The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 373. Social Justice： A Religious Movement

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00:00:57.420 Hello to everyone watching and listening.

00:01:10.880 Today I'm speaking, once again, because we've done it before, with playwright, journalist, and political satirist Andrew Doyle, also known as Titania McGrath.

00:01:20.200 We discuss the intentional irrationality of the far-left doctrines that use religious rhetoric and practices, despite the absence of God, or perhaps the presence of a different God.

00:01:34.760 Their paramount desire to dismantle societal structures, regardless of need or merit.

00:01:41.240 The argument for transcendence inherent in the pursuit of art, and how woke culture stifles genuine expression, forcing dogma to take the place of fundamental truths, and, say, purposefully doing so.

00:01:56.680 Looking forward to it.

00:01:58.700 Well, Mr. Doyle, it's good to see you again.

00:02:01.060 I think we're damn near friends, or at least I like you.

00:02:04.380 I don't know what you think about me, but...

00:02:06.240 The feeling's very much mutual, Jordan. Thank you so much for having me.

00:02:08.820 Well, that's good. Well, us reprehensible types, you know, we need to stick together.

00:02:12.940 We do.

00:02:14.300 Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

00:02:16.340 So, the first, I thought I'd hassle you for a bit first.

00:02:19.880 I got two things to hassle you about, I think.

00:02:22.700 The first is, it says on your Wikipedia page, for whatever that's worth, that you regard yourself as left-wing, and so I think you deserve some harassment for that.

00:02:32.940 But also, I don't know what the hell that means anymore.

00:02:35.980 And then, after I'm done bugging you about that, I thought I'd bother you about having a PhD in early Renaissance poetry and make the humiliation complete.

00:02:44.980 Okay, let's start with the left-wing thing.

00:02:47.060 Okay, yes.

00:02:48.020 Well, firstly, I'd say that Wikipedia is full of errors.

00:02:51.160 I wouldn't trust absolutely everything you see on Wikipedia.

00:02:52.880 However, on that score, I think it's broadly accurate.

00:02:55.980 I know that, I mean, I've never voted for a right-wing party.

00:03:01.880 I did vote for Jeremy Corbyn, which, to be honest, I now regret.

00:03:07.120 As you should.

00:03:07.840 I think if you were to, I'm with you, I don't really know what left-wing and right-wing means anymore.

00:03:13.380 I think the culture war has, in fact, obliterated those two designations.

00:03:16.660 I really do believe that because, you know, if you were to write down my views on most subjects and sort of give them to an impartial observer and say, is this person on the left or on the right?

00:03:28.600 I think, broadly speaking, most of my values would fall into what traditionally would be considered left-wing.

00:03:34.400 I think I have some sort of more conservative values when it comes to culture and education and the arts, perhaps.

00:03:40.720 But that's the same as someone like George Orwell, who was very much a cultural conservative as well as being a socialist.

00:03:46.720 I think, economically speaking, I do believe in fair proportionate taxation of the wealthy.

00:03:54.480 I do believe in the welfare state.

00:03:56.360 All of those sort of, I believe in redressing economic inequality, looking out for working class people, social mobility.

00:04:05.560 So all of these kind of things, I think, would traditionally be deemed to be left-wing.

00:04:09.400 But I think what the culture war has effectively done is it's substituted identity, group identity, for the notion of class and money.

00:04:20.920 And what that now means is that people who describe themselves as left-wing are nothing of the kind.

00:04:26.780 I mean, most of the activists that you see, the sort of most vociferous cheerleaders of the critical social justice movement tend to be, well, let's put it nicely, quite posh.

00:04:36.580 They tend to have quite plummy voices, double-barrelled names.

00:04:39.040 They're called things like Hugo Ponsford and Sage Willoughby and things like this.

00:04:42.720 Particularly the case with environmental activists.

00:04:45.100 You know, those people who glue themselves to Van Gogh paintings and the Statue of David or whatever it might be.

00:04:51.540 When they talk, they are almost like a caricature, like the kind of thing that I would have invented as a joke of a kind of left-wing activist.

00:04:58.360 And have invented, in fact.

00:05:00.520 Exactly.

00:05:01.060 Well, Titania McGrath has that name because she's very, very well off.

00:05:06.360 Part of the joke with that and part of what I find so funny about so many of these activists is that they are bleating about oppression and persecution and privilege.

00:05:17.320 And they're independently wealthy.

00:05:19.740 They've had everything handed to them on a plate.

00:05:22.000 They're not in a position to do that.

00:05:23.040 Andrew, you know, look, I noticed this when I was teaching at Harvard, at an Ivy League school, obviously.

00:05:32.240 So all of my students were the top 1%, obviously.

00:05:37.360 And if they weren't at that moment, they were going to be by the time they were 40.

00:05:41.340 So at worst, they were top 1% in, what would you call it?

00:05:46.560 Infancy.

00:05:47.180 There we go.

00:05:47.680 And so you might think that'd be good enough on the privileged side.

00:05:52.080 But it seems to me that there's a small coterie of very noisy people for whom being rich and privileged is not enough.

00:06:00.700 They also want all the victimization privileges of being oppressed.

00:06:04.720 Because then you can have bloody well everything, can't you?

00:06:07.520 And if you're a narcissistic psychopath, then everything is what you want.

00:06:11.660 And you want it now.

00:06:12.620 And I want to just follow up on that a bit with regards to this left-wing issue.

00:06:17.380 So, you know, there's about a dozen studies now.

00:06:20.480 I want to write an article about this or maybe even a book.

00:06:23.000 There's about a dozen studies now looking at the personality predictors of left-wing authoritarianism.

00:06:29.180 And so, from 19, from the end of World War II till 2016, social psychologists in particular, and that's a rather dismal discipline, denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism outright.

00:06:44.760 It was only a right-wing phenomenon, apparently.

00:06:48.340 You know, I mean, Stalin and Mao notwithstanding.

00:06:51.740 But it started to switch a bit in 2016.

00:06:54.420 We did a study in my lab, first of all, showing that left-wing authoritarianism was a coherent, you could identify a coherent set of beliefs statistically that were associated with so-called progressive causes allied with the willingness to impose them using fear, force, and compulsion.

00:07:13.020 That's not a bad definition of left-wing authoritarianism.

00:07:15.660 But then a number of other studies have come out, and the most interesting ones concentrate on what's known as the dark tetrad.

00:07:24.180 And the dark tetrad is a group of personality traits that were too evil to make it into the standard personality models.

00:07:30.360 They were excluded by fiat to begin with.

00:07:34.440 Manipulativeness, that's Machiavellianism.

00:07:37.200 Psychopathy, which is predatory parasitism.

00:07:40.680 Narcissism, that was the original dark tet triad.

00:07:43.900 But that wasn't bad enough, so the psychologists had to add sadism to it to fill in the last quadrant.

00:07:50.880 And the correlation between dark tetrad personality traits and left-wing authoritarianism is so high that it isn't obvious that they're distinguishable.

00:08:03.080 And so what I see happening...

00:08:04.600 Go ahead.

00:08:04.960 Is it not similarly high amongst right-wing authoritarians?

00:08:07.760 No, it's not.

00:08:09.660 So it's a different kind of authoritarianism.

00:08:11.560 Yes, it looks...

00:08:13.840 I mean, this isn't clearly laid out yet, you know.

00:08:17.340 But the focus at the moment...

00:08:19.220 Now, I think, first of all, anybody who's willing to use fear and compulsion and force is likely to also be characterized by those dark tetrad traits.

00:08:29.860 But I think the additional pathology that emerges on the left, and this is something we can discuss, obviously, is that you have to be a particular kind of evil snake to mask your psychopathic power mongering in the guise of compassion.

00:08:48.220 And I don't think the right-wing authoritarians do that.

00:08:51.640 They more or less come right out and say, like, fuck you.

00:08:54.560 I'm going to take everything you have, especially if you're a group I don't like.

00:08:58.220 But the left-wing types, they say, well, you know, really, I'm your best friend.

00:09:02.800 Historically speaking, is that necessarily the case?

00:09:04.600 I mean, you know, if you take the example of the Third Reich and Nazism, that was underpinned by a belief, a sincere belief, a sort of quasi-religious belief that what they were doing was for the good of society.

00:09:16.440 However abhorrent we might find it.

00:09:19.160 Look, fair enough, man.

00:09:20.340 And I know perfectly well that in the 1930s, for example, as the Nazis marched towards the death camps, their primary rationale for the original implementation of euthanasia, so to speak, of mass killing was compassionate euthanasia.

00:09:38.000 But then I would also say, and this is something we actually don't know, you know, that the Nazis were national socialists, and their political stance was a weird mixture of what we would think of as left and right-wing now, right?

00:09:51.260 I mean, there was the fascist component that involved the aggregation of power at the pinnacle, corporate and governmental and media, all of that, right?

00:10:00.760 So that seems kind of right-wing and monolithic, but it wasn't like they were, it wasn't, there were socialist elements in the platform as well.

00:10:11.060 And so we don't know enough to sort that out, I would say, maybe on the statistical side.

00:10:15.860 But doesn't all of this sort of point to the fact, or not even the fact, but my contention, that actually thinking in terms of left and right when it comes to this is kind of redundant?

00:10:24.380 I think in a way you've sort of hit it.

00:10:25.820 Yeah, exactly.

00:10:26.780 The debate has always been the struggle between liberty and authority.

00:10:31.180 And so, you know, to go back to whether I'm left-wing or right-wing, I think I'm probably just liberal.

00:10:35.160 I think there are liberal-minded people on the left, there are liberal-minded people on the right among libertarians.

00:10:39.920 It's not something that is tied to a left-right worldview.

00:10:43.540 But when I hear people talking about how we're trying to frame the culture war in terms of left and right,

00:10:49.320 or to say that the culture war doesn't matter and there are more important things,

00:10:52.660 actually, this struggle between liberty and authority, which John Stuart Mill talks about in his book on liberty,

00:10:58.200 George Orwell has written about this, that that's the thing that matters.

00:11:02.260 And the recognition that there is an authoritarian impulse in humanity, that there is an enduring appeal to authoritarianism,

00:11:09.000 whether you come from the left or from the right, this is something that George Orwell, to go back to him, he tackled this as well.

00:11:13.740 Well, it's precisely the reason why when he wrote Animal Farm, he couldn't get it published for so long,

00:11:18.700 because people were horrified by the possibility that left-wing people could be authoritarian.

00:11:23.040 And what he was saying is that this is something that doesn't, it's irrespective of a left-wing view or a right-wing view.

00:11:30.720 And I think although you might be able to pinpoint psychological differences and tendencies among those on the left who have an authoritarian bent

00:11:38.020 and those on the right who have a similar authoritarian bent, perhaps it's more useful just to think,

00:11:43.580 particularly when it comes to the culture war, in terms of who believes in traditional liberal values.

00:11:48.300 I know that means something very different in America, but liberal values insofar as individual autonomy,

00:11:53.660 shared humanity, freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, etc.

00:11:59.260 Those kind of liberal values, you can do whatever you want with your life so long as it does not impinge upon the rights of others.

00:12:05.540 That's something that left and right can agree on.

00:12:08.220 And the social justice warriors, whilst they might call themselves left-wing,

00:12:13.520 really their movement is characterized by authoritarianism.

00:12:16.120 They oppose those liberal values.

00:12:16.940 Well, that's what it looks like.

00:12:18.240 And quite, well, not just what it looks like, quite explicitly.

00:12:20.500 I mean, the early critical race theory texts explicitly say, I mean, if you read Derek Bell,

00:12:26.500 he wrote an essay called Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory?

00:12:29.040 He talks about how critical race theorists have always mistrusted liberalism.

00:12:33.040 They see the liberal project as having failed, because we still live in a society where racism exists.

00:12:39.640 And they take that as evidence that liberalism doesn't work, rather than…

00:12:43.980 Right, because the previous societies were so non-racist.

00:12:48.260 Right, exactly.

00:12:49.560 They don't understand that point.

00:12:52.480 Social liberalism is about an ongoing process.

00:12:54.960 It's about recognizing that we live in an imperfectable world and trying to do our best with a bad lot.

00:12:59.240 And the problem is that authoritarians tend to be, as well, kind of utopians, even though in the case of the social justice activists, I don't think they've got a clear sense of what their final ideal society would look like.

00:13:13.520 At the moment, they just seem to me to be on a sort of rampage of destruction.

00:13:19.600 They've problematized…

00:13:20.020 Yeah, well, that is what it would look like.

00:13:21.340 That is what it would look like.

00:13:22.460 Just a wasteland, then.

00:13:22.840 I've always thought that Hitler got exactly what he was aiming at.

00:13:26.160 He shot himself while Europe was burning.

00:13:29.440 And it's like a big f*** you to God, fundamentally.

00:13:32.120 Well, that was because he was the personality type that would rather everyone was torn down rather than he fails.

00:13:39.980 I mean, one of the things that comes in…

00:13:41.440 Yeah, well, that's precisely, yeah.

00:13:41.980 Well, that is the dark tetrad type, man.

00:13:44.000 That's for sure.

00:13:44.840 I mean, he was deeply narcissistic.

00:13:47.800 You know, he would bore people with those lectures late at night when no one was interested.

00:13:52.220 It was all about him.

00:13:55.280 One thing that comes out very clearly, there's a great biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw.

00:14:00.160 One thing that very much comes out about that is this guy was a narcissist.

00:14:04.760 And when he knew that the game was up, he wanted everyone to pay.

00:14:08.640 Yes, that's narcissism right there, man.

00:14:11.640 That's absolutely right.

00:14:12.860 Well, and he said that, you know.

00:14:14.060 I mean, at near the end of the Second World War, when the Russians were advancing on Berlin,

00:14:20.500 he continually expressed his dismay at the uselessness of the German people who had failed him.

00:14:27.480 Yes, exactly.

00:14:28.340 And those who had failed on the Eastern Front, or from his perception, had failed,

00:14:33.280 even though he'd put the military in an impossible situation, couldn't take any responsibility for his own mistakes.

00:14:39.640 But that kind of narcissism…

00:14:40.860 And I don't like comparing social justice activists to Hitler.

00:14:43.520 I think that's their trick.

00:14:45.080 That's what they do.

00:14:45.760 They call everyone Hitler.

00:14:46.600 But I think you can definitely see that combination of narcissism and also a kind of religiosity,

00:14:57.020 intolerance, and yes, exactly what you say, a desire to destroy.

00:15:03.780 You know, that if we can't get our way, we'll just destroy everything.

00:15:06.020 Okay, so let's talk about that.

00:15:07.880 I want to use that as a segue, and I haven't tortured you about having a PhD in Renaissance poetry.

00:15:13.260 We'll get back to that.

00:15:14.560 I want to use that as a segue into the religious issue because you wrote a book here recently.

00:15:19.720 Just make sure I get the title exactly right.

00:15:21.700 The New Puritans, How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.

00:15:25.920 And so we could talk about religious issues.

00:15:29.600 I've been thinking recently, along the religious lines, let's say, that what we're seeing is

00:15:36.220 just the modern manifestation of an eternal battle.

00:15:39.960 And that battle is laid out first, very early in the biblical corpus, in the story of Cain and Abel.

00:15:46.500 Because what you have in that story is two modes of adaptation,

00:15:51.740 which I think roughly parallel a kind of demented narcissistic authoritarianism

00:15:57.340 and a kind of responsibility-laden individualism.

00:16:01.560 We can discuss that.

00:16:02.940 But what happens is Cain and Abel make sacrifices, right?

00:16:06.800 And that's what people do when they work, because work is the sacrifice of the present to the future.

00:16:14.080 And human beings uniquely work.

00:16:15.940 I mean, maybe beavers work and bees, but look.

00:16:19.060 Essentially, human beings uniquely work.

00:16:22.160 We're willing to sacrifice the present for the future.

00:16:25.240 Now, what happens in the story of Cain and Abel is that Cain appears to make bloodless

00:16:30.820 and relatively low-quality sacrifices, whereas Abel's all in.

00:16:37.940 And the consequence of that is Abel gets rewarded by God,

00:16:41.360 and everyone loves him, and things go well for him.

00:16:43.620 And Cain, nothing goes his way.

00:16:46.680 And then instead of noticing that maybe he has something to do with that,

00:16:51.720 he calls God out for creating an improper cosmos and really puts him on the stand.

00:16:57.920 And God says, look, buddy, if you got your act together, things would go well for you.

00:17:03.400 And the fact that they're not might have more to do with you than me.

00:17:06.940 And Cain thinks, to hell with you, God.

00:17:09.780 I think I'll go kill your favorite.

00:17:12.580 And so that's the story.

00:17:14.080 And that's one hell of a brutal story.

00:17:16.280 And then, you know, Cain's descendants, including Tubal Cain,

00:17:20.120 which is about four generations down the line,

00:17:22.820 they're the builders of the Tower of Babel and also the first people who make implements of war.

00:17:28.200 So there's an idea there that there's a resentful and bitter,

00:17:33.060 revengeful spirit that preoccupies mankind,

00:17:36.520 and that it can spread out from the individual and take out the entire polity.

00:17:41.700 And I can't help but see a reflection of that on the intellectual landscape now in the political domain.

00:17:48.160 I mean, I think now I'm curious about what you think about such things,

00:17:51.120 because you have described this new movement, let's say, as religious.

00:17:55.960 So, you know, what do you mean by that?

00:17:57.680 What do you think about these more metaphysical speculations?

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00:19:37.280 I suppose I should be very clear about that, and in the book I do make it clear.

00:19:43.940 I've called the book The New Puritans, and I refer to the religion of social justice, because one of the things I'm very keen to do,

00:19:50.420 and one of the reasons why I feel that the critical social justice activists are winning,

00:19:55.680 is because a lot of people do not understand their aims.

00:19:58.120 They don't understand what they're about, and that they effectively fall for the linguistic tricks.

00:20:03.280 I mean, you all know that the culture war is largely about who gets to define the meaning of words.

00:20:08.860 Activists often use words, but they mean the opposites.

00:20:12.280 They call themselves progressive, for instance, but I believe that they are regressive.

00:20:16.280 They call themselves liberal, but they are deeply illiberal.

00:20:19.240 You know, they're in favor of censorship and authoritarianism.

00:20:22.080 They scream about fascism while they themselves are using fascistic tactics,

00:20:27.300 such as violence to silence political opponents.

00:20:29.420 So the language, unless you understand where they're coming from, and unless you understand that theirs is a belief system,

00:20:37.420 which is largely tied to unfalsifiable claims, which depends upon a kind of coterie of high priests,

00:20:45.800 edicts from above, you know, telling the masses what they should believe and punishing those who dissent.

00:20:50.980 It has all the hallmarks of fundamentalist religion, at least, the idea of excommunicating heretics,

00:20:57.780 sort of sniffing out heretics, searching for them, and doing the metaphorical equivalent of burning them at the stake,

00:21:03.500 which is what we call council culture, destroying their livelihoods, destroying their reputations.

00:21:07.520 A kind of merciless, brutal, cruel, and vicious quality,

00:21:11.640 which nonetheless dons the guise of compassion and righteousness.

00:21:17.680 You know, I'm sure that bullies and innately cruel and sociopaths throughout history

00:21:24.100 have probably been attracted to the priesthood,

00:21:26.680 because it gives them the opportunity to be a figure of authority, to enact cruelty,

00:21:31.520 and at the same time to be validated as a principled and important member of society.

00:21:37.220 So I think it does attract those—

00:21:38.040 You mean like Pharisees and scribes, those sorts of people.

00:21:40.860 Exactly, and I'm not suggesting for a second, you know, if you take something as brutal as the Inquisition,

00:21:45.980 I mean, I'm sure a lot of those people involved felt that they were doing God's work

00:21:49.320 and genuinely thought they were on the side of the angels,

00:21:51.020 but you can be damn sure that there were some psychopaths who were attracted to those positions of power.

00:21:57.240 So when I'm saying that I talk about the religion of critical social justice,

00:22:00.960 I'm doing so to try and make it accessible.

00:22:03.800 I've found that if you just—because it is so baffling to everyone.

00:22:07.260 Most people are completely baffled, because for a start,

00:22:09.800 they have their own kind of esoteric language, this terminology like heteronormativity

00:22:14.820 and toxic masculinity and cisgender, etc., words that most people just don't even know what they mean.

00:22:20.440 But if you see them as kind of a biblical script or a religious text,

00:22:25.320 and they do have their foundational holy texts, such as Foucault and Judith Butler and things like that,

00:22:30.480 if you make this analogy to religion, I think it makes the movement comprehensible.

00:22:35.620 And I think in order to defeat it, it has to be comprehended.

00:22:39.080 And I think most people can't comprehend it.

00:22:41.700 So let's try to get at something that might approximate a definition of religious.

00:22:47.420 So this is how I've been thinking about it technically.

00:22:50.540 So imagine that you see the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions,

00:22:56.300 which you have to because you're fundamentally ignorant.

00:22:59.500 You have to presuppose things in order to move forward because you don't have infinite knowledge.

00:23:03.320 So you have to look at the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions.

00:23:07.080 Then you can imagine that some presuppositions are deeper than others.

00:23:11.220 And what that would mean is some presuppositions, very little, very few other presuppositions depend on.

00:23:19.320 And some presuppositions, many other presuppositions depend on.

00:23:24.660 Right?

00:23:24.940 Sort of like it's like citation depth in the scientific literature.

00:23:28.520 And so freedom of speech, for example, would be a presupposition in a liberal polity upon which almost all other presuppositions rest.

00:23:36.580 So if you move it, you're moving the depths.

00:23:39.840 So a religion specifies the deepest presuppositions, and they have to be axiomatic,

00:23:45.700 because that's sort of where your ignorance bottoms out.

00:23:48.640 You have to say, I hold these things to be self-evident before you can proceed.

00:23:52.380 And that is something like the existence of a deity as a presupposition that has to underpin.

00:23:57.380 Oh, right.

00:23:58.300 Okay, so that's the next issue.

00:23:59.980 So I read a lot of Carl Jung years ago, and very deeply.

00:24:05.520 And one of the things Jung said about Protestantism, which I found remarkable,

00:24:10.660 he criticized both Catholicism and Protestantism, you know, as a friendly critic, I would say,

00:24:16.800 pointing out that the temptation that Catholicism might fall prey to is one of centralizing authoritarianism,

00:24:25.640 and the temptation that Protestantism falls prey to is fractionating individualism.

00:24:33.120 He said, the logical conclusion of the Protestant revolution is that every single person becomes their own church.

00:24:40.520 And so it looks to me like that's happened, and what's happened.

00:24:43.900 And psychologists have abetted this, and even the great clinicians, I believe, have abetted this,

00:24:49.020 regardless of my admiration for them, by substituting the self for God.

00:24:55.040 And I think what you have, especially on the psychopathic, narcissistic fringes of what used to be the left,

00:25:03.300 and you see this on the right as well, is the momentary self elevated to the status of God.

00:25:10.540 Well, you see that an awful lot, which I think is why, I mean, you've identified the narcissism within these kind of movements,

00:25:16.880 but also the rapidity with which they resort to religious terminology or religious ideas or religious modes of expression.

00:25:24.540 For instance, you remember when, was it outside of Netflix, when there were protests against Dave Chappelle's show,

00:25:32.460 and there was that comedian protesting with a sign that said,

00:25:35.960 we like Dave, or we like jokes. I think they had signs like that.

00:25:40.140 And one woman cornered him, and it was all caught on film, and she screamed repeatedly in his face,

00:25:45.680 repent, motherfucker. She said it again and again and again.

00:25:49.460 And I mentioned that in the book, because I love that that sort of combined,

00:25:53.600 that combination of rage and religiosity, I think, really encapsulates what the movement is all about.

00:25:58.440 I think in terms of the presuppositions of that movement, which it takes as axiomatic,

00:26:03.180 it's not supernatural, okay? It doesn't talk about a deity, even though it has its profits, I think,

00:26:09.560 from the French post-structuralists of the 1960s.

00:26:12.740 But I think it does have certain axiomatic presuppositions, such as,

00:26:17.600 there are power structures that dominate society, that underpinned all human interaction,

00:26:22.600 and these are based on the notion of group identity, and that that is how society needs to be understood.

00:26:27.980 As Foucault talked about grids of power through society, power not being a top-down phenomenon,

00:26:34.020 something that sort of is latent within all of our interactions and behaviour.

00:26:41.400 And they see that they believe that, these activists believe that they can pick this apart

00:26:46.960 and understand it, and remedy the wrongs in society, so long as that they can identify where

00:26:51.500 the power structures lie, and who is exercising privilege at the expense of the oppressed.

00:26:58.840 That's why critical race theorists, I mean, it was put like this in James Lindsay and Helen

00:27:04.940 Pluckrose's book, that the key question that you ask, if you are a critical race theory,

00:27:09.280 is not, a theorist, is not, did racism take place in this situation, but how did racism manifest

00:27:16.180 in this situation? Yes, right, right. So it's almost like a ghostly spiritual thing

00:27:20.360 that is always there. I think that's one of their, that's one of their major presuppositions.

00:27:24.360 Yeah, well, then, well, so here's another way of thinking about that from the religious

00:27:28.880 perspective. I mean, Milton Satan is an authoritarian narcissist, and he rules over hell. And so he's a

00:27:37.860 figure that's very much analogous to Mao or to Stalin, right? He's someone who climbs the most

00:27:43.780 pathological possible power hierarchy, and then regards himself as a victor, even though he's

00:27:49.380 actually the biggest loser. And so, so Satan is the spirit, you might say, in the Judeo-Christian

00:27:56.820 tradition, who rules the world by force. Now, the postmodern neo-Marxist types believe that there's

00:28:05.760 nothing but power. So I can't see that that's any different than a certain Christian heresy that

00:28:11.840 rose up in the Middle Ages, making the claim that Satan himself was the ruler of the earth,

00:28:17.440 right? Because the notion there is that power itself is the only, or at least the ultimate

00:28:23.520 motivator and, well, motivator is the right way of thinking about it. And so, and then it follows,

00:28:30.560 a lot of things follow from that, right? One thing that follows from that is that there's no such thing

00:28:35.040 as free speech, because there's just conflicts between different claims to power. And that if you

00:28:39.920 promote free speech, that's just an indication of how conniving you are to use that entire

00:28:45.740 philosophical language to do nothing but buttress your own colonialist power claims.

00:28:50.440 Yes, because their theories always put you in that position where you can't win.

00:28:54.260 You know, it's similar with the critical race theory. They have their notion of interest

00:28:58.060 convergence. You know, when people say, well, there are extremely successful black individuals in

00:29:03.360 our history, Barack Obama, say, someone like that, they will say the only reason that those people

00:29:08.280 have succeeded is because it was in the interests of white people for them to succeed. In other words,

00:29:14.040 if black people don't succeed, right? So if black people don't succeed in society, that's evidence

00:29:18.820 of critical race theorists' claims. But if they do succeed, it's also evidence of their claims,

00:29:23.060 because that's interest convergence. So they keep putting you in this kind of situation.

00:29:26.140 That to me has to be religion without, as in religious belief that has not been, it has merely

00:29:34.520 been asserted rather than proven. The fact that they take on the very notion of rationality,

00:29:41.040 enlightenment ideas, the fact that they think that those things are even part, and they also see

00:29:44.900 that through group identity, that that is just the product of some dead white men in periwigs.

00:29:49.140 So how do you understand? There seems to be, okay, so we figure we've got a couple of, what would you

00:29:55.720 say, contenders for deity. One would be Satan himself, right? The spirit of power. The other

00:30:00.600 would be the untrammeled hedonic self. It's something like that. But then there's a weird paradox there,

00:30:07.420 not that the paradox bothers the postmodern types, that group identity is paramount,

00:30:13.420 but full, what would you say, full licentiousness on the personal front, and the granting of every

00:30:23.160 whim on the personal front is also requisite. And I don't, I can't quite square that coherently.

00:30:31.440 Like, how is it that the radicals can push forward the notion that group identity is the only identity,

00:30:37.140 but also push forward the notion that everything possible is to be permitted, every individual at

00:30:43.300 every moment. But you put your finger on it when you said that the paradoxes don't

00:30:48.660 trouble the postmodernists. You know, it's sort of built into their whole idea. When Derrida was

00:30:54.060 writing, he was trying to write incoherently. You know, it's part of it. He managed, too.

00:30:58.900 He did manage. It's absolutely unreadable. So let me try and understand what you're saying here.

00:31:07.880 You were talking about the idea that- Well, we see this worship of the self that emerges.

00:31:11.580 So there's contenders for God, right? We have power, and we have the self. And then there's an

00:31:19.260 element of that that spreads out into identity. Now, the radical types definitely put forward

00:31:24.900 group identity as paramount, and yet they worship the self.

00:31:29.320 What do you mean by licentiousness? What do you mean by, do they believe that absolutely everything

00:31:33.620 is permissible, that any kind of individual desire is able to be fulfilled? Because in their world,

00:31:39.900 they're quite prescriptive, aren't they, about which modes of behavior are acceptable and which

00:31:44.380 aren't? Well, that gets extraordinarily complex because it looks to me, one of the things I see

00:31:49.800 on campuses, for example, is the insistence on the left progressive front, let's say, that any form of

00:31:57.580 sexual identity or behavior whatsoever is permissible. And not only permissible, but to be celebrated.

00:32:03.580 Now, it's complicated because at the same time, right, every single interaction between a young

00:32:11.260 man and a young woman is so absolutely dangerous that it has to be subjected to contractual

00:32:17.300 validation before it can proceed. That's what I mean.

00:32:19.180 Well, yeah. Well, it's a weird psychoanalytic truism, you know, that if you go too far in one

00:32:24.960 direction, you simultaneously go too far in the other. And that really muddies up the water,

00:32:29.820 right? So the really narcissistic types, for example, have an extremely uncertain core,

00:32:36.000 right? But that doesn't make them any less, what would you say, forthright in their claims that

00:32:40.500 they should rule. So you can't stretch yourself. Go ahead.

00:32:44.600 Well, I'm not so sure that it's about fulfilling any indulgence, no matter how depraved. I think it's

00:32:52.780 more about what they call queering society. I think it's more about if it is in the service of

00:32:57.780 demolishing the cis, white, heteropatriarchal structures that are in place, then that is

00:33:05.640 seen as a benefit, as something positive. Right. So you think that licentiousness serves the

00:33:11.200 purposes of demolition? I do.

00:33:12.720 What about the reverse hypothesis? Is that, because I would say this might be more true of Foucault,

00:33:17.900 all the demolition was put forward to license the licentiousness? Like, I don't know. I mean,

00:33:26.000 this is a real question.

00:33:26.920 Yeah, I'm not sure about that. I mean, a lot of people will say that because Foucault has,

00:33:30.240 as you know, a very shady past.

00:33:33.280 Yeah, you might say that.

00:33:34.420 Yeah, absolutely. And people have pointed out that there seems to be a strong correlation between

00:33:39.280 some of the founding postmodernists and, shall we say, well, yeah, depraved sexual activity,

00:33:46.160 sometimes pedophilia, these kinds of things. The question, I suppose, are you suggesting

00:33:50.460 that they created this kind of theoretical framework in order to justify that sort of

00:33:57.000 behavior? Is that what you mean?

00:33:57.980 Well, you see, I'm not, I waver, and maybe the causality is interactive because you could,

00:34:05.000 see, I see a lot of stunningly immature behavior on the radical front from a developmental psychological

00:34:12.320 perspective. So, for example, a lot of the behavior I see looks to me like unsocialized

00:34:17.980 two-year-old behavior because two-year-olds are highly prone to motivational and emotional whims

00:34:24.260 in the short term, and they're incapable of developing a shared frame of reference.

00:34:29.280 That doesn't happen until kids are three. And aggressive two-year-olds who don't develop

00:34:34.740 that by four never develop it in their entire life because they become alienated and they don't

00:34:39.940 make friends and they can't further their development. And so, you could say, if this is

00:34:46.300 sort of a Freudian id-like view, that part of what we're seeing is the expression of extremely

00:34:52.080 unsocialized, immature, motivational, and emotional demands fragmented with a, what would you say,

00:34:59.560 temper tantrum-like insistence, constant insistence that those whims be granted immediately? And then

00:35:08.540 you could say, well, the entire power critique has been erected by, on the intellectual front,

00:35:14.400 just to justify that. Although you could also reverse it and say, no, the licentiousness, which

00:35:19.900 was the case you were making, the licentiousness is promoted because it's revolutionary in a sense,

00:35:26.080 and it can be used to demolish the so-called traditional power struggle.

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00:36:36.060 Well, it has to be because they just have so many impositions on other people's freedoms.

00:36:42.920 They have so many ideas of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, particularly in the arts,

00:36:46.900 in film, in plays, in books, that, you know, they're for censorship. They believe that things

00:36:52.520 that are, that horrible word they use, problematic, and they like to problematize things. So it can't be

00:36:57.840 the case that they just believe in a kind of global free-for-all. It can't be that because I think

00:37:02.420 they, they, they come across more like Pharisees to me than, than anything else. But maybe what

00:37:07.760 you're describing in terms of the temper tantrums and the things that we see, uh, from, from these

00:37:12.140 people is that that is just simply the natural consequence of when you have decades of academics

00:37:17.120 and figures of authority saying that we ought to prioritize our emotional responses and our own

00:37:21.560 subjective view of the, of, of the world over objective, uh, epistemological frameworks that,

00:37:27.460 you know, or, or actual practical responsibility. I mean, I saw this at the University of

00:37:32.180 Toronto. It was one of the things that constantly made me morally ill was that my idiot compatriots

00:37:37.860 thought that the best thing to do with young people was to teach them to protest rather than

00:37:42.100 to help them figure out how to make them their way responsibly and productively and generously in the

00:37:47.520 world, which is... They've created a generation that are infantile. I mean, it is an infantilized

00:37:52.680 world and we see it in absolutely every strand of our culture and politics as well. And it's because,

00:37:58.180 as you say, academics by and large are activists first and academics second. Uh, you know, um,

00:38:05.620 Helen Pluckrose trend traces out to the, what she calls the applied turn of postmodernism,

00:38:09.700 late eighties, you know, postmodernists for many years were, were quite enjoyed sort of theorizing

00:38:15.140 and frolicking about coming up with these airy fairy ideas, not applying them to society, not seriously

00:38:19.460 saying we should, uh, you know, reconstruct society and apply these methods. And then the applied,

00:38:24.580 the applied postmodernists said, no, actually we can, we can, we can actually change society,

00:38:30.100 revolutionize society through the application of our untested theories and highly contested

00:38:35.140 theories. And they did it. And, and what's so tragic is not, I mean, is, is that it eventually

00:38:42.100 worked. You know, we're now in a situation where our government over here, the government,

00:38:45.860 certainly in Canada and in the U S they are implementing these ideas, these, these highly contested

00:38:52.340 theories in, in public policy, in education, in the educational.

00:38:56.340 Yes. They're making the mandatory. Yeah. Well, that was, you know, that was what propelled me

00:39:00.180 into the public domain to begin with was the first move of that sort on the Trudeau liberal

00:39:04.340 government front, but that's mandated speech. But that's why surely it does merit the analogy

00:39:10.740 with religion because you are imposing on society ideas, uh, that are not, that are, are based on

00:39:19.620 belief, simply based on belief. You know, there is no evidence, uh, that, that reorganizing society

00:39:27.460 in the way that the critical race theorists would like to do so that we have a hyper racialized

00:39:32.660 society that focuses first and foremost on your group identity and secondarily on who you are as

00:39:37.460 an individual. There's no evidence that this is making society less racist or that. So we seem to,

00:39:44.100 we seem to have agreed that the desire for demolition and destruction rules paramount even over the

00:39:54.260 desire for untrammeled personal, say, self-expression. I think that that is inevitable when you,

00:40:02.580 when you come from the supposition that society is inherently broken, that it is undergirded by

00:40:09.220 power structures that only support the already privileged. Okay. So let's, let's dive into that

00:40:16.020 because this is, this is a good place to further interrogate the left issues. So, you know, a lot

00:40:21.220 of the people that I talk with, Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, Brett Weinstein, those are good,

00:40:26.900 Eric Weinstein, those are good initial, um, exemplars are more classical leftist types.

00:40:36.180 And yet they're identified by the screaming radicals as gateways to the alt-right. So,

00:40:42.100 which is extraordinarily interesting because it means as soon as you're no longer a useful idiot,

00:40:47.940 from the radical perspective, you're instantly a Nazi, which is very convenient for them. Um, but

00:40:55.700 here's the, here's the thing. The postmodern critique that society is to be understood is nothing but the

00:41:03.540 manifestation of power is attractive, partly because when social arrangements or even psychological

00:41:12.820 arrangements pathologize, they do pathologize in the direction of power, right? So if you're,

00:41:21.460 you can tyrannize yourself like an overlord, you can tyrannize your partner, you can tyrannize your

00:41:28.580 family and your community, you can act like a tyrant on the, on the local political stage and then

00:41:34.660 nationally, right? You can do that in business as well. And so, and that happens relatively often. So

00:41:41.620 the, there's a core of sense in the claim that power is a powerful motivating force. Now, I think the

00:41:50.740 radicals go too far when they say everything is about power because well, everything is a lot of

00:41:57.700 things and you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but the problem, the problem,

00:42:03.300 the left therefore has, if the left is willing to be reasonable and say, well, some social structures are

00:42:10.900 corrupted by power, then the left has to figure out and can't, because I've asked like 50 senators and

00:42:17.300 Republican and, and congressmen on the Democrat side to do this. If your leftist stance is that

00:42:25.300 power corrupts society, then how in the world can you tell when those who make that claim take that

00:42:32.820 claim too far? And I've asked, like the reason I brought up the Democrat, the senators and the

00:42:38.900 congressmen is because I asked every lefty I could get my hands on. And that's been quite a few over the

00:42:43.860 last five years, when the left goes too far. And I even asked Robert Kennedy that recently,

00:42:50.180 and he said, well, I'm trying to run a campaign based on unity. And so I don't want to go down

00:42:54.420 that rabbit hole. It's like, well, the barbarians are at your gate, buddy. They've been canceling you

00:42:59.380 for 18 years. So, so how do we separate out this? Well, there are so many things that you've

00:43:05.380 raised there. I mean, firstly, you're right to identify that there is a kernel in truth,

00:43:09.380 of truth in the postmodernist claims that power is important. It is significant in human behavior

00:43:14.660 and society and history. All of that, that is absolutely accurate. And you're also right

00:43:19.620 that where they go wrong is to assume that everything is about power. Like you say, power

00:43:23.380 is really important, but it's not everything. And I wonder whether reducing, reducing everything to

00:43:28.900 just power structures makes things understandable, easier in a way.

00:43:35.140 Yeah. Well, we found the best predictor in our first study, the best predictor of left-wing

00:43:40.180 authoritarianism was low verbal intelligence. Right. Because people want easy answers.

00:43:46.260 Absolutely. And power is a good, easy answer, right? It covers a lot of territory.

00:43:51.300 Well, any ideology is, because it means that you're outsourcing your thinking to a set of rules.

00:43:56.660 And that is what is happening. But that's why all those people that you've tried to ask this

00:44:01.620 question, what happens when the left goes too far in terms of their own megalomania?

00:44:06.580 They won't answer the question because to do so would be to acknowledge that there is a flaw

00:44:10.100 in their ideology. There's a potential flaw in their system, that they're dealing ultimately

00:44:13.460 with human beings. That's, you know, it's a set to go back to Orwell. It's the same reason

00:44:17.380 why the Stalinists have never forgiven Orwell. All these people on the left have always hated him

00:44:22.180 for pointing out that the left is just as susceptible to corruption as the right is. And they've never

00:44:26.420 forgiven him for that. And it comes down to that idea of moral purity. I mean,

00:44:30.260 one of the reasons I call them the new Puritans, again, it's an analogy, it's trying to make them

00:44:34.420 accessible. It's because in their world, to deviate even slightly from this very simplistic formula

00:44:39.940 that they've applied to society to make, to give them power, ironically enough, to get to put them,

00:44:45.220 to put them in a position where they can control other people, but also can control their own

00:44:50.020 understandings, comprehensions of the world, because they've got this framework through which they can

00:44:54.980 look at it. And to say, well, actually, your framework is flawed in all sorts of ways.

00:44:59.700 That's harder because then you have to start thinking. And they don't want to start thinking.

00:45:03.860 Thinking is the death of ideology. I think that's why you're getting that moral purity,

00:45:09.220 but it's also why, I mean, you mentioned, interestingly, people like Joe Rogan and Russell

00:45:13.300 Brown being considered a gateway to the alt-right. They're still traditionally, politically more akin to

00:45:21.220 the left, I would say, than the right. But because they've deviated slightly, you have this kind of

00:45:26.500 puritanical sledgehammer coming down and saying, no, you're straying from what our ideology says

00:45:33.700 you should believe. And that, to me, also feels like a fundamentalist religion. It feels like,

00:45:39.380 you know, within a, and I'm making the distinction clearly between a religion and a fundamentalist

00:45:43.460 religion, because I think even within Catholicism, the Vatican has always encouraged debate, theological

00:45:48.020 debate and discussion. It's not as though they just give you the catechism and say, that's it.

00:45:52.020 David, there's all these kinds of discussions and debates and nuances being teased out in

00:45:57.060 theological thoughts. Theologians for centuries have done that. But with fundamentalist religion,

00:46:02.500 that doesn't happen. It doesn't happen with ISIS, for instance. You don't get the sort of the leaders

00:46:06.020 of ISIS sitting around cross-legged in their caves saying, you know, well, let's decide whether we're

00:46:11.140 right about this fine theological point. That doesn't happen. So what scares me, I think, about the critical

00:46:16.580 social justice movement is that they are like a fundamentalist religion for some reason. I mean,

00:46:21.860 this is why, and you know this, whenever you meet one of these people, whenever you encounter them

00:46:25.780 online, get into some kind of discussion, you know what their opinions are and absolutely everything.

00:46:30.020 Yes, yes, yes. It's like turning a crank on someone's head.

00:46:33.380 Yeah. I've never been surprised by them. I'd like to be surprised once in a while. I've had a few

00:46:39.140 occasions recently where I've gotten to conversation. You know, I fall for it. You should just block

00:46:42.900 them really because they're not people who can be reasoned with. But every now and then I take the

00:46:46.660 bait and I say, okay, what is it you think I've said? What has upset you? What is the perspective

00:46:51.540 that I have that you disagree with and why? And they can't do it. They just come back screaming

00:46:56.660 Nazi or whatever. And then you think, okay, well, I shouldn't have bothered trying. But they never

00:47:00.500 surprised me. I just wish they would. Because if you're not thinking for yourself and challenging your

00:47:05.700 own ideas, if you're not coming from the basis, from humility, if you're not coming

00:47:09.860 to the world on the understanding that you're probably wrong about an awful lot of things,

00:47:15.380 I don't think you're fully human in a way. I think you're like an automaton. You know,

00:47:19.540 you're just following a code, a script. You're possessed by a principality.

00:47:25.140 Right. I find that disturbing. Okay. So let me hassle you about something else. I tweeted out

00:47:32.820 about Richard Dawkins here recently and I talked to Richard Dawkins and I actually admire Richard

00:47:40.580 Dawkins. I liked his books. They taught me a lot in some of his essays too. And I think Dawkins

00:47:46.900 is a real scientist in that he believes there is truth and that the pursuit of the truth will set

00:47:52.340 you free, which by the way is a religious claim, but he still believes that. In any case, I also think

00:47:58.740 that Dawkins and Harris and the rest of the new atheists helped pave the landscape for this new

00:48:05.460 woke catastrophe because it's a humanistic movement fundamentally and it's radically anti-science. And

00:48:11.940 I think that Dawkins, well, I know Dawkins sees that because I've been watching his tweets and I did talk

00:48:16.500 to him. And it's certainly the case that the woke mob, I think, can take out science even more easily

00:48:23.540 than they can take out the vestiges of Judeo-Christian thought. And they're definitely going to do that.

00:48:29.140 So now Dawkins and his coterie looked at the history of the West and they said, well,

00:48:36.260 we should dispense with that medieval superstition and we should progress down the enlightenment trail.

00:48:41.140 And I've talked to Douglas Murray about this. Now, the problem with that, it seems to me,

00:48:46.420 so Jung said something very interesting as well that I'll bring up. He implied that Catholicism,

00:48:54.580 with all its strange mysticism and dreamlike propositional structure was as sane as people

00:49:03.300 got. Like that in order for people to function psychologically and to exist together socially,

00:49:10.500 the belief system that united them had to have a dreamlike quality. Okay. So, and that now the new

00:49:18.100 atheist types would say, well, no, no, no, we can replace all that mumbo jumbo and darkness and occult

00:49:24.500 mysticism with a clear headed rationality. But what I see happening instead, and this is on the

00:49:30.260 religious front, is that in the aftermath of the death of God, what we've seen reemerge is either

00:49:36.260 a form of worship of power or degeneration into a kind of polytheistic paganism, not a move forward

00:49:42.660 to enlightenment type Dawkins rationality, quite the contrary. And so, one of the things I'm curious,

00:49:49.860 I know Murray is uncomfortable about this. Douglas Murray is uncomfortable about this.

00:49:56.260 If the woke movement is a religion and if it's a dangerous religion, is the alternative to that

00:50:03.300 no religion or is the alternative to that whatever might constitute genuine religion?

00:50:08.820 And what do you think about that? Well, I think there is clearly something within humanity

00:50:14.660 that we require a certain satisfaction from some kind of belief system which is outside of ourselves

00:50:21.060 or a sense that there is something beyond ourselves. I suppose you might call it transcendence. I think

00:50:24.900 there is a need for that. I think that I get that through the arts. I think that's why

00:50:31.860 we create things. That's why we are creative beings, which is also why I think the woke movement is

00:50:38.340 threatened by the arts and seeks to curtail it and actually to transform it into just another

00:50:44.420 propagandizing tool because it fundamentally doesn't understand what art is. So, it is interesting to me,

00:50:51.460 though, to have noted that the new atheist movement, the one that you described, they seem now to have

00:50:57.140 evolved into the most woke of all. The humanist society, there's something about them that they

00:51:04.500 bought into gender identity ideology very quickly, probably before other bodies did. And the humanist

00:51:10.340 society in the UK now is fully paid up in that really quasi-religious belief system. The idea of a

00:51:17.620 a sexed or gendered soul that doesn't match your biological form, how is that anything other than

00:51:24.180 religious? Actually, how is it anything other than supernatural, really?

00:51:28.580 You know, so I think... Of course.

00:51:30.180 But it has been interesting to me that those were the very people, the people who were talking about

00:51:34.420 rationality and to sort of claw back the primacy of enlightenment values, that they are the ones who

00:51:40.340 have been most susceptible of all. Of course, this is what has got Dawkins in trouble.

00:51:43.460 Right. Well, that's a stunningly devastating observation, right? Because if it turns out

00:51:50.580 that those who wanted to walk down the mass enlightenment pathway produced children who were

00:51:57.140 most susceptible to woke ideology, that's a pretty damning bit of evidence for the validity of that

00:52:03.940 approach. I mean, I'm trying to look at it. Well, because it's always concerned me that some of my

00:52:11.780 most intelligent friends and acquaintances have fallen for the woke movement. In other words,

00:52:16.900 you talk about the fact that a lot of the activists are very infantile in their behaviour,

00:52:22.020 and yet some of the smartest people in society seem to buy into it. It has the capacity to infect

00:52:27.700 everyone, perhaps because it isn't responsive to intellectual rigour. It exists regardless of that.

00:52:36.020 Right, but then that begs the question of why it attracts the intelligent types that you're

00:52:41.620 describing. I mean, look, it originated in the bloody academy. It didn't originate,

00:52:46.660 hypothetically, it originated not only in the academy, but in the core of the academy that was

00:52:51.700 mostly occupied with the humanities, right? So it obviously appeals to the intellect, let's say.

00:52:57.620 Or is it just that we're all, we all have the capacity to become, to fall for hysteria? Is it

00:53:08.660 possible that we're just all, I mean, look, my book opens with a discussion of Salem, the witch hunts

00:53:15.300 in Salem. And one of the key things about that, the more I read about it, and the more I was fascinated

00:53:21.540 by the fact that it was these figures in authority, it was the ministers, the judges,

00:53:25.220 it was the highly intelligent in the community who were the ones who were pushing this. I mean,

00:53:29.700 the girls were screaming and crying witch and pointing and saying that the devil was everywhere,

00:53:33.060 and they'd seen people sign the devil's book and all of that kind of thing. I see those girls as

00:53:37.460 analogous with the screaming anime activists online who just shout Nazi everywhere. They see Nazis

00:53:42.740 everywhere. The girls saw witches everywhere. I see that as very, very similar. But it would have

00:53:47.740 gone away if the ministers and the judges said, no, this isn't rational. You're wrong. You know,

00:53:52.620 there's no evidence for your claims. We have to move on. But they didn't. They went along with it.

00:53:57.500 That's why people ended up being executed. It's when figures in authority capitulate to the

00:54:03.440 screaming of the children. You've described the children, the activists as children. The activists

00:54:08.200 themselves, I would posit, are not the problem. If they were all out there with their billboards

00:54:12.640 It's the enablers. It's the enablers. It's the politicians, the people in charge.

00:54:17.780 So one of the things you see as the biblical corpus unfolds itself symbolically is an emerging

00:54:26.280 relationship between the figure of Cain. And so that's that bitter figure who's out for revenge

00:54:32.820 and the figure of the, what would you call it, untrammeled intellect. So for example, very rapidly

00:54:40.240 after the Cain and Abel story, you have the story of the Tower of Babel. And what you see there

00:54:45.700 are emperors who are competing to replace God, right? They're building towers that are ever and

00:54:53.400 ever higher, predicated on the proposition that they could build a tower all the way to heaven.

00:54:58.420 So that's like Jacob's ladder and thereby replace God. Then you have, you know, the Milton's

00:55:04.620 meditations on Lucifer. Lucifer is the, what, the highest angel of God's heavenly kingdom who's gone

00:55:12.020 most wrong. And he's a stellar example of the, of the untrammeled intellect, you know, and I kind of

00:55:17.840 see this in the new atheist movement too. It's like, we're so smart that our theories can replace

00:55:25.940 the transcendent. Now your way out of that, I think you just told me your way out of that

00:55:31.020 is your involvement on the aesthetic front with the arts, right?

00:55:35.740 Well, I think so. Well, there are two, there are two ways. There's also humility. I think I come

00:55:41.580 back to that point. What you're describing is hubris and that's something which is, which is common,

00:55:48.100 particularly common among intelligent people, I think.

00:55:50.440 Right, right. Absolutely. It's the cardinal sin of the intellect is hubris.

00:55:55.060 Yes, exactly. But yes, the arts, I think, are, I suppose, our way out if they are sustained

00:56:05.120 because they satisfy that human need to understand ourselves and to explore ourselves and to

00:56:13.220 interrogate our existence. It's so important, therefore, that the arts aren't curtailed in

00:56:20.340 the way that they currently are being done.

00:56:21.480 So let me ask you a question about that. I agree with that. I mean, I see that the signal power

00:56:26.780 of beauty, especially manifested in music for me, speaks of something that's truly transcendent. So

00:56:33.100 here's a question for you. So is there a superordinate unity at which the arts aim? And is that unity not

00:56:44.440 equivalent to the monotheistic spirit? I know this is a major question, right? I'm thrown out a major

00:56:51.260 question. It is a major question.

00:56:52.460 Something makes the arts the arts, right? It's their movement towards beauty. What beauty and

00:56:57.860 unity? Transcendence. But are the arts unified? Are they the manifestation of a unitary spirit?

00:57:05.500 And you see, that unitary spirit is what I think is the antithesis of power.

00:57:09.680 I couldn't profess to know. And I think a lot of people have attempted to define even what

00:57:14.060 art is. And I think people have failed. I've always liked Zola's definition of art as

00:57:20.100 life seen through a temperament. The idea that what the artist does is attempt to present to you

00:57:28.080 his view of the way that he sees the world on the understanding that we all see the world

00:57:33.780 differently. And there is something quite beautiful about that, about expressing ourselves artistically.

00:57:40.260 But it's not just variety. You know it's not just variety because there are qualitative distinctions

00:57:45.840 between presentations of worldview. So, I mean, Dostoevsky trumps 50 shades of gray, right?

00:57:53.280 Because, so there's a hierarchy of rank, right? And the greatest artists occupy the highest rank. And

00:58:00.100 that is what tilts them more towards that transcendent unity, I think. It's something like that.

00:58:05.260 Well, yeah, that's absolutely right. It's genius, isn't it? Genius. That's how the canon is formed.

00:58:11.840 I mean, the canon is, you know, I think academics like to think that they're the ones who select

00:58:15.020 what is in the canon. The canon is formed through influence, through to what extent other great

00:58:20.100 artists borrow and imitate and innovate on the back of other artists.

00:58:25.060 That's that same depth of presupposition that I was describing earlier, right?

00:58:29.040 Yes.

00:58:29.340 The more fundamental a text is, the more other texts depend on it.

00:58:32.860 But the reason they do, the reason that artists do that is because obviously,

00:58:36.620 people like Michelangelo, Brahms, Dickens, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, all of these are clearly

00:58:44.920 the pinnacles of human achievement. They're achieving something that most of us simply cannot

00:58:49.400 do. All we can do is look in awe at what they have achieved and other artists look in awe at that

00:58:54.600 and try to come close to it, or at least, or in some cases of extreme genius, build upon it.

00:58:59.680 And that is maybe dissatisfying something fundamental.

00:59:05.400 Well, there's a cardinal observation, because the hypothesis that you just put forward is something

00:59:11.040 like the purpose of art is to, what would you say, to provoke the emulation of greatness.

00:59:19.600 And that's based on the hypothesis that there is something transcendent that's great.

00:59:24.860 You know, and that's that unity that I think that the arts are striving toward.

00:59:29.740 Yeah, well, I don't know. I don't think it's conscious like that. I don't think that we...

00:59:33.300 I don't think so either.

00:59:35.120 And all I can say is that artists, I think, great art provokes something of the numinous

00:59:42.540 in us.

00:59:43.640 Right.

00:59:44.640 And whether that's religious or spiritual or godly or whatever, I don't know.

00:59:49.180 But it's something that...

00:59:49.920 Well, I think it is sort of by definition, right? I mean, you know what I mean?

00:59:53.640 It's like, well, if that's not religious, then what is? Dogma?

00:59:57.480 It's certainly religious on the experiential front.

00:59:59.880 Yes, I suppose what I mean is it doesn't point to the existence of God, necessarily.

01:00:03.820 It just points to the existence of something beyond ourselves that we require in order

01:00:08.640 to have a satisfactory life.

01:00:10.760 That sounds a lot like God.

01:00:13.180 Okay.

01:00:14.020 Well, that will be depending on your definition of God.

01:00:15.300 I'm not trying to be picky, you know?

01:00:17.060 No, I know.

01:00:17.360 Well, that's the thing, man, because it is a matter of definition, you know?

01:00:20.700 Like, I don't think God...

01:00:25.960 This transcendent unity that I've been tapping towards here is something like the central animating

01:00:33.880 spirit of mankind at its best.

01:00:36.360 It's something like that.

01:00:37.420 Now, you might say, well, is that real?

01:00:39.060 And that's not a good question, because you can't ask that question without bringing an

01:00:45.560 a priori set of presuppositions about what constitutes real to bear on the question.

01:00:50.340 Like, is it the same reality as the materialist atheists claim most real?

01:00:55.120 Probably not.

01:00:56.720 No.

01:00:57.540 But that doesn't mean it's not real.

01:00:59.040 It just means we can't agree on what constitutes real.

01:01:01.440 Well, we can't agree on what constitutes a woman, so that's not surprising.

01:01:04.580 Well, then, let's suggest then that, or let's agree that the critical social justice movement

01:01:10.580 is essentially godless.

01:01:12.520 I think it is godless.

01:01:14.240 It doesn't have...

01:01:15.540 It has no yearning after that sense of the numinous, and it has no capacity to produce

01:01:20.680 it.

01:01:21.340 That's why no great art has ever been produced from...

01:01:24.820 Can you name a single woke activist who has produced a great work of art in any medium

01:01:30.760 or any genre?

01:01:31.900 Because I can't.

01:01:32.680 I don't think...

01:01:33.460 Okay, so that's an interesting...

01:01:35.600 That's a very interesting observation.

01:01:37.300 You know, what is it?

01:01:38.060 The gospel statement, by their fruits, you will know them.

01:01:41.000 So if they bear nothing but bitter fruit, then you might think they're worshipping the

01:01:44.580 wrong god, or in your case, they're no god.

01:01:48.180 But, right, that was your criticism of the woke types.

01:01:51.380 I think they worship power as a god, but whatever, we're close enough on that, so we don't

01:01:55.320 have to discuss it.

01:01:56.160 So let's talk about the artistic front here, because I see the scientists being mowed down

01:02:01.820 like grass under a lawnmower by the woke activists.

01:02:04.380 And that's going to continue, because the real scientists don't have a political bone

01:02:08.160 in their body, and they have no idea what's coming for them.

01:02:10.720 But I'm particularly sickened by the bloody artists, because the only thing they have to

01:02:15.480 offer is this connection to the truly numinous.

01:02:18.900 And that's true across art forms, right?

01:02:20.660 They point to the numinous, and they're willing increasingly to subordinate that ideology or

01:02:25.900 to remain silent in the face of this onslaught to bolster their moral self-righteousness.

01:02:31.580 Yeah, that's really difficult.

01:02:32.240 They're cutting their own throats.

01:02:33.640 It's horrible to watch.

01:02:34.860 It's horrible to witness, because genius, artistic genius, can only come about by those who can

01:02:39.820 think outside the box, who are not conformists, ultimately.

01:02:45.080 This is a movement that demands conformity.

01:02:47.940 And artists, of all people, are the ones who are going along with it.

01:02:50.200 Now, to an extent, I suppose that's always happened, though.

01:02:52.520 I mean, it must have always happened, because people, artists, have to get on with the business

01:02:55.660 of living.

01:02:56.920 Back in my era, the Renaissance period, the area that I studied for my doctorate, you

01:03:02.240 had patrons.

01:03:03.280 You had patrons of the arts in society who would effectively say, to William Shakespeare,

01:03:07.140 for instance, when King James patronized William Shakespeare's company, the King's

01:03:10.500 Men, it went from being the Lord Chamberlain's Men to the King's Men, and he said, they were

01:03:15.180 patronized, but Shakespeare could write whatever he wanted, right?

01:03:18.500 The great patrons are the ones who don't try to steer the artist in a certain way.

01:03:23.060 I mean, sure, you would get, for instance, at the start of Shakespeare's narrative poem,

01:03:27.340 Venus and Adonis, you have this sort of sycophantic passage about the person to whom it is

01:03:34.720 dedicated, Henry Ruthsley, the Earl.

01:03:37.880 And that's because Shakespeare also needed to live at that point.

01:03:41.560 He wasn't yet a rich man at that point.

01:03:42.940 He became very, very rich ultimately, but at that point he wasn't.

01:03:46.800 So artists do require an income.

01:03:51.380 And in order, in our day and age, in order for an artist to be employed, they have to

01:03:56.480 satisfy a set of demands by the gatekeepers of various industries.

01:04:00.140 That's theatre, the publishing industry, comedy industry, television, executives, commissioners,

01:04:07.100 all of those kind of things.

01:04:07.980 The problem is that at the moment, all of those people are entirely captured by the

01:04:13.060 woke ideology.

01:04:13.900 They are all, it's foot soldiers, or at least even in some cases, I suppose you could call

01:04:18.980 them, it's clergy.

01:04:20.280 And so they make these demands to artists.

01:04:23.260 And I suppose, unless you are independently wealthy, what choice have you?

01:04:28.380 In other words, what this thing does is it's, you know, we can't all be a Van Gogh living

01:04:32.860 in complete poverty, doing whatever the hell he wanted.

01:04:35.680 Well, that's a very sympathetic account.

01:04:39.980 And I have some sympathy for that account because I've seen people, many, many people

01:04:46.140 who've faced the threat of cancellation and are terrified by it, not least often because

01:04:52.040 they have a family to support, let's say.

01:04:54.980 But let me push back on that a little bit.

01:04:59.140 And you tell me if you think there's any flaws in this.

01:05:01.500 Okay, so look, as far as I can tell, your best bet in life is to play the most transcendent,

01:05:13.100 iterable strategy.

01:05:15.380 And because you're going to pay a price for what you do, no matter what you do.

01:05:18.660 You're going to pay, in fact, you're going to pay the ultimate price no matter what you

01:05:21.580 do.

01:05:22.000 So you're already screwed in the fundamental analysis.

01:05:24.480 Now, and that means that you're, the fact that you're going to pay means that you're

01:05:30.220 always confronted with a choice.

01:05:31.800 And the choice is to say what you believe to be true and take the consequences, or to

01:05:37.360 fail to say what you believe to be true and take the consequences.

01:05:41.080 Now, people will say, well, I don't want to speak right now because look at the consequences.

01:05:47.280 And I would say, well, that's always why people have lied throughout history, is to avoid the

01:05:51.700 consequences or to get something they don't deserve.

01:05:54.220 And so I could say, from the judgment perspective, rather than the mercy perspective, especially

01:05:59.700 to artists, it's like, I don't give a damn about your financial need.

01:06:03.760 The only thing you have to offer the world is the purity of your vision.

01:06:08.220 And if you sacrifice that, well, you're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

01:06:12.620 And you might be protected in the short term, but they're going to come for you in the future.

01:06:16.940 But maybe a lot of these creative people are thinking to themselves, I will play the game

01:06:20.320 as far as I need to, so that I can establish myself and then I can make my own artistic

01:06:24.460 choices.

01:06:25.360 That's happened many times.

01:06:25.660 Yeah, right.

01:06:26.360 It doesn't work.

01:06:27.060 That's what the faculty did.

01:06:28.740 They said over and over as they rose up the ladder from graduate student to professor,

01:06:33.280 well, once I have tenure, I'll be brave.

01:06:36.700 It's like, that isn't how it works.

01:06:38.400 You don't get braver because you're more pretty.

01:06:40.300 Okay, so you didn't do that.

01:06:42.560 So why didn't you do it?

01:06:44.480 So look, I completely share your sense of dismay and particularly from artists, you

01:06:50.740 know, I think the world of academia is rather more careerist, I think.

01:06:55.820 And so, although I think it's just as unforgivable, it's more understandable.

01:07:00.400 I think to be an artist, you have to be the kind of person whose sole fealty is to your

01:07:06.220 muse.

01:07:06.880 It has to be that.

01:07:08.040 Otherwise, you're not really an artist in any serious sense at all.

01:07:10.400 You have to be creating what it is you are personally impelled to create, whatever drives

01:07:15.480 you.

01:07:16.580 And, you know, there are some people who have done that in history.

01:07:20.020 William Blake was poor throughout his life, died in poverty, and he could see all these

01:07:27.160 mediocre people playing the game and becoming rich, but he couldn't do it.

01:07:32.280 He was too much of an authentic artist.

01:07:34.200 He wasn't able to do that.

01:07:37.020 And I wish all artists could have that.

01:07:39.280 But the other thing about that is actually very few people are great artists.

01:07:44.000 Most people are sort of peddlers of popular culture or, you know, kind of functional hacks,

01:07:50.140 the people who can produce the entertainment that actually we do really need and require

01:07:54.440 that, like, I'm not trying to denigrate popular culture.

01:07:56.540 I think it's really, really important, but it's not the same as great art, right?

01:08:00.080 So pop music, I really enjoy pop music, but I don't pretend to myself that it's Brahms.

01:08:05.700 You know, we have those hierarchies, hierarchies, by the way, which the woke would like to tear

01:08:10.600 down and say, that's all about the implementation of power again and the implementation of privilege.

01:08:15.420 They will say there's no difference between a...

01:08:18.100 There's no such thing as quality.

01:08:20.320 No, no, no, exactly.

01:08:21.360 Exactly.

01:08:21.680 Because it's all about subjective feeling.

01:08:23.200 And they would say that there's no difference between an Elton John song and a Beethoven symphony.

01:08:27.820 They'll say there's no difference there.

01:08:28.940 It's just about, you know, and to pretend that there is, is a problem in and of itself.

01:08:32.580 And that's why I think there are two things.

01:08:35.920 The way that artists could really be supported in this partly comes from academia, partly

01:08:41.220 comes from literary theorists and people who, by the way, I think have completely lost the

01:08:45.520 plot, but they need to retain the primacy of the canon, of the Western canon.

01:08:49.860 They need to say, actually, there are certain works of art that are greater than others.

01:08:54.720 They need to be able to be bold enough to say that, rather than stripping away Chaucer or

01:09:01.640 Shakespeare or Marlowe or whatever from the canon to make way for mediocre writers who happen to

01:09:07.820 represent a marginalized group identity.

01:09:10.920 Well, I see in that, again, this re-emergence of the spirit of Cain.

01:09:16.580 Because Cain, imagine you're a mediocre artist, wannabe.

01:09:21.140 And part of the reason for that, maybe, isn't so much that you're talentless, although that might

01:09:25.420 have something to do with it, but that you're unwilling to say a true word or to paint a true

01:09:29.980 brushstroke. You're too cowardly, so you're not going anywhere.

01:09:33.180 Okay, so you're getting irritated and resentful because your sacrifices aren't being appreciated by God.

01:09:39.980 And so what do you do? Well, if you're Cain, you destroy your own ideal, right?

01:09:44.400 Because that's what Cain, see, Cain says to God, my punishment is more than I can bear.

01:09:48.960 Now, that's a very ambiguous phrase because you can't tell exactly what he refers to.

01:09:53.700 But as far as I can tell, what he means is, well, I've really spent my whole life miserable and

01:09:59.400 jealous because I'm not able and I want to be more than anything else. And now I've gone and killed my

01:10:06.000 own ideal. And so how can I live? I've killed my own ideal. Well, that's what these bloody woke

01:10:12.460 artists, wannabe types are doing.

01:10:15.460 It's not just even the woke. This predates the woke. Harold Bloom, the great literary theorist,

01:10:21.040 used to write about the critical theorists, the identitarian theorists of the 90s as being the

01:10:26.360 theorists of resentment. That's what he called them. I think that's exactly right. It started way back in

01:10:32.380 the 60s with feminist writers trying to problematize writers such as D.H. Lawrence or Norman Mailer or

01:10:38.360 whoever it might be, Ernest Hemingway, whatever, saying that these writers are sexist. I mean,

01:10:43.120 when I was studying as an undergraduate for English literature, you basically got the highest marks

01:10:48.200 if you problematize texts. If you went through a play and teased out the homophobic elements or the

01:10:53.540 racist elements, you'd get rewarded almost like you were a kind of moral detective. And I think it all

01:10:58.760 started there. It goes way back to that.

01:11:00.440 Well, so then I would say that's part of the prideful hubris of the intellect. So you have these

01:11:06.760 second-rate creative wannabes in English departments, let's say. And instead of

01:11:12.820 worshipping the spirit of Shakespeare, which is what they should properly be doing and transmitting

01:11:17.180 that to students, they elevate their critical capacity over and above the creative capacity of

01:11:22.760 the artist, lay moral claim to the integrity of their arguments, and then propagandize to the

01:11:28.680 students who pay $50,000 a year for the privilege.

01:11:32.140 Which is why I go back to humility, because I think the only sensible or intelligent approach

01:11:37.060 to Shakespeare is humility. Similarly, you know, when we saw recently the publishing house,

01:11:41.900 which publishing house was it that decided to rewrite P.G. Woodhouse's novels? P.G. Woodhouse

01:11:46.920 is the greatest comic prose stylist in the English language. The idea that a group of 20-something

01:11:52.840 activists in a publishing house think that they can write better than Woodhouse, think that they

01:11:58.180 can improve his work by this sort of horrendous, boulderized version.

01:12:01.920 Especially morally.

01:12:03.660 Of course morally. It's all based on morals. So it's so infuriating. I mean, it makes me very,

01:12:08.900 very angry because it's the arrogance of that that I find absolutely stunning. But similarly with

01:12:15.660 productions of Shakespeare. So there's some... I just saw a review the other day for a production of

01:12:21.740 Julius Caesar by the Royal Shakespeare Company. By all accounts, it's just an identitarian mess.

01:12:26.280 It's just... It's taking the play and just reshaping it to promote voguish ideas that are in fashion at

01:12:34.800 the moment about group identity and the primacy of group identity and power structures, etc.

01:12:39.040 And therefore, they're missing the entire play. And as an audience member... This is why I think

01:12:43.040 it's better to read Shakespeare at this point, because as an audience member, you are subject

01:12:49.720 to whatever interpretation the director wants to impose on it. And if that director is really a

01:12:55.080 preacher in disguise, then you're just going to get a sermon, not a play. That seems to me what's

01:13:00.940 happening over and over again. I saw today, actually, there was an article about Macbeth.

01:13:06.160 Yeah, yeah. Trigger warning.

01:13:08.500 It's a trigger warning on Macbeth at the University in Belfast, Queens University in Belfast, right?

01:13:12.980 Now, those people are studying a module on Shakespeare. And it's actually even a secondary

01:13:17.540 module. They already have a decent knowledge of the subject. This is like an advanced module where they

01:13:22.860 are to really get into the weeds with this great writer. And to put a trigger warning in that is

01:13:29.220 to say that the way that we need to perceive these great texts is through our particularly

01:13:35.300 obsessive, moralistic, identitarian lens, and that we have to see them as morally dangerous

01:13:42.200 texts, potentially dangerous texts. Well, maybe they're exactly right on that front,

01:13:46.880 because if you are a woke propagandist, there is nothing more dangerous to you than the spirit

01:13:51.220 of Shakespeare. Sure. And there is something dangerous, actually, particularly about Macbeth,

01:13:55.560 I think, because in Macbeth, I mean, I think Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's greatest plays.

01:14:00.880 And I think one of the reasons why I always found it disturbing, even as a child, even though I didn't

01:14:05.180 really know why I found it disturbing as a child, because it's one of those that gets on

01:14:07.980 school texts, because it's such a short one. But actually, when you watch it, it isn't like

01:14:13.160 your... Shakespeare created so many sort of great embodiments of evil, people like Iago in Othello,

01:14:21.460 or Edmund in King Lear, or Aaron in Titus Andronicus, these figures. But Macbeth is different,

01:14:27.360 because with Macbeth, you go along with Macbeth knowing that it could be you. I think it's the

01:14:34.000 closest to what... When you write about Solzhenitsyn, talking about the line of good and evil

01:14:39.220 cutting through the heart of every man, that to me is Macbeth. Because Macbeth is like this incredible

01:14:44.360 study into... Or representation of, what if we lived in a world where we didn't have free will?

01:14:49.580 Macbeth knows everything he is doing is wrong, and cannot stop it from happening. And that's...

01:14:55.040 It's like when you're watching it, if you're watching a good production of Macbeth,

01:14:58.040 you are Macbeth, right? And you're falling into this vortex. You're... That's why I think...

01:15:05.160 Well, that's actually like a definition of great literature. I think literature almost always

01:15:11.480 portrays something like a romantic adventure, and then something like the battle of good against

01:15:18.120 evil, depending on how that's laid out, right? It's a romantic battle of good against evil. Okay,

01:15:23.320 but the great literary authors place that battle in the soul of a single individual, right? So that

01:15:32.140 each character contains the entire landscape of the cosmic battle, instead of there being some

01:15:37.960 characters parsed out as good, and other characters parsed out as villainous. And so then when you sit in

01:15:43.460 the audience, and you experience that, you're experiencing the divine drama in your own soul.

01:15:50.560 Yeah, and that is disturbing, right? Let me throw you something at you. So I went to

01:15:56.160 Jerusalem with Jonathan Paggio, and Paggio is about the deepest religious thinker I ever encountered. And

01:16:03.380 he was a postmodernist for a good while, and so is expert in that domain as well, which makes him a

01:16:08.700 particularly vicious critic now of the postmodernist types. Anyways, we walked the Via Dolorosa in

01:16:15.800 Jerusalem. And what that is, so if you imagine a tragic story, then you embody that. And the ultimate

01:16:26.060 tragic story is the worst possible thing happening to the best possible person, right? That's like,

01:16:31.940 that's the pinnacle towards which all tragedy strives, you might say. And walking the Via Dolorosa

01:16:38.620 is an exercise in literary experience. Because the point of that pilgrimage, so to speak, is to place

01:16:47.300 yourself not only in the role of the recipient of all that brutality, but also in the role of the

01:16:55.240 deliverer of the brutality, right? To imagine yourself as the mob, as yourself as the best friend

01:17:02.080 who betrays, as the intellectually hubristic Pharisee and scribe, as the hapless ruler of Rome,

01:17:10.260 that's all you. And that's what literature does. It walks you through that. And I think Macbeth and

01:17:16.420 Macbeth and plays of that magnitude are threatening to the woke types, most particularly because they do

01:17:26.020 require that pilgrimage of moral inquiry. And that does upset the ideological apple cart. So they hate

01:17:34.280 art. They hate art because it pushes past propaganda always. Exactly. And that's why the passion of the

01:17:39.380 Christ is the most powerful story and the most enduring story, not story, but account of the

01:17:45.720 brutality that we, I mean, when you read about the experience of Jesus on the way to Calvary,

01:17:50.940 can any of us be sure that we wouldn't be among the jeering mobs throwing the stones?

01:17:54.720 No, we can be sure we would be. We can be certain we would be.

01:17:58.400 Well, the woke don't agree with that, do they? Because the woke like to judge the past. And they

01:18:02.840 will say that if I had lived in the antebellum South, if I'd have lived in the civil war, I would

01:18:08.340 have been the ones trying to free the slaves. I wouldn't have been a slave owner. I wouldn't have

01:18:11.420 been one of those people who supported racial segregation. But of course they would. And in fact,

01:18:17.460 they would have been the first ones to do it because they can't think outside the world.

01:18:20.260 All right. So I've been thinking about this mythological motif of the harrowing of hell.

01:18:27.080 So what happens in this ultimate tragedy is that, well, first of all, the best possible person is

01:18:34.160 put to death by the worst possible people in the worst possible way. And you might think, well,

01:18:38.840 that's as bad as it gets, right? Because sort of by definition, that's as bad as it gets.

01:18:43.360 But you know, that isn't as bad as it gets. And that's pretty awful because, you know, you just

01:18:49.200 pointed to something is that if you're looking at history and you have any bloody sense, you think,

01:18:53.720 I wouldn't have been a victim or a hero. I would have been a perpetrator because most people were

01:18:58.280 perpetrators. Although, you know, there were plenty of victims. I would have been a perpetrator.

01:19:03.000 And so then when you realize that you likely would have been a perpetrator and that you probably are

01:19:08.500 at the moment, unbeknownst to yourself, well, then you're facing something, I think, that is in some

01:19:13.740 ways worse than death. I think it's hell. I actually think that is that you have to understand that

01:19:19.740 there is a part of you that would willingly dwell in hell before you can rescue yourself from it at

01:19:24.940 all. You know, and I think that's what we're called to do in the aftermath of the 20th century

01:19:29.340 and the horrors of Auschwitz to wake up and think, oh, my God, there's something inside us that's so

01:19:34.500 malevolent that to gaze upon it for a second is to suffer for nightmares from nightmares for the rest

01:19:39.920 of your life, but that that's also your moral obligation. And that seems to me what the harrowing

01:19:44.660 of hell is, right? It's the descent through death into the realm of malevolence itself and to take that

01:19:51.260 on to yourself. God, that's a horrible thing. So when the woke try to police art, apply trigger warnings

01:19:57.120 to art, censor it, remove scenes, etc., are they, in your view, attempting to prevent that experience,

01:20:05.680 that necessary human experience of confronting the worst possible version of yourself? Is that

01:20:10.820 what they're doing? That's what it looks like to me. I mean, I think they're protecting themselves

01:20:15.800 from chaotic complexity, but that also denies them possibility. So that's terrible and hope.

01:20:21.920 But more importantly, they're trying to shuffle off the responsibility of confronting Satan in the

01:20:28.600 desert. So there's something, well, I mean, there's something quite understandable about all of that,

01:20:32.840 isn't there? Because it is uncomfortable. I mean, people have done this with the arts forever. When,

01:20:38.660 I mean, one of the most interesting things I think about King Lear, for instance, Shakespeare's King

01:20:42.860 Lear, is that that was not the, after 1680, roughly 1680, his version wasn't on the stage anymore.

01:20:50.080 It was rewritten by a guy called Nahum Tate. And that was the version of King Lear that was on the

01:20:54.660 stage for 150 years. And in that version, you have a happy ending. You don't have Lear come in,

01:21:01.400 cradling his daughter, who's been hanged, because they couldn't cope with that. They couldn't cope.

01:21:08.420 And it's not just, it's not just, because I think King Lear, of all his plays, really represents this

01:21:13.640 complete barren. I mean, it is barren. It's pre-Christian. It is godless. It's this society where

01:21:19.020 exactly what you describe, the best type of person has the worst possible experience.

01:21:24.980 In spite of what critics have said, Lear is meant to be much loved, a great ruler who is subjected

01:21:31.420 to this endless cruelty that ultimately ends in an unbearable moment. The unbearable moment is

01:21:38.160 Cordelia coming in dead. His fool has been hanged. It is complete nihilism. This is a play that makes

01:21:48.020 you think, what if there was nothing else? What if there was no God? What if being good didn't

01:21:52.860 matter? What if the very worst things happened to the best? And they couldn't handle it. So

01:21:57.200 the Nahum Tate version was what people went to see. And in the end, Cordelia gets married to Edgar,

01:22:02.060 and it's a happy ending. And although that seems like a travesty to us, it actually makes sense to

01:22:07.500 me as well. It makes sense why audience goers didn't want to confront that. Why would they?

01:22:12.920 Well, I don't think they would, but I think the horrible truth might be that the only way to

01:22:20.160 paradise is through death and hell. And that's like, I'm not saying that with any degree of

01:22:25.720 satisfaction, but I don't see it. Because look, one of the things I tried to do, I took my studies of

01:22:32.040 Auschwitz in particular, but also the Gulag really seriously. I was trying to figure out,

01:22:36.700 well, I tried to put myself in the position of an Auschwitz camp guard who kind of enjoyed his job.

01:22:46.180 Right. And the horrible thing is you can put yourself in that position. And the horrible

01:22:50.360 thing about that is you discover all sorts of things about yourself by thereby doing so that

01:22:54.740 you pretty much wish you never discovered. But the upside, and I suppose this is the redemptive

01:23:00.580 upside, is that if you recognize within yourself the source of all malevolence and evil, if you can

01:23:07.400 actually do that, if you'll look at that, then you can transcend it. But there's no other way.

01:23:12.780 There's no pretense. And so, and I've been terrified of this for decades. It's what I taught

01:23:17.440 my students at Harvard and at the University of Toronto. I said, you have to take upon yourself

01:23:22.360 the sins of the perpetrator in order to rectify the catastrophe of the Holocaust.

01:23:26.260 You know, and weirdly and perversely, you know, the leftist radicals in some demented way are

01:23:32.560 insisting upon that, right? They say, well, the problem is, is they put the onus on the souls of

01:23:39.160 other people. They say, well, look, you powerful people, you white people, you privileged group

01:23:44.820 people, you're the perpetrators. It's like, no, God damn it, you're the perpetrator.

01:23:49.220 But it's really hard, though, for them to put themselves in that position and for them to

01:23:53.080 confront that aspect of their own soul, if we want to call it that.

01:23:57.340 Yeah, it's the hardest thing. It's the hardest thing.

01:24:00.120 But also, they can't do it because they don't recognize their own behavior for what it is.

01:24:04.920 They don't see that they are the cruelest of the cruel. They don't see that they are themselves

01:24:09.540 capable of all sorts of monstrosities because I've seen the way they behave.

01:24:13.840 It also might be, Andrew, that they don't see anything. Like, something has to, okay,

01:24:20.700 I always believed that if you understood something, you could find your way forward. Like, I would say

01:24:26.800 that's, and I think my father helped me with that in some deep way, right? He instilled that in me

01:24:31.960 in some way I don't really understand. And I've always been convinced of that. And so,

01:24:36.660 so one of the consequences of that is the idea that, well, if you can, if you can take it upon

01:24:44.840 yourself to gaze into the abyss, let's say as deep as you possibly can, that what you will see

01:24:51.260 eventually, if you look hard enough, is the light. But, you know, you have to believe that the light

01:24:56.160 is a possibility, right? And maybe that's the fundamental axiom of an appropriate faith,

01:25:01.000 is the light is a possibility. And if all you believe is that power rules, well, how can you look

01:25:06.380 upon evil without despair? And what are the consequences for humanity if you have a ruling

01:25:11.400 ideology that doesn't enable any of us to have that experience anymore? Because that seems to me

01:25:16.600 Well, we know what the consequence is. We saw it in the 20th century. Right.

01:25:21.100 Right? Many, many times. Well, I suppose then it's not too alarmist to say that that's where the

01:25:27.740 woke are leading us. Well, that's what it looks like to me. Well, no, no comedy, no art,

01:25:34.660 no literature, no science, no free speech, no redemption from guilt, no genuine individual

01:25:44.300 identity, no up, no down, right? Just a desert of barren endeavor, right?

01:25:51.600 Yes.

01:25:51.880 With maybe some impulsive hedonism thrown in now and then.

01:25:55.020 And yet they would deny everything you've just said. They would deny every claim that

01:26:00.220 you're making there. They would say they're not trying to do any of that at all. That they want

01:26:04.480 to preserve art. They want free speech to flourish. They just want to protect marginalized communities

01:26:09.080 within that. That would be their argument. So it's very difficult to combat.

01:26:13.340 Well, the marginalized community argument is a very interesting one too. I've been trying to work that

01:26:19.040 through, especially with Pajot. And he helped me walk through the idea of the center and the fringe

01:26:25.760 in the biblical corpus. And so there's an idea. There's an idea, for example, in the ancient geography

01:26:32.320 of the, of the, of the, of the ancient Israelite times, the poor were allowed to glean on the edges

01:26:40.160 of the fields, right? And so there was a, a border of uncertainty around, what would you say?

01:26:48.860 Around a demarcated territory. And that border of uncertainty was where the marginalized were allowed

01:26:56.500 to thrive. And so there does have to be a center and there has to be a margin. But if you bring the

01:27:03.180 margin to the center, you destroy the center and you destroy the margin. And that's partly why I don't

01:27:09.420 buy the postmodern claim that it's compassion that's driving the centering of the marginalized,

01:27:15.760 because the, that's a serpent that eats its own tail. And I think what we're seeing happen right now

01:27:21.440 on the LGBT front is that the fringe of the fringe is devouring the fringe faster than the center even,

01:27:27.860 right? Because you know that most of the kids who are surgically transitioned are, would, would have

01:27:33.040 been gay. It's 80%. Yeah. Right. So that's pretty damn interesting. And so. Well, that might be the thing

01:27:40.020 that breaks it apart. I wonder if that's the thing that breaks it apart, because there is now a schism

01:27:44.640 within this LGBTQIA2S plus, whatever you want to call it, community, which doesn't exist anyway.

01:27:52.760 And the schism is precisely what you described, which is that gender identity ideology is not just

01:27:58.320 a fanciful theory, a quasi-religious way of viewing the world. It's also actively anti-gay,

01:28:07.560 insofar as it does suggest, well, firstly, it denies homosexuality, because homosexuality and

01:28:15.440 gay rights have always been predicated on the recognition that a minority of people are attracted

01:28:19.840 to members of their own sex. It eliminates that by saying there's no such thing as same-sex

01:28:24.220 attraction, and that actually you should be attracted to gender or gender identity. This is

01:28:29.000 why Stonewall, which is the UK's foremost LGBT charity, redefined the word homosexual on their website

01:28:35.240 to say it's same gender attracted. I wrote an article recently about this, and I mentioned

01:28:40.960 Nancy Kelly. Non-women being attracted to other non-women. Right. No, non-men. Non-men being

01:28:46.580 attracted to other non-men. That was great, man. That was great. That's the definition of lesbian now,

01:28:50.740 is non-men are attracted to non-men. It's unbelievable. And Nancy Kelly, the CEO of Stonewall,

01:28:57.160 has said that women who want to exclude biological men from their dating pool are sexual racists,

01:29:03.320 or akin to sexual racists. Yeah. Well, that's the logical, that's the logical. I said this

01:29:08.440 five years ago in a discussion I had at Queen's University. It's like, well, you don't think

01:29:13.660 discrimination is right. No, we don't. Well, how about sexual discrimination? Should you just lay

01:29:18.500 down on the ground and spread your legs for every comer, so to speak? Yeah. Because you're certainly

01:29:23.220 being discriminatory if you don't. Like, really, like, fundamentally, that is the most egregious

01:29:28.640 form of discrimination. They're right about that. Absolutely. A sexual orientation is a form of

01:29:32.440 discrimination. Like, she says, you're like a sexual racist if you don't want to sleep with

01:29:36.360 someone with a penis and you're a woman. No, you're just homosexual. Right.

01:29:39.060 She's describing homosexuality there. But she's saying that homosexuality is itself bigoted.

01:29:44.160 And that's coming from the head of the gay rights, the foremost gay rights charity in this country.

01:29:48.160 That's insane. The inversions are incredible. You know, when I was at school, the kids,

01:29:53.660 the kids who were effeminate, the boys who were effeminate, who didn't want to play football and all

01:29:58.220 the rest of it. The bullies called them girls. They said, you're just girls. You're not even a

01:30:02.120 proper boy. You're not a real boy. That's what mermaids and Stonewall says now. They say that's

01:30:07.560 what the Tavistock was doing. They're saying you're basically probably trapped in the wrong body.

01:30:10.980 Let's fix you. Like you say, between 80 and 90 percent of adolescents referred to the Tavistock

01:30:15.600 Clinic are same-sex attracted. Well, that's what they do in Tehran. That's the head of gender

01:30:20.440 transformation, sex transformation surgery in the world, which is really quite something.

01:30:24.900 The mothers in Tehran and the heads of Stonewall are peas in a pod. They feel the same way about

01:30:32.180 homosexuality. Iran and Pakistan for a while, although not anymore, were funding same sex

01:30:38.380 change operations because they hang gay people from cranes. That's why. You get the death penalty

01:30:45.360 for being gay. So, of course, they want to heterosexualize and fix gay people. But I would

01:30:49.340 never have seen this coming. None of us did. You know, I've spoken to all these gay activists who've

01:30:53.560 come out of retirement, basically. And they're like, we never saw it coming where, you know,

01:30:58.000 it's more dangerous now to be a gay kid than it was when I was growing up. Far more dangerous.

01:31:03.420 Oh, yes. When I was growing up.

01:31:04.840 Oh, yes.

01:31:05.720 Yeah.

01:31:06.220 So you guys were actually doing pretty good under the, what would you say?

01:31:09.740 We were doing all right.

01:31:10.520 The thumb of the Judeo-Christian fascists.

01:31:12.880 I mean, we had-

01:31:13.420 Instead of the tender mercies of the tea activist types.

01:31:16.320 You know, we had the government putting, implementing a thing called Section 28, where they said that

01:31:21.040 teachers couldn't mention homosexuality in schools unless they linked it to AIDS. That's

01:31:26.100 not great. That's a terrible situation to be in. So there was that. So we had anti-gay ideas from

01:31:32.580 members of staff, fine. If you were out as a gay kid, which no one was, by the way, you would be

01:31:38.720 beaten up. You would be bullied. You would be abused, right? But what you wouldn't have is that figures

01:31:44.820 in authority wanting to chop your dick off. Right, right, right.

01:31:48.560 And that's, so it's much more dangerous now. Like you wouldn't have politicians and the media

01:31:54.680 and the commentariat and gay charities saying, maybe we need to fix you. Maybe we need to sterilize

01:32:00.880 you, medicalize you.

01:32:01.140 Okay, so let me ask you, let me ask you a question about that. And this is one that's really,

01:32:05.820 well, I don't know what to make of it. You know, I, just like the stereotypical guy who says he's not

01:32:10.880 bigoted, I have a lot of gay friends and they're people I really admire.

01:32:14.500 So Bjorn Lomburg, Douglas Murray, you, like Andy Ngo, you know, that's four. Those are pretty

01:32:20.300 stellar examples, by the way. I have a sneaking suspicion, by the way, that the genetic configuration

01:32:25.700 that leads to male homosexuality is integrally tied up with creativity itself. And that's why

01:32:32.320 it sustains itself in the gene pool.

01:32:34.400 That is fascinating. If true, put it aside, but because I've always wondered why you have this,

01:32:38.920 this disproportionate correlation of homosexuality in art.

01:32:42.320 Another possibility too, which is that if you happen to get the balance between masculine and

01:32:47.220 feminine qualities exactly right as a man, you are hyper attractive to women.

01:32:53.520 Right.

01:32:54.080 So that's another possibility, right? So you could think of homosexuality as an overshoot of that

01:32:59.960 target. Now I'm speculating, although I think the creativity hypothesis is a better one. Imagine that

01:33:05.440 homosexuality is polygenetic, but it's associated with a much higher probability of creativity.

01:33:11.920 Well, then obviously it's going to be conserved, even though it has, you know, lack of reproductive

01:33:16.780 ability. It has to be associated with something stellar because obviously it would just disappear.

01:33:23.260 So, and gay men are radically overrepresented in creative disciplines, like radically.

01:33:28.100 If you can get to the heart of why that is, I'd be absolutely fascinated by that. But that was a

01:33:32.740 side point, wasn't it? That was a side point from what you wanted to say about-

01:33:35.320 Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Well, here is what I wanted to ask you about, and I don't know what

01:33:38.520 to do about this. It's like, I think that part of the problem that we're trying to figure out is

01:33:42.740 back 20 years ago, we did what we could to bring especially male homosexuality into the center,

01:33:49.560 by legalizing gay marriage and by attempting to normalize it in some ways. Now, I think that left

01:33:58.800 a lot of questions unanswered. So here's one question. It's like, well, okay, now if it's

01:34:03.240 normalized all of a sudden, same-sex relationships, same-sex sexual relationships, where do you draw

01:34:11.520 the line and what the hell do you teach children? And one answer would be, you don't talk about sex

01:34:16.360 at all. And another answer would be, well, you talk about gay sex 50% of the time. You know,

01:34:21.800 like, I don't know what the answer is, but it really is a problem. And I think we're dashing

01:34:27.620 ourselves to pieces in some ways, trying to solve that problem. And I don't know what the hell the

01:34:32.500 solution in the U.S. is take your kids out of the school system. That's what the solution seems to be.

01:34:38.420 So, but I don't know what you think about all that.

01:34:40.620 It's so difficult because I think educationists at the moment are getting it very, very wrong in terms of

01:34:44.480 what they're teaching children about sex and gender and sexuality and all the rest of it.

01:34:48.540 And I think gay people are bearing the brunt of a lot of the blame here. You know, so I think-

01:34:52.700 Oh, yeah.

01:34:53.340 What's happening is, you know, when you have drag queens twerking in front of children or stripping

01:34:57.920 in front of children or whatever-

01:34:58.540 Yeah, that doesn't seem good.

01:34:59.820 Doesn't look good. And because they have bracketed us all as LGBTQIA+, this is one big thing,

01:35:07.000 then, you know, and there's evidence, isn't there, that homophobia, or at least,

01:35:11.920 I don't really like the word, but anti-gay sentiment is on the rise because I think they

01:35:16.000 think this is gay people doing all of this stuff. It's not. It's gender ideologues. It's gender

01:35:21.560 ideologues who have taken over the LGBT community, whatever that might be. And as I've said, gender

01:35:27.120 ideology is actively hostile to homosexuality. So gay people aren't the agents of these societal

01:35:35.100 changes. They're the victims of it. Because now I'm getting it from both sides. I published

01:35:39.500 that article in the mail about the pride flag. And I was getting gender ideologues piling in on me,

01:35:47.360 calling me evil and telling me I should kill myself. And, you know, the lovely things that

01:35:52.000 the compassionate people often say. And then I was also getting right-wing people, mostly from

01:35:57.120 America, calling me a sodomite and saying that I was evil and that I was going to burn in hell

01:36:01.180 for my sexual orientation. So now we've got it from both sides. So great. Thanks for that. I mean,

01:36:05.640 that's what the woke have done. You know, it's not. And that's why. Yeah. Yeah. And that isn't

01:36:10.740 over yet. You know, that isn't over yet. That's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

01:36:15.180 And God only knows how it's going to shake out. I mean, this year's pride celebration was a whole new

01:36:20.980 set of. Well, people are getting sick of it. Yes. Yes. Well, and no bloody wonder. A month?

01:36:26.680 Really? Yeah. Good God, guys. Partly because it's become so corporate. You know,

01:36:31.740 it's a site. Corporations put their flags up every... They don't put it up in the Middle East or

01:36:35.540 in Saudi Arabia or places like that where it might actually make a difference, by the way,

01:36:39.620 flying that flag, where gay people are killed for being gay. No, they don't do that. But they put

01:36:44.040 it up here. They never did this, by the way, before gay marriage, before the age of consent was

01:36:50.220 equalized. They didn't do any of that. They're doing it now because corporations are so in lockstep

01:36:56.360 with the woke ideology, which is another reason, by the way, if you want to go back to this left-right

01:36:59.860 distinction, why I think this is so unhelpful because it's a movement. Right, right. I agree.

01:37:04.020 I agree. Well, and I don't think there's any worse woke than woke capitalism. No, no.

01:37:08.600 That's the bastard child of greed and ideology, man. It's some sort of monster.

01:37:12.560 Well, that is right-wing wokeness. It can't be anything but because capitalism is, you know,

01:37:17.040 these are essentially money-making bodies. These are not socialist organizations. So there is a

01:37:24.560 confusion there. And also, by the way, whenever they, the woke always side against the workers,

01:37:30.580 you know, whenever- I know, that's so, and the poor. And the poor. I know, that's so interesting

01:37:36.500 too, because I've watched the radicals, especially in Europe over the last five years, because I was

01:37:41.920 curious. It's like, well, when push comes to shove, let's say on the climate front, are they going

01:37:47.040 to sacrifice the poor on the altar of woke? And the answer is in a bloody heartbeat, in a second,

01:37:52.740 no holds barred. That's what net zero does. Net zero is precisely that. It's the poor that bear

01:37:57.000 the brunt. But that's why I don't think- Absolutely.

01:37:59.440 And whereas I'm probably wrong to say the wokeness is closer to the right or whatever that is,

01:38:04.760 it's definitely not a left-wing movement in any traditional understanding of what left-wing

01:38:08.000 means. It can't be. Now, I think we have to stop thinking about it politically altogether.

01:38:12.080 Exactly. I think fundamentally, the religious analysis is the right one. But that's a weird one,

01:38:16.880 Andrew. That's going to take us some strange places, because if this is actually, first of all,

01:38:21.380 we're actually making the claim that this is a spiritual battle, a religious battle. And that's

01:38:26.660 a hell of a claim to make, especially for somebody who's more tilted towards atheism. And I don't

01:38:32.560 even know what the hell it means to make that claim. But I don't think it is a political struggle

01:38:36.660 fundamentally.

01:38:37.800 That's right. And to bring that into the LGBTQ stuff, the way that sex education appears to

01:38:44.040 be run at the moment, I don't know how it is necessarily where you are, but in Wales, definitely,

01:38:49.040 in Scotland, definitely, and in England, we are having similar problems. You have gender

01:38:53.200 ideologues writing the curriculum, effectively.

01:38:55.880 Yeah.

01:38:56.240 So children are being told.

01:38:57.660 Even worse.

01:38:58.180 It's Canada, after all.

01:38:59.720 Oh, yeah, of course.

01:39:00.320 Oh, my dear. Think of this country. I mean, we've got narcissistic, we've got, what would

01:39:05.780 we say? We've got the cardinal narcissist running our country. He's everything woke you could

01:39:11.340 possibly imagine. And he's got that psychopathic charm that lends itself to fooling, gullible

01:39:17.120 women. It's a perfect bloody storm.

01:39:19.800 I don't see any difference between effectively encouraging teachers to promote gender identity

01:39:26.680 ideology to young children as having some kind of hook-handed Islamic cleric come in and say

01:39:33.540 gay people should be burned to death. I don't really see the difference there insofar as

01:39:37.420 you're promoting a really reactionary belief system onto children when it comes to the realm

01:39:44.880 of sex and sexuality. And I think that's really, really dangerous. So unless we grapple with

01:39:49.720 this point, or unless we as a general population grapple with the fact that sex education now

01:39:54.280 is really a religious preaching, that's all it is. You were talking about where do you

01:40:00.640 stop? How much do you teach them about what? Actually, kids generally learn and figure things

01:40:05.000 out for themselves, don't they? So I've always been of the view that sex education doesn't

01:40:08.860 need to be as, I think people need to know the basics. But I think there's far too much of it

01:40:14.020 going on. But we've reached the point where, I mean, you must have heard this audio recording

01:40:18.480 that was leaked this week from a school in England, a place called Rye College. The teacher was

01:40:24.100 recorded berating two 13-year-old girls because they would not accept that one of their peers

01:40:30.060 identified as a cat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And look, it looks silly. Well, it is pretty rude, you know.

01:40:36.100 It is. Cannot let the poor girl wear a tail and all that. Well, you know, this is the thing.

01:40:42.880 There was a report in the Telegraph this week as well saying that there's a school where

01:40:46.540 one child identifies as a horse. There's one who identifies as a dinosaur. There's one who quite

01:40:52.260 creatively identifies as a moon and wears a cape. Now, I think what's happening there is those kids

01:40:57.780 are being satirical. What they're seeing is- God, I hope so. No, I think they are. Go, kids, go.

01:41:03.360 You know, the kids that are saying, I'm a cat and I need to lie down and I need to be stroked and I

01:41:08.540 need to meow. Look, they have seen that the figures of authority, the teachers, are totally

01:41:14.020 capitulating to this bizarre belief system, this esoteric cult. And unless you- I would have done

01:41:20.660 that in a heartbeat when I was 13. I would have. As a kid, I would have 100%. I would have said,

01:41:25.140 I'm a velociraptor and, you know, you have to, you know, and you do what I say or I'll eat you

01:41:29.040 or whatever. I don't care what it is, but they, these kids are pushing. They always test the limits

01:41:33.700 anyway. But what's brilliant about this is the teachers can't do anything about it. If a young

01:41:41.480 child decides he's a moon and wears a cape and a teacher says, no, you're not, she's denying the

01:41:45.880 sacred creed of gender identity ideology, which is in the national curriculum now. So she'll get fired.

01:41:51.840 So this puts the kids in an incredible position of power. They're having fun with it. And this is

01:41:56.880 also why I'm slightly heartened by this, because I kind of think the kids are going to be our way

01:42:02.640 out of this. I think, I think, I hope that this mad religious fervor will burn out because the kids

01:42:08.580 see it for what it is. You know, the fact that that woman in that recording was saying that these

01:42:12.280 girls were, I think she said they were despicable. I think that was the word she used, despicable

01:42:15.820 for not validating or accepting their friend's identity as a cat. I mean, that's such an extreme

01:42:24.420 position for a teacher to take. I also don't, by the way, I don't think it's fair to dogpile her and

01:42:29.700 bombard. And I saw some, someone doxing her, putting a face. And look, she's just following,

01:42:35.480 she's probably not a very intelligent person. She's probably not very thinking, but she's just

01:42:38.880 following what she's told to say. She's been told by all of the teacher training colleges,

01:42:42.840 all of the academics in education, that this is the case and you've got to go with it.

01:42:46.220 And she's just doing her job. So I think that's unfair as well. I would like teachers to be more

01:42:51.180 intelligent and creative and to challenge this stuff. But, you know, that's not happening.

01:42:56.740 So yeah, maybe it may be. I guess we're, I guess we're learning why the eternal serpent always

01:43:00.700 devours its own tail, right? Right. It's so interesting to see these things push too far,

01:43:06.580 start to eat themselves. You know, it's, it's, we're living in the strangest times, man.

01:43:11.100 That might be it. That might be the hope though, right? So it's an optimistic, it's an optimistic

01:43:15.280 point to make, but ultimately, because I think this ideology is not sustainable because it is

01:43:22.000 too full of. We did walk ourselves back from the brink of tyranny on the COVID lockdown front,

01:43:27.660 right? I mean, we were, we went full totalitarian for two years, but then everybody seemed to decide

01:43:32.660 maybe that wasn't such a good idea. But that's quite instructive, isn't it? The way that we now talk

01:43:37.520 about it, everyone's sort of, no one mentions it now, do they? It was, it was, you know, you walk

01:43:43.080 around, very few people wearing masks. People have just sort of, there came a weird turning point where

01:43:48.900 everyone just decided, actually, it's, it's, it's a, it's a virus with a very low mortality rate.

01:43:53.100 Let's just not worry about it. And that just sort of happened. People have forgotten the mania,

01:43:58.500 the extreme mania, people screaming at each other on the streets if they weren't wearing masks and

01:44:02.440 the, the, the extreme policies, um, the, the Canadian government's reaction to the, the truckers

01:44:08.420 who were worried about their livelihood due to lockdown. You mean stealing their bank,

01:44:12.080 bank accounts. Stealing their bank accounts and, and, and threatened to what, give the money to

01:44:16.400 other, to charities or something? Didn't they even, didn't, I mean, you all know. Yeah, yeah. Go said,

01:44:20.880 so 10, 10 million dollars was raised on GoFundMe. That's it. Yeah. And then, then the GoFundMe decided

01:44:28.560 they weren't going to distribute it to the truckers. Then they decided instead of refunding

01:44:33.040 it, they were going to distribute it to a charity of their choice. Then Ron DeSantis said, I think you

01:44:40.440 better not do that or else. And then they decided they would refund it. And now the money that hasn't

01:44:46.120 been refunded is in escrow. And there's a huge fight in Canada about who owns it. We haven't settled

01:44:51.200 the trucker mess here at all, you know, but the trucker convoy, it had something to do with everybody

01:44:55.940 taking those goddamn masks off. I'm sure. I wonder though, how those politicians who were involved

01:45:01.800 in this will feel about this in 20 years time. I wonder about that. I know one of your politicians

01:45:05.940 claimed that the truckers were beeping their horns because they were dog whistling to fascists

01:45:11.580 because the honk honk is HH. And that means Heil Hitler. I mean, that was something that was

01:45:16.980 seriously said. That's common knowledge here in Andrew. Everybody who honks their horn is actually

01:45:20.800 secretly admiring Hitler, especially if they do it twice. That is so insane. And I, so I wonder

01:45:27.100 whether... At Salem, which trial level is insane? Exactly. And Salem is a good example, right?

01:45:33.040 Because, you know, there's a reason I've used it in the book is that I think it gives us our clues to

01:45:38.300 our way out because Salem happened so quickly. It happened within just over a year, right? Late 17th

01:45:44.180 century, this hysteria emerged from nowhere and fizzled out immediately. And everyone afterwards

01:45:51.340 repented. All of the people who were most involved in it said, we got that wrong.

01:45:56.620 What happened there? We went mad for a while there. Because they weren't witch hunters.

01:46:01.980 This is maybe the first widespread mental illness afflicting our new electronic nervous system.

01:46:08.880 That's it. I think this is a hysteria on a global scale, akin to what happened in Salem. I think

01:46:16.940 it's perpetuated itself by a similar means, which is firstly, just the mechanism of hysteria,

01:46:26.160 which I'm not qualified to talk about, but also the fact that people in authority go along with it

01:46:31.760 because they're terrified not to. You know, because in Salem, anyone said, hang on, I don't think this is

01:46:36.840 right. They were the next to be executed. So you don't have politicians saying, hang on a minute.

01:46:41.320 Is it possible for human beings to change sex? Do I know what a woman is? They all know the answer,

01:46:46.860 just as the magistrates in Salem knew that the girls weren't seeing the devil.

01:46:51.100 But it all fizzled out very, very quickly. One of the points I make in the book is about

01:46:55.760 that all of the prosecutions were secured on this thing called spectral evidence. In other words,

01:47:01.580 the girls' experience, what we call lived experience, the girls believed that they were seeing

01:47:06.300 devils. And therefore that was taken as evidence. And that's why the case is collapsed. Because at

01:47:12.000 the end, the deputy governor of Massachusetts wrote to the leading clergyman in the country and said,

01:47:17.240 can we use, can spectral evidence be admissible in court? And they all said, no, of course not.

01:47:23.060 The whole thing disappeared overnight. Everyone denied they had any part in it.

01:47:26.360 You know, these weren't witch hunters. They didn't go around hunting witches.

01:47:28.800 That happened a lot in Europe. It didn't happen in New England.

01:47:31.240 And so maybe that's the least stupid pathway forward for us now. And maybe God willing,

01:47:36.940 that's the one we'll take. We should stop, I guess. I don't want to, because you're very

01:47:40.780 entertaining to talk to. For everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Andrew for

01:47:45.400 another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform side, a little bit more personally.

01:47:50.500 I want to see a bit more about what makes them tick. And so if you're interested in that,

01:47:54.200 head over to the Daily Wire Plus platform. You could throw those characters,

01:47:57.920 those reprehensible right-wing bastards a penny or two, if you're inclined to, because,

01:48:02.780 you know, they are heading the fight to support free speech in the US. You know,

01:48:08.200 YouTube has been after us because I'm allied with the Daily Wire types, been after us pretty badly

01:48:13.020 in the last month. They took down three of my talks, including one with Helen Joyce,

01:48:18.200 because you know how reprehensible good old Helen, the economist journalist is. And they also took down

01:48:23.740 the talk I had with Robert F. Kennedy, despite the fact that he's running for president. And so

01:48:29.600 that's YouTube. And they're definitely going after all the Daily Wire folks. So thank you all for your

01:48:34.580 time and attention and to Andrew for talking to me and helping me delve into these things,

01:48:38.740 get a little bit more clarity along with everyone else. And for everyone watching and listening,

01:48:43.600 we'll see you soon. And to the Daily Wire folks, thanks for your support. Andrew,

01:48:48.420 off to the Daily Wire. Thank you very much.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 06, 2023

373. Social Justice： A Religious Movement ｜ Andrew Doyle

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