In this episode, Douglas Murray joins me to discuss his new book, The Madness of Crowds, and how you can make smart moves in your own life to solve the problems we re all facing right now. He s also the author of the best-selling book, "Madwells" and "Woke."
00:48:12.940We can think of examples in our own lives and careers.
00:48:15.380And there are many cases from the past, you know.
00:48:19.940And there were serious cases where this same truth held.
00:48:25.480The French kings were pretty incompetent.
00:48:29.940But once the post-revolutionary famines occurred, the French peoples learned that,
00:48:36.700that there were new levels of incompetence that they had never dreamt of.
00:48:41.920You know, the Shah of Iran had quite a lot of people in prison who were political opponents.
00:48:48.040Some thousands of people were in prison who were political opponents of his.
00:48:52.100And many people thought it just couldn't be worse until they met the Ayatollah in person.
00:48:58.500And they realized that a few thousand people being in a prison system was nothing compared to a system which decided to just shoot people on sight and hang them arbitrarily in the street for reported offenses against the new regime.
00:49:14.400I mean, these may sound like extreme examples, but they're not.
00:49:20.940When you say this thing is intolerable and the whole damn thing has to be pulled down, you are inviting people to join you in relearning a lesson that people in history have had to learn again and again.
00:49:35.400And I simply suggest, as a small c conservative, that people are better at understanding the risks of very, very violent and sudden change.
00:49:46.400That they step back from that impulse, that they weigh up the pros and cons of this, that they don't say, I mean, also, by the way, when you say what should one say to a person who says these things, I think this is what the adults say.
00:50:11.340You know, I mean, I'm not denying for a moment that the history of American slavery was bad, but who exactly was the past Rosie for?
00:50:23.980I mean, you could point to me, but I mean, I happen to be white.
00:50:27.760I happen to have been born in the UK in the late 20th century.
00:50:31.240I'm among the luckiest generation in history.
00:50:34.860It would be possible for somebody like some of the people you just played that recording of, screaming, you know, you don't have my experiences because my ancestors suffered.
00:50:48.860It could be perfectly possible for everyone to play that game.
00:50:52.200Brett Weinstein, by the way, whose family happened to be Jewish, he never makes anything of this.
00:50:56.920I bet the Weinsteins in history didn't have an entirely rosy time.
00:51:00.560I'd have to work out exactly what, I know a little bit of their family history, but I would have thought that whenever they fled what's now Eastern Europe, they didn't do it in optimal circumstances.
00:51:16.400I bet they met some pogroms on the way.
00:51:20.000I bet they dodged Auschwitz only just.
00:51:31.980I could say, you know, not a damn thing about me, my privilege or my past.
00:51:35.800And you certainly don't know about my ancestors' past.
00:51:39.180The past wasn't rosy for my ancestors either.
00:51:42.900Most of my family spent their time eking out a living on a remote Scottish island where they stayed for centuries, never warm, never well fed.
00:51:52.660And in the 20th century alone, my grandmother had to see her father die in the First World War when he went off to a foreign country he'd never been to before, and then lose her brother in the next war a few years later.
00:52:08.800Do I or anyone else deserve to be talked to as if we are from some elite, lucky class, and there are some lucky, excellent, beneficiary, hereditary people who can win the Oppression Olympics and then talk down to the rest of us?
01:07:06.300And by the way, part of that is because in America, there is a presumption, which is wrong, I think, that empathy is an unadulteratedly good thing.
01:07:17.400In fact, empathy is not an unadulteratedly good thing.
01:07:22.820Empathy has all sorts of problems associated with it.
01:07:25.780It's not like I mean, you often hear this.
01:08:00.640And in other words, the empathetic view, the view that empathy alone will get you out of problems is wrong in cases we all know in our lives.
01:08:12.400If we have only empathy, we will make a lot of bad and wrong decisions.
01:08:18.440Paul Bloom of Harvard or Yale, I can't remember which, wrote a book about this a few years ago called Against Empathy, precisely trying to balance out the overdoing of the empathy significance in American life.
01:08:32.840But empathy being a trait, which, as it happens correctly, women are more associated with men, is seen as being.
01:08:41.760I mean, it is an incredibly important instinct, obviously, but it's only an important instinct if it's counted and balanced by other instincts, too.
01:08:53.160And if you decide that empathy must rule, I mean, we have this in the teaching of history, obviously, trying to understand how people in the past felt.
01:09:03.360Well, that is an important thing, but it's not that much use if you don't know whether the French Revolution came after or before the Russian Revolution.
01:09:12.920You know, it's not that useful if you don't know the most basic dates.
01:09:18.200And I bet that if I have actually tried it on occasions and campuses and educational institutions in America and in Britain, if you are speaking to somebody who believes that they are just drowning in empathetic capability, if you ask them a very basic question, you know, what's the capital of Saudi Arabia?
01:09:40.280And they can't answer, you know, the adult should say, you know, before you believe that you can solve the world by your magnificent, healing, empathetic capability, find out something about the world.
01:09:56.400Find out something, you know, and this is, of course, a particular I'm not American myself, you know, but it's a particular problem in America and has been for a long time.
01:10:04.920The idea that, I mean, I'm not being snotty about this, I hope, and I'm not being anti-American about it, but when you travel a lot, as I've done in my career, you learn an awful lot about everywhere you go, even the places where nothing seems to be happening.
01:10:25.440You discover stuff about everything, you discover stuff about everything, you discover stuff about it, and you are cautious about making judgments about other people and places without knowing an awful lot, you know, and there's a humility about that which we should encourage.
01:10:41.140And unfortunately, I think because of a lack of travel, a lack of a certain amount of curiosity, and certainly a paucity of decent education in the United States, there are just an awful lot of people who think they've got the whole thing sussed out, who just don't know very basic things about the rest of the world.
01:11:00.460No, we're not allowed to learn them anymore.
01:11:01.880And they're not allowed to learn them.
01:11:03.560Yeah, I mean, I was telling this story not long ago, but there was a person at Smith College who got, they complained about her because her syllabus had, it wasn't just that it had some white men, white male authors on the list, it was that there were any.
01:11:20.580So you can't offer historical books if written by white men, which is really tough when you look at who's been in charge of writing for the past couple hundred years, or you're, you know, you're going to get in trouble at the university.
01:11:55.100Well, you know, the other, the other thing it cancels out is enthusiasm, because I'm, I'm, I'm sure like me, when you were going through school and education, what were the greatest moments?
01:12:12.360The greatest moments, certainly for me, were when you read something and you, it felt like, it didn't matter who the author was, just a great author felt like a hand was reaching across centuries and greeting you and saying, I remember this, I was there too.
01:12:32.220And you have that feeling, for instance, what, what's the most thrilling feeling as a reader?
01:12:39.260It's, it's reading something and thinking, I didn't know anyone else had ever thought that.
01:12:44.480I didn't know anyone else had ever felt that.
01:12:47.400How amazing that this person who lived long before my time felt like this too.
01:12:53.340And I've had that from read, from reading writers of so many different backgrounds, nationalities, and much more.
01:13:03.600And it's just the greatest thrill as a reader you've encountered.
01:13:06.640It's one of the great human, human thrills.
01:13:08.580You will minimize the opportunity of having that joy if you decide that discovering great things is of secondary importance to discovering exactly, correctly diverse things.
01:13:25.920Because in my view, at any rate, the canon, for instance, which is now such a disliked term, the canon is quite good at ameliorating difference.
01:13:38.380And we can always work at making it more so, you know, allowing people into it, as it were, teaching people who have made the grade, as it were.
01:13:49.660But you don't need to, as I always try to point out this, you don't need to do this along the categorization lines that our age is pushing.
01:13:59.820You know, there are gay writers who have made it into the canon on their own merits.
01:15:01.980James Baldwin belongs to everyone now.
01:15:04.220So, but I think the problem, there's so many layers to it.
01:15:09.340Yes, I do think empathy can be exploited and too much of it, even on one's own, can be problematic.
01:15:15.480I also think, as you point out in the book, there is, there's too much of a weird courage happening by some people, some people like Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates, to exploit people who are in a vulnerable position.
01:15:34.880You know, Robin DiAngelo, her, her book, their books are about shaming.
01:15:39.020And I know you, you have an example of Kevin Williamson of National Review.
01:16:08.580And, and by the way, one of the things that is interesting in this is, is the power dynamic that existed there and exists, I think, an awful lot.
01:16:20.300It's, it's, it's so common, but people don't call it out.
01:16:24.100The person in the position of power there was Ta-Nehisi Coates, not Kevin Williamson.
01:16:28.640But it was presented as if the power ran the other way around.
01:16:34.420Can I give an example of something when I felt this in my own life?
01:16:37.640A couple of years ago, I did a, a company in Australia asked me to come and do a tour of Australia and New Zealand.
01:16:43.640And, and, uh, they wanted it to be a kind of best of enemies tour.
01:16:48.400Um, you know, they're referring to the documentary about Corvidal and William F. Buckley and their famous, um, uh, contretemps around the time of the 1968 Democrat Republican conventions.
01:16:58.640Um, uh, I said to the organizer, I said, that's not going to work.
01:17:03.280Well, because if, if you find somebody who's an opposite of mine politically, and we start touring around Australia and New Zealand for six or eight nights, we're going to hate each other on night one.
01:17:13.940And we're not going to be speaking on night two.
01:17:16.080And by night three, it's going to be really horrible.
01:17:18.520And so I said, how about we do something different?
01:17:22.860You get somebody who I respect and who hopefully might respect me, who has a deep, we have deep political differences and let's see how we can talk and agree and disagree amiably.
01:17:38.260They actually, they came back and, uh, got, um, the agreement of, uh, Dr. Cornel West of Harvard.
01:17:43.760And, uh, you know, Cornel West is a, by his own descriptions of revolutionary socialist.
01:17:51.740Um, and I am not, uh, I was going to say, yeah, exactly.
01:17:57.060And, uh, uh, we, we, we, we did, uh, um, I think six, six events together.
01:18:03.100And it was for me, I think for him as well, it was just one.
01:18:07.040And the reason it was wonderful was because we had both, first of all, we'd both drunk from the same well throughout our lives.
01:18:14.760We had common, uh, cultural references, philosophical references, literary references.
01:18:21.380And there were also different wells he had drunk from, which I had come, which I learned from speaking with him to respect more.
01:18:28.480I mean, he went off on a magnificent riff.
01:18:30.380It happened that Aretha Franklin died one night whilst we were on this tour.
01:18:33.240And he went off on the most magnificent riff about Aretha Franklin.
01:18:36.940And I, you know, and it was just such a gift to be there as he was speaking like that about such an artist.
01:18:46.040So I learned from him about a whole range of things.
01:18:49.360But here's, here's the key thing is that one of the things I was aware of throughout was that for some people in the audiences, they would interpret it as being me in the position of power.
01:19:02.640And Dr. Cornell West of Harvard as being in some kind of unpowerful position.
01:19:09.300What I was conscious about throughout was that exactly the opposite was the case.
01:19:59.980And I knew that this was going on in the Kevin Williamson, Ta-Nehisi Coates situation.
01:20:04.620And I know it's one of the causes of the asymmetry of our time, which is that the pretense has been going on for a while.
01:20:12.100That, for instance, the white male is always and everywhere in the position of power.
01:20:17.280And in fact, not all the time, but certainly in the most public arenas, the opposite is the truth.
01:20:26.440Because particularly the white male can at any moment be almost completely taken out by another person making an accusation of racism.
01:20:37.820And here, by the way, is the secondary problem from that.
01:20:41.940My late philosopher friend Roger Scruton and I often used to talk about this.
01:20:46.520There is something very curious in our age about the fact that the most damaging claims are unprovable and impossible to be defended against.
01:20:56.240If you said to somebody, you are a racist, they actually, people say, well, if you're not, you should sue.
01:22:30.100Otherwise, for the foreseeable future in American public life in particular, there are going to be people who notice that a very powerful weapon appears to be hanging around, fully loaded.
01:22:44.240And there is no charge for firing it, and there is no charge for firing it insincerely.
01:22:51.840In fact, you can profit by firing it insincerely.
01:22:59.000If you go around firing that insincerely, you will get better off.
01:23:08.720Now, you and I might hope that the world is packed with sincere and honest people who would resist the temptation to go and pick up that loaded revolver.
01:23:17.280But, you know, I hate to say it, but the history of human beings suggests that there might be some dishonest people in our time.
01:23:25.040There might be some people who are willing to advance dishonestly.
01:24:16.640And I've been thinking a lot about you and what you wrote on this because I, and I say on my podcast all the time, Douglas Murray has the answer.
01:24:24.940Douglas Murray has figured out the way forward.
01:24:27.600And I, and I speak of, you know, the, the way you say people should handle when they get unfairly accused or when they try to get, somebody tries to shove, quote unquote, anti-racism down their throats, which is actually racism.
01:24:57.560I love the way you talk about it and I'm inspired by it.
01:25:00.680I do think it's the answer, but then, okay, but then let's put it to practical application.
01:25:05.880I think back to my own situation at NBC when I had said, you know, people used to wear blackface and it wasn't really a thing.
01:25:12.540You know, it's like, it wasn't a big deal.
01:25:15.140And, uh, talking about this woman who was trying to dress like Diana Ross on the Real Housewives, I said, you know, what, what she's trying to do there is honor somebody.
01:25:24.080So how did we get to the point where this wasn't a thing to the point where now she's in hot water?
01:26:25.080And I deeply apologize if I did, or to those who, who, who were.
01:26:30.480And now I think the biggest lesson I've learned since, since that day is that the vast majority of the people attacking me were not in good faith.
01:26:41.680They weren't, they wanted to punish me for all sorts of different reasons.
01:26:47.240And it's not that I want the day back and the apology back, but it's hard in the moment, right?
01:26:54.640It's near impossible in the moment, especially if you don't have a sympathetic boss, right?
01:26:59.000Somebody who's going to back you to, to turn around and say, you know, if I, if I could have done it over, would I have gone out the next day?
01:27:07.280And I've said, let me prove to you that what I said is factually true.
01:27:11.960Let me show you the examples and why I said it.
01:27:14.600And can't we have a discussion about the point I was trying to make about this woman in modern day America who is trying to honor someone?
01:27:26.620I tried a bit, but anyway, that I wish I could have been more forceful and I wish I could have explained myself, but people weren't open to it.
01:27:36.720And because there wasn't good faith and I see that and I see that on Evergreen and I see that at Yale when they're screaming at the professor.
01:27:45.240And I, I just, I don't know if we can, if we just need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that these attacks, racist, sexist, what have you, are usually in good faith.
01:27:57.540If I can say that the problem for getting out of it is, I think, among other things, the problem that we have for getting out of this situation, you can correctly identify is, the obvious thing to say is, look, these accusations are hurled around so much and so insincerely that they've basically lost their power.
01:28:22.720The reason why that's a dangerous thing to do would be that it would allow for the bad people, the nasty things lingering in the woodsheds of all our societies, to get a free pass.
01:28:38.420That's, that's the fear I think a lot of us, if we're honest about it, legitimately have.
01:28:42.780I would love to be able to just say, you know, the term racist doesn't mean anything anymore.
01:28:48.680The problem is, I know that there will be some people who will benefit from that, who I wouldn't want to benefit from it.
01:28:55.120It's the same with if, you know, the temptation to say, there's no sexism, what are you talking about?
01:29:02.300There are nobody in our society is sexist, there are nobody in our society is homophobic, shut up and go away.
01:29:08.880But I know that there are some people, not a large number, but a certain number of people who will benefit in an unpleasant way from that.
01:29:15.720And simultaneously, we cannot all be held hostage by the fear of those people.
01:29:22.720So, what I try to urge people to do is just in general, to try to hear other people's speech in the way they would like their own speech to be heard.
01:29:37.060Which is not waiting, waiting tensed to spring, having found the erroneous word.
01:29:49.920But listening in a spirit of generosity and interpreting people's words in a spirit of generosity.
01:29:57.440Now, of course, this is really hard in the situation, as we started off with, where, among other things, people want their political opposites to suffer.
01:30:09.100And I know, because, I mean, I've never had a case as serious and high profile as the one that you've just had, but you had and that you've just described.
01:30:19.260But I've had a little bit of it, of knowing, for instance, that I am speaking in front of an audience that wants me to fail.
01:30:27.800That wants me to slip up, that wants to catch me out, using some term, you know, term, and as you just described, in that situation, if, among other things, if you have co-workers who want you to fail.
01:30:47.760Let alone, if you have co-workers who want you to fail, then you just, it's a horrible position to live in.
01:30:57.080Because instead of regarding the world and words and ideas as this just wonderful opportunity to communicate and to swap ideas and to solve things.
01:31:49.260I mean, what if we actually had, in American society, a serious attempt to address serious problems, like homelessness, which, by the way, as a visitor to America is just such a visible and awful problem in your major cities.
01:32:03.460What if we had a serious attempt from left and right to address the really lingering question that's coming along, which is why it's so difficult for young people in an age with inflation, in the way it's been for such a long time, to accumulate capital and to begin their lives in a way that their parents began their lives.
01:32:30.160What if we had an opportunity from left and right, from all positions, to try to address these questions and come to some solutions?
01:32:39.420We just, we don't, and America doesn't have that.
01:32:41.940America has lost that capability because nobody trusts the other side because they think they're going to do something funny.
01:32:50.920And here's, here's the really nasty, bad thing that causes that.
01:32:55.760The really nasty, bad thing that causes that is that the left in America no longer trusts the right, that the right isn't going to reopen Auschwitz.
01:33:06.460And the right doesn't trust the left not to start communism.
01:33:14.440I would have thought it should be possible in a country of the size of America and with the gifts that America has to do better than that.
01:33:24.100To have enough people who neither want the gulag nor the concentration camp, which I would have said was 99 point something percent of the American population.
01:33:36.460To incarnate what a serious attempt to address serious challenges affecting the Republic actually looks like.
01:34:02.580That's it because conversation is being shut down and it's the, it's the tool we need most right now.
01:34:09.760And out of, because of fear, uh, people are silent.
01:34:15.280You know, you've written about the silent majority and, you know, I know you say they need to be silent no more, that they're, they're, they are a majority.
01:35:49.660And I, I also, I, I, I, um, I'm humble about this situation because like you, I'm in an unusual situation in that I, I, I'm, I'm not answerable to a boss.
01:36:03.580I'm not answerable to my editors and the papers I write for.
01:36:06.400Um, but, uh, my books and elsewhere and say what, what I like.
01:36:10.460And, um, I, I love that opportunity, but it's not common.
01:36:15.640Uh, most people, uh, you know, they, they have, um, loved ones, they have dependents, they might have a mortgage, um, if they're lucky and, or rent to pay.
01:36:27.400And I don't say just go out and like be brave and, uh, risk everything because that, that's a heck of a lot to ask of anyone.
01:36:37.880And the, the truth is, I think that there's only a couple of options.
01:36:42.660I think some unusual people will become, um, um, like flare lights, um, it won't necessarily happen by design like with Brett Weinstein.
01:36:55.720I mean, it, it, it, it wasn't by design that we all know who he is now.
01:37:00.100It was an accident because the thing just came at him and he couldn't budge.
01:37:05.480Uh, he wouldn't bend, he wouldn't, wouldn't genuflect in front of it.
01:37:11.540And, and so unusual people like that will be thrown up by the era, but not everyone can or will do that.
01:37:20.920Um, what I would urge such people to do is simply in whatever way they can, in whatever small ways they can, without jeopardizing everything in their lives, um, to make small steps towards truth.
01:37:36.780Um, you know, Václav Havel's wonderful phrase, you know, live in, try to live in truth, um, is, is, is just so important.
01:37:47.900It's, it's, it's the great, the great insight of philosophers across the ages has been the significance of trying to live in truth.
01:37:58.440You know, Solzhenitsyn energy is the same thing.
01:38:01.260And, and if, if, if you, it's not, it's not just by the way, because truth is an abstract good in itself.
01:38:08.280Although I do believe that to be the case, it is that you will feel a freer and better person as a result of it.
01:38:17.900Um, because as I think I said in Joe Rogan, it's very demoralizing to live your life with lies.
01:38:22.580And I think the demoralization is a part of the whole thing.
01:38:26.200The truth is that we are all capable in our personal and professional lives of doing extraordinary things.
01:38:37.580Nobody does all the time, but sometimes.
01:38:40.040And some people's extraordinary things will be an extraordinary encounter with another person, a discussion they didn't think they could ever have, airing a thought they didn't think they could air.
01:38:51.760And trying to see through the fog of lies around them, the fog of half truths and untruths that they're urged to say, seeing their way through that and feeling their way to the other side.
01:39:07.180And as I say, for most people, that will not include some extraordinary sort of running through the hail of bullets, um, act of bravery.
01:39:18.700For most people, it will just be conversations they will have with co-workers carefully, but honestly, and feeling your way in the circumstances you're in.
01:39:30.580Having that conversation with people you know, um, your, your loved ones is obviously a very good place to start.
01:39:38.740The opposite is, um, is, is we will, particularly in America, we will be caught in an, a retributive cycle.
01:39:47.720I was speaking to a Russian friend the other day, um, who pointed out that apparently there was a child who, in America, who, who reported their parents for having been at the Capitol protests.
01:39:59.600I hadn't, I hadn't, I hadn't seen this, that reported their own parents.
01:40:04.820And of course, his Russian friend said, well, well, this is what we were taught in the Soviet Union.
01:40:10.220You know, the boy, the famous boy who some people dispute whether he actually existed or not, who, who reports his parents, uh, to authorities, uh, and who was made into a sort of hero.
01:40:21.900Um, we, we, we really, really don't want to enter societies like that.
01:40:27.880We want to be in societies where we can have differences out quietly.
01:40:39.900And we can do all of these things without fearing that at any moment the trap door opens underneath us and we go all the way to the bottom.
01:40:48.880If we live in that society, then we will become timorous, we will become enfeebled, we will live not even half lives.
01:40:59.620And I think we can all live better lives than that, but they start, they start from a position of knowing that the sort of life we should be living.
01:41:11.180And we should be living a life in which we can solve problems, in which we can share ideas, in which we can talk across boundaries, read across continents,
01:41:22.640and know that the world is an extraordinary amount of information and knowledge to acquire and not a set of traps waiting for us to fall, but an amazing set of opportunities that
01:41:42.460offer us to offer us to offer us the opportunity to do things that are endless.
01:41:50.540America, in particular, should be aiming for that, to be solving things, to be doing things, to be growing things, to be showing a way, and to be inventing things that we've never dreamt of.
01:42:03.460That's what Americans should be aiming for, not this embittered, trapdoor culture, which will get nobody anywhere, other than the people who are so happy to see America fail.
01:42:24.380I mean, you have, you, I know you've, you've said this, but you, what is the goal to, to die in your bed years from now saying, no one ever criticized me.
01:42:37.740I managed to make it through unscathed.
01:42:58.860Strive valiantly, recognize you'll make mistakes.
01:43:04.140You know, I mean, what life is, is only successes, you know, everyone has failures because everyone fails at times, you know.
01:43:16.360And, and, and I, I do think that we, you know, we, by the way, if I may say so, one of the worst signs in all of this is that comedians are coming under such flack.
01:43:28.220Comedians, comedians, like the court jester is so vital in a society because the comedian says things that are true, even if you don't want to admit they're true.
01:43:38.360And, and I, and I hated seeing comedians being come for in recent years.
01:43:43.340One of my, you know, the pythons in the United Kingdom were famous for being able to say things like in the life of Brian, which people couldn't say, but they knew to be true and knew to be funny.
01:44:50.320But she became a novelist, uh, and a pretty good one.
01:44:53.260Um, anyhow, but she wrote, she wrote a book about the Vietnam War, which she covered called Nothing and Amen.
01:44:59.660And it's, it's a great, great book, one of the great books about war.
01:45:02.620Um, and in Nothing and Amen, at the very beginning, uh, a niece of hers says to her, Oriana, it's a great opening to a book, says, Oriana, what is life?
01:45:14.760And Oriana Falaci says, I went to Vietnam to find out.
01:45:19.560And, uh, throughout this extraordinary book, she describes what she saw, the risks she took, and so on.
01:45:26.300She described, among other things, a great love affair she was having at the time.
01:45:29.260And at the very end of the book, she says something that's worth, worth quoting, because she says, she says she ends up, after she comes back, she says to the little girl, she says, um, life is something you've got to fill up well, without wasting any time, even if you break it, by filling it too full.
01:45:57.080I'd rather people have that spirit in them than the cringing spirit of the age.
01:46:04.420But if I can say so, it's, it's, it's not enough that one simply calls on people to behave well or something.
01:46:13.000I think it's, I think it's necessary for people to demonstrate that.
01:46:18.140This is why America has had four very bad years in many ways, because there has been a president who is, you know, better than anyone does, does not behave well, does not behave graciously.
01:46:30.460I spoke with a friend some years ago, who said to me, an American friend said, look, I'm trying to bring up a, I'm trying to bring up children at the moment, Douglas.
01:46:38.840And, you know, he said, my, my eldest is a bit big for his age, and I have to tell him things like, look, just because you're bigger than the other boys in the class, you know, you mustn't use that as an advantage over them, because it's, it's chance.
01:46:51.380And you must make sure you don't throw your weight around, you know, and he said, Douglas, the problem is we have, we have a president who does exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to teach my son to do.
01:47:00.480So that is a problem, but it's not a reason for everybody else in public life in America to also dispense with the hope that they can demonstrate how to behave well as well.
01:47:16.740And I think incrementally, if different people with a platform demonstrate even one virtue, I mean, if I can say so, and I'm not, I wasn't primed to say this, and I don't want to embarrass you, but I think your own behavior in recent years demonstrated such grace under fire, that I think a lot of people will have learned from it.
01:47:43.080I think they will have observed it. I don't know if they say it very often. But I think it will have impacted a lot of people. To know, for instance, that when you are assailed, you don't have to answer back by being worse than the people who assailed you, but by rising above it and by demonstrating grace and decency.
01:48:11.000These things don't get noted very often. And people don't like to note it about themselves. And they even don't like to note it about other people. But I think they are noteworthy. And if it happens enough, and if it's accumulated often enough, something can change.
01:48:27.700Well, thank you for saying that. I think about my kids, you know, and there's, you can learn so many lessons as you go through life with your children and try to steer them in the right direction.
01:48:38.240And there was a situation with my now 11-year-old a few years ago where he felt uncomfortable because students in the lunchroom were chanting something. It was an innocuous word, but in their world, it was a derogatory world. I don't remember. It was something silly.
01:48:55.100And it was directed at one kid. And my son did not want to participate in this, but was feeling the peer pressure and genuinely didn't know what to do. You know, he wasn't going to chant, but, you know, he also wasn't going to stand up and say, stop that right now, fellow third graders.
01:49:15.900You know, so I felt for him. You know, he brought it up to me and asked what I thought he should have done. And we talked about how, yes, it would be wonderful if you could find the nerve to do that, right, to stand up and shut it down.
01:49:29.640But realistically, there's another option. And there's another option for all of us when the group pylon takes place, when the bullying takes place, the social media, you know, just fire catches and someone's world is almost destroyed.
01:49:44.180And that is to not pile on, to not chant, to do something interruptive, potentially, maybe your tray falls off the table, or at a minimum, maybe you get up and you go to the bathroom, you're not a participant. And then you could round back, I told my son, and ask, ask that boy, if he wants to come over for a play date that day, something to shore him up. It doesn't even have to be about the specific incident, just something to let him know he's loved.
01:50:13.720And we can all do that. That's something that doesn't require huge risk taking.
01:50:19.160Yes, it just requires, yes, restraint. That's one of the only things it requires. It requires restraint.
01:50:24.800And don't, there's such a good lesson. I mean, don't join the mob. Don't join the mob. By the way, why don't you join them?
01:50:32.920I've said this a few times in years about not joining the mob. Perhaps I've never said why.
01:50:37.900It's because you don't know what the mob's going to do. You can't predict what it's going to do, and you're going to get caught up with them.
01:50:46.360If you join the mob, the mob might break into the capital, and then you're one of the people who is in that mob.
01:50:55.340If you're in the online mob, and you join in, you gain nothing from joining in, but you could have made the person who's been piled in on just that little bit worse.
01:51:09.780And, you know, I watched this the other day when some people who were at the capital protests that turned into a riot were being put on no-fly lists.
01:51:20.840And there were people on the internet saying, ha-ha, somebody I know, I'm living for this at the moment.
01:51:27.920A video of a man at an airport completely distraught saying, look what they're doing to us.
01:51:33.760I had no idea of a specific situation in this man, but when a man is weeping in public at an airport, he's just at the end of his, he's at the end of his tether there.
01:51:45.900That's the most humiliation you can have at this point, and he can't get home.
01:51:51.040I don't know what involvement he had, but I wouldn't glory in that moment.
01:51:57.820And I saw people glorying in, like, I saw somebody I met once who I don't know well, but who got a little bit caught up in the Me Too thing and was humiliated for a period.
01:52:08.400And I saw him piling in on this, and I thought, I didn't say anything because I just decided not to.
01:52:12.960But I thought, you know, I thought, wow, you know, a few years ago, when the mob was coming for you, you loathed it.
01:52:20.820And yet here you are, here you are, just saying, you know, like, really happy to join the mob again.
01:52:54.400Anything is better than joining the mob because it's true that we are wired as human beings to get into an us and them situation all the time.
01:53:04.520But the instinct to do that is so strong in the current era with social media and much more.
01:53:22.380They pay a huge price in just the endless diminution of their character, the curdling of their own view of the world and other people, their misplaced sense of self-righteousness against the other.
01:53:38.140And we see this with the COVID thing, people doing, you know, lockdown shaming on people.
01:53:43.060You know, there's an account that finds people who were celebrating Christmas with people above the legal number and trying to out them for their place of work.
01:53:56.500And you want to say, you know, you just want to say, you just want to stop a moment and reflect on whether that's the person you want to be.
01:55:48.300And, you know, if there was one thing that we could do with this age breaking down, it's the idea that there are good people and bad people.
01:55:57.380You know, that we all have the capacity for good and evil.
01:56:02.840And we don't just have it year by year or day to day, but all the time, down the center of us.
01:56:11.520It's what makes human beings so fascinating, so extraordinary.
01:56:21.700And if people could realize that, that, you know, I have a friend who's a doctor in the UK who said that he was a prison doctor for many years.
01:56:31.400He said that one of the, he said, he said for years, people said to him, oh, I don't know.
01:56:37.400I just, I just, I fell in with the wrong crowd.
01:56:41.560And he said, in all the years that I was a doctor in prisons, he said, I met so many people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never met the crowd.
01:56:51.700The point is, the crowd is not made up of people, people with evil on their forehead.
01:57:22.960I want the audience to read it because I do think, we didn't get to this day, but I do think you do answer the question of sort of how wokeness started and the Marxist origins and how it tracks Marxism, which is being pushed at the academic level.
01:57:36.840And even in the K through 12 level now, it's scary, but I just thought this was the most thoughtful book that made me, it was a call to action in many ways.
01:57:47.180And I've listened to so many podcasts that you've done.
01:57:50.340I'm just, I feel like you're appointment listening.
01:57:53.200So I'm honored to have had you here and have had the opportunity to ask you my own questions directly.
01:57:58.860And I really hope, Douglas, is the first of many.
01:58:12.720I know I keep saying it, but it's true.
01:58:15.240Smart just in terms of how well read he is and how well informed, but also in the way he sees the world and translating it into usable information.
01:58:23.180I don't know about you, but there are about six references in there that I had no idea what he was talking about.
01:58:30.800And I don't know about you, but I would really like to be better read.
01:58:32.760One of the things I want to do, I actually want to do, is get like a, you know how Dennis Prager has Prager University?
01:58:39.380I want to have like Kelly College, where we get like the top three books from all of our guests that you need to read to be a better citizen, right?
01:58:50.600To be like a smart, well-informed person.
01:58:52.560I don't know about you, but like when I was at Syracuse, I was kind of, I drank.