The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:30.000 Hello everyone, watching and listening.

00:00:33.000 Today I'm speaking with historian and author Neil Ferguson.

00:00:36.080 We haven't spoken before, although I've wanted to for a long time.

00:00:38.920 We discuss the historical and deeply mythological precedent of world-ending narratives.

00:00:46.540 How the global doomsday ethos abdicates local responsibility while empowering the elite class.

00:00:54.180 The out-of-control gigantism plaguing our administrative states today.

00:00:58.740 And how we might strive as individuals to deal with the genuine tragedy of life morally, humbly, and religiously.

00:01:08.600 So, I was reviewing your book, Doom, this morning.

00:01:13.380 And I've been wanting to talk to you about it for a long time.

00:01:16.220 I'm very interested in the apocalyptic vision and its implications for political organization and psychological organization as well.

00:01:32.700 And I thought I'd just start with a couple of comments to get us going.

00:01:36.500 The apocalypse, in some ways, is always upon us.

00:01:40.740 And you write about that in your book.

00:01:43.460 I mean, because people might ask, well, why has mankind always been consumed at the narrative level with notions of the end of the world?

00:01:54.600 And the answer to that is, at least in part, because we always inhabit demarcated conceptual worlds and even embodied worlds.

00:02:05.060 And all of those worlds do come to an end.

00:02:07.380 And so, the idea that there's a universal end is built into the fabric of reality.

00:02:13.600 And it's something that we have to permanently contend with.

00:02:17.060 And so, it's there as a lurking existential abyss.

00:02:21.200 But it's also there as a practical problem that we have to contend with.

00:02:24.600 And the grand apocalyptic visions, the book of Revelation, for example, are in part attempts to structure our apprehension of the, what would you say, the eternal apocalypse.

00:02:37.900 And to also help us determine practically and politically how that might be at least staved off, although perhaps even managed more comprehensively.

00:02:49.780 And so, I guess I'm curious, why did your interests, do you think, coalesce around the conception of doom?

00:02:58.380 And it's been a couple of years now since this book was published.

00:03:03.160 How have your conceptions changed?

00:03:06.060 And what did you learn as a consequence of investigating this narrative trope so deeply?

00:03:12.460 There's a great sketch in the Beyond the Fringe album, which goes right back to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett in the 1960s.

00:03:28.000 And the sketch is the end of the world.

00:03:29.980 And it's essentially a sect of millenarians who gather on a hill to anticipate the end of the world.

00:03:36.980 They have a long and quite amusing discussion about what it's likely to involve.

00:03:42.660 Will the veil of the temple be rent asunder?

00:03:46.100 And the time comes, they count down to the end of the world, and nothing happens.

00:03:52.260 And Peter Cook, who's the leader of the sect, ends the sketch by, well, never mind, lads, same time next week.

00:03:58.700 And I always thought that was very funny, because the end of the world has been consistently overpredicted by human beings for millennia.

00:04:10.580 We're fascinated by the idea of the end of the world, and I think it's for a slightly different reason from the one that you hypothesized.

00:04:18.580 We have the reality that we as individuals end to contend with.

00:04:24.040 That's just one of the givens of human life.

00:04:31.200 Even for billionaires in Silicon Valley, right now, the end of their individual lives is inevitable.

00:04:40.680 And that's really the hardest thing to deal with about life, that it ends.

00:04:46.180 And we also know how it ends.

00:04:48.040 We know what that's like.

00:04:49.060 Because at some time or another in our lives, we encounter death.

00:04:53.840 The death of a grandparent, a parent, of a friend.

00:04:57.140 We also see things being destroyed.

00:05:00.280 We see buildings collapse or bridges.

00:05:04.200 We see fires consume areas of woodland.

00:05:07.800 So we know what dissolution looks like, not just for us as individuals,

00:05:11.320 but we know what it looks like for expanses of land or edifices.

00:05:16.200 And I think we therefore infer the consoling thought that it's all going to go down in flames at some future date.

00:05:27.240 And the great monotheistic religions have as one of their centerpieces the end of the world.

00:05:32.420 It's there in Islam as well as in Christianity.

00:05:37.020 And I think it's also exciting.

00:05:38.640 I think we find the end of the world kind of a cinematic prospect, which is why there are so many movies about it, as well as works of science fiction.

00:05:49.040 So we're fascinated by the end of the world because it's clearly a spectacular prospect.

00:05:53.840 But it's also consoling to us.

00:05:55.600 We may die as individuals, but everything's going down at some point.

00:05:59.500 And the issue is when.

00:06:00.640 So many Christians at successive periods in the history of Christianity have anticipated quite an imminent end of the world.

00:06:11.540 And, of course, they're always disappointed, like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

00:06:16.160 So the consoling issue, I mean, the easy read on that, I suppose, is that the end of the world is the precondition for the establishment of an ever more glorious paradise.

00:06:26.800 And you can understand a consolation in that.

00:06:30.560 But you're pointing to a different kind of consolation, I suppose, which is, it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that something like schadenfreude is that the fact that we end is easier to swallow if we understand it in relationship to the potential end of everything.

00:06:47.180 So I don't exactly understand why you highlighted consolation.

00:06:51.280 I can see it in the heavenly vision, let's say, post-apocalypse, but you seem to be pointing to something else.

00:06:58.240 Well, of course, religion offers an afterlife that will be better and resurrection in the case of the great monotheistic religions.

00:07:11.640 But I don't think that's always what's in people's minds when they contemplate the end of the world.

00:07:18.480 I was very struck as I was researching the book, how many times in the midst of a localized disaster, individuals said it felt like the end of the world.

00:07:29.400 So when you're in the midst of a massive conflagration, the biggest wildfire in US history, or when you're in London during the Blitz,

00:07:41.480 when you're in the midst of some localized disaster, it seems somehow consoling to say, oh, it's clearly the end of the world.

00:07:50.660 So I don't think it's just that people say, and therefore I can look forward to being reunited with my ancestors in some happy afterlife.

00:07:59.060 I think there's just a sense that if everybody's going down, that doesn't make it quite so bad as if it's just me.

00:08:04.300 Well, you know, there might be another element to it as well.

00:08:08.680 I mean, the Terminator movie series came to mind when you were walking through your discussion,

00:08:16.580 I suppose, in reference to the science fiction representations of the end of the world.

00:08:20.720 And all of our conceptual schemes, when they encounter an obstacle, undergo a collapse into a kind of chaos and then a potential regeneration.

00:08:31.360 And that's the same as a stage transition in Piagetian child development.

00:08:37.000 And it's the same as the scientific revolution.

00:08:39.300 And every act of learning is simultaneously the death of some set of preconceptions.

00:08:45.960 And there's pain in that, which is partly why we don't like to have our ideas challenged.

00:08:50.560 But, you know, there's also adventure in it.

00:08:52.320 And part of the reason that people do go to watch movies like The Terminator and the plethora of end of the world movies that do make themselves manifest is because I think we can see in the confrontation with cataclysm an adventure.

00:09:11.180 I mean, that's what people are doing in a theater when they're watching The Terminator series.

00:09:14.440 I mean, it's a dreadful adventure, but it's a total adventure.

00:09:17.800 It's completely engrossing.

00:09:19.200 And it might be that you could imagine, and I think that this is part of the emphasis of the Judeo-Christian notion of ultimate sacrifice.

00:09:28.300 You could imagine welcoming the apocalyptic reality of the world with open arms, being willing to undergo that adventure of continual death and transformation, and transforming that entire death and rebirth process into something like the most exciting possible adventure.

00:09:49.640 I mean, you know, what you do see in the biblical corpus, there's always a wrestling with the apocalyptic reality of existence, socially and individually.

00:09:59.400 And there is the insistence throughout the text that the appropriate way to deal with that is not to run from it or deny it, but to relate to the degree that it's possible to welcome it with open arms.

00:10:12.940 Now, that's a very tricky thing to manage, obviously.

00:10:15.520 The death, how do you welcome the death of everything with open arms?

00:10:18.780 But in some ways, it doesn't matter because it's a reality that people have to face.

00:10:23.620 I think what's fascinating about the book of Revelation is that it's so spectacular.

00:10:29.680 It's an extraordinary visualization of a cataclysm, and it's really very elaborate.

00:10:38.000 It's worth reading and trying to picture it in your mind, and you realize that you would need the most advanced computer graphics to realize it on a screen.

00:10:48.780 I think it's partly that you need a spectacular prelude for the kingdom of God to be plausible.

00:10:56.120 Because the terrible truth about the kingdom of God is that it does sound quite dull.

00:10:59.740 I mean, the reality about the saints and angels and God himself is that they don't really know how to throw a party.

00:11:12.200 And we need more than that to excite us.

00:11:17.160 So, I think that the apocalypse is attractive because it's so much more exciting than the ultimate outcome, the utopian outcome of heaven.

00:11:27.000 Now, what's interesting about science fiction is that it really discards utopia.

00:11:32.060 There's some utopian science fiction, but most of it's dystopian.

00:11:35.920 And you gave the example of the Terminator movie series.

00:11:38.720 That's part of a long tradition of visualizing an end of the world which is dystopian, where an apocalyptic event occurs, and all you're really left with, in the case of the Terminator movies, is a pile of rubble in which a few surviving humans are picked off by killer robots.

00:11:59.100 The interesting thing to me about science fiction is that from its birth in the early 19th century, as a genre, it provides the apocalypse without the prospect of some ultimate reign of God and the saints.

00:12:13.620 And we find that hugely exciting.

00:12:15.340 So, the paradox at the heart of the book is that we spend a lot of time thinking about the end of the world.

00:12:20.800 Of course, environmentalists are the latest heirs to the millenarian tradition.

00:12:25.180 They love to say that the world is about to end, it's in 12 years, it must be now eight years and counting.

00:12:30.960 That's part of a long tradition where secular movements embrace, often unwittingly, religious ideas about the impending apocalypse.

00:12:42.320 And that's exciting to people, so they're drawn to it.

00:12:45.560 Greta Thunberg is just the latest prophet of the millennium.

00:12:49.960 And I think that's a very important reason to be sceptical about stories about the end of the world.

00:12:56.820 Because while we spend a lot of time discussing the end of the world in its latest incarnation, catastrophic climate scenario, we kind of miss the much more likely, smaller-scale, medium-sized disasters.

00:13:11.420 And the key point the book makes is we're getting worse at handling those.

00:13:14.840 So, we spend ages talking about the end of the world, endless conferences on climate change and the apocalypse, and we utterly bungle what was, in fact, not a particularly disastrous pandemic.

00:13:26.680 And we're going to bungle our way through some geopolitical disasters.

00:13:30.920 We're doing that right now.

00:13:32.920 I think that's the critical argument of the book.

00:13:35.200 And that's why the subtitle of the book is so important, The Politics of Catastrophe.

00:13:38.940 The key argument the book makes is that most disasters shouldn't be thought of as either natural or man-made.

00:13:47.800 Disasters happen, and then we, as a species, collectively bungle them or not.

00:13:53.260 And that's the critical point.

00:13:55.440 Disasters are, in many ways, politically determined, even if their origins are natural.

00:14:01.820 So, that's the argument of the book.

00:14:03.120 Okay, so there's three themes there that I'd like to expound upon.

00:14:10.620 So, the first is, you interestingly pointed out that the dystopia and the apocalypse is more interesting than the subsequent heaven.

00:14:22.480 And that's the problem with socialist visions of utopia that people like Dostoevsky laid out in the late 1800s.

00:14:33.320 In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky famously pointed out that if we did bring about the socialist utopia,

00:14:39.940 and he described that as the endless opportunity to sit in pools of bubbling water,

00:14:47.700 busy ourselves with the continuation of the species, and eat nothing but cake,

00:14:52.480 that human beings would break it all into a chaotic mess at the first opportunity,

00:14:58.420 just so that something exciting could happen.

00:15:00.400 And so, there's the problem with a satiation vision of heaven.

00:15:07.240 So, that would be a vision where everyone has everything they need all the time,

00:15:10.800 is that precisely when you do that with an infant,

00:15:14.200 or when you enter that state after Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas dinner,

00:15:18.480 all you do is go to sleep.

00:15:20.120 There's no reason to be conscious.

00:15:22.580 Consciousness demands something like an adventure.

00:15:24.900 And the classic vision of heaven does seem lacking in that it isn't obvious what you would do there.

00:15:32.020 So, that's something we could delve into.

00:15:34.740 Then you pointed out that one of the additional underground advantages to being an apocalyptic doomsayer

00:15:42.980 is that you can, I'm modifying your argument slightly,

00:15:46.480 but that you can present yourself as the ultimate virtue-seeking redeemer

00:15:54.560 by claiming to be obsessed by nothing but large-scale disaster.

00:16:00.680 You can construe yourself as virtuous because of the depth of your concern,

00:16:05.720 and you can abdicate your responsibility to actually deal with less self-dramatizing problems,

00:16:12.400 with the less self-dramatizing problems that actually constitute problems you could solve and address

00:16:19.220 if you put your mind to it in the real world.

00:16:21.680 You know, and there's psychological reasons for assuming.

00:16:25.100 One of the things you see when people's lives go seriously astray

00:16:28.680 is that they don't generally, people generally don't run off a cliff

00:16:33.200 immediately after doing brilliantly.

00:16:36.480 What happens is they make one error, and then they make a more serious error,

00:16:41.240 and then they repeat that 10,000 times, and then they're in hell.

00:16:45.360 And it was their failure to rectify the mini-crisis all along the way

00:16:53.740 that brings upon the apocalypse in their life.

00:16:56.600 And I do see a lot of that political posturing characterizing the modern world,

00:17:02.560 that people act out the role of world-redeeming savior,

00:17:06.620 but they're not actually attending to genuine problems that are right in front of them

00:17:10.960 that they could address if they acted responsibly.

00:17:15.940 And then the final theme you developed, you said, this is very interesting,

00:17:19.580 you said that the notion of natural disaster in some sense is ill-conceptualized

00:17:28.820 because there's ambiguity about whether when a disaster occurs,

00:17:36.740 it's a consequence of the hand of God, say, in the earthquake or the flood,

00:17:43.280 or the utter failure of the authorities to have prepared properly for a foreseeable disaster.

00:17:49.600 You know, I thought this very clearly when Katrina hit New Orleans,

00:17:53.880 because a hue and cry went up about the catastrophe of the natural disaster,

00:17:59.500 but you didn't have to dig very far before you realized that the reason that that hurricane

00:18:05.220 was so devastating in New Orleans was because, well, the dikes hadn't been maintained

00:18:10.700 and they'd only been built to withstand a one-in-one-century flood,

00:18:14.520 and that the entire infrastructure of the society was corrupt.

00:18:18.260 And so, you know, in mythological representations, in deep narratives,

00:18:24.080 there is an identity between the evil king and the wicked queen of nature.

00:18:29.280 They're the same thing.

00:18:31.060 And so if the king gets wicked enough, the evil queen of nature arises.

00:18:35.780 And that's a representation of the fact that if your state is corrupt,

00:18:41.240 natural disaster will definitely make itself shown,

00:18:45.620 and that you actually can't distinguish.

00:18:47.100 There's no distinction between lack of preparation and a natural disaster in the final analysis.

00:18:52.360 And corruption and blindness facilitate that nexus.

00:18:58.900 So the Egyptians had a story.

00:19:01.100 It's the story upon which their whole culture was funded,

00:19:03.700 that the state corrupted.

00:19:06.040 That's Osiris.

00:19:06.900 The state corrupted and became willfully blind as it aged.

00:19:11.560 And then it was overthrown by, that's Osiris,

00:19:14.060 it was overthrown by Seth, who's the precursor of Satan.

00:19:16.820 And then he rules.

00:19:18.240 So now the tyrant rules.

00:19:20.180 And then Isis, who's the queen of the underworld, she's nature.

00:19:24.400 She makes herself known again.

00:19:26.660 Chaos, right?

00:19:28.220 With enough disintegration at the sociological level,

00:19:32.820 then chaos makes itself manifest again.

00:19:35.800 It's one of the most ancient stories of mankind,

00:19:38.400 playing out that dichotomy between the tyrant and natural disaster that you just described.

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00:21:20.960 Let me take those points in order if I can.

00:21:27.600 I think that the most interesting thing to me about fantasies about the end of the world,

00:21:35.140 about the various millenarian cults through history,

00:21:38.440 is that they are often accompanied by certain forms of behavior that one might characterize as ascetic.

00:21:47.220 So the asceticism is an important part of many religious and secular movements.

00:21:53.620 So the end is approaching, the apocalypse is nearing, and therefore we should fast or perhaps even flog ourselves like the flagellant orders at the time of the Black Death.

00:22:06.880 And it seemed to me very interesting how many similar patterns one could see in our time.

00:22:15.960 Whether you are preoccupied with climate change or systemic racism, it doesn't matter.

00:22:22.680 You should engage in some kind of ascetic atonement in advance of the Great Reckoning.

00:22:29.960 And this, I think, infests a lot of contemporary progressivism.

00:22:36.640 The desire to eat rabbit food, to be constantly trying to eliminate things from one's diet,

00:22:48.780 the desire to engage in abstention from reproduction.

00:22:55.600 We must have children because climate change is so cataclysmic.

00:23:00.540 And so you have these sorts of ascetic behaviors, which you can find in medieval and ancient religion.

00:23:06.820 So I think that's an important first point.

00:23:09.620 The second point is that mythology of the sort you described in the case of the ancient Egyptian myths

00:23:17.020 makes a lot of sense if you imagine yourself living in the prehistoric or very ancient world.

00:23:25.020 Life expectancy was very short.

00:23:29.060 Individuals were extraordinarily at risk from a whole variety of premature forms of mortality.

00:23:37.080 And the natural world was deeply mysterious because there was no scientific framework for understanding

00:23:42.580 anything, the fluctuations in the level of the River Nile, the periodic droughts that afflicted early agricultural societies.

00:23:55.180 And so you end up with ways of making sense of an extraordinarily cruel and capricious world.

00:24:03.020 So I think that's an important reason why myths persist.

00:24:08.340 I guess they're deeply rooted in our pre-modern experience.

00:24:13.780 And I think that if one tries to think about our present predicament,

00:24:20.460 it's odd that such things have such enduring power over us.

00:24:26.900 Because since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment,

00:24:30.260 we have a much better handle on the challenges that a species like ours faces

00:24:37.100 on a planet like ours.

00:24:39.960 So what's odd is that despite having really quite a good understanding of, say, infectious disease

00:24:46.880 or the ways that hurricanes strike the eastern seaboard of the United States,

00:24:53.880 we seem to be getting worse at handling pandemics and hurricanes.

00:24:58.800 And that's a really important argument that the book makes.

00:25:02.380 Compared with the generation of the 1950s, the generation of the 2010s and 2020s seems really

00:25:08.860 quite bad at disaster management in most Western societies, not only the United States.

00:25:14.140 And it's explaining that that takes us into new territory.

00:25:17.620 Because I don't think you can explain the diminishing competence of the modern state

00:25:22.120 without having a theory of its degeneration.

00:25:25.380 And that's something that is a really important part of the book.

00:25:29.720 Okay, so I want to pick up on two of those topics.

00:25:33.640 So the first is, you point out that as the apocalyptic vision predominates,

00:25:41.960 there's a turn to asceticism.

00:25:44.440 And then you describe, we could say, veganism and vegetarianism.

00:25:47.680 And, well, and the insistence by the environmentalists that we must engage in degrowth

00:25:53.180 and that we must reduce our standard of living.

00:25:55.540 And, yes, okay, but there's a very interesting psychological rationale for that as well,

00:26:03.260 which is that if the old state of being has become corrupt,

00:26:08.660 so that's the old king.

00:26:11.440 And now we're threatened by its collapse.

00:26:15.060 Then the proper thing to do is to engage in repentance and atonement.

00:26:23.760 Because what you want to do is you want to offer up your stupid preconceptions

00:26:29.660 to be destroyed so that you can rectify the corruption,

00:26:34.120 so that you can stave off the disaster.

00:26:35.960 And so, now, it's interesting, because with the millenarian and apocalyptic movements on the left,

00:26:44.240 you have a simultaneous insistence that all sorts of impulsive, pleasure-seeking, licentious behavior

00:26:52.460 should be centered and prioritized and celebrated.

00:26:56.660 But at the same time, you have this insistence that there's a certain kind of asceticism that's also necessary.

00:27:02.980 And I see in that, as a psychologist, I see that as a proper mechanism of repair gone astray,

00:27:11.920 right, is that, well, you should always be cutting back, in this ascetic way,

00:27:19.140 on your idiot excesses locally to improve the manner in which you conceptualize the world.

00:27:26.340 That's the continual sacrificial offering of your own insufficiency and your own stupidity.

00:27:32.120 And that does renew the world.

00:27:35.300 And so, but now we've got this dynamic where we globalize the apocalypse,

00:27:41.900 we view the end of the world,

00:27:44.120 we assume that nothing but a kind of universal asceticism and atonement will suffice.

00:27:50.240 That enables us to set local concerns aside, as we already discussed, and to act irresponsibly.

00:27:56.240 And maybe that's part of what's producing this inability to actually respond,

00:28:02.620 you know, locally and effectively to genuine problems.

00:28:06.800 You know, in the Old Testament, there's a second commandment is to not use God's name in vain.

00:28:12.860 And what that means, as far as I can tell, is that you shouldn't claim divine motivation for doing things that are actually self-serving, right?

00:28:23.340 You shouldn't attribute sacred motivations to your own, to your own instrumental, impulsive and self-serving behavior.

00:28:30.980 And then that's echoed in the New Testament with the insistence that you shouldn't pray in public.

00:28:35.300 Now, if you take on the apocalyptic burden and you're virtuous only in consequence of your compassionate concern,

00:28:45.200 it gives you a perfect excuse to dispense with local responsibility.

00:28:49.520 And if you dispense with local responsibility,

00:28:51.760 then you're no longer able to engage in the concrete problem-solving activities of the sort that you described.

00:28:58.460 I mean, what did you conclude when you're, I mean, you have a chapter on developing political incompetence

00:29:03.680 and also one on, you know, a sort of a belief in scientism.

00:29:07.840 And that seems to me to be part of your attempt to assess the local failure

00:29:12.580 while we're concentrating on the global apocalypse.

00:29:15.560 And so what do you make of that, that concatenation of causal forces?

00:29:21.020 There are two things that are going on, I think.

00:29:24.420 One is that the more people refer to the science,

00:29:30.020 the more you should suspect that they are engaged in some quasi-religious activity.

00:29:37.280 Because the notion of some settled body of knowledge called the science

00:29:42.740 is at odds with the reality of the scientific method,

00:29:45.920 which is a constant struggle to falsify hypotheses through experimentation.

00:29:52.520 During the COVID-19 pandemic, but I think it predates it,

00:29:55.860 it was already going on in debates about climate,

00:29:57.880 there was a lot of spurious invocation of the science.

00:30:01.940 And one might as well have been saying the gods or the deity,

00:30:06.580 because it was, in fact, quite unscientific thinking that was going on.

00:30:12.020 I'll give you an illustration of this.

00:30:14.420 A great delusion is to imagine that we can prevent the rise of average temperatures

00:30:19.860 by large-scale asceticism in the West.

00:30:23.420 We must give up internal combustion engines.

00:30:27.420 We should give up eating meat and so on.

00:30:30.320 If we end up buying electric vehicles and solar cells manufactured in China

00:30:37.440 with electricity generated by burning ever-larger quantities of coal,

00:30:41.920 the probability of reducing average temperatures is zero,

00:30:47.420 because that is, in fact, the perfect illustration of wrongheadedness in action.

00:30:57.240 If one accepts the premises of the debates on the causes of rising temperatures,

00:31:02.820 it makes no sense at all for us to behave this way.

00:31:06.800 Our asceticism will make no difference if it manifests itself as increased burning of coal in China.

00:31:13.440 So that's the first thing that's going on.

00:31:15.000 I mean, like, well, or increased burning of coal in Germany,

00:31:18.440 because that's what's happened with the Green Revolution in Germany.

00:31:21.260 Exactly.

00:31:21.800 They shut off the nuclear plants and started up the lignite plants.

00:31:24.800 Right.

00:31:25.740 So this kind of wrongheadedness leads to all kinds of policy errors,

00:31:31.240 because people are focused on the satisfaction of asceticism,

00:31:35.840 the virtue signaling that comes with getting rid of nuclear power stations

00:31:40.560 or internal combustion engines.

00:31:42.620 So there's a kind of generalized failure which embraces the policy elite

00:31:47.160 to think rationally about the problems that we're trying to address.

00:31:51.760 The second problem, which I think is just as important,

00:31:54.440 is the way the administrative state functions.

00:31:57.380 If you compare central governments today with their counterparts of half a century or 70 years ago,

00:32:03.280 they've become much larger.

00:32:04.760 They're very bloated in terms of the numbers of people employed.

00:32:08.260 They intervene in many more ways.

00:32:10.880 There's an enormous corpus of regulation in all Western countries.

00:32:16.760 And this administrative state, unwieldy, regulatory, is very inefficient.

00:32:22.900 It's very bad at achieving its intended goals.

00:32:26.480 And that has to do with the way that bureaucracy works

00:32:29.320 and the sclerotic tendencies that the modern state suffers from.

00:32:34.040 So between the science as a quasi-religious way of thinking

00:32:39.300 and the administrative state,

00:32:41.740 we have a very, very dysfunctional approach to nearly all the problems that confront us.

00:32:47.060 And that is really the central argument of doom.

00:32:49.660 It's very significant that in our lifetimes,

00:32:52.800 governments have got worse at dealing with disasters, not better.

00:32:56.600 Despite the accumulation of scientific knowledge,

00:32:59.040 we seem somehow collectively to be worse at scientific thinking.

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00:34:19.220 Okay, so imagine this.

00:34:24.800 You magnify the size of the apocalypse, right?

00:34:28.240 So it becomes a world-ending Ragnarok.

00:34:31.480 Then you magnify the size of the bureaucratic state

00:34:34.260 because you have to in order to deal with that apocalypse, okay?

00:34:38.640 Then because the state is so global and large and so central,

00:34:43.100 it loses its connection with the real world.

00:34:45.580 It has no subsidiary organization.

00:34:48.040 And then it flails about pointlessly.

00:34:50.240 Now, I'm going to walk through a couple of narrative representations of that.

00:34:54.240 It'll tie it back to the imagery of Revelation.

00:34:56.720 You might find this interesting.

00:34:58.040 So you see that dynamic play out in the opening chapters of Genesis

00:35:01.420 because what you have is the descendants of Cain.

00:35:04.940 So Cain makes improper sacrifices and he becomes bitter and resentful.

00:35:09.180 And he turns to technology.

00:35:10.840 It's Cain's descendants that turn to technology first.

00:35:14.420 They build the first cities.

00:35:16.160 And then the city becomes corrupt.

00:35:18.080 It becomes corrupt in the direction of the Tower of Babel.

00:35:21.560 Now, the Tower of Babel is a ziggurat, right?

00:35:24.400 It's a stepped pyramid.

00:35:26.480 And at that time, the potentates of the Middle East

00:35:30.380 were competing to build the largest ziggurats.

00:35:32.800 They were trying to build towers to heaven.

00:35:34.940 To glorify themselves.

00:35:37.660 And that's the subtext of the Tower of Babel story.

00:35:40.980 So what happens is that the ultimate Tower of Babel is erected to reach to the sky.

00:35:47.120 And that's a challenge to the supremacy of God.

00:35:51.500 And the consequence of that is that the cosmos, the spirit of the cosmos,

00:35:57.860 the creative producer of the cosmos,

00:36:01.840 makes all those who inhabit the Tower unable to communicate with one another.

00:36:07.820 So they start to lose even the ability to share concepts.

00:36:11.980 And this structure collapses.

00:36:14.140 And it's because that Tower of Babel is too large.

00:36:17.940 It reaches too high.

00:36:19.020 It's too uniform.

00:36:20.380 And it's destined to failure.

00:36:21.900 Of course, that begs the question, you know, what's the alternative to that?

00:36:24.700 But I would say the entire remaining biblical corpus is actually an attempt to answer that question.

00:36:30.280 But it's very germane.

00:36:31.580 Now, that imagery is picked up again in the book of Revelation.

00:36:36.180 So one of the central images in the book that I think is very relevant.

00:36:40.660 Imagine that the book of Revelation is trying to conceptualize the apocalypse as such.

00:36:46.580 The manner in which things deteriorate before the ultimate disaster.

00:36:51.820 And so one of the main images is of a seven-headed beast.

00:36:55.560 And on the back of the beast is the horror of Babylon.

00:36:59.460 And it's an image of a centralizing state, a monstrous centralizing state.

00:37:10.260 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:37:11.740 With multiple heads, with something like disinhibited licentiousness as its partner.

00:37:21.680 That's the image.

00:37:23.100 And so the notion there is that when things deteriorate to the point where apocalypse is likely,

00:37:28.060 you have the construction of monstrous state-like apparatuses aligned with individual fragmentation

00:37:36.560 down to the point of licentious atomization.

00:37:40.380 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:37:42.980 So, you know, you're striving towards, it seems to me in your argument,

00:37:47.240 you're striving towards the hypothesis that there's something like an out-of-control gigantism

00:37:53.040 that's causally related to the inability of these bureaucratic organizations

00:38:01.800 to actually respond to actual occurrences in the world.

00:38:05.840 So two thoughts.

00:38:07.800 There's only one law of history.

00:38:09.260 I'm a historian, and that's the law of unintended consequences.

00:38:14.340 And so what typically happens is that well-intentioned people come to power,

00:38:20.200 identify a problem which they feel they must address,

00:38:23.400 and they undertake measures to address the problem which have unintended consequences.

00:38:28.460 This was true when, back in the 1960s and 70s,

00:38:31.500 people persuaded themselves that there was a terrible problem of overpopulation,

00:38:34.700 that Malthus was going to be vindicated, and therefore there had to be drastic population control,

00:38:38.980 especially in Asia.

00:38:39.920 And that turned out to have all kinds of unintended consequences.

00:38:43.520 In our time, fears not just of climate change, but of dangerous technological developments

00:38:53.640 have given rise to a view which my friend Nick Bostrom in Oxford exemplifies,

00:38:59.720 is that we need to have very, very powerful surveillance powers to prevent bad things from happening,

00:39:06.840 whether it's to prevent CO2 emissions reaching the levels of the net zero program,

00:39:15.600 or whether it's to stop dangerous research being done with artificial intelligence.

00:39:20.500 We need to empower the state to have even greater powers of surveillance than the mid-20th century totalitarian regimes had.

00:39:28.460 And so one of the key arguments in the book Doom is that actually totalitarianism is the thing most to be feared.

00:39:36.000 In the 20th century, totalitarian regimes cause way more premature death than anything else.

00:39:42.060 And so the last thing we should want to do in the 21st century is to create new forms of totalitarianism

00:39:47.340 out of a belief that only an all-seeing state can prevent disaster.

00:39:53.000 So this is a really, really important argument that the book makes.

00:39:56.400 And I think it's become even more relevant with the major breakthroughs we've seen in artificial intelligence

00:40:02.080 in the two years since the book was published.

00:40:05.620 The other thing that I would say is we want the universe to be moral.

00:40:10.880 We are very strongly inclined to think when bad things happen to us

00:40:15.160 that they may in fact be retribution for sins that we committed in the past.

00:40:21.000 And even the most rational individual is susceptible to this idea.

00:40:27.740 I know this because my parents did their very best to raise me as a product of the Scottish Enlightenment,

00:40:34.980 an atheist and a devoted believer in the scientific method.

00:40:38.980 But when bad things happen, I have this uneasy sense that I may have brought it upon myself

00:40:44.540 by transgressing in some way, illustrating that you can't really escape the Christian legacy

00:40:50.480 unless you travel a very long, long way away from post-Christian civilizations.

00:40:56.940 Now, it's not, in fact, a moral universe.

00:40:59.400 This is the bad news.

00:41:01.120 It's really not.

00:41:02.240 I mean, a lot of the bad things that happen are random.

00:41:05.280 They're governed by power laws.

00:41:08.420 They're extremely difficult to predict.

00:41:11.180 Wars are, in fact, pretty randomly distributed.

00:41:14.140 There's no cycle of history that tells you when a war is coming.

00:41:17.860 Same applies to financial crises.

00:41:20.520 Wildfires and earthquakes are not normally distributed.

00:41:24.120 They can't really be thought of in probabilistic terms.

00:41:27.120 And so much of the terrible stuff that happens to us has nothing to do with there being a moral universe.

00:41:35.240 Cancer may strike one of us down in a much shorter time frame than we're both tacitly assuming we have.

00:41:42.560 And if we are diagnosed with a terminal cancer, how will we react to that news?

00:41:49.580 What if I hear this tomorrow?

00:41:51.660 It'll be a tremendous shock to me, mainly because it will render my younger children much more vulnerable in my absence.

00:42:01.620 But will I be able to resist the temptation that I brought it upon myself?

00:42:04.920 It'll be there in the back of my mind because I've just inherited from generations that way of thinking.

00:42:12.920 And it's worth adding one little footnote to this.

00:42:16.900 My friend, the historian Tom Holland, wrote a nice book recently, Dominion,

00:42:21.440 arguing that Christian ways of thinking about the world have outlived Christianity in these secular times that we inhabit.

00:42:30.780 A very good illustration of this point is how much Calvinism is still out there.

00:42:37.200 The belief that you belong to the elect, the people because of predestination who are ensured of salvation,

00:42:44.700 is a very powerful one.

00:42:46.500 And it persists long after people have ceased to attend Calvinist church services.

00:42:52.140 I'm always impressed by the presence of the self-appointed elect in academic life.

00:42:59.320 People who have a sense that they are morally superior to those around them.

00:43:04.020 They do belong to an elite.

00:43:06.460 And their behavior should be, as it were, fitting to that preeminence.

00:43:13.160 Now, I am a kind of Calvinist atheist.

00:43:16.200 I come from the west of Scotland where that kind of thinking was very well established.

00:43:20.520 Now, I can see the people who think they belong to the elect all around me in American academic life.

00:43:27.560 And, of course, the critical idea which Robert Louis Stevenson gets at in The Master of Ballantrae

00:43:34.020 and James Hogg gets in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner is that the elect are the worst people.

00:43:40.140 It's the people who think that they belong to the elite who turn out to be capable of the most diabolical acts.

00:43:46.700 So, you know, if you have that feeling that you might belong to the elect,

00:43:51.440 disabuse yourself of that notion because it often empowers dreadful acts of cruelty.

00:43:56.420 I presume that's why the gospel enjoinder is that the last will be first, right?

00:44:04.800 And the first will be last.

00:44:06.100 It's pointing to something like that.

00:44:07.700 There's a couple of themes you developed.

00:44:09.580 So, you pointed out that it's often the reaction to a crisis that's worse than the crisis.

00:44:17.300 And you pointed to the law of unintended consequences as the cause of that.

00:44:21.620 And that's, I think there's something technically true about that in that there is a very large number of possible consequences of any given act.

00:44:33.240 And the probability that you can specify the consequence you want and only that consequence diminishes with the complexity of the action.

00:44:42.960 Okay, so, and you know, you can see even systems as sophisticated as the immune system falling prey to the law of unintended consequences

00:44:54.580 because sometimes people die when they're infected by an organism because the immune system overreacts.

00:45:01.200 And the COVID overreaction was a generalized social immune system overreaction.

00:45:07.620 And it was much worse than the hypothetical crisis itself.

00:45:13.420 But what I wanted to focus on was the reason that that overreach occurs.

00:45:19.760 Now, I've been writing a book about biblical narratives, so they're very much on my mind.

00:45:25.740 And that's partly why I'm bringing them up.

00:45:27.300 But I talked to a good friend of mine and his brother, Jonathan Pajot and Matthew Pajot, about the first cataclysm,

00:45:37.360 the first apocalyptic cataclysm as it's laid out in the book of Genesis.

00:45:41.400 And that's the sin of Eve and the consequent sin of Adam.

00:45:44.920 And their view is that the sin of Eve is one of pride, is that she encounters the serpent who turns out to be Satan.

00:45:53.300 So it's the possibility of predation and natural catastrophe allied with the possibility of evil.

00:46:02.040 That's a good way of thinking about it symbolically.

00:46:04.380 And her first presumption is that she can encompass that and hearken to it and listen to its voice and integrate it.

00:46:16.080 And that's what produces the fall.

00:46:18.420 And Adam's consequent sin is he agrees with Eve, and I would say mostly to try to impress her, which speaks very deeply to the motivation of men.

00:46:27.440 And so there's this notion.

00:46:29.220 It's a very, very interesting notion.

00:46:31.380 And I'd like to know what you make of it, is that the fundamental reason that cataclysms occur,

00:46:37.000 and I guess this is an objection to your theory of an amoral world, so we'll see where this goes,

00:46:45.440 is that it's people's overreaching pride that is the eternal precursor to the fall.

00:46:51.460 You know, pride goes before a fall.

00:46:53.100 But it's this notion that we can bite off more than we can chew,

00:46:57.020 that we can encapsulate and control more than we're really competent to.

00:47:02.140 We have an overexpansive vision of our competence.

00:47:06.880 We trumpet that to parade our moral virtue.

00:47:10.860 It motivates us to overextend ourselves in places we shouldn't.

00:47:16.360 And the constant consequence of that is systemic collapse, you know, at different scales.

00:47:23.240 And so it begs the question, you know, I've really wondered about this.

00:47:26.020 And, you know, if you, I think it's something to meditate on.

00:47:32.740 If you didn't overreach in your life, you know, if you were properly humble in your claims of mastery,

00:47:42.380 if you only dealt with what was local and that was within your bounds of competence,

00:47:47.800 you know, maybe extending yourself a bit to learn,

00:47:50.000 maybe you wouldn't bring on yourself a continual sequence of relatively apocalyptic catastrophes, right?

00:47:57.580 It's like, and you pointed to that at the end of your last sequence of comments.

00:48:01.720 You know, you said there's a tension there.

00:48:04.440 You said, well, the universe is full of random events and it's not essentially moral.

00:48:09.120 But you also said, but we overreach constantly.

00:48:13.180 And that does produce, you know, various forms of cataclysm.

00:48:16.940 And so I would say, see, there's a paradox in those two viewpoints because how about this?

00:48:23.060 Is how about our immorality makes us more susceptible to the random fluctuations of the world?

00:48:29.760 That joins those two visions together.

00:48:32.260 I think it's rather, rather different from the way you've put it.

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00:49:27.800 It's often people with a strong sense of morality who overreach.

00:49:38.720 Humility is important.

00:49:40.560 We need to be humble about our ability to predict the consequences of our actions.

00:49:44.600 It's a non-linear world, but we are quite linear thinkers,

00:49:48.320 and we love to say other things being equal,

00:49:52.260 this act will have the following consequence.

00:49:55.620 But of course, other things are not equal in a complex system.

00:50:00.700 Let me give you an illustration of this point,

00:50:02.940 which is currently in people's minds because of the success of the movie Oppenheimer.

00:50:08.980 Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer, was a very moral individual.

00:50:14.360 At least he felt himself to be rooted in an ethical education that he'd had at an elite school in New York,

00:50:22.260 drawn out of those ethical premises towards communism in the 1930s.

00:50:31.080 But when given the challenge to build an atomic bomb in order to win World War II,

00:50:40.040 he embraced that challenge and achieved it with astonishing brilliance.

00:50:46.380 Brilliance both as a scientist and, as it turned out, as a leader of scientists.

00:50:50.620 But he quickly began to see, after the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

00:50:57.780 that there were unintended consequences.

00:50:59.580 He was unable to prevent the arms race that soon broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union.

00:51:07.020 He was unable to prevent the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, the Super.

00:51:12.140 He lost the arguments about the development of nuclear weapons.

00:51:18.320 And if one looks back at that era,

00:51:20.720 the single most amazing thing to me about that breakthrough

00:51:25.020 is that we have subsequently made so much more use of the destructive potential of nuclear fission

00:51:32.940 than of its productive potential.

00:51:35.960 We've built many, many more nuclear warheads than nuclear reactors.

00:51:40.800 That illustrates, I think, very powerfully the law of unintended consequences.

00:51:45.060 But it began with an individual, Oppenheimer,

00:51:49.620 who was filled with a sense of his own morality

00:51:52.640 and took that sense with him to the grave.

00:51:56.360 Right, okay, but maybe that, okay, but you're pointing to something there

00:52:00.500 that is akin to a point you made earlier,

00:52:03.260 is that you said, you know, that he was filled with a sense of his own morality.

00:52:08.220 And that, and I can understand why that might be associated with

00:52:12.800 the totalitarian temptation of religious dogmatism and Calvinism, let's say.

00:52:18.740 But I could say, perhaps I could say in response,

00:52:22.140 he should have been filled instead with a sense of his own potential sinfulness.

00:52:27.560 Right, and I would also say that,

00:52:29.020 and you can tell me what you think about this,

00:52:30.500 because these are ideas that I'm just, you know, trying to develop,

00:52:33.180 is that you already told me that as far as you're concerned,

00:52:36.900 it's the very people who regard themselves as the elect and the saved

00:52:40.340 and the already moral who are most likely to overreach

00:52:44.180 and who present the biggest danger.

00:52:45.580 And you followed that up with a description of Oppenheimer, right?

00:52:48.660 This incredible Luciferian intellect,

00:52:52.160 and that's the proper symbolic representation,

00:52:55.640 who engaged in this world-destroying scheme

00:52:59.300 and then was potentially world-destroying scheme

00:53:01.560 and was unable to control it.

00:53:03.520 But you characterized him as convinced of his own moral virtue.

00:53:07.440 So I would say, okay, well, if that's the problem,

00:53:09.720 maybe he should have been convinced of the opposite of that,

00:53:12.820 which would be his intrinsic insufficiency and sinfulness.

00:53:17.400 Now, there is a continual injunction throughout the biblical corpus

00:53:20.920 to do precisely that.

00:53:22.520 And the reason I'm bringing that up, too,

00:53:24.520 is because something else that you said begs a question.

00:53:28.220 You know, if the law of unintended consequence rules,

00:53:31.420 then under what conditions is action, any action, not overreach, right?

00:53:38.820 Because you could say, this is combinatorial explosion.

00:53:41.860 You can't predict the consequence of any action,

00:53:45.240 and yet you have to act.

00:53:47.840 And so then the question emerges,

00:53:50.320 well, since you have to act,

00:53:52.500 but there's the danger of exponentially cascading unintended consequences,

00:53:56.600 in what spirit should you act?

00:53:59.780 And you've already pointed out,

00:54:01.100 well, it shouldn't be in the spirit of smug, self-satisfied,

00:54:05.120 Calvinistic, dogmatic certainty in your moral right.

00:54:09.280 Well, then what should it be?

00:54:10.520 Well, hopefully it should be the opposite of that.

00:54:13.140 You know, and that is a kind of radical humility, right?

00:54:16.060 It's an openness to the possibility of error.

00:54:18.940 I mean, I don't know exactly how those things should be calibrated,

00:54:21.600 but because we do have to act,

00:54:24.440 and it does seem to me that there is a domain of action.

00:54:26.900 Like, what do you think it was that Oppenheimer did wrong, fundamentally?

00:54:32.260 I mean, I characterize his intellect as Luciferian, right?

00:54:35.540 He's reaching for a power that, in principle,

00:54:42.520 I don't know if it should have been forever off limits.

00:54:45.040 I have no idea how to adjudicate that.

00:54:47.180 But you have a sense that Oppenheimer himself recognized

00:54:50.480 that he had, it wasn't that he had too much faith

00:54:53.880 in the comprehensiveness of his intellect,

00:54:55.980 that he was too tempted by the power that was offered to him

00:54:58.760 as a consequence of being developer of this immense weapon.

00:55:02.980 Where do you think he went wrong?

00:55:05.360 That's key to the question of where science itself goes wrong.

00:55:08.440 I should be clear, I haven't watched the movie,

00:55:11.080 but I read the book American Prometheus.

00:55:13.780 I prefer books to movies.

00:55:15.700 And the book makes it clear that what Oppenheimer got wrong

00:55:20.300 was to flirt with communism.

00:55:24.240 And that was wrong because it was the moment

00:55:27.700 when he set aside his scientific judgment

00:55:31.080 and drank at least some of the snake oil

00:55:34.840 that the Soviet regime was successfully exporting in the 1930s.

00:55:39.920 This was a terrible mistake that ultimately undermined his credibility

00:55:43.320 and limited his power to steer the course of the nuclear race.

00:55:50.080 What he got right was to develop a bomb that could end World War II

00:55:54.000 without the need for a large-scale conventional forces invasion of Japan,

00:55:57.320 which would have cost untold numbers of American soldiers' lives.

00:56:02.580 And I think it's very important to emphasize

00:56:04.920 that if Oppenheimer had said to himself,

00:56:09.000 I must be humble and resist the temptation to win this race,

00:56:16.700 and of course, a number of physicists did take that view

00:56:20.260 and refused to participate in the Manhattan Project,

00:56:22.640 it might have been disastrous.

00:56:24.580 I constantly try to remind people

00:56:26.960 in the work I've done on the Second World War

00:56:29.760 that the Axis powers, the totalitarian powers,

00:56:32.400 nearly won that war.

00:56:34.160 And it took tremendous creativity by a whole range of scientists,

00:56:37.980 not only Oppenheimer, but think of Turing,

00:56:40.120 those cryptographers who did such a crucial job

00:56:44.160 of making sure that the Allied powers cracked the Axis powers codes.

00:56:48.840 It took a huge effort to win that war.

00:56:53.200 The critical thing, I think, comes from another secular Jewish intellect,

00:57:01.360 Henry Kissinger, whose biography I've spent a large part of my career writing.

00:57:06.080 In the 1950s and 60s, Kissinger, before he entered the realm of power,

00:57:11.620 came up with the idea of the problem of conjecture.

00:57:14.800 It's an extremely important idea that should be communicated to any decision maker,

00:57:19.560 whether they're in the private sector or the public sector.

00:57:21.760 And the problem of conjecture says that at any given moment,

00:57:25.580 when one must take a decision, there is a kind of asymmetry.

00:57:30.900 And the asymmetry arises from the fact that if you act,

00:57:35.400 let's say if you had acted in 1938 to prevent Hitler's takeover of Czechoslovakia,

00:57:43.260 there would have been a cost.

00:57:44.940 The war would have begun earlier.

00:57:46.820 And even if you had successfully prevented a much larger war,

00:57:52.380 the world war that broke out in 1939, you would have got no real gratitude for that.

00:57:57.400 You get no payoffs for the averted catastrophe.

00:58:01.280 Your preemptive action has a cost, and that you're held responsible for.

00:58:06.140 The tempting thing, particularly in a democratic system, is to do nothing,

00:58:09.560 hope for the best, because that has a low cost.

00:58:13.220 And if disaster nevertheless happens, if you're unlucky, then you say to yourself,

00:58:19.040 well, anybody in my position would have made the same error.

00:58:22.540 So the cost of preemption is high, and you have to take a decision conjecturally,

00:58:27.940 because you can't know that in acting in 1938,

00:58:31.500 you avert a much larger and more dangerous war.

00:58:34.580 You cannot have that certainty.

00:58:36.220 And there are no data that will tell you.

00:58:38.280 So I think decision-making under uncertainty is the hardest thing of all.

00:58:43.140 But it has to be done.

00:58:45.120 And I think what I've learned from Kissinger is that you will be held responsible

00:58:50.660 and judged very harshly for those actions you take.

00:58:55.600 Even if they avert disaster, you won't get thanked.

00:58:58.460 Nobody ever will thank Henry Kissinger for avoiding World War III.

00:59:01.700 Nobody will, I think, ever thank any statesman for avoiding calamity.

00:59:08.700 They will only blame them for the actions that they took.

00:59:11.860 And here's the final point that Kissinger makes.

00:59:14.200 Most choices in the realm of power are between evils.

00:59:18.340 You just have to decide which is the greater and which is the lesser.

00:59:21.920 There are very frequently no good options.

00:59:24.580 I think that's very clear today in the Middle East,

00:59:26.940 since we're talking at a time of fresh disaster in that region.

00:59:32.360 There are no good choices facing the Israeli government

00:59:36.180 or even the government of the United States.

00:59:38.540 But there's no option to do nothing.

00:59:41.100 I think that must be clear.

00:59:43.220 Let me take apart what you just said.

00:59:45.420 And so, the first thing you brought up is that Oppenheimer flirted with,

00:59:54.260 let's call it, radical left utopianism.

00:59:57.720 Now, that's very interesting because I would say that's true of intellectuals across the West

01:00:04.460 and has been since the, what?

01:00:07.340 I don't know.

01:00:08.360 The last hundred years.

01:00:09.680 And it's certainly something that characterizes the academia, academia at the moment.

01:00:16.420 I mean, Larry Summers came out two days ago, the former president of Harvard,

01:00:21.460 savaging Harvard as a consequence of its descent into this radical leftist, statist utopian vision.

01:00:28.820 So, there's something key to the presumption of the intellect

01:00:35.700 and belief in a state-imposed utopia.

01:00:38.760 So, that's one thing.

01:00:40.660 Then you said a sequence of things that were very, very complicated.

01:00:45.060 The first was, well, inaction also produces a combinatorial explosion.

01:00:51.320 So, we're stuck with the necessity of action.

01:00:53.920 So, that's a big problem.

01:00:55.160 That brings up the issue again is then under what conditions is action appropriate.

01:00:59.280 Then you said you're also not rewarded for preventative action because, in part, because nobody can tell what you prevented if it doesn't happen, right?

01:01:12.300 And so, there's no public virtue in that.

01:01:14.880 And that entices the leaders of modern states to forestall action because they'll be blamed for action and then maybe to react precipitously once it's too late.

01:01:26.740 So, then again, we're back to the central question here, at least in part, which is how do you organize your attention and sequence your action so that overreach is least likely?

01:01:43.820 Now, you discussed Kissinger in that regard and said that, you know, he was constantly choosing between evils and regarded that as a necessity of statescraft.

01:01:54.920 You have to conduct yourself.

01:01:58.260 We talked earlier about this idea that, you know, that there's a tremendous moral hazard in praying in public and signaling virtue to yourself and demanding recognition for your positive actions.

01:02:11.280 And you said that prevention doesn't produce public acclaim.

01:02:19.180 That what that has to mean, at least in part, is that you have to be oriented to act properly despite its reputational advantage or cost, right?

01:02:29.200 See, that's exactly it, is that something other than reputation has to motivate your action.

01:02:33.860 And then the question is, what should motivate your action if it's not status, power, and reputation, right?

01:02:42.420 That's exactly right.

01:02:43.380 That's where that should be.

01:02:44.220 Enoch Powell said all political careers end in failure.

01:02:48.520 I think that any leader should reconcile himself or herself to ultimate failure because doing the right thing, averting disaster, will not get you rewarded.

01:03:04.600 And I think this is just to—

01:03:06.300 So then why bother?

01:03:07.380 Why bother doing the right thing?

01:03:08.880 And how do you even determine what the right thing is if it's not associated with public acclaim?

01:03:14.360 What would right be?

01:03:15.960 Because it must have ultimately been right for Churchill to speak out against appeasement, as he did throughout the 1930s,

01:03:24.340 to take the helm in 1940 when all his predictions had been fulfilled and Britain had been brought to the brink of catastrophe,

01:03:31.800 to lead Britain to an ultimate victory in 1945 and then suffer a massive electoral defeat.

01:03:39.320 This is a noble story.

01:03:40.880 And I think that's what any leader should aspire to, to be right on the basis of historical judgment,

01:03:48.720 to accept that there will not necessarily be triumphal processions, that there may in fact be ignominy at the end of the road.

01:03:56.980 But to have done the right thing, to save your nation and get no thanks for it,

01:04:01.620 that seems to be the most that any leader can aspire to.

01:04:05.480 Okay, okay, okay.

01:04:06.920 Well, I've got two comments about that, and then we'll wrap this part of the interview out.

01:04:12.780 I understand that you have a hard out.

01:04:15.660 You described Churchill's actions in terms of ultimate right.

01:04:19.820 And so you made reference to a concept of ultimate right.

01:04:23.500 And then you turned to a particular concept of ultimate right,

01:04:26.660 which was a form of extreme self-sacrifice with no public acclaim.

01:04:32.300 I got to say, those are strange things for someone who also said during the same discussion,

01:04:38.220 who proclaimed a kind of central atheism, because I can't help seeing echoes in that of,

01:04:45.280 well, the Christian passion, for example, is that you're called upon to do right at your own expense,

01:04:51.800 even your own ultimate expense, with no hope of public acclaim,

01:04:57.120 and you do that in the service of something that's ultimately right.

01:05:02.600 And so, well, that's a parallel that occurred to me when you made the argument.

01:05:08.640 That's a perfectly shrewd observation.

01:05:09.960 I'm a lapsed atheist, Jordan.

01:05:11.760 I go to church every Sunday, precisely because, having been brought up an atheist,

01:05:17.100 I came to realize in my career as an historian, not only that atheism is a disastrous basis for a society,

01:05:23.800 atheist societies have probably committed more violations of human rights than any others,

01:05:28.760 but also because I don't think it can be a basis for individual ethical decision-making.

01:05:36.700 Churchill was a Christian, and I think it has to be understood as such.

01:05:40.440 So I am a lapsed atheist and proud of it.

01:05:43.700 Ah, okay. Well, you know, it turns out I wanted to talk to you for the additional half an hour that I usually use,

01:05:51.360 but that's actually just a perfectly fine place to bring this part of the conversation to an end.

01:05:56.180 I would be more than happy to talk to you again in some greater detail.

01:06:01.240 There's obviously many other things that we could explore.

01:06:03.900 For everyone watching and listening, most of you know that I'm going to continue to talk to Dr. Ferguson on The Daily Wire.

01:06:12.580 I want to understand more deeply where his interest in such topics arose during the course of his life.

01:06:20.580 I usually use an autobiographical approach in that half an hour.

01:06:24.760 So if those of you who are watching and listening would like to join us on The Daily Wire side, that would be great.

01:06:30.040 Otherwise, Neil, thank you very much for a very stimulating conversation.

01:06:33.700 Thank you to everyone who's paid attention and devoted some time to walking through this podcast with us.

01:06:41.020 Thanks, John.

01:06:41.480 Thank you.

404. A Podcast About the End of the World ｜ Dr. Niall Ferguson

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