In this episode, I interview Professor Frank Ferreide, a sociologist at the University of Kent and author of many books, about his political life and views. We talk about how he became a communist, why he left the left, and what he thinks about democracy today.
00:17:01.660Yes, I mean, what you got here is this marriage of convenience on the one hand,
00:17:07.500but also the coming together of movements that are motivated by their victim outlook, their identity
00:17:17.740obsession, and their absolute hatred over anything that's to do with the accomplishment of Western
00:17:24.860civilization. And it is really a very negative, destructive force that has kind of emerged fairly
00:17:33.660recently and has acquired quite a large momentum within sections of European society.
00:17:42.380It's also interesting as well that it's happening largely in liberal democracies, because particularly
00:17:50.060in the case of English liberalism, that was born out of the need to prevent religious sectarianism.
00:17:58.620That's where I at least would draw that thread, because of the English Civil War and the conflict
00:18:04.860between the Protestants and Catholics. And yet, within our liberal democracies, we're now seeing
00:18:10.780a revival of that just between different groups. It's no longer the Protestants and the Catholics,
00:18:14.860actually, they're seemingly getting along these days, at least far more than they used to. And this is,
00:18:21.900to my mind, something that lots of Western European countries and perhaps even North American ones
00:18:29.260shouldn't have to put up with. It's something that's been decided on our behalf by our political class,
00:18:34.300whereas the opinion polling seems to suggest that nobody actually wants this sort of thing.
00:18:38.540It is, yeah. But you have to remember that amongst our elites, particularly the ones that deal with
00:18:46.220culture, liberalism has mutated into illiberalism. So liberalism no longer has got any virtues, because
00:18:54.860intolerance itself is seen in a very suspicious kind of a way. How can you tolerate people like reform,
00:19:02.700for example? At the same time, even free speech is seen as a kind of potentially a form of hate speech.
00:19:09.900So all the liberal ideals that emerged in the 18th, 19th century are seen from a negative perspective
00:19:17.900by these kinds of movements. And what's happened is that, unfortunately, they've been complicit
00:19:22.940in creating this polarized political environment where, under the guise of multiculturalism,
00:19:30.860we basically created a monstrous situation where there's no single culture that binds people together,
00:19:38.300that creates the basis for any kind of national solidarity. And instead, what you've got
00:19:44.060are a very kind of ghettoized conception of public life, where people only talk to people like themselves,
00:19:50.540and where there's no possibility of a liberal meeting of minds.
00:19:55.900Well, it's my understanding that this prior state of being, if you will, is only really possible when you
00:20:03.660have what is dubbed a high trust society. And I think that you get to that sort of society,
00:20:11.660although it's quite a woolly concept, in my opinion, through being able to create a sort of mental
00:20:17.980notion of what other people are thinking. And any way you can really do that in any reliable sense
00:20:23.500is if you have a certain degree of certainty as to what that other person is thinking. And I grew up
00:20:30.140in a part of sort of almost rural South Devon, where everyone sort of knew each other, people said hello
00:20:37.020to each other on the street. It's the sort of thing that people accuse reform of wanting to go back to.
00:20:44.540And I think part of the reason that existed is that everyone knew that we were on the same sort of
00:20:51.980page in living in a community. And it was quite a static community that didn't change too much.
00:20:57.660And I think these are the sort of conditions that you can breed a society where this is possible.
00:21:02.780And with things like mass immigration, as well as just having economic problems that compel
00:21:11.900people to move within a country to certain areas, you see lots of people moving to London
00:21:16.700from areas similar to where I grew up and adopting that local culture. That seems to be what seems to
00:21:23.900be contributing to this sort of thing. What do you think?
00:21:26.860I mean, I wouldn't go as far as you do. I think that you can have what you call a high trust
00:21:33.660environment, which is another way of saying that people that you meet are people that you almost know
00:21:42.060instinctively what they're thinking. There's a taken for granted assumption. You take for granted that
00:21:48.380if I do this, that's how you're going to react. And you take for granted that when you go in the shop
00:21:54.060and you smile at somebody, they're going to smile back. And old ladies take for granted that if they're
00:22:00.860carrying a lot of shopping, you're going to help them out. So there's all these different
00:22:04.940sort of ways of being that are integral to that. Now, I don't think that you need to have a static society
00:22:12.780for that to be perpetuated. You can have a dynamic society that is evolving and developing. So long as
00:22:20.460the cultural underpinnings are there, and there's no reason why those cultural underpinnings of a
00:22:27.580taken for granted environment need to be detached from a new world. The problem occurs when, and this is
00:22:34.860what happens in Britain, for example, when the people that ought to be the guardians of those cultural norms
00:22:40.700and cultural ideals, wake up one morning and decide that they are no longer signing up to it. They no
00:22:47.500longer are prepared to uphold those ideals. On the contrary, they play an important role in demonizing
00:22:54.540it and undermining it and pathologizing it. And I think that what we're forgetting is that when you have
00:23:00.780the guardians of society essentially opening the doors to what are in effect alien ideals
00:23:07.420and alien values, then you have a lot of trouble. And the trouble comes from their decision to play
00:23:14.940that role. And then later on, the very same people who open the doors will then promote multiculturalism
00:23:21.580and will see that as being somehow more superior than what they call monocultural life in Devon.
00:23:28.300As if somehow people in Devon are so narrow-minded that they are incapable of appreciating other cultures,
00:23:37.420or even of engaging with other cultures, which is obviously a caricature.
00:23:43.100I will concede that it doesn't need to be as static as I perhaps emphasized, but I'm interested
00:23:49.100who you might put the sort of label of cultural guardians. Who do you mean by that sort of term?
00:24:01.500Well, what I really mean by that is if you look at the British case, we used to have what was called
00:24:07.900the British establishment. And the British establishment was more or less intact until
00:24:13.500the late 1980s. And it consisted of people who, in a sense, went to the same kind of schools,
00:24:21.260went to the same universities. And even if they didn't go to the same schools and universities,
00:24:27.260signed up to a particular cultural outlook about who they were, what it meant to be British. They would
00:24:34.060understand that the history of Britain was something to be proud of, that the ability of Britain to
00:24:42.780to fight Germany in the Second World War and to resist fascism was really a worthwhile episode. And
00:24:50.620they could look back it prior to a lot of other achievements. And they would kind of run all the
00:24:55.820different institutions, everything from universities to schools, to the media, to our theaters, and then
00:25:04.300also in the private sector in business and banks and all these other institutions. And they would be one big
00:25:11.900established. Now, within that, you had people who specialized in dominating our cultural institutions.
00:25:18.780And I think that these people in particular, somewhere along the line, particularly in the late 60s,
00:25:24.460early 70s, took the decision that they would no longer transmit the ideals into which they were
00:25:32.140socialized, internet for children. And all of a sudden, the schools changed what they were teaching.
00:25:40.140Instead of telling children that they should be proud of being British, they began to indicate that
00:25:46.300being British was problematic, that there was something deeply flawed in our history. And in the theaters,
00:25:53.900in the cinemas and in music and elsewhere, a very similar script was being written and promoted to
00:26:01.500the point at which there was almost a self-conscious attempt to distance society from its historical legacy,
00:26:09.980to really kind of detach young people from any connection with what had gone on beforehand,
00:26:15.660and create a situation almost like a moral vacuum, into which all their newfangled ideals could kind
00:26:23.500of, you know, sort of rush into. And I think that's what created the situation where
00:26:28.300that a relatively homogeneous set of cultural assumptions gradually unraveled, and people who
00:26:35.100held onto those cultural assumptions were always ridiculed and made fun of. Somehow they're nostalgic,
00:26:42.940they are unable to change, and they are really living in the past. They have outdated ideas. Instead of
00:26:48.780understanding that there was something inherently valuable about those kind of links, about those connections,
00:26:56.220and certainly that our younger generation had to learn from the experience of the past,
00:27:01.500instead of just simply in a one-dimensional way rejected.
00:27:04.460No, I think that's a perfectly reasonable perspective. And in fact, I can look at
00:27:11.100media from, say, the 70s or 80s, even back to the 60s, that explicitly pokes fun, even in a sort of
00:27:20.380good-natured way. But it sort of adds up to what your average person might identify with, culturally
00:27:28.940speaking. And it did seem to start some sort of change in culture, as you're alluding to. And
00:27:42.300on the topic of culture, actually, I wanted to talk about one of the topics of one of your books,
00:27:47.500a culture of fear, which you wrote in 1997, as well as you've also written quite extensively about
00:27:53.500fear as a concept, because you wrote in 2018, how fear works as well. And I wanted to bring in
00:27:59.820something from the psychological literature that I'm familiar with, that evoking fear makes
00:28:07.260individuals both more susceptible to political messaging, as well as increases their desire for
00:28:14.220authoritarian leadership, more generally. And this seems to be a sort of quirk, if you will,
00:28:19.900of human psychology that has increasingly propagated in the sort of public consciousness. People are
00:28:28.700aware that this exists. And first of all, do you agree with this characterization? And second of all,
00:28:36.220do you think that this is actually being increasingly knowingly capitalized upon by political elites today?
00:28:44.220Yeah, I'm always very suspicious of arguments that see fear as working in that kind of
00:28:53.820causal way, that it's a very obvious effect, because the important thing is that fear itself can have
00:29:03.420many, many consequences. Fear can bring people together. As you know, the fear of the enemy, for
00:29:10.700example, or even in, you know, from disaster studies, when people really are scared,
00:29:16.300communities exhibit far greater solidarity than when everything is all right. So the consequences
00:29:22.540of fear are manifold. But I think what is a problem, what is distinct about our regime of fear is that
00:29:31.500fear has acquired this free-floating dimension where it can attach itself to anything.
00:29:36.140And therefore, when you have so much talk about fear and the obvious side of that, when safety
00:29:44.940is elevated into this foundational value in our society, then what it does is it kind of dispossesses
00:29:52.140people of their agency, dispossesses people of their capacity to deal with the challenges of our time.
00:30:03.020Because fear is normalized. More or less, we're told that unless you fear, you're not responsible,
00:30:09.180you're not a responsible individual. And I think in my writings, what I've tried to sort of look at is
00:30:13.820the way in which this kind of fear culture has become institutionalized. And it's this empowering
00:30:20.780effect is what I'm really concerned about, because it basically means that we now have this funny
00:30:26.300situation, well, not funny, grotesque situation, where like this morning on the Today program, people are arguing that it's wrong to examine kids
00:30:35.500because it makes them stressful and they become fearful, not understanding that sometimes it is not a bad thing
00:30:44.620to fear the results of an exam, especially if you haven't done very much work for it. Those are entirely
00:30:49.900okay, normal kind of reactions. But when we're told that fear has this paralyzing effect upon you,
00:30:57.900then we're almost inciting people to feel weak and vulnerable and powerless.
00:31:02.540And that's really what I'm particularly concerned about, because that kind of powerless psychology,
00:31:09.900that sense of not being in control, is what encourages people to become members of identity
00:31:16.940groups who all feel that they're victims. They all feel that they've been put upon and they haven't got the
00:31:21.980power to change the world because they've been history's victims. So I think in that sense,
00:31:29.100it's in that way that the culture of fear today has this very corrosive effect on public life.
00:31:37.340Because to sort of reiterate what you're saying and sort of to clarify part of my question,
00:31:44.620fear response, of course, is located in the amygdala, which is pretty close to the brainstem.
00:31:50.460And as a sort of rule of thumb, the closer to the center of the brain something is,
00:31:54.460the more core and the older it is to human functioning. And therefore, it's fair to say
00:32:00.540that it's a very deeply rooted aspect of our psychology. And therefore, it can be quite
00:32:07.740difficult to override. Although that's not to say it's impossible, because of course, I quite like
00:32:13.500this almost Buddhist notion, it's sort of an Eastern philosophical notion, that once you start to
00:32:19.420understand the circumstances of an emotion, it's particularly true of anger, I think. Once you
00:32:24.780understand all of the factors surrounding it, then the emotion starts to disappear in a sense.
00:32:32.620At least this is something I've found in myself. I don't know whether you necessarily agree,
00:32:36.860but I think the same is true of fear. Once you understand the situation, it's far easier to resist
00:32:44.060that initial harmful aspect of fear. And I think that were people to approach fear in that way of
00:32:51.900it's a challenge to be overcome, and something that once you understand it, it seems manageable,
00:32:57.660and it restores agency, then this problem would probably diminish, I imagine.
00:33:04.460Yeah, I think you're right. I think that if fear is the challenge to tackle,
00:33:08.060especially when it's very clearly focused on the target of what's scaring us, that I think it is
00:33:18.540entirely manageable. The problem to me is not fear. It's what we call anxiety. And anxiety is much more
00:33:25.260diffused than fear, because anxiety is something that is intangible. You just worry about things,
00:33:32.060all kinds of different things that are in the air. And that is much more difficult to deal with,
00:33:37.500because you cannot really, it's like a bar of soap that goes right through your hands,
00:33:42.380whereas fear has got a tangibility that you can engage with and deal with.
00:33:46.860I know within my sort of research specialization of behavioral decision-making that
00:33:53.980risk taking under uncertainty, those conditions are sort of optimal for maximizing irrational responses,
00:34:01.420and that uncertainty and risk do seem to play a very important role in human decision-making. And I
00:34:09.900think that with increasing understandings of this, I think that there is going to be some degree of
00:34:17.180political utilization of it. I know that the behavioral insight team in the UK, which was set up in I think
00:34:25.7402010 by David Cameron, and now it was sold off. It was a government apparatus sold off
00:34:32.700as a private enterprise, which is already a little bit concerning, but now it operates within the space
00:34:40.060of 14 years in 50 different countries. In my mind, that sort of skyrocketing of that enterprise seems to
00:34:46.540suggest that there's perhaps great utility in the minds of ruling elites to use these behavioral economic insights
00:34:58.220to control populations. It sounds a little bit conspiratorial. I don't think it's necessarily in that sense,
00:35:05.100but simply it's a new way of understanding how to govern is perhaps a more sensible way of putting it.
00:35:12.700But it is also concerning because that suggests that there's going to be behavioral interventions that
00:35:20.300are beyond our awareness, and that raises lots of ethical questions. Is this something that
00:35:24.300would perhaps concern you? Not as much as you. I mean, I think the politics of behavior is a very real
00:35:32.060phenomenon. And I know that the Nudge Unit, which is what you're discussing, has got all these ambitions
00:35:41.500to not just to do things that we might not otherwise do. And they make all kinds of claims as to how
00:35:48.940effective they are in terms of influencing our individual decision making. And obviously, it is
00:35:58.700obviously a concern when you have governments doing that kind of manipulative sort of activities, which
00:36:07.820goes against the whole spirit of open democratic debate and discussion, because basically trying to
00:36:14.300avoid having an argument or winning the argument for this particular policy by going around it.
00:36:20.460So I totally agree that those things are a problem. I happen to think that they're not nearly as effective
00:36:27.180as many people think they are. I mean, we saw that in the discussion with Cambridge Analytics, that
00:36:32.300despite their gross claims that they have influenced this and that, that was a
00:36:36.140a bit of a fantasy. So I don't think that that kind of psychological manipulation is what I really worry
00:36:45.660about. What I do worry about is something else, which is that, you know, with the politics of
00:36:52.460behavior, you've got other aspects of it, which are potentially much more corrosive. For example,
00:36:58.540as you saw during the COVID experience, you had a situation where public health became entirely
00:37:06.300politicized and political life became medicalized at the same time. And when you basically use health
00:37:15.420in that kind of instrumental way, you kind of weaponize health and health concerns,
00:37:21.820then their effect is potentially sort of much more effective for a very simple reason that it's,
00:37:31.180you know, when you, when you basically medicalize political life, you can't really argue against it.
00:37:37.500And then when it isn't medicalized, because when it's not medicalized, you just say, well,
00:37:41.500they're wrong. I'm right. It's a debate. Let's, let's have a debate. When you have the so-called experts,
00:37:49.100you know, scientists and everybody else saying that this is what science says, this is,
00:37:53.740this is what you need to do if you're going to have a healthy society, and you come back saying,
00:37:58.780well, I don't agree with you. How can you, Frank Ferretti, who's, who can, you know,
00:38:03.980knows nothing about medicine, claim to have the same moral status as we do. So that kind of
00:38:11.740social engineering, you know, is much more dangerous for me than the,
00:38:15.660the, the nudge aspect of it, which I think is, you know, is a problem, but by no means as,
00:38:22.380as corrosive and as, as, as, as dangerous as the use of public health for, you know, political purposes.
00:38:30.220You actually presaged my next question there, because I was going to ask about the COVID pandemic and
00:38:37.020the sort of use of those sorts of methods and, and the use of fear in particular. And I was going to
00:38:45.660mention the fact that there was a project called Project Fear. And I thought that was rather on the
00:38:53.340nose, really. And I was going to bring up BBC coverage in particular, and there were things
00:38:59.500that I spotted at the time with my sort of, um, psychology background and particularly, um,
00:39:06.060focus on research is that they provided figures of cases and deaths without a frame of reference.
00:39:12.380And this sort of capitalizes on the human inability to understand probability, particularly rationally.
00:39:18.060And this is something that has been demonstrable in lots of different domains. And it's quite
00:39:22.780unfortunate, but once you sort of gain a level of expertise, you'd be, you're much more able to
00:39:28.780quantify certain likelihoods, but there were examples of things like 40,000 dead and where
00:39:35.180that might be useful, um, in comparison would be against say flu deaths in previous years, because
00:39:41.260then that allows people to, um, sort of have a frame of reference to understand it. But 40,000 as
00:39:47.100a number in isolation sounds scary. It's a, it's something that it sounds like a lot of people. It's
00:39:55.580more people than, you know, and I think that were it to be put into perspective of percentage of the
00:40:03.340population, say people might be able to have a bit more of a rational understanding of it. And this was,
00:40:09.820I think, knowingly done, um, to encourage people to adhere to the lockdown policies.
00:40:17.740Yeah. I mean, the lockdown policies were, uh, very, very clearly, uh, uh, sort of choreographed in such
00:40:24.620a way that, uh, uh, it had the maximum effect on people's anxieties that you, you basically made
00:40:33.260people anxious, as anxious as possible in order to, uh, get the right kind of results from your
00:40:39.820perspective. Um, but yeah. And, and, and to that extent, that was a very unique, uh, almost like a
00:40:46.300laboratory like moment when you had the systematic application of the politics of fear used in such
00:40:54.220a way. And, and every psychology being used and cultural politics being called upon, it was very,
00:41:01.260you know, uh, kind of a very kind of, uh, uh, academically and intellectually, uh, sort of founded
00:41:09.500project, uh, that people are still finding out about.
00:41:13.580Yeah. And one of the things that surprised myself and lots of other people is just how
00:41:19.660much adherence to the rules there were. Yeah. Just the, the level of adherence to these,
00:41:25.500these policies seem to suggest that these, um, methods are incredibly effective. And I think that
00:41:31.660that this is something that is going to be used as an example for governance in, in the future,
00:41:37.100I think, um, because of, uh, the unprecedented level of obedience, I suppose you could call it.
00:41:46.940Maybe not. I mean, I, I think you're right. You know, there were, I was often quite surprised by
00:41:54.140how a sectional society was almost, uh, demanding even more lockdown measures than existed.
00:42:01.900But then, uh, the other side of this is if you, I don't know if you remember, they were saying that
00:42:06.540when this is all over, it's not going to be over. This is the new normal. And they were saying that
00:42:12.300we may well be, you know, carrying on wearing masks. You know, we're not going to be shaking
00:42:17.340hands with each other anymore. We're going to do like, you know, behave like in Asia, where people
00:42:21.500don't have any physical contact with each other. So they kind of had this very dystopian view of the
00:42:26.220future. And the interesting thing is that now when you talk to people, they almost forgotten about
00:42:32.060COVID. It's like a memory, a bad memory. Yes. But it no longer influences most people's behavior,
00:42:41.500which I think is a really good thing because it indicates that in the end we're human beings
00:42:46.860and the love of life and the need to communicate and come close to each other
00:42:51.980tends to override these technocratic attempts to insulate us from one another.
00:42:59.020That is certainly a nice silver lining to draw from it because I suppose I hadn't really looked
00:43:03.020at it before, but it does show you that human beings are adaptable enough and versatile enough
00:43:08.700that we can deal with very adverse circumstances and then sort of return to the norm for want of a
00:43:16.140better way of putting it, which I suppose is quite an optimistic thing in a way because it suggests that
00:43:22.300however wrong things can get, we can at least return to some semblance of what we know, which
00:43:29.820I suppose there's a whole host of psychological things I could unpick there, but I'm going to move
00:43:35.260on to something slightly different. So in one of your interviews you were talking about
00:43:41.580I suppose what might be described as the woke left and that's one of those terms that I think
00:43:47.580is also ill-defined and is very difficult to pin down that is used by the right leftwards,
00:43:56.540as well as some people in the centre ground as well. But conceding that aside, one of the things that
00:44:04.220I've noticed is that as part of this hatred of the West and a sort of a rejection of the notion that
00:44:17.340strength is a good thing is that these supposed woke types have begun to venerate what amounts to
00:44:25.180weakness in a sense. I'm not entirely sure whether this is what you were alluding to when I heard you in
00:44:31.660a previous interview, but it seemed to ring true with some of my readings of their own literature, if you will.
00:44:43.740Yeah, well I think this is based on the fact that from their point of view the meaning of personhood
00:44:52.460is very different than the classical definition of what it needs to be a human being.
00:44:57.500So from their definition of a person who they see people as not being able to deal with challenges,
00:45:05.820that challenges they see as principally harmful or at the very least traumatic,
00:45:12.940at the very least deserving of some kind of psychological diagnosis. So they have a
00:45:18.220very medicalised view of a human being which is more like that of a potential patient
00:45:23.980as opposed to an agent. And I think that kind of definition of what a person is means that they
00:45:32.540tend to regard people's weaknesses as the default way of being, as the normal way of being. And not
00:45:41.260only that, but they sometimes go a step further and they basically argue that to even talk about normal
00:45:47.180is wrong because it assumes that there's something wrong with being abnormal. And then having eradicated
00:45:53.980the distinction between normal and abnormal, they then go on a step further and they say there's
00:45:59.660something actually quite attractive and nice about being abnormal or rejecting heteronormativity
00:46:07.020or rejecting marriage or rejecting your family or rejecting all those things that you thought
00:46:14.380were part of normality. And I think in that sense, there is ultimately this
00:46:21.900almost like this moralised conception of weakness where the weaker you are, the more you can claim victim
00:46:29.900status. The more put upon you are, the better person you are. So there's a kind of an attempt to gain
00:46:37.820moral authority to the amount that you supposedly have suffered. I think that the moral aspect of it is
00:46:46.620very central to it because in this day and age, it seems like having moral authority is, at least at an
00:46:56.700interpersonal level, one of the best kinds of authority you can have. Because generally speaking,
00:47:03.420people are suspicious of people who wield authority in more traditional senses. And so there's a certain
00:47:14.140utility to it. It gives you a greater right, for example, to lay claim to resources, both cultural,
00:47:23.740emotional and financial. And some of the psychological researchers seem to indicate that, in fact,
00:47:30.460that there are people who have noticed this trend and are predisposed to be a bit, I suppose,
00:47:37.500Machiavellian in the pejorative sense. And they use it to their own ends because they're more like
00:47:43.980to have these dark triad traits that indicate some form of psychopathy. And I'm not saying that's all of
00:47:49.580them, of course, because that'd be a blanket generalization. But it seems to be that there
00:47:54.300is an element of that that people notice and capitalize upon as well.
00:47:58.300Yeah, I think there is that. And that's really why identity politics has become so important,
00:48:08.460the whole politicization of identity. And the reason why you then have so much
00:48:13.820care being devoted towards building this hierarchy of different identities. So I think that's really
00:48:23.260very, very significant. And there is this, what in sociology we call moral enterprise, where you basically
00:48:31.900are trying to gain virtue points by the way you operate within public life itself.
00:48:37.900Yeah, of course, the kind of moral dimension of this is more superficial than real, because what it's
00:48:47.020based upon is a kind of moral authority that's not really founded on any kind of system or morality,
00:48:55.980but just simply on the demand that, you know, I demand, you know, because of all my suffering,
00:49:03.260I demand to be taken more seriously than you or anybody else who has not had undergone that fate.
00:49:12.780Well, I think that moral claims to resources tend to be seen as more legitimate than other ones. It's
00:49:19.500sort of similar in a way to how we refer to our military as the Department of Defense,
00:49:27.100that's because we're framing it as if to say, well, we're defending ourselves. So we're preempting
00:49:34.220the fact that we're going to have to justify our actions. And I think that history of
00:49:42.700the 20th century and even Iraq and Afghanistan seems to suggest that it's not always the case that