The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 472. A Call for the Sane - Beauty, Truth, & Purpose

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to talk with Douglas Murray.

00:01:14.960 Douglas is the author of The War on the West, The Strange Death of Europe, and The Madness of Crowds, among other books.

00:01:23.180 Douglas has been a cardinal voice signaling to everyone the danger of the culture war, trying to assess its reasons, trying to mount a defense against its most destructive aspects, and trying to call people's attention to the dangers that beset the Western world and freedom in general.

00:01:47.080 Because freedom in general is essentially identical to the Western world, for better, for worse.

00:01:53.520 And so an assault on the West is an assault on everything that isn't nihilistic, catastrophic, and authoritarian in its essence.

00:02:03.200 What did Douglas and I talk about today?

00:02:05.200 We talked a lot about the situation in the UK, the recent uprisings of the British working class, the incredible ethnic and cultural tensions that have been generated in the wake of an immigration policy,

00:02:27.580 whose rationale is, what would you say, incomprehensible, not only incomprehensible, but absent.

00:02:36.320 What's the function of the untrammeled immigration policies that characterize Germany and France and the UK, especially given the obvious fact that they're producing a tremendous amount of internal stress?

00:02:50.900 We talked a little bit about the more pragmatic aspects of the problem, it's easier to travel now than it ever was before, it's easier to share information, and certainly both of those factors play a cardinal role,

00:03:04.920 but there's also this strange blindness among the political elite, a willful blindness, or perhaps a motivated willful blindness, to the catastrophic consequences of these kinds of indiscriminate policies.

00:03:19.800 So, Douglas and I spent a lot of time delving into that, trying to parse it apart, assessing also the strange union of the radical leftists with the Islamic fundamentalists,

00:03:35.740 let's say, with regards to what's happened in Israel and in Gaza since October 7th.

00:03:41.640 So, tough conversation.

00:03:44.120 We also talked about Douglas' plan to do a speaking tour for the next couple of months, and he's in a number of American cities.

00:03:53.640 You could go to Live Nation and type in the name Douglas Murray and find tickets, so I'd also recommend that.

00:03:59.240 I think it's going to go in LA on the 23rd of September.

00:04:03.580 So, anyways, on with the analysis of the strange death of the West.

00:04:10.640 Well, hello, Mr. Murray. It's good to see you again.

00:04:14.340 It's been about a year since we've done a podcast already, and it's been some time since we've seen each other.

00:04:20.720 We obviously saw each other when you were on tour with me last September.

00:04:25.080 I guess, first of all, I'm pleased to be able to talk to you, and there's lots to talk about, that's for sure.

00:04:30.220 And I guess maybe the first thing I'd like to find out is, well, what have you got planned in the upcoming months?

00:04:36.480 What's on your plate?

00:04:37.480 Well, I'm in New York at the moment, and in September, I'm doing a tour here in the U.S., a speaking tour, doing six cities from L.A. to New York, finishing at the Beacon Theater, where I saw you a while ago, and also doing Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Denver, and maybe some more dates to add.

00:04:59.260 But that's in September, and anyone who's interested can go to the Live Nation website, and you'll find all the details there.

00:05:05.600 Otherwise, I am, as ever, living out of a suitcase and trying to keep abreast of all the things that are doing as lots of things in our society is falling apart.

00:05:18.620 So I've spent a lot of the last year in Israel, in the Middle East, covering the conflict there in Israel and Gaza.

00:05:24.060 I was there for almost six months after the 7th of October.

00:05:29.460 But now things are kicking off in quite a number of countries, as you know.

00:05:35.260 So this speaking tour, let's concentrate on that for a minute, too.

00:05:38.780 So what's your goal and your plan?

00:05:41.540 What are you offering people who come to, and what are you hoping to achieve?

00:05:45.920 What are you offering people who are going to come and listen?

00:05:47.680 Well, one of the things is that it's a follow-on from, you know, I wrote this book, The War on the West, which you and I discussed when it came out about 18 months ago.

00:05:57.980 And since then, there have been so many things that have happened, not least the 7th of October and the war that's followed.

00:06:04.160 Because I've covered all of this up close and got some pretty extraordinary camera footage of this, I wanted to present it to an audience to be able to show what I've seen and what I think of as the realities that I think a lot of people are running away from at the moment.

00:06:21.740 But the realities of what happens when, you know, well, frankly, when violence breaks out.

00:06:27.900 And I think it's a great warning to people in America and elsewhere, a great warning of, you know, this stuff can become very real, as it did in Israel last October.

00:06:40.740 And anyhow, it's going to be some fun to be had along the way.

00:06:44.100 My friend and colleague from the Monk Debates in Toronto, Natasha Hausdorff, is going to be with me on stage to do the Q&A session and interview.

00:06:52.160 And yes, there's going to be a lot of never-before-seen footage from a lot of crazy situations.

00:07:02.160 So, it sounds in some ways like what a live current affairs show that's focused specifically on this issue.

00:07:10.280 Okay, so you said that you're going to use, if I've got it right, you're going to use the occurrences of October 7th and afterwards as an object lesson, right?

00:07:20.600 An object lesson in the consequences, what, of the disintegration of a societal ethos?

00:07:25.700 The consequences of, like, what, how do you exactly do you tie in what you were writing about in the war on the West with what you've seen unfold since October 7th, say, in relationship to what you're going to speak about?

00:07:38.520 Well, one thing is, of course, is that October 7th, for a lot of people in Israel, was an example of what happens when you've been living in a delusion and are suddenly woken up from that.

00:07:53.200 I've written a lot in recent years, as have others, about the way in which, in all Western democracies, we've had a sort of lack of seriousness, really, about some of the threats that we face.

00:08:07.080 There's a slumberingness that's gone on for a long time, which I and others have warned against.

00:08:16.160 But I suppose, among other things, of course, it's not just about that, it's about how people react in the face of real threat and real crisis.

00:08:23.760 And that's one of the things that I'm very interested in at the moment, is the way in which a terrible situation like that throws up these two completely counter-forces.

00:08:36.080 One is the force of real evil and what it's like to stare into the face of real evil.

00:08:42.520 The other is, of course, the face of true heroism, the people who, in the face of atrocity, become the person that they were meant to be.

00:08:54.280 And I've seen a lot of that in the last year.

00:08:57.640 And I think there are enormous lessons to be learned, not just of the negatives, but the positives of the way in which, actually, when extraordinary events occur, extraordinary people are thrown up.

00:09:11.980 And, you know, we might all see a bit more of that in the years ahead.

00:09:14.940 So, in what manner do you view what happened in October 7th, on October 7th and afterwards, as a reflection of the sorts of things that you were worrying about in War on the West?

00:09:27.780 How do you see it as another step in the logical unfolding of the processes that you were assessing?

00:09:35.740 Well, partly from that and partly from the previous books, including my one, The Strange Death of Europe, that came out in 2017, a lot of that was concerned with saying,

00:09:48.580 look, you know, there are deep, deep challenges that are going on to what we used to call the liberal democratic society, and a deep unwillingness of people to realize that those challenges were not metaphorical.

00:10:01.360 Since 7th of October, we've seen unbelievable scenes on everywhere from the streets of London and major cities in Europe to the most elite campuses of Northern America, Ivy League campuses,

00:10:16.600 where students who have the most privileged existence imaginable have decided to openly throw their lot in with the terrorists of Hamas.

00:10:25.100 You know, this has gone further a lot faster, I think, than a lot of people realized.

00:10:31.360 But it is something I've been warning about for a very long time, that yes, there are deep, deep things happening in our society,

00:10:40.920 including what I've described in the past as being the thing of people at risk of rebelling for the sake of rebellion and out of boredom.

00:10:53.520 And this is a deep thing in American society in particular.

00:10:58.600 You know, the call for a great cause.

00:11:03.860 One of the student protesters at Columbia was quoted in New York Magazine the other month,

00:11:09.640 saying that he was a first-generation, low-income student who was the first member of his family to go to university.

00:11:16.800 And you think, well, that sounds good.

00:11:18.540 And then he went on to say, and when I got to Columbia, I learned about the rich history of protest at Columbia.

00:11:26.040 And I decided, I knew, he said, I knew that as soon as it kicked off, I wanted to be in the middle of it.

00:11:33.920 I mean, wow.

00:11:35.100 So let me ask you about that in some more detail.

00:11:42.640 So this is going to be a complicated question.

00:11:44.920 But you put your finger on something that's crucial and deep, psychological rather than political,

00:11:51.940 or even spiritual, let's say, rather than political.

00:11:56.740 As you know from touring with me, you know, I've been investigating,

00:12:00.940 one of the things I've been investigating is, what is it that makes life worthwhile?

00:12:05.400 Well, I talked to a philosopher this week on my podcast who has written a couple of books

00:12:12.920 on a stream of analytic philosophy that's been debating whether or not if you weighed up the evidence

00:12:20.920 en masse, whether, you know, existence itself is a net good or a net evil with whatever implications

00:12:28.420 you might want to draw from that argument for its creator, right?

00:12:32.260 So I'm not trying to make a theological case, but part of this inquiry is like,

00:12:36.780 if there was a God, is it more logical to conceive of him as good or as evil?

00:12:42.940 And underneath that is a sense that the proper axis of evaluation for such a question is

00:12:49.100 whether there's more pain and misery in the world or pleasure.

00:12:54.460 And my sense is that that's the fact that that's how the argument is constituted is actually

00:13:00.100 an indication of the pathology of our culture, because it's a fool's game to map pleasure and

00:13:07.420 pain onto good and evil, partly because there are evil pleasures and there are morally justifiable

00:13:14.660 pains, right?

00:13:15.560 So whatever the landscape, whatever the moral landscape is, it's not reducible to the hedonic

00:13:20.800 landscape and any axiomatic assumption that it is.

00:13:23.580 Okay.

00:13:23.720 So there's a corollary to that, and one of the corollaries would be, well, if we're not

00:13:28.940 built to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, let's say, which is a powerful argument because

00:13:34.580 emotions are powerful and the positive and negative emotion systems are powerful motivating

00:13:40.140 systems.

00:13:41.140 But if we're not built to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, then what's the cardinal call

00:13:46.900 to existence?

00:13:47.660 And my sense is that it's something akin to adventure.

00:13:51.920 Maybe it's romantic adventure, which is an even better formulation.

00:13:56.360 All right.

00:13:56.740 So then let's say if that's the case, and you and I talked about this the last time we talked

00:14:01.360 about the truth as part of the call to adventure.

00:14:04.940 Heroic adventure, yes.

00:14:06.480 Exactly.

00:14:07.100 Exactly.

00:14:07.640 Well, so then if that's the case and the cardinal motivation in life is something like the heroic

00:14:14.020 call to adventure, then you might ask yourself, well, what, if that's not being pursued, what

00:14:21.840 beckons as an ersatz alternative?

00:14:25.080 And like certainly protest in the name of ideology is a tempting false adventure.

00:14:32.600 It's very tempting.

00:14:33.600 It's very tempting.

00:14:34.540 I mean, I would say in general, the purpose, finding purpose in a higher cause is of course

00:14:40.560 one of the most useful ways to find a meaning in your life beyond the maximization of pleasure.

00:14:47.780 Unfortunately, the rebellious attitude for the sake of rebellion becomes extremely appealing.

00:14:58.540 Another of the students at Columbia, I'm sorry to hark on about it, but it does show a rot

00:15:03.920 somewhere, you know, at elite institutions.

00:15:06.700 One of the other students at Columbia said that it started the year out as a protest in

00:15:11.840 October against the climate emergency, the climate crisis.

00:15:17.680 And, you know, within a month, it was Hamas.

00:15:21.840 So one of the things I noticed, I suppose it was in about 2014, which was approximately when

00:15:28.520 I was starting to detect that something had gone seriously wrong with the universities,

00:15:33.800 let's say, one of the things I did recognize amongst my colleagues was this axiomatic presumption

00:15:41.840 that part of what the universities were there for was to teach young people how to be moral

00:15:49.600 by protesting, that that protest itself had become a stand-in for morality.

00:15:56.880 And so, you know, you can feel some sympathy for that kid that you were describing.

00:16:02.660 I mean, he's gone off to an elite institution hoping to be taught how to live a good life

00:16:08.520 in the classic sense by the world's most profound experts.

00:16:12.820 And what he found when he got there was that since the 1960s, the best thing that the universities

00:16:18.100 have to offer to their students is the false, the false reputation, the false claim to morality

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00:17:37.920 The life of an activist is the ideal life and the life that's rewarded and the life that

00:17:55.440 is seen to be virtuous.

00:17:56.600 I mean, it's all of that.

00:17:57.720 And by the way, one of the other things that has struck me very much in recent times has

00:18:02.320 been the fact that, of course, a lot of the problems that we see emerging in our societies

00:18:08.100 in the West come about not just from that boredom, but, of course, the fact that when

00:18:12.200 the financial pied goes out and stops being able to lift people up, a lot of other stuff

00:18:21.560 gets revealed.

00:18:24.100 We see this in the UK at the moment.

00:18:26.200 It's not, by any means, the only explanation for the riots that have been going on.

00:18:31.420 But if you look at all of the northern towns in which the riots have been going on, the

00:18:35.440 material well-being of the population has declined in the last 13 years since the last

00:18:41.500 set of riots.

00:18:43.420 And, you know, you sort of think, well, if the society isn't working for you financially,

00:18:50.840 and joblessness has actually gone up, and on top of that, you have challenges to your

00:18:59.720 identity, well, of course, there's a cause right there.

00:19:05.200 And not an ignoble one.

00:19:06.640 If it's about saying, you know, I want to defend my culture and all of that, ignoble once

00:19:13.640 somebody thinks that the best way of doing that is to pick up a brick and throw it at a

00:19:17.200 policeman or at a place of worship.

00:19:19.860 Yeah, well, it's no simple matter to distinguish the genuine protests from the false protests.

00:19:25.840 That's for sure.

00:19:27.500 And so, let me ask you one more question about your tour and your talk, and then maybe we'll

00:19:33.680 turn our attention to the situation in the UK.

00:19:36.420 Okay, so you're planning on showing your audiences footage from your journeys through the Middle

00:19:43.780 East for the last six months.

00:19:45.560 So, I guess I'm curious about, well, you know, you didn't step into the conflict in the Middle

00:19:52.240 East as a naive observer, either of people or of societies.

00:19:55.940 But my suspicions are that you've seen a lot more in the last six months than you ever really

00:20:00.440 wanted to see.

00:20:01.280 And so, I'm curious about what you've seen and what you've concluded from that and how

00:20:07.660 it's altered or extended your viewpoint or challenged it for that matter.

00:20:13.060 Like, you've been poking your nose into very dangerous places.

00:20:18.080 And so, what's been the consequence for you?

00:20:20.860 And what is it that you're hoping to shed a light on with the imagery in particular, let's

00:20:25.560 say?

00:20:26.360 What are you hoping to shed a light on for the people who are going to come and hear you

00:20:29.700 talk?

00:20:30.920 Well, there's quite a lot of things.

00:20:32.180 I mean, I've covered a lot of conflicts before, including in the Middle East.

00:20:36.180 And a lot of what has been happening is sadly familiar territory to me.

00:20:43.980 There are, though, as you and I have discussed before, there's a reason why hell is a pit

00:20:50.200 that's endless.

00:20:51.800 And when it comes to violence and the ability to commit acts of evil, it seems to me that

00:21:03.200 I mean, that axiom that the pit is just endless has really been shown in the last year.

00:21:11.000 I've been in Israel and Gaza most of the time since the 7th.

00:21:14.960 And yes, I mean, of course, like anyone reporting from the front line has seen lots of things

00:21:20.080 that I'd rather not have seen.

00:21:21.640 But I mean, my belief is that there's a very important role in society for people who do

00:21:26.500 that and come back and tell everyone else what it's like.

00:21:29.440 Not least, of course, to warn people.

00:21:31.100 I mean, there's lots of things that, you know, I've seen as a reporter and the reporter

00:21:35.120 from War Zones, which I know I would not want other people to see.

00:21:39.000 I know I didn't want to see myself.

00:21:40.880 But in order for other people not to see that, you have to know where people can go.

00:21:47.520 And, you know, I mean, like one of the things that has struck me a lot in the last year has

00:21:53.360 been that the, and I've made this comment a couple of times in pieces and elsewhere,

00:21:58.900 that the terrorists of the 7th in particular were deeply gleeful whilst carrying out acts

00:22:06.620 of unbelievable barbarism.

00:22:08.500 And that's something that I've been thinking about a lot, because to be doing something

00:22:16.080 you think is right but is evil is one thing.

00:22:20.640 To be doing something that is evil and being joyful about it is, and for people around you

00:22:29.180 to celebrate it.

00:22:30.580 And then several degrees of remove that people who think they've got the same cause as you

00:22:37.100 would excuse it or, you know, say, well, context or, you know, much like all sorts of

00:22:47.120 things like that, that are just alarming.

00:22:49.420 And, you know, I've often thought actually in recent months of, there was a late historian

00:22:56.040 and writer called Gita Sareni who died about 20 years ago, made a great impact on me when

00:23:00.180 I was growing up.

00:23:01.140 She wrote, among other things, a biography of the child killer Mary Bell, and also the

00:23:05.980 biographies of Stangl, the camp commandant of Treblinka, who she interviewed, and also

00:23:12.340 of Albert Speer.

00:23:13.760 I remember reading an interview with Gita Sareni towards the end of her life, and she was

00:23:17.420 not a religious person, but she said, having spent a lot of her life considering evil and

00:23:23.900 staring at evil and writing about evil, she said, it feels like a force that descends.

00:23:31.420 It just manifests and there's no other explanation for it.

00:23:36.560 It's not, it isn't just about some problem in the developmental process or simply a matter

00:23:44.860 of education or opportunity, is it on top of all those problems that do exist, sometimes

00:23:50.500 there is an incarnation of evil in the world.

00:23:55.560 Well, in one way of thinking about that, I think, even technically, is that, because I've

00:24:01.380 been thinking about this a lot in relationship to these new large language models, you know,

00:24:05.520 one, there's a statistical probability that any given concept will be associated with any

00:24:12.500 other given concept.

00:24:14.620 And if your mapping is technologically advanced enough, you can calculate those statistical

00:24:20.460 relationships, and that's what the large language models do.

00:24:23.060 And then you can start to see, you can start to map mathematically what the psychoanalysts

00:24:31.420 called complexes.

00:24:33.500 And complexes are systems of ideas that occur in each other's proximity, and there's a core

00:24:40.520 to them.

00:24:41.420 And one of the ways of imagining the theological representations of evil, the legions of devils,

00:24:49.380 let's say, that are behind the generation of the bottomless pit of hell, is that they are

00:24:55.160 representations of complex of ideas that hang together.

00:24:59.600 I think you put your finger on the core of it, actually.

00:25:03.340 The core of it isn't evil.

00:25:04.860 The core of it is gleeful evil.

00:25:07.300 Right?

00:25:07.940 Yes.

00:25:08.140 So it's not merely the evil.

00:25:10.380 And it's the...

00:25:11.980 It's rejoicing in evil.

00:25:13.120 Well, and that is actually the core of sadism from a psychopathological perspective, right?

00:25:22.980 It's not...

00:25:23.540 It's positive delight.

00:25:24.980 It's quite...

00:25:26.460 It's a multidimensional characterization.

00:25:29.180 It's positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others, right?

00:25:34.560 And the unnecessary element is also cardinal, because that plays up the element that's parody.

00:25:39.740 You know, so in Auschwitz, for example, one of the games the guards used to play,

00:25:43.020 was to have the prisoners who got off the train cars shivering and frozen and accompanied

00:25:49.220 by their dead relatives who, you know, died of asphyxiation or froze to death in the cattle

00:25:54.860 cars.

00:25:55.540 They'd arrive at the camps, and then they'd be compelled to carry wet sacks of salt from

00:26:01.020 one side of the camp, which was the size of a town, to the other, and then back.

00:26:06.720 And so it's a parody of work, right?

00:26:08.720 And it's a demonstration to the person themselves that not only are they suffering for every...

00:26:15.920 For all the reasons that they're in the camps and by the fact of the burden that they're

00:26:19.880 carrying, but the utter counterproductive pointlessness of the painful labor is also emphasized and

00:26:27.360 insisted upon.

00:26:28.320 And then delight taken in that.

00:26:31.080 And that is a very dark thing to observe.

00:26:34.100 Yes.

00:26:34.460 I mean, there's one of the...

00:26:35.360 I was in the...

00:26:37.520 One of the maximum security prisons in Israel earlier this year and saw the Hamas terrorists

00:26:42.420 from the 7th who had been captured alive.

00:26:45.880 And one of them was somebody who I recognized from one of the atrocity videos who had thrown...

00:26:53.100 There were two young boys, about 10 and 12, they were with their father, they went into

00:26:58.960 the safe room when the bombs started falling, and the Hamas terrorists came and they saw them

00:27:04.440 go and they threw a grenade, and the father threw himself on the grenade, and was killed

00:27:09.260 in front of his sons, and then, you know, one of them lost an ear and the other one lost

00:27:13.060 an eye, and they were staggering around the main room of their house, weeping and wailing

00:27:17.560 in the most unforgettable, awful, awful way.

00:27:21.880 And one of the terrorists came in, and who'd just killed their father in front of them,

00:27:26.940 came in and opened the fridge and helped himself to the food.

00:27:30.780 And the youngest of the boys, in total trauma, and, you know, said, that's my mother's food.

00:27:37.760 And the terrorists turned to him and said, where's your mother?

00:27:40.480 I want her too.

00:27:41.460 How could anyone do that?

00:27:47.660 You put your finger on it.

00:27:50.240 Well, you know, that idea of the descent, it's like, one of the things that God accuses

00:27:57.600 Cain of when he becomes bitter is opening the door to evil.

00:28:01.460 He said his suffering wasn't merely a consequence of his failure in life, it was a consequence

00:28:06.380 of his failure tempting him to open the door to evil.

00:28:11.520 And so, if you think about it in terms of these complexes of associated ideas, there are

00:28:17.500 ideas that if you let in, they bring a host of other ideas with them, and a host is exactly

00:28:22.180 the right phrase.

00:28:23.940 And you might be tempted in a moment of weakness to invite something in that you think that you

00:28:29.740 can control or that you could bend to your own purposes.

00:28:32.220 But the problem is, is that you're inviting in a complex that has been around forever,

00:28:37.500 and that once lodged inside you might prove that whatever defenses that you might think

00:28:48.080 you have there to mount are trivial in comparison to the power of what you've invited in.

00:28:53.880 And that is, I think you can think of that technically, and it is a terrible thing.

00:28:58.260 And it is the kind of things that are warned against at the theological level, although

00:29:03.240 that's a very complicated thing to untangle.

00:29:08.100 And so, all right, so let's turn from that a bit.

00:29:12.980 So that's the sort of thing that you're going to explain as you're communicating with your

00:29:16.980 audience.

00:29:17.460 And what you're hoping to demonstrate to people is that, is the logical conclusion of the

00:29:26.220 sorts of games, for example, that are being played on the university campuses.

00:29:29.900 For sure.

00:29:30.880 For sure.

00:29:31.740 Yeah.

00:29:32.740 Yeah.

00:29:33.200 Well, then, of course, the problem with that is, at least to some degree, is that that complex

00:29:38.420 of ideas that takes possession of people in the circumstances that you're describing

00:29:42.920 has that end in mind.

00:29:46.200 Oh, yeah.

00:29:46.700 Absolutely.

00:29:47.480 Yeah.

00:29:47.780 Of course.

00:29:48.500 Yeah.

00:29:48.700 Of course.

00:29:49.120 Yeah.

00:29:50.800 All right.

00:29:51.560 All right.

00:29:51.900 Well, let's turn our attention to the situation in the UK, if that's the case.

00:29:56.580 I mean, so let's start with something contentious, I suppose.

00:30:03.120 Tammy and I went out on a limb recently and interviewed Tommy Robinson.

00:30:09.840 I saw it.

00:30:10.440 I've been watching Tommy for a long time.

00:30:13.500 And he struck me as particularly interesting.

00:30:18.880 Well, for two reasons is the first reason, I suppose, is because he is a genuine working

00:30:24.160 class guy and for better or worse.

00:30:27.680 And second, I haven't seen anyone anywhere who's been more unwavering in his commitment to reveal

00:30:37.480 the atrocities of the grooming gangs in the UK, which are organized patterns of activity

00:30:45.300 that are very pervasive, that are so terrible that it's almost impossible to talk about them

00:30:50.840 without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.

00:30:53.000 So, now, there's no doubt that there are many things that you could accuse Tommy Robinson of

00:31:00.240 and many things, many of those he would admit to.

00:31:03.400 But to me and also to my wife, fair enough.

00:31:10.340 But the fact that he's pointed his finger at something that seriously needs to be attended

00:31:18.080 to and has paid a major price for it is also not ignorable.

00:31:23.200 It's like, do we expect someone who's brave enough to do that to also be perfect in every

00:31:27.940 regard?

00:31:28.620 That's asking a bit much, given that there's many people who, in principle, have moral characters

00:31:34.300 much more unsullied than Tommy Robinson, who are cowering in silence constantly in the face

00:31:41.240 of this absolute brutal atrocity.

00:31:43.520 And so, well, so we interviewed him.

00:31:46.320 And what did I think of Tommy?

00:31:48.980 He's very articulate.

00:31:50.480 He can certainly make a case for himself.

00:31:54.320 And then I thought it was up to the audience to listen and to make their own judgment.

00:31:59.540 Now, that was before the recent march that Robinson and his crew organized in London,

00:32:06.240 which, in my estimation, I'm interested in your perspective, went as peacefully and well

00:32:12.600 as the protests in Ottawa, which it was modeled after.

00:32:17.440 And so I thought his crew handled that extraordinarily well.

00:32:22.700 Now, in the aftermath of those protests, of course, all sorts of chaotic hell has broken

00:32:26.900 loose.

00:32:28.040 And, well, why don't you are much closer to such things than me?

00:32:34.300 I mean, being a denizen of that country, I'm looking from outside, trying to make sense

00:32:39.340 out of it.

00:32:39.800 But my sense at the moment is that the UK is somewhat of a tinderbox.

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00:33:42.940 Yes, and I wish it hadn't been so predictable.

00:33:52.740 I, again, I wrote about this so many years, warned about it.

00:33:59.400 The Strange Death of Europe was largely my last ditch attempt to warn my own society of

00:34:05.160 birth and other Western countries not to go down the path that they were precisely going

00:34:10.780 down, and as the former government minister said in the Times a couple of days ago, the

00:34:15.800 thing about my prediction on that was that I made them not with any glee, but in a spirit

00:34:21.460 of deep lamentation about what was about to happen to my society.

00:34:26.640 And as I see it there, Tommy Robinson is a very interesting example of this whole thing,

00:34:34.400 but let me just explain how I see it.

00:34:37.080 The, this whole conflagration of recent days started when a 17-year-old went into a Taylor

00:34:47.480 Swift dance class a couple of weeks ago now and started hacking at young girls with a knife,

00:34:54.900 killed three girls, nine-year-olds thereabouts, wounded many others.

00:35:00.020 And the news of that came out, and a very typical modern British, modern European, modern Western

00:35:07.240 thing happened, which was that in the aftermath, people started to suspect something was being

00:35:15.700 kept from them.

00:35:17.700 Now, wiser heads would wait, but not everyone's a wise head after nine-year-old girls bludgeoned

00:35:27.180 to death, stabbed to death.

00:35:30.400 So, false information went out online saying that the attacker was, had arrived on one of

00:35:40.120 the many boats of illegal migrants that come across the English Channel every, every week.

00:35:45.680 That was untrue.

00:35:47.620 In fact, he was the son of immigrants from Rwanda.

00:35:52.480 But, but people started to sense that there was a cover-up of some kind, or at least the news was

00:35:58.020 being managed.

00:35:59.180 The police in Britain seem always to think they're being very clever at this, and it's always seemed

00:36:03.580 to me that they exacerbate every problem they put their, their mind to.

00:36:08.760 They insisted that the first, the young man was originally from Cardiff, the capital of Wales,

00:36:14.920 and people just sense there's something, there's something they're holding from us, sure enough.

00:36:18.980 Anyway, the point is, it's very unpleasant, ugly, and again, evil forces can get unleashed at such

00:36:27.940 a time, the spirit of revenge.

00:36:30.820 And some protests started peacefully at first, then some violent.

00:36:37.760 A mosque was targeted nearby, and then violence started to spread out to other towns.

00:36:43.120 Then Muslim communities started to arm up, in some cases, literally, with people turning

00:36:49.740 up with knives to defend their areas.

00:36:55.480 This is all, and maybe it'll die down by the time this podcast has gone out, or maybe it'll

00:37:00.540 get a lot worse.

00:37:02.040 But the one thing you can say with absolute certainty is it's not going to go away, because

00:37:07.060 all of this is the consequence of what I call the problem of primary and secondary problems.

00:37:14.100 The primary problem in the UK, as in Europe, in recent years, has been the total unwillingness

00:37:22.600 of the political and other classes in the UK to address deep, deep concerns of the public.

00:37:30.520 And when people said in recent days, how could anyone leap to such a conclusion that the attacker

00:37:35.960 would be, and you go, because everyone's seen this before, you know, people don't actually

00:37:42.340 forget very fast, the media class may, but they don't forget very fast that it's only

00:37:48.340 seven years ago that the son of Libyan migrants to the UK went and detonated a suicide bomb at

00:37:57.900 an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

00:38:00.500 They don't forget fast that three people who had no right to be in the UK, including one

00:38:06.480 whose asylum claim had been rejected, but who was nowhere near being deported, went across

00:38:10.960 London Bridge in 2017, hacking at the throats of passers-by and shouting, Al-Akbar.

00:38:17.540 They don't forget that.

00:38:18.520 They notice it.

00:38:19.700 But the British government and others have had this very, very clear policy that they don't

00:38:27.660 really know what to do to tackle that.

00:38:30.280 They don't know what to do really to tackle the grooming gangs issue.

00:38:33.960 There was another set of prosecutions the other day, and another case is coming to court

00:38:38.800 in the coming weeks.

00:38:40.200 You could say, well, they clearly do.

00:38:42.160 They're using the law.

00:38:43.240 But a lot of the public say, well, not fast enough, and not really.

00:38:47.980 There's an awful lot of rapists still walking around with girls who are their victims in the

00:38:52.960 same towns, and the government knows that the public ascribed this to the government's

00:38:59.480 immigration policies, its integration policies, but the government can't take responsibility

00:39:04.100 for that because they've made that mistake now.

00:39:08.740 The conservative government that just left power, that said that they would bring migration

00:39:13.360 down to tens of thousands a year, left office with net migration of legal migration at almost

00:39:19.380 three quarters of a million a year, which is, by the way, completely unsustainable, but

00:39:24.480 they just keep doing it anyway.

00:39:26.160 The interesting thing that Tommy Robinson speaks to and has always spoken to is, what are you

00:39:31.540 allowed to do about this or say about this?

00:39:34.600 Now, if you're me, for the time being, you're allowed to write about it sometimes.

00:39:43.200 You're allowed to speak about it sometimes.

00:39:45.180 You're allowed to raise alarms sometimes.

00:39:50.860 You're allowed to speak your mind somewhat.

00:39:54.900 But if you're a Tommy Robinson character, if you grew up in Luton, and you haven't had many

00:40:01.940 advantages in life, and you've had quite a lot of disadvantages, and you're white and working

00:40:06.380 class, what are you allowed to do about this?

00:40:09.780 What are you allowed to say about any of this?

00:40:11.480 And the government, for decades now, has had the attitude, you're not allowed to do anything.

00:40:19.080 You're not allowed to say anything.

00:40:20.440 You can't do anything, because if you do, we'll call you a racist, and we'll call you

00:40:26.280 far right.

00:40:27.900 And this has all gone on for a very long time.

00:40:32.000 Well, it's an effective epithet.

00:40:34.400 When I first came across your work, and I've seen this reaction in the depths of my soul

00:40:40.680 to many people, when I first came across your work, which is quite a long time ago now, I

00:40:47.460 was leery of it.

00:40:49.600 And I think the reason for that is that it's something like this.

00:40:53.620 It's that there are a lot of people in the world, and I'm not going to be able to meet

00:40:58.440 all of them or read all of them or have anything to do with all of them.

00:41:01.920 And now and then, some of them get tarred with some epithet.

00:41:06.900 Well, the cost to me of accepting that tarring is very low on average, because if I don't

00:41:13.920 pay attention to some person, there's a whole bunch of other people I could pay attention

00:41:17.280 to.

00:41:17.660 So it's not like the pool of people to attend to shrinks, right?

00:41:21.980 So, and that epithet of far right is a very effective brand of tarring.

00:41:31.600 And it's even effective among people who are very skeptical of such things.

00:41:37.460 So I'll give you an example.

00:41:38.660 So I talked to Michael Schellenberger after he released the WPATH files, when he was investigating

00:41:45.780 the absolute pathological corruption and craven cowardice of the cadre who presented what purport

00:41:55.240 to be the standard guidelines for enlightened care to the American Medical Association, the

00:42:01.240 American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association.

00:42:05.300 And he was appalled at their lack of competence and their ideological possession.

00:42:11.920 It was another bottomless pit.

00:42:14.540 And I asked him how he became aware of this.

00:42:19.480 And he said, well, one way was that he had listened to Abigail Schreier and I talk about

00:42:23.820 it.

00:42:24.320 I guess it was two years ago when Abigail first put out her book, Irreversible Damage.

00:42:29.000 It was the first podcast I did after I'd been so ill.

00:42:32.120 And I was terrified to do it because it was such a hot topic.

00:42:35.720 And, you know, Schellenberger himself said he listened to that podcast, but he really couldn't

00:42:41.100 believe it.

00:42:43.080 You know, and that's another example of the effectiveness of that tarring.

00:42:47.220 Yes.

00:42:47.680 It's so easy to demolish someone's reputation.

00:42:50.480 And it's especially easy to demolish a reputation for people who do not have, as it were, a backlog

00:42:57.120 of published work.

00:42:59.020 Yeah.

00:42:59.140 I mean, it's relatively easy to weigh up someone's views and make an estimation of them if they

00:43:06.400 have seven books to their name, as I do, or, you know, thousands and thousands of articles.

00:43:12.340 But it can't be the case that only book authors are allowed to say anything about the disintegration

00:43:18.580 of their societies.

00:43:19.520 It's not like you should only be left to people who write newspaper articles.

00:43:25.100 Yeah.

00:43:25.360 Well, God, no, not that.

00:43:27.780 Maybe least of all.

00:43:30.240 But then you go to this question, which, as you know, has come up in Canada in recent years

00:43:35.360 and is very live now in Britain, which is what, again, what are people allowed to do?

00:43:40.980 Now, obviously, by the way, and I'm aware, as you always are, of the deep desire of bad

00:43:46.780 faith actors to seize anything I say in this discussion and misrepresent it.

00:43:52.320 So let me do a very boring piece of throat clearing, if I may.

00:43:55.340 The idea that people's response to any problems in their society should be to go out and commit

00:44:00.160 acts of violence is obviously insane and wrong.

00:44:02.980 What we're seeing on the streets of the British cities, though, raises this question, as I

00:44:11.080 say, of if the public keep saying something to the politicians and the politicians keep

00:44:17.360 not just ignoring them but insulting them, what are they allowed to do, these people?

00:44:22.760 These are populations that have every single election, like the rest of the British people,

00:44:30.300 for 20 years, they have voted for less immigration, I've been told that they'd get it, and instead

00:44:36.680 it's just gone up.

00:44:38.620 These are, they've lived through an economy since 2008, where of the jobs created by the

00:44:47.180 British government in the last, since 2008, so in the last, what, we're talking, 16 years,

00:44:54.920 of the jobs created since 2008, 74% have gone to people who were not born in Britain.

00:45:03.280 So just, just people think about this for a second.

00:45:08.740 The government refuses to do what the public keep on asking for and what the government

00:45:14.420 keeps on saying it'll do.

00:45:15.760 It is seen to be, I think, accurately, extremely lax on policing certain social cohesion issues.

00:45:26.140 It's extremely eager to crack down on anyone of a Tommy Robinson type.

00:45:32.740 And what material benefits have come about in the society in the last 16 years have largely

00:45:40.420 gone to people who were not born in the country.

00:45:43.680 What, I repeat, what is permissible in this situation to do?

00:45:52.100 And I would say peaceful protesting would be one thing, or speaking up, or, you know, whatever

00:45:58.960 you like to do, except that every time even there is a peaceful protest, the peaceful protesters

00:46:04.000 are defamed as far-right neo-Nazis.

00:46:07.720 I mean, there definitely will have been and have been in last, in recent days, some extremely

00:46:14.220 ugly people who've come out of the woodshed, who I'm sure do include, there's like one guy

00:46:20.280 everyone's obsessed with who has a swastika tattoo on his back.

00:46:23.560 Is that guy representative of all the people who are angry in the wake of the slaughter in

00:46:28.480 Southport?

00:46:29.280 I would have thought not.

00:46:30.580 And in any other situation, every public official, political official, opinion writer and policeman

00:46:37.260 would be very wary of trying to tar everyone with that brush.

00:46:42.140 I mean, for instance, the police and authorities, even when you have discovery of an imam in a

00:46:50.700 mosque preaching violence, everyone is incredibly careful, lawyers at all the newspapers and everyone

00:46:58.300 else, to make sure that it isn't implied that everyone who attends that mosque is somehow in

00:47:02.780 favor of this.

00:47:04.160 In fact, woe betide you if you did do that.

00:47:06.300 You have to say it's this one person and no one else is responsible.

00:47:10.120 But somehow, the actual desire to tar anyone who has, as I say, not got a voice and is wanting

00:47:21.280 to make their voice heard as a violent far-right neo-Nazi seems to me to be a big error by Keir

00:47:30.540 Starmer and others, because, you know, if you can't say, we recognize your deep, deep concerns

00:47:40.040 about some things that have happened, including mass stabbings, terrorism, and much more.

00:47:46.640 We understand your deep, deep concerns, and we are going to try to get onto this and on top

00:47:51.380 of this, but there is no excuse to turn out on the streets and be violent against your Muslim

00:47:56.680 brothers and sisters and neighbors or anyone else.

00:47:58.500 They can't say that.

00:48:00.800 They just cannot say it.

00:48:02.320 They just have to go to the secondary thing.

00:48:04.880 What kills me about this is, it's exactly what I've said for years.

00:48:08.020 If you don't deal with a primary problem, you get secondary problems.

00:48:11.980 And if you just focus on the secondary problem, you will never, you'll not only not solve the

00:48:17.520 primary problem, you will make it worse.

00:48:20.620 Exactly what we're seeing.

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00:49:14.600 Okay, so a couple of, I got a couple of questions out of that, well, one observation.

00:49:23.060 The first observation is that the epithet far right is rapidly losing its utility.

00:49:30.820 Now, when I hear someone now described as far right, I think, yeah, maybe, probably not,

00:49:36.960 but maybe.

00:49:37.660 And now, and I should also point out that I actually, it's not like I'm unaware of the

00:49:43.720 existence of bad actors.

00:49:45.920 I don't even know if right and left are the right dimensions of evaluation anymore, and

00:49:50.740 I suspect not, but for now, we'll stick with that.

00:49:53.900 I mean, ever since I came out in defense of the defensive response of Israel to the October

00:50:01.720 7th massacre, I've had no shortage of far right trolls on my case.

00:50:07.260 And I know what they're like, studying them historically.

00:50:10.400 And of course, that happened to me when I partnered with The Daily Wire to begin with, because its

00:50:14.920 head man in some ways, at least in the public eye, was Ben Shapiro.

00:50:18.980 And so, I'm perfectly aware of what the far right agitators look like, and they're a remarkably

00:50:27.080 despicable bunch.

00:50:28.920 So, we'll get that out of the way to begin with.

00:50:31.980 The idea that they're in the same camp, for example, as the working class protesters that

00:50:41.480 you're describing in the UK is absurd, because, first of all, what the working class protesters

00:50:47.720 are doing isn't fundamentally political.

00:50:49.620 It's fundamentally based in something approximating frustration.

00:50:54.460 Okay, so having said that, then I've got a question.

00:51:00.920 So, with regards to the drivers of immigration, you know, you say the politicians campaign,

00:51:08.400 at least on the conservative side, at least some of the time, with the claim that they're

00:51:13.420 going to get a handle on this, but they don't.

00:51:15.800 In fact, quite the opposite, they seem to facilitate it.

00:51:19.320 And so then, is that because it's actually beyond their control?

00:51:23.760 Or is it because, here's a psychological reason, it's like, for decades, our culture has insisted

00:51:30.120 on something approximating a position of moral relativism.

00:51:34.480 There's no way of drawing hierarchical distinctions between the value claims that different cultures

00:51:40.680 present.

00:51:41.480 We can't admit for a moment that there might be some reason to be leery, let's say, of an

00:51:48.360 immigrant class that would be associated with the kind of education that the madrasas are

00:51:53.720 producing for all sorts of ideological reasons.

00:51:56.720 We can't make any allowance for the idea that some immigrants might be more difficult to integrate

00:52:02.720 into our culture than others.

00:52:04.040 And that is a thorny problem.

00:52:05.740 Don't get me wrong.

00:52:06.640 Now, so we open the floodgates, let's say, and we find out that there are people who don't

00:52:13.620 have democracies in their own country because they don't have the culture for it, let's

00:52:17.920 say, or the desire for it.

00:52:19.300 And they bring those attitudes along with them, surprise, surprise, because they weren't just

00:52:23.360 freedom-loving, oppressed people striving to be free, who are now thrilled to death to

00:52:29.120 be in a democratic country, but people who are pretty damn prone to bring all of the problems

00:52:33.620 that they had in their own country along with them.

00:52:36.540 Now, and we're not supposed to say that.

00:52:38.880 Now, my sense is the working class doesn't get to have their say, because if they had

00:52:45.080 their say, everyone who's modern and liberal and tolerant in that pathological manner that

00:52:51.640 accepts everything without distinction would have to do some serious digging into the understructure

00:52:57.420 of their own belief systems and think, oh, well, and then that touches on something else.

00:53:02.160 Now, so here's a weird segue, or what would you say, an idea that popped into my head,

00:53:09.460 an association.

00:53:11.720 Richard Dawkins announced himself as a cultural Christian.

00:53:15.460 So then one of the things that makes me ask is something like, well, what is it that the

00:53:20.700 West has right, that the enemies of the West have wrong, that's percolating at the bottom

00:53:26.160 of all of this mess, that's driving what?

00:53:30.600 That's driving the relativistic arguments of the pro-immigration types, but that's also

00:53:36.180 fulminating this terrible clash of cultures that we unsurprisingly see emerging on our streets.

00:53:43.600 It's like, so the first, the question first is like, what the hell's driving the mass of

00:53:48.960 immigration into the West?

00:53:50.500 Because we see it in Canada, maybe worse than anywhere else at the moment, or at a more

00:53:56.420 rapid rate than anywhere else.

00:53:58.160 Canada is so damn peaceful, it's hard to destabilize it.

00:54:00.800 But we're working hard on that.

00:54:03.480 So what's driving this, Matt?

00:54:05.900 Is it the insistence?

00:54:07.340 Is it this ideological insistence?

00:54:09.700 It's a lot of things.

00:54:10.700 The one is, as I've warned about for a long time, the one is something that isn't inevitable,

00:54:15.300 but is hard to resist, which is a simple ease of movement in the 21st century, the relative

00:54:21.080 cheapness of travel compared to any previous century, and the knowledge through the devices

00:54:26.580 we have in our pockets around the globe, I mean, what, three billion people are on WhatsApp

00:54:32.140 alone, the ability of people anywhere in the world to discover the life of anyone else in

00:54:37.600 the world easily, and add to that the fact that most countries in the world are not even

00:54:48.080 remotely approximating either the safety or the wealth available in 21st century Canada,

00:54:58.060 for instance, or Britain, and it's inevitable that a lot of people will want that.

00:55:04.340 And now, as I've said for years, just because they may want it does not mean that Western

00:55:12.300 liberal democracies can remotely be the place where everybody who wants a better life can

00:55:18.120 or should go.

00:55:19.480 It's simply impossible.

00:55:21.280 And you just crunch the numbers on people in sub-Saharan Africa who want to move into

00:55:25.500 Europe, for instance.

00:55:26.720 And if that happened, if the third of sub-Saharan Africa who want to move moved, Europe would

00:55:33.440 be totally unrecognizable.

00:55:35.280 Now, the second thing that comes from that is that it is extremely difficult for politicians

00:55:42.080 to maintain their borders.

00:55:45.720 And I think this is highly regrettable because I think the only way in which, among other things,

00:55:50.840 you can have an actual asylum system where you actually take in those unusual cases where

00:55:57.780 asylum should be needed, just disappear once you have illegal migration every day coming

00:56:05.160 in on boats, or as in the case of America, millions of people walking across the southern

00:56:09.720 border in the last four years.

00:56:11.720 And add to that the fact that, as was famously said in 1968 by somebody, it's the easiest

00:56:20.120 thing to put off any difficult decision you have to make today and leave it for your successors

00:56:25.120 to address.

00:56:26.680 All the time making it harder for your successors.

00:56:29.000 But I said this to a European politician some years ago when they said that they were going

00:56:32.860 to deport the million illegals that were in their country.

00:56:35.360 I said, how are you going to do it?

00:56:36.740 Because you and I know that on day one, if you rounded up everyone who is legally in the

00:56:42.360 country and put them on what, buses, trains, boats, the first woman or child crying would

00:56:49.040 be on the front page of every newspaper the next morning, and by day two, you would have

00:56:53.340 to stop because of public pressure.

00:56:56.660 That's just, it seems to be a reality for the time being.

00:56:59.340 By the way, until such a time emerges, and it could, where the society says we don't give

00:57:05.200 a damn anymore, we don't give a damn, that may well happen.

00:57:10.320 But until that does happen, you know, countries are absolutely incapable, politicians are incapable

00:57:16.980 of answering this question.

00:57:18.120 Then you have a follow-on one, which addresses what you mentioned about Richard Dawkins, among

00:57:22.040 other things, which is America, it's not quite true to say that America was a society based

00:57:28.200 on an idea, but it's a nice idea.

00:57:30.700 America was based on an idea, but the idea came about because of the people who founded

00:57:36.280 the Republic, the United States of America.

00:57:40.260 And if they hadn't...

00:57:41.020 Englishmen.

00:57:41.980 Right.

00:57:42.620 If they had have been from somewhere else, even a different denomination, the United States

00:57:48.080 would be very different.

00:57:49.580 However, as far as states founded on an idea goes, America was probably the most, the nearest

00:57:56.580 European nations, Britain, are not based on an idea.

00:58:03.800 They were not based on an idea.

00:58:05.840 Now, that isn't to say that they don't have very distinct cultures.

00:58:09.240 And my word, the different cultures across Europe are so different that everyone jokes

00:58:14.000 about their neighbours and regards their neighbour in the neighbouring European country

00:58:17.060 being wildly different from them.

00:58:18.740 To an outsider, it seems preposterous that the Swedes and the Norwegians would have distinctions

00:58:23.160 between them, but they do.

00:58:25.340 But I say this to say that Europe and Britain was made up of ethnic identities.

00:58:33.260 And those ethnic identities had ideas, of course.

00:58:36.200 But even in Britain, you have the Welsh, you have the Scots, you have the English, the Northern

00:58:40.000 Irish, the Irish.

00:58:42.740 How do you integrate into that?

00:58:46.180 How do you do it?

00:58:47.320 Does anyone know?

00:58:51.000 And the answer is no.

00:58:52.940 Have some people, I'd say yes.

00:58:56.640 Have a majority, it doesn't look that way to me.

00:59:04.140 And so this is just a bomb underneath the societies in Europe in particular.

00:59:10.480 However, it has been about ethnicity, we don't like things about being about ethnicity, so

00:59:18.100 we say it's about an idea.

00:59:20.520 But all my adult life, this idea has been so hard for anyone to pin down that they've

00:59:29.560 just failed it time and time again.

00:59:31.840 I'm old enough to remember when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and I contributed to a book

00:59:35.840 that he edited about being British, what Britishness was.

00:59:39.100 That was 20 years ago.

00:59:41.840 And Britain is no closer to defining that today than it was 20 years ago.

00:59:48.380 People say things like, Britishness is about queuing or fair play.

00:59:53.040 And that is so completely inadequate to the task at hand.

00:59:57.300 But the other one that can come along with this, and this is one of the ones that white

01:00:01.000 working class communities in the UK deeply resent, in particular, is the you don't have

01:00:07.800 a culture, which is one of the other nice things that race baiters of all shapes have

01:00:15.900 been doing for years at these people.

01:00:18.080 You don't have a culture.

01:00:19.540 It's what I wrote about in the War on the West, the jabbing majority populations.

01:00:23.860 And if you do have a culture, it's not a good one, or it's a rapaciously evil one, or it's

01:00:28.880 one that's only to be described through the lens of colonialism or slavery or racism or

01:00:34.120 institutional racism or patriarchy or whatever.

01:00:37.560 And they've just done this for years.

01:00:40.360 There has been what I showed in my last book to be this, for instance, why do all the holy

01:00:44.420 places of the British people keep being attacked, literally and metaphorically?

01:00:48.880 Metaphorically, why does Winston Churchill, the great hero of the British nation, keep

01:00:55.660 on being attacked by people because they want to hurt these people?

01:01:01.000 They want to hurt the people who revere them.

01:01:03.440 They literally want to strip their gods from them.

01:01:06.380 They want to defile the holy places of the culture.

01:01:09.760 You might say, well, why do you want to do that?

01:01:12.180 Revenge for some people, supremacy of a different kind for others, weakness among others, false

01:01:22.600 adventure, cowardice, going along with the tenor of the times, however bad that direction

01:01:29.760 of travel happens to be.

01:01:32.460 But I said recently, before these riots happened, I said, you know, it would be, and I might have

01:01:39.740 said this to you in private before, Jordan, but I say it would be madness to, if, I don't

01:01:43.920 know, if people from the Indian subcontinent made up 3% of your population, it would be

01:01:49.500 madness to try to demoralize that population or to try to find ways to just say that they

01:01:57.500 were nothing and never had been anything.

01:01:59.820 And it was sort of best if they just tried to sidle through their lives without harming

01:02:04.640 anyone.

01:02:05.540 Why would you do that to 3% of the population?

01:02:07.840 Among other things, it's rude, it's cruel, it's unusual, and that 3% of the population

01:02:13.440 is a significant amount of the population.

01:02:15.220 You don't want to demoralize 3% of the population.

01:02:17.600 Okay.

01:02:19.140 Why would you do that to a majority?

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01:03:59.240 Who is so insane that they want to do this to majority populations?

01:04:08.380 And the answer seems to be, well, we're finding out.

01:04:12.020 We are finding out.

01:04:14.000 Well, okay, let's delve into that on the ideational front.

01:04:18.800 I mean, I would say, who would want to do that?

01:04:22.540 Well, my sense is that it's this metastasization of Marxism.

01:04:29.340 It's the spirit that metastasized Marxism that's bringing this about, and consciously.

01:04:35.200 And so you have the people that hold the center, the majority of people, who approximate some

01:04:41.700 implicit ideal, however poorly.

01:04:43.860 And then you have people who are perhaps unable to do that, or who are unwilling to do it, or

01:04:51.620 who are even opposed to it.

01:04:52.920 And they occupy the margin.

01:04:54.920 And there's many of them.

01:04:56.200 There are a plethora.

01:04:57.920 And the postmodernists, especially the modern queer theorists, let's say, want to bring that

01:05:05.440 margin into the center by whatever means necessary.

01:05:08.380 Now, I think there's a profound philosophical misunderstanding that accompanies that desire.

01:05:17.820 Although, if the underlying desire at the base is just the desire for chaos, which is

01:05:22.920 certainly possible, then it's not a mistake.

01:05:25.660 It's not a bug.

01:05:26.500 It's a feature.

01:05:27.380 But no, we tend to believe in the West that an idea has its opposite, and that progress might

01:05:35.260 be obtained by watching the war of a thesis and its antithesis.

01:05:40.500 But that's not how things work.

01:05:43.560 You have a thesis, and you have a plethora of antithesis.

01:05:47.380 In fact, an infinite plethora.

01:05:49.460 And so if you try to center the marginal, all that happens is you demolish the entire structure.

01:05:55.440 And one of the ideas that I've been working on recently, conceptually, is that imagine that

01:06:02.260 now you're motivated to center the marginal at all costs.

01:06:06.860 And you presume, to begin with, because you're naive or corrupt, that those marginal are a

01:06:12.000 community, and they're a community with something in common, apart from their marginalization.

01:06:16.540 Well, that's certainly the claim of the alphabet mob, for example.

01:06:19.820 We're all a community.

01:06:21.080 It's like, yeah, I don't think so.

01:06:22.880 It doesn't look like it.

01:06:23.780 It looks to me like you're a plurality, united by your, what would you say, your resentment.

01:06:28.400 Okay.

01:06:29.020 And narcissism.

01:06:30.460 And narcissism.

01:06:31.360 Okay.

01:06:31.740 So then, but here's the subtle part of the argument, let's say, and I think this is true.

01:06:36.760 It looks to me that if you demolish the center by centering the marginal, you destroy the

01:06:44.400 marginal first, not the center.

01:06:47.220 Because the thing is, well, the thing is, Douglas, the center is protected.

01:06:51.840 You know, let me give you an example.

01:06:52.900 Let me give you an example, because I think this is relevant.

01:06:56.240 So since the 1960s, since the early 1960s, under the guise of the sexual revolution, there's

01:07:03.040 been an all-out assault, let's say, against the structure of marriage.

01:07:07.440 And so, and the consequence of that is that many people aren't married.

01:07:11.240 But none of those people are wealthy and educated, because the wealthy and educated are just as

01:07:17.100 married as they were in the early 60s.

01:07:19.120 The people who aren't married are the economically marginalized, let's say, the people who are

01:07:24.000 in trouble.

01:07:24.460 And so, that freedom that came from the removal of the patriarchal ideal, which is a burdensome

01:07:30.700 thing to bear, and also a judgmental entity, let's say.

01:07:35.340 You know, single mothers aren't to be tolerated, that finger-wagging sort of morality.

01:07:40.260 It's like, fair enough.

01:07:41.340 Okay, now we bring the marginal to the center.

01:07:44.080 Who dies first?

01:07:45.680 The center?

01:07:46.460 No.

01:07:47.120 The marginal.

01:07:47.640 Yes.

01:07:48.320 Well, another example of that, which is, you see that in, I don't want to go on a tangent

01:07:53.240 to it, but you see that in the drug normalization, which is that the elite classes who almost always

01:08:01.160 push for further liberalization in laws are actually the people who, if they do dabble

01:08:06.480 in that themselves, are most likely to be able to be saved.

01:08:10.200 After all, there's a reason that their job will probably support them if they want to go

01:08:14.300 into rehab, and they will be able to pay, and maybe even their office will pay, maybe

01:08:18.440 their firm will pay.

01:08:20.000 Not so for the people lying on the streets of this city with absolutely no safety net,

01:08:26.800 who have not benefited from that liberalization process, to say the least.

01:08:33.320 But it's the same thing, absolutely.

01:08:35.140 The people you bring in, you bring in the most marginal case, and then, yes, in the end,

01:08:39.660 the marginalized become the people who suffer the most.

01:08:41.680 And by the way, I mean, we've just lived through this bizarre, I know, sort of social stampede

01:08:48.300 on the Paris Olympics thing.

01:08:49.740 But what you said was just resonating with me, because I say, why is it now so completely

01:08:54.780 predictable that an Olympic Games will have to open with a sort of balls-out, bearded drag

01:09:00.460 queen being the center of attention?

01:09:02.120 And a very obese trans person should be the kind of, like, the main figure of worship in

01:09:10.240 this bizarre modern cult theology.

01:09:14.180 And I know you notice this, I notice this.

01:09:18.040 The truth is everybody notices this.

01:09:20.120 It's absurd.

01:09:21.540 It's a complete, it's a kind of replacement theology, as far as I can see.

01:09:26.220 And one that hasn't been thought through at all well, and doesn't work, and is hideous

01:09:31.300 and ugly, and does not encourage people to aspire to anything beautiful or true.

01:09:36.260 Yeah, well, that's the dread abomination of desolation, right, that the theologians warned

01:09:41.300 about.

01:09:41.680 When it's put in the highest place, then it's time to head for the hills.

01:09:44.780 And what does that mean?

01:09:46.240 It means something like, well, when the social order is so inverted that the most monstrous is

01:09:51.700 elevated to the highest place, then that's a sign that, like, all, that chaos is about

01:09:57.380 to return.

01:09:58.240 And that seems to me to be highly probable.

01:10:00.260 Well, we can see it, and everyone can feel it.

01:10:02.440 Absolutely everyone can feel it in one form or another.

01:10:05.700 You know, and it's very terrifying to see it start to emerge in such a dramatic form in

01:10:13.200 the UK.

01:10:14.360 You know, and it is something for, as a Canadian, it's really something to go to Europe and hear

01:10:18.900 the elite types express doubt about whether or not they have a culture.

01:10:24.200 You know, I heard people in the Netherlands say that to me.

01:10:27.560 I met a group of, you know, very well-placed comedians and artists and writers, and that

01:10:36.220 most of them were conservative people.

01:10:37.780 And they expressed doubts about even the existence of their own culture.

01:10:42.020 You know, and I come from the hinterlands of northern Canada, and I go to a place like

01:10:46.020 Amsterdam, and it just makes my bloody jaw drop, and it's the same whenever I visit the

01:10:50.260 UK.

01:10:50.720 It's like, you people don't think you have a culture?

01:10:52.840 It's like, well, who has pretensions to a culture then?

01:10:56.160 Like, if Europe doesn't have a culture, then no one has a culture.

01:11:01.800 I mean, Europe has a culture that's so miraculous that people make pilgrimages there in the tens

01:11:07.080 of millions just to see its remnants.

01:11:10.260 Yes.

01:11:10.560 So, it's like, what the hell is this claim?

01:11:14.100 It's the nicest way to interpret what has been attempted in that regard is, it's nicer

01:11:23.620 to incomers if we do ourselves down a bit, because otherwise it's boastful.

01:11:29.880 And maybe that is the instinct of some people.

01:11:33.840 It's been a stupid thing to try to progress that from an instinct into an actual policy

01:11:41.240 and to, you know, to fall back on the sort of mantras of, you know, everyone's a migrant,

01:11:49.920 for instance.

01:11:50.900 I mean, this is one of the ones that has just been endlessly forced on people.

01:11:54.880 And again, sorry to keep referring to it, but as I said in the strange death of Europe,

01:11:58.820 people in Europe, Europeans, British people, others, do notice that if they moved to China

01:12:07.020 or India, they would not become Chinese or Indian.

01:12:09.920 They do notice that.

01:12:11.320 And they do notice that if they had children in that country, their children would not be

01:12:16.280 regarded as Indian or Chinese either.

01:12:19.300 And that's just to pick out two countries that happen to be the largest ones.

01:12:22.880 But in that case, a lot of people think, how come anyone can move here and immediately

01:12:28.480 become us?

01:12:29.940 And the answer is that's not clear at all.

01:12:32.900 It doesn't seem obvious at all.

01:12:35.200 At the same time, of course, nobody wants to say nobody can become like us, because that's

01:12:40.140 too judgmental and too negative a thought, too pessimistic a thought.

01:12:46.360 And so what happens is just a set of stupid and banal lies.

01:12:50.140 Diversity is our strength.

01:12:52.780 That's another one.

01:12:54.140 Diversity is our strength is possibly the main mantra of British and European societies

01:12:58.660 now.

01:12:59.580 And actually, again, as mantras go, it's false.

01:13:03.120 Diversity does bring some strengths, and it also brings some weaknesses.

01:13:07.580 Diversity can bring a range of ideas, and it can bring ideas so terrible that they could

01:13:13.820 destroy the society.

01:13:14.860 It wasn't great that Ali Habiali's parents moved from Somalia to the UK, got asylum, and

01:13:25.180 their son then macheted an MP to death in his surgery.

01:13:29.560 We didn't need the Ali family to bring the worst of the war zones of Somalia to the streets

01:13:39.660 of a British constituency.

01:13:41.220 And so when you hear people saying things, insisting, everybody insisting all the time

01:13:49.040 diversity is our strength, people know it's a lie, people know at the very least it's a

01:13:54.240 half-truth, and they get fed up with this stuff being forced at them, because all the

01:13:58.500 time they're noticing the downsides of this.

01:14:01.540 And the downsides include, by the way, I mean, it can never be said enough, the change of a

01:14:06.460 society, when the movement is so fast, and the numbers are so large, and the type of

01:14:13.340 diversity is so difficult.

01:14:15.480 People notice that, for instance, a high-trust society of the kind that Britain used to be

01:14:20.980 becomes a very low-trust society.

01:14:24.040 And then it becomes poor.

01:14:25.660 And the belief in institutions that used to characterize Britain, once all of those have

01:14:30.700 delegitimized themselves, what are you left with?

01:14:33.220 And then they come for the holy places, they come for your gods, they come for your

01:14:37.100 temples, and people are meant to suck it up endlessly.

01:14:41.460 And I've never been sure that they would.

01:14:45.680 So, well, here's an obvious question, too.

01:14:49.400 It's like, well, here's a definition of war.

01:14:52.900 War is the definition of irreconcilable diversity.

01:14:57.440 Right, so diversity is our strength.

01:15:01.000 It's like, okay, well, Hamas and Israel have diverse viewpoints, and they're not reconcilable.

01:15:08.160 So what do we have?

01:15:09.280 A war.

01:15:10.080 So what's the story that people are supposed to swallow?

01:15:13.520 It's that although the world has been eternally mild in internecine conflict, the war between

01:15:20.260 diverse viewpoints, if we import all that diversity into the West, magically we'll wave a wand and

01:15:28.060 all that diversity will be transformed into nothing but what?

01:15:31.180 Productive, complex productive cooperation.

01:15:34.900 In the absence, by the way, in the absence of any reconciling framework, because people

01:15:42.120 like Trudeau, for example, dispense with the idea of any national identity whatsoever.

01:15:47.560 So their presumption is something like, the natural state of people, regardless of the diversity of their

01:15:54.740 opinions, no matter how diverse those opinions are, their natural state is productive peace.

01:16:02.260 Right?

01:16:02.600 So that's what?

01:16:03.340 That's Rousseau?

01:16:04.220 Is that what that is?

01:16:05.380 Is that an unbelievably naive Rousseau?

01:16:08.060 And is that the unwillingness?

01:16:10.600 Is that a reflection of the unwillingness to look at the aspect of the human psyche that's

01:16:16.600 gleefully pursuing murder and mayhem?

01:16:20.500 Just to not, and just to never cast an eye in that direction.

01:16:23.840 It's all sweetness and light.

01:16:25.660 We're all little children.

01:16:27.600 And if that's what it looks like, something like that to me, it'll be the strange death of

01:16:33.360 Europe will be something like the death of the overprivileged at the hands of their own

01:16:37.720 naivety and cowardice and cowardice.

01:16:40.580 You can see it very closely.

01:16:43.080 I mean, as I say, you know, some ways, I mean, it's a horrible thing to say, but thank goodness

01:16:48.700 the killer in Southport wasn't a migrant who had arrived illegally into the UK a couple of weeks

01:16:57.320 earlier.

01:16:57.660 But you want the peace of your society and the possible peacefulness of your society

01:17:03.220 for the foreseeable future to be reliant on that never happening again?

01:17:09.640 Well, there's also reliable evidence, Douglas, that the children of immigrants are more likely

01:17:14.540 to be radicalized than the immigrants themselves.

01:17:16.920 Absolutely.

01:17:17.660 Reverse integration.

01:17:18.600 Yeah, yeah, especially if they're having a hard time integrating, right?

01:17:22.760 Well, I mean, that's one of the most common ones.

01:17:24.460 I've spoken with you about this before, but I mean, the most common one is, you know, a

01:17:29.000 parent who flees a particularly ugly and warlike society like, say, Somalia might realize how

01:17:36.480 lucky they are to arrive in Canada.

01:17:40.460 They might.

01:17:41.400 One would hope that they did.

01:17:43.560 Will the child?

01:17:44.380 No, the child's expectation is that the place they've born in is the normal order of things.

01:17:52.660 And then a load of other people in society, you know, have totally forgotten what the state

01:18:01.300 of nature can be and has been for most of human history and forget that actually, you know,

01:18:08.620 you can bang on all you like about disinformation or online and so on.

01:18:13.640 Most people are just looking at the situation in front of them and then suddenly war breaks

01:18:19.380 out, hell breaks loose.

01:18:21.040 Hopefully it's contained, but sometimes you see it completely uncontained.

01:18:26.260 That's certainly what I saw in Israel, the absolute epitome of unconstrained hate that

01:18:34.400 was unleashed on Israel on the 7th.

01:18:36.260 By the way, again, one other quick thing on that, because it's something that is so often

01:18:43.160 in my mind is, onto communities, by the way, in the south of Israel, precisely overpopulated

01:18:49.220 by people who dreamed the dream of peace with their neighbors and believed, for instance,

01:18:54.520 that, you know, by driving Palestinian children from Gaza to Israeli hospitals every weekend,

01:19:00.520 and they were doing something in the cause of peace.

01:19:03.400 Literally, the woman who was doing that, who was in her 70s, was burned alive in her home

01:19:07.720 on October the 7th.

01:19:09.520 So the simple dream, dreaming does not make it so.

01:19:14.460 You may well be living in the most wonderful dream, but if everyone else is not, you better

01:19:21.660 just hope you're not woken up one day.

01:19:23.360 But the likelihood is you will be.

01:19:26.060 And again, what I've laid out about the situation in Britain, I hope, is some example of that.

01:19:30.760 A dream which maybe doesn't work.

01:19:35.800 Maybe you're woken up from.

01:19:37.940 Okay, so now I have a better insight, too, into your goal in the speaking tour.

01:19:42.920 It's like, you're doing, see, you're destined to be Cassandra, so that's always fun.

01:19:48.540 And you can tell if you're Cassandra, if you make prophecies that you pray would not come

01:19:52.660 true, but believe are likely.

01:19:54.700 Oh my gosh, yes.

01:19:55.460 You can't believe how much that's been on my mind.

01:19:59.940 My late friend Jonathan Sachs wrote, after A Strange Death of Europe came out, he wrote

01:20:04.980 to me with a message from, with a line from Ezekiel, where he said, he said, what's the

01:20:14.100 line?

01:20:15.340 He said, and whether they listen or fail to listen, they should know that a prophet stood

01:20:19.280 among them.

01:20:20.360 Right, right, right.

01:20:21.280 I have children when I got in.

01:20:23.560 I really hope that he wasn't right.

01:20:25.860 Right.

01:20:26.220 Well, so I can see, I see.

01:20:28.060 So, so, you know, what you're doing at the deepest level with this new tour is, I can see

01:20:35.060 why it's the logical next step in what you've been doing, because you're going to attempt

01:20:41.480 to bring to public attention all those things that people would rather not look at.

01:20:45.480 Right.

01:20:46.700 There's a very old idea, and I elucidated it in some detail in this new book I wrote, this

01:20:53.600 We Who Wrestle With God, that the way you become immune to the poison of the worst serpents

01:21:00.560 is by looking at the things you least want to look at.

01:21:05.140 Right, and the goal of the prophet, the role of the prophet is to identify what it is that

01:21:11.540 people want to look at least and to hold it up in front of them in the hopes that that

01:21:16.280 will, that that will make the people who are viewing voluntarily stronger and that that

01:21:23.340 will set the social order itself on a more appropriate path.

01:21:27.400 Well, we certainly don't need, we certainly don't need people to be more dreamy and weaker

01:21:32.520 than they currently are.

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01:22:40.440 All right, so maybe we could turn our attention in this direction.

01:22:49.500 You know, in this conversation, we've done a lot of what conservative types often do, which

01:22:58.260 is to point to what's not good and to make a case for its pathology and danger.

01:23:05.800 Now, it's that proclivity, let's say, that gives rise to the accusations from the radical

01:23:15.360 utopians of the reactionary nature, let's say, of the right.

01:23:18.960 Now, like I said earlier, I don't know if right and left, I don't believe even that the right and

01:23:23.280 left is the right way to conceptualize what's going on in our society now.

01:23:26.340 But again, we'll leave that aside.

01:23:29.340 You know that with this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, for example, that was started last

01:23:35.480 year in the UK, we've been trying to outline something approximating a positive vision rather

01:23:42.300 than merely pointing to the evils of the current pathway.

01:23:46.680 And that outlining of a more positive vision is something that conservatives aren't particularly

01:23:52.060 good at.

01:23:53.080 And I can understand that in a sense, you know, because it's strange times indeed where you

01:23:58.760 have to point repeatedly about what should be self-evident in relationship to your culture

01:24:03.980 to remind people that it exists.

01:24:06.800 You know, and at the deepest level, you might say, well, the confusion about what constitutes

01:24:11.200 a woman is a cardinal example of that.

01:24:13.140 It's like we're so lost that we can't agree on the distinction between the sexes.

01:24:17.980 And so that's, there isn't a form of loss that's more profound than that, as far as I can figure.

01:24:25.860 So what do you see, let's say, as, what do you offer, what do you console yourself even,

01:24:37.960 let's say, with, in regards to something approximating a, what is it that you're defending?

01:24:45.060 What is it that's the West, let's say, that you're, whose loss you're decrying?

01:24:50.180 What's, what's at the bottom of this that we're in such radical danger of losing?

01:24:55.000 This is exactly what Dawkins was pointing to, however implicitly, when he described himself

01:24:59.860 as a cultural Christian.

01:25:01.020 It's like, okay, the West is under assault.

01:25:04.420 Well, what is it that's worth defending precisely?

01:25:07.520 And how do you conceptualize that and make it explicit?

01:25:10.080 And so, I mean, when I go to Europe, what do I love about Europe?

01:25:15.400 The great beauty of its artistic tradition.

01:25:17.780 That's something that, if you have any sense, and then it is the aesthetic sense at all,

01:25:22.080 that drops you to your knees.

01:25:23.420 To go to Italy, to a town like Florence, and to go into a random church,

01:25:27.820 where there's a painting that, if sold, would be worth $500 million,

01:25:32.880 and to see it just hanging on the wall, unguarded, with no one around.

01:25:38.120 Well, what is that?

01:25:38.880 That's an indication of two types of treasure.

01:25:41.120 One, the art itself.

01:25:44.080 Two, the fact that that art can just sit there without having 100 men with machine guns around it,

01:25:49.900 making sure that no thug comes along and purloins it.

01:25:52.680 So that's the treasure of that implicit trust that you described.

01:25:56.500 So there's the beauty, there's the deep sense of voluntary civilization that characterizes Europe, right?

01:26:04.500 There's a remarkable history of valuation of the individual all the way down the economic framework

01:26:12.280 that's particularly present in the UK, probably.

01:26:16.560 It's there in the Netherlands as well.

01:26:18.920 There's other European countries that share that.

01:26:21.080 This is not no civilization and no culture.

01:26:23.820 And then, so what do you, what is it that we should be promoting and fighting for, as far as you're concerned?

01:26:31.540 The main thing is that what you've just outlined, we should be continuing.

01:26:34.940 You know, one of the things is where small-c conservatism is that if the most radical figures on the left

01:26:46.980 come up with completely bizarre new manifestos for what should happen,

01:26:51.540 like the complete forgetting of biology or anything else,

01:26:55.680 if they come up with that, it's true that others could resist that and say,

01:27:00.280 no, we have an alternative utopian vision and so on.

01:27:04.020 I, myself, am not a devotee of that idea.

01:27:07.160 I'm a devotee of the idea of returning to the sane and the normal and the pursuit of the beautiful and the true.

01:27:15.940 Now, those are all things which you don't have to invent a whole new paradigm for.

01:27:20.940 We had it.

01:27:21.600 We have it in the civilization you just described and the institutions and the buildings and the works of art and much more.

01:27:28.080 It's what I, I mean, think of it this way.

01:27:30.540 What if instead of everybody in our age who has any intelligence being told that they should use it to

01:27:38.600 problematize history and go over history, focus on things that were solved and try to unsolve them and make the situation worse?

01:27:51.780 What if instead of that, people actually wanted to make history?

01:27:54.680 What if instead of being figures who could make the past worse and approach it with greater lack of nuance than ever before,

01:28:08.700 they decided to become historic figures themselves?

01:28:12.020 Well, that would be something to aim for.

01:28:13.840 What if instead of seeing the dozen or so figures that stand over the courtyard at Columbia University, Dante, Aristotle, and so on,

01:28:25.060 what if instead of viewing them as simply dead white men, you viewed them as part of a tradition that you can be a part of and add to, and add to?

01:28:35.820 Well, that would be something.

01:28:38.620 And I think it's a very good vision for life.

01:28:42.080 And I think it did our forebears well.

01:28:45.160 And if you have a pride in that tradition, which certainly in Europe we have the right to,

01:28:53.000 not to eradicate any dark times, goodness knows,

01:28:56.320 but a right to have that tradition and to want to add to it and to want to preserve it and keep it going,

01:29:01.940 that seems to me a pretty good basis for life and remembering things that everyone knew until yesterday.

01:29:07.820 And I wonder, is it pride or is it grateful aspiration to?

01:29:13.980 You know, because that word pride, that's been a very thorny word, you might say.

01:29:19.880 And increasingly so in recent years, it's like, well, the right attitude to have towards the great figures of the past.

01:29:27.080 I mean, in this Peterson Academy that we just launched, we have one of the members of the House of Lords do a lecture series on seven great historical leaders of the past.

01:29:38.180 I mean, I'm kind of rubbing my hands together about that course, because it's not the sort of course that you could get at a university, all things considered.

01:29:45.280 There were no great men.

01:29:47.540 They were just pursuing their own power dynamic for their own narrow, self-serving purposes.

01:29:52.380 Which is so preposterous.

01:29:54.420 I mean, you just, I was with some mutual friends of ours recently on the island of St. Helena.

01:29:59.320 And although I tend to take the British view about Napoleon, which is that he was a proto-tyrant,

01:30:06.160 you cannot sit in Napoleon's study in Longwood House looking out at the ocean

01:30:10.440 and considering the battalions of the British army that had to stay on the island to keep the emperor inside

01:30:16.000 and the fleet of British boats that had to sit in the harbour facing inwards to make sure the emperor didn't escape,

01:30:21.660 to just think, wow, this was a world historical force, this man.

01:30:28.360 You know, you're able to take the bad with the good sometimes.

01:30:33.140 And, you know, but goodness me, I mean, the idea that there were no great men in history

01:30:39.120 or that it's all just sort of relative is so preposterous.

01:30:43.000 And you don't have to go to a sort of Carlisleian great man theory.

01:30:45.960 But, by the way, that's a much better theory of history than anything that's being pushed on us at the moment.

01:30:52.120 I mean, just sorry, I don't want to ramble, but I mean, there's a case that I was saying,

01:30:56.640 actually, I did an alternative commencement speech for some of the students at Columbia the other month

01:31:01.080 because they weren't allowed a commencement ceremony because of the protesters at their university.

01:31:06.220 And, of course, so a nice group of students and their families asked if I would speak,

01:31:11.200 and I did, and I did as much as I could.

01:31:13.820 But one of the things, you know, I said, you know, as well as talking about the famous great figures of the past,

01:31:20.260 I gave the example of there was a 16-year-old who Andrew Roberts mentions in his history of World War II,

01:31:26.520 the storm of war, the 16-year-old who lied about his age to get into the British Navy as a submariner in 1940 or so,

01:31:37.080 is on one of the submarines that sinks a German U-boat.

01:31:41.340 They get the crew off the boat and it's sinking.

01:31:45.540 But this 16-year-old and a couple of the others get into this German U-boat as it's sinking,

01:31:51.140 find, among other things, one of the encryption devices, which is sent back to Bletchley Park

01:31:57.040 and which allows the Allies to crack the Enigma code.

01:32:00.340 That 16-year-old ended up being, as it happened, he was chucked out of the Navy because he'd lied about his age.

01:32:08.220 But that 16-year-old boy called Tommy changed the course of human history for the good.

01:32:13.740 Now, tell me it wouldn't be better as a society, instead of telling people to wallow in grievance and anger and bitterness,

01:32:24.120 to say, you know, it actually doesn't matter where you come from.

01:32:27.620 If you have it in you, you could be a world historical figure as well

01:32:31.620 and improve things demonstrably for the better with your life.

01:32:34.940 I suppose one of the conclusions that you could draw would be that the provision of ideologies

01:32:44.160 that claim the contrary are generated for no other reason than to alleviate the responsibility for doing so

01:32:50.960 from the shoulders, to lift the burden of responsibility for doing so from the shoulders of the authors of those ideologies.

01:32:59.520 Everything is pointless.

01:33:01.780 All morality is relative.

01:33:03.200 No one's life has any true significance.

01:33:06.420 I can do whatever the hell I want with whoever the hell I want to,

01:33:10.080 with no consequences whatsoever, because in the final analysis, does it really matter?

01:33:15.940 It's like, well, does it really matter?

01:33:18.020 Well, the reason I concluded eventually that it did really matter was because that's the pathway to hell.

01:33:25.580 And it looks to me like even if heaven doesn't exist, hell matters.

01:33:30.500 And you'll figure that out when you get there.

01:33:33.800 And it sounds to me like what you're doing with your new tour is bringing, what, an expanded vision of the hell that awaits us

01:33:42.020 if we don't walk a little bit more carefully than we have been.

01:33:45.460 And the heroism that can await you too.

01:33:48.200 That's, I will get into this more, but I mean, that is one of the things that I find extraordinary from my past year.

01:33:55.000 I've seen it before, but wow, until you see what people are able to do under unbelievable circumstances

01:34:03.580 and to risk their lives and sometimes to give their lives for a common good, for a purpose, for a cause,

01:34:15.480 sacrificially, almost self-sacrificially.

01:34:18.320 I'm thinking of people who drove right into the fire on the 7th and were citizens

01:34:24.520 and who stood up for their neighbor and saved a lot of people.

01:34:31.200 And people often think heroism is, you know, sort of a thing from the past.

01:34:35.500 No, it isn't. No, it isn't.

01:34:37.780 It's something that if the time emerges, you would hope you'll be able to raise yourself to.

01:34:42.340 But I've seen many people who did.

01:34:44.680 Well, that's the purpose of education is to prepare yourself for precisely that.

01:34:48.660 I mean, you saw, when you came on tour with me, you saw the lights go on in the crowd, let's say,

01:34:56.060 when a case was being made for the relationship between truth and responsibility and adventure and meaning.

01:35:03.200 It's like this call to take your place at the feet of the greats, let's say.

01:35:09.540 That's not some cliche.

01:35:11.460 And it's so interesting to watch people's response to the re-presentation of that pathway

01:35:18.820 because so many people are so seriously demoralized.

01:35:22.260 It's like, no, you know, you could gird your loins, so to speak, and become something.

01:35:28.360 And you have a cardinal role to play and you'd find the meaning of your life in doing that.

01:35:32.340 And that meaning is more real than anything else because it actually is the medication that you can take

01:35:39.620 that doesn't precisely make you immune to pain, but it makes you able to accept it without becoming bitter and murderous.

01:35:47.940 And that's not nothing.

01:35:49.600 Well, it has to be that there is an answer to demoralization.

01:35:53.520 And that is something like remoralization of people.

01:35:55.920 A reminder of people to rise to their better instincts, to rise to their better pasts, to aspire to their better forebears.

01:36:05.140 That's all possible.

01:36:06.520 You know, there's no reason that radicals on any side should have to drag us down into this pit.

01:36:13.200 Absolutely no reason.

01:36:14.980 And we should be able collectively to cut whatever rope it is that they are trying to link us to and pull us down on

01:36:22.200 and saying, no, you can go that way, but you're not taking me with you.

01:36:26.840 Yeah, you're not taking me or anybody I can communicate with effectively with you.

01:36:31.260 We've got 12,000 students signed up already to Peterson.

01:36:34.520 That's fantastic.

01:36:36.320 Yeah, well, so, you know, that's a good index of the hunger that people have for an education

01:36:43.300 that has the goal that you just described, which is to remind people not only of where they could go if they weren't awake,

01:36:52.200 but also of who they could be if they decided to be who they could be.

01:36:56.260 Absolutely.

01:36:56.920 I was with one of my fellow St. Helena's the other week with Andrew Doyle,

01:37:01.340 who had just done the Shakespeare series for you.

01:37:03.960 And I said, what a fantastic thing to have Andrew Doyle teaching Shakespeare.

01:37:09.640 Because, and I said to him, you know, one of the funny things these days is that if you wanted to get a university grant

01:37:15.000 to study Shakespeare, you'd only be able to get one if you were promising to queer Shakespeare

01:37:21.220 or problematize him or look at him through the colonial lens.

01:37:25.620 If you just wanted to study the tragedies or the comedies, it'd be extremely hard to get a grant.

01:37:30.200 But as a friend of ours pointed out, I like to reiterate, you know, the stupid thing about that is the idea

01:37:37.420 that it's our job to judge Shakespeare.

01:37:43.460 Whereas maybe Shakespeare is able to judge us.

01:37:49.060 And maybe if you read Shakespeare well and watch it well and listen to it well and think about it well,

01:37:54.260 you'll realize that sometimes Shakespeare judges us and finds us wanting.

01:37:57.860 And, you know, maybe that's just possible.

01:38:02.300 That one of the reasons why we keep on wanting to chuck out great figures from the past

01:38:05.760 is because actually, like anything beautiful, it makes us nervous.

01:38:10.320 Any ideal is a judge.

01:38:12.500 Yeah, exactly.

01:38:13.700 Right, right.

01:38:14.420 Well, and that's a very interesting thing to contemplate psychologically.

01:38:17.840 Because the conundrum there is, well, that means the higher ideal, the more severe the judgment.

01:38:23.680 So that's a problem.

01:38:24.760 And that's a non-trivial problem.

01:38:26.360 Like, I'm not trying to make light of that.

01:38:27.620 But there's a corollary to that is that, well, every ideal is a goal and there's no hope without a goal.

01:38:34.000 So you can sacrifice the ideal to avoid the judgment, but then you don't have a goal.

01:38:38.800 And if you don't have a goal, you have no joy, you have no enthusiasm, you have no hope.

01:38:44.900 And then your life truly is the kind of bitter misery.

01:38:47.940 This is what happens to Cain, right?

01:38:49.980 When he kills Abel, he kills his ideal.

01:38:52.460 And the first thing he says to God is, my punishment is greater than I can bear.

01:38:56.400 It's like, well, why?

01:38:57.620 Well, you've just killed that which you most wanted to be.

01:39:04.500 And so what do you do after you've done that?

01:39:06.720 Well, there's no place to go.

01:39:08.280 There's no place you can run to.

01:39:10.000 There's no place you can avoid your fate.

01:39:12.340 And the universities have become places that are dedicated towards the demolition of the very ideal that gave rise to them.

01:39:20.520 And obviously, that can't stand for long.

01:39:24.280 Yeah.

01:39:24.680 Well, no.

01:39:25.140 And that's why, I mean, the great answer, as I said at the end of the war in the West, the great answer to all of this.

01:39:30.440 And it also comes back to what you were saying about pride.

01:39:34.660 I prefer to use the term gratitude and to say that really the appropriate answer to much of the immiseration and much more is to turn it around and instead of resentment, feel gratitude.

01:39:47.800 And that's not impossible because millions and millions of people across the world have waged that war within themselves and won.

01:39:57.260 Well, I think, you know, part of what you experience when you go into a great cathedral, if you have any sense, is, I wouldn't say it's a sense of your own littleness because that's not right.

01:40:12.300 But it might be something like a sense of your own littleness in relationship to the wealth of possibility that's pointed at by these remarkable architectural forms.

01:40:23.440 It's like, look what human beings can do.

01:40:25.400 And are you doing that?

01:40:27.500 Exactly.

01:40:27.780 Are you doing that?

01:40:28.880 Probably not.

01:40:30.020 And there's a reason why people are demoralized about that because there must be some reason that we haven't been building things like the great basilica at Saint-Denis in recent years.

01:40:40.980 And there's a reason that those places increasingly look like lost tombstones in a ragged urban, you know, dystopia.

01:40:51.260 And yes, and that's why all of these things point to the same direction.

01:40:56.080 The way down and the way up.

01:40:59.480 And the way down, we know, and we've all been able to study and we've all been able to see quite enough of.

01:41:06.280 The way upwards, there's a task.

01:41:09.140 All right, sir.

01:41:11.160 Well, I think we'll close up.

01:41:13.660 I always get the sense when I'm talking to you that our conversation has just begun.

01:41:18.660 But, well, we'll be able to continue it as we have over several years now.

01:41:22.500 And for those of you watching and listening, Douglas came on my tour last September for a number of events.

01:41:31.160 And that was very useful and hopefully inspiring certainly was for me.

01:41:37.000 And hopefully it was for the audience.

01:41:38.220 That certainly seemed to be the case.

01:41:39.800 And with any luck, we'll be able to continue that in the future.

01:41:43.400 Good luck with your speaking tour.

01:41:46.780 Thank you.

01:41:47.300 I hope that I can come and see you at one of those events.

01:41:48.860 Yeah, I'd love that.

01:41:50.120 You said where do people look?

01:41:52.580 So if they go to Live Nation, to the website of Live Nation, and type in my name.

01:41:59.460 And we start on September the 8th at Fort Lauderdale, although that's sold out.

01:42:03.700 And we go through Miami Beach, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York, and then Denver on October the 13th.

01:42:11.180 So it's a little over a month.

01:42:12.360 Yeah.

01:42:12.500 When are you in L.A.?

01:42:14.560 I am in L.A. on the September the 23rd at the Wilton in L.A.

01:42:22.840 Maybe we'll come out to L.A. and see you.

01:42:24.960 That would be fun.

01:42:25.700 Good to see you.

01:42:26.700 Yeah, yeah.

01:42:27.640 Okay.

01:42:27.920 So, all right.

01:42:29.120 Well, for everybody watching and listening, most of you know that we'll continue this conversation

01:42:33.820 for another half an hour behind the Daily Wire paywall.

01:42:36.220 And I think what I'll do with Douglas is focus a little bit more on the situation in Israel

01:42:41.580 and what he learned and to delve into some of the geopolitical realities behind that,

01:42:47.480 especially with regards to the, what would you say, the conspiratorial involvement of players

01:42:56.100 like Iran in fostering this bloody hellacious mess.

01:43:00.520 And so, if you are inclined to join us for that, that would be much appreciated.

01:43:05.200 Otherwise, Mr. Murray, it's always a pleasure, a perverse pleasure in talking to you.

01:43:12.560 And, well, good luck with your tour.

01:43:15.600 Thank you.

01:43:15.920 You said you, Fort Lauderdale's already sold out.

01:43:18.620 What size venues are you addressing?

01:43:22.340 Pretty big ones.

01:43:24.580 The, I think we're now filling with Fillimore in Miami Beach for the 10th of September.

01:43:30.740 So, yeah.

01:43:31.480 They're nice-sized theatres, but still tickets for some of them, so come along.

01:43:35.140 Well, so that's heartening, you know, the fact.

01:43:37.840 It's pretty strange, you know, if you think about it, that you can make a live event out

01:43:41.660 of what you're doing, showing people this horror and atrocity and making an intellectual case

01:43:46.840 and that there is enough public appetite for that to make it not only an event, but a mass event.

01:43:53.420 That's, in some ways, unprecedented because you're doing, what, live journalism?

01:43:59.120 That's not something that we've seen before.

01:44:02.960 It might also have to do with the fact that as the online world becomes more and more pathological

01:44:08.240 and more and more difficult to trust, the value of these in-person events is going to increase proportionately.

01:44:15.020 Absolutely.

01:44:15.980 It's a community of people finding each other as well, finding other people concerned about the same things.

01:44:21.760 Yes, yes, yes.

01:44:24.240 And you're actually there to watch.

01:44:26.140 You can evaluate deeply.

01:44:28.040 And so that's an interesting, unexpected consequence of the virtualization of the world, right?

01:44:34.900 Okay, and then I guess what I'll close with, apart from an invitation to everyone once again

01:44:40.260 to join us on The Daily Wire side, is we'd love to have you lecture for Peterson Academy on poetry.

01:44:44.820 I'd love that.

01:44:45.780 Yeah, we discussed this.

01:44:47.320 I'm definitely keen to do that.

01:44:49.440 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:44:50.660 Yeah, well, we could make a great course out of that, and that's our goal.

01:44:56.480 So, all right, we'll talk about that further.

01:44:58.700 And to everyone watching and listening, thank you very much.

01:45:01.580 If the film crew up here in my cottage in Northern Ontario, appreciate the fact that you

01:45:06.080 guys set this up and make it straightforward.

01:45:08.080 And also to The Daily Wire for facilitating this.

01:45:11.580 And Douglas, well, on to the next interview.

01:45:14.720 And it was a pleasure talking to you.

01:45:16.240 Thank you for sharing what you've seen and been thinking about with everybody watching

01:45:20.300 and listening.

01:45:21.600 Thank you, Jordan.

01:45:22.240 Thank you.

01:45:28.640 Thank you.

01:45:31.140 Yeah.

01:45:32.120 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 15, 2024

472. A Call for the Sane - Beauty, Truth, & Purpose ｜ Douglas Murray

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