The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 535. Is It Too Late for the UK？ A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall

00:00:00.000 As you pointed out, after the horrors of World War II,

00:00:04.000 there was a consensus around the world that we should never forget.

00:00:08.000 The problem with never forget is that you can't remember what you don't understand.

00:00:13.000 That sort of, to me, explains everything.

00:00:15.000 That's, by the way, what we're seeing crumbling now.

00:00:17.000 That's why people are so upset about J.D. Vance's speech in Munich.

00:00:21.000 Anything that goes against the open society ideology,

00:00:24.000 if you're against that, you must be for the Holocaust. 0.98

00:00:27.000 Diversity without unity is indistinguishable from chaos.

00:00:30.000 National identity is shared participation in the same stories.

00:00:35.000 The story is everything.

00:00:36.000 And this is why I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment.

00:00:39.000 The famous tolerance paradox, buried within there,

00:00:43.000 was the seeds for a new type of totalitarianism.

00:00:45.000 How can we work out what the correct relationship is with the nation,

00:00:48.000 where we can't even identify what the nation is?

00:00:50.000 We could ask ourselves, what's the essence of civilization?

00:00:54.000 It seems to me that the proper story for free societies is...

00:00:59.000 Hello, everybody.

00:01:16.000 I'm here in Cambridge in the UK today at the end of the ARC convention.

00:01:22.000 I have as my guest today Winston Marshall,

00:01:27.000 and I have a long and storied history with Mr. Marshall.

00:01:31.000 I, in part, was in part responsible for the destruction of his musical career

00:01:36.000 because he had the audacity to indicate to the public at large

00:01:42.000 that he didn't think I was entirely despicable,

00:01:45.000 and that didn't go so well for him or for the band.

00:01:48.000 And so that's on me.

00:01:51.000 However, the upshot of that has been that Winston has become a emerging star

00:01:59.000 in the alternative media landscape in the UK,

00:02:03.000 which is behind the curve in the alternative media department,

00:02:08.000 but coming on quite strong with people like Constantine Kissin, for example.

00:02:12.000 And Winston's become a very astute or has shown his ability

00:02:17.000 as a very astute political commentator and cultural analyst.

00:02:23.000 And we spent our discussion today talking about,

00:02:27.000 well, partly about the conference,

00:02:30.000 the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference,

00:02:33.000 but more as a means of interrogating the relationship between the story

00:02:42.000 that sits at the base of a culture,

00:02:44.000 that necessarily sits at the base of a culture,

00:02:46.000 and that provides people with psychological integrity and social unity,

00:02:51.000 and the political structure that is nested within that.

00:02:55.000 And we delved further into that,

00:02:58.000 and discussed the relationship between the presuppositions of Christianity,

00:03:04.000 or more broadly Judeo-Christianity,

00:03:07.000 and the free, abundant, and productive societies of the West,

00:03:12.000 trying to think through the causal relationship between those two,

00:03:17.000 if any, and to delineate that.

00:03:19.000 And so that's part of an ongoing conversation,

00:03:23.000 you might say, about the reinvigoration of the West on first principles,

00:03:28.000 and something that's of extreme necessity,

00:03:32.000 particularly in the UK and Europe,

00:03:34.000 and perhaps in Canada and Australia as well.

00:03:37.000 The tide has turned to some degree in the US, maybe,

00:03:40.000 but the rest of the West is in relatively dire straits, existentially speaking.

00:03:47.000 And so, we spent our time discussing why that is,

00:03:52.000 and what conceivably, if anything, might be done about it.

00:03:56.000 So, join us for that.

00:03:59.000 So, we just spent three interesting days, more or less together,

00:04:04.000 or at least in the same environs in London,

00:04:07.000 at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,

00:04:10.000 the second convention.

00:04:11.000 4,200 people, as opposed to 1,500.

00:04:14.000 We had people from 90 countries.

00:04:17.000 What do you think?

00:04:18.000 Well, first, congratulations.

00:04:19.000 Oh, well, thank you.

00:04:20.000 Yeah.

00:04:21.000 It's a great success.

00:04:22.000 It seemed to be, yes.

00:04:23.000 Which you, I think only you could have pulled off

00:04:26.000 and pulled everyone together.

00:04:27.000 Such disparate people from across the world,

00:04:30.000 unified by a common, at least appreciation,

00:04:35.000 that things have gone wrong, even if they don't know.

00:04:38.000 We don't all each know exactly how it's gone wrong.

00:04:41.000 And it was overwhelmingly positive.

00:04:44.000 It was not, there's a problem we've got in our space, I think,

00:04:47.000 is a lot of people trying to take things down, or angry, or anti things.

00:04:51.000 You've actually created an environment that is for something,

00:04:54.000 that is not just countering, but trying to offer and proffer

00:05:00.000 a positive vision for the future, which we need.

00:05:03.000 So, part of the problem that conservatives have,

00:05:09.000 perhaps less so classic liberals, is the formulation of a vision.

00:05:14.000 The visionary types tend to tilt in the liberal direction,

00:05:18.000 traditionally, so to speak.

00:05:21.000 And so, conservatives do find themselves very frequently playing something

00:05:26.000 approximating a reactionary role.

00:05:28.000 They can see when we've wandered off the path,

00:05:32.000 but aren't very good at specifying what the proper path might be.

00:05:37.000 Okay, so we've noticed some things as we've run these two conventions.

00:05:42.000 We've observed our speakers.

00:05:44.000 We've had, I don't know, maybe 150 speakers across both conventions,

00:05:49.000 and also monitored the social media network responses to our broadcasts.

00:05:55.000 So, and maybe you can tell me what you think about this.

00:05:59.000 If we invite a politician, regardless of their stature,

00:06:04.000 and they do what you just described, which is to only point out problems,

00:06:11.000 which would often be a critique of the people across the aisle, let's say,

00:06:15.000 or if they speak in a partisan manner,

00:06:19.000 they disappoint the audience that's there,

00:06:22.000 and they get zero views on social media.

00:06:24.000 It doesn't matter who they are.

00:06:25.000 They can be very well-known as politicians.

00:06:28.000 Well, Kemi Batenhock, the leader of the Conservative Party, actually did that. 0.60

00:06:31.000 And what bothered me is she used the term populist

00:06:34.000 in a pejorative sense in her speech.

00:06:36.000 And as soon as she did that, I was, like, a bit bothered,

00:06:39.000 because I was like, again, this is the anti, this is the negative,

00:06:42.000 which is not exactly what ARC is about.

00:06:44.000 Yeah, when we opened our first convention a year and a half ago,

00:06:48.000 Kevin McCarthy spoke, and it was pretty partisan,

00:06:51.000 pretty Republican, American Republican.

00:06:54.000 And it was a fine speech from the political perspective,

00:06:59.000 but it wasn't a good opening to the conference,

00:07:01.000 and it didn't do well, either at the conference or online.

00:07:04.000 We had Kemi and Batenhock and Mike Johnson open this time,

00:07:11.000 and Kemi's speech was more political.

00:07:14.000 And although she's very articulate,

00:07:19.000 and it was a good political speech,

00:07:21.000 it wasn't as effective, I didn't think, as Mike Johnson's.

00:07:25.000 And Johnson's worked because he stuck to ideas.

00:07:28.000 And I mean, that's what we're trying to do,

00:07:30.000 is we're trying to operate at the level of culture, let's say,

00:07:34.000 which is, I think, the right space for conservatives to operate in.

00:07:38.000 We're looking at the preconditions for a civil and free society,

00:07:41.000 trying to sort out what those are.

00:07:43.000 Now, we've also noticed something on the press side.

00:07:46.000 So if we offer an invitational vision and we specify something positive

00:07:52.000 and we aren't partisan, then the speeches do very well in person and online.

00:08:00.000 But also, it's very interesting in relationship to press coverage.

00:08:04.000 Mostly, the press has been neutral to us or positive, both times.

00:08:10.000 There's some exceptions, like The Guardian, but, you know, what do you expect from The Guardian?

00:08:16.000 And that's mostly like second-rate carping anyways.

00:08:19.000 It's nothing substantive.

00:08:21.000 But it appears that the reason we've escaped from maybe serious protest as well,

00:08:28.000 because there were no protestors.

00:08:29.000 One or two.

00:08:30.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:31.000 Barely.

00:08:32.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:08:33.000 A pretty weak showing on the protest front.

00:08:35.000 But I think the reason for that, again, is that if we're true to our mission

00:08:40.000 and we are offering a positive alternative, then we get something approximating a hall pass

00:08:47.000 and people are excited about it and interested.

00:08:50.000 Now, you said that you thought that the conference was very positive.

00:08:53.000 And so what do you mean by that exactly?

00:08:55.000 What I mean is that if you get tied into the culture wars and the dialogue online,

00:09:00.000 it's all a lot of no, you're wrong, no, you're wrong, no, you're wrong.

00:09:03.000 And here it was, this is wrong, but here's actually an alternative.

00:09:06.000 Like, this is wrong and this is why it's wrong and here's a better alternative to that.

00:09:11.000 I'd say on, I found it interesting with regards to the media and your idea of culture

00:09:16.000 is that one of the headlines, I think, from an Australian paper was that 0.99

00:09:19.000 it's the culture stupid playing on the Bill Clinton thing. 0.99

00:09:22.000 Right. 0.99

00:09:23.000 And that, I think, is partly because of what you describe, is that the culture is upstream from politics.

00:09:32.000 I think that's what you're sort of implying that, the Andrew Breitbart thing.

00:09:36.000 I would also say, and perhaps this is why some people like this, is that there's been such an attack on our culture for so long,

00:09:44.000 that even being in a place where it's okay to feel like it's, even being in a place where culture isn't negative, like one's…

00:09:55.000 Right, just outright, just its utility outright denied, to not have that.

00:10:00.000 Exactly.

00:10:01.000 Right.

00:10:02.000 So that might be more important than the specific, what, recommendations on the cultural side.

00:10:07.000 The mere fact that we can gather together and say, well, there is clearly something here that's not destructive and worth preserving.

00:10:15.000 That's a relief in and of itself.

00:10:17.000 Exactly.

00:10:18.000 Right, and then we can figure out what it is, which is what we're trying to do.

00:10:20.000 But that, by the way, I think is really crucial, because I think that there has been a concerted effort since the end of the Second World War to crush our culture. 0.58

00:10:30.000 Mm-hmm.

00:10:31.000 And I think this ties in with the populist thing, which I was keen to talk to you about.

00:10:36.000 And a lot of populists will think, or a lot of people who frame the populist age, it's sort of over the last 30 years,

00:10:45.000 you look at failed Iraq wars, trillion dollars spent there, the Wall Street bailout 2008,

00:10:52.000 you were turbocharged by COVID and the failure of elites there.

00:10:56.000 But I think you can actually go back to the post all the way to the end of the war,

00:11:00.000 and this attack on the culture, which has inspired what I think is the worldwide populist movement,

00:11:07.000 has been deliberately because we learnt the wrong lessons at the end of the Second World War.

00:11:13.000 So this is what the writer N.S. Lyons has called the long 20th century, which we're now coming out of.

00:11:21.000 And so at the end of the Second World War, you have writers like Karl Popper writing about the open society,

00:11:26.000 and they create this dichotomy between the open society and the closed society.

00:11:32.000 And the motivation is never again, of course, like after the Holocaust. 0.96

00:11:38.000 The lesson seems to have been in Europe that these national cultures are wrong.

00:11:43.000 Nationalism is evil.

00:11:45.000 And the dichotomy that's created, those were the closed societies, negative, and we need to aim for an open society.

00:11:57.000 And so that sort of, to me, explains everything that's going on.

00:12:02.000 It explains everything from mass migration, explains everything from the clampdown on free speech,

00:12:07.000 it explains even the failure to address the British-Pakistani rape gang scandal.

00:12:14.000 It all comes from that.

00:12:16.000 And even within that, there's been an attack on British national identity, which is another thing I'd like to get into with.

00:12:27.000 So there has been this onslaught on culture, which we could perhaps talk about, but what, so there's this relief at ARC at the conference,

00:12:36.000 where it's like, oh, it's not, we need not be ashamed about these things.

00:12:40.000 But also, it doesn't go into the, because I do see an emerging reaction to this attack on our culture that is negative.

00:12:47.000 And there is a, some people are calling it sort of the post-modernist riot or the woke riot.

00:12:54.000 There's a fraction which has got some elements to it that are not so pretty, I think.

00:12:59.000 So what ARC is to me is a positive contention with that, the failure of the post-war consensus.

00:13:13.000 So let's unpack some of that. So let me see if I get your diagnosis right, first of all.

00:13:20.000 So, as you pointed out, after the horrors of World War II, there was a consensus around the world that we should never forget, that was one phrase, and never again.

00:13:32.000 The problem with never forget is that you can't remember what you don't understand.

00:13:37.000 Quite.

00:13:38.000 And so, you could say, well, we obviously don't want to replicate the horrors of the Holocaust, but that, to manage that successfully means that we've mapped the causal chain that led to the Holocaust and that we did that accurately so that we're solving the proper problem. 0.80

00:13:56.000 And your contention, as far as I can understand it at the moment, is that we reflexively identified something like nationalism as the core of the problem, maybe for the war as such, but also for the exacerbation of ethnic identity that produced the Holocaust.

00:14:18.000 Yes.

00:14:19.000 And that the antidote was something like a borderless open society that transcended national identity.

00:14:25.000 Yeah.

00:14:26.000 Okay.

00:14:27.000 So let's take that apart a little bit.

00:14:29.000 So, the first part…

00:14:30.000 I can actually, sorry, follow that in just to explain that back.

00:14:33.000 Yeah, okay.

00:14:34.000 So, at the end of last year, I was speaking at Oxford University for a Roger Scruton lecture.

00:14:39.000 And the topic was, what is English and British identity?

00:14:42.000 And it was a room full of students, presumably all conservative, and I was discussing that topic, what it is to be British, what it is to be English, the differences and what have you in the history.

00:14:53.000 And then at the end, I asked the room, what do you think?

00:14:57.000 Every single student in the room gave a different answer as to what it is to be English, which ranged from ethnicity, i.e. it was an ethno-nationalist argument, all the way to there's no such thing as Englishness and Britishness.

00:15:10.000 And everything, no one agreed.

00:15:12.000 That's the Conservatives.

00:15:14.000 Now, to add colour to that, our mutual friend Constantine Kissin has just gone viral on Twitter a week or two ago because there was an argument he had with Fraser Nelson where he argued that Rishi Sunak, our former Prime Minister,

00:15:27.000 might indeed be British, but that he, as a brown Hindu, was not English.

00:15:33.000 Now, that erupted where he was smeared by left-wingers, you know, the classic types, saying that he was arguing for ethno-nationalism, which he was absolutely not.

00:15:45.000 But even within the right, there was no consensus on what that is.

00:15:48.000 Now, I'll just tie it back to my thesis about open society.

00:15:52.000 In 1944, there was a writer called Hans Koen, who, it was similar to Karl Popper, that there's a, they're thinking about how do we separate the good and the bad here about what a national identity is.

00:16:09.000 And he didn't coin the phrase, civic nationalism, but his thesis basically was what would become civic nationalism, which is civic nationalism, good, is...

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00:17:33.000 What is democracy?

00:17:34.000 Democracy, I guess, geographic sovereignty or land sovereignty and a sort of civic duty.

00:17:47.000 Mm-hmm.

00:17:48.000 And then on the other side, they have ethnicity, which we probably all...

00:17:52.000 It's different from country to country, but we all agree that it's a bad idea to say just ethnicity.

00:17:58.000 It's on the other side of ethno-nationalism.

00:18:01.000 But they also lumped in culture.

00:18:04.000 So, they put the cultural side in the ethno bucket.

00:18:08.000 So, you have this growth now.

00:18:10.000 So, people...

00:18:12.000 Fast forward 80 years and you have diversity is our greatest strength.

00:18:16.000 When actually, I happen to believe unity is our greatest strength.

00:18:19.000 Or rather, I should say, diversity without unity, it all kind of crumbles apart.

00:18:24.000 So, Britain now is in a place where we can't...

00:18:26.000 Diversity without unity is indistinguishable from chaos.

00:18:29.000 Exactly.

00:18:30.000 Right?

00:18:31.000 And the world is a multicultural place and it's rife with conflict and war. 0.99

00:18:35.000 Right?

00:18:36.000 And there's some naive presumption that if you bring people from all corners of the world to a particular geographical locale,

00:18:44.000 they'll leave all the strife behind them and only bring the fruits of their culture. 0.77

00:18:48.000 And that's in...

00:18:49.000 Well, I guess partly what we're trying to do in this discussion is to determine why people believe that.

00:18:55.000 Well, they did that as a reaction to the Holocaust. 0.92

00:18:57.000 Yes, yes.

00:18:58.000 And to the war.

00:18:59.000 To the war.

00:19:00.000 Right.

00:19:01.000 And that's, by the way, what we're seeing crumbling now.

00:19:03.000 That's why when people are so upset about J.D. Vance's speech in Munich, it's because they can't...

00:19:09.000 Anything that goes against the open society ideology, they have this dichotomy, which is a false dichotomy,

00:19:15.000 which means that if you're against that, you must be for the Holocaust.

00:19:18.000 Right. You must be a fascist. 0.98

00:19:19.000 You must be a fascist. 0.98

00:19:20.000 That's why they use the term fascism, because they actually can't code it any other way.

00:19:23.000 They don't even know they have this ideology. They've been swimming in it for so long.

00:19:26.000 Well, this is partly why we've introduced a stream into ARC that's specifically focused on identity.

00:19:35.000 And it's also associated with our concern about the better story, narrative identity.

00:19:41.000 And so the classic Catholic alternative to... 0.65

00:19:50.000 You could say that what the open society people did was replace tyranny with chaos.

00:19:57.000 Right.

00:19:58.000 So remove all the unifying institutions, nation state identification, for example.

00:20:05.000 There's something like an assault on marriage.

00:20:07.000 There's an assault on the family.

00:20:09.000 There's the assault on local identification.

00:20:12.000 It's like all those layers of social identification get associated with something like oppression and fascism.

00:20:19.000 That would be a variant of the patriarchy critique, right?

00:20:22.000 The patriarchy, which as far as I can tell is something like any form of hierarchical social arrangement,

00:20:29.000 is in essence oppressive.

00:20:34.000 Now the problem with that hypothesis is that something can become oppressive when it degenerates,

00:20:42.000 without being oppressive in its essence.

00:20:44.000 And I think part of the reason that people are so lost now,

00:20:48.000 and perhaps part of the reason that the ARC movement has become successful,

00:20:53.000 is that people understand that the destruction of those hierarchical identities has left them bereft.

00:21:02.000 And I think that psychologists have actually contributed to the problem in a major way,

00:21:07.000 sort of regardless of their philosophical orientation,

00:21:10.000 because clinical psychologists, including the famous psychologists like Freud and Jung say,

00:21:18.000 had this implicit idea that mental health was something that characterized the individual.

00:21:29.000 That it was something like brain health, except it was the psyche,

00:21:33.000 and that you carried it around inside you.

00:21:36.000 And so that means if you were a well-constituted individual,

00:21:41.000 you had a well-organized mind.

00:21:44.000 But that's not right.

00:21:46.000 It's seriously not right.

00:21:48.000 Because it eliminates the fact of our social being in a profound way.

00:21:57.000 Freud sort of thought of the human being, let's say,

00:22:00.000 as a collection of id-like drives and instincts, right?

00:22:04.000 And that those were suppressed by the superego.

00:22:07.000 So it's sort of, it's almost a, it's a combination of the viewpoints of Rousseau and Hobbes.

00:22:14.000 Hobbes would have said, the human being left to his own devices is an internecine war of conflicting impulses.

00:22:22.000 There has to be a leviathan to impose restraint on that.

00:22:27.000 And Freud thought the same thing in relationship to the superego.

00:22:30.000 The superego is an inhibitory structure.

00:22:33.000 And that the relationship between the natural human being and the constraining elements of the social world is inhibitory.

00:22:42.000 You inhibit aggression, you inhibit sexuality.

00:22:45.000 And that's not true either.

00:22:48.000 And it's not true in a very profound way.

00:22:52.000 If you are married, your sexuality is not inhibited.

00:23:00.000 It's integrated into a higher order structure that's contractual, long-term and social.

00:23:08.000 We know it's not inhibited partly because in the 60 years after the sexual revolution,

00:23:14.000 the people who are having most sex are married religious couples.

00:23:20.000 So no one would have saw that coming, but that happens to be the case.

00:23:24.000 It isn't that sex is inhibited or that you're subject to the patriarchal oppression of marriage as a contractual obligation.

00:23:34.000 It's that sexuality finds its place in a higher order game.

00:23:38.000 Well, if you're in a marriage, who you are compared to who your wife is starts to become extremely blurry, right?

00:23:50.000 Part of your identity is husband, maybe 30% of it.

00:23:54.000 And then the integrity of your psyche, which might be the balance of your emotional function, is actually dependent not on something that's going on in your head, but on the integrity of the relationship, right?

00:24:08.000 If the relationship is well negotiated, then you're not overwhelmed by existential angst and you have some hope.

00:24:18.000 Yeah.

00:24:19.000 The dynamic is external.

00:24:20.000 And then you could add, well, children to that.

00:24:22.000 Yeah.

00:24:23.000 And the same thing happens.

00:24:24.000 Now you're a father and your psychological health is dependent on the integrity of the social structure.

00:24:30.000 Yeah.

00:24:31.000 The same with town, the same with state, the same with nation, right?

00:24:35.000 And then you could ask, well, what's all that nested in?

00:24:38.000 And the conventional answer to that is something like one nation under God.

00:24:42.000 And that would be the ultimate superordinate principle.

00:24:44.000 And then the identity becomes the harmony across those levels.

00:24:49.000 It's not internal.

00:24:50.000 And when you lose all that, which it, now that is something you'd lose if this open society idea is taken to its limit.

00:24:58.000 Because all of those social arrangements become part of the fascist patriarchy and have to be dispensed with, but that leaves people with nothing.

00:25:06.000 Well, so that's exactly what happened.

00:25:08.000 And they deliberately got rid of any relationship with the nation, with the country, even though these are ancient things.

00:25:15.000 Like the English people are an ancient people. 1.00

00:25:17.000 This is deep within our psyche.

00:25:19.000 I believe, although, I mean, you better answer how.

00:25:24.000 I'd like to know from your point of view how, what is the correct relationship to have with one's nation?

00:25:31.000 Because it seems that the lesson after World War II was that there is no correct relationship.

00:25:36.000 This wasn't the same lesson in America, by the way, because I think that their lesson was we Americans ended, we defeated the Nazis. 0.67

00:25:43.000 Right.

00:25:44.000 And kind of had that a little bit.

00:25:45.000 Without being responsible for them.

00:25:47.000 Without being responsible.

00:25:48.000 But Europe had a completely different story for itself about what happened.

00:25:53.000 Yeah.

00:25:54.000 The Americans didn't emerge from the Second World War with guilt.

00:25:57.000 Right.

00:25:58.000 Not really.

00:25:59.000 Yeah.

00:26:00.000 In fact, quite the contrary, right?

00:26:01.000 Because as you said, they stepped in as saviors, so to speak, and quite successfully.

00:26:06.000 And you'd think the British would have had the same response, seeing as, even at one point, we were the only ones standing to the Nazis.

00:26:11.000 Yeah, right.

00:26:12.000 Right.

00:26:13.000 And you did, to some degree.

00:26:14.000 Like, there was that strain of pride in that victory.

00:26:18.000 But it did get suppressed across time.

00:26:21.000 Okay, well, let's-

00:26:22.000 Suppressed across time to the point now that if you even have an England flag draped across your front door, you're besmirched and belittled as far-right and racist.

00:26:32.000 Right, so the glory of the World War II victory for Great Britain was eclipsed by the shame of the colonial enterprise.

00:26:39.000 Some might say something like that.

00:26:41.000 Okay, so you might ask, we could inquire into the nature of national identity.

00:26:46.000 Yeah.

00:26:47.000 Now, I think identity works the same way at all the levels we described, but to the degree that there is a national identity, I think the technical definition of a national identity is shared participation in the same stories.

00:27:02.000 Yeah.

00:27:03.000 So, one of the things I've figured out, and we're trying to promote this view, let's say, at Ark, because we want to get the story right, well, the first thing you need to know is that the story is everything.

00:27:15.000 And there's a technical reason for that.

00:27:18.000 So, and this is why I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment.

00:27:22.000 The Enlightenment folks believe that you can orient yourself in the world as a consequence of the facts.

00:27:27.000 But the problem with that is that there's an infinite number of facts and combinations of facts.

00:27:33.000 And so, you drown in the landscape of unmediated facts.

00:27:38.000 So, you have to prioritize facts.

00:27:41.000 And that's what a value, that's what a value, a system of values does.

00:27:47.000 A system of values prioritizes the attentional significance of the facts.

00:27:52.000 So, if you go to a movie, and you watch the protagonist, you map what he attends to, what he gives attentional priority to, and that enables you to duplicate his emotions in your own body.

00:28:06.000 And then you evaluate the consequence of that value structure as it plays itself out across time.

00:28:12.000 And the reason we find that gripping is because there isn't anything more important to us than how to determine how to prioritize the facts.

00:28:21.000 So, a story is a description of the way someone prioritizes their facts.

00:28:26.000 Okay.

00:28:27.000 Once you know that, the next question that emerges is, what then is the correct story?

00:28:33.000 Mm-hmm.

00:28:34.000 But even independent of that, it leaves you with another conclusion, which is that you and I share an identity only insofar as we participate in the same story.

00:28:45.000 Yes.

00:28:46.000 It's the definition.

00:28:47.000 It's like with your wife, for example, you might say, well, what unites you?

00:28:51.000 Well, a shared vision of the past, present, and future.

00:28:56.000 It's a shared story.

00:28:57.000 Yeah.

00:28:58.000 And you can understand that if you also understand how it might fracture.

00:29:02.000 So, one of the shared axioms of the story might be sexual fidelity.

00:29:10.000 Okay.

00:29:11.000 So, that gives you a foundation.

00:29:13.000 Because we're true to each other, all of these other things remain true, right?

00:29:19.000 Mm-hmm.

00:29:20.000 We understand our commitment to the past.

00:29:21.000 We understand where we are now.

00:29:22.000 We understand where we're going.

00:29:23.000 If you violate that, the story falls apart.

00:29:26.000 And, well, the whole relationship is plunged into chaos.

00:29:29.000 There's no identity.

00:29:30.000 There's nothing that's unifying.

00:29:32.000 And so, a culture is the union of people around a story.

00:29:37.000 Yeah.

00:29:38.000 And we have lost our story.

00:29:40.000 Absolutely.

00:29:41.000 It's been destroyed.

00:29:42.000 Not only by the Open Society ideologues, but also by the Marxists.

00:29:46.000 And you can see what's going on in the schools with that.

00:29:49.000 They've completely twisted our story so that, instead of it being that we are the people

00:29:55.000 that stood up against the Nazis.

00:29:57.000 We are the people that defeated Hitler.

00:29:59.000 We are the people, the British I'm talking about, that ended slavery at great cost.

00:30:03.000 The cost of billions and of thousands of British men.

00:30:06.000 We are the people that defeated Napoleon.

00:30:08.000 Instead, young children are coming out of school thinking British Englishness, it's evil.

00:30:14.000 And so, the whole country, I believe, is falling apart because of that.

00:30:20.000 We're really in the period of chaos.

00:30:22.000 And that's why, also, you have Sadiq Khan banging on, as I said, diversity is our greatest strength.

00:30:28.000 That's intentionally because that's their proposition.

00:30:32.000 That's the best they've got.

00:30:33.000 But it can't last.

00:30:35.000 And so, again, back to the arc, it was a feeling like, okay, maybe it's okay.

00:30:41.000 Maybe it's okay to actually feel these things.

00:30:44.000 But the answer, the question that hasn't been answered is, what is the correct relationship

00:30:52.000 with the British with their story that includes all of these people that have come here,

00:30:57.000 who have their own stories?

00:30:59.000 And without answering that question, we won't find unity as a nation.

00:31:03.000 Right, right.

00:31:04.000 And that's the same question is, what are the core values?

00:31:08.000 Well, okay.

00:31:09.000 So, this is an argument that runs parallel to your observation of the consequences of the open society philosophy.

00:31:17.000 So, it's a Marxist presupposition that the fundamental uniting story is one of power.

00:31:26.000 Now, we can take that apart.

00:31:28.000 Marx himself actually approached that in a relatively simple and in some ways straightforward and in some ways even accurate manner.

00:31:39.000 He posited that the fundamental dimension of differentiation between people was socioeconomic position.

00:31:48.000 And that is a fundamental differentiator, you know, among many, but that was the Marxist proposition.

00:31:57.000 And then, once you knew that the fundamental determinant of the interrelationship between people was comparative socioeconomic status,

00:32:07.000 you could divide people into the oppressors and the oppressed.

00:32:10.000 You could tell a story about virtuous revolution on the part of the oppressed, and away you went.

00:32:16.000 You had the whole ball of wax, let's say.

00:32:19.000 Now, the problem with that is that the basis of socioeconomic differentiation in a non-corrupt society isn't power.

00:32:30.000 It's productive competence, right?

00:32:32.000 So, that's a big problem.

00:32:34.000 Now, it can degenerate in the direction of power.

00:32:36.000 But it was obvious that Marx was wrong because capitalism ended up being so productive because it didn't free up genuine productive resources,

00:32:45.000 and it was a voluntary game, that the impoverished pulled themselves out of poverty, even though the distinction between rich and poor remained.

00:32:54.000 And so, you don't mind a slight side.

00:32:59.000 But the irony is that Karl Popper actually spoke more about totalitarian Marxism in his open societies, his famous open societies, than he did about Nazism.

00:33:10.000 Of course, he was criticizing Nazism as a refugee in New Zealand, a Jewish refugee from Austria.

00:33:15.000 But the irony of that is that it's the famous tolerance paradox, which is actually buried in a footnote in that book, where he writes,

00:33:29.000 we should consider it criminal, those who, he doesn't use the word, inspire intolerance, but that essentially inspire intolerance.

00:33:39.000 So, even though he wrote against both Marxist and fascist totalitarianism, buried within there was the seed for a new type of totalitarianism that's, I think, emerged.

00:33:50.000 Yeah, well, the paradox of what you do about whether you tolerate intolerance, that's a terrible paradox.

00:33:57.000 It's a place where, what would you say, the axioms of a tolerant society start to devour themselves.

00:34:03.000 All right, so let's return to that in a moment.

00:34:05.000 So, what happened to the postmodernists is they took that narrative of oppression by power and they made it multidimensional, right?

00:34:13.000 So, in fact, they even deprioritized the economic because if you're white and poor, say, in the US, you don't get any attention from the postmodern neo-Marxists.

00:34:23.000 But they're playing the same, they have the same assumption.

00:34:27.000 Their assumption is that the orienting dimension of the world is power, right?

00:34:31.000 There's nothing but power.

00:34:33.000 And Foucault, of course, is famous for this because Foucault denied the very existence of the goodwill that would enable genuine transformative dialogue.

00:34:42.000 His sense was, you have your poor power orientation and I have mine.

00:34:47.000 And our dialogue is nothing but a zero-sum game between competing ethos.

00:34:53.000 There was no neutral or transcendent territory between us that we could appeal to and move forward to a higher mode of resolution.

00:35:03.000 That was all delusion or maybe justification of our own power claims.

00:35:08.000 Now, it seems to me, and this is something that I've been working out and I tried to clarify this to some degree at ARC, that there's something that the West has got canonically correct that makes a hash of relativistic claims or multicultural claims.

00:35:30.000 Because we could ask ourselves what's the essence of civilization, which is what we are asking if we ask what's the core of our identity or the core of our story.

00:35:39.000 Or if we're asking how we could have unity without the pathology of nationalism or of patriarchy, let's say.

00:35:46.000 Is there a principle that could unite us?

00:35:50.000 Now, power is one.

00:35:52.000 It's not reflected in the mythology in the Lord of the Rings, right?

00:35:56.000 Because the one evil ring that binds them all together is the ring of power.

00:36:00.000 And power does, power can unite, but it's fragile.

00:36:03.000 And it requires force.

00:36:05.000 So, it seems to me that the proper story for free societies, so free and voluntary societies, is not the story of power, but the story of voluntary self-sacrifice.

00:36:18.000 And that's antithetical to the claim of power.

00:36:23.000 You know, so, let's see, is this a good way of explaining it?

00:36:30.000 One of the things we've noticed, my family and I, as I've become more notorious, let's say, or more well-known, is that people approach me for a lot of different reasons.

00:36:42.000 And some of those reasons aren't so good.

00:36:44.000 They're self-serving, let's say.

00:36:46.000 One of the ways we've determined how to distinguish between people who are after their own ends and people who are interested in a productive partnership is that they come with an offer and not a request.

00:37:01.000 The point is, is that the basis of a genuine social interaction is something like an offering, right?

00:37:10.000 So, if you and I want to establish a relationship, it's a good idea for me to bring something to the table and give it to you.

00:37:17.000 From what I understand, this is how warring tribes in the default tribal condition of humanity started to trade.

00:37:26.000 So, what seems to happen, human beings have been around for about 350,000 years, and we didn't seem to get our act together until about 20,000 years ago.

00:37:35.000 You might ask what the hell we were doing for the 330,000 years before that, and one answer is tearing down anyone who had any modicum of success whatsoever and fighting endless tribal battles.

00:37:47.000 And so, then you might ask, how the hell do you get out of that, because that's kind of a self-sustaining dead end.

00:37:54.000 So, imagine a tribal group here and a tribal group here, and this group is watching this group and vice versa, and this group sees that this group has some cool stuff that they maybe would like to have and vice versa.

00:38:06.000 Then imagine there's a no man's land of disputed territory between them.

00:38:11.000 Sometimes, a tribe will get the bright idea of taking some of their valuable stuff and leaving it in the no man's zone, just abandoning it, and then retreating.

00:38:22.000 Then the other tribe will come in and take the stuff. 0.95

00:38:25.000 Now, they could just take the stuff and leave.

00:38:28.000 But now and then, the other tribe figures out, well, if they left some cool stuff, then maybe there would be more valuables forthcoming.

00:38:38.000 But the interesting thing about that initiation, that process, is there's a sacrificial offering at the beginning.

00:38:44.000 You have to give something up.

00:38:46.000 And I do think it's that act of giving something up voluntarily that actually defines, well, I think it defines the psyche with integrity, but even more importantly, it defines society.

00:38:58.000 It's not power.

00:38:59.000 It's not power.

00:39:00.000 It's the antithesis of power.

00:39:01.000 So, within as well as between societies?

00:39:03.000 Within the individual and between society.

00:39:06.000 Yeah.

00:39:07.000 I think we establish psychological integrity by having each of our internecine drives give something up in relationship to an emergent totality.

00:39:19.000 That's what happens when you mature, right?

00:39:21.000 You start sequencing your whims in a way that allows each of them to attain their end, but in some order over some time period in relationship to some goal.

00:39:32.000 Some of that goal would be the establishment of genuine social interactions.

00:39:37.000 All that's sacrificial.

00:39:38.000 Now, it looks to me like the biblical stories are an examination of sacrifice, like an interrogation of sacrifice.

00:39:47.000 And Christ being the ultimate story of sacrifice.

00:39:49.000 Exactly, exactly, exactly.

00:39:50.000 Because once you understand that voluntary sacrifice is the basis of civilization and community, the next question that emerges is, well, what's the highest possible form of sacrifice?

00:40:05.000 And that's actually the quest, you might say, that the biblical stories arrange themselves around.

00:40:14.000 Because you establish the principle of sacrifice actually with Adam and Eve right at the end of that story, but certainly with Cain and Abel.

00:40:20.000 There's two patterns of sacrifice established there.

00:40:23.000 The pattern of Abel and the pattern of Cain.

00:40:25.000 But then that's fleshed out as all the stories progress.

00:40:28.000 And in principle, that culminates in the, well, what we construe as the ultimate sacrifice, which is something like a total sacrifice, right?

00:40:36.000 So then you might ask yourself, is it true that a totalizing sacrifice is the basis of social abundance?

00:40:47.000 This is why Christ is the miraculous provider of the water that eternally replenishes and the fish that multiply and the bread that doesn't end.

00:40:58.000 The idea is that if you establish the right pattern of sacrificial identity, you produce a society that is endlessly abundant.

00:41:08.000 It's like a meta principle.

00:41:09.000 It's a meta principle of provision.

00:41:11.000 And it's based on the idea of sacrifice.

00:41:13.000 And it seems to me, I think what's revolutionary about our time is that I think we can, I think we can now understand that like explicitly instead of it being buried in our stories.

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00:42:40.000 With regard to the national identity, forgive me for going there, and what I'm reading from what you're saying, but maybe I've got this wrong, is that there's a correct interplay, a correct sacrifice that the nation should have for the individual and the individual should have had for the nation.

00:42:58.000 There's a certain amount of the individual should give to the nation and the nation in return.

00:43:02.000 Yes, yeah, yeah.

00:43:03.000 Well, that would be something like, you see that also in the biblical stories, say in the story of Abraham with the establishment of the idea of covenant.

00:43:13.000 Yes, exactly.

00:43:14.000 Right?

00:43:15.000 So what happens with Abraham, this is dead relevant as far as I'm concerned.

00:43:18.000 So God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure.

00:43:24.000 He says to Abraham, if you leave your zone of comfort and venture out into the terrible world, I'll make you four offerings.

00:43:32.000 One is your life will be a blessing to yourself.

00:43:35.000 The other is, another is that your reputation will become enhanced among your compatriots for valid reasons.

00:43:46.000 The third is that you'll establish something of multi-generational permanence.

00:43:51.000 And the fourth is you'll do it in a way that will increase universal abundance.

00:43:55.000 And I think those four offerings each speak to the heart of man, you might say.

00:44:00.000 Yeah.

00:44:01.000 So what the story does is it stacks.

00:44:06.000 It's so interesting.

00:44:08.000 It's so interesting.

00:44:09.000 It stacks the developmental instinct, which might be that search for expansive adventure that would take a child away from his home and then turn him into a teenager and then a man that that willingness to venture into the world.

00:44:25.000 It hypothesizes that that's a divine instinct and that its full manifestation will produce the proper social ordering.

00:44:35.000 So it unites the instinct for individual development with the social, the pattern of social interaction that produces permanent abundance.

00:44:44.000 And that seems to me to be right.

00:44:47.000 And so, well, so a national identity in part is going to be a variant of that offering.

00:44:53.000 It's right.

00:44:54.000 You're going to offer something to the community wholeheartedly.

00:44:57.000 And the consequence of that will be there'll be an offering in return.

00:45:02.000 Yeah.

00:45:03.000 So there's just on that, because you've added problem, I think, for the British and the English, if we're going to use biblical terms, is that covenant, you use that.

00:45:11.000 Now, the Israel, the Israelites are going in and out of, if you read through the Old Testament, they're in and out of covenant.

00:45:18.000 They break their covenant of God.

00:45:19.000 Yeah, continually.

00:45:20.000 Even after Moses brings them to the promised land, then you have, I guess you have Joshua, but then the book of Judges, they break their covenant.

00:45:28.000 Yeah.

00:45:29.000 They have false gods and they have this chaos.

00:45:31.000 Yeah, they fragment.

00:45:32.000 They pursue power.

00:45:34.000 They pursue hedonism.

00:45:35.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:36.000 So I think that that's kind of what we're experiencing now.

00:45:39.000 But we can't quite agree what that covenant is.

00:45:42.000 I mean, it's even taboo now to say, suggest we're a Christian country.

00:45:46.000 So even though, you know, our flag is Christian, even though our national anthem starts with the word God.

00:45:52.000 Your king is head of the church.

00:45:53.000 Our king is head of the church.

00:45:54.000 Nominally.

00:45:55.000 That has been tied in with one of the, it's not quite taboo, but it actually was taboo to even say you're a Christian until the last five years or so.

00:46:04.000 When I started the music industry, I was told, whatever you do, don't tell anyone you're Christian, even though I wasn't at the time.

00:46:09.000 And that might have changed, but we are so lost.

00:46:13.000 We have so broken our covenant as a nation with who we were, who founded us, that I guess it's the period of judges.

00:46:21.000 So not only have we, how can we work out what the correct relationship is with the nation where we can't even identify what the nation is?

00:46:29.000 Right, right.

00:46:30.000 Well, we have exactly the same conundrum in Canada.

00:46:32.000 I mean, it's so interesting watching Canada's response to Trump's proclamation that our nation should become the 51st state.

00:46:41.000 Because one of the consequences of that is that the same Justin Trudeau who announced formally that Canada had no national identity, that we were a post-national state, and that we had no unifying history, nothing but a legacy of oppression and racism, is now flying the flag.

00:47:03.000 You know, even though he has stated in no uncertain terms that there is no unifying force behind the Canadian project.

00:47:12.000 But there is no difference between that and the kind of fragmentation that makes you desperate psychologically and unbelievably weak as a nation.

00:47:20.000 Right?

00:47:21.000 Because there is nothing pulling you together.

00:47:23.000 But the fundamental question, obviously, the fundamental question is, well, what is the proper unifying principle?

00:47:29.000 Yes.

00:47:30.000 Right?

00:47:31.000 And so, you said, for example, that we threw out the nation and even intermediary patriarchal structures after World War II because we were afraid of the proclivity of those arrangements to degenerate into, say, fascism or communism.

00:47:45.000 And fair enough, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

00:47:50.000 Right.

00:47:51.000 One of the things that you might ask yourself is, how do you stop national identity from sliding into fascist ethno-nationalism?

00:47:59.000 Yes.

00:48:00.000 And, well, the American solution to that has been one nation under God.

00:48:04.000 Yeah.

00:48:05.000 Or a pluribus unum.

00:48:07.000 Mm-hmm.

00:48:08.000 Of anyone.

00:48:09.000 Right, right.

00:48:10.000 They found it as a multicultural nation where they found a meta-narrative to unite all the subcultures.

00:48:17.000 Right.

00:48:18.000 Europe has a completely different problem.

00:48:19.000 Well, the strange thing is, though, that the Americans only managed that because they were British.

00:48:24.000 Right?

00:48:25.000 I mean, America gave more explicit voice to the principles that English common law, for example, and English identity, for that matter, had already established.

00:48:35.000 The Canadian take on the American War of Independence was always Englishmen fighting for their rights.

00:48:42.000 You know, the Americans think about it really as a revolution in quality, but Canadians think of it as, no, it's a return to the Americans of the rights of the British that they were denied.

00:48:56.000 Mm-hmm.

00:48:57.000 And I think that's more accurate.

00:48:58.000 Now, the thing about Britain that makes it maybe somewhat different than the U.S., or one of the ways, is that that identity that unites the many and that is oriented towards God is more implicit.

00:49:12.000 It's more coded in English common law rather than being part of a bill of rights.

00:49:17.000 It's coded in the manner in which the monarchy evolved across time and in the relationship between the monarchy and parliament.

00:49:24.000 But it's there.

00:49:25.000 But still, the question is what's at its core.

00:49:27.000 And this is where I think we can talk about the union between Christianity and the transcendent reality that puts the nation in its proper place.

00:49:44.000 It shouldn't be the nation uber always.

00:49:46.000 The nation shouldn't be worshipped like God.

00:49:49.000 Yeah.

00:49:50.000 Well, then the question would be what's above the nation?

00:49:52.000 Well, the idea would be God.

00:49:54.000 And then you might ask, well, what's God?

00:49:55.000 Well, the Christian idea is that God is Christ for all intents and purposes.

00:50:01.000 Well, Christ is at minimum, this you could speak psychologically or politically, Christ is at minimum the principle of maximal voluntary self-sacrifice.

00:50:12.000 And that should be the superordinate end.

00:50:16.000 So what that would mean, for example, is that the true king serves the poor, right?

00:50:21.000 Because that would be how power would manifest itself sacrificially.

00:50:26.000 And you see that.

00:50:27.000 That's part of the Christian drama is that the king of kings was in service to the lowest of all.

00:50:36.000 And you see that echoed in the Old Testament stories continually, too, where lowly people, so to speak, are given their due regard as made in the image of God, right?

00:50:50.000 And that seems to me to be an appropriate principle of sovereignty.

00:50:53.000 Like what?

00:50:54.000 I don't know. 0.51

00:50:55.000 You could replace it with the classic vision, like the Roman vision, which would be if I can crush you, then you're weak enough so that I should. 0.59

00:51:04.000 Yeah.

00:51:05.000 Right.

00:51:06.000 That actually makes me moral.

00:51:07.000 The fact of my power is an indication of my morality.

00:51:10.000 And there's a logic in that, right?

00:51:12.000 I mean, that's the attraction of the strong man, right?

00:51:15.000 That might be the attraction of someone like Andrew Tate.

00:51:18.000 If I can't hurt you, why shouldn't I?

00:51:21.000 But, well, then you think, well, we're not going to turn to that principle.

00:51:25.000 Well, what do you have as an alternative?

00:51:27.000 The abdication of any sort of authority or power?

00:51:31.000 And then you get nothing but weakness.

00:51:33.000 The alternative seems to be something like the inversion of power so that the true sovereign serves the most dispossessed.

00:51:41.000 That's certainly core to the Christian ethos.

00:51:44.000 But that's maybe where we've got that.

00:51:46.000 So back to the post-war period.

00:51:48.000 Yeah.

00:51:49.000 It's we can't let the Holocaust happen again. 0.98

00:51:52.000 Obviously, we all agree on that.

00:51:53.000 So then we must prioritize those minorities.

00:51:57.000 We must prioritize those minorities over the majority, which is part of the motivation to kind of kill that common culture that we had, I think. 1.00

00:52:04.000 Which is also why, I don't know if you saw the ordo amoris argument come up between, there's a sort of English, I guess I would say open society ideologue called Rory Stewart against J.D. Vance.

00:52:18.000 And they're arguing about the correct order of love.

00:52:21.000 And the open society types want to prefer the other over the-

00:52:27.000 Yes, yes, I saw that.

00:52:28.000 The conservatives want to prioritize the family.

00:52:31.000 Yeah, the open society types prioritize the periphery over the center.

00:52:36.000 That's a classic postmodern move.

00:52:38.000 Yeah.

00:52:39.000 Yeah, well, I think, yeah, go ahead.

00:52:41.000 If you carry on with that also, I think that you could tie in the environmental stuff.

00:52:44.000 Yes, I agree.

00:52:45.000 And they go all the way that they even prioritize animals and the environments and not just all sentient beings, but all living life and rocks, you know.

00:52:54.000 Yeah.

00:52:55.000 They go so much to the extreme there.

00:52:57.000 And that's where you have the rise of veganism and all this other stuff.

00:53:00.000 Possibly.

00:53:01.000 But no, no, I think that's, I think that, and that is a, I've had extensive discussions with Jonathan Paggio about this problem.

00:53:10.000 And it's the problem of the center versus the periphery.

00:53:13.000 Mm-hmm.

00:53:14.000 Okay, so here's something cool.

00:53:16.000 The original church, the center of the temple is the Holy of Holies, and the priest can only go in there once a year.

00:53:25.000 Once a year.

00:53:26.000 And that's where the ark was held, and the ark had, I think, Aaron's staff in it and some manna, something like that.

00:53:32.000 And there's, and so Aaron's staff would be something like the living staff of tradition.

00:53:37.000 Mm-hmm.

00:53:38.000 Right?

00:53:39.000 The staff that can mutate and transform but maintain its integrity.

00:53:44.000 Mm-hmm.

00:53:45.000 So that's like the living force of tradition.

00:53:46.000 And manna is the descent of the food from heaven that nourishes the soul.

00:53:52.000 It's something like that.

00:53:53.000 So then that's in the sacred box, and that's at the center of the tabernacle.

00:53:59.000 Okay, now, then the center is surrounded by peripheral structures, veils, right?

00:54:06.000 So the Holy of Holies is veiled, and then the veils eventually end, and that's the boundary of the tabernacle.

00:54:12.000 And then you have the periphery, which becomes the community.

00:54:15.000 Mm-hmm.

00:54:16.000 Well, that pattern, that's the pattern of perception itself.

00:54:19.000 Mm-hmm.

00:54:20.000 This is something very interesting to know, because it's germane to the point that you just made,

00:54:23.000 is that every perception has a center and a periphery, and the perception itself is defined by the center.

00:54:31.000 And so, like, the center for the perception of this glass would be the union of function and matter that makes this a drinking vessel.

00:54:40.000 Now, if I crack this and there was a piece taken out of it, it would still be a glass, but now it's kind of a monstrous kind of glass, right?

00:54:48.000 It's lost its ideal integrity.

00:54:51.000 Okay, so if you know that perception has a core, an ideal at the center, that's like Moses' staff,

00:54:59.000 and then it's surrounded by increasingly distal peripheries till it merges, say, with another perception.

00:55:08.000 There's monstrous forms on the outside.

00:55:11.000 That gives you some sense of the proper wording of your priorities.

00:55:14.000 Mm-hmm.

00:55:15.000 The central has to be prioritized over the distal, because otherwise you can't even see.

00:55:19.000 Yes.

00:55:20.000 Okay, so the problem, part of the problem of the open society concept is, you know, you might say,

00:55:27.000 in principle, you should care as much for the stranger, the unknown stranger in a foreign land as you should for your own child.

00:55:35.000 Well, the problem with that, a problem with that is, your finitude makes that impossible.

00:55:42.000 There's no way I can pay attention to three billion children. 0.86

00:55:46.000 Yeah, right.

00:55:47.000 Right?

00:55:48.000 I wouldn't have a second for each of them.

00:55:51.000 Mm-hmm.

00:55:52.000 So there's no way of distributing my attention equally across the infinite landscape of possibility.

00:55:58.000 Mm-hmm.

00:55:59.000 So I have to localize it.

00:56:00.000 Now then the question is, well, how best to localize it without ignoring the periphery?

00:56:05.000 And it seems to me that's something like a circle of responsibility, which is the argument Vance made.

00:56:09.000 It's like, well, I can't take care of all women, but I could take care of my wife. 0.99

00:56:13.000 And I could establish the pattern of taking care in my relationship with her, and that would propagate through my children.

00:56:20.000 It would be example for the community.

00:56:22.000 And I can't take care of all children, but I could take care of mine.

00:56:26.000 And if I can do, take care of my wife, and I can take care of my children, and then maybe I can take care of some other people in my community.

00:56:32.000 You can expand your domain of concern as your expertise grows, but you can't flatten out the bloody hierarchy and say you owe the same amount to everyone.

00:56:44.000 Well, it's actually worse, because they say that you owe the same amount as everyone, but they actually even prioritize the other.

00:56:50.000 So it's not—

00:56:51.000 Right.

00:56:52.000 It's kind of an inversion, which I think goes back to this ick, this post-war ick.

00:56:56.000 I think part of that's—I think that's part of the problem of the Pharisee. 0.63

00:57:02.000 So, it's the Pharisees who crucify Christ, fundamentally. 0.70

00:57:07.000 And they do that because he really insults them, really effectively. 0.86

00:57:11.000 He says to them, they're the religious hypocrites, so you have three categories of enemy. 0.97

00:57:18.000 These are the classic enemies of, what would you say, of the sacrificial ideal. 0.73

00:57:24.000 Yeah.

00:57:26.000 Three enemies. 0.98

00:57:27.000 Religious hypocrites, scribes—those are the academics, by the way—and lawyers, and they're still lawyers. 1.00

00:57:36.000 So the religious hypocrites, they're the virtue signalers. 1.00

00:57:40.000 They're the ones who use God's name in vain, right, by attributing to themselves divine motivation when they're only pursuing their own selfish ends. 0.99

00:57:49.000 Okay, so Christ tells the Pharisees, you put yourself forward as mouthpieces of the prophets, he says.

00:57:57.000 If you would have been around during the time of the prophets, you would have been part of the force that opposed and persecuted them.

00:58:03.000 So, that's a pretty vicious insult.

00:58:05.000 And then he says, the only reason that you portray yourself as ethically virtuous is so that you can have—so that you're recognized in the street and you can have the best seats in the synagogue.

00:58:15.000 And so these are people who are pursuing reputational status, because that would be that second offering to Abraham, right, that your name will become renowned among your peers.

00:58:27.000 They're gaming the reputational system by claiming divine virtue without making any of the sacrifices.

00:58:33.000 The nature worshipers do that.

00:58:35.000 It's like, well, I'm for the planet.

00:58:37.000 Yeah.

00:58:38.000 Well, what does that mean from you?

00:58:40.000 Well, I don't have to offer anything.

00:58:42.000 There's no—I've got no skin in the game.

00:58:45.000 I'm just saying that my transcendent moral orientation trumps any of your concerns.

00:58:50.000 What could be more important than saving the planet?

00:58:53.000 And then I have a pathway to moral virtue that's very straightforward, which is, well, obviously I'm a planetary savior because I prioritize the planet over your children, for example, right?

00:59:04.000 So that proclivity to accrue unearned moral virtue is a cardinal sin.

00:59:10.000 Yeah.

00:59:11.000 And that tendency that you described to prioritize the periphery ties into that perfectly.

00:59:16.000 Yeah.

00:59:17.000 Because I can say, well, look how wonderful I am.

00:59:19.000 And that's what the net zero people do, as far as I'm concerned, on the backs of the poor.

00:59:23.000 Right.

00:59:24.000 It's like, we're concerned about the planet. 0.89

00:59:26.000 And so, obviously, you're a repugnant character if you stand against that.

00:59:30.000 A more extreme version is what Helen Joyce would describe what's happening psychologically to the parents who are letting their children transition.

00:59:37.000 Because how could they possibly admit to what they've done?

00:59:41.000 They've essentially butchered their own children to this ideology.

00:59:45.000 For their own moral self-aggrandizement.

00:59:48.000 Or for prioritizing this other, these vulnerable.

00:59:54.000 Yeah.

00:59:55.000 And so they've sacrificed their own children for those people.

00:59:58.000 Right.

00:59:59.000 But it's worse than that, because they're not actually prioritizing those other people.

01:00:05.000 They're using the claim that they're prioritizing those other people, so that's their tolerance, to ratchet up their moral reputation.

01:00:18.000 You know?

01:00:19.000 And so they're actually sacrificing their own children for the sake of their moral status in their community.

01:00:27.000 Look how tolerant I am.

01:00:29.000 Right.

01:00:30.000 Look how widely embracing the arms of my maternal virtue are.

01:00:35.000 Look what you are.

01:00:36.000 I have the most peculiar child.

01:00:38.000 And yet, I'm such a wonderful person.

01:00:40.000 I still love them.

01:00:41.000 Right?

01:00:42.000 Yeah.

01:00:43.000 And you're right that they'll never admit to that, because if you saw yourself in the mirror and you were that person, you would never recover from that.

01:00:50.000 Yeah.

01:00:51.000 It's so brutal.

01:00:52.000 You said earlier about the damage that psychologists have done.

01:00:55.000 Yeah.

01:00:56.000 And which made me think of, there was an American psychologist in the 50s called Gordon Allport.

01:01:04.000 Allport.

01:01:05.000 Allport.

01:01:06.000 And he had this concept of the sort of hate speech pyramid, where at the bottom you have hurty words, and at the top you have genocide.

01:01:15.000 Mm-hmm.

01:01:16.000 And this is part of the same worldview of the open society ideology, is that we've got to stop the Holocaust happening again. 0.94

01:01:24.000 And this, in terms of damage done by psychologists, I think is the foundation that's led to hate speech and led to hurty words being criminalized in Britain.

01:01:35.000 And I'm not sure if you're following.

01:01:37.000 Oh, yes.

01:01:38.000 The level of not just-

01:01:39.000 Non-crime hate incidents.

01:01:40.000 Non-crime hate incidents.

01:01:41.000 Which has been a quarter million registered since 2014.

01:01:43.000 Mm-hmm.

01:01:44.000 We tried to bring in very similar legislation in Canada with Bill C-63.

01:01:47.000 Oh, of course.

01:01:48.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:01:49.000 Except it's worse, I think.

01:01:50.000 It's on hold for now because Trudeau prorogued Parliament.

01:01:54.000 But Bill C-63, it's part of the Online Harms Act, and it purports to protect children from sexual exploitation.

01:02:03.000 Who could object to that?

01:02:05.000 Exactly.

01:02:06.000 I mean, if you have, like, the top part of the sandwich is protection of children, and the bottom part of the sandwich is protection of children, and the middle is the most authoritarian legislation I've ever seen anywhere.

01:02:17.000 Mm-hmm.

01:02:18.000 It would produce a whole society of informers hell-bent on criminalizing non-hate crime incidents.

01:02:24.000 Yeah.

01:02:25.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:02:26.000 And it is associated.

01:02:27.000 I agree that, you know, there is a sense that you don't want to start the ball rolling in the genocidal direction.

01:02:37.000 And fair enough, but before you intervene, you better make sure you have your causal sequence right and the diagnosis proper.

01:02:45.000 And if your theory is, well, words of criticism lead to genocidal murder, then you should work on your causal reasoning a little bit more.

01:02:56.000 The pathway is by no means that clearly laid out.

01:03:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:03:01.000 So, I mean, now that's coming out where, you know, someone got a non-crime hate incident for hanging soiled jeans in their back garden, or a young girl was booked for calling another girl retarded in school, or saying that another one smelled like fish. 0.72

01:03:19.000 Mm-hmm.

01:03:20.000 It's totally insane.

01:03:21.000 But the other side of that is what Schellenberger calls a censorship industrial complex, which has been turbocharged as a fight against the populist movement, which is a movement, I think, in spirit, against the open society's ideology.

01:03:34.000 I'm banging on the open society's ideology, but I think it's the most helpful way for me to understand the populist movement, which I'm interested in hearing your critique about populism.

01:03:44.000 Well, I think that there are forms of embodied wisdom that are relatively resistant to propositional derangement.

01:03:59.000 If you're smart and you worship your own intelligence, which is highly likely if you're smart, you end up with this Luciferian temptation.

01:04:07.000 Picture this. You open your browsing history, print it out, sign your name at the bottom, and nail it to your front door for all your neighbors to see.

01:04:15.400 While you're at it, why not display it on a billboard along a major highway?

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01:05:23.980 ...to presume that the world should fall at your feet because you happen to be intelligent.

01:05:28.760 I guess that's how God curses people.

01:05:31.280 He blesses with a high IQ.

01:05:33.300 You have this Luciferian temptation.

01:05:35.940 And the Luciferian temptation is to fall in love with your own well-reasoned presumptions.

01:05:41.540 And the intellectual elite are very prone to such things.

01:05:45.680 And so they can derange themselves with the quality of their own thought.

01:05:49.300 But sensible working class people who've put themselves together in the physical world, you might say, 0.97

01:05:57.200 are, they're inured against that, I would say, to some degree, by the harsh realities of their immediate existence.

01:06:05.840 You know, if you're a demented farmer, you're going to be broke and miserable pretty damn quickly. 0.95

01:06:11.500 Now, the problem the working class has is they can't articulate their wisdom worth a damn. 1.00

01:06:17.880 You know, and so lots of people have come up to me and said that listening to me has helped them articulate what they know to be true.

01:06:25.760 Yeah.

01:06:26.020 Which is what an intellectual should do, by the way.

01:06:28.240 I mean, I think that the populist instinct in that regard at the moment is very solid.

01:06:34.580 You saw that in the trucker convoy in Canada, in the farmer protests in Holland in particular, and in Britain.

01:06:41.980 And I'd say in this country, the working classes, the ordinary people, they might not be able to articulate it with words, 1.00

01:06:47.840 but they know what it is to be English.

01:06:49.980 They know what it is to be British.

01:06:51.580 And it's not an ethno thing.

01:06:53.640 It's they understand the culture.

01:06:55.280 They wouldn't be able to articulate it.

01:06:57.920 They know it.

01:06:58.940 They instill it.

01:06:59.620 They have it instinctively.

01:07:01.080 Yeah.

01:07:01.440 Well, and I think that insofar...

01:07:04.480 It's the high IQ, sort of middle class, upper class people who are trying to tear it down with words.

01:07:12.060 Yes.

01:07:12.440 Well, it's a funny thing, too, because those are the people who've benefited maximally from the structure.

01:07:17.200 They want to play both ends against the middle.

01:07:19.180 Yeah.

01:07:19.320 I mean, I saw this with Ivy League students because at Harvard, for example, and at the University of Toronto,

01:07:26.480 when I was talking to left-wing students and they were talking about, say, the oppressive nature of the elite,

01:07:32.080 I thought, you're the elite.

01:07:35.480 Yeah.

01:07:35.920 You might be on the junior end of it, but the fact that you're at Harvard means you're already a member of that club and thoroughly.

01:07:45.040 Well, I think if you earn more than 30 grand a year, I think you're in the top 1% in the world.

01:07:51.200 Right.

01:07:51.600 Well, there's also that.

01:07:52.840 Of course, there's that as well, which puts everyone in the West in that elite position.

01:07:56.720 Well, yes, fair enough.

01:07:58.280 But it's certainly the case for students at high-quality universities.

01:08:01.920 And I thought, well, what's driving their identification with the oppressed?

01:08:07.940 And the answer is, well, part of it's guilt because they've been given a position of privilege, let's say,

01:08:13.620 without necessarily having thoroughly done the work to justify it.

01:08:19.240 But we can leave that aside.

01:08:20.400 There's a much worse motivation, which is that there's never enough for someone who's narcissistic.

01:08:28.000 And so if Harvard opens its doors to you and now you're a member of the elite, you might say, well, you could rejoice at that gift.

01:08:36.700 Or you could say, that's not enough for me.

01:08:39.540 I want all the privileges of the elite and all the moral cachet that goes toward the oppressed.

01:08:46.700 So now I'm an ally of the oppressed.

01:08:48.560 So I get to have all the reputational status of the oppressed and all the advantages of the elite, right?

01:08:55.180 And that's the position that the, increasingly, that the university educated hold in our society.

01:09:00.740 Illustrating the perversion of this open society, Julie, that I've been trying to explore with you.

01:09:06.280 That says it better than any example you could give.

01:09:09.820 Yeah, well, there's always a shadow side to moral proclamations, right?

01:09:14.380 It's like, well, the postmodernists did point that out to some degree.

01:09:18.000 But it's one of the things you really have to ask yourself is who pays the price for your moral proclamations?

01:09:26.060 And if the answer isn't you, then you don't have any right to the proclamation.

01:09:31.160 I mean, one of the things that we're all trying to work through this in ARC, too, you know, because ARC is not a conservative right-wing movement.

01:09:38.220 It's not a political movement.

01:09:39.300 And you can see that partly in our approach to energy policy, which is, well, we'd like energy to be as close to free as possible.

01:09:50.780 Well, you know, insofar as that's commensurate with a free market society, we want to do everything we can to drive energy costs down.

01:09:59.000 Well, why?

01:10:00.160 Well, because energy is wealth for the poor.

01:10:04.200 And that's the simplest way to put it.

01:10:06.200 If energy was cheap enough, there wouldn't be any people who are absolutely poor.

01:10:11.060 There'd still be people who are relatively poor.

01:10:12.900 And so that's not a classic right-wing approach because it's concentrating on the people who are poverty-stricken.

01:10:21.100 But we're trying to come up with answers.

01:10:25.120 Well, it is.

01:10:25.620 I mean, you mean that in the sense that that's not what left-wingers think of right-wingers.

01:10:29.760 Well, the weird thing.

01:10:30.640 Well, the weird.

01:10:31.360 Yeah, sorry.

01:10:31.980 I'd missed my train of thought there.

01:10:33.440 One of the things that struck me to the bone watching the political discourse over the last 15 years is that the radical left would sacrifice the poor to their planet-saving pretensions in a heartbeat.

01:10:51.460 And that's very surprising because you might think that the core of the ethical left is service to the poor.

01:11:00.140 But now you see with net zero energy policy, and I know the conservatives are also guilty of that, is that if push comes to shove, and it's my pretensions to be a planetary savior versus you being able to heat your house when you're 70, it's like we'll see you later.

01:11:19.220 Yeah, it's important to note that the conservatives, particularly in this country, but I think across the West, have been part of that net zero program.

01:11:26.900 I once went on LBC, which is a radio show, and there was an MP from each party, including the Tories, and it was off topic.

01:11:34.680 They suddenly went into net zero, and everyone agreed.

01:11:36.520 Yeah.

01:11:36.800 I was like, what's going on here?

01:11:38.780 I'd say for ARC, there were, the classic left was represented.

01:11:44.680 You had Morris Glassman of the Lord Labour Pier.

01:11:47.900 You had Eric Weinstein, who he'd call himself a progressive.

01:11:50.260 So it's not all the left, which is, I think, something that those who didn't go to ARC might assume it's some right-wing convention.

01:11:57.780 And I actually think that was one of the beautiful things, is there are people who identify the same problems.

01:12:02.340 We might have different solutions to them.

01:12:04.500 And I thought that that was a sort of wonderful thing, that you got right, and maybe there's more room for those people there.

01:12:12.580 But also, in terms of this right-left-wing thing and the way it's coded in low definition, I think one way of understanding ARC was a bit like Hayek's definition.

01:12:23.900 Have you read his essay, Why I'm Not a Conservative?

01:12:26.060 No, no.

01:12:26.780 He has a paradigm where you have the sort of conservative-progressive line, and then you have the liberals, who are kind of like a thermometer, who will align because they're more principled rather than temperament.

01:12:39.860 They'll align with whichever side is less authoritarian or closer to their own principles.

01:12:47.840 So, at the moment, the liberals, and you've said this quite a few times, the classical liberal types, are aligning with the conservatives because it's the progressives and the left who have gone completely authoritarian.

01:12:58.440 And I would lump in the open society ideologues in that bucket.

01:13:02.200 And that seems to me what the new paradigm is, the new dichotomy.

01:13:06.780 Well, we're kind of hoping that.

01:13:09.300 My sense is, I just talked to James Orr about this in his new podcast, that the conservatives, see, it seems to me that the classic liberal project is viable when certain preconditions are met.

01:13:28.160 And I think the conservatives stand for the maintenance of those preconditions.

01:13:31.940 Now, it's complicated because the preconditions for liberalism are probably not well propositionalized.

01:13:39.100 So, you could imagine the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, it's sort of as if they did this.

01:13:47.000 If marriage is the standard and functional families exist and the nation is Christian, then everybody can be an autonomous individual. 0.61

01:13:58.480 And then you can lay out the structure of autonomous individuality and you can engage on the liberal project.

01:14:05.600 But if that understructure falls apart, then that system of classic liberalism can't maintain its integrity because there's nothing that's – like every system depends on some axiomatic presuppositions to maintain its validity.

01:14:20.460 And the conservatives, technically, I think the conservatives stand for the maintenance of those axioms.

01:14:25.900 It's hard for conservatives to propositionalize what they stand for, though, because those axioms usually aren't explicit.

01:14:33.180 It's like the working class identity, British identity. 0.76

01:14:36.800 Yeah, right.

01:14:37.100 Well, what's British? 0.68

01:14:38.300 Well, they know it when they see it, but they can't say it.

01:14:41.940 But it's not surprising because it's very complicated.

01:14:44.300 It's like, well, is the monarchy British?

01:14:48.040 Well, it is in its British form.

01:14:50.240 And what's the British form of monarchy?

01:14:52.320 Well, you could unpack that for a month, right?

01:14:55.540 It's something like, you know, I think the American system lacks this to some degree.

01:15:01.740 It's executive, legislative, judicial, and symbolic.

01:15:05.660 That's the problem with the American system.

01:15:07.300 That's right.

01:15:08.020 The symbolic collapses into the president. 1.00

01:15:10.260 And then why everyone loses their shit with Trump. 0.99

01:15:13.560 It's also why America produces dynasties, right? 0.99

01:15:17.060 Like the Kennedys and the Bushes. 0.79

01:15:18.780 And so, and who knows where that'll go?

01:15:23.040 But the monarchy in the UK has this symbolic quality.

01:15:26.840 It's extremely useful.

01:15:27.780 And it does take a fair bit of weight off the executive branch.

01:15:34.200 Yeah.

01:15:34.380 Because the prime minister isn't the king.

01:15:36.380 Right.

01:15:36.640 And the prime minister himself has to kneel before someone.

01:15:40.560 Right, right.

01:15:41.260 It tempers him.

01:15:42.440 Right.

01:15:42.880 And the king is supposed to be kneeling before God.

01:15:45.480 Quite.

01:15:45.800 And then the question, of course, arises which, well, which God and is God real?

01:15:51.420 Our king has that problem, by the way.

01:15:54.140 Of course he does.

01:15:54.800 Well, his God in some part is Gaia.

01:15:58.180 And that's not a good substitute for someone who runs the Church of England.

01:16:03.120 You know, and it's a degeneration into nature worship.

01:16:06.000 And the nature worshipers say, well, there is no higher deity than the earth.

01:16:09.720 It's like nature worshipers always end up sacrificing children.

01:16:15.060 And you can understand why.

01:16:16.620 You already laid it out earlier in the argument.

01:16:19.120 You said, well, if you prioritize rats, you deprioritize children.

01:16:23.740 Like, that's a zero-sum game.

01:16:26.420 Right.

01:16:26.660 Because it is zero-sum.

01:16:27.540 Of course it is.

01:16:28.840 Relative value is a zero-sum game.

01:16:31.500 You know, and so if it's the planet first, then children aren't first.

01:16:35.280 And, well, you can see the consequences of that.

01:16:37.460 Because we don't have any children.

01:16:39.560 Yeah.

01:16:39.740 So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:16:42.800 So, back to Britain.

01:16:45.980 Let's talk about, well, I'd like to hear your view on the situation in Britain right now.

01:16:51.300 I talked to Kevin Badnock and I talked to Nigel Farage.

01:16:54.480 You guys have a split on the conservative side.

01:16:58.040 Yeah.

01:16:58.200 What do you make of that?

01:16:59.860 And are you, well, let's talk about that more generally.

01:17:04.780 Well, as far as, we had a general election last year.

01:17:08.460 Sir Keir Starmer won with 20% of the electorate.

01:17:11.300 He's not a popular prime minister.

01:17:13.820 And he's only gone down in popularity.

01:17:15.480 He won because the right was split, as you say, between reform.

01:17:20.020 UK and Nigel Farage is just sort of seen as our populist.

01:17:23.240 And I think he would say to some, I think he's even said it on my show, to some extent he's a populist.

01:17:28.600 And Kemi Badnock, who's got this impossible job where half the party have not learned the right lessons from the election.

01:17:37.520 They think they lost because they went too far right.

01:17:41.900 And then they gave seats away to the Dems. 0.95

01:17:44.120 And then the other part of the, well, it seems obvious to me they lost because they lost their votes to reform who was on the right of them.

01:17:50.500 So she's got this very difficult task to take a whole organization, which is itself split.

01:17:58.840 It's not entirely clear to me that she has the authority even within it, because it's CCHQ.

01:18:03.520 And she's got four and a half years to take them to an election where every time she says anything in parliament, 1.00

01:18:12.400 Sir Keir Starmer can say, you had 14 years, why don't you do anything?

01:18:16.060 And likewise, she gets outflanked on her right.

01:18:19.880 So it's kind of a very difficult situation.

01:18:25.260 Reform UK have, I guess, their problems are that they, I mean, they're storming up the polls, which is encouraging for them.

01:18:34.040 Their problem is, can they get together enough people, you know, to get 300 or 400 candidates for the next election?

01:18:39.860 Yeah, and qualified and useful candidates.

01:18:42.000 Qualified, exactly, which is extremely difficult.

01:18:43.720 I mean, actually, technically, the Conservatives have the same problem,

01:18:45.700 because I would say there's very little talent in their ranks in parliament at the moment.

01:18:49.640 So it's not entirely clear to me what will happen.

01:18:54.960 And so anyone who has any predictions, it was so much, it's four years away, the next election.

01:18:59.120 So it's going to be four weeks.

01:19:01.200 So calling what might happen is impossible.

01:19:04.200 Some people say there might have to be some sort of deal.

01:19:06.800 Maybe that's the case.

01:19:07.980 Will Kemi, can she make it to the election? 0.93

01:19:10.420 Well, there'll be some kind of deal, because at least the Conservatives at the moment have the advantage of being able to fight.

01:19:19.820 But, like, the fact, you see, this happened in Canada, right, because Reform UK was named after the Reform Party in Canada.

01:19:27.900 And what happened 30 years ago, something like that, the right split in Canada, there were a variety of reasons for that.

01:19:35.520 Part of it was that the Conservatives were no longer arguably sufficiently libertarian or socially conservative.

01:19:45.300 And so there was a fracture in the ranks, and Preston Manning pulled the Conservatives back to the Conservative side.

01:19:53.120 That took a number of years, and then the Conservatives reunited.

01:19:56.480 But it was a salutary operation, all things considered.

01:20:00.220 And I think now in Canada, we have at least some leaders on the Conservative side who have some spine.

01:20:07.540 And that was a consequence of this war.

01:20:10.120 Now, you can imagine that because Badnock faces Farage as ferocious opposition and vice versa, they could use that opportunity to really hash things out.

01:20:23.400 So Farage is a little more daring at the moment on the net zero side than Badnock.

01:20:28.080 He hasn't come out and said that the whole bloody climate apocalypse narrative is a dehumanizing and parasitical scam, which it is, but he's at least making overtures in that direction.

01:20:47.460 Now, Badnock, when I interviewed her, she pointed out that she was leery about the rampage towards net zero, especially on the economic side, right from the beginning.

01:20:57.640 And more power to her.

01:20:59.300 But the thing is, they can play off each other and see how far they can push the argument and what that does in terms of their popularity.

01:21:08.860 There's an opportunity there, and that would be true with regard to all Conservative policies.

01:21:14.280 Like, maybe within the Conservative Party, first principle arguments couldn't be undertaken, but now they have to be.

01:21:20.640 So, you know, and they're both smart, I think.

01:21:23.520 I was very impressed with Badnock.

01:21:26.440 I mean, she's an engineer, so she thinks like an engineer, which is really systematically and thoroughly.

01:21:32.860 And she's also a lawyer, though she hadn't practiced as a lawyer, was at least trained in law school.

01:21:37.760 So is she smart enough, though? 0.99

01:21:39.320 So, for example, Kamala Harris, some people have really called her as being dumb. 1.00

01:21:43.120 And if you listen to what she said through the election, you'd be like, maybe she's an idiot. 1.00

01:21:46.320 But it might be that she wasn't actually that dumb. 0.99

01:21:50.400 It was that she wasn't bright enough in that she had so many different factions and trying to keep this whole operation going that she was censoring herself from losing the wrong people. 0.94

01:22:01.300 Whether it was the woke side of her party or the more conservative side of her party, she couldn't quite have the dialogue to pull it all together.

01:22:11.420 If Badnock plays this game that you're describing, she risks losing people.

01:22:17.700 She could lose the right wing of her party.

01:22:19.660 They could just go over to reform.

01:22:21.500 The left wing could go over to Lib Demp.

01:22:23.400 It can kind of fall apart.

01:22:25.040 It's almost like, is that the realm for that conversation?

01:22:27.960 Farage has a huge advantage.

01:22:28.960 There's only five MPs that he's got.

01:22:30.880 Right, right.

01:22:31.820 Well, I think the way, so the Democrats in the U.S., there's a reason Harris didn't go on any podcasts.

01:22:38.180 A couple of reasons.

01:22:38.960 The first is that the Democrats are so clueless when it comes to the alternative media that they might as well be living in 1970.

01:22:46.760 We invited, by we I mean a group of major podcasters in the U.S., we've invited Democrats to speak with us.

01:22:56.820 We've offered formal invitations repeatedly for eight years, and we mediated those invitations through one of the Democrats' central political messengers, and they got the invite.

01:23:12.740 And we couldn't find one who would do it, not one.

01:23:17.300 Now, Dean Phillips talked to me after he got slaughtered in his presidential campaign because he got betrayed so badly by his Democrat peers.

01:23:26.340 And I've talked to RFK and Gabbard who are, you know, heretical Democrats. 0.68

01:23:31.740 But the thing about the Democrats that is very much worth understanding is all the people who have a voice left or got killed.

01:23:42.080 But with their anti-pluralist, which, by the way, is they accuse the populists of being anti-pluralist.

01:23:46.780 But if you look at Trump's coalition, it's a pluralist coalition.

01:23:48.640 Yes, it certainly is, yes.

01:23:49.920 And Obama now, anti-pluralism, they can't say anti-populist anymore because that doesn't work.

01:23:54.620 So they're anti-pluralist.

01:23:55.640 But it was the Democrats.

01:23:57.440 I heard your interview of Dean Phillips.

01:23:59.260 Yeah.

01:23:59.500 What he's describing is a totalitarian party.

01:24:01.940 Oh, absolutely.

01:24:03.280 And it's worse than that.

01:24:04.640 It's worse.

01:24:05.320 And maybe this is a reflection of that totalitarian proclivity.

01:24:10.280 The reason Harris didn't go on podcasts, apart from the fact that the Democrats are completely clueless about the alternative media, and, like I said, live in 1970, is that a Democrat won't say anything that hasn't been workshopped.

01:24:24.540 Right.

01:24:24.920 And the reason for that is they don't want to offend anyone. 0.85

01:24:28.280 Well, if you're not going to offend anyone, you're going to say the most anodyne things, which, of course, Harris always sounds like she's talking to retarded kindergarten children. 0.97

01:24:38.240 Yeah. 0.96

01:24:38.580 It's so demeaning.

01:24:39.680 And you might say, well, that's the level at which she's capable of conducting discourse, and that might be true. 0.89

01:24:46.300 But there is this additional element of the absolute inability of the Democrats to say anything that would, say, offend their most sensitive progressive junior staffer.

01:24:57.820 And that's not happening just in the Democrat Party.

01:25:00.340 That's been happening in the progressive movement.

01:25:03.020 Yes, yes, definitely.

01:25:03.960 Definitely all American liberals have this censoring, which, again, fits into my idea that hurty words, they think hurty words end up in genocide. 0.92

01:25:12.600 And I would say that the opposition to that, what's happened in return, is Trump doesn't give a damn.

01:25:18.620 He says whatever he wants.

01:25:19.780 Yes.

01:25:20.080 All of them.

01:25:20.860 And you have a kind of response to the virtue signaling left, is the vice signaling right, where, you know, what's the most popular comedy show in the world?

01:25:29.140 It's Kill Tony now.

01:25:30.220 Right, right, right. 0.99

01:25:30.680 Where they find the meekest, these literally disabled people, and they will humiliate them on stage. 1.00

01:25:37.760 And everyone's going to have equal opportunities, humiliation, but it's very much a total antithesis of that that's happened at the cultural level.

01:25:47.060 Yeah, yeah.

01:25:47.960 Well, you've seen firsthand that proclivity for cowardly virtue signaling in the entertainment industry.

01:25:57.080 Yeah, absolutely.

01:25:57.440 Thank you.

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01:27:01.360 It's amazing to watch this in the theater community and in the motion picture community in the U.S.

01:27:11.920 This is starting to fragment.

01:27:13.340 I mean, Hollywood is in catastrophically dire straits.

01:27:17.000 The projections are now that 50% of live theaters will close in the U.S. in the next three or four years.

01:27:23.820 And part of the reason for that is that who the hell wants to go watch a modern movie?

01:27:30.860 They're dull beyond comprehension.

01:27:32.980 Now, there are some bright spots.

01:27:35.240 Sheridan, is that his name?

01:27:37.140 Tyler Sheridan, who did Landman and Yellowstone.

01:27:41.580 And Top Gun went through the roof because there's no ideology.

01:27:44.660 Well, Tom Cruise is not woke in the least, and he's about the only star left who can pull his weight at the box office.

01:27:51.980 But there are, like I can see, there's been a number of, I've made contact with a number of Hollywood stars who are still private in their interest in what I'm doing.

01:28:03.520 Love what you're doing.

01:28:04.360 Yeah, but there's enough of them now so that I can see that that's going to change dramatically.

01:28:09.800 And so I don't know what that'll mean for a Democratic reformulation.

01:28:15.220 I've been talking to a friend of mine, the same guy who does the messaging for the Democrats.

01:28:19.940 And he's, I told him after the election that if he could go and find some Democrats that he thought had some leadership potential,

01:28:27.760 that this podcast circuit that the people I've been in communication with, we'd be happy to talk to them.

01:28:34.460 Because all of us are, what would you say, sophisticated enough to understand that it would be real useful for the Trump team to have some opposition that wasn't insane.

01:28:46.960 But my friend's response to that after a couple of months was that he couldn't find a single Democrat he thought had the chops or the moral force to manage a podcast interview.

01:29:00.600 They're all so concerned with the soundbite and not offending anyone that it would just be a disaster.

01:29:07.420 Yeah, exactly.

01:29:07.840 Podcasts brutally punish people who won't speak freely.

01:29:10.520 Exactly.

01:29:10.980 Right.

01:29:11.260 You just, the comment section will just, it's like being flayed.

01:29:15.280 Yeah.

01:29:15.760 And it's clear Harris couldn't manage that and didn't even know that she should.

01:29:19.880 Bless.

01:29:20.500 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:29:21.800 It would have been a very interesting thing to see.

01:29:24.020 But I don't know, how do you feel about what's going on in the entertainment industry?

01:29:28.880 Like you, I have a lot of messages from people that I probably would never have spoken to because they're so famous who will privately say, you know, I read that book by Andy.

01:29:37.340 No, what's the problem?

01:29:38.440 Right.

01:29:38.720 I also think that it might be the case that you're right, that there's a critical mass now that the culture can shift.

01:29:49.120 But what I also see is that there's a double, it might be that the opposition are doubling down and they realize that they're losing.

01:29:57.400 So, for example, you had Oliver Antony at Ark.

01:29:59.920 Yeah.

01:30:00.360 Now, when he blew up onto the storm in 2023 with his amazing song, Rich Man, North of Richmond, if you look at the attacks he got, it was all ad hominem.

01:30:11.000 This guy should have been, he was the counterculture.

01:30:14.320 He was.

01:30:14.640 Yes, yes.

01:30:15.340 He should, he was a hero.

01:30:16.520 He was a working class, Ross Belt. 0.99

01:30:19.380 He should have been the hero.

01:30:20.920 Well, like J.D. Vance, really.

01:30:22.900 Like J.D. Vance.

01:30:23.460 He was the musical version of J.D. Vance.

01:30:25.540 Yeah.

01:30:26.220 And you'd think that this was, you know, they always virtually singling and say it's all about the working people.

01:30:32.260 Yeah.

01:30:32.800 Here was your hero on a plate.

01:30:34.600 They didn't just ignore him.

01:30:36.300 They wrote all these hit pieces like right-wing influencers have found their new hero.

01:30:42.240 Yeah.

01:30:42.720 This happened in the film industry as well with the Sound of Freedom film.

01:30:46.020 And I know you interviewed Tim Ballard, the subject of the film.

01:30:48.860 Now, the attacks from the media were just utterly shocking.

01:30:55.580 Here was a film exposing child sexual exploitation.

01:30:59.520 Here was a film exposing the most evil thing, really, that you could imagine.

01:31:04.880 It might be the most evil thing going on in America.

01:31:07.800 It's a hard competition.

01:31:08.860 A hard competition.

01:31:09.400 And their response was to slander Ballard with all these accusations, call it conspiratorial, say it's a 4chan film.

01:31:20.380 They just did everything they can to take it down.

01:31:23.440 And even it made a fortune.

01:31:25.700 It actually slayed at the box office.

01:31:28.080 You thought it's, they're not even money.

01:31:30.120 I know.

01:31:30.820 I know.

01:31:31.340 I know.

01:31:31.880 They're not even motivated by their own self-interest.

01:31:34.560 Yeah.

01:31:34.860 Yeah, that's a dangerous person, you know.

01:31:36.820 Yeah, exactly.

01:31:37.420 So what you're seeing with those attacks is that they're not no longer ignoring, they're attacking because that's maybe the last gasps of this era, of this period.

01:31:48.320 Where there'll be, I hope anyway, I pray, that we'll break on through and get to the other side where it's like you can talk normally again.

01:31:55.480 I think we're probably there in certain, like I mentioned, Kill Tony or, you know, the podcast circuit.

01:32:00.480 People don't care anymore.

01:32:01.400 And people watch those in droves.

01:32:03.200 But these last industries, I mean, theatre's supposedly the worst of the lot.

01:32:07.980 So we'll see what happens there.

01:32:09.440 But I see it maybe moving in that direction.

01:32:11.740 Maybe.

01:32:12.460 I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side is we'll talk about the shifting communication landscape in the UK and Europe.

01:32:20.560 Because it looks to me, in the United States, the new media forms are now dominant.

01:32:29.400 Not here.

01:32:30.160 No, I know.

01:32:30.820 That's what I want to talk about.

01:32:31.780 The biggest podcasts in this country are all mainstream media.

01:32:35.960 They're all, it's all, or rather the mainstream media ideology.

01:32:39.760 And we can talk about that.

01:32:40.900 Yeah, let's talk about that.

01:32:42.260 Let's talk about that.

01:32:43.420 And we can talk about how Trump observed that and catalyzed it as well, or at least put the finishing touches on it.

01:32:50.160 And I'd like to talk to you more about the UK and about France and Germany, about Europe in general, and what you think the implications are of the emergence of this mega populism in the US.

01:33:03.620 We can talk a little bit more about populism, too, because we didn't get a chance to flesh out the advantages of a populist political movement and the disadvantages.

01:33:12.100 And so we'll turn to that.

01:33:13.360 So for everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:33:18.500 We'll continue for another half an hour there.

01:33:21.000 And apart from that, well, any summing words for, any words to sum up your observations in relationship to ARC, let's say?

01:33:32.480 Because that's sort of the issue of the moment on the political front, as far as I'm concerned.

01:33:38.860 Any closing thoughts about what happened there?

01:33:44.760 Apart from saying it was phenomenal, I mean, it feels like the Overton-Widger window was edged on a few topics.

01:33:53.500 Yeah.

01:33:53.740 Whether it was net zero or talking about our culture, as we've described a little bit in this conversation.

01:34:01.920 And I think that's something that people like Douglas Murray are so good.

01:34:04.720 It's like articulating what's in the zeitgeist but not yet been said.

01:34:09.020 And so listeners should go to the ARC YouTube and watch all this.

01:34:12.220 Yeah, well, I think one of the things we're doing, the conservatives in Canada have told me that, and some of them in the US as well,

01:34:20.840 have told me that the role I've played culturally for them is to establish a beachhead in relationship to difficult topics.

01:34:30.640 So I can criticize climate apocalypse mongering, for example, and go substantially farther in that criticism than they would be willing to go.

01:34:42.200 But by moving the beachhead 200 yards up the beach, let's say, they can come up 50 yards, and that's fine.

01:34:51.540 And I think ARC, I think that's actually the role of ARC, is to push the envelope and to do that intelligently and carefully and positively.

01:35:01.740 And in the right direction, because the envelope's getting pushed in another direction.

01:35:05.620 So I hinted at this earlier in the conversation.

01:35:07.800 But one response to the open society, those who observe the open society ideology, is that they say,

01:35:16.340 oh, look, all of the philosophers behind them are Jews. 0.89

01:35:19.780 Yeah, right.

01:35:20.260 And they go, oh, George Soros, open society, Jew, he's the one doing it. 0.73

01:35:24.200 So then you have this new emergent anti-Semitism, I see it coming on the right, because they're taking the wrong lessons from what's going on.

01:35:32.280 Even though they might have observed correctly about the open society ideology, that they're making the wrong decisions there, I think.

01:35:40.220 Yes, well, the opposite of one falsehood can be another falsehood.

01:35:42.780 Exactly.

01:35:43.220 Right, well, you see the same thing with regards on the masculinity side, with regards to the attraction of people like Andrew Tate.

01:35:51.160 Quite.

01:35:51.300 Right, and you can understand why he's an attractive figure, because he's at least not a cringing milksop. 0.99

01:35:57.960 Right.

01:35:58.400 But that's damning with faint praise, you might say.

01:36:02.760 Right.

01:36:03.580 And when it comes to Andrew Tate, you've done a great job in your work in identifying the positive masculinity, lest it be hijacked by those types.

01:36:12.140 Which certainly will be.

01:36:13.480 And that, I think, is the responsibility arc, is to identify the positive things we have to articulate, lest it be hijacked by those more nefarious actors.

01:36:23.120 Yes, which is inevitable.

01:36:24.500 That's another thing we could talk about, too.

01:36:26.280 I'd like to talk with you about the dynamic between the cluster B psychopaths and the political, because that can happen on the left and the right.

01:36:35.080 Oh, yeah.

01:36:35.180 Okay, so we'll leave that.

01:36:35.760 Oh, definitely seen that on the right.

01:36:37.000 Yes, yes, definitely.

01:36:38.500 So we'll leave that for the Daily Wire side.

01:36:40.300 Thank you very much for talking to me today, and to all of you who are watching and listening on the YouTube side, your time and attention is much appreciated.

01:36:48.060 And to the film crew here in, well, we're in Cambridge, as I've got a speaking engagement here later.

01:36:54.280 And so thank you for the opportunity on that front.

01:36:58.300 And, well, we'll talk to you another half an hour on the Daily Wire side.

01:37:02.280 Thanks, everybody, for your time and attention.

01:37:04.180 Thank you.

01:37:11.960 Bye.

01:37:16.300 Bye.

01:37:16.620 Bye.

01:37:16.940 Bye.

01:37:17.840 Bye.

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01:37:18.680 Bye.

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01:37:19.360 Bye.

01:37:20.000 Bye.

01:37:20.840 Bye.

01:37:22.040 Bye.

01:37:22.600 Bye.

01:37:22.700 Bye.

01:37:23.580 Bye.

01:37:24.260 Bye.

01:37:24.440 Bye.

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01:37:32.780 Bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 03, 2025

535. Is It Too Late for the UK？ A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall

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