot, as you know, in normal times, but I hadn't been to the U.S. for a couple of years.

00:42:26.980 And I was horrified by the fact that just normal discourse seemed to be impossible across political divides.

00:42:35.240 All dinner tables erupted in exactly the fashion that you would expect.

00:42:43.820 Everyone stuck in their own positive feedback loops.

00:42:48.040 But you did this first, but your side did that.

00:42:52.140 And as you say, you could start from anywhere, but that was the nature of it.

00:42:57.440 There 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.

00:43:09.760 And that isn't such a bad reason to dislike the right at the moment.

00:43:16.460 How did you allow this man out?

00:43:19.420 How did you allow him to win?

00:43:20.820 That seemed to be their criticism.

00:43:24.320 And there is a criticism to make of the American right over that.

00:43:27.340 I think it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

00:43:29.040 But it's a reasonable criticism for the right to contend with. 0.73

00:43:33.700 The problem is...

00:43:34.820 Well, the right has to contend with the potential power of a kind of mindless populism,

00:43:40.520 just as the left has to contend with the constant potential to be swamped by intellectual-like ideology.

00:43:48.720 And so, if the left tends to go out of control in an intellectual direction, an ideological-intellectual direction,

00:44:04.300 and a lot of that is explicit in, say, in the identity politics ideology that's paramount now,

00:44:12.760 and maybe it was explicit in the form of Marxism earlier,

00:44:18.640 the right can easily respond to that with a pronounced implicit anti-intellectualism.

00:44:24.720 And I think that's exactly what Trump represented.

00:44:28.160 I mean, it's funny because he was a kind of elite.

00:44:30.920 Obviously, he comes from a wealthy background,

00:44:32.820 but he wasn't markedly part of the insider intellectual elite.

00:44:37.520 And he was able to express the frustration of the common person, so to speak, 0.95

00:44:43.220 with the idiocy of the intellectuals in the manner that he acted, essentially, 0.98

00:44:51.220 and in whom he had contempt for, I suppose. 1.00

00:44:54.120 And you could blame that on the stupidity of the people who voted for Trump, 1.00

00:44:59.360 but you could equally point to the red flag that was being waved in front of their face 1.00

00:45:06.180 by the identity politics types.

00:45:08.100 And again, that's another place where a positive feedback loop can easily become instantiated.

00:45:13.760 The issue is how to dampen this down.

00:45:16.380 So one of the other things I noticed was, of course, on the right,

00:45:20.600 there was a certain type of voter on the right in America who didn't just make peace with Trump,

00:45:25.200 which was something that you could do.

00:45:26.920 I wrote about this a number of times.

00:45:28.900 You could say, well, these are the things he did which are reasonable,

00:45:32.100 or, you know, we're in power, so we should try to make sure that we exercise it well

00:45:37.220 and have whatever impact we can to improve the administration.

00:45:41.680 There was something else going on, which was people recognizing that Trump hurt their opponents,

00:45:51.380 you know, that he was a low tool to get back at the left.

00:45:55.700 Now, I've heard that everywhere over recent years.

00:45:58.560 You know, like, they've produced...

00:45:59.720 Yeah, definitely.

00:46:00.560 There was an element of vengefulness.

00:46:02.380 Exactly.

00:46:02.880 It was up yours.

00:46:04.160 So the left have kept producing people who've been provoking us and prodding us.

00:46:08.540 And we on the right in America keep producing sort of, you know,

00:46:13.720 third presses of the Bush family or various other dynastic politics that corrupts America.

00:46:22.480 We keep producing them that, and we're just not giving anyone of equal vengefulness,

00:46:29.840 lowness, a willingness to just hit people nastily if they...

00:46:36.660 Trump was willing to do a lot of that stuff, if not all of it.

00:46:41.220 And a certain type of right-wing voter had had enough and was willing to get the only person

00:46:48.400 willing to play the left on equal terms.

00:46:51.080 And one other thing from that, of course, he did something that, again, the right has

00:46:55.560 historically sort of not been very good at, which is having a program of his own,

00:47:00.760 not just fighting the next battle you're going to lose.

00:47:04.080 You know, if the battle...

00:47:04.740 People tend to think of the battleground of politics as being sort of level, and it isn't.

00:47:09.460 At times, it tilts more one way than the other.

00:47:12.260 At times, historically, it's harder to advocate left-wing proposals on certain things,

00:47:17.380 and then it suddenly becomes all downhill.

00:47:19.560 It becomes easy to do it.

00:47:21.740 It's...

00:47:22.180 In the same way, the right tends to be at a disadvantage, constantly having to push uphill,

00:47:27.800 and inevitably what it does is it makes a compromise with the latest left-wing demand,

00:47:32.100 and therefore the left actually accumulates a bit more power, a bit more influence, a bit

00:47:37.940 more furtherance of its ideology.

00:47:40.340 And that slightly sloped situation had existed in American politics, in the views of a lot

00:47:48.320 of people on the right, for some years.

00:47:50.480 Donald Trump comes along and seems to do that to it.

00:47:53.480 He seems to be willing to say, no, no, no, we're not just going to be on the back foot

00:47:56.880 fighting the next thing the left's going to win.

00:47:58.860 We're actually going to do stuff of our own.

00:48:01.080 And that is a dynamic that had been missing in American politics.

00:48:07.460 And I think, to that extent, a certain type of right-wing voter was willing not just to

00:48:13.200 be...

00:48:13.760 to make peace with Trump, but actually willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and

00:48:19.200 indeed to allow him to use the tools of government.

00:48:22.980 When I channeled my inner redneck, which wasn't that difficult, given that I'm from Alberta,

00:48:28.020 which is a rather conservative and sort of self-consciously proud redneck Texas of Canada,

00:48:35.280 I suppose.

00:48:36.900 And I'm not saying that in an entirely disparaging way.

00:48:40.400 There are certain advantages to that.

00:48:42.440 Anyways, when I was channeling my inner redneck, I could certainly come into contact with feelings

00:48:47.720 of exactly that type.

00:48:49.020 Because I could imagine myself in the belloting chamber, reaching out to put the checkmark

00:48:54.960 next to Hillary's name and saying, oh, to hell with it, which is a hell of a thing to

00:48:59.420 say in the ballot room and putting a check by Trump's name.

00:49:03.060 You know, and you can do that quite easily, too, when you think, well, it's just your vote.

00:49:06.760 It's one among, you know, millions of votes.

00:49:09.220 And what difference does a little impulsiveness on and a little vengefulness on my part make?

00:49:14.960 And Trump was definitely a candidate of resentment, although I think you could say exactly the

00:49:20.420 same thing about Hillary. 1.00

00:49:21.680 And the fact that we had candidates of resentment is a bad, that's bad, because resentment is

00:49:27.880 a terrible, terrible motivation.

00:49:30.320 Absolutely.

00:49:30.920 One of the worst.

00:49:31.860 And it has tended to be identified with the left on politics.

00:49:35.920 And I think now it is equally, at least, able to be identified with the right.

00:49:40.640 But here we come to what I regard as being the real challenge, and to answer the deep

00:49:45.240 underlying question of how we try to improve this.

00:49:48.620 In America, the thing that struck me most was this.

00:49:52.140 I, and I wrote about this in Spectator recently, I was very worried by one thing in particular,

00:49:56.200 which is what happens when you don't just have different interpretations of events, but

00:50:01.460 the thing that you've just seen, you disagree on the nature of what it was you saw.

00:50:06.520 Oh, yeah.

00:50:06.800 Opinion's nothing, man.

00:50:08.200 It's disagreement about facts that's everything.

00:50:10.480 And that's perception.

00:50:12.280 Now, in political terms, in democratic terms, this is, of course, an absolute catastrophe.

00:50:18.640 Because as I was saying to some friends in Britain recently, one of the great things

00:50:25.660 about democratic politics isn't just that it gives you a winner. 0.94

00:50:29.100 It gives you a loser.

00:50:30.660 In the UK, by 1997, the Conservatives have been in power for 18 years, most of them under 0.95

00:50:40.320 Margaret Thatcher, and then under a weak successor.

00:50:44.700 And by 1997, the British public have had enough of the Conservatives.

00:50:49.500 The best interpretation is that they have become weak, and they were very, very weak.

00:50:54.840 They also appeared to be slightly corrupt around the edges. 0.97

00:50:59.200 They seemed to be hypocritical on morality issues, and much more. 0.94

00:51:05.940 The country had had enough of them, and they voted them out in a landslide. 0.85

00:51:10.400 And for 13 years, the Conservative Party is in the wilderness trying to work out how to

00:51:16.440 be appealing to the electorate again.

00:51:18.400 And it manages it.

00:51:19.820 In the same way, by 2010, the Labour Party, the Labour left, have frankly become a bore to

00:51:28.580 the public.

00:51:29.660 They've been in office long enough.

00:51:31.960 We've got the successor to Tony Blair, just like we had the successor to Margaret Thatcher.

00:51:37.000 We're on the weak and falling apart, slightly, slightly, I don't use the word in a real sense,

00:51:43.140 but a sort of corrupted part of the political system.

00:51:46.400 It's late in the day, and the public vote the Conservatives back into office, albeit only in

00:51:51.300 a coalition at first.

00:51:52.700 But the important thing about this is, what does the party do in the interim?

00:51:56.820 In the case of the UK, the left, after it loses the 2010 election, goes slightly further

00:52:02.500 to the left, and then crazily far to the left.

00:52:05.420 And then last year, in 2020, the British public, in its genius, totally rejects the far left-wing

00:52:12.760 politics of Jeremy Corbyn.

00:52:14.280 And now the Labour Party is in the process of trying to make itself electable again and

00:52:19.120 coming into the centre.

00:52:20.220 Why do I give this, for most of your viewers, obscure lesson in the last few decades of British

00:52:27.140 politics?

00:52:27.600 Because the most important thing, in a way, was not who won, but who lost and what they

00:52:33.360 did when they knew they lost.

00:52:34.740 And as you know, psychologically, this is one of the most important lessons.

00:52:40.260 Freud writes about this in the essay on, what's it, on melancholia, that you have to be able

00:52:48.620 to recognise that the thing has been lost in order to be able to even love again.

00:52:53.880 You have to bury the thing that has been lost to recognise that it has gone.

00:52:58.760 And what I am horrified by in American politics is the fact that that mourning process is not

00:53:07.100 allowed to occur.

00:53:08.640 They cannot bury the dead.

00:53:10.760 They cannot grieve for the loss because they don't think they lost.

00:53:14.860 There's a technical problem there too, which is that the margin of victory wasn't much greater

00:53:25.020 than the margin of error.

00:53:27.580 You know, and that's been a problem for multiple elections now, right?

00:53:30.980 Four elections in a row.

00:53:32.380 It's been too close to call.

00:53:34.580 And, you know, there is always a certain amount of corruption in any electoral process.

00:53:40.760 Maybe it's half a percent or a quarter of a percent in a pristine system.

00:53:45.000 But when your margin of victory is of the same magnitude, then, well, then you can make a

00:53:50.940 plausible case that corruption has potentially undermined the validity of the process.

00:53:56.680 Absolutely.

00:53:57.280 And, you know, both sides, I'm not simply making an equivalence here, but I mean, both

00:54:02.340 sides have tried this in American politics in recent years.

00:54:05.600 You know, it's not like it was obscure Democrats who pretended that Trump was an illegitimate

00:54:10.380 president who had not been legitimately voted in in 2016.

00:54:13.860 It was not obscure figures.

00:54:16.180 It was the woman who was defeated by him at the ballot box, who was among the people, who

00:54:21.680 played with the idea.

00:54:23.420 First of all, we had that the Russians had actually manipulated the ballot machines. 0.90

00:54:28.480 Remember that?

00:54:29.120 You know, they all walked back from it now that they were, or they pretend they didn't

00:54:33.000 do it, but they were literally pretending and claiming that the Russians had managed

00:54:36.340 to get access to the voting machines in America in 2016.

00:54:40.180 And then they sort of slowly stepped it back and they had that the Russians had sort of 1.00

00:54:44.980 financed stuff and then it was Russian bots.

00:54:47.300 But for four years, the Democrats played with that.

00:54:51.040 Trump then totally reprehensibly takes that even further and says that the election results

00:54:58.940 can't be accepted and he won't even leave office is the first reaction, which obviously

00:55:05.040 is playing with the most dangerous elements of the democratic process.

00:55:08.840 And so, you know, nine out of 10 Trump voters now still say they believe he won the election.

00:55:15.920 In terms of healing this, the first thing I can come up with on this, the first thing,

00:55:21.280 the most basic thing, is that Joe Biden, after coming into office, has to make sure this never

00:55:26.740 happens again.

00:55:27.460 How does that happen?

00:55:28.280 I'm not an American.

00:55:29.180 I can only make, as it were, friendly suggestions.

00:55:31.860 I would just make sure that the next president makes sure this can never happen again, that

00:55:37.540 there is some bipartisan, non-partisan way in which they agree who wins the election next

00:55:45.460 time around.

00:55:46.760 And that four years from now, whoever wins...

00:55:49.020 Hypothetically, that's what the Electoral College was supposed to be doing. 0.96

00:55:52.680 Absolutely.

00:55:53.020 And I suppose it did perform that function, but was still...

00:55:56.860 I do think, again, it's a problem of margin of error, a technical problem of margin of

00:56:01.820 error.

00:56:02.760 You know, you can't expect anything other than for there to be questions about the validity

00:56:09.460 of an election when it's that close.

00:56:11.220 It's going to happen.

00:56:12.920 Well, you know, you can have these questions, but as long as you respect the outcome...

00:56:20.020 I mean, you can have very close elections and still accept them.

00:56:23.660 Yes.

00:56:24.240 I mean, in 1997, there was a conservative seat, which I think was lost by nine votes.

00:56:30.820 And they got recount after recount, and eventually, actually, there was a re-vote, and the conservatives

00:56:36.480 lost by about 20,000 votes, because the voters were so fed up with the conservatives making

00:56:41.240 them vote again.

00:56:42.060 Now, the point is that it was very close, but it would have been respected.

00:56:48.220 It isn't just the closeness of the elections in America, although I agree it's obviously...

00:56:54.520 No, I'm certainly not trying to justify it either.

00:56:57.440 I'm just saying that this eventuality is much more likely under those circumstances.

00:57:01.760 Absolutely.

00:57:02.540 But this process that they're now stuck in of just not agreeing on what they just saw

00:57:08.560 is lethal.

00:57:11.800 Okay, so let's talk about that for a minute, too, because this brings up another technical

00:57:16.640 issue.

00:57:17.920 And because you opened the can of worms by stating that people now don't have differences of opinion

00:57:25.220 about the facts.

00:57:26.420 They have different facts.

00:57:28.180 Yes.

00:57:28.280 And the question is, in part, how is it under normal circumstances that people do see the

00:57:35.980 same facts, but then have different opinions?

00:57:38.320 It means there's a very deep consensus on top of which there's relatively trivial dispute.

00:57:44.620 That's a much better situation.

00:57:46.320 But part of the way that people do that is by using...

00:57:50.020 Well, look at it this way.

00:57:51.360 You have five senses, each of which depend on a very different physiological mechanism.

00:57:59.300 And that's because you can see things that aren't there, and you can hear things that

00:58:03.100 aren't there, and you can touch things that aren't there, but you can't see, hear, and

00:58:07.700 touch things that aren't there.

00:58:09.620 So you use this multidimensional process of triangulating.

00:58:16.000 You actually use pentangulating, I suppose, with your five senses, and you determine what's

00:58:20.820 real, but even that's not enough.

00:58:22.860 Then what we do is we seek consensus.

00:58:25.540 We say, okay, well, here's what the phenomenon appears to be to me.

00:58:30.100 What do you see?

00:58:31.560 And then if you see it and someone else sees it, and this would especially be good if we

00:58:35.200 didn't share the same opinions, but we could agree on what we saw, then we think it's real.

00:58:39.300 Now, the technical problem is now, no matter what you believe, you can find a like-minded

00:58:47.700 group that's discussing this avidly to confirm your confirmation bias and what that means.

00:58:55.220 And I'm seeing this happening.

00:58:56.660 I can't believe how rapidly it's happening.

00:58:58.960 I'm seeing people degenerate into a conspiratorial paranoia.

00:59:03.680 And I'm seeing it in family members and in friends and like, and as well as manifesting

00:59:10.300 itself in broader society.

00:59:11.760 And it's really, I think we're driving ourself insane with the net.

00:59:15.740 Yes, I absolutely agree.

00:59:17.320 I'm very, very worried about where we are.

00:59:19.620 And I'm in political terms.

00:59:21.240 I mean, it's obviously deeper, but in political terms, I'm worried about it because I think

00:59:25.740 the right is about to go off in America like the left in America has gone off.

00:59:29.740 Well, that was, that was the likely outcome five years ago.

00:59:33.280 It looked to me like that was why I tried to, I was concerned back in 2016 that things

00:59:41.320 were starting to degenerate and that the left would wake up the sleeping right, you know,

00:59:46.380 the radicals on the far end of the spectrum who prefer action to words, let's say, by a

00:59:52.720 large margin and who are truly dangerous.

00:59:55.640 I could see them being prodded into awakeness.

01:00:00.020 And it was a very frightening thing.

01:00:02.260 It still is a very frightening thing.

01:00:04.100 I mean, one of the things I've thought about a lot in recent years about this is, of course,

01:00:07.700 is, is, is, is not just that there's that possibility of the two sides fighting it against

01:00:14.040 each other, but, but there ends up being no place to trust each other.

01:00:19.680 This is, this seems to me, in my conversations with people of different political types, what

01:00:25.180 I notice is that there is the most important thing if you're actually going to solve a problem

01:00:30.640 and you know better than anyone how, how much the political talk, shall we say, is actually

01:00:35.260 not set up to solve problems.

01:00:37.200 It's set up for a performative thing.

01:00:40.340 It's set up for people to just play their part and read the script.

01:00:45.920 And, and almost none of our political discussion is actually problem solving oriented, almost

01:00:51.740 none of it.

01:00:52.400 Um, but when you do, when you do get close to solving a problem, it exists and it exists.

01:01:00.380 The possibility only exists if the other person is, is able to be trusted by you, not to pull

01:01:09.660 some funny stuff when you're not looking.

01:01:12.080 And I was thinking about this recently.

01:01:14.560 I was thinking about this recently when I was in America and I was talking at one point

01:01:17.080 with Brett Weinstein on his podcast and, and, you know, I completely, Brett is, Brett is

01:01:22.740 from a very different political, uh, um, uh, tradition from, from me.

01:01:27.880 We have very different instincts on an awful lot of things, um, and a lot of very similar

01:01:32.620 instincts.

01:01:33.160 But when I talk with Brett about problems like, uh, and we talked about poverty and homelessness

01:01:38.360 and things, I, I completely trust him.

01:01:42.060 And he allows me to concede where I'm not willing often to concede because I'm, I'm slightly

01:01:49.120 worried that, you know, for instance, let me give the obvious one.

01:01:52.080 I worry about the inequality discussion, like a lot of people on the right, not because I

01:01:56.300 don't believe inequality exists, but I worry that the people who've been thinking about

01:02:00.080 it, most of the ones with the worst possible answer, you know, the people inequality, that's

01:02:05.660 another thing we should discuss because inequality is a terrible, terrible problem.

01:02:10.880 It's a society devouring problem. 0.98

01:02:14.180 The only thing worse than inequality are the purported solutions frequently.

01:02:18.120 Exactly.

01:02:19.120 So, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's perfect example of it because, um, every political

01:02:24.100 side has a version of this, you know, what you, I think, I think, well, we've talked about

01:02:29.720 this a bit in the past, but I think one of the reasons that the right finds it so hard

01:02:33.520 to persuade the left to talk about immigration, for instance, is that the left just doesn't want

01:02:38.440 to acknowledge it's, it's the serious debate it is, because it notices that the right is

01:02:43.200 the side that's been thinking about it most, and it doesn't trust the answers the right

01:02:47.260 has.

01:02:48.380 So it's, it's, it's definitely something that both sides have as, as an instinct.

01:02:53.060 So how do you solve a problem in this situation?

01:02:56.820 Only by people from across the political divide, trusting each other, that, that they, that they

01:03:03.300 don't have something funny they're going to pull when you're not looking, or to put it

01:03:07.780 another way, they're not going to do something when you're beyond your own competency on the

01:03:12.580 subject you're trying to solve.

01:03:14.180 So that, that's how you actually solve a problem.

01:03:19.860 Now, of course, as I say, we're not solving any problems at the moment.

01:03:24.340 And I noticed this, I said that the last couple of years, it's like the eye of Sauron, our society,

01:03:29.820 particularly whipped up by the wretched social media companies that make them rich, have turned

01:03:35.040 our societies into a great eye of Sauron, which scours across the land, and it looks at one

01:03:40.520 thing dementedly, and then it moves on to another thing. And the problem about it is it doesn't

01:03:45.100 solve a damn thing. None of the things, none of the things it focuses on, you know, it focuses

01:03:50.900 on, on, on, on, on, oh, what did we have? We had, oh, we had a green issue in January, it was meant

01:03:57.920 to be a climate emergency of January of last year, every, every democratic government was meant to

01:04:02.460 announce a climate emergency, then we have the COVID emergency, then we have the BLM emergency, you

01:04:07.900 know, it's been emergency after emergency, and we don't seem to solve them. In fact, we seem to, we seem

01:04:12.640 to make them worse, when we address them, because we can't agree on the thing that we're meant to be

01:04:17.760 addressing. So as I say, if, if, if, if I was to try to try to come up with the things to solve this, it

01:04:23.780 would be that the people from the left and right who could trust each other, but just just one other

01:04:28.920 thing on that, the thing about that is, the reason why I think we haven't been able to do that,

01:04:34.080 particularly in America is this. In my view, the American left has an incorrect approximation

01:04:41.220 of the proximity of fascism to the American political system, you know, or white nationalism

01:04:48.440 to the center of the political system. And obviously Trump has given them a heck of a lot of ammunition,

01:04:53.880 but they were willing to use it anyway. They've been using it for years. They wanted to claim,

01:04:59.080 basically that fascism was very, very close. Now you see scenes like the reprehensible scenes

01:05:05.340 at the Capitol the other day, and you see the ammunition that these reprehensible people

01:05:10.720 have just given the left to continue to pretend that the American right, all of the right, you know,

01:05:16.520 CNN presenters and others have said all of the right is now with the Nazis, with the fascists, 0.84

01:05:23.400 with the white supremacists. And if that's the case, you can't, if you're on the American left,

01:05:30.620 communicate with anyone on the American right, because when you're not looking, they're going to

01:05:34.520 smuggle fascism in and get you all. And the problem is that an element of the right, look,

01:05:41.460 sometimes it's a reasonable critique, distrusts the left, because it doesn't trust that its social

01:05:48.260 welfare instincts aren't going to be then subsumed into their socialist instincts aren't then going

01:05:53.400 to be subsumed by a deep desire to have communism. So the right doesn't trust the left. Now, I think

01:05:58.760 there are elements of the right that have, particularly in America, deeply overstated the proximity of

01:06:05.540 communism to the American political system. Just as... Do you think I'm one of those?

01:06:12.140 No, I don't. No, I don't. Why not? Well, I think... There's something I worry about, you know,

01:06:19.620 when I'm looking at this positive feedback loop situation arise, you know, I can't help but see

01:06:27.420 similarities in the social identity movement and the Marxist movement. And I mean, you make that case

01:06:35.780 in your book, so maybe you're one of them too, you know. Sure. Sure.

01:06:42.140 And I don't know if this is a situation where, you know, the left purports to see fascism lurking

01:06:48.940 behind every right wing move. And do you think the right is just as culpable with regards to seeing

01:06:54.540 communism behind every left wing move? I mean, I think it's complicated. Let me give you a statistic

01:07:00.460 here. A friend of mine just told me the other day, you know, there's only two self-described

01:07:06.520 democratic socialists sitting in the congressional house in the United States on the Democrat side.

01:07:12.520 There's only two. The rest of them are moderates, and most of the moderates are moderate moderates,

01:07:19.000 you know. Now, those two attract a disproportionate amount of attention, partly because they're incredibly

01:07:25.160 savvy social media users, whereas the moderates aren't at all and are blind technologically in that

01:07:33.480 sense. But, you know, I guess I wonder how much conscience scouring.

01:07:40.120 Everyone's asking themselves that I suppose now how much conscience scouring is in order after the

01:07:44.920 events on the hill last last week or two weeks ago. Well, I think that would have been

01:07:51.480 that would have been shocking to a lot of us and should be. And I mean, it's obviously

01:07:58.040 it's a concern I understand much more in the European context because I know it much better.

01:08:03.880 I don't know. I think I think I have a fairly good idea of what's what's hiding in the woodshed in

01:08:12.280 America. Use the cold comfort farm analogy. I think I know that there is something nasty in the woodshed on

01:08:20.600 the right. But I've never believed that it's it's got any chance of persuading the GOP

01:08:29.960 to adopt its platform. You know, I think there are there are some nasty things in the woodshed

01:08:36.680 in every society and on both political sides. And in a way, the question of maturity in your

01:08:44.600 political system is, the extent to which you keep that woodshed locked. Right. Now,

01:08:50.920 it seems to me that in Britain, for instance, the country I know best, I've spent more time in than

01:08:57.560 any other country. In Britain, I'm fairly confident in our politics that that we have that woodshed very

01:09:04.120 closely locked. You know, when when when a maniac killed a Labour MP several years ago, the late Joe

01:09:12.600 Cox and shouted Britain first, we had nobody in Britain, nobody on the political right who said,

01:09:20.200 I think we've got to understand the grievances of the attacker. We had nobody. Nobody. Nobody wants

01:09:27.320 that anywhere near the political system. So what about the grievances? What do you think is happening

01:09:34.120 in the US on the right with regards to the grievances of the Capitol Hill protesters? Well,

01:09:39.000 here seems to me to be the problem. But on the political left, and I saw this myself,

01:09:46.600 because I was I was in Portland, and I was in Seattle on my travels before the election,

01:09:51.400 and I saw the immiserated state that Antifa and BLM have turned those cities into. I was disgusted by what I 0.97

01:10:00.600 saw. I was disgusted by the fact that I spent several nights with Antifa in in Portland and

01:10:09.400 seeing them and being mixed up with them undercover, obviously seeing what they were doing to attack

01:10:14.680 federal buildings and so on. I was just horrified. I've seen quite a lot of the world. I've seen a

01:10:19.240 number of war zones. I've traveled all across Africa and the Middle East and the Far East. I've seen a lot

01:10:23.880 of things. I've never seen a first world city like that. I've never seen that in a democracy. Never.

01:10:30.440 And it's horrific. And I was horrified, what's more, by the fact that my left wing friends with

01:10:36.760 noble exceptions, like Brett, who I mentioned earlier, my left wing friends in America didn't

01:10:41.960 want to hear about it or even concede that I've seen with my own eyes what I've seen, because they

01:10:47.320 just feared that if you concede that's happening then you allow Trump in. And so they've been willing

01:10:54.120 on the American left for years now to excuse and in many cases at a very senior level actually extol

01:11:03.000 political violence. We have we have CNN presenters and Democrat representatives willing to say things like

01:11:11.160 the protesters not only, you know, mustn't stop, they shouldn't stop. They should keep going. And these aren't

01:11:18.280 these aren't obscure figures that they're people like Kamala Harris, the vice president elect, who were willing

01:11:24.440 to play with encouraging along the protests that were roiling America last summer. And so and so in that in that

01:11:32.120 situation, it wouldn't surprise me for a moment if there were people on the political right willing to say

01:11:39.640 all make all sorts of excuses and say, well, the election, this, that and the other. But that's where

01:11:46.120 the right will go wrong. That's where the right will go wrong. And I think it has to be totally clear.

01:11:51.480 And instead of just pointing out a double standard has to actually do something different and say, you know,

01:11:57.560 we are not going to excuse for a moment people assaulting federal agents and breaking their way into

01:12:05.560 federal buildings and and and causing the death of a policeman. We on our side will not in any

01:12:12.280 circumstances give cover to people doing that. We will say it's wrong. And we will say it's wrong,

01:12:18.360 even if the left keeps on saying that its form of violence isn't wrong, because the only way out of

01:12:23.960 this is if we show people by demonstrating by living by extolling the way out of it. That is the only answer.

01:12:31.320 OK, so let so let me ask you another question. You know, I can I can two questions. I guess I can hear

01:12:37.960 the voice of a liberal friend of mine, a good friend of mine in in my head while you're talking

01:12:44.120 and saying it's disingenuous at a time like this, two weeks after the Capitol Hill assault,

01:12:50.280 to talk about the Antifa movements in Portland and in Seattle, because they're of a different

01:12:56.760 magnitude. The what what happened in Washington was on the order of an insurrection. And so that's

01:13:03.160 the first objection. And the second one is that I had a brief discussion with my wife about

01:13:12.440 Trump's claim that the election was stolen. And so I've been running this margin of error problem over

01:13:18.840 in my head, say that there was a he he he was defeated by a small margin, relatively small margin.

01:13:26.440 Now, the compelling piece of evidence that he lost, in my estimation, is the fact that and I believe

01:13:32.200 this is right, that of 90 court challenges that the Trump administration has brought forward,

01:13:37.480 only one has been upheld. And that includes the decisions of the judiciary, where the judiciary

01:13:46.200 was fundamentally Republican in its in its in its nomination and in its origin. And so but and her

01:13:54.040 response was, well, you've been saying for years that the judiciary has become increasingly corrupted by

01:14:00.040 left wing activists, let's say, which is really something that's happened to a large degree in Canada.

01:14:05.320 How do you know that the judiciary itself isn't irredeemably corrupt? And I mean, I'm just I'm not

01:14:14.200 willing to to go that far. I don't believe for a moment that Republican nominated judiciary members

01:14:23.720 have been corrupted by left wing propaganda to the point where they overthrew the American election.

01:14:28.520 But but it's the fact that that idea emerges is a real indication of breakdown in this trust that

01:14:38.840 you've been, you know, in this fundamental level of trust that we've been describing. All right,

01:14:43.160 so I'm going to let you riff on those. Well, first of all, yes, in order to look, I have I have endless messages,

01:14:52.040 as I'm sure you do now from the people on the American right, GOP voters who want to persuade

01:14:59.320 me that the election was stolen and that everybody has let Trump down. And in order to believe that,

01:15:05.400 you have to not only believe that all of those courts were wrong and were corrupted in some way.

01:15:11.240 But for instance, the Vice President Pence was corrupted and Mitch McConnell was right.

01:15:16.600 Right, right. Exactly. Yes. All the senior people. OK, so it's worth dwelling. It's worth dwelling on

01:15:22.840 this for a moment because lots of viewers are going to have this as a question. They're going

01:15:27.320 to be wavering with regard to their attitude towards the election. So what we're saying is that

01:15:32.280 the fundamental here's the reasonable perspective. It was very close. No doubt there were irregularities.

01:15:39.080 However, yes, when Trump challenged the integrity of the vote, even the judiciary that would have been

01:15:45.240 ideologically tilted towards him and even nominated by him in some circumstances overruled his objections

01:15:53.560 in the vast majority of cases. Plus, you just said you also have to hypothesize that Mike Pence was

01:16:00.920 somehow got to and that all of the right wingers, the Republican people on the right who are who

01:16:06.680 refused to go along with Trump's claim that the election was stolen. All those people were subject to

01:16:11.560 the same corruption. So the only person that's allowed to be pristine from that perspective is

01:16:17.560 Trump himself. Everywhere else, there's betrayal. And I would strongly urge people, apart from anything

01:16:23.240 else, to look at the absurdity of that idea that the perfect, the only perfect person in the United States

01:16:30.680 is Donald J. Trump. Really? Have you never had any doubts about his character? Have you never

01:16:37.960 wondered about his priorities? Have you never have you never allowed yourself to succumb to the

01:16:45.320 temptation of gleefully using Trump as a weapon against people that who have annoyed you in the

01:16:50.760 past? And is your attraction towards Trump not generated in large part by a kind of resentment that

01:16:57.720 you wouldn't be willing to proudly admit publicly? You have to look. And now you're in a situation where you

01:17:05.800 have to think that he's he's the only paragon of virtue. This is not a this is not a road that I

01:17:12.120 would recommend traveling down. Absolutely. And I worry, I worry that among other things,

01:17:17.640 the opportunity cost to the Democrats of not can not recognize the Democrats had four years where they

01:17:25.240 could have realized that they lost to Trump in spite of the American public knowing who he was.

01:17:29.800 Yes. Not that they didn't know his character or his flaws, but they knew all of them and they voted

01:17:36.040 for him anyway. That's a lesson to try to learn from. And they should have spent four years trying

01:17:40.920 to learn from it. And they didn't. Well, I don't know. I don't know if they didn't. You know, it's

01:17:46.760 I think this this tangles us back up with the problem that we were discussing to begin with.

01:17:51.400 Like, I've worked reasonably closely with the Greg Hurwitz is. Yeah, I did these ads. I met him with

01:17:59.800 you in London. That's right. That's right. You did. You did that. I forgot about that. And we we've

01:18:05.560 talked also about the collapse of the grand narrative. Like, it's not easy for the moderates on the

01:18:10.920 Democrat side to get the stage. Partly, they don't know how they're, they're not social media experts

01:18:17.400 by any stretch of the imagination. And they may have some, some of the contempt that is associated

01:18:23.320 with inability with regard to using the new media forms. They're not savvy in that regard. And they

01:18:29.640 may have learned at least in part, but I don't think they know how to control the ideologues on

01:18:34.600 the left. And it's partly because they, they don't know how to put forth an alternative narrative.

01:18:38.760 Well, here's one very straightforward one that the American left could do. It could recognize you can

01:18:44.360 be proud of your country and feel that it's broadly speaking, been a great force for good in the world

01:18:52.360 without being a reprehensible person. Yes, absolutely. That's a very good place to start.

01:18:58.200 Well, I would say the messages, the messages that have been put out by this particular, uh, group

01:19:04.600 and the candidates that they have supported would agree with that statement. And, and so, so there,

01:19:10.520 yeah, but, but the problem is it's hard. The point is they could have worked more on that. They could

01:19:16.200 have worked to try to make the deplorables feel somewhat, um, less alienated. Yes, that they, that

01:19:25.640 they heard that they didn't want to make their lives more painful. They wanted to lessen the pain.

01:19:31.000 That could have been, that could have been changed. But, but, but the point is that now

01:19:34.440 there's the risk of the same opportunity cost on the American right, that they're going to spend

01:19:40.920 four years with this obsession of the election that's just passed, that massive amount of attention

01:19:48.120 of voters and of thinkers and of outlets and of money and much more is going to be dedicated,

01:19:55.720 first of all, to this attempt to prove everyone other than the Trump family let America down in

01:20:03.880 the last few months. And secondly, that of course, it's going to continue to be caught up with the

01:20:09.080 Trump trade and that he will haunt, not just American politics, but specifically, uh, Republican

01:20:15.080 politics. Okay. So let's talk about, let's talk about this impeachment move then. So, um, my sense

01:20:21.720 was that my sense is that in some way, Trump is better ignored than persecuted. Yes. And the reason

01:20:30.200 I believe that is because of this move towards paranoid conspiratorial thinking that I see emerging

01:20:36.840 everywhere. And the last thing you want to do to people who are becoming paranoid is to persecute

01:20:41.640 them. And for the Democrats have, if the Democrats are going to prosecute Trump, I shouldn't say

01:20:48.840 persecute, not in that context. Anyways, if they're going to prosecute Trump, they need to figure out

01:20:54.600 how to detach the prosecution of Trump from the persecution of people who voted for him.

01:21:01.400 Yes. Right. That's a very tricky thing to do. And so it, I think it would be better to let him go

01:21:06.920 with a whimper than to let him go with a bang. Well, here's, here's one way, by the way. Um, I mean,

01:21:12.840 I know when I was writing about BLM protests last summer, I, at any, by the way, I make a suggestion

01:21:22.200 here, by the way, the American media is much, much more corrupted than the British media. You know,

01:21:26.360 we still have a much wider variety of platforms in the UK and allow people a wider and better array

01:21:32.280 of opinion than the American media, which is almost totally sunk, not completely, but almost totally.

01:21:37.960 In Britain, we don't have quite the same problem. Why do I say that? Because no editor of mine would

01:21:43.320 allow me to claim that everyone who went on a BLM march looted. No editor of mine would allow me to

01:21:50.280 write that. If I even tried it and I wouldn't, I would immediately have my first edit back saying,

01:21:56.680 you can't claim that because everybody who was upset at the death of George Floyd last summer did not go

01:22:04.520 and loot the local Nike store. Some people did. It was too large a number and there were too many

01:22:12.440 people giving cover for them and so on, but you can't say they all did. Right. So let's play the

01:22:19.000 same standard. Are you allowed to pretend that everyone who attended the Capitol Hill demonstration

01:22:24.440 the other week was responsible for the most reprehensible people and their actions? No, you shouldn't

01:22:30.760 do that. Are you allowed to pretend that all Republican voters or Trump supporters were

01:22:35.640 responsible for it? No, you shouldn't be allowed to do that. I mean, we could try to. Not unless you

01:22:41.720 want to live with the consequences. Absolutely. We could try to hold people to that standard. It's

01:22:47.080 a perfectly reasonable. It would have been journalism 101 in America until a few years ago. It's only,

01:22:52.200 as I say, because of the totally corrupted nature of the American media that it's possible for that to

01:22:57.720 happen. By the way, can I just give a quick, as it were, a parenthesis on that? I was just writing

01:23:03.480 a piece yesterday about Andy Ngo and his forthcoming book, Unmasked, which I blurbed and

01:23:10.920 is now the number one bestselling book on Amazon happily. But I read one of the reports on the, again,

01:23:17.720 I don't get stuck on the Antifa thing because the left wing, the Democrat friend in your head will be

01:23:22.600 saying he's talking about Antifa again. I want to get those off as soon as possible.

01:23:26.200 Yeah. Okay. To an example of the corruption of the American media, the American media reporting

01:23:31.320 on the Antifa protests outside the bookstore in Portland and other places, trying to force them

01:23:36.520 not to stock Andy's book. The reports on that said things like, and this, what these were, you know,

01:23:43.560 unusual fringe publications, but ABC and other networks said things like,

01:23:49.400 Andy Ngo, who claimed to have been assaulted and hospitalized by Antifa in 2019. I said,

01:23:57.160 what is this claimed to be? Either the journalist in question was hospitalized or he was not. It's not

01:24:04.680 hard to find that out. It's not hard to satisfy it so that you accurately represent to your readers

01:24:11.240 what happened one day in 2019. You don't need to do these things that signal that you don't agree with

01:24:19.800 the interpretation of the individual in question, which you believe might be attributed to you if

01:24:25.000 you accurately report the facts. It's in these little slippages that the American media has gone so badly

01:24:32.360 wrong. And in, as a result, the American political debate has helped to go so badly.

01:24:37.000 So let me, let me offer something that might be an analog to that maybe.

01:24:43.160 And this might also be viewed by listeners or viewers as concentrating on rearranging the deck

01:24:49.560 chairs when the ship is sinking. But in any case, last week, the Biden-Harris organization put out a tweet

01:24:59.720 with a little video and it was Joseph Biden discussing what he was going to do to small

01:25:05.960 business owners that had been decimated by this terrible pandemic. And then he listed all the

01:25:12.360 identity politics groups that would be preferentially treated. Now he could have, I watched that and I

01:25:18.360 thought that was a big mistake. He could have because he's at the height of his ability to set his own

01:25:24.120 agenda and not to pander to the radicals on the left. If he can't do it right now, he's never going to be able to

01:25:29.560 do it. He should have said, people have been devastated by this pandemic, small business

01:25:35.240 owners. We're going to do everything we can to help them, starting with those who have been affected

01:25:39.800 the most, which is a perfectly reasonable place to start. But he had to list Asians, Latinos, women,

01:25:47.720 people of color. He may not have listed that particular category, certainly blacks.

01:25:52.280 Yeah. And it seemed to me to be completely super, super, super, superfluous. And, and one of those

01:26:02.280 small slips of the sort that you're describing that lead to this tip, this positive feedback loop.

01:26:08.440 Exactly. I saw that video as well. I was horrified. I thought you, if you're the incoming president,

01:26:14.520 you won the election, you have the most important opportunity now to help heal America and you're

01:26:20.040 pulling this. Well, and you also have something obvious to do in front of you. All Biden,

01:26:25.000 all Biden has to do. There's nothing he has to do except immunize the population as fast as possible.

01:26:32.040 It's like, he's got the clearest mandate of any president that I can remember because the problem

01:26:38.360 is self-evident. It's like the pandemic is terrible. It's, it's killing people and it's driving them crazy.

01:26:45.560 Well, that's, that's absolutely, I mean, we should get on that. This is one of my other big fears,

01:26:51.240 that the era of the pandemic, it's several, it's the worst possible time to have an overarching

01:26:58.120 conspiracy narrative introduced to the system by the American president. I mean, the outgoing

01:27:04.680 American president is a very bad time. That's for sure. Donald J. Trump must know this. It's,

01:27:11.400 it's one of the fears that conservatives always had about him was that he was going to pull some 0.99

01:27:16.040 crap like this at the end. You know, it was one of the reasons why a lot of good people wouldn't 0.96

01:27:21.960 join the administration, why they wanted to keep a million miles away from him. And this is a very,

01:27:29.160 very dangerous and reprehensible thing for him to have done in recent years.

01:27:33.320 Yes. Well, you can see his, you can see his essential narcissism manifest itself. And like,

01:27:38.760 it seems to me quite likely that a large, that 75% of Trump believes what he's saying,

01:27:46.760 can't conceive of the fact that he lost the election. And, and I'm, I mean, maybe that's not

01:27:52.200 relevant. Although I think it's, it, it, I'm always trying to understand him from a psychological

01:27:57.720 perspective, but I think his narcissism is so great that he's willing to risk. It appears that

01:28:04.280 he's willing to risk everything in order to, to maintain his belief in victory.

01:28:09.080 Yes. Including the Republic and including all conservative voters. And yes, and more importantly,

01:28:14.280 the Republic, I think it's completely reprehensible. And I know there will be people watching who support

01:28:19.640 Trump. And with fear of this, I still think it's very, very, well, look, we, we, we already,

01:28:24.520 we already, we already walked through why supporting Trump at the moment is something that needs to be

01:28:31.160 rethought. And then we should, I want to get back to that just for one moment. Look, the problem is,

01:28:37.560 is that if you want to maintain your support for Trump under the current conditions that you're going

01:28:41.320 to make yourself a lot more politically radical than you were last week, because you have to swallow

01:28:47.080 so much more than you did two weeks ago, say, or three weeks. You have to believe that absolutely

01:28:51.640 every institution in American life is totally corrupted. And that the only incorrupt, uncorrupted

01:28:57.080 thing is Donald J. Trump. Right. And both of those, like each of those things is not true. And the

01:29:02.120 combined, the combination of them is even less true. Yes. So, so, so it's very, very important that

01:29:08.200 people realize that Donald Trump was in a, in a society that was very close already to conflagration.

01:29:19.800 And he started playing with the matchbox in a very dangerous way from the moment of the evening

01:29:27.480 of the election, when he said that he thought he'd won it already. And his insistence that he has won it

01:29:34.280 still to this moment is a deeply corrupting influence on all of American politics. And it's

01:29:40.360 going to do enormous damage to everyone on the right of politics, everywhere in the world for

01:29:44.760 the foreseeable future. So I, I, I think it was reprehensible what he did. However, I add this to

01:29:50.360 the fact that we're already in this era. I mean, since, since we last spoke, Jordan, if we had, when we last

01:29:57.000 spoke, if either of us had said to the other, that the citizenry of all of our countries will be

01:30:03.000 confined to our houses throughout 2020 and 2021. And made not to see our friends and our closest

01:30:13.480 family in many cases, and not to be allowed to go to the funerals of loved ones and much, much more.

01:30:20.600 And that just basic things like shopping for essential goods would become problematic. If either

01:30:26.520 of us had said this to the other one, when we last spoke, we wouldn't be able to foreseen the

01:30:31.720 circumstances in which such a horror show occurred. We've been in the middle of this horror show.

01:30:37.640 We're still in it in our respective countries. And so again, we already have a very dangerous

01:30:44.600 situation occurring, where we are all even more in our solitudes than the social media systems have

01:30:51.240 already made us. We've already lost almost all of our remaining social antennae. We don't have

01:30:58.200 the ability to feel exactly what it is in a normal situation, like down the pub,

01:31:04.040 or talking with friends in a normal situation over a cup of coffee. We've lost all of that in the last

01:31:10.360 thing. So it's a very bad idea. There's nowhere that isn't a catastrophe.

01:31:15.720 And so it's very easy to believe that there's catastrophe everywhere, even where there isn't.

01:31:20.280 Because, and in this situation, our most important duty, it seems to me, is to hold on as much as we can

01:31:34.120 in this very, very choppy time and not fall into conspiratorial thinking or vengefulness or

01:31:46.120 Yes, excuse of violence. Or resentment.

01:31:50.680 Or resentment.

01:31:51.960 Resentment, legitimization of extra-political or non-political means and much more.

01:31:58.200 We could point out, you know, that the Democrats are making a conservative argument with regards

01:32:05.000 to the election. They're saying, look, the institutions worked.

01:32:11.640 Therefore, we're the valid government. But before they can make the claim that they're the valid

01:32:17.720 government, they have to accept the claim that the institutions worked.

01:32:22.200 And the conservatives shouldn't object to that because the conservatives believe that the institutions

01:32:27.560 are valid. And so it's up to everyone right now to maintain their faith in the validity of the

01:32:33.560 institutions and to not overreact and to remember that we've all been driven half out of our

01:32:38.840 minds or maybe more by this enforced isolation and the fear that the pandemic has produced.

01:32:45.320 And that that's also opened the door to a political catastrophe on the heels of the biological 0.63

01:32:51.320 catastrophe.

01:32:52.120 Yes. 1.00

01:32:52.520 Everyone needs to breathe deeply and wait for the damn vaccination. 0.99

01:32:56.680 It's only going to be a few more months before, with any luck, before this is brought under control. 0.99

01:33:01.640 We don't want to burn down the ship just before it gets into port.

01:33:04.760 This is this is one of the reasons why, you know, I've again, I mean, you know, you get criticism from

01:33:11.320 making this point and largely at the moment from a an increasingly conspiratorially inclined right.

01:33:18.040 But, you know, I don't believe that the last the last year is simply some kind of prelude for democratic

01:33:27.480 governments coincidentally across the entire world to fundamentally reprogram our species or something like

01:33:33.880 that. I don't I don't I don't see it. I think there's all sorts of criticism. I think that

01:33:39.800 we've made the economies too secondary in a discussion on the public health for my taste.

01:33:46.280 But again, if we had a mature political discussion in any of our countries, it would it would have involved,

01:33:52.600 as you know, I've discussed this before in Aristotelian terms to do with immigration, but I can do the same thing

01:33:57.800 in relation to the pandemic, which is you have competing virtues of almost equal seriousness.

01:34:06.120 You have the public health and you have the economy. And for a time in all of our societies,

01:34:11.240 we over prioritize the public health, perhaps and under prioritize the economy.

01:34:15.960 And if you don't have an economy, then at some point you don't have a public health system or anything like it.

01:34:21.240 And you end up in a situation of a country where the poor and disdressed are much more likely to just 0.87

01:34:27.080 die. And so we sacrificed we sell what we're doing is sacrificing long term public health for short term

01:34:36.680 gains on the hospital front. And that's actually not surprising. Like I've thanked my lucky stars many

01:34:43.240 times in the last year that I'm not in a position to be making those decisions because it must be hell.

01:34:48.120 And what we need to all step back and think, look, we might get lucky. There's a dozen vaccines

01:34:54.200 that are that are making their way to market and many that have already arrived. And a few months

01:35:00.040 is a hell of a long time when you're living through it, but not very long time when you think

01:35:03.960 about it in retrospect. And so if we're smart, we're going to write this out.

01:35:08.120 Absolutely. And here's an example of where the whole thing can both be mended and can go awry.

01:35:13.960 One thing I've tried to alert some people to in the last year has been, are we sure that it's,

01:35:20.760 are we sure that, for instance, it's worth our GDPs crashing and our and our state borrowing soaring

01:35:28.920 in this fashion for this virus? The answer might be yes. But if it's yes, then you have to be pretty

01:35:35.960 sure that nothing like it's going to happen again. And I'm not at all sure of that. I'm not at all sure

01:35:42.200 that, among other things, because the country that gave us this virus is led by a communist regime

01:35:47.560 that has done everything it can to cover over how the virus came about. And so here's one of the risks

01:35:53.400 we have in the era we're going into. The question of how to make sure that nothing like this ever

01:36:00.600 happens again is likely to be subsumed and forgotten about, among other things, because a lot of energy

01:36:09.080 is going to be expended by people in fruitless and conspiratorial pursuits, which will include

01:36:16.440 conspiratorial pursuits against everyone in government in their respective countries.

01:36:21.080 And we will we will lose the opportunity, for instance, to hold the CCP to account or to make

01:36:27.480 sure that they don't give us another virus like this in a couple of years time, because we also know

01:36:32.280 from this this last year that we live in societies which are dominated by risk aversion

01:36:41.000 and are highly litigious. I mean, many of the firms that will will not come back will not come back

01:36:47.480 because they were in fear that one employee might get the virus if they returned too early to the

01:36:53.720 office and then sue their employer. For instance, all of these are, they're not the deepest problems

01:36:59.720 in a society, but they're, in terms of the technocracy of a society, they are very serious

01:37:05.080 problems and need addressing. I worry that we're going to address none of this because of energies

01:37:11.720 expended in fruitless directions. And I wonder if we can't just somehow again come and come across

01:37:21.640 ways to solve problems. And that can be done by trust being built across political divides.

01:37:29.880 Well, so that's, that's a big part of this is that I would say another, if one piece of advice is to

01:37:37.240 understand what you're sacrificing by continuing to support Trump under these conditions, another

01:37:41.800 piece of advice would be to risk trust. Yes, at the present time, you know, we've been through

01:37:52.440 in the West, we've been through crises of various sorts in the past and managed them quite successfully,

01:37:58.280 all things considered. And you could point to the pandemic response and look at all the things that

01:38:03.720 have been positive about it. The biggest of those being the dozen or so vaccines or more that are

01:38:10.040 in the pipeline and that have been produced with unbelievable speed, and, and apparent utility.

01:38:17.080 And I'm praying that that's the case, knowing full well that, you know, vaccinating 100 million people

01:38:22.600 with a relatively unproven chemical is a dangerous enterprise. But I'm praying that it goes well. And I'm

01:38:30.200 praying as well that that trust. I've been thinking increasingly, I wrote about this in my book that's

01:38:36.360 coming out in March about trust as a form of courage, right, rather than because naive trust is

01:38:42.360 useless. And anybody who's been hit is no longer naive. And so maybe no longer trusting, but you can

01:38:47.880 replace that with a trust that's born out of courage. And if you manifest trust, even across a political

01:38:54.200 divide, you call to the best in the person across that divide by saying, look, I'm willing to trust

01:38:59.880 you knowing full well that you're as big a snake as me. So that's what we need at the moment. And I,

01:39:07.480 and I'm, I'm hoping Biden. Well, I mean, I, he has a, he has a great burden. And I hope that he can be

01:39:14.520 pragmatic and concentrate on the real problems and, and help us put, I was looking, I was reading your

01:39:21.560 book and I kept thinking, this sounds like the past to me because the pandemic has switched

01:39:26.280 things around so dramatically. It's like, well, this is so 2018 or, or, and, and maybe it's not,

01:39:33.400 maybe it's still valid for today, but maybe the pandemic has changed everything too. And, you know,

01:39:38.840 we can put some of these trivial and adolescent preoccupations behind us and concentrate on the

01:39:46.600 real problems at hand. So some people listening will have heard me say this before, but when,

01:39:53.320 when the pandemic first struck in 2020, I was under the, for a moment, I mean, I thought a lot of

01:39:59.800 things like all of us, one of my thoughts, secondary thought was, oh, well, at least that'll see off all

01:40:06.040 the identity politics nonsense. I thought, well, you know, no one's going to have much time for

01:40:11.400 playing gender games. If we're all going to lose a significant swathe of our loved ones. 0.72

01:40:17.560 And I thought for a time, I thought, I thought, well, no, that will make the subject of the madness

01:40:21.080 of crowds look like a sort of dated, a dated book already. Like, you know, one of these books written

01:40:27.560 just before a catastrophe, which, which wipes out the relevance of the book in question. And I sort of had,

01:40:34.120 I had that feeling for a few weeks, I thought, and then I saw the same stuff coming in the same games

01:40:41.400 being played. And then of course, after the death of George Floyd, I saw, you know, one of the subjects

01:40:47.720 I take on the book race just below. And I say in the updated version, you know, that was, that was my

01:40:54.440 experience of it was in the way I was, I was hoping my book was going to be irrelevant. And then,

01:40:59.320 and then suddenly it seemed to be right over the target again. And, and, and, and, you know,

01:41:07.320 and it's, it's strange because, because I felt, I felt already that what I'd seen that just,

01:41:15.960 and what I'd warned about had just exploded just after I'd warned about it. And as you know,

01:41:22.920 I've had this experience. I mean, it's very worrying because you see the speed at which things pick up and

01:41:29.000 the, and the, and the violence that just catches faster than you'd ever feared.

01:41:33.960 That's a characteristic of positive feedback loops spiral out of control unbelievably quickly.

01:41:40.200 And before we knew it, you know, in Britain,

01:41:43.960 suddenly Winston Churchill was a reprehensible figure to a lot of people. Yes. Overnight.

01:41:51.000 And I resisted that as I always do. I resisted the attempt to smuggle in a new narrative about

01:42:00.680 everything in my, my society and country and my country's history under cover of a terrible

01:42:07.240 policeman's actions in Minnesota. But I think most people felt at that moment that they were on the

01:42:13.080 back foot, if they believed as I do, that their society had a lot to be said for it,

01:42:20.600 rather than this horrible, hostile rewriting that was being attempted on the back, on the back of an

01:42:26.840 incident, awful as it was in Minnesota. And I, and I just, I, but I saw the speed and the recklessness

01:42:35.000 with which people tried to push in a new story. And then I suppose one of the things I thought about

01:42:40.920 was, well, what are the things that I suggest in the madness of crowds being ways out? And are they

01:42:47.480 still working? Would they still be relevant in this situation? And perhaps I would say this, but I do

01:42:53.560 find that the answers I give, I mean, they're not the most specific in a way, but I try not to be

01:43:00.680 specific. I try to give them the deepest, most widely applicable answers I can.

01:43:06.200 Well, you talk about, you talk about forgiveness. And I figured that would be a good way for us to

01:43:12.600 close out this discussion, you know, and I think that that's, you know, I think that that's,

01:43:18.600 that's a topic upon which much meditation could be expended. You know, we have to live with each

01:43:25.880 other. The left wingers have to live with the Trump voters and the Trump voters have to live with the

01:43:31.080 identity politics types. And we have good, solid institutions. And I think we need in the next

01:43:38.280 coming months to put out our, put out our hands to our, to those who oppose us, knowing full well that

01:43:45.960 we might be burnt in the attempt, but to do it nonetheless, and to keep doing it because the,

01:43:51.000 all the alternatives are much worse unless you want to see things burn. And yes, most people are

01:43:56.680 moderate and reasonable. Yes. And, uh, will feel deep embarrassment at some point if they allow

01:44:04.200 their own political side to run to its extremes, they will, you know, I, I, I think this about,

01:44:10.040 I don't want to get stuck on him again, but I'll be very quickly. I think this about,

01:44:14.520 about what has happened in recent weeks on the Republican right. There will be, and should be,

01:44:19.720 some embarrassment that a president, a Republican president was able to stand in front of a very

01:44:26.440 large crowd, mainly comprising Patriots and to say words, which were, if that were not incitement,

01:44:33.080 direct incitement, but were real fighting talk and raise the question of exactly what it is he thought

01:44:39.320 the crowd should do, you know? And I think he didn't ever want to make that too clear, even to himself.

01:44:46.200 I think I read the speech carefully and it's, it's, it's, it's, here's what I think.

01:44:52.680 This is what I would suggest you do if you were true Patriots.

01:44:56.680 Right. And I think this is, this is a reckless, reckless speech. And I think that people should

01:45:02.760 have the decency on any and all political sides to say that recklessness, you don't have to go all

01:45:10.360 the way to incitement, that reckless speech, you've got to be careful with, and you've got to try to

01:45:15.880 limit it. And you've got to try to call it out where you can, and not just enjoy it because at

01:45:21.560 some point it will lead to something which will humiliate you and humiliate your side and much,

01:45:29.400 much more. It will make you feel shame. And you want to try to avoid that. So in The Man's

01:45:34.680 of Crowds, one of the things, as you say, I referred to is, is this, and I write a chapter on

01:45:40.040 is the importance of forgiveness. And, and it's quite easy when you're caught up, as you well know,

01:45:44.840 when you're caught up in the sort of day-to-day fights that are going on and the endless information

01:45:50.120 and, and, and new examples and new lows that are always being hit. It's quite easy to, to lose sight of

01:45:57.640 the, of the deep underlying answers to some of our present traumas. But I'm, I'm absolutely persuaded

01:46:04.680 that one of them lies in forgiveness. And one of the reasons I, I go there is obviously we, we live

01:46:11.640 in this society and the social media has exacerbated it beyond all previous human belief. We live in

01:46:17.480 societies which are very eager to demonstrate us and them instincts without having to leave your bed.

01:46:27.480 You know, you can, you can shame somebody, you can, you can try to destroy them, you can do your bit

01:46:33.000 to pick up on something somebody said or once said and go for them and pummel them and destroy them and 0.91

01:46:38.760 everything, every future they've got. You can do that, but you should also know how dangerous it is. And my

01:46:46.280 hope has always been that the more people saw this, the more they would step back from this manner of

01:46:51.000 living. But the thing, the thing that, that, that struck me and made me write about the forgiveness

01:46:55.800 thing in particular actually was, was something that Hannah Arendt, who perhaps isn't a thinker,

01:47:01.320 I think over highly of actually, um, I, all sorts of criticisms of her, like a lot of people have.

01:47:07.160 Um, but, um, there's a lecture that Hannah Arendt delivered in the 50s, which I, I happened to read

01:47:12.920 a few years ago, and it just made an enormous impression on me. Because Arendt says, um, in this

01:47:18.200 lecture something, I think it will be highly pertinent to a lot of people listening, which is that,

01:47:21.960 is that we've always as human beings had a one worry in particular, which is how do we act in the world?

01:47:32.360 How do we act in the world? How do we put one's foot in front of the other? How do we put one word

01:47:38.840 in front of the, of another and, and, and say the next one and, and decide what our actions should be

01:47:45.640 day to day, never mind year to year. And we all have the terror of action and the young people in

01:47:52.680 particular have it because they haven't tried it out enough. They haven't, they haven't yet made

01:47:56.680 their mistakes and you've got to make your mistakes in order apart from anything else to lose some of

01:48:00.840 the terror of the question of action in the world. But Hannah Arendt says something so interesting in

01:48:05.640 this lecture. She says, she says, as human beings, we only ever really found one mechanism

01:48:12.200 to make the horror of acting in the world less horrific. And that was the mechanism that we know

01:48:20.520 as forgiveness, which in, in religious terms, you can add to is also the possibility of redemption,

01:48:27.480 which perhaps in a highly secularized society, we ought to also think about more, not just forgiveness,

01:48:32.520 but redemption. And, and, and I say that this is therefore something that we should all be trying to

01:48:38.440 exercise in our lives because we sure as hell know that we as individuals do not want to ourselves

01:48:44.360 be treated without ever having forgiveness demonstrated to us by other people towards us.

01:48:51.480 We don't want to live in a situation where when we want slip, if we once wear the wrong thing or make

01:48:57.320 the wrong move or, or, or make the wrong move on someone else or, or, or, or say the wrong thing,

01:49:02.760 we don't want to live in a world where we at any moment can destroy ourselves catastrophically and

01:49:09.080 unmendedly. We don't want to live in that world ourselves. So why would we expect other people to

01:49:15.320 live in that world or to want to live in that world? And the mechanism, therefore, that we all have to,

01:49:20.040 in our political and non-political lives, because politics isn't, damn well isn't everything,

01:49:25.960 but in our political and non-political lives, we have to work at finding ways to forgive.

01:49:33.480 And, and, and, and there's a lot to say about this, but this is, this is seems to me to be one of the

01:49:39.080 absolute keys in our time that we all need to work on. How can I forgive a person who has done a wrong

01:49:45.880 to me? How can I allow somebody else who may have made a mistake to live again? It's not, it's not the same

01:49:57.720 thing as you well know. I mean, it's not the same thing as being willfully naive. It's not about just

01:50:04.440 giving people a, you know, second time. It's the nature of the apology matters deeply as well, of

01:50:10.280 course, the nature of the seeking for redemption or seeking for forgiveness matters. You know,

01:50:15.400 we know that you can't just sort of say, oh, well, yeah, that's sorry about that and move on,

01:50:20.200 that it has to be deep and deeply meant. But when an, when a feeling of that is deeply meant and is

01:50:26.280 deeply offered, it should not be retributively and deliberately willfully smashed away in order to

01:50:36.040 win a short term political or other point. And so I think that's a good, I think that's an excellent

01:50:43.640 place to, to end the conversation. And for everyone who's listening to consider deeply in the upcoming

01:50:51.240 months, you know, we want to extend a, an intelligent and compassionate hand across the political divide

01:50:59.400 and hope that we don't rock the boat any further than nature has already decided to rock it. And maybe

01:51:07.000 we'll make it through this dire time and put things back together. And for all the right wingers who've

01:51:14.920 been tossed out of power in the United States is you'll get your opportunity again soon enough. And

01:51:20.280 in the meantime, you better wish your new president well.

01:51:22.920 Good talking to you, Douglas, and very nice to see you.

01:51:28.120 It's been terrific to see you. I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to see you, Jordan.

01:51:31.240 Thanks very much. I'm, I hope we talk again soon.

01:51:35.080 I really hope so.

01:51:52.920 Thanks for that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 24, 2021

152. Radical Ideology and the Nihilistic Void ｜ Douglas Murray

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