The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 178. Free Speech and the Satirical Activist ｜ Andrew Doyle

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00:00:50.980 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, episode 32 of season 4.

00:00:59.300 I'm Michaela. I hope everyone had a wonderful Father's Day weekend.

00:01:04.060 On this episode, my dad spoke with Andrew Doyle.

00:01:07.600 Andrew Doyle is a British comedian, author, playwright, journalist, a master of political satire, and the voice of Titania McGrath.

00:01:15.940 Jordan and Andrew discussed his new book, Free Speech and Why It Matters, The Hate Crime Law in Parliament, Free Speech and Its Importance, Twitter Attacks, Creativity, Titania McGrath's Story, and more.

00:01:30.100 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:01:31.440 Andrew Doyle is with me today.

00:01:49.800 Andrew is a British comedian, playwright, journalist, political satirist, and author who co-created the fictional character Jonathan Pye and the equally or perhaps even more fictional character Titania McGrath.

00:02:05.140 He recently published his first book, Free Speech, Why It Matters, which came out in 2021, but previously published two more as the aforementioned Titania McGrath.

00:02:18.300 The first of those was Woke, A Guide to Social Justice, published in 2019, and the second was My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, published in 2020.

00:02:31.580 I haven't met Andrew before.

00:02:33.340 I'm looking forward to talking with him about free speech and about his satire and about the intersection between those two and whatever else comes up.

00:02:43.280 Thank you very much for coming on today.

00:02:45.500 I'm looking forward to speaking with you.

00:02:47.040 Thanks so much for having me.

00:02:49.840 So shall we start perhaps with the discussion of your book?

00:02:53.060 I finished it yesterday.

00:02:55.700 I've become notorious, I suppose, for my particular take on free speech.

00:03:02.080 And so it was a book that interested me.

00:03:05.560 Tell me why you wrote it and what you learned and all of those things.

00:03:10.400 Well, it's not the sort of book I ever envisaged that I would have to write.

00:03:13.800 You know, I think if you go back 10, 15 years, the idea that free speech, which is obviously the seedbed of all our liberties, would be something that we would have to defend, would have probably seemed a little bit ridiculous to me because I basically took it for granted.

00:03:27.540 I thought that everyone was on that side.

00:03:29.840 But I fear that something has happened, particularly over the past 10 years or so.

00:03:35.540 And it is connected, I feel, with the rise of this social justice movement or what we might call critical social justice or however we want to call it.

00:03:43.960 A lot of people call it the woke movement.

00:03:45.360 However you want to label that ideology, which at its heart has a real mistrust of free speech.

00:03:52.680 And you hear it all the time in the kind of phrases that the activists use, phrases like words are violence or this kind of language normalizes hate or legitimizes hate or all this kind of thing.

00:04:02.820 And there's a real genuine mistrust of the power of language to effectively corrupt the masses.

00:04:09.920 And what I wanted to do, I suppose, was try and marshal a defense for this principle that I had always, always taken for granted.

00:04:18.520 But at the same time, attempt to grapple with the concerns that people might have, because my worry with the culture war, as we call it, is that you have two sort of extreme poles arguing against each other.

00:04:30.360 And most people are caught in the middle.

00:04:31.780 I think most people are broadly for the idea of free speech, but they have a few reservations, for instance, when it comes to demagogues espousing hate or hate against a particular minority group or something like that.

00:04:43.340 Or people are concerned about the ways in which language can cause harm.

00:04:47.760 And I don't think anyone would deny that words can be hurtful.

00:04:50.660 So most people, I think, are somewhere in between and are open to persuasion.

00:04:55.440 And I think my point, my principal argument in the book is that absolute freedom of speech is always going to be better.

00:05:04.160 And in fact, by promoting free speech, you're doing something to help those very people that you are concerned about.

00:05:10.240 So recently, the Scottish Parliament passed a hate crime law that has its supporters and also its detractors.

00:05:22.080 And I'd be interested in your feeling about that.

00:05:25.880 Now, you said, I believe in this book, if I remember the statistics correctly,

00:05:29.700 that there have been 120,000 incidents of police investigated speech hate crime in Britain in how long since that's been over the last five years or so?

00:05:43.920 It's worse than that.

00:05:45.500 The statistic I quote is between 2014 and 2019, there are 120,000 recorded incidents of non-crime.

00:05:54.380 They call them non-crime hate incidents.

00:05:56.360 And this is something which is now routine in the UK.

00:05:59.140 I mean, obviously, I'm going to be talking about the UK and the US and Canada is a very different kettle of fish, I'm sure.

00:06:04.880 And I'm sure a lot of the people who are watching won't be familiar with the problems we have in the UK.

00:06:09.220 Of course, we don't have constitutional protection for free speech.

00:06:12.160 We don't have a First Amendment.

00:06:13.680 We don't have anything like that.

00:06:15.200 So we are particularly vulnerable.

00:06:17.260 And at the moment, unfortunately, in the UK, the police who are trained by the College of Policing, who do issue very specific guidelines about this,

00:06:26.100 and anyone can check this because if you go to the government's website on hate crime and hate speech, they make very clear what they're talking about.

00:06:32.380 What they say is that there are five protected characteristics, and these fall into race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, and disability.

00:06:40.820 I think I might have misquoted that, but there's one missing.

00:06:43.100 But anyway, there are five protected characteristics.

00:06:46.140 And if a victim, and they do use the word victim rather than complainant, if a victim perceives that any speech or crime was motivated by hatred towards any of those five protected characteristics,

00:06:59.580 then it qualifies as a hate crime if it's criminal.

00:07:02.720 If it's not criminal, if it's just speech or something like that, it qualifies as a non-crime hate incident.

00:07:08.460 Police will investigate that.

00:07:10.260 They will record that.

00:07:11.300 And although non-crime incidents don't lead to prosecution, they do go on a criminal reference check that many people take.

00:07:17.920 We call it a disclosure and barring service here.

00:07:20.640 So it can affect your employment prospects.

00:07:23.460 And is that without a trial?

00:07:25.320 That's recorded without a trial?

00:07:27.340 Of course.

00:07:27.940 There's no trial.

00:07:28.400 So you get a quasi-criminal record.

00:07:30.720 You get something flagged up, particularly if you're applying for a teaching job, say something like that, where you're working with children.

00:07:35.580 It's very important.

00:07:36.300 And you get this thing flagged up.

00:07:37.700 So it does have serious ramifications.

00:07:40.040 But even beyond that, we have hate speech laws, which are encoded into the Public Order Act, which is one example.

00:07:46.900 But the main example is the Electronic Communications Act 2003.

00:07:50.780 In this country, and I do quote the statistic in the book as well, we have roughly 3,000 people arrested a year for offensive things that they have said online.

00:08:03.960 So in other words, nine people a day, roughly, the police in the UK are arresting.

00:08:07.860 And people in the UK will be familiar with this, because if you see the Twitter accounts of various police forces, various police departments across the country, they often put things out like, you know, make sure you don't say anything offensive or thoughtless online, or we will be knocking on your door.

00:08:20.720 They say these very kind of frightening things.

00:08:24.100 There was a recent police display outside a supermarket in the UK.

00:08:29.800 It went viral, this image.

00:08:31.260 It was them next to a big digital billboard.

00:08:33.160 And the slogan on the billboard was, being offensive is an offence.

00:08:37.940 And this was flanked by police officers who were socially distanced, but they were there in their masks, which made it seem slightly more sinister.

00:08:45.740 They got in a lot of trouble for that, because people were saying, well, being offensive surely isn't a crime.

00:08:51.020 But actually, the problem with that is that the police clearly thought it was a crime.

00:08:54.840 And they, you know, they were acting on that basis.

00:08:56.680 They'd obviously hadn't just concocted this billboard out of nothing.

00:08:59.660 They'd really considered what it should say.

00:09:01.460 And more to the point, actually, they were right.

00:09:04.220 In this country, you can go to prison for jokes, for offensive remarks.

00:09:10.440 And people have gone to prison, have been arrested routinely for causing offence.

00:09:15.920 And of course, the notion of offence is incredibly subjective.

00:09:19.720 In fact, the legal stipulation in the Communications Act is that you will have broken the law if the judge and jury deem that you have communicated material that is, quote unquote, grossly offensive.

00:09:32.120 Well, I don't know how you define that.

00:09:33.560 And also, who defines it is the real question as far as I'm concerned.

00:09:38.300 I mean, I've looked into this legislation to some degree.

00:09:41.320 And one of the things that struck me about it was that it seems to be purposefully left up to the hypothetical victim to define offence, which has become a subjective reality.

00:09:54.860 And you can understand why that might be to some degree, because how would you define hate and how would you define offence without, especially the latter, without making recourse to someone's subjective experience?

00:10:08.860 But then, of course, well, we'll delve into that in a moment.

00:10:13.660 I should start with the hard question, I suppose, which is, well, clearly people can say hateful things, and those things can be damaging psychologically and physiologically, I suppose, if people are stressed enough and the borderline is very difficult to identify.

00:10:29.160 Why is it that people shouldn't just assume that you're a mean loudmouth and that they shouldn't pay any attention to you at all because you're concerned about this?

00:10:40.040 I mean, that's the general criticism of critics of hate speech, let's say.

00:10:46.920 And so why in the world aren't the people who are putting this forward just trying to make the world a nicer place?

00:10:53.880 What's the big problem here?

00:10:55.220 Well, I think a lot of people do assume that I'm a mean loudmouth.

00:10:59.180 I think they assume that about most people who defend freedom of speech.

00:11:03.700 And I'm sure the latter part of your question is absolutely right, insofar as I imagine a lot of the people who are sceptical about free speech are, in fact, trying to make the world a better place.

00:11:13.360 I don't think that's mutually exclusive.

00:11:14.740 I mean, the problem here is that the legislation as it currently stands here means that, for instance, if you say something critical about me and I perceive that it was motivated by hatred towards me on the basis of my sexuality, for instance, I could phone the police and that would be recorded and would appear on hate crime statistics in this country because it's all about perception.

00:11:36.500 That word is used about five or six times within the one passage in the hate crime legislation, the word perception of the victim.

00:11:43.160 And again, I say victim, not complainant, which suggests a complete disregard for due process.

00:11:47.840 But I suppose we can leave that aside.

00:11:49.000 But the most common, the most common and the most frightening misconception I have found when it comes to people defending free speech is that they are doing so because they want to have the right to say appalling things about people with no comeback whatsoever.

00:12:04.060 And they want to go back to some imaginary good old days, you know, where you could just be casually homophobic and racist and sexist and all the rest of it.

00:12:12.160 And no one would call you out for that.

00:12:14.080 Now, I don't know anyone who falls into that category.

00:12:16.360 And most people who are, you know, advocating for free speech are doing so precisely because they are aware that in countries where free speech protections are meagre, minorities tend to suffer the most.

00:12:28.140 And in fact, there is a it seems to be a corollary to me that those who are genuinely for free speech are also for equal rights and protecting the vulnerable in society.

00:12:38.380 And this perception, which I really find unpleasant, this perception that if you are standing up for this most foundational of principles of freedom of speech, if you're standing up for that, you can only be doing so if you have a nefarious motive.

00:12:50.800 I mean, what a horribly pessimistic view of humanity.

00:12:53.380 Well, it seems to be a direct derivation of the hypothesis, for example, that all Western social organizations, particularly Western, are based on power and are best conceived of as tyrannical.

00:13:13.640 And so if that's your view, why would you not assume that most use of speech is essentially an exercise of power in the service of tyranny?

00:13:24.760 But then why would you assume that the government in control of any particular country isn't part of that tyranny that you're describing?

00:13:32.240 It seems odd to me to be mindful of the potential for tyranny, but then to outsource all your individual liberties to the state.

00:13:40.720 It seems contradictory to me.

00:13:41.940 Well, I guess the way that that is elided over is by allowing the hypothetical individual victim to define the offense.

00:13:53.480 This is the problem, though.

00:13:54.480 I mean, the problem I've run into, and this is partly why I appreciated your book, is that increasingly people are called upon to defend fundamental assumptions that were so taken for granted

00:14:08.460 that virtually no one has an argument that's fully articulated at hand.

00:14:14.640 When no one questions free speech, no one has to defend it thoroughly.

00:14:18.640 As soon as it's questioned, well, it becomes an extraordinarily complicated problem.

00:14:23.520 The same with gender identity.

00:14:25.900 When no one's paying attention to it, it's obvious.

00:14:28.780 But as soon as you have to think it through, it becomes a rat's nest, to say the least.

00:14:33.500 When I was in the UK a few years ago, I saw a number of things that I felt were disturbing.

00:14:41.560 People seem to have accepted the omnipresence of CCTV cameras to a degree that I found horrifying.

00:14:49.040 Frankly, I don't like CCTV cameras.

00:14:51.860 I don't like the message they portray, which is that everyone is criminal enough, so they should be surveyed all the time, and someone needs to be watching.

00:15:03.460 I noticed, too, in London in particular, that many buildings had instituted airport-level security,

00:15:11.980 so that you had to pass through a metal detector and have your bags checked, etc., while you were moving in and out of buildings.

00:15:18.960 And it struck me as quite horrifying, given that, as far as I'm concerned, Great Britain and its legal and parliamentary traditions are at the epicenter of Western freedoms.

00:15:32.240 I mean, you could make a case for France, I suppose, but not a strong one, as far as I'm concerned.

00:15:37.960 Yet, your citizens seem to have accepted this with virtually no problem.

00:15:44.780 And now, on the heels of that, we have this multiplication of hate crime.

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00:17:08.400 Your citizens seem to have accepted this with virtually no problem, and now on the heels of that, we have this multiplication of hate crime.

00:17:19.880 That's as much a surprise to me as it is to you.

00:17:23.820 I mean, you won't have seen all of the CCTV cameras.

00:17:27.100 Apparently, they're absolutely everywhere.

00:17:28.600 You can't walk anywhere in the UK without being potentially monitored.

00:17:34.360 I'm not saying someone's watching you all the time, but things are being recorded and digitised.

00:17:39.080 Yeah, and it's interesting to me because I remember back in the early 2000s,

00:17:43.220 when the government was trying to push through its ID card scheme,

00:17:46.080 and broadly speaking, the left were unanimously against it.

00:17:49.580 And they didn't like this idea of living in a society where there's someone on the corner saying,

00:17:53.440 papers, please.

00:17:54.260 No one really wanted that.

00:17:56.040 But we've become very docile and very accepting of the idea that we need to be coddled and monitored by the state.

00:18:02.900 I mean, I know there's a recent debate about vaccine passports,

00:18:04.980 and people seem very blasé about this idea that we might have to have our ID embedded and encoded onto a card to get anywhere or to do anything.

00:18:13.840 So I think there's something going on there, and it is connected with what you've brought up in terms of hate crime legislation.

00:18:20.300 We've just become accustomed.

00:18:22.120 I mean, you mentioned specifically the problem in Scotland.

00:18:25.180 And seriously, it relates very closely to what you're saying,

00:18:27.960 because the SNP, who are the only really party with any clout in Scotland,

00:18:31.680 that's the Scottish National Party.

00:18:34.120 And it's never a good idea, is it, when you have one political party which doesn't really have an opposition.

00:18:38.680 They have a reputation for quite nanny state-ish policies.

00:18:42.140 You know, they introduced a, what was it called, the named person scheme.

00:18:46.300 It didn't go through in the end, but they wanted to assign every child born in Scotland with a state guardian.

00:18:52.100 You know, they effectively didn't trust the parents to raise their own kids.

00:18:55.520 They have other examples, you know, minimum pricing on alcohol or a ban on two-for-one pizzas,

00:18:59.780 because they don't trust poor people not to gain weight.

00:19:02.860 So all sorts of, these sorts of policies.

00:19:05.040 But in this current hate crime bill, which has just sailed through because there's no opposition,

00:19:09.460 Hamza Youssef, the Justice Secretary, has pushed through,

00:19:12.940 he specifically included an element to this bill,

00:19:16.120 which says that they can criminalise you for things you say in the privacy of your own home.

00:19:20.040 I mean, that to me is, I mean, that's just a given.

00:19:22.320 I would have never thought that anyone in this country would not consider that

00:19:25.920 to be an incredible invasion on individual liberty.

00:19:29.260 You can make a strong case for Scotland as the ground zero for many of the,

00:19:35.780 developing many of the concepts that undergird the entire Western notion of freedom.

00:19:40.840 And to see that emerging in Scotland is absolutely stunningly terrifying, as far as I'm concerned.

00:19:47.060 You think of Mel Gibson with a face covered in woad, 0.71

00:19:49.620 shouting freedom as he's executed, you know, in Braveheart.

00:19:53.020 You do think of Scotland as being associated with it.

00:19:55.200 But honestly, Scotland, for some reason, and I don't know what it is,

00:19:58.500 and it might be to do that it's effectively this one party state,

00:20:01.280 it seems to have this incredible sense.

00:20:03.880 And they've really bought into this idea that unless they can police the thought,

00:20:08.080 the thought and speech of their citizens, then they will just run amok.

00:20:12.820 There's another element to that bill.

00:20:14.280 I don't know if you know about this.

00:20:15.180 There's a specific element on the bill which talks about the public performance of a play.

00:20:18.940 So they've effectively said that they will criminalise public performances.

00:20:24.080 So say if it can be deemed that those performances were designed to stir up hatred,

00:20:28.840 that's the formulation, stir up hatred.

00:20:31.160 I'm not quite sure what that means necessarily.

00:20:32.820 But when Hamza Youssef was questioned about this in Parliament,

00:20:36.180 he actually said, well, theoretically, a neo-Nazi or someone from the far right

00:20:39.720 could get together with a group of actors and put on a play to recruit people to his cause.

00:20:45.240 And as I said at the time, I don't know any neo-Nazis, but they're not into amateur dramatics.

00:20:49.900 That's not their thing.

00:20:50.820 They don't do that.

00:20:51.860 They wouldn't get involved.

00:20:52.760 And yet he's got this idea in his head that that is a feasible...

00:20:55.600 I mean, it seems ridiculous, but it's not really,

00:20:57.940 because the ramifications are quite serious.

00:21:00.500 And the way it's just gone through without any opposition really, really troubles me.

00:21:05.340 I mean, there have been modifications, I should say, in fairness.

00:21:08.200 In the initial bill, in the initial draft of the bill,

00:21:11.140 they had said that you could be criminalised irrespective of intention.

00:21:14.180 In other words...

00:21:15.420 Yes, that was terrifying.

00:21:17.460 ...awful.

00:21:17.980 I mean, if you wrote a play that then stimulated someone to join the far right,

00:21:22.520 then you were still responsible whether you intended it or not.

00:21:24.580 Now, the problem is, you know, with theatrical representation

00:21:26.660 or any kind of artistic representation,

00:21:28.360 is sometimes you want to represent the worst aspects of humanity,

00:21:31.540 because that's part of drama and literature and all the rest of it.

00:21:36.020 I mean, you would be...

00:21:37.180 There would be no artistic freedom if that went through.

00:21:39.080 So fortunately, that element of the bill was modified.

00:21:42.640 Well, and also the attempt to reverse the idea that intent is important,

00:21:47.480 that's even more catastrophic.

00:21:51.640 It's always been a miracle to me that our legal system

00:21:55.260 ever became psychologically sophisticated enough

00:21:58.740 so that intent rather than outcome was what mattered.

00:22:02.540 Because you have to be a sophisticated thinker

00:22:05.420 to see that someone has done damage to someone else,

00:22:09.020 and so the damage is real and marked and troublesome and costly,

00:22:14.500 all of that, painful.

00:22:16.220 But because the intent wasn't there,

00:22:19.720 the severity of the action is dramatically mitigated.

00:22:23.160 That's a sign of maturity and sophistication to note that,

00:22:26.140 and the fact that it's built into the legal system

00:22:28.020 is nothing short of remarkable.

00:22:30.140 And then to remove that and to make the felt consequences

00:22:35.640 the arbiter of the reality of the situation

00:22:39.300 is a dreadful assault on the integrity of the law as such,

00:22:43.140 as far as I can tell.

00:22:44.940 Well, moreover, it's something that everyone intuitively understands.

00:22:48.580 We all understand the difference between murder and manslaughter.

00:22:51.600 We all understand that intent actually does,

00:22:53.540 like you say, escalate the severity of a crime.

00:22:57.960 And it's bigger than that, isn't it?

00:23:00.600 Because this idea that intention doesn't matter

00:23:03.140 is actually built into so much of this,

00:23:05.980 what we call social justice discourse.

00:23:07.380 If you think of critical race theory,

00:23:09.840 it's just a given that there are racist structures

00:23:12.980 and you can be racist without intending to be racist.

00:23:15.480 And I really do dispute that,

00:23:17.020 because I think in order to be racist,

00:23:18.780 intention has to be at the heart of that.

00:23:20.560 Otherwise, it's incoherent to me.

00:23:21.800 But this is really a degraded view of humanity, I feel,

00:23:28.900 where we are effectively like marionettes

00:23:31.300 and that we're just being played

00:23:34.580 and that we don't have any agency anymore.

00:23:37.360 And therefore, we can't be responsible for our own words,

00:23:41.460 not just our actions.

00:23:42.420 We can't be responsible for our own words

00:23:44.040 and the ramifications.

00:23:45.140 So we have to be controlled

00:23:46.280 and we have to be stifled by the state.

00:23:48.580 And it makes me very nervous.

00:23:51.800 So I've been thinking through the importance of free speech,

00:23:57.540 I suppose, from a psychological perspective.

00:24:00.000 And it seems to me that, well,

00:24:03.160 we can walk through some axioms

00:24:04.680 and you can tell me what you think about them if you would.

00:24:07.480 So, I mean, the first thing we might posit

00:24:10.720 is that it's useful to think.

00:24:13.700 It's better to think than not to think.

00:24:15.580 And that might seem self-evident,

00:24:17.320 but thought can be troublesome and stir up trouble

00:24:21.200 and your thoughts can be inaccurate.

00:24:23.480 So it's perhaps not that unreasonable

00:24:28.040 to start the questioning there.

00:24:30.320 But I think it was Alfred North Whitehead

00:24:33.920 who said that thinking allows our thoughts to die

00:24:39.080 instead of us.

00:24:40.480 And so he was thinking about the evolution of thought

00:24:46.060 in some sense from a biological perspective.

00:24:48.140 So imagine a creature that's incapable of thought

00:24:51.240 has to act something out,

00:24:54.360 a representation of the world or an intent.

00:24:56.460 It has to be embodied.

00:24:57.940 And then if that fails,

00:25:00.240 well, it fails in action.

00:25:01.680 And so the consequence of that might be death.

00:25:04.480 It might be very severe.

00:25:06.000 Whereas once you can think,

00:25:09.400 you can represent the world abstractly,

00:25:12.120 you can divorce the abstraction from the world,

00:25:14.940 and then you can produce avatars of yourself,

00:25:19.360 sometimes in image, like in dreams, let's say,

00:25:21.940 or in literature and fiction and movies and so on,

00:25:24.700 produce avatars of ourselves that are fictional

00:25:27.100 and then run them as simulations in the abstract world

00:25:32.480 and observe the consequences.

00:25:34.440 And we do that in our stories.

00:25:37.980 We do that when we dream.

00:25:40.060 We do that when we imagine in images

00:25:42.300 and depict a dramatic scenario playing itself out.

00:25:46.740 But then we also do that in words

00:25:48.620 because we encode those images.

00:25:50.860 It's one more level of abstraction.

00:25:52.560 We encode those images into words

00:25:54.560 and those words become partial dramatic avatars.

00:25:58.640 And then the words can battle with one another.

00:26:01.120 So thought seems to work, let's say, verbal thought.

00:26:04.920 You ask yourself a question.

00:26:07.600 You receive an answer in some mysterious manner.

00:26:10.620 There's an internal revelation of sorts.

00:26:13.260 That's the spontaneous thought.

00:26:15.600 You know, when you sit down to write a book,

00:26:17.180 thoughts come to you,

00:26:18.320 perhaps because you pose yourself a question.

00:26:20.380 And no one knows how that works,

00:26:22.020 but we experience it,

00:26:23.620 that thoughts manifest themselves

00:26:25.020 in the theater of our imagination.

00:26:26.820 So that's the revelatory aspect.

00:26:28.540 And then there's the critical aspect,

00:26:30.120 which is, well, now you've thought this

00:26:33.440 and perhaps you've written it down.

00:26:35.320 Can you generate counter positions?

00:26:38.180 Are there universes that you can imagine

00:26:40.340 where this doesn't apply?

00:26:41.840 Are there situations where it doesn't apply?

00:26:44.400 Are there better ways of formulating that thought?

00:26:47.600 And, but I would say with regard to critical thought

00:26:51.480 and to some degree with regard to productive thought,

00:26:53.780 an indeterminate proportion of that

00:26:58.600 is dependent on speech.

00:27:01.400 I don't think it's unreasonable to point out

00:27:03.860 that thought is internalized speech

00:27:06.140 and that the dialectical process

00:27:08.660 that constitutes critical thinking

00:27:10.820 is internalized speech.

00:27:12.780 So you and I are engaging in a dialectic enterprise.

00:27:15.620 You'll posit something and I'll respond to it

00:27:17.860 and you'll respond to that.

00:27:18.960 And we're in a kind of combat.

00:27:23.040 There's some cooperation about it as well.

00:27:26.300 And we're attempting to formulate a truth more clearly,

00:27:29.100 at least in principle, if we're being honest.

00:27:32.060 We do that when we're speaking.

00:27:34.000 So our thought, the quality of our thought

00:27:35.840 is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds.

00:27:39.760 Absolutely.

00:27:40.260 And then, so go ahead.

00:27:41.980 Well, I couldn't agree more

00:27:43.420 because I think speech is the way

00:27:45.960 in which we collaborate on our thoughts.

00:27:47.700 You know, that's how it works.

00:27:49.300 You refine those thought processes

00:27:51.080 that you've described.

00:27:52.040 I mean, I'm no psychologist,

00:27:53.580 but I understand this basic premise

00:27:55.020 that we have these various thoughts

00:27:57.540 that are continually in conflict within ourselves.

00:28:00.460 Unless we're able to articulate them

00:28:02.280 and to engage in others through that process,

00:28:04.560 through that transactional process of speech,

00:28:06.620 then those thoughts are never refined

00:28:08.340 and they remain in this kind of infancy.

00:28:11.160 And this is why-

00:28:11.540 Yes, well, they're as refined

00:28:13.020 as we can make them as individuals.

00:28:14.640 But that's also assuming

00:28:16.340 that you even have the words,

00:28:17.840 which you also learned

00:28:18.920 in the dialectical process.

00:28:21.040 Right, exactly.

00:28:21.560 It's not as though the truth

00:28:22.740 is ever fully graspable,

00:28:24.340 but we can get nearer to it

00:28:26.060 through that collaborative process

00:28:27.200 of speaking and articulating the thoughts.

00:28:29.240 And in fact, even in the act of,

00:28:30.400 like you say, writing or articulating yourself

00:28:32.600 with your self-authoring program,

00:28:35.280 for instance,

00:28:35.580 the act of writing things out

00:28:37.300 is what clarifies the points of view for you.

00:28:40.380 I've actually found that the way

00:28:43.320 that I think about these issues now

00:28:44.980 is largely a product of the fact

00:28:47.060 that I've written so much about it

00:28:48.540 and changed my mind through the act

00:28:50.520 of learning how to express myself

00:28:51.860 on these points.

00:28:53.380 And the consequence of not having that opportunity,

00:28:57.500 I think is something

00:29:00.360 I would barely want to contemplate.

00:29:02.180 And I think that to give an example

00:29:03.920 of the moment,

00:29:06.240 which is that because any kind of attempt,

00:29:08.920 do you have a discussion or debate

00:29:10.580 about the perceived conflict

00:29:11.860 between trans rights

00:29:13.000 and gender critical feminism? 0.98

00:29:14.620 Because to even attempt that discussion

00:29:16.200 at the moment

00:29:16.720 will have such grave social consequences.

00:29:20.720 And certainly in terms of career prospects,

00:29:23.200 major consequences,

00:29:24.500 people will not have that discussion.

00:29:26.300 I have people I know in politics,

00:29:28.380 in the media,

00:29:28.960 and they say to me,

00:29:30.020 quite honestly,

00:29:30.520 I will not talk about this.

00:29:32.300 I have concerns.

00:29:33.080 I have qualms.

00:29:34.020 I want answers to questions,

00:29:35.660 but I absolutely will not

00:29:36.920 open my mouth about this.

00:29:37.980 And if you don't do that,

00:29:40.360 this is why no one understands the issue.

00:29:42.840 This is why no one has reached

00:29:43.960 any kind of consensus on this issue.

00:29:46.000 All we have is a sense in which

00:29:47.860 to have the quote unquote wrong opinion

00:29:49.960 makes you a pariah.

00:29:51.900 And therefore,

00:29:52.740 I'd better not have that opinion.

00:29:54.040 Well, then that's not

00:29:54.640 a sincerely held conviction.

00:29:56.580 That's just...

00:29:57.140 Well, if the definition of wrong

00:29:59.740 is continually transforming

00:30:01.260 and in an unpredictable manner,

00:30:02.840 then it's best just to sidestep

00:30:04.360 the issue entirely.

00:30:05.320 Exactly.

00:30:05.960 And then that leaves it murky

00:30:07.300 and ill-defined

00:30:08.080 and assuming that you believe

00:30:09.980 that thought has any utility.

00:30:11.340 And so when you're sitting down to write,

00:30:13.060 when I'm sitting down to write

00:30:14.240 and I produce a sentence,

00:30:16.780 you know,

00:30:17.100 it might have come

00:30:17.860 from some theoretical perspective.

00:30:19.680 Maybe I'm approaching something

00:30:20.820 from a Freudian perspective

00:30:22.680 or a Marxist perspective

00:30:24.080 or an Enlightenment perspective,

00:30:27.760 et cetera.

00:30:28.140 I mean,

00:30:28.760 it's a psychological trope,

00:30:32.100 I suppose,

00:30:32.660 that we all think

00:30:34.580 the thoughts of dead philosophers,

00:30:36.700 right?

00:30:36.900 We think we have our own opinions,

00:30:38.380 but that's really rarely,

00:30:39.840 very, very, very rarely the case.

00:30:42.200 It's not that easy

00:30:43.060 to come up with something

00:30:44.020 truly original

00:30:44.840 and generally make

00:30:46.100 incremental progress at best.

00:30:48.320 And so your ability

00:30:49.700 to abstractly represent the world

00:30:51.600 and then to generate

00:30:52.620 avatars that can be defeated

00:30:55.020 without you dying

00:30:56.020 is dependent on your incorporation

00:30:57.840 of a multitude of opinions.

00:31:00.000 And that in itself

00:31:00.920 is a consequence of,

00:31:03.540 I mean,

00:31:03.880 that works to the degree

00:31:04.960 that communication

00:31:05.600 is actually free

00:31:06.860 and that you can get access

00:31:08.000 to as much thought

00:31:09.080 as you can possibly manage.

00:31:10.600 So I can't see

00:31:11.840 how you can deny

00:31:12.880 the centrality

00:31:13.820 of free speech

00:31:15.820 as a fundamental right

00:31:17.540 or the fundamental right,

00:31:18.840 perhaps,

00:31:20.020 unless you simultaneously

00:31:21.140 deny the utility of thought.

00:31:23.240 But maybe if you

00:31:24.620 are also inclined

00:31:26.420 to remove the individual

00:31:29.900 from the central position

00:31:32.220 of the political discourse,

00:31:33.780 then maybe you can also

00:31:35.360 make the case,

00:31:38.500 at least implicitly,

00:31:39.540 that individual thought

00:31:41.080 doesn't matter

00:31:41.760 and that mostly

00:31:42.500 it's just causing trouble.

00:31:44.260 But I think individual thought

00:31:45.120 is key.

00:31:45.640 And actually,

00:31:46.060 even in the outline

00:31:48.080 you've described there,

00:31:49.360 there is individual agency

00:31:51.000 in reaching a conclusion

00:31:52.820 that has been articulated before.

00:31:54.760 Insofar as if you are engaged

00:31:56.240 with a multitude of writers

00:31:57.340 and philosophers

00:31:57.820 and artists and ideas

00:31:58.940 and you've come out

00:32:00.000 with a perspective,

00:32:01.120 well,

00:32:01.380 that perspective

00:32:01.980 may not be original to you,

00:32:03.460 but the process

00:32:04.200 that you've gone through

00:32:04.880 to reach that viewpoint

00:32:05.900 is individual to you.

00:32:07.600 You know,

00:32:07.860 there is a power in that.

00:32:09.360 There's something important

00:32:10.240 about that.

00:32:11.260 You know,

00:32:11.400 there's something crucial.

00:32:12.780 It's if you're

00:32:13.620 a practicing psychotherapist,

00:32:15.660 one of the things

00:32:16.760 you have to learn

00:32:17.640 is to not provide people

00:32:20.240 with your words too much.

00:32:22.260 What you want

00:32:23.860 is for them

00:32:24.660 to formulate

00:32:25.440 the conclusion

00:32:27.060 and you can guide them

00:32:28.680 through the process

00:32:29.440 of investigation.

00:32:30.200 You talked about

00:32:31.180 the self-authoring process

00:32:32.320 and which is online

00:32:34.160 at self-authoring dot com

00:32:35.900 that it steps people

00:32:38.620 say through the process

00:32:39.720 of writing an autobiography

00:32:41.040 of analyzing

00:32:42.340 their current virtues

00:32:43.340 and faults

00:32:43.880 and of making

00:32:45.500 a future plan.

00:32:46.440 the utility

00:32:47.840 of all of that

00:32:48.580 is dependent

00:32:49.080 on the person

00:32:51.540 who's undertaking

00:32:54.260 the exercise

00:32:54.980 generating their own

00:32:56.960 verbal representations.

00:32:59.760 Right?

00:33:00.400 Yes.

00:33:00.640 And that seems

00:33:01.340 to cement it somehow

00:33:02.680 as yours

00:33:03.740 if you've come up

00:33:04.740 with the words.

00:33:06.180 And so

00:33:06.580 it's the uppermost

00:33:08.580 expression of personhood

00:33:10.320 the ability

00:33:11.560 to have the words

00:33:14.540 that you should speak

00:33:15.580 reveal themselves

00:33:16.400 to you

00:33:16.880 and to have the right

00:33:17.660 to express them

00:33:18.460 as you see fit.

00:33:20.380 Yes.

00:33:20.480 In which case

00:33:21.100 if you are merely

00:33:22.280 repeating an accepted script

00:33:24.260 then to what extent

00:33:25.960 can you even say

00:33:27.480 to be an individual

00:33:28.060 at all?

00:33:29.100 You know

00:33:29.220 this to me

00:33:30.640 Well I think

00:33:31.100 that's part

00:33:31.660 of the philosophical

00:33:32.480 conundrum

00:33:33.240 is that

00:33:33.720 if you believe

00:33:35.480 that all people do

00:33:36.480 is repeat

00:33:37.240 pre-digested scripts

00:33:38.980 especially if

00:33:40.280 your view

00:33:41.460 is that

00:33:41.920 the fundamental

00:33:42.820 human motivation

00:33:43.680 is power

00:33:44.420 and the entire

00:33:45.580 social landscape

00:33:46.540 is nothing but

00:33:47.300 a competition

00:33:47.960 between

00:33:48.500 equally

00:33:49.840 what would you say

00:33:51.740 selfish and single-minded 0.51

00:33:53.140 power strivers

00:33:54.820 then there is no

00:33:56.400 individual

00:33:57.660 there's no individual

00:33:59.240 in that

00:33:59.740 conceptual world

00:34:00.960 and it seems to me

00:34:02.500 that that's the world

00:34:03.520 that

00:34:03.880 we're being pushed

00:34:07.240 to inhabit

00:34:09.440 and are criticized

00:34:11.000 for on moral grounds

00:34:12.580 for criticizing

00:34:13.440 and I'm still trying

00:34:14.740 to get my hands

00:34:15.420 around this

00:34:15.940 I mean

00:34:16.200 when I went to Britain

00:34:17.420 I saw

00:34:18.660 the CTTV cameras

00:34:20.740 and the increased security

00:34:22.000 and it isn't clear

00:34:23.420 to me

00:34:23.760 how that's related

00:34:24.680 to the social justice

00:34:26.380 issues

00:34:26.860 that so-called

00:34:27.980 social justice issues

00:34:29.020 that we're discussing

00:34:29.860 but they seem to me

00:34:31.380 in some very difficult

00:34:32.520 to comprehend way

00:34:33.520 part and parcel

00:34:34.220 of the same thing

00:34:35.320 the same dangerous thing

00:34:36.660 well I think

00:34:37.920 it's probably connected

00:34:38.580 just in terms of

00:34:39.320 this distrust

00:34:40.360 of humanity

00:34:40.860 or this belief

00:34:41.540 that people need

00:34:43.220 to be shepherded

00:34:44.440 otherwise

00:34:45.380 left to their own devices

00:34:47.020 chaos will reign

00:34:48.740 I think that's

00:34:49.400 I think that's the connection

00:34:50.940 it's not directly connected

00:34:52.160 as far as the

00:34:52.760 the issues relating

00:34:53.960 to liberty

00:34:54.440 and CCTV

00:34:54.940 obviously predate

00:34:55.980 what we now call

00:34:57.420 whatever the current

00:34:58.040 social justice movement

00:34:58.980 is called

00:34:59.660 but I think there is

00:35:01.360 there is something there

00:35:03.020 I mean

00:35:03.440 the censorship

00:35:05.300 the impulse

00:35:06.340 to censor

00:35:07.000 what people

00:35:07.480 read

00:35:08.180 and this is something

00:35:09.440 that particularly

00:35:10.100 hits home to me

00:35:11.080 in the arts

00:35:11.880 is based on this view

00:35:14.080 that ultimately

00:35:15.580 it's the people

00:35:16.440 are

00:35:16.880 or the populace

00:35:18.020 is liable

00:35:19.820 to corruption

00:35:20.540 if they're exposed

00:35:21.840 to the wrong

00:35:22.560 materials

00:35:23.400 and what's very

00:35:25.340 interesting to me

00:35:25.920 about that

00:35:26.220 I mean you've written

00:35:26.780 a lot about the way

00:35:27.540 in which literature

00:35:28.640 for instance

00:35:29.900 informs our experiences

00:35:31.520 because it is in a sense

00:35:32.520 like when you read

00:35:33.600 philosophers

00:35:34.020 you're feeling

00:35:35.900 your way through

00:35:36.620 other lives

00:35:37.380 and other experiences

00:35:38.340 that are trans-historical

00:35:39.740 and cross-cultural

00:35:40.700 and they inform

00:35:41.960 the way that you react

00:35:42.900 in your own

00:35:43.360 individual experience

00:35:44.680 but if you start

00:35:45.840 to say as an artist

00:35:46.880 no you can only

00:35:47.840 represent for a start

00:35:49.360 what you personally

00:35:50.400 are or have experienced

00:35:52.100 and you cannot

00:35:53.180 represent anything

00:35:54.040 which is morally

00:35:54.720 problematic

00:35:55.500 to use the phrase

00:35:56.300 that they absolutely

00:35:56.900 adore

00:35:57.500 then art

00:35:59.020 fails to

00:35:59.840 and literature

00:36:00.380 in particular

00:36:00.860 fails to function

00:36:02.400 in the way

00:36:02.880 that it should

00:36:03.380 because you can't

00:36:04.700 explore those things

00:36:05.740 this is why I often

00:36:06.620 when it comes

00:36:07.640 to censorship

00:36:08.740 of the arts

00:36:09.380 I often go back

00:36:10.520 to what Oscar Wilde

00:36:11.560 said about this

00:36:12.260 he said there's

00:36:12.640 no such thing

00:36:13.240 as a moral

00:36:14.000 or an immoral book

00:36:15.120 books are well written

00:36:16.440 or badly written

00:36:17.320 that is all

00:36:18.340 and that actually

00:36:19.720 art and morality

00:36:20.700 sometimes are not

00:36:22.440 in other words

00:36:23.660 art shouldn't just be

00:36:25.000 about promoting

00:36:26.220 whatever the

00:36:27.100 ethical trend is

00:36:28.860 of any given time

00:36:29.880 it's much bigger

00:36:30.700 it's not art

00:36:31.240 at that point

00:36:31.980 at all

00:36:32.720 as far as I'm concerned

00:36:34.280 if you can state

00:36:35.800 the purpose of the art

00:36:37.020 in explicit terms

00:36:38.940 especially if it's

00:36:40.040 in accordance

00:36:40.520 with a

00:36:41.060 let's say

00:36:43.380 an ideology

00:36:44.320 that's shared

00:36:45.180 by a multitude

00:36:45.940 of people

00:36:46.620 it's not art

00:36:48.020 at all

00:36:48.300 it's propaganda

00:36:49.120 it's totally banal

00:36:50.540 I mean

00:36:50.880 this is why

00:36:51.820 so many people

00:36:52.320 are getting sick

00:36:52.740 of Hollywood

00:36:53.120 I mean

00:36:53.400 to bring it down

00:36:53.880 to a different level

00:36:54.480 that people

00:36:54.940 are sick

00:36:55.540 of the entertainment

00:36:56.120 on their TV

00:36:56.820 on their streaming

00:36:57.980 services

00:36:58.420 and on Hollywood

00:36:59.320 because they have

00:37:00.180 this constant feeling

00:37:00.940 that they're being

00:37:01.440 hectored

00:37:01.940 by some moralistic

00:37:03.260 person in a studio

00:37:04.280 saying

00:37:04.720 you know

00:37:05.240 our focus here

00:37:06.300 is on diversity

00:37:07.340 our focus here

00:37:08.100 is on

00:37:08.500 the right moral

00:37:10.640 message

00:37:11.120 that the message

00:37:12.100 of the story

00:37:12.680 is one that would

00:37:13.280 be approved

00:37:14.080 by a group

00:37:14.540 of intersectional

00:37:15.280 activists

00:37:15.720 and you get this

00:37:16.460 all the time

00:37:17.100 seeping into

00:37:17.580 mainstream entertainment

00:37:18.340 and people get

00:37:19.120 really really sick

00:37:19.820 of it

00:37:20.040 it's not that

00:37:20.920 when you see

00:37:21.840 a lesbian kiss 0.98

00:37:23.380 in Star Wars 0.77

00:37:24.120 that that offends you

00:37:24.880 because you're 0.72

00:37:25.340 a homophobe

00:37:26.020 most sci-fi fans

00:37:27.940 they've never had

00:37:29.060 a problem

00:37:29.280 with diversity

00:37:29.800 or anything like that

00:37:30.660 what bothers them

00:37:31.520 about it

00:37:31.960 is this sense

00:37:32.620 of someone

00:37:33.200 saying to them

00:37:34.280 we think you're 0.99

00:37:35.540 all evil bigots 0.99

00:37:36.400 and you need 0.99

00:37:36.860 to be educated

00:37:37.560 and that's why

00:37:38.060 we're going to

00:37:38.420 shoehorn in 0.99

00:37:39.220 a lesbian kiss 0.98

00:37:40.560 into the end

00:37:40.980 of this film

00:37:41.400 that's why

00:37:41.780 people have

00:37:42.120 a problem

00:37:43.100 I mean

00:37:43.340 you had it

00:37:43.940 yourself recently 0.99

00:37:44.640 with that ludicrous

00:37:45.340 Marvel comics thing

00:37:46.220 where you became

00:37:46.780 the Red Skull

00:37:47.540 and that to me

00:37:49.460 was a perfect example

00:37:50.780 of the banality

00:37:51.680 of an artistic

00:37:53.820 endeavour

00:37:54.420 that becomes

00:37:55.460 an exercise

00:37:56.320 in political pedagogy

00:37:58.180 because that

00:37:58.780 was quite clearly

00:38:00.100 I mean

00:38:00.700 you couldn't even

00:38:01.640 say it was satirical

00:38:02.540 because it

00:38:04.160 cannot be satirically

00:38:05.120 effective

00:38:05.520 if the thing

00:38:06.580 that they are

00:38:07.000 comparing you to

00:38:07.860 is the precise

00:38:08.540 opposite of the

00:38:09.180 thing you believe

00:38:09.800 I mean

00:38:10.060 of all the sort

00:38:11.380 of public figures

00:38:11.940 I can think of

00:38:12.600 you have

00:38:13.580 the most clear

00:38:15.000 track record

00:38:15.740 of opposing tyranny

00:38:16.760 in all its forms

00:38:17.900 which anyone

00:38:18.660 who knows anything

00:38:19.200 about your work

00:38:19.760 will know

00:38:20.300 you've spent years

00:38:21.320 lecturing about

00:38:22.000 the evils of

00:38:22.440 authoritarianism

00:38:23.180 including Nazism

00:38:24.340 so the idea

00:38:25.280 that you would

00:38:25.700 then become

00:38:26.120 this super magic

00:38:27.260 Nazi 0.83

00:38:28.220 is propagandistic 0.57

00:38:30.760 it's totally

00:38:32.780 banal artistically

00:38:34.240 firstly

00:38:34.840 it's not satirically

00:38:36.420 right

00:38:36.700 but also

00:38:37.780 it's just

00:38:38.280 it's just

00:38:39.200 it's just

00:38:39.920 do you know

00:38:41.280 what it reminds me

00:38:41.860 of actually

00:38:42.060 I don't know

00:38:42.340 if you remember

00:38:43.180 after the fatwa

00:38:43.840 against Salman Rushdie

00:38:44.760 there was a film

00:38:46.680 made in Pakistan

00:38:47.420 called International

00:38:48.940 Guerrillas

00:38:49.440 where they turned

00:38:50.880 Salman Rushdie

00:38:51.680 into this evil

00:38:52.800 villain 0.80

00:38:54.500 playboy

00:38:55.360 who was colluding

00:38:56.000 with the

00:38:56.520 Israeli military

00:38:57.600 services

00:38:58.140 and at the end

00:38:59.060 of the film

00:38:59.380 these flying

00:39:00.040 copies of the

00:39:00.960 Quran

00:39:01.320 float down 1.00

00:39:02.440 and shoot

00:39:02.780 laser beams 1.00

00:39:03.320 into his head 1.00

00:39:03.800 and kill him off 1.00

00:39:04.360 but 1.00

00:39:04.880 and that is 0.97

00:39:05.520 such a ridiculous 0.98

00:39:06.220 laughable film 0.99

00:39:07.680 you know

00:39:07.920 you put your enemy

00:39:08.640 as the main villain

00:39:09.380 and you just

00:39:09.920 misrepresent him

00:39:11.200 in that way

00:39:11.480 but that's just

00:39:11.860 what they did to you

00:39:12.440 it's as banal

00:39:13.360 as that

00:39:13.680 and that's

00:39:14.360 I think people

00:39:14.820 are sick of that

00:39:15.520 well the response

00:39:17.660 thankfully seems

00:39:19.260 to indicate

00:39:19.860 that no

00:39:20.860 it didn't

00:39:21.720 that people

00:39:22.220 it didn't do me

00:39:23.680 any harm

00:39:24.260 as far as I can tell

00:39:25.360 I mean it was very

00:39:26.780 shocking to me

00:39:29.320 that it happened

00:39:30.100 it took me about

00:39:31.280 12 hours

00:39:31.880 to sort of

00:39:32.420 regain my composure

00:39:33.320 because I actually

00:39:34.000 couldn't believe it

00:39:34.780 to begin with

00:39:35.400 I was sure

00:39:36.240 that it was a

00:39:37.340 fabrication

00:39:38.720 especially

00:39:40.200 but then

00:39:41.060 it was even more

00:39:42.260 shocking when I found

00:39:43.060 out who

00:39:43.380 authored it

00:39:44.740 you know

00:39:45.720 it wasn't

00:39:46.360 it was someone

00:39:46.840 who had

00:39:47.200 an intellectual

00:39:47.920 reputation

00:39:48.580 and so

00:39:49.800 but he's an

00:39:51.360 activist isn't he

00:39:52.140 he's a

00:39:52.800 he's an

00:39:53.260 intersectional

00:39:53.780 activist

00:39:54.160 he definitely

00:39:54.880 his opinions

00:39:55.680 definitely

00:39:56.160 place him

00:39:56.680 on the radical

00:39:57.300 on the side

00:39:58.440 of the radical

00:39:58.900 left

00:39:59.360 so

00:40:00.580 it's very

00:40:02.140 difficult to

00:40:02.760 so there's

00:40:03.820 an attack

00:40:04.920 on

00:40:05.340 on

00:40:06.560 the essence

00:40:07.660 of free speech

00:40:08.480 I mean I remember

00:40:09.360 reading

00:40:10.100 Derrida

00:40:10.920 Derrida

00:40:11.980 criticized

00:40:12.900 our culture

00:40:14.080 western culture

00:40:14.820 as

00:40:15.080 phallogocentric

00:40:16.840 yeah

00:40:17.660 and it's really

00:40:18.380 actually quite a

00:40:19.240 precise word

00:40:20.140 so the phallic

00:40:21.640 part of it is

00:40:22.580 masculine

00:40:23.300 obviously

00:40:23.980 related to the

00:40:25.280 phallus

00:40:25.720 to the

00:40:26.120 and

00:40:27.080 logos

00:40:27.980 is

00:40:28.480 well that's

00:40:29.540 the central

00:40:30.140 concept of

00:40:31.840 Greek rationalism

00:40:32.960 but it's also

00:40:33.740 the central concept

00:40:34.640 of Christianity

00:40:35.320 and

00:40:35.760 the logos

00:40:37.060 is

00:40:37.820 something like

00:40:39.860 the magical

00:40:40.500 power of

00:40:41.360 genuine

00:40:42.560 and true

00:40:43.260 speech

00:40:43.900 it's

00:40:44.720 something

00:40:45.000 like that

00:40:45.560 and

00:40:45.720 there are

00:40:46.920 representations

00:40:47.480 of

00:40:48.080 the magical

00:40:49.220 power of

00:40:49.980 speech

00:40:50.360 that predate

00:40:51.540 Greece

00:40:52.140 and

00:40:52.520 Christianity

00:40:53.280 you see it

00:40:54.040 in Mesopotamia

00:40:54.940 that

00:40:55.980 this

00:40:57.100 the equivalent

00:40:58.380 to the

00:40:58.900 savior

00:40:59.220 in ancient

00:41:00.060 Mesopotamian

00:41:00.860 religious thinking

00:41:02.740 was Marduk

00:41:03.440 and he could

00:41:04.000 speak magic

00:41:04.700 words

00:41:05.220 he had eyes

00:41:06.260 all the

00:41:06.520 way around

00:41:07.500 his head

00:41:07.940 which meant

00:41:08.740 that he

00:41:09.040 paid attention

00:41:09.760 to everything

00:41:10.340 but he

00:41:11.060 could speak

00:41:11.500 magic

00:41:11.860 words

00:41:12.260 and

00:41:12.520 and so

00:41:15.280 that idea

00:41:15.900 of the

00:41:16.660 centrality

00:41:18.300 of speech

00:41:18.980 to the

00:41:19.660 and its

00:41:20.560 association

00:41:21.100 with

00:41:22.040 the very

00:41:23.060 fabric

00:41:23.460 of reality

00:41:24.180 that's

00:41:25.040 been an

00:41:25.460 idea

00:41:25.720 that

00:41:26.040 has

00:41:27.140 strived

00:41:28.180 to make

00:41:28.560 itself

00:41:28.860 manifest

00:41:29.300 for thousands

00:41:29.880 and thousands

00:41:30.380 of years

00:41:30.980 I mean

00:41:31.800 in

00:41:32.280 the Judeo-Christian

00:41:34.000 tradition

00:41:34.500 in the

00:41:34.860 biblical

00:41:35.100 tradition

00:41:35.680 the word

00:41:37.060 is given

00:41:37.980 cosmological

00:41:39.180 status

00:41:39.780 as the

00:41:40.520 thing

00:41:40.940 that brings

00:41:41.940 habitable

00:41:42.760 order

00:41:43.100 out of

00:41:43.620 chaos

00:41:44.460 and it's

00:41:45.020 identified

00:41:45.500 with divinity

00:41:46.500 itself

00:41:47.100 and so

00:41:47.620 the assault

00:41:49.680 on free

00:41:50.640 speech

00:41:51.080 is an

00:41:51.400 assault

00:41:51.740 on a

00:41:52.100 principle

00:41:52.440 that's

00:41:53.600 fundamental

00:41:54.260 beyond

00:41:54.960 say

00:41:55.980 its

00:41:56.220 centrality

00:41:56.840 its central

00:41:57.560 importance

00:41:57.960 to the

00:41:58.340 enlightenment

00:41:58.860 and is

00:42:00.080 it

00:42:00.540 it's

00:42:01.500 it's

00:42:01.820 an assault

00:42:02.300 on the

00:42:02.740 on the

00:42:03.300 idea of

00:42:03.680 the logos

00:42:04.040 itself

00:42:04.700 I agree

00:42:05.860 this is why

00:42:06.280 I always

00:42:06.700 mistrusted

00:42:07.240 the

00:42:07.680 post-structuralists

00:42:09.360 when I was

00:42:09.960 studying for

00:42:10.480 English

00:42:10.680 it was the

00:42:11.480 Derrida and

00:42:12.060 Foucault and

00:42:12.580 Lyotard and

00:42:13.140 these were

00:42:13.740 taken as a

00:42:14.300 given and

00:42:14.620 this idea

00:42:15.020 that there's

00:42:15.320 no

00:42:15.540 there is

00:42:16.260 no truth

00:42:16.680 beyond

00:42:17.020 language

00:42:17.360 you know

00:42:17.600 language

00:42:17.960 is all

00:42:18.360 language

00:42:18.780 the way

00:42:19.120 in which

00:42:19.340 we construct

00:42:19.860 our

00:42:20.040 perception

00:42:20.340 of reality

00:42:20.900 and our

00:42:21.200 perception

00:42:21.500 of truth

00:42:21.940 and that

00:42:22.600 actually

00:42:22.800 there is

00:42:23.140 no truth

00:42:23.560 at the

00:42:23.760 heart

00:42:23.920 I just

00:42:24.480 found it

00:42:24.740 so

00:42:24.920 depressing

00:42:25.520 depressingly

00:42:26.720 pessimistic

00:42:27.360 because it

00:42:27.700 also means

00:42:28.080 that you

00:42:28.300 can construct

00:42:29.660 any kind

00:42:30.200 of reality

00:42:30.700 you like

00:42:31.300 maybe that's

00:42:33.560 part of the

00:42:34.060 motivation for

00:42:35.020 it is

00:42:35.600 the hypothetical

00:42:38.800 lack of

00:42:39.620 constraint

00:42:40.180 by anything

00:42:41.540 that that

00:42:42.060 seems to

00:42:42.700 imply

00:42:43.940 right I

00:42:44.460 mean if

00:42:45.380 there's no

00:42:45.880 canonical

00:42:46.360 reality

00:42:47.080 well there's

00:42:48.060 no responsibility

00:42:48.880 that's for

00:42:49.640 sure

00:42:49.900 you could

00:42:51.280 argue that

00:42:52.220 there's no

00:42:52.600 meaning and

00:42:53.120 it's deeply

00:42:53.560 pessimistic but

00:42:54.380 maybe the

00:42:54.800 payoff for that

00:42:55.380 is no

00:42:55.640 responsibility but

00:42:56.580 there's also no

00:42:57.180 constraint of any

00:42:58.100 sort there's

00:42:58.460 certainly no

00:42:58.820 ethical constraint

00:42:59.820 and I mean I

00:43:02.380 keep trying to

00:43:03.000 dig to see

00:43:03.620 what's at the

00:43:04.120 bottom of

00:43:04.620 this this

00:43:05.800 anti-logo

00:43:06.680 sentiment and

00:43:08.100 it's a very

00:43:10.100 it's a very

00:43:10.700 difficult thing

00:43:11.380 to make to

00:43:12.420 get right

00:43:13.120 maybe it's not

00:43:14.180 even as

00:43:14.580 deliberate as

00:43:15.200 the way that

00:43:15.920 it sounds

00:43:16.440 maybe it is

00:43:17.860 just the fact

00:43:18.440 that that

00:43:19.380 these theories

00:43:20.160 for whatever

00:43:20.680 reason became

00:43:21.440 fashionable in

00:43:22.440 universities about

00:43:23.320 20 years ago

00:43:24.080 and now for

00:43:24.640 whatever reason

00:43:25.260 they have

00:43:25.740 escaped into

00:43:27.540 the mainstream

00:43:28.080 and you know

00:43:29.120 I mean most

00:43:29.540 of the people

00:43:29.880 that push this

00:43:30.420 stuff don't

00:43:31.700 read Foucault

00:43:32.560 and they don't

00:43:33.440 know about the

00:43:34.420 people whose ideas

00:43:35.420 they've imbibed

00:43:36.720 and actually very

00:43:37.300 much misunderstood

00:43:38.120 you know I mean

00:43:38.720 the whole point of

00:43:39.680 the post-modernist 0.96

00:43:40.280 was to trash

00:43:42.100 the notion of

00:43:43.380 grand narratives

00:43:44.040 and what we have

00:43:44.840 now in the

00:43:45.600 social justice

00:43:46.100 movement is an

00:43:46.640 incredible grand

00:43:47.360 narrative you know

00:43:47.940 we are on the

00:43:49.020 right side of

00:43:49.560 history we are the

00:43:50.400 righteous ones and

00:43:51.060 everyone else needs 0.92

00:43:51.640 to be decimated

00:43:53.380 and it seems to

00:43:55.740 me that this

00:43:57.480 stuff I don't

00:43:58.220 think it's as

00:43:58.720 conspiratorial as

00:43:59.880 that I think it's

00:44:00.500 just sort of

00:44:01.560 circumstances of

00:44:02.780 history one thing

00:44:03.560 after another and

00:44:04.180 this is where we're

00:44:05.080 at now but the

00:44:06.280 end result that we

00:44:07.020 have to deal with

00:44:07.940 which I think you've

00:44:08.740 alluded to is this

00:44:09.520 idea that if there

00:44:10.840 is no such thing as

00:44:11.660 reality beyond

00:44:12.300 language then you

00:44:12.980 are at liberty to

00:44:14.140 construct whatever

00:44:15.720 pseudo reality that

00:44:18.260 you desire or is

00:44:19.680 easiest for you

00:44:20.620 and we see

00:44:21.760 elements of this

00:44:23.140 reverberating I

00:44:23.920 think in a lot of

00:44:24.580 the discourse at the

00:44:25.280 moment of things like

00:44:26.040 lived experience you

00:44:27.520 know you can present

00:44:28.660 as much data as you

00:44:29.960 want but it will be

00:44:31.120 disregarded if it

00:44:31.980 doesn't tally with

00:44:33.280 what lived experience

00:44:34.240 really means which is

00:44:34.960 what I want to be

00:44:35.880 true or what I

00:44:36.920 there's also this

00:44:37.500 insistence that seems

00:44:38.640 part of it that I

00:44:40.080 mean I objected to

00:44:42.040 some legislation that

00:44:43.000 was passed in

00:44:43.680 Canada and that's 0.94

00:44:44.720 sort of what

00:44:45.400 propelled me into

00:44:46.500 public visibility

00:44:48.600 let's say and to

00:44:50.520 begin with I was

00:44:51.380 mostly concentrating

00:44:53.200 on the violation

00:44:54.800 of the principle

00:44:56.260 of free speech

00:44:57.020 that the

00:44:58.020 legislation seemed

00:44:58.840 to me to

00:44:59.200 represent because

00:45:00.580 it compelled

00:45:01.640 certain utterances

00:45:02.620 and I was never

00:45:04.100 a fan of hate

00:45:05.180 speech laws to

00:45:06.040 begin with and

00:45:07.000 and this was

00:45:08.400 something beyond

00:45:09.360 hate speech laws

00:45:10.220 because hate speech

00:45:11.020 laws stop you from

00:45:12.300 saying things

00:45:13.220 whereas compelled

00:45:14.520 speech laws force

00:45:15.920 you to say

00:45:16.660 something which is

00:45:17.540 much worse even

00:45:19.080 though the first

00:45:19.700 one is also

00:45:20.480 inadvised ill

00:45:21.980 advised as far

00:45:22.780 as I'm concerned

00:45:23.360 but I've realized

00:45:25.780 more recently that

00:45:26.840 I was also

00:45:27.600 disturbed although

00:45:28.740 in a less explicit

00:45:29.800 manner with the

00:45:31.620 theory of identity

00:45:33.300 that was an implicit

00:45:34.380 part of the

00:45:34.940 legislation so with

00:45:36.720 gender identity

00:45:37.560 for example and

00:45:38.460 we're engaged in a

00:45:40.300 discussion across

00:45:41.620 our culture about

00:45:42.540 gender identity

00:45:43.720 I mean I know as

00:45:44.920 a personality

00:45:45.500 psychologist that

00:45:46.620 there are

00:45:49.300 females 0.96

00:45:50.600 biological females 1.00

00:45:51.820 who have masculine

00:45:52.680 personalities and

00:45:53.620 there are biological

00:45:54.480 males who have 0.64

00:45:55.100 feminine personalities

00:45:56.020 that the link

00:45:57.300 between personality

00:45:58.340 as such and

00:45:59.300 and biological

00:46:00.980 structure is

00:46:02.040 suggestive but

00:46:05.380 not absolute

00:46:06.100 and there's a lot

00:46:07.280 of variability

00:46:07.980 but the idea

00:46:11.380 that identity

00:46:12.140 is something that

00:46:12.960 you define

00:46:13.580 yourself

00:46:14.240 and that

00:46:16.000 you can

00:46:16.400 change

00:46:17.100 at will

00:46:18.880 at any

00:46:19.660 point

00:46:20.200 seems to me

00:46:21.520 to be entirely

00:46:23.020 counterproductive

00:46:24.080 and dangerous

00:46:25.440 because it's

00:46:26.560 inaccurate

00:46:27.100 so your

00:46:28.400 identity

00:46:28.840 isn't merely

00:46:29.940 your membership

00:46:32.060 in whatever

00:46:32.960 group you

00:46:33.700 happen to

00:46:34.140 identify with

00:46:34.940 at that moment

00:46:35.700 it's certainly

00:46:36.260 not merely

00:46:36.900 your sexuality

00:46:37.720 or merely

00:46:38.360 your race

00:46:39.080 in fact

00:46:39.880 your identity

00:46:41.080 is barely

00:46:41.900 your race

00:46:42.740 because your

00:46:43.680 identity

00:46:44.080 is something

00:46:44.760 more like

00:46:45.380 how you

00:46:46.980 conduct

00:46:48.200 yourself

00:46:48.680 in the

00:46:49.060 world

00:46:49.480 and if

00:46:51.000 you define

00:46:51.520 yourself as 0.94

00:46:52.300 black 0.90

00:46:53.160 let's say 0.95

00:46:53.880 that doesn't

00:46:55.200 give you much

00:46:56.440 of a map

00:46:57.160 to

00:46:57.500 encountering

00:46:59.720 and approaching

00:47:00.200 the world

00:47:00.660 it's nowhere

00:47:01.400 near detailed

00:47:02.320 enough

00:47:02.760 and

00:47:03.720 and then

00:47:05.640 the idea

00:47:06.140 that you

00:47:06.660 define it

00:47:07.380 I've been

00:47:09.040 thinking about

00:47:09.700 that

00:47:10.020 a lot

00:47:11.580 you never

00:47:13.580 define your

00:47:14.320 identity

00:47:14.800 by yourself

00:47:15.900 you can't

00:47:17.100 because

00:47:17.440 you're surrounded

00:47:18.460 by other

00:47:18.920 people

00:47:19.300 and

00:47:19.560 they have

00:47:20.740 to play

00:47:21.280 along

00:47:21.620 with you

00:47:22.260 and

00:47:23.120 if they

00:47:23.840 don't play

00:47:24.240 along with

00:47:24.640 you

00:47:24.780 voluntarily

00:47:25.380 which means

00:47:25.980 they appreciate

00:47:26.760 the quality

00:47:27.440 of your

00:47:27.720 game

00:47:27.980 and they

00:47:28.440 understand

00:47:28.900 it

00:47:29.260 then

00:47:30.200 you're

00:47:31.120 either

00:47:31.300 going to

00:47:31.620 be alienated

00:47:32.300 or you

00:47:32.700 have to

00:47:33.060 impose

00:47:33.400 your identity

00:47:33.960 by force

00:47:34.860 but that's

00:47:36.060 also not

00:47:36.520 a very good

00:47:37.020 solution

00:47:37.580 I mean

00:47:37.920 I just

00:47:38.880 spent some

00:47:40.720 one of the

00:47:41.200 world's foremost

00:47:41.880 authorities on

00:47:42.760 aggression

00:47:43.320 and that'll

00:47:44.360 be released

00:47:44.800 in a bit

00:47:45.960 perhaps it's

00:47:47.240 been released

00:47:47.680 before this

00:47:48.240 will be

00:47:48.560 released

00:47:48.940 he's done

00:47:52.160 longitudinal studies

00:47:53.240 of aggression

00:47:53.760 and if the

00:47:54.680 idea that

00:47:55.660 our social

00:47:56.780 structures are

00:47:57.440 predicated on

00:47:58.180 power

00:47:58.740 was true

00:48:00.120 then

00:48:01.180 children would

00:48:02.180 start out

00:48:02.920 not being

00:48:03.580 aggressive

00:48:03.980 and they would

00:48:04.440 become more

00:48:05.060 aggressive with

00:48:05.800 time and the

00:48:06.500 more aggressive

00:48:07.080 children would

00:48:07.860 be more

00:48:08.220 successful

00:48:08.760 and none

00:48:09.660 of that is

00:48:10.240 true

00:48:10.540 children start

00:48:12.020 out more

00:48:12.540 aggressive than

00:48:13.220 they are on

00:48:14.880 average by the

00:48:15.820 time they're

00:48:16.260 adults

00:48:16.700 aggression levels

00:48:18.620 decrease with age

00:48:19.660 rather than

00:48:20.180 increasing and

00:48:21.120 there's no

00:48:21.420 evidence whatsoever

00:48:22.280 that it's a

00:48:23.200 useful long-term

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00:51:13.640 identity is something you

00:51:17.320 negotiate the way you

00:51:18.640 negotiate a game yes

00:51:20.640 more like it has to be

00:51:22.100 that way and so there's

00:51:24.180 something rather sinister

00:51:25.080 isn't there about the way

00:51:26.060 in which present-day

00:51:26.940 identity politics is

00:51:28.080 about imposition onto

00:51:30.000 others rather than an

00:51:32.780 assertion of who I am or

00:51:34.720 whatever that might be I

00:51:35.580 mean I always mistrusted

00:51:37.120 it and so I can see the

00:51:38.300 utility of identity

00:51:40.820 politics politically

00:51:41.620 speaking in scenarios where

00:51:44.240 people are marginalized

00:51:45.000 you know I understand why

00:51:45.960 gay people collectively

00:51:47.000 came together back in the

00:51:48.480 60s to fight for their 0.99

00:51:49.580 rights because there was

00:51:51.020 obviously a serious

00:51:52.020 problem or the civil

00:51:52.660 rights movement in

00:51:53.700 Northern Ireland in the

00:51:54.480 60s and 70s and that

00:51:55.380 kind of thing where

00:51:56.580 Catholics weren't able to 1.00

00:51:57.660 have the vote or to get

00:51:58.680 housing so that sort of

00:51:59.740 makes sense to me the

00:52:01.000 current identity

00:52:01.840 politic or what we might

00:52:03.420 call identitarians a lot

00:52:05.400 of it strikes me as about

00:52:07.140 as about power in fact I

00:52:08.900 feel like they would be an

00:52:10.280 incredible subject for

00:52:11.240 Foucault if he were alive

00:52:12.320 today because I've

00:52:14.140 noticed this correlation

00:52:15.060 and a lot of people have

00:52:16.460 noticed this correlation and

00:52:17.400 I never get an answer

00:52:18.140 about this but why is it

00:52:19.800 whenever online whenever

00:52:21.160 I'm viciously attacked or

00:52:22.600 threatened something

00:52:23.320 particularly pernicious the

00:52:25.720 person doing it always has

00:52:27.480 their pronouns in their

00:52:29.120 bio or a rainbow gay flag 0.81

00:52:31.340 in their bio why is there a

00:52:33.620 correlation that I've

00:52:34.360 experienced again and again

00:52:35.460 I mean it's it's almost

00:52:36.380 inevitable at this point

00:52:37.300 between the need to

00:52:39.980 self-identify in terms of

00:52:42.300 sexuality and gender and a

00:52:44.900 kind of cruelty or

00:52:46.520 viciousness or a need to

00:52:47.860 attack an aggression one of

00:52:49.520 it's one of the things

00:52:50.860 that that disturbs me

00:52:52.360 constantly about

00:52:54.160 ideological representations

00:52:56.280 of of the world

00:52:58.720 broadly speaking is that

00:53:00.880 their fundamental danger is

00:53:03.320 that they always contain a

00:53:04.640 too convenient theory of

00:53:06.160 evil and malevolence and

00:53:08.540 for me any theory that

00:53:11.100 locates the fundamental

00:53:12.280 problem of evil somewhere

00:53:14.040 other than inside you is

00:53:16.900 dangerous now that isn't to

00:53:19.260 say that social structures

00:53:21.740 can't be corrupted and

00:53:24.220 aren't corrupt it's that's

00:53:25.900 an existential problem in

00:53:26.980 and of itself it's it's

00:53:28.400 always the case that our

00:53:29.600 social institutions aren't 0.82

00:53:30.900 what they should be and

00:53:32.020 they're outdated and they're

00:53:33.140 predicated to some degree on

00:53:34.480 deceit and people who use

00:53:36.600 power can manipulate them

00:53:38.020 sometimes successfully that

00:53:40.000 problem never goes away and

00:53:41.980 it never will but the when

00:53:45.580 when the evil can be easily

00:53:47.300 located somewhere else then

00:53:49.080 you have every moral right to

00:53:52.560 allow your unexamined

00:53:54.260 motivations to manifest

00:53:56.540 themselves fully because you

00:53:58.400 can punish the evildoers and 0.94

00:54:00.220 always remain on the moral side

00:54:01.840 of the fence I think a huge

00:54:03.520 attractiveness in that I think I

00:54:05.900 mean this is something you've

00:54:06.540 explored a lot with the idea of

00:54:07.940 the Solzhenitsyn's idea about

00:54:09.700 the good and evil cutting through

00:54:11.000 the heart of every human

00:54:11.900 every human being because that

00:54:14.260 that to me uh it really gets to

00:54:18.000 the heart of a lot of of what I

00:54:19.340 would call a kind of infantile

00:54:20.640 culture I think this is a symptom

00:54:21.880 of of of of childishness you know

00:54:25.100 whenever I was learning about

00:54:27.720 literature and and and what

00:54:29.100 constituted more sophisticated

00:54:30.200 literature and what didn't

00:54:31.360 Disney films childish films let's

00:54:33.940 take Tolkien for instance good

00:54:35.300 people look sorry bad people look

00:54:37.580 bad they look like orcs they're

00:54:38.900 ugly and there are villains and 0.95

00:54:40.680 then there are heroes and they

00:54:41.580 are good there isn't complexity

00:54:43.040 and if you have a more complex

00:54:44.940 novel like a Mervyn Peake novel

00:54:46.400 where people aren't necessarily

00:54:47.840 good or bad they're both they

00:54:49.240 struggle within themselves and

00:54:50.460 with other people that is a mark

00:54:52.000 of a kind of adult novel as

00:54:53.480 opposed to a a childish novel

00:54:55.280 right and that that's quite an

00:54:56.420 important distinction and I think

00:54:57.480 most of the political and

00:54:59.100 ideological battles that I find

00:55:00.540 myself in the middle of and I'm

00:55:01.360 sure you do as well are because

00:55:03.300 people are just reducing

00:55:04.480 everything to this binary of good

00:55:06.520 versus evil and putting

00:55:08.020 themselves on the side of good

00:55:09.400 it is a very infantile almost

00:55:12.700 almost like a caricature of

00:55:14.900 religion you know it's it's a 0.99

00:55:16.860 it's and I see it again and

00:55:18.740 again we had it in this country

00:55:19.840 with the Brexit vote effectively

00:55:21.340 what happened in the vote here

00:55:22.940 and the reason why it became so

00:55:24.000 toxic and families fell apart and

00:55:26.140 people you know you wouldn't

00:55:26.800 believe I know it wasn't

00:55:27.920 reported very much elsewhere but

00:55:29.220 it was like a kind of ideological

00:55:30.740 civil war here but not a very

00:55:32.400 sophisticated one because it came

00:55:34.080 down to this narrative that if you

00:55:35.420 voted to leave the EU you were 1.00

00:55:36.880 evil racist stupid and if you 1.00

00:55:39.280 voted to remain you were you 1.00

00:55:40.540 were good and progressive and and

00:55:42.320 all the rest and noble and

00:55:43.720 virtuous right and of course

00:55:45.380 there are all sorts of good

00:55:46.260 reasons to have voted either way

00:55:48.260 and and this kind of caricature and

00:55:50.740 it happens again with well you

00:55:51.900 described you described it as a

00:55:53.820 caricature of of of religion and I

00:55:56.680 think that's what an ideology is and

00:55:59.080 this is one of the reasons that I've

00:56:00.880 been inclined let's say to go to

00:56:05.480 have my shot at the rational

00:56:07.320 atheists much as I'm a fan of

00:56:09.840 enlightenment thinking I mean I was

00:56:12.000 convinced as a consequence of

00:56:14.040 reading Jung as primarily but also

00:56:16.480 Dostoevsky and also Nietzsche

00:56:18.040 primarily and Solzhenitsyn I would

00:56:20.520 say as well that and then biology as

00:56:25.260 well as I studied that more deeply

00:56:27.140 there's no escaping a religious 1.00

00:56:32.220 framework there's no way out of it and

00:56:35.640 you if you eliminate it say as a

00:56:39.780 consequence of rational criticism

00:56:41.540 what you inevitably produce is its

00:56:44.440 replacement by forms of religion

00:56:47.140 that are much less sophisticated I mean

00:56:49.220 well it's not religion it's a it's a

00:56:52.900 fundamentalist really it's like you

00:56:54.340 know if I look back to my Catholic

00:56:55.920 upbringing actually acknowledge you

00:56:57.940 acknowledging your own capacity for

00:56:59.640 sin is at the heart of Catholicism 0.99

00:57:01.280 that's why we have the confessional

00:57:02.780 that's why you sit there and tell this

00:57:04.620 stranger all these things you've done

00:57:05.920 wrong

00:57:06.280 well that and that's that's far from

00:57:11.580 trivial it's unbelievably not trivial

00:57:14.560 and because it was so common like a

00:57:17.580 common part of Catholicism it can be

00:57:19.440 passed over without notice and so

00:57:22.140 religious the religious structures that

00:57:25.580 we inherited I'm going to talk about

00:57:27.500 Christianity most specifically because 1.00

00:57:29.320 it's the dominant form of it's the it's

00:57:32.320 the form of religious belief that

00:57:33.680 primarily undergirds our social

00:57:36.420 structures it's our operating system my

00:57:38.920 my producer came up with that term the

00:57:41.180 other day and I thought it was apt and

00:57:44.200 it does localize the drama between good

00:57:46.920 and evil inside and makes you responsible

00:57:50.600 for that and and makes you encourages you

00:57:55.960 let's say to attend to the ways that you

00:57:57.960 fall short of the ideal and when you

00:58:00.960 criticize a structure like that out of

00:58:02.680 existence you don't criticize the

00:58:04.720 questions that gave rise to it out of

00:58:06.940 existence and the questions might be well

00:58:09.660 what's the nature of the good what's the

00:58:13.000 nature of evil those are religious 1.00

00:58:14.660 questions what's the purpose of our life

00:58:16.780 how do you orient yourself if you're

00:58:19.620 trying to move up let's say rather than

00:58:22.780 down how should you conduct yourself

00:58:25.840 etc etc those questions don't go away

00:58:28.420 and they can't not be answered and so

00:58:31.860 the way that a traditional religious

00:58:35.200 structure answers them is in a

00:58:37.700 mysterious way it uses ritual it uses

00:58:40.280 music it uses art it uses literature it

00:58:42.820 uses stories all these things that are

00:58:44.980 outside the realm of easy criticism and

00:58:47.660 then some of that's translated into you

00:58:50.860 know comprehensible explicit dogma and

00:58:53.120 that's the part that's most susceptible

00:58:54.700 to rational criticism but when that

00:58:58.540 disappears i've been thinking about this

00:59:00.320 a lot this week because of what happened

00:59:01.640 to richard dawkins recently you know and

00:59:04.920 i have my differences with dawkins and

00:59:06.700 the rest of the rational atheists because

00:59:08.400 i think that they underestimated the

00:59:11.180 danger of dispensing with what they were

00:59:13.440 attempting to dispense with and i see the

00:59:16.160 influx of religious fervor associated with

00:59:20.020 political ideas as a direct consequence of

00:59:23.360 of the lack of separation let's say

00:59:26.020 between church and state psychologically

00:59:28.620 but but dawkins has fallen foul of this

00:59:31.500 new religion but a religion but his case

00:59:34.100 actually really is testimony to what we're

00:59:37.840 talking about that this is not a religion

00:59:39.320 in a traditional sense it is an infantile

00:59:41.160 religion that only sees things in binaries

00:59:42.820 of good and evil because he was effectively

00:59:45.060 he was posing a question about identity he was

00:59:48.500 saying if it is possible for rachel dolezal to

00:59:51.120 identify as black why is she universally condemned

00:59:55.200 and derided but somebody can identify as the

00:59:58.860 opposite sex and they are celebrated and all he was

01:00:01.640 doing was posing the question he wasn't even

01:00:03.480 actually making a claim yeah well he was doing he was

01:00:07.440 doing what a scientist actually does i mean i've been shocked

01:00:10.280 frequently in my interactions with journalists because

01:00:13.880 i've worked as a scientist for three decades and i'm accustomed to

01:00:18.280 the way that scientists think and speak and when i'm sitting around with my

01:00:22.160 graduate students and there's a problem or an issue

01:00:24.660 what they do and my colleagues as well is generate a bunch of hypotheses about

01:00:29.840 why that might be they don't necessarily believe them but

01:00:32.600 the first trick is to generate as many um what would you say hypotheses i said that

01:00:38.680 already that might account for it ranging from biological through social etc

01:00:43.160 and that is exactly what dawkins did he even said that's what he was doing

01:00:47.400 that puts you on the side of the devil i mean there was a viral tweet this week

01:00:51.520 from a teacher saying i will never allow my pupils to play devil's advocate i will

01:00:55.940 never allow that in the class because some some views are oppressive and i and and

01:00:59.720 are not to be entertained i mean but that's the point that's why the vatican

01:01:03.300 will call in a devil's advocate when someone is potentially being canonized

01:01:06.880 well if you can't play devil's advocate you can't think that's it you have to

01:01:11.400 have devil a devil's advocate in your head if you don't have a devil's advocate in

01:01:16.260 your head torturing every thought you generate you're not you're not engaged

01:01:20.360 in critical thinking right that's for sure that's the scientific process to

01:01:23.560 disprove yourself i mean that's that's what surprises me about uh richard

01:01:27.520 dawkins response because i think what he didn't realize is that he was caught in

01:01:32.180 this good versus evil binary and he had he had he was the heretic now uh he had

01:01:37.360 been branded he posed the question you're not you're not meant to pose uh and

01:01:41.560 therefore he's he's now outed himself as one of the demons he's there in

01:01:46.780 pandemonium with the other demons now that so he then he of course backtracked and

01:01:51.840 apologized and said well i didn't want to offend anyone and of course in a in a in an

01:01:57.100 adult rational world that would be taken in good faith and and what but he

01:02:01.280 didn't i don't think he fully appreciates what's going on here is that he's

01:02:04.920 already uh marked himself as well here's his here's his apology let's say now what

01:02:11.200 he should have said as far as i'm concerned here's what he said okay um i do not

01:02:15.940 intend to disparage trans people i see that my academic disgust question has been misconstrued

01:02:25.280 as such and i deplore this it was also not my intent to ally in any way with republican

01:02:31.260 bigots in the u.s now exploiting this issue and so okay it's so interesting that that's what he did

01:02:37.840 because well it's buying into the tribalism thing you know well it's also it's it's not a it's not

01:02:45.780 the best response for that to defend him what he should have said was something like look people

01:02:53.240 here's something to think about that i was posing that's what scientists do and you didn't understand

01:03:01.300 that but that's not my problem it's your lack of sophistication but he instead of saying that

01:03:07.800 he immediately removed himself from the bad people and that was the republican bigots

01:03:14.740 which just seems to me to pour fuel on the fire and and then he also said that he didn't intend to

01:03:23.800 disparage trans people which isn't the issue at all well also there's no implication in what he asked

01:03:29.420 that he had ever intended to disparage trans people but to be fair to him to be fair to him

01:03:34.060 i understand when you're caught in the middle of a twitter storm you you just want it to stop and

01:03:38.280 i've heard you talk about this as well it's actually your response probably isn't going to be the best

01:03:42.140 the best one you just wanted to go away no well look i mean one of the things that's really worth

01:03:46.600 pointing out here and i it's not like i don't have sympathy for dawkins i have sympathy for dawkins i

01:03:51.120 sent out a tweet defending him yesterday i mean dawkins is an admirable scientist in my estimation i

01:03:56.960 learned lots from reading his books um that doesn't mean i don't have my criticisms of dawkins but

01:04:03.540 just because you have criticisms of someone doesn't mean that they've never done anything

01:04:08.380 worthwhile or that you haven't learned something from them and that's especially true in the

01:04:12.880 scientific realm um i just don't understand why okay so back to the twitter issue so what i've seen

01:04:26.540 repeatedly and and this is worth some discussion is when i'm watching twitter when i'm watching these

01:04:32.720 attacks on people what i've seen the most general risk pattern of response to be is that it doesn't

01:04:38.880 take very many people attacking you on twitter before it's seriously psychologically disturbing

01:04:44.820 yeah you know and that is interestingly related to this whole issue of hate speech that we've been

01:04:49.940 discussing because it is the case that vicious attacks have a quite a pronounced psychological effect

01:04:56.060 especially if they're personal and people generally fold and apologize instantly if my my sense has been

01:05:02.800 if the twitter mob is 20 people it's sort of like they're reacting to 20 of their neighbors showing

01:05:08.740 up on their doorsteps with pitchforks and and um torches and i think it's it's actually an admirable

01:05:15.200 response in some sense because a well socialized person actually does care what their neighbors think and

01:05:22.860 if you offend 20 of your neighbors it's possible 20 of your tribe it's possible that you've done

01:05:29.420 something wrong you might ask yourself that now on twitter you're connected to hundreds of thousands

01:05:34.700 of people and if you would offend 20 it's not clear what that means it might just mean that you said

01:05:40.440 something it feels a lot worse than it actually is as well it feels amplified because there's all

01:05:45.380 these people who are strangers who know absolutely nothing about you uh and it's particularly frustrating

01:05:49.580 because more often than not when it's happened to me it's it's always been uh an imagined grievance

01:05:54.520 it's not actually something i've said it's something that they've assumed that i've said or or a way

01:05:59.660 that they have interpreted this and and the more you try and fight back against it or try and explain

01:06:03.640 your actual position the more they double down on their you know and you've had this as well people

01:06:08.680 are going after a figment of their own imagination that's impossible to fend off you know and and it

01:06:13.760 does do psychological harm and i've never denied that and this is something i addressed in the book

01:06:17.520 because i i quoted i can't remember her name now but the writer talking about how hate speech

01:06:22.360 could be said to be violence insofar as the psychological impact can have it can have a

01:06:27.840 physiological impact it can make you sick it can make you unwell the the impact of words but of

01:06:32.720 course that or the example i use is uh is taxation i could become physically sick because i'm under

01:06:38.320 stress from being overly taxed by the government does that mean that the government has committed an

01:06:41.860 act of violence against me it could be applied to absolutely anything i think an anarchist would argue

01:06:47.180 yes right sure exactly but but that wouldn't be me um and but that but you could apply that to

01:06:52.500 absolutely any conceivable scenario where anything that has happened to you has led to uh stress and

01:06:57.000 physical degeneration and so i don't think it's right to single speech out and say speeches

01:07:02.600 that but we can well also also it's it's a one-sided argument because dangerous as speech free speech is

01:07:10.380 we don't ever have to deny that there's such a thing as hateful speech or damaging speech

01:07:14.520 or corrosive speech or untruth speech or pathological speech in every possible direction that isn't the

01:07:21.540 issue the issue is what's more dangerous to regulate it or to leave it be despite its dangers that's the

01:07:29.580 only rational argument the only complete argument let's say even if you have the most repugnant

01:07:36.100 character who is advocating the most vile ideas about society and attempting to proselytize even someone

01:07:42.000 who's attempting to recruit people to his or her cause um even something as vicious as neo-nazism or

01:07:47.560 something like that the question isn't you know do i support what that person is saying because obviously

01:07:52.340 we don't the question is do you take a few instances of people behaving in this way uh and use that as a

01:08:00.220 reason a justification to empower the state to make a decision about what people can say and think that's the

01:08:05.440 bigger principle that's at stake here i worry that with with with social media and twitter as well is

01:08:11.340 that we we end up buying into the illusion that there are more hateful people in the world than

01:08:15.260 there actually are because even the people who send these hateful things probably wouldn't behave like

01:08:19.900 that in real life there's something about the online world and what it does is absolutely i mean this is the

01:08:25.780 heart of cancel culture this is why it works like you said it's just a few tweets that's all it takes i've

01:08:30.760 seen situations where companies and corporations will backtrack on a policy just because of one or

01:08:35.380 two tweets because they fear this this deluge of of people they it has such disproportionate power

01:08:43.520 and often with this this kind of cancel culture it is often about something that someone hasn't even

01:08:48.740 said the example of dawkins is is perfect because a lot of the people and some prominent people i saw

01:08:54.360 were saying look dawkins has now outed himself as a transphobe if you said to them where is the

01:09:00.980 transphobic thing tomorrow bucko well quite because if if someone is transphobic simply because you've

01:09:06.560 decided that you know i mean it was the same with jk rowling uh it became suddenly quite normal for

01:09:13.840 commentators on the mainstream media to say that she has said transphobic things well where because i've read

01:09:19.640 her comments and her essay on the trans issue that she posted on her blog and it was a long

01:09:24.600 essay which was very compassionate and nuanced and at no point it's the opposite she says that she

01:09:30.500 supports trans rights and she would stand there against any discrimination if you and i've been in

01:09:35.020 these fights all the time if ever you ask someone to say can you just quote the transphobic thing that

01:09:39.160 she said they never can and an adult would say okay i can't find the evidence of my preconception so

01:09:45.620 therefore i should revise my view but they don't they they double down on it and they find these

01:09:51.440 sort of they use kazooistry and whatever linguistic uh semantic tricks they can to come back round to the

01:09:59.160 to the conclusion they'd already decided same with with dawkins i mean not just the american humanist

01:10:03.640 association i saw a major blogger saying that anyone who was defending him is transphobic and like well

01:10:09.060 if that's all it takes to be smeared in this way if it doesn't matter what you say if all that matters

01:10:14.020 is what people decide that you believe then then i suppose this goes back to the pseudo reality we

01:10:18.780 were discussing well i guess what what dawkins got in trouble for let's take it apart a bit okay because

01:10:23.380 it's worth it's worth doing he said this is his original tweet in 2015 rachel dolazal a white chapter

01:10:31.020 president of naacp was vilified for identifying as black some men choose to identify as women and some women

01:10:41.500 choose to identify as men you will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify

01:10:49.300 as discuss okay so we put forth a set of propositions but the proposition has a point and the point is

01:10:59.400 what is it that you can and can't identify with and what what power do people have to

01:11:08.820 enforce their decision on others and that's really that's really the question he's asking if you strip

01:11:16.060 it down and that is actually a question that's very threatening to well let's see who would it be

01:11:21.880 threatening to what would be threatening to anyone who insists that you can choose an identity say in

01:11:28.200 the realm of of gender and that you should have the right to enforce your choice despite other

01:11:34.240 people's opinions let's say so he's he's asking why is there an inherent contradiction in the

01:11:39.860 intersectional discourse why is it why is it that racial identity is not malleable and in fact has to

01:11:48.080 be strictly policed hence why we have all these debates about cultural appropriation why is that so

01:11:53.380 rigid and yet even if the lived experience let's go back to that the lived experience of the person tells

01:11:58.600 them otherwise i mean rachel dodderzal wrote a whole book uh in which she outlines how she feels that she

01:12:05.040 has always been black it isn't just i choose to be black one day it is something her lived experience is

01:12:10.180 that in essence she is so why is that to be vilified universally without question and there's no discussion

01:12:15.800 to be had here and yet someone who chooses uh you know those what that gender identity is something 1.00

01:12:22.720 that is malleable and open to options and actually infinite uh options why and i think well maybe he's

01:12:30.100 vilified because he asked a question that's at the heart of the problem with identity politics period it's

01:12:35.580 i mean particularly because when it comes to race i mean virtually all intersectionists would accept that

01:12:39.680 race is socially constructed this is something they're always talking about and so therefore in a

01:12:43.920 sense there is more of a case for transracialism if if you want to say that you can you that it is an

01:12:49.000 identity that that can be mixed well in some sense we already accept transracialism as a given and so

01:12:54.040 here's something i might as well get in trouble for this um well if your ancestry is 95 caucasian and

01:13:04.560 five percent non-caucasian asian black let's say you're not caucasian right generally speaking you can 0.95

01:13:14.760 identify with the minority group and so at some point the question becomes well it's a ridiculous 0.88

01:13:21.300 question which which is why the whole notion of group identity construed in this way is so pathological

01:13:26.600 but we obviously accept some degree of transracial identification if your racial group is disproportionately

01:13:38.580 in one category but you identify with the other and that's instantly not only accepted it's

01:13:44.060 standard practice right and i'm with the intersectionist on this insofar as race is we're

01:13:49.080 all the same i you know ever since we've broken down the human genome we know there are no differences

01:13:53.180 between us so this idea uh that it must be so rigidly policed this this this this social construct

01:13:59.940 these these arbitrary ideas and yet gen i mean i think it's something okay so now we know why now

01:14:05.540 we know exactly why dawkins got himself in so much trouble okay you know he put his finger well it will

01:14:10.580 for sure it's for sure but but the magical super nazis are always in trouble so you are exactly

01:14:15.720 exactly but then what but with the with the question of uh of the the gender identity debate but this is

01:14:22.640 the debate we need to be having is actually the other thing he put his finger on there is that actually

01:14:27.860 people are arguing with different definitions in their heads you know for for uh um for the

01:14:32.840 identitarians the idea of a woman a woman is an identity it isn't a biological reality uh but for

01:14:39.680 most for most people the classification of woman is biological reality not identity so in other words

01:14:45.200 and why cannot why why is it that we cannot have that discussion say okay so you believe this thing

01:14:49.680 we believe the other uh and that's why we're at loggerheads uh but but let's let's have the

01:14:54.460 discussion why can that not happen why does it have to be if you've decided that's what we're that's

01:14:59.180 actually what we're trying to unpack is what's the motivation at the root of this and it seems to me

01:15:03.400 i do believe it's something like a pronounced infantilism i mean one of the things i've been

01:15:09.100 toying with is the idea that the the gender that the demand for gender fluidity in late adolescence 0.99

01:15:21.700 let's say is something like the consequence of insufficient fantasy play in childhood

01:15:29.300 that that i remember for example when my son was little his sister and her friends used to dress him

01:15:39.880 up as a fairy princess they did this with some regularity and i kind of cast a dim eye on that but

01:15:45.680 i thought it through and you know it sort of disturbed me and then i thought it through and i thought

01:15:49.760 wait a second here leave the kid alone leave the girls alone he is playing out what it means to be

01:15:56.460 female in dramatic play and he needs to do that because otherwise he can't understand what it means

01:16:02.660 to be female that's how children understand that's how adults understand things for god's sake we go to 1.00

01:16:08.280 a movie and we watch someone play out a female and we identify with that because otherwise we wouldn't

01:16:15.100 be enjoying the movie and we get we get a bit of a clue about what it's like to inhabit someone else's skin

01:16:20.540 so there's this necessity for play in gender roles and that has to manifest itself and 0.93

01:16:26.700 if the play has been interrupted let's say by electronic equipment for example or or or any of the

01:16:35.980 other things that might be interrupting it well maybe that desire comes back with a vengeance

01:16:39.760 later and i i have to be whoever i say i am i have to be able to play with this and well if it's a

01:16:46.820 developmental requirement there's going to be a lot of insistence behind it and it looks immature and it

01:16:52.420 is because it should have happened earlier most people stabilize their gender identity by the time 0.97

01:16:56.980 they're three or four but it doesn't always happen so there isn't infantilism in this demand for

01:17:04.680 for fluidity of identity uh this insistence that other people play the game that i insist they're

01:17:10.660 going to play and then what about the idea that the gender critical feminists would come in and say 1.00

01:17:15.260 well the idea of dress a boy dressing up in a dress there's nothing inherently female about that or

01:17:21.240 feminine about that in any case that all of this is a construct anyway and why can't we let the kids 1.00

01:17:26.500 just some kids are not gender conforming and they can just do what they want i mean

01:17:30.320 the the concern i have with the current identity obsessed ideology is that they see a boy in a dress

01:17:38.000 and they will say well he could potentially be a woman and by doing so are reinforcing the most

01:17:45.300 conservative views of of gender uh to begin with um and that to me see well that that like i'm

01:17:52.740 intuitively against that because i wasn't a gender conforming i didn't play football with the other

01:17:57.400 boys you know i didn't i mean i didn't dress up in dresses but i may have done if they were lying

01:18:00.960 around you know i i i i've i've i find it very odd that this uh supposedly progressive radical

01:18:08.260 movement uh is so dependent on the idea of of very very traditional unyielding notions of what it is

01:18:16.140 to be male and what it is to be female yeah but only in the case where the identity is across the

01:18:22.480 the sex it that that it so you can be if if you're a man who believes he's a woman that's inviolable and

01:18:32.400 has a biological reference point but if you're a woman who thinks she's a woman it doesn't 0.98

01:18:36.580 it's completely malleable and so you know that's an inherent contradiction again and that's that's

01:18:42.080 and it's work and it's worthy of discussion surely and and the contradiction doesn't go away

01:18:46.380 because you won't allow the conversation to happen which is the contradiction gets played out in

01:18:50.840 in actuality if you don't allow it to be dealt with in abstraction so then the question is how do

01:18:58.780 we break through and i mean this is something i've been really really thinking about is that

01:19:04.280 it isn't no it's it's no longer just a matter of trying to persuade people it's almost trying to

01:19:09.780 de-radicalize people at this point how do how do i explain to someone the world isn't this fantasy

01:19:15.340 world that you've created in your head where it's just it's full of transphodes and neo-nazis and all 0.99

01:19:19.000 these and and good versus evil the world is actually much more complex and nuanced and requires

01:19:23.160 discussion and thought how do you break through someone's fantasy so that we can have that

01:19:28.100 discussion well it used to be that you sent them to the university so they could study the humanities

01:19:33.180 that's the last thing you should do now well that was the answer i mean that was the whole point right

01:19:38.280 to to make people more sophisticated in their conceptions and in which case is it the case that

01:19:43.860 it's over now if if people were to be educated out of those problems and now that actually the the higher

01:19:51.600 education itself has become so ideologically driven that to go to university means you end up

01:19:55.300 more indoctrinated than when you went there what what hope is there i feel like i'm i sound a bit

01:20:00.320 frustrated here but i feel like i'm bashing my head a bit against a brick wall because half most of the

01:20:04.920 time when i'm caught in an argument with with these ideologues they are arguing like i say with a monster

01:20:10.040 they've created in their own heads i'm not the person they think i am i don't have the values

01:20:13.160 they think i have and and therefore the the discussion is stymied from the outset and it

01:20:17.580 does make me very frustrated and that's probably the real reason i wrote the book actually because i

01:20:22.520 want i want the idea of free speech to be elevated again as a sacrosanct principle so that we can have

01:20:27.580 these conversations and so that people don't get demonized and attacked for things they don't

01:20:32.000 believe and so that we can reach some kind of consensus on these issues that we've been

01:20:37.640 describing these contentious issues because when you have an issue that's particularly tendentious

01:20:40.680 you it requires more conversation it requires more discussion and more understanding and

01:20:44.680 i don't think we're getting that at the moment yeah well i guess i'm somewhat optimistic about that

01:20:50.200 because i can see all the possibility that long-form conversations of this sort bring well there's an

01:20:59.520 appetite for them isn't there but but is there an appetite for them from the activists and the

01:21:04.960 ideologues who have seized so much control in our major educational cultural institutions yes i think

01:21:08.780 i think so i think so i think so i mean i've been struck by how how deep the hunger is for

01:21:16.620 for genuine conversation and and very much heartened by it and so that's a counter movement

01:21:24.000 i hope you're right i just don't see any evidence of that from the people i'm talking about i don't see it

01:21:30.120 from the people who will say to you it's another problem too though isn't it with twitter for

01:21:34.600 example is right it's never the same people and that that plays with us psychologically because

01:21:41.020 of course we are built to more or less assume that we're interacting with a continuous community

01:21:46.920 yeah and and we aren't we're are we're we're interacting with a discontinuous community on

01:21:53.060 twitter and so we're led astray in our presuppositions constantly and but it's worse than that

01:21:59.260 it's like it because it isn't i know it's i know it's different people all the time but they all have

01:22:04.080 the same views on absolutely everything it feels like you're arguing with the borg you know it feels

01:22:08.660 like just one one mind speaking through many many voices yes well it is that then that's the hallmark

01:22:13.360 of an ideology it is precisely that and then i guess it's a matter of it's certainly and it's a matter

01:22:19.880 of trying to understand the ideology ever more deeply to see what it's actually focused on

01:22:24.120 but i do i i do read their books and i do read their articles and i do try to understand

01:22:28.600 i don't believe the people i'm talking about return the favor they they always use the phrase

01:22:32.820 educate yourself and what they mean by that is read these select books and digest them uncritically

01:22:39.220 that's what they mean by educate yourself you know they don't mean read widely and tackle the various

01:22:44.920 views and come to a conclusion yourself the last thing they want is critical thought critical thought

01:22:49.260 is the enemy you know ironically it's the enemy of critical theory it's a hallmark of white supremacy

01:22:54.620 culture as far as i can see right that's what they say but that's because it's amazing too to see

01:22:59.980 that set of ideas propagate itself across the culture so quickly the the canadian federal government

01:23:06.100 in its diversity inclusivity and equity training program now uses those concepts like associating

01:23:13.280 white supremacy with punctuality for example they use those in the training of their civil servants

01:23:18.980 it's it's it's been accepted wholeheartedly to that degree and i've seen them i've seen the

01:23:24.640 screenshots that often get leaked of these training sessions and it will it pointed uh hallmarks of

01:23:29.820 white supremacy punctuality politeness hard perfectionism yeah all these noble things and and i'm

01:23:36.000 thinking well if i was a person of color i would be outraged by this this idea that this is this is a

01:23:41.000 culture that's alien to me this is it's so offensive uh and this is what it's so absurd even i mean it's

01:23:47.700 so absurd that you you can hardly mount an argument against it i mean conscientiousness is is a is a

01:23:53.600 personality trait and there's no racial differences in conscientiousness right and it it wouldn't matter 0.99

01:24:00.760 to me if it was just a few idiots on twitter or these extreme it wouldn't matter to me but these 0.99

01:24:06.640 people have disproportionate power institutional power political power i mean the biden administration 1.00

01:24:11.980 is is on on side with an awful lot of this kind of of stuff and and the end no so is the trudeau

01:24:17.660 government i mean to have this in the in the training uh training documentation that's produced by the

01:24:24.100 federal government is just absolutely stunning it's also the document that i was referring to i tweeted

01:24:28.760 about it yesterday it's so badly written that it's it's it's it's stunning it's maddening with him

01:24:35.820 and how is it he's got away with his history of blackface for instance how is it that there is no

01:24:41.500 consistency there like you know lack of effective opposition is a big part of it's insane i mean if

01:24:47.820 you look at those old videos it looks like he's spent more time in blackface than out of it and yet

01:24:50.980 he he isn't the one who's being attacked and vilified for that it's okay he's got a free pass it's weird

01:24:55.040 to me yeah well the the opposition in canada and this is a problem in general is a real problem for our

01:25:00.820 entire culture is that the woke narrative is very romantically attractive it's got this rebelliousness

01:25:07.280 about it and this impetus to go out and march in the streets and you know to work on a global cause

01:25:13.360 and like traditional conservatives and even traditional liberals can't mount a counter narrative

01:25:19.000 they they don't have the imagination and it's a huge problem the trouble is though the cause that

01:25:25.460 they're fighting for is large largely illusory and that that to me is is is very frightening we've

01:25:30.380 had people in this country claim that our major universities such as oxford and cambridge are

01:25:34.960 structurally institutionally racist all of the data tells us this is just simply not the case oh yes well

01:25:40.960 that's just happening constantly in canadian universities the mcgill physics department has now

01:25:45.640 put out a diversity inclusivity and equity statement and um that that's predicated on exactly those views

01:25:53.120 well i think we need to push back against the this particular hyper racialization of society because

01:25:59.580 it is re-inscribing old racial tropes even to the extent of fear of miscegenation this old racist idea

01:26:06.000 of this fear of mixed couples you know there was an article in the guardian here recently talking about

01:26:10.380 how finding mixed race people attractive is problematic you know this idea it's almost just 1.00

01:26:15.500 taking old racist ideas and just giving them a kind of hint of respectability and of course the end

01:26:20.740 point of that is segregation you saw presumably the story at the in in california the brentwood school

01:26:26.260 the elite school that segregated its parents but on their their what was it a dialogue session with

01:26:31.940 the teachers and you would have white parents in one room you're seeing that in convocation ceremonies

01:26:36.180 at universities too how can this not how can this be anything other than racist you know it's

01:26:41.640 interesting that the the group fair you know the the group foundation against intolerance and racism

01:26:46.640 a lot of those those people who are doing great work i think are starting to call this neo-racism

01:26:50.840 there needs to be a label for it um and i think maybe that's the right way to go about it because

01:26:57.060 the word racism has almost become meaningless because the people who use it the most they throw

01:27:01.540 it around so liberally you know that i never believe it when i hear someone branded that way i assume

01:27:07.180 it's someone not being honest and not being truthful so what do we call this what do you call it when

01:27:12.200 people are advancing the cause of racial segregation in the name of anti-racism what do you call that i

01:27:17.520 don't know what i think i think that's going to be the real struggle is not it's not just breaking

01:27:22.380 through the fantasy world i don't like this idea of having to negotiate someone else's dreamland

01:27:26.160 there's that thing firstly but also there's the linguistic minefields how do you convince people the

01:27:31.620 other reason i mean you mentioned the rebellious aspect of it i think the other reason why it's so

01:27:35.360 appealing is because the language sounds like you're doing good social justice anti-racism who wouldn't be

01:27:42.080 anti-racist uh black lives matter of course they do who would disagree with that but but but these

01:27:47.820 that these phrasing can be used to push through some very pernicious ideas and i mean when it comes

01:27:54.280 to anti-racism for instance i mean ibram x kennedy makes absolutely clear in his book that he feels to

01:27:59.720 be not racist is simply another form of racism that this that this dichotomy doesn't exist well

01:28:04.740 what and that's why i find it very hard when i'm having these arguments because if i say

01:28:09.940 i have a real problem with anti-racism people will say oh i see so you're for racism and then you have

01:28:14.980 to explain what anti-racism means when used by these academics in these very niche fields such as

01:28:19.980 whiteness studies you have to explain first what that means why that's dangerous for society and how

01:28:25.140 in order to genuinely oppose racism you have to oppose the discourse of anti-racism i mean when you say

01:28:30.960 it like that it's it's it's maddening isn't it it's it's like it it's it's it's the stuff of

01:28:36.200 nightmares because there is no coherent sense and and because so much of it is rooted in language and

01:28:41.540 misdirection through language and and and shielding what is actually meant it it becomes impossible to

01:28:48.720 win the argument and and maybe that's the point you know maybe maybe this they gave the word to us

01:28:54.540 gaslighting you know when they when they gaslight all the time and say the culture war is a right-wing

01:28:59.260 myth or cancel the people who are the the chief practitioners of cancel culture saying that cancel

01:29:04.260 culture doesn't exist when they when they say the opposite of what what is the observable reality

01:29:08.440 i i don't know how to uh break through that how to how to break through those arguments because not

01:29:15.480 only have they constructed a pseudo reality in their own minds they've constructed the language with which

01:29:20.760 to sustain that pseudo reality so no one else can be drawn out of it and that that to me is going

01:29:26.140 to be the challenge let me ask you let's go sideways for a minute now and and i suppose this is an

01:29:33.380 exploration of potential solutions as well this has been a very serious conversation but you're a

01:29:38.660 satirist and a comedian as well and so you have terrible how unfunny i am in real life isn't that

01:29:44.840 awful you know when i'm doing stand-up if i've got a script i can be funny but i can't be funny

01:29:49.580 spontaneously people are very disappointed about that i'm sorry well i'm curious about your motivations

01:29:56.360 you let's talk about titania mcgrath why don't you define describe her first for everyone

01:30:01.880 so titania mcgrath originated as a twitter character um in around april 2018 and the idea

01:30:09.820 of the character is that she is a very um privileged poe-faced uh young white intersectional activist

01:30:16.520 who is determined to be offended by absolutely anything she can problematize absolutely anything

01:30:21.620 you know you could give her you know a pair of shoes or a hat or a a holiday in margate and she 0.79

01:30:27.700 would find a way to say that it is uh irredeemably transphobic and white supremacist or something like

01:30:32.540 that she can do those things that the activists always do so nothing is ever good enough for her

01:30:36.560 she's also immensely privileged she comes from well a independently wealthy background she lives in you 1.00

01:30:41.820 know one of those uh sort of gated communities which is 99 percent white um but she uh she she has a 0.99

01:30:49.680 deep mistrust of the working class um and um she but she she thinks that she is virtuous and noble and

01:30:56.940 good and she goes on twitter uh and uh goes on the attack all the time uh trying to uh isolate thing

01:31:04.580 trying to save the world within her through through uh intersectional theory um and it's a very

01:31:09.580 recognizable type of act even if you know nothing about intersectional intersectionality or anything of

01:31:13.640 the stuff that came out of the school of thought of kimberly crenshaw or any of those academics even if you

01:31:17.660 know nothing about that you will recognize this type of figure because this figure is ubiquitous

01:31:22.440 on twitter on social media uh they always have their pronouns in their bio uh they always use the

01:31:28.320 same terminology such as hegemony or discourse or or problematic or or phalogocentric if you want to

01:31:34.740 go back to derrida you know and she knows the right jargon to use lived experience cultural appropriation

01:31:40.620 mansplaining toxic masculinity all of those kind of things and we know and all of these things tend to

01:31:45.840 be slogans in substitute of thought you know that they're just things that get thrown out there and

01:31:50.600 and so what i wanted to do with the character do you know what slogan means what you mean is

01:31:55.340 etymologically no i don't slew egg garum it means battle cry of the dead i love that oh god

01:32:01.660 that doesn't send a chill up your back you didn't understand it well that's this is it i'm going to

01:32:10.300 use that that's great because that it is a kind of uh it's almost like a battleground of zombies

01:32:16.600 who who don't have any capacity for independent thought anymore i mean you you try get into a

01:32:21.680 conversation with with someone like this and i have many times well sure many very publicly

01:32:26.560 and the slogans that come back at you all the time and and and and the lack of interrogation of

01:32:32.200 those slogans you know but what i find so frustrating and so horrifying in some sense i mean

01:32:36.440 i think a great canonical example of that is the interview that helen lewis did with me for the

01:32:41.780 for gq which is it's now more popular online than the channel 4 interview which i think the gq interview

01:32:49.120 has like 32 million views or something preposterous but i never did talk to helen lewis i just talked to

01:32:56.820 the ideology and it's not i don't like that i like to talk to the person and find out what they think but

01:33:04.120 i heard you saying as well that before the interview uh she was very uh frosty and and

01:33:10.780 oh yes almost as though she had decided what you were in advance funnily oh there was no almost i

01:33:16.720 definitely decided what i was before the before the discussion yes exactly and she's been beating 1.00

01:33:23.360 the same drum more recently as well which has driven many people to the interview because she

01:33:28.920 published an article in the atlantic monthly and in another locale as well so when when you're

01:33:34.040 faced with those i mean it's it's i just see it all the time so often and to give another recent

01:33:39.880 example that we had the um obviously since the harry and megan interview with oprah winfrey uh and

01:33:46.860 there was a controversy over here because piers morgan who hosts a show called good morning britain

01:33:50.940 got into an argument with another colleague on the show man called alex beresford i think

01:33:55.440 and um it was really interesting watching once the they'd had the argument they sat down they tried to

01:34:00.380 talk through the issues and piers morgan pointed out that some of the things that megan had said in

01:34:04.700 the interview were factually wrong and had been proven to be factually wrong his response was alex

01:34:10.080 beresford's response was but that's her lived experience and then he said yes but we have the

01:34:14.320 evidence here that it is factually incorrect and again he said but it's her lived experience so in

01:34:19.020 other words see that's that insistence that the fantasy world the subjective world trumps everything

01:34:24.540 right so so and that once you've it's almost like these these phrases if you use the right if you

01:34:31.580 use the phrase lived experience or toxic masculinity whatever you're in the club what you've signaled

01:34:35.680 that you're you're you're right you know and i know that academics have always done this you know

01:34:39.560 the jargon you're you're in the group you're in the in group if you've got the right if you know how

01:34:42.800 to deploy the right words but there's something more sinister about this because it is morally right in

01:34:47.600 these situations that that's the sinister thing is that it's it's it's more it's morally incontrovertible

01:34:54.740 you've made the statement and that's it and there's no further discussion yes well you're not evil that's

01:34:59.080 what you're saying right i'm not evil so i think so with so the reason with titania i wanted her to be

01:35:05.140 obsessed with this language and so and and and why i read so much of this stuff so that i knew that the

01:35:10.780 way that they speak is because i thought the best way to expose the the inherent contradictions of

01:35:16.980 of of that position and the thoughtlessness moreover the thoughtlessness of that position

01:35:21.380 is is is to to embody it in a character right so you were playing you were playing a dramatic game

01:35:27.440 essentially which is a form of thought in doing so i've actually uh come to understand the people

01:35:34.280 i'm satirizing a whole lot more and look let's face it every now and then they'll hit on a point

01:35:38.500 that is actually right and and you know even when i read white fragility by robin d'angelo which i

01:35:43.860 think is a terrible book and is is is so flawed throughout every now and then she'll hit on

01:35:47.380 something and you think for a moment oh there's something in that and then she'll undercut it by

01:35:51.480 saying well everyone's a racist and all the rest of it you know and it just goes back to being absurd

01:35:54.900 but um and that book in of itself is a very good example of this you know setting up a reality that

01:36:00.520 cannot be penetrated because she will say that any kind of uh critical questioning of her position is

01:36:06.860 evidence of the very pervasiveness of white supremacy that she's identified so you can't win 0.99

01:36:11.580 because even engaging in a discussion is proof of your malevolence according to her theory it's

01:36:16.500 absolutely hopeless um but i thought i thought i thought because the movement is so riven with

01:36:21.840 contradiction actually the more effective way of tackling it isn't through dialogue firstly because

01:36:27.560 the people i'm talking about seem are impervious to reason uh they mistrust dialogue they see debate as

01:36:33.160 a form of violence so you're never going to get through to them that way yeah and that that's

01:36:36.640 actually an explicit part of the theory it really is so then in creating a satirical character right

01:36:42.400 it's not that they're anti-free speech there's no such thing as free speech in that theoretical

01:36:47.000 framework no it's a misapprehension all the way down to the bottom which is why i i get so frustrated

01:36:52.660 i've often been in debates where i've tried to invite these very people to participate in the debate to

01:36:57.020 hear them out and they would say that to even appear would be to dignify the position so it's

01:37:03.300 an absolute nightmare um and it also protects themselves from from potential criticism which

01:37:09.300 is of course the whole point but i but i thought by creating a satirical character that embodies

01:37:14.140 those contradictions that thoughtlessness it might reflect back onto them that the i suppose how they

01:37:22.160 look to normal people because i don't think they appreciate i think they're so caught up within their

01:37:26.460 own little bubbles with their own little groups they they never hear an alternative point of view

01:37:30.840 i mean i i used to work with academics like this who were so within their little groups and they're

01:37:35.600 constantly quoting each other and supporting each other and giving the illusion that their views

01:37:39.860 cannot be disputed uh but if you're but what if you you're suddenly confronted with how other

01:37:45.980 people perceive you and will that give you pause for thought so when you started titania you

01:37:52.340 didn't announce that she was a satirical character you started playing on twitter tell me tell me the

01:37:57.120 story exact what exactly what happened because that twitter account became extraordinarily well known and

01:38:03.700 very rapidly so i'm curious about what how you did that and how you responded once it started to

01:38:09.460 you know amass some cultural significance i was very surprised that it took on um it became so

01:38:17.100 popular so quickly and i'd started it uh because more to entertain myself more than anything i was

01:38:24.300 so frustrated with this and i wanted to try and expose the absurdity of i mean my my background is

01:38:29.520 as a stand-up comic and as a stand-up comic i'm not necessarily satirical i will stand there on a stage

01:38:34.860 and ridicule the thing that i perceive to be a problem with society with satire what you're doing is

01:38:40.740 you're often embodying it with a kind of ironic detachment or you are uh you know you're addressing it

01:38:46.220 you're always going after what you perceive to be the vices and follies of society and i thought that

01:38:50.840 was a good way of doing it right so you had to stay on a kind of edge you had to be believable

01:38:55.800 enough as the character right so that you could pass but you had to push it just past the point of

01:39:01.720 of of what of rationality or believability it's a funny edge i was continually getting into arguments

01:39:09.520 with people and staying in character i've always stayed in character uh and even to today and i've

01:39:14.080 actually if you go to the titania account now my pinned thread is a thread of conversations that

01:39:19.740 i've had with people in character who are angry about the things i've tweeted and these can go on

01:39:24.460 for pages and pages and it's fascinating to me because um it's close enough to the truth she says

01:39:29.640 really ridiculous things really absurd things like um like speaking or writing in english as an act of

01:39:35.180 colonial violence she'll say that you know uh the only way to guard against uh fascism is if the

01:39:40.660 state are allowed to arrest people for what they say and think you know stuff like this which is so

01:39:44.180 obviously absurd and yet it's close enough to what people actually say um that people believe it and

01:39:51.720 get annoyed about it and what i've always liked to do is to stay in character and have those conversations

01:39:55.540 with these people um and um and then i posted the screenshots of the conversation so but part of

01:40:02.260 the point of that is not to humiliate the people who had fallen for it because actually the point i'm

01:40:07.820 making is i understand why they would fall for it because it's so close to what people actually say

01:40:12.580 um and and and by doing that my hope is i suppose that it it exposes uh the folly of this stuff

01:40:21.380 sometimes even when i'm in those arguments i will say something that is so out of the out of you know 0.98

01:40:27.080 just completely out of the realm of possibility so stupid um and yet they still don't 0.98

01:40:32.820 things have become so absurd that they don't twig i mean even today there was a story today in the uk 0.99

01:40:39.180 uh a museum a jane austen museum is now going to interrogate jane austen's use of sugar in her tea

01:40:46.300 because it has connections to plantations and white supremacy and slavery uh you know something like

01:40:51.500 that which is just so absurd or the the recent controversy over bluey the australian cartoon dog

01:40:57.800 because it doesn't have enough dogs of color and and gender diverse dogs in the cartoon now that

01:41:03.700 sounds like something i would make up as a joke um but it's real it's it's actually happening and

01:41:08.900 people are taking it seriously and so therefore in a sense it's become harder with titania because

01:41:14.680 anything that i come up with uh is going to be topped by by real life very very quickly um what have you

01:41:22.720 learned about the people that titania annoys so she's a hyper politically correct avatar and but 0.96

01:41:29.460 she tangles up people who are opposed to that sort of thing and so that must have also shed substantial

01:41:35.920 light for you on people on the other side of the it does and so what have you learned well one of the

01:41:44.080 things is that the people on the other side who might even be quite um might even be of my opinion

01:41:50.100 about these things uh a lot of people are very quick to anger uh and and verbal abuse as a as a

01:41:57.840 goat as an instant response um so a lot of the people who get angry with her really go after her

01:42:03.880 looks and and i mean she's not real um a friend of mine lisa created the image of the woman she's a 0.95

01:42:09.440 composite of four different women so it's not a parody you see this is the thing it's not a parody of any

01:42:13.720 particular person it's a it's a type of person um and yeah the the people who get angry with her and

01:42:21.060 the people who are genuinely angry about the social justice movement are absolutely furious about the

01:42:25.220 way it is impinging on every aspect of their lives they are sick of it so when they see someone as

01:42:29.820 extreme as titania they really let rip and i don't think that's healthy you know i it's not in my nature

01:42:34.180 to go and abuse someone online or to get angry online it's but i've seen the extent that what it

01:42:40.060 what it shows i suppose is that that kind of uh uh instinct to immediately go for the abusive or the

01:42:46.560 vicious or the attack or the ad hominem is present across the political spectrum it's it's it's everywhere

01:42:52.440 or maybe that's just a sign of twitter maybe that's just a symptom of of social media um and i've learned

01:43:00.920 a lot about how social media works i think that's that's another thing about it is that i've really uh

01:43:05.940 for one thing the the fact that she's she's been banned a number of times and i've learned how to

01:43:10.960 avoid the bans and about about the way that big tech censors and how they censor and why what if

01:43:17.760 what does she be banned for so uh the tweets that she was banned for a couple of times she's had a

01:43:23.840 number of one-day suspensions a number of seven-day suspensions once or twice it's been inexplicable to

01:43:29.340 me why why she would be banned it seems a bit like someone at silicon valley has twigged that their

01:43:34.980 precious ideology is being mocked and they don't like it that that's the only explanation i could

01:43:39.080 think of however on a couple of instances it's when she's uh i suppose what they would say incited

01:43:44.980 violence um and of course she hasn't done anything of the kind there was one tweet where she said she

01:43:49.060 was going to go to a uh a ukip rally ukip is a right-wing nationalist political party in the uk

01:43:54.000 and she said i'm going to go to this ukip rally uh to punch people in the name of compassion or love or

01:43:59.700 something like that you know which is the idea that a lot of these activists have that actually 0.93

01:44:03.620 whereas words are violence and awful actual physical violence can be defended uh you know

01:44:09.540 in their in their view it's so perverse and of course i was making a comment about the perversity

01:44:14.440 of that idea that that you think microaggressions are are actual violence but you're perfectly content

01:44:20.420 to go out and set fire to cars and beat people up if they have the wrong opinion or pepper spray

01:44:24.420 people in the face if they voted for trump you know there's an obvious there's an obvious

01:44:28.200 contradiction there that i was trying to expose so she had a ban there i think that might have even been 1.00

01:44:32.720 the one where she was permanently banned i had an email from twitter saying this is a permanent ban

01:44:37.480 you're not getting back on and then there was a bit of an outcry from from from people who follow

01:44:42.120 her some prominent people who follow her and twitter rescinded that changed their minds and brought her

01:44:47.240 back and as a result of that inevitably her follower count leapt because of course when you try and

01:44:51.720 censor something you draw attention to it but you're you're always treading a fine line i mean my friend

01:44:56.340 lisa who i mentioned lisa graves used to have a twitter account called jarvis du pont who is one of my

01:45:01.100 favorite accounts on on twitter and he was um banned completely permanently banned they actually

01:45:06.860 went on a bit of a purge of satire accounts there was one afternoon where twitter purged 12 or 13

01:45:12.480 satirical accounts and deleted them uh titania came back for some reason i think it's because she was the 1.00

01:45:18.680 bigger account but a lot of them just got ditched and that i think shows that you know the the powers

01:45:24.180 that be at silicon valley they don't like to be mocked they don't well no one in authority likes to be

01:45:28.500 mocked it's the best way to undermine authority isn't it and it's it's why every despot in history

01:45:33.220 has killed the clown well that's why we have to be so careful when any of our laws start making

01:45:39.700 comedians nervous they're the ultimate canary in the coal mine and i'm more so than artists i think

01:45:46.180 the artists are next probably but absolutely i mean you you'll know in canada mike ward was fined i think

01:45:51.880 forty two thousand dollars uh by the quebec human rights commission for a joke that he told if you

01:45:56.500 and by the way if you you know this is montreal of course has one of the world's great comedy

01:46:01.260 festivals and and some of that humor i've been to the comedy festival a couple of times and at

01:46:06.000 midnight you can go and hear particularly outrageous comedy which i actually think it was in one of those

01:46:12.320 where he said what he got fined for and i you know i don't even know the context because because

01:46:17.440 he said it in french for one thing so i didn't fully understand but i read the transcript and i spoke

01:46:21.940 to him about it and what was interesting is that he's not some you know open mic act who's who

01:46:27.060 doesn't hasn't been on the set he's an established famous successful uh comedian who was uh who was

01:46:33.160 fined for a joke that if you actually break it down and analyze it there's nothing remotely offensive

01:46:37.540 about it you know i mean it's perfectly i don't think comedy can it can exist without the potential

01:46:43.320 to cause offense and what worries me neither can truth right quite and comedy is almost always truth

01:46:50.660 almost always that comedian says something funny and it's true in a way that people didn't expect

01:46:55.520 and they know it and and well it's also that it's also that thing of of of uh of teasing the boundaries

01:47:02.440 of tolerance of of of of almost almost having that kind of cathartic effect the way that the the

01:47:07.740 ancient greeks would watch a tragedy and and hear about the dismemberment and all sorts of

01:47:12.180 violent things to philosophically to purge themselves of the of of of that evil that lay

01:47:17.020 within uh in a sense when you hear a comedian say something utterly outrageous uh it it can have that

01:47:23.580 effect on you and you laugh in spite of yourself and then you laugh again because you are saying to

01:47:28.280 yourself why did i laugh at that that makes me i shouldn't have done that so you're almost laughing

01:47:31.660 at your own response as well it has a double effect and we are really losing that i mean i don't know how

01:47:36.240 it is in canada but but but in the uk a lot of this kind of mistrust of comedy and mistrust of jokes

01:47:43.080 and the idea that certain jokes normalize hatred is coming from the comedians themselves and a lot

01:47:47.920 of comedians uh take it on themselves to police other comedians material and they get very angry

01:47:53.020 when people broach certain subjects i consider it very very unhealthy um and not all comedians by the

01:47:58.980 way i'm not saying that all comedians i'm just saying certainly the more establishment comedians

01:48:02.860 absolutely uh would fall into this category and it's it's really shocked me this has been

01:48:06.900 since i started titania in particular a lot of comedians have been very angry that i mocked the

01:48:12.340 social justice movement or you know that i you know which to me is absurd because you know i spent

01:48:18.120 years three years writing co-writing the jonathan pye character and because that predominantly mocked

01:48:25.200 trump and the right and conservatives and and you know it went those were the targets that was okay

01:48:30.820 so i never got uh this kind of venom about about that but as soon as i was mocking social justice

01:48:37.040 ideology which i perceived to be an extremely powerful ideology you know this isn't i don't

01:48:40.920 think i'm punching down i think i'm punching up at these at these at these people who have captured

01:48:45.400 these institutions and and and are ruthless by the way absolutely ruthless and bullying i think the

01:48:50.140 social justice movement utterly legitimizes bullying and i don't like bullies and i like to stand up to

01:48:54.420 bullies and that titania is my attempt to stand up against the bullies but what they will do

01:48:58.060 is misrepresent my intentions and will say oh no you just want to have a go at gay people or whatever

01:49:03.200 or have a go at minority groups and and i've been very shocked by that because that that kind of 0.98

01:49:08.720 response has even come from comedians and my view is that if you've got half a brain you know that's

01:49:14.220 not what i'm doing you i mean you absolutely have to know that that's what not what i'm doing and yet

01:49:19.240 maybe they do know maybe that maybe this is a willful misinterpretation as a means to attack me

01:49:24.100 because i've because i've mocked the ideology i'm not meant to mock but i tell you what whenever

01:49:28.900 there's whenever there are consequences for mocking someone then i think that's the person

01:49:32.680 you ought to be mocking right i think that's a sign do you would you what effect has producing

01:49:42.620 titania had on your life and and if you could go back and decide whether you were going to do it

01:49:47.260 again would you i mean it must be shocking i would think it's shocking to have have seen what

01:49:53.700 happened to be at the center of what happened when you created that character but i'd like to know

01:49:59.280 i well for one thing i didn't yeah i didn't expect the reaction that i got also you've got to remember

01:50:04.980 that for a long time the character i was anonymous um because i i part of the effects of the character

01:50:10.620 was that people thought she was real that was so sort of integral to it and then i was outed by a

01:50:16.060 newspaper over here the week that her first book came out um and that although that was very good for

01:50:22.400 the book because it generated a lot of publicity because then the story became that i was the

01:50:25.160 person behind the character um in effect it had an innovating impact on the on the on the character

01:50:30.940 because now what happens people know it's me behind the character people however what i will say is even

01:50:36.340 to this day there's always some people who fall for it whenever i tweet something there's always some

01:50:39.820 people who fall for it so it has that so so there's that but then there's the impact on my personal

01:50:44.860 life well i would do it again because i feel very passionately uh that the the movement that i'm

01:50:53.580 mocking the ideology that i'm mocking is a dangerous one and i i feel very passionately that it is uh uh

01:51:00.300 divisive and damaging to society as damaging as any ideology can be i think it has the potential to go

01:51:06.860 to those lengths um and and so that i think i would almost be in dereliction if i if i didn't mock it it

01:51:14.600 would be it would be i tell you what it would be it would be an act of self-censorship if i didn't go

01:51:18.920 after these targets and that's by the way how most comedians i mean a lot of comedians think this stuff

01:51:22.760 is ridiculous they won't go near it because they know that if they do they won't get on the bbc

01:51:26.080 and they won't get booked by certain clubs so they just leave it well alone but i think

01:51:29.420 i i i couldn't do i could i just that's not in my nature so i i so i i don't regret that

01:51:36.780 the the fact that so many friends of mine former friends on the company circuit no longer talk to me

01:51:43.220 that's something which i suppose i could say is unfortunate on the other hand how many times

01:51:49.520 has that happened to you how many friends do you think you've lost it's in double figures

01:51:54.880 it's certainly in double figures and i think um and it's not just tanya it's also partly i suppose

01:52:02.880 my politics it's also um it it's it's effectively being honest about what i think and saying opinions

01:52:11.080 that might not be the establishment of fashionable opinions and it gets people very angry i mean one

01:52:16.280 particular incident i can think of is when i met for a drink with two friends very old friends of

01:52:20.960 mine a married couple and uh he started screaming at me in the pub i won't swear on your podcast but

01:52:26.720 calling me an effing nazi and then another word which i probably shouldn't say at this point um

01:52:31.540 but but and and and i thought he was joking at first and and we had this conversation and i and it was

01:52:37.100 true he'd he'd completely bought into this fantasy of who i was and and there was no going back from

01:52:44.020 that um and i know it was fueled by alcohol but no apology was forthcoming or no you know it's and

01:52:51.360 then every now and then there'll be i mean it happened to be a couple of months ago where a

01:52:53.960 comedian i've known for many many years from the circuit suddenly sent me this abusive message online

01:52:58.680 on twitter and started attacking me and saying i was what he said i was funded by dark foreign powers

01:53:05.080 or something utterly absurd you know and um and i thought well okay so this is now of course that is what

01:53:12.720 you'd say if you were funded by dark foreign powers well this is this is the problem like i said you 0.87

01:53:17.820 know i've said it before like if uh you know if i am getting all this dark money it must be very dark

01:53:21.620 because i haven't seen any of it it's not you know that'd be great fine but i'm not and this idea that

01:53:26.440 i'm this sort of it's that going right back to what you said at the start like that i'm defending

01:53:30.740 free speech because i i because i'm an evil person who wants to say evil things and so there's all of

01:53:36.800 that or that i'm mocking i'm mocking minority groups through titania which is absolutely not

01:53:41.780 what i'm doing it's the opposite i'm i'm mocking those very affluent and powerful people who uh very

01:53:47.560 patronizingly assume that they they know what's best for minorities you know it's the opposite of 0.87

01:53:52.560 what people say it is um but these kind of experiences uh on the one hand i think it's a bit sad

01:54:01.000 isn't it because there are people now i've had to go through my phone and delete lots of numbers

01:54:05.740 because i know we'll never talk again but on the other hand were they my friends to begin with i'm

01:54:10.600 not so sure you know if if they can if they can suddenly become so bigoted and that is the word

01:54:16.760 they well it's an indication of how profound the divide has started to become in our culture right

01:54:21.600 that i mean 20 years ago i never lost any friends because of my hypothetical political opinions but

01:54:27.940 things have changed you must have lost your your case must be much more severe than mine

01:54:34.180 you know because you're so much more famous and so much more known how has have lots of friends

01:54:39.300 turned on you no actually oh not not a lot uh some there's some outstanding exceptions although even

01:54:46.860 in those situations i would say there was extenuating circumstances no i've been i've been

01:54:52.800 really fortunate in that regard that my the my close circle of of intimates my family and and my

01:54:59.300 my close friends have been staggeringly loyal to me under which is wonderful severe distress yes

01:55:05.880 that's wonderful so is it maybe the case does that tell us that actually what it's really about is

01:55:11.800 the fact that i was working in an industry which is you know the so the comedy industry is so on board

01:55:18.220 with the woke ideology to such an extent that in fact so many of it's it's uh so many comedians are now

01:55:24.740 really just uh advertised for that for that ideology maybe maybe i mean my professional

01:55:30.780 colleagues certainly haven't leapt to my defense well that's that's what i was going to ask actually

01:55:35.180 surely you know that's been no that's pretty much done with i mean i i would say my name i've decided

01:55:41.100 this recently because of the slurs that have been associated with me i can't in good conscience

01:55:48.980 except graduate students anymore because right if they go out you know you talked at the beginning

01:55:55.300 about this register where that's been set up in britain um where if you are charged accused of a

01:56:02.900 non-crime hate act yeah it's recorded without a trial i mean i've been on hiring committees many many

01:56:10.240 times and especially in academia there's an oversupply of highly qualified people of radical oversupply

01:56:18.140 and so if there's anything in your record at all that's the least bit uh contentious it's like

01:56:24.780 you're you're done and so being my student that's not a little bit contentious that's

01:56:30.640 really really contentious and so it's now become impossible for me to to uh to serve my proper

01:56:39.060 function as a as a scientist and as a university professor so that's it's taking a lot of adjustment

01:56:45.380 on my part to get accustomed to that and i don't practice clinically anymore as well and there are

01:56:50.680 a variety of reasons for that but uh certainly the i've become very very susceptible to attacks through

01:57:02.040 the college of psychologists um the governing board they can make the life of a practitioner

01:57:08.160 brutally miserable with a single letter and um that's very very punishing and it's also perhaps

01:57:19.140 not necessarily good for my potential clients to be associated with someone who's controversial they

01:57:25.140 already have enough trouble so although i've been fortunate on the family and friends front the

01:57:30.660 on the professional front things have have been you know more dismal isn't that just suggestive of the

01:57:38.580 of the the power of this movement and and the effectiveness of the effectiveness of cancel culture

01:57:43.720 in fact the way the ease with which people can become stigmatized you know all it takes is a few

01:57:49.740 accusations of your far right or alt-right or whatever and it's there you know any prospective employer

01:57:55.400 can google that and it comes up and who's going to take the risk you know the accusation is sufficient

01:57:59.920 to damn you and and that's that's what well there that you put the finger on the on the absolute 0.77

01:58:06.980 catastrophe of the non-crime hate index it's like yeah well it's it's a permanent stain especially in a 1.00

01:58:14.380 in a technological universe where nothing is ever forgotten no matter how long the lag and it's worse

01:58:22.380 because the government here feels no compunction to address this or or to no politician seem to has

01:58:28.260 well i suppose they are well because the strategy is that if you oppose hate speech laws you're

01:58:34.320 obviously a hateful person why else would you oppose hate speech you know it's the old thing and

01:58:37.720 and a politician doesn't want to stand up in parliament to be the one who is seen to be siding

01:58:41.840 with the the evil guys the bad guys well you have to make a very very subtle argument to stand up

01:58:46.660 against hate speech laws because you're faced with the problem that there is such a thing as hate

01:58:51.040 speech yeah obviously so when it's pernicious and terrible it's like okay so you're arguing uphill

01:58:58.100 this is again why it's such a bloody miracle that we ever had free speech to begin with it's

01:59:04.540 almost inconceivable to me that we managed to generate the baseline presumption of innocence

01:59:10.700 that's a miracle the the fact that you can go bankrupt and start again that's a miracle the idea

01:59:18.100 that you ever had free speech and that that that was genuinely the case that's a miracle

01:59:22.580 and none of this is is given the appropriate respect and awe that it deserves because it's so

01:59:29.720 unlikely it's hugely unlikely i mean i know in the book i talk a kind of very very short history of

01:59:36.040 free speech from the ancient greeks to today and it and it the point of that is to to accentuate this

01:59:41.240 point that actually the fact that we have it is astonishing and unlikely so unlikely and and all the

01:59:47.020 more reason why we need to defend it we need to be really really vigilant about any cracks that

01:59:52.120 appear in this in this because it will go away very very easily you know if we don't defend it

01:59:57.980 and it's hard particularly when it comes to the idea of that's why i wrote a chapter on hate speech

02:00:02.640 because and and and took the the other side's view seriously because just trashing the opposing

02:00:09.460 argument isn't going to help we have to talk about it and explain you know why it's important

02:00:14.200 nevertheless but for one thing like you say hateful speech exists let's start from that point let's

02:00:19.700 acknowledge that that hateful speech exists and it can be hurtful and it can do damage but then the

02:00:25.320 alternative is a state that might in the future be completely unscrupulous uh that is going to decide

02:00:31.120 for you what what you can say and those are the things that we have to tackle and no but and the

02:00:35.340 other key thing is that no one knows how to define hate speech you know unesco the european court

02:00:40.280 of human rights they they've all agreed there's no way to define hate speech every european country

02:00:45.700 that has hate speech laws has different hate speech laws different definitions subjective abstract

02:00:51.280 concepts such as hate such as offense such as a perception you know and these are on the statute

02:00:57.380 books and you don't want this stuff on the statute books because it's all very well i mean i know the

02:01:00.620 we talked about the smp and their hate crime bill the defense i'm always running into is people are

02:01:05.500 saying yes okay technically someone could be arrested and imprisoned for saying some an

02:01:10.700 offensive joke technically yes but no one in their right mind no jury no judge uh is going to

02:01:17.920 we've got common sense it's okay well that's so myopic i mean what because you don't know who's going

02:01:23.500 to be in charge in 10 years time you don't know who that judge is going to be you how can you possibly

02:01:27.960 just you can be certain that someone will be in charge that doesn't approve of you and that you

02:01:32.980 don't approve of that will in right that will in certainly happen you don't want vague vague wording

02:01:40.800 on the statute books it's going to be exploited at some point even though even if it's not today

02:01:47.200 there's absolutely no way that you can guarantee it against future against the future abuses of that and

02:01:52.720 i don't it is as you say it's a certainty so i i'm i'm yeah i think it's i think it's actually one

02:01:59.120 of the most important arguments that we should make uh and that and that we need to do you know

02:02:04.620 free speech needs to be defended in every successive generation it's not something that

02:02:07.840 you you know you know this you you get it and then it's there forever no that's not true

02:02:11.940 there's something about human nature there's something about people in power there's something

02:02:16.320 about the way that we are uh that it will collapse it's it's an edifice that is not secure

02:02:23.360 at any given time and but it's hard it's that thing of of being smeared the risk is you're going

02:02:29.860 to be smeared you're going to be associated with the worst possible kinds of people because of course

02:02:33.560 it's only really controversial speech that ever requires protection uh and people are going to say

02:02:38.320 well then you must support what what these awful people are saying and it's it's hard to make the

02:02:43.380 case but it's a case that nonetheless has to be made and particularly by politicians i've been

02:02:48.080 incredibly disappointed uh by the way in which uh politicians in this country have not made any kind

02:02:54.200 of effort to to if anything is from what i can see uh there are moves even in the in the english

02:02:59.560 parliament to push through further hate speech laws we should be repealing them not pushing for them but

02:03:03.160 but no one wants to have the argument no one wants to be tainted yeah well they get identified one by

02:03:08.240 one and taken out that's what happens when you get put on a list this is it the the the identitarian

02:03:14.260 left if that's what we're going to call them i don't know what to call them that's the problem

02:03:17.480 they're very clever about evading even a label um but they like making their lists they like

02:03:22.680 observing and saying you know you you you are you are problematic uh you have sinned and and and now

02:03:29.380 they have a an electronic trail they they these are the people that absolutely love going through all

02:03:34.880 of your old tweets and messages and anything they can find uh and of course the point about that is you

02:03:40.440 can do that to anyone there is no one alive who if you had complete unfettered access to everything

02:03:44.880 they've ever written online or in their emails or text messages that you couldn't construct a case

02:03:49.120 to damn someone that's actually one of the things that's more or less saved me is that right well by 0.60

02:03:55.460 the time i made my political statement which was a philosophical statement or even a spiritual 0.98

02:04:00.600 statement not a political statement i already had 200 hours of lectures online and so essentially

02:04:07.200 everything i'd ever said to students was recorded and there wasn't it it wasn't possible to pull out

02:04:13.980 a smoking pistol so this was very smart and also i mean but this is why it's also astonishing i find

02:04:19.960 it unendingly astonishing the way you are mischaracterized because because it's all there

02:04:24.720 everything you think is out in the open you've been very very very clear and explicit about your

02:04:29.560 point of view and so when they try and demonize you and turn you into this thing people can check and

02:04:34.260 they'll realize that you're i think what they're doing is they're relying on the reputational damage

02:04:39.200 being a kind of barrier to people even investigating who you really are yeah well to some degree that

02:04:44.440 that works but it doesn't really work because what genuine generally happens is that you know for every

02:04:51.680 person who wouldn't open a lecture because of my reputation there's three or four who do because

02:04:58.220 they're curious and and then it has an even more perverse effect on in some cases on the true

02:05:04.600 believers because they're primed to find anything i said offensive but that doesn't happen or maybe

02:05:12.600 they even find it useful and then that's not good at all it's like well he's not interesting when you

02:05:19.240 meet the people when you get into conversation with people and you and you can see that you're not

02:05:23.660 what they thought you were and they don't know quite what to do with that you know and that that

02:05:28.400 to me is that to me is why another reason why we need more speech not less we need to have

02:05:32.560 the conversation so that people can be disabused of the fantasies that they've been wallowing in

02:05:37.500 you know but i do very much enjoy that when when uh people expect one thing and then they actually

02:05:43.200 actually speak to me and and they they they don't see that that there's no evidence of it because it

02:05:48.840 doesn't exist yeah well it's interesting to watch that unfold in the public domain too i mentioned

02:05:53.200 those two interviews the channel four interview that has been viral and and the interview by by helen

02:06:00.060 lewis at gq and those those interviews basically consists of consist of nothing but

02:06:07.700 the attempt by the interlocutor to have a conversation with the person that exists in their imagination

02:06:16.160 right which bears almost no relationship to me at all that was particularly the case with with

02:06:21.720 uh kathy newman and yeah it was less so with helen lewis but it was still that was still essentially

02:06:28.360 the issue it's quite reassuring though isn't it that that once it's out there people can see through

02:06:33.300 it you know it's very reassuring is and what's what saved me and this has given me an endless

02:06:40.520 supply of hope i would say is that all i've ever had to do is be is just show everything it's like

02:06:47.600 here's the situation no edits like this is what happened and every time so far so far

02:06:55.800 you know i haven't been fatally damaged um yeah i mean one of the things one of the the things i've

02:07:04.300 learned most i think since since uh titania kicked off and and it became a known thing is i've learned

02:07:09.960 simply never to trust uh the perception of someone as as as constructed in the media or online or you

02:07:18.560 know i i it's a not it's never the same person i've i've ended up meeting coming from the background

02:07:24.480 i did most of my friends were always on the left i didn't really know uh conservative people and now

02:07:29.600 i have a lot of friends who are conservatives you know and they're just not this villain that they

02:07:34.840 were made out to be and even some famous conservatives who people have said they're absolute monsters

02:07:38.940 they're evil they want to eat babies basically the equivalent you know and and you you get to know

02:07:42.980 them and you realize oh my goodness the the the perception is so removed from the so far removed

02:07:48.260 from the reality that even i once had had bought into it myself because everyone's telling you this

02:07:53.520 oh yeah the same thing is so i've certainly had that experience repeatedly repeatedly i never trust it

02:07:59.080 now i like whenever i hear the way people talk about people online i just i i never trust it unless i

02:08:04.200 know someone personally i'm never going to trust that again and i think that's an

02:08:07.720 it's an important lesson for me so what's next for you and also how how do you make a living you

02:08:15.540 can't make a living as tatania mcgrath well i mean you're locked down still so it's got to be hard

02:08:20.500 being a comedian right so i mean well comedy came to an end i mean the last i did a tour i did a stand-up

02:08:27.180 comedy tour in 2019 early 2019 and that was really uh the last big thing i did because as soon as i was

02:08:35.880 about to do some more live performances the lockdown the lockdown came and and it's the same you know

02:08:41.040 i'm not complaining because absolutely every live performer has has the identical experience and we've

02:08:44.560 all we've all you know i'm not in a position to complain uh and that what yeah it's a very good

02:08:50.400 question i like it because it's also very direct how do i make my money well i um i write articles for

02:08:56.040 various publications i um there's the the titania books uh have have kept me going um i obviously

02:09:03.260 used to work on the jonathan pi character we had a couple of television shows and live tours those

02:09:08.680 those were particularly lucrative and for a long time i did just make my money as a stand-up comic

02:09:12.820 so literally just the money i would make from um from from the circuit uh now i've i've just got a job

02:09:18.720 with well it's it's you know i gave up being a full-time teacher for this and i uh was on a

02:09:26.940 regular wage it was a good it was a good salary and uh i left it at great risk you know because

02:09:34.100 i don't come from a wealthy family i don't have the means to support myself without this kind of

02:09:39.080 stuff so i uh i went well i actually went part-time first and was on the stand-up circuit and then i

02:09:45.760 started earning enough from stand-up to to get by and so i went full-time stand-up uh but i i was

02:09:51.660 really i was genuinely struggling financially for a long time and then um then jonathan pi happened

02:09:57.320 which was very successful uh particularly because we had a big viral hit around the time of the

02:10:01.860 donald trump election which actually went viral in america as well and that really helped broaden

02:10:06.140 the character and then we did live tours and all the rest of it i mean we played the london

02:10:09.240 palladium and the hammers with apollo and so it was a big thing for me and then titania happened

02:10:14.840 and and the book did very well and the second book did well and how many copies do you and you

02:10:19.540 don't have to tell me obviously but i don't know actually the truth is i don't know i i i that's

02:10:24.140 something i should ask at some point it's the sort of thing i don't look into you know it's i i i i got

02:10:29.700 a royalty check the other day and i thought that's i thought it was done and actually this was quite a

02:10:33.660 lot of money i thought well okay that so that's good this is something that i can keep me going but

02:10:38.040 i've also just got a new job um as a broadcaster on a new channel called gb news in the uk uh and

02:10:45.260 that will be uh a pretty full-time full-on uh presenter job um so i will be i will but what's

02:10:52.580 good about that job is uh you know what i think we have a real problem in them with the news media

02:10:57.120 in this country is that we don't have enough diversity of thought and and and the conversations

02:11:01.000 that we ought to be having this gives me an opportunity to do that so it's very much related

02:11:04.640 to the work i've been doing but in addition i'm going to continue with my comedy work and

02:11:09.760 titania uh we're doing a some live shows with titania played by an actress we did that just

02:11:15.780 before the lockdown we had to postpone the tour now we're going to do another one um so i will

02:11:21.380 yeah it's a lot of people get very scared by um making a living as a creative person because

02:11:27.320 you're always on the line should be jesus it's a tough way to make a living man it really i mean

02:11:31.960 you're taking a massive risk and most creatives i know are very very poor you know it's it's

02:11:37.320 simply not and most have other jobs you know there's a tiny fraction that are hyper rich

02:11:41.180 and everyone else starves virtually no one and i consider myself extremely fortunate to be able

02:11:46.360 to do this full the stuff i love full-time because for most of my adult career i couldn't and i was

02:11:52.220 you know i had to have a full-time job and as well as go out in the evenings uh and and do all of

02:11:57.180 this stuff and and so it's a real uh you have to really commit and and you also have to be aware

02:12:05.200 in the back of your mind of the likelihood of failure that's it you know that's the other thing

02:12:09.920 that you have to be fully aware of um and i'm i'm by no means taken for granted you know i i think i'm

02:12:15.780 yeah it's the stuff i've done comedy and titania and the book i've just written is that none of this

02:12:21.420 stuff would make me rich it would it would it would keep me going uh the new job i've got is going to

02:12:27.180 be a more regular income which is something i miss i haven't had this since i was a teacher i missed

02:12:31.600 that you know there was i missed routine and all the rest of it um yeah well that's another

02:12:35.680 complicating factor is not only if you're trying to exist creatively not only is it a very high risk

02:12:43.120 proposition financially but you lack that psychological uh comfort that comes from

02:12:50.200 routine which you know people artistic people often are hypercritical of routine but god life man

02:12:57.500 routine keeps you sane and trying to invent yourself every day that's that's not for the faint-hearted

02:13:04.080 i've seen very few people manage that successfully across decades no absolutely and i i think particular

02:13:10.240 you know particularly in comedy you know you because you have to work for about three or four

02:13:14.680 years on the circuit without getting paid anything in fact you're losing money because you're paying for

02:13:18.220 your travel expenses and then you get somewhere and you don't get you don't get paid for it and

02:13:21.680 and it's this is why a lot you'll find a lot of comedians particularly in the uk are from

02:13:25.720 are from quite wealthy backgrounds or privately educated because they you know they have rich parents

02:13:31.320 who can help them out put them up in a flat and they don't have to work during the day

02:13:34.520 and they escalate much quicker through the ranks but but if you come from my sort of background

02:13:39.320 you can't do that you have to have the job and then and and you have to it's like having

02:13:43.660 two jobs uh and so you have to really care about it i mean my my advice is always that i do believe

02:13:49.540 although it comes with that insecurity if it is a vocation for you you have to do i mean for me

02:13:56.340 i couldn't have done anything it is a genuine vocation for me even if i were making no money

02:14:01.440 whatsoever out of comedy or writing or the rest i would still be doing it because i would feel

02:14:06.820 unfulfilled if i were not doing it i think there's something also quite i mean i take your point

02:14:11.500 about the practicalities of living and the business of living but my god i think uh depriving yourself

02:14:16.640 of your vocation can be so soul destroying i know it is well for for i've i've spent a lot of time

02:14:22.480 studying creativity scientifically and um the first thing that's useful to note is that creativity is not

02:14:29.620 common i mean everyone isn't creative that's wrong some people are very creative a minority of people

02:14:37.460 are very creative and i mean it's it's a continuum but you don't get you know you don't get creativity

02:14:43.800 till you get out to the point where what you're doing is original and that's very difficult so it's

02:14:48.660 a minority proposition and then of those original people there's only a tiny fraction that can make a

02:14:53.940 successful financial go of it because it's just you have to be creative plus you have to have some sense

02:14:59.440 for marketing and sales and business and you have to be reasonably emotionally stable and etc etc it's

02:15:05.380 very very difficult but if you are creative by temperament well that's you and to not do that is

02:15:14.140 to not be you it's like asking an extroverted person not to be around people or an agreeable person

02:15:20.360 not to engage in intimate relationships or a conscientious person not to be driven by duty it's

02:15:25.760 like that's what you're like and so yeah you're stuck with it it's a double-edged sword creativity

02:15:30.940 it's vital it's entrancing it's necessary um it's transformative it's disruptive but it's a high risk

02:15:39.120 high risk high return game and the probability of failure is overwhelmingly high even if you're an

02:15:47.120 entrepreneur and and you know more practically oriented in your creativity the probability that

02:15:51.840 you'll make money from your innovation or your invention rather than other people is very very low

02:15:57.020 but but you need to find a way i mean it's also very difficult if you're a creative person to

02:16:01.920 a lot of creative people don't think in practical terms they don't think in terms of uh money actually

02:16:07.380 they're hopeless a lot of them i know are hopeless in no they also tend to be casually

02:16:11.180 contemptuous of that to regard it as practical concerns as selling out it's like you should be

02:16:15.940 bloody happy if you have the opportunity to sell out so i think that the ideal is to find a way to

02:16:21.440 pursue your vocation but have one eye on the reality that you know you will have to earn money

02:16:27.060 somewhere or another i mean yes and i think it's it's that's why i think i'm lucky insofar as with

02:16:33.100 titania i hit on something that had commercial viability but it was very true to what i desperately

02:16:37.360 wanted to do and i think that's so rare i think uh some of the stuff i've written some of the plays

02:16:42.400 i've written for instance i don't think would have any commercial success whatsoever but i wrote them

02:16:46.080 because i needed to write them and and and some of them didn't even get on and maybe one day they

02:16:50.480 will and that would be great but well just think what you have to accomplish though right you have to

02:16:55.000 have your creative endeavor aligned with market demand at exactly that time it's impossible it's very

02:17:04.880 very unlikely actually that's why i always say don't attempt to to anticipate the zeitgeist because

02:17:10.260 you won't like the best thing an artist can do is do what they believe and hope because a lot of it

02:17:16.620 is luck you know i mean there's actually there's a technical literature on that too i mean what

02:17:21.500 essentially what you do is continue to produce ideas and right it's a darwinian competition

02:17:26.660 essentially they're like life forms these ideas and now and then one will find a niche that it can

02:17:31.820 thrive in but but the best way to uh maximize your chances that that niche will manifest itself

02:17:38.820 is to be um is to overproduce because right i look yeah for i'll give you an example i answered a

02:17:45.960 bunch of questions on quora so that's a website where anybody can ask any questions and anybody

02:17:51.640 can answer i answered about 50 when i was playing with quora and one of them was a list of everything

02:17:56.920 people should know of things people should know in their life and i derived my books out of that list

02:18:01.300 yes um it was disproportionately successful most of the answers i generated got virtually no views

02:18:08.320 but it got it must be hundreds of thousands now but even before i wrote the books it was tens of

02:18:12.800 thousands but had i not written 50 i wouldn't have got that one the other 49 failures so to speak were

02:18:21.240 the the answers weren't necessarily worse they just didn't hit the zeitgeist like that answer did and

02:18:29.740 and i think that's a great piece of advice over overproduction because it's the same with the

02:18:34.060 beatles they they they look like an overnight success it's because they've been playing endlessly

02:18:38.460 in those dingy clubs in in europe you know before before it happened is it you you produce as much as

02:18:45.340 it takes 10 years to become an overnight success that's that's it so it you know of of most of the

02:18:51.180 things i've written have done nothing and gone nowhere and had no success whatsoever it's just

02:18:54.940 but but the one thing occasionally when it hits that's that's what sustains all the rest of it and

02:19:00.360 it's also why creativity is it continues to be selected let's say from a biological perspective it's

02:19:06.120 like that's why i said it was a high risk high return game almost everything you do creatively will

02:19:11.420 fail but now and then you're disproportionately successful and so that keeps the whole game going

02:19:18.520 you didn't have any sense did you that when you put the lectures on youtube that it would

02:19:22.720 explode in this way did i mean that not in this way this was completely i still i i'm still shocked

02:19:29.260 constantly by my life i'm shocked out of out of sanity by my life i just can't this is why i asked

02:19:36.640 you about titania you know you you get at the center of a whirlwind like that and there's something

02:19:42.760 very surreal about it and i mean yeah i keep getting hit by surreal things and it's very hard to

02:19:50.340 wrap my head around it like this red skull episode was just one of many equally surreal occurrences but

02:19:58.680 yes no i had no i had no idea i knew i was working on something important back when i was in my 20s when

02:20:07.700 i wrote my first book and it was out of that that all my lectures came and i spent 15 years working on

02:20:12.920 that book and i worked on it about three hours a day and so i i and i thought about it all the time

02:20:18.760 and so i knew there was something to it not necessarily because they were my ideas but because

02:20:24.760 of the people who i had read and and delved into while i was writing the book i knew the ideas were

02:20:30.300 significant and and i could see the effect of the ideas when i was lecturing on my students so i had

02:20:36.660 some sense that there was something vital that i was involved in something vital but sure but had

02:20:45.000 you uploaded those videos uh a couple years before or a couple years later you probably would have

02:20:49.200 missed the zeitgeist and nothing would have happened you know i mean it doesn't matter i i always think

02:20:53.600 with any kind of creative endeavor or intellectual endeavor it doesn't matter how good you are in a

02:20:58.220 sense it has to be good and the timing has to be right and and like you say if you just keep i think

02:21:02.920 persistence is it if you just keep doing it not only does your craft get better and and you are

02:21:08.400 when if it does hit you're in a position there's no doubt look if you if you okay so in in scientific

02:21:13.940 literature the hallmark of impact is citations and so if your work is cited it means that someone

02:21:20.660 who's written another scientific article makes reference to something you wrote and that's all tracked and

02:21:27.660 it's used for promotions and it's used to judge scientific merit it's it's it's it's its own

02:21:33.000 science uh citation tracking um a very small number of your published papers accrue most of the citations

02:21:42.900 so that's the first thing so what that means is the more papers you publish the more likely it is that

02:21:47.640 one of them will become highly cited and my highly cited papers aren't necessarily the ones that i

02:21:53.720 thought would be most impactful so yeah um you but the other uh piece of information from

02:22:01.480 literature on creativity is that the best predictor of quality and so you could index quality by impact

02:22:09.120 let's say or by citations is quantity yeah it's not a great predictor but it's the best one and so

02:22:15.340 and this is good advice for everyone out there who's a musician or an artist it's like

02:22:20.240 produce produce produce produce as much as you can because you do get better at it right

02:22:25.260 you absolutely do and and so there's that but there's also i think the other important thing is to

02:22:31.880 to actually be true to yourself in in your artistic endeavors insofar as don't be trying

02:22:37.160 to anticipate the design guys don't be trying to anticipate what other people are doing

02:22:39.780 i my my big concern in the current climate that we live in is that a lot of artists are choosing

02:22:44.940 to self-censor because the penalty for risk-taking has got too high uh you know you can be completely

02:22:51.740 uh i mean if i think of an example like think about what kind of catastrophe that is because

02:22:56.380 we've already discussed the fact that the impediments to creativity are almost insurmountable

02:23:01.560 and so then you add an additional one which is self-censorship because of social pressure it's like

02:23:06.500 you just decimate the creative enterprise by doing that we wouldn't have anything we we the western

02:23:11.720 canon would be decimated it's ridiculous i mean an example i often think of is is one of my favorite

02:23:16.240 playwrights is edward alby and when he came to write his play the goat which was a very controversial

02:23:20.680 play because it was about a man having an affair a sexual affair with a goat behind his wife's back

02:23:25.240 and obviously that doesn't sound palatable well at least he went beside behind his wife's back

02:23:29.800 exactly at least it wasn't sort of an open sort of paganistic thing absolutely but um

02:23:34.060 i mean it's it's a shocking play and it's meant to be it's about uh where our lines of tolerance

02:23:40.120 tolerance are where they lie and why um and all of his friends told him don't do this you've got a

02:23:46.160 a valuable career an incredible reputation you're turning 80 you're 80 he was roughly 80 years old

02:23:50.420 when this play came out and they said you're just going to scupper everything and he said that one

02:23:55.040 when that he got that response that's the reason he did it he went out there and he put the play on

02:23:59.620 and it turned out to be a huge success it won i think the tony award for best play was

02:24:03.320 critically and commercially successful it was absolutely massive so um it just goes to show i think

02:24:08.500 to an extent i mean i'm not saying disregard uh feedback from other creative people or people

02:24:13.620 who have suggestions what i am saying is if you're true to your muse whatever that that is uh the

02:24:20.220 rewards will come actually or they are more likely okay so that brings us back to free speech too

02:24:25.440 because you know the problem with laws that abridge free speech is they abridge creative endeavor and

02:24:31.800 that's a terrible thing because it's the source of endless renewal and it's the thing that fixes

02:24:37.140 corrupt structures and so to to take aim at that is to take aim at the very process that would rescue

02:24:44.180 you from the conundrum you you you are pretending to be obsessed by i mean has there been any

02:24:50.660 innovation not just in artistic terms but in scientific terms without the risk of offense without

02:24:56.200 you know i mentioned i mentioned the example of galileo in the in the book because you know he wasn't

02:25:01.360 he caused a great deal of offense by oh hell darwin who offended himself so badly that he was sick 0.72

02:25:07.120 he was sick for like a decade because of the implications of what he'd thought up which were

02:25:12.540 exactly thoroughly offensive to himself as they would be in in in with his belief system at the

02:25:18.420 time and and but but that's that's the we can see in hindsight what we would have lost if people

02:25:24.880 weren't willing to risk offending others in fact even what you said to kathy newman in that interview

02:25:29.900 about you're risking being offensive by disagreeing with me now in this way like it's it's how it's

02:25:34.360 important to risk offending people it's because otherwise you just end up in this kind of you know

02:25:39.980 this hive mind and and and and for the arts it becomes utterly stultified it becomes so boring when

02:25:47.980 when everything is predictable and everything is in line with a a viewpoint and no one wants to

02:25:52.440 you know the art is the best way that we interrogate the complexities of humanity it's it's it's i love

02:25:59.580 what sometimes what the filmmaker lars von trier he said in an interview once that sometimes when he's

02:26:04.560 making a film he will take an indefensible moral position and attempt to defend it through the film

02:26:09.620 which i think is such a fascinating idea dostoevsky did that all the time in his great novels and so

02:26:14.700 brilliant i mean that's what what made dostoevsky so staggeringly brilliant was he would take

02:26:21.020 positions that he that he despised with all his soul and make the people putting those beliefs

02:26:28.580 forward that strongest characters in the book i mean he was so brave it's the best thing to do it's

02:26:34.720 it's uh i wrote a play once where i i complete it was a one-man play where i completely tried to embody

02:26:40.300 the kind of person i despise it was someone who enjoyed relished watching by acts of violence and he

02:26:46.040 would take uh scour the internet for clips of real life violence and it's something i could you know

02:26:52.060 whenever i've had that whenever someone's tried to show me a beheading or something i've i know i

02:26:56.340 never want to see that kind of thing i know i never want that in my head and so i wanted to write a

02:27:00.140 character who who relished it but from a position from a non-judgmental position i've never put that

02:27:05.960 play on i've written it's done but but but the act of doing it was so incredibly liberating and

02:27:10.840 interesting um and the idea that you can you know you keep hearing this all the time um you know

02:27:16.880 whenever a new film or a play comes out of a book um is this sending the right message david lynch's

02:27:22.740 last series the latest twin peak series was criticized i read a review saying well there's

02:27:27.180 violence against women in this and he needs to be called out for this well representing violence

02:27:32.320 against women isn't an endorsement of violence against women you know maybe that's what the character

02:27:36.480 does and maybe we're supposed to hate him for it or whatever you know and or if you read

02:27:40.200 an autobiography of a complete reprobate there can be something really interesting about that and and

02:27:45.340 imagine all of this gone all of this potential but that is the end point of of that's why i believe

02:27:51.260 that this this current social justice ideology is anti-art i think it's it's it's opposed to the

02:27:56.540 the artistic spirit quite quite fundamentally opposed to it which is why i feel we must push back

02:28:02.320 against it so that's a great place to end no no that's great that's great well thanks a lot

02:28:09.880 much appreciated it was a pleasure and the time flew by which is a good marker of a

02:28:16.400 engaging exchange of free speech let's say absolutely thanks so much for having me jordan

02:28:22.620 my pleasure good luck eh thank you

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 21, 2021

178. Free Speech and the Satirical Activist ｜ Andrew Doyle

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