The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Interview with Professor Frank Furedi

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to an interview with Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, Frank

00:00:06.040 Ferreide. You're also a renowned author and have written many great books and it's a pleasure

00:00:13.520 to have you on the show. Nice to talk to you. So I'm going to address the elephant in the

00:00:21.740 room first and foremost because people who might look up your name on Wikipedia might

00:00:26.900 see that you are a former member of the International Socialists. You formed the Revolutionary Communist

00:00:32.400 Group and then you formed the Revolutionary Communist Tendency which was refounded as the

00:00:39.440 Revolutionary Communist Party. It's even a mouthful to explain. So clearly you've played a significant

00:00:45.620 role in communist groups but it seems like you've moved away from this. How much do your politics

00:00:52.440 today resemble those of your past? And if you have changed your mind over time, what made

00:00:59.900 you move away from them, I suppose? Well, you know, we're talking about a time

00:01:07.780 which was about 50 years ago, half a century. It's a long time. Most of your listeners have

00:01:14.220 not lived 50 years or anything near it. And the world has changed quite considerably during

00:01:21.100 that time. I mean, I'm the product of the radical 1960s, which I really enjoyed. I had a great

00:01:27.560 time in the 60s and it was a nice feeling to believe that anything is possible. But then

00:01:34.060 since that time, the world has changed. And, you know, invariably as the world changes, sort

00:01:40.440 of saw the issues that are really important, also altered and not like what they were in

00:01:46.900 the previous era. And I think what has happened is this. I don't think I've changed all that

00:01:51.620 much. I'm still the same person I always was, but the world has changed. It's demanding different

00:01:56.340 answers, different, raising different questions. And I think that I've evolved in relation to that.

00:02:05.100 And very importantly, obviously, in any political journey, you learn from your experience.

00:02:12.440 There's a trial and error element in there. And I've learned a lot from the people I worked

00:02:19.340 with. So that although I'm seen as being almost the very opposite to what I was when I began

00:02:26.800 my life in radical politics, I still am motivated and inspired by the same kind of issues

00:02:34.580 as I was in the 1960s. It's just that they've taken a different form.

00:02:39.760 I understand that completely. And in fact, there's something you mentioned in an interview with

00:02:45.360 Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum, just something that you sort of dropped in, which I

00:02:49.560 actually thought was very interesting, because it was something that reminded me of something in

00:02:54.060 myself. So you mentioned in passing that one of the things that moved you away from the left

00:03:00.720 was the miners' strike and your opposition to the fact that a ballot wasn't held. And to sort

00:03:09.900 of people, perhaps, who aren't familiar with what you believe, that might seem a bit of a

00:03:17.480 juxtaposition, because of course, revolutionary and communist tend not to go... This, of course,

00:03:23.080 was in the time when you were associated with those groups, tend not to use the language of democracy

00:03:31.200 necessarily. And that makes me think perhaps that there were seeds of conflict perhaps already

00:03:38.940 in there. If you're thinking in those terms, then it seems like something outside of that paradigm.

00:03:46.180 Well, I've always been a Democrat, you know, all my life. You have to remember that I was

00:03:52.960 born in Hungary, was nine years old, but the Hungarian Revolution broke out against

00:03:58.760 Stalinist Russia. So I was always against the Soviet Union and that kind of Cold War

00:04:04.960 totality and politics. But I always felt that, in a sense, democracy was the foundation of public

00:04:13.740 life in any political setting. And I still believe that. I also believe that not only do you have to

00:04:20.540 have democracy as a way of getting people elected, but democracy is also where you live your life,

00:04:26.620 where you're open to debate, you're open to controversy. You know, you don't see your opponents

00:04:32.620 necessarily as your enemies. They're just people that you disagree with about different political

00:04:36.940 points. And I argued, and this was something that people on the left hated when I said that,

00:04:41.740 I said I would rather lose a ballot, but having had the ballot democratically,

00:04:48.380 than to cheat and without any kind of democratic accountability, you know, sort of manage to

00:04:54.780 avoid having that ballot and win the arguments in that kind of dishonest way.

00:05:01.420 So I always feel that, you know, elections are coming up. Okay, so use an election, but at least democracy

00:05:08.220 has had the last word. And that's much more important that people feel that their voice is

00:05:13.900 counted rather than somehow preventing people from having access to decision making.

00:05:19.260 And I think you've probably had a similar case when you've been advocating for free speech as well,

00:05:25.260 in that I was reading that you got given a little bit of a hard time from a leftward direction for

00:05:33.900 advocating for free speech for people you disagreed with. And I think that that's a sort of parallel

00:05:38.140 thing to what you're saying there really, isn't it?

00:05:39.900 Yeah, it's the first time it happened in the late 70s. Everybody on the left argued for no platform

00:05:46.380 for the fascists, as they called them, that was the National Front. And I said, look, I hate the

00:05:51.820 politics of the National Front, I disagree with it. But you cannot bureaucratically, you know, cancel

00:05:57.420 them and bureaucratically prevent them from speaking, because that means you're just as bad as they are.

00:06:02.460 You know, you're using fascist methods to fight fascism, there's a bit of a contradiction there. And I

00:06:07.580 basically argued that you need to have the courage of your conviction and argue against them and

00:06:12.300 debate it out with them, and win the arguments rather than hide behind administrative solutions.

00:06:17.660 And that seems to be a similar sort of rhetoric that was in play at the NatCon in Brussels,

00:06:24.300 which I believe you were in attendance.

00:06:25.900 I was organizing it, yes.

00:06:28.060 Oh, clearly, I've not been doing my research there. It's a bit different than in attendance. But

00:06:34.380 yes, and it seemed like the mayors in Belgium, they seem to be quite left leaning. And they're

00:06:42.220 doing it because they're political opponents, as opposed to, you know, some sort of actual genuine

00:06:49.580 safety concern.

00:06:50.540 That's right. I mean, basically, we had three, we lost two venues, because the mayor said,

00:06:58.380 we can't have meetings there, it's unsafe, it's bad for a public order. But basically,

00:07:04.060 they just hated the fact that people like myself and others were having a discussion.

00:07:10.060 And fortunately, the third venue, the guy that owned it, believed in free speech. So he managed

00:07:15.580 to hold it, but then they called in the police, they tried to stop it. And I just thought it was

00:07:20.780 so interesting that in Brussels, the capital of Europe, you would have such an anti-democratic,

00:07:27.100 illiberal sort of political cultural prevailing, that they were simply not prepared to have people

00:07:33.660 who they disagreed with, have the capacity to have an open discussion and a proper debate.

00:07:40.780 That kind of small scale totalitarianism, which is what they were practicing, to me is really,

00:07:46.540 really dangerous, because it creates the impression that there's something inherently wrong

00:07:52.060 with discussion and debate, rather than understanding that that's how we learn about

00:07:56.220 each other.

00:07:56.780 Hmm. Well, it's always struck me as something that's a bit of a position of weakness, really,

00:08:02.220 because if you're shutting down discussion about potentially your own ideas, that seems to indicate

00:08:08.140 that you're worried that that discussion is going to undermine your ideas. So it's a very cynical way of

00:08:14.380 approaching politics, really, isn't it?

00:08:17.100 It is. It basically gives up on politics, because you're relying on administrative solutions,

00:08:24.780 rather than political solutions, for dealing with issues that you disagree with. And that creates a

00:08:32.140 very destructive dynamic, because ultimately, it means that you're preventing the public from actually

00:08:39.820 listening to a wide range of opinions. And nobody should have the right to prevent other people

00:08:46.460 from accessing information from different quarters, or listening to different views on the same subject.

00:08:55.180 And I think that one of the things that's certainly contributing to this is, I don't know

00:08:59.820 whether this is a trend that you've spotted, you've obviously got far more years of experience

00:09:05.100 following the political world than I have, that there has been an increasing reliance on very

00:09:12.700 subjective political terminology that I think helps undermine how people understand the political

00:09:21.980 atmosphere. And I think a practical example might make this easier to demonstrate, that the BBC,

00:09:28.860 when talking about the Reform Party in the upcoming election, they use the term far right, which they

00:09:36.460 then later retracted. And this is a term that could mean any host of different political groups. And I think

00:09:45.100 it's used subjectively to basically build an association between two political factions that might not otherwise

00:09:53.260 be associated with one another. Because I think Nigel Farage and Reform, they're perhaps carrying on

00:10:01.020 Margaret Thatcher's legacy. That's the language that Farage sometimes uses. And some of their policies seem

00:10:06.540 a little bit neoliberal, neoconservative. And yet, far right is also used to describe the national

00:10:13.100 socialists of the mid 20th century. And those two things are pretty much antithetical to one another.

00:10:21.260 And yet they're being pushed together by linguistic manipulation, it seems to my mind.

00:10:27.420 Nigel Farage Yes, I think that linguistic engineering by the mainstream media is very, very

00:10:34.380 important. It's very pernicious. Because they're trying to essentially

00:10:38.620 dominate the discussion by determining the language through which we interpret events.

00:10:46.620 And as you know, if people are told that these are the words that you need to use to make sense of

00:10:53.260 public life, then that actually influences the way you think. So, just to take your example, I mean, you

00:11:01.100 and I know that for all its sins, the Reform Party has a political outlook that's roughly comparable to mainstream

00:11:11.020 conservatism in the 70s and the 80s. There's nothing unusual about it. You know, pretty much

00:11:17.100 the average member of the Tory party would have signed up to reform in 1979 or 1980. But today,

00:11:24.780 it's no longer the case that you can have a moderate right or even a centrist right. Whenever the word right

00:11:33.340 is used, it's always either extreme right or far right. Or in many cases, particularly in Europe, they call it the

00:11:42.300 hard right. And I know that this is obviously an illegitimate use of political language. But what they're trying to do

00:11:52.780 is to create the association that anybody that is right of the mainstream center is by definition

00:12:02.380 an illegitimate political actor, because they are in the same mold as the authoritarian fascists were in the 1930s.

00:12:11.900 They're just like the hard ride. They're trying to kind of create that kind of

00:12:15.660 association, which then means that people have a very skewed view of what it is that's going on.

00:12:23.980 By the way, what's also interesting is that if everybody on the right is the hard right or extreme right,

00:12:29.980 then the center itself also loses meaning, meaning because you almost have this almost like a skewed

00:12:38.220 balance occurring, where the center itself is no longer a center of anything, because there is no

00:12:45.740 balance between right and left anymore. So the political language, I think, of our times has turned

00:12:52.540 into a zombie language where we're using categories and concepts that have had some meaning in a previous

00:13:00.700 era, but today no longer correspond to what is really taking place and how people view the world.

00:13:09.020 I can certainly see something happening with these sorts of political labels, similar to the word

00:13:13.900 racist in a sense. It used to be one of the words that held the highest stigma in Western society, at least

00:13:23.500 Western Europe and North America. And now it's been used so much that its value has been diluted. And

00:13:33.580 by doing so, the left is unwittingly creating more legitimate enemies than it would have otherwise had, I think.

00:13:45.980 I wouldn't even call it the left, because that's also another word that's lost its meaning, but the

00:13:50.620 people who call themselves left-wing have basically turned, have a very kind of promiscuous definition

00:13:59.020 of racism. So ultimately, racism is something that's in your DNA if you're a white person. That's

00:14:07.020 particularly how it's seen. And as a white person, the only thing that you can do is to acknowledge your

00:14:11.900 racism and almost like through a series of mea culpas, try to atone by becoming essentially a non-entity,

00:14:23.180 who just basically allows other identity groups to have the dominant role within society. So it's

00:14:30.460 become this fairly corrosive kind of concept that's got nothing to do with racism as it emerged in history

00:14:38.540 or the way that it worked. It's got nothing to do with oppression or exploitation. It's merely a

00:14:44.380 cultural artifact that is used to kind of end up certain people with identity. But what is

00:14:51.820 interesting about all these words, because I just come back from France, where they're having these

00:14:57.020 elections and people talk about the hard left and the hard right. And when I, you know, the hard right is

00:15:02.860 the Rallement National, which is, again, I wouldn't call them hard right, the right wing, but not hard

00:15:09.500 right. But the hard left, they are hard, but they're not left wing. Because when you look at the left wing

00:15:15.100 in France, it's a very good example of what happens. They are really, they are basically a coalition of

00:15:21.100 identity groups, where you have the coalition between a kind of radical Islamism on the one hand, a kind of

00:15:29.180 Hamas type of sort of political outlook that's converged with people who are, you know, have got

00:15:37.660 this kind of radical leftish identity outlook. And what unites them is that they have a common hatred

00:15:45.020 for the legacy of French history, but also for Western civilization. I mean, otherwise, why would a

00:15:52.620 transgender activist and a Hamas, you know, sort of pro Hamas sort of militant have anything in common,

00:16:00.540 other than the fact that they hate the West, they hate Western civilization, they say Israel 0.99

00:16:05.740 as being a hyper Western world, you know, sort of society. And therefore, what you end up is a movement

00:16:12.380 that is called left, but got nothing to do with what left wing politics used to mean historically.

00:16:19.580 This is certainly a vindication of that phrase that politics makes strange bedfellows, because I've

00:16:24.860 noticed the same exact trend. And it is strange, isn't it, that quite radical sections of Islam can 0.74

00:16:36.540 ally with what is seen as, you know, is called the radical left. And yet many of these Muslims have 0.98

00:16:44.940 socially conservative views that are more conservative than many of the groups they're

00:16:50.220 opposing. It's a sort of bizarre situation where this is overlooked purely for what amounts to ethnic

00:16:58.940 or religious grievance.

00:17:01.660 Yes, I mean, what you got here is this marriage of convenience on the one hand,

00:17:07.500 but also the coming together of movements that are motivated by their victim outlook, their identity

00:17:17.740 obsession, and their absolute hatred over anything that's to do with the accomplishment of Western

00:17:24.860 civilization. And it is really a very negative, destructive force that has kind of emerged fairly

00:17:33.660 recently and has acquired quite a large momentum within sections of European society.

00:17:42.380 It's also interesting as well that it's happening largely in liberal democracies, because particularly

00:17:50.060 in the case of English liberalism, that was born out of the need to prevent religious sectarianism.

00:17:58.620 That's where I at least would draw that thread, because of the English Civil War and the conflict

00:18:04.860 between the Protestants and Catholics. And yet, within our liberal democracies, we're now seeing 0.99

00:18:10.780 a revival of that just between different groups. It's no longer the Protestants and the Catholics,

00:18:14.860 actually, they're seemingly getting along these days, at least far more than they used to. And this is,

00:18:21.900 to my mind, something that lots of Western European countries and perhaps even North American ones

00:18:29.260 shouldn't have to put up with. It's something that's been decided on our behalf by our political class,

00:18:34.300 whereas the opinion polling seems to suggest that nobody actually wants this sort of thing.

00:18:38.540 It is, yeah. But you have to remember that amongst our elites, particularly the ones that deal with

00:18:46.220 culture, liberalism has mutated into illiberalism. So liberalism no longer has got any virtues, because

00:18:54.860 intolerance itself is seen in a very suspicious kind of a way. How can you tolerate people like reform,

00:19:02.700 for example? At the same time, even free speech is seen as a kind of potentially a form of hate speech.

00:19:09.900 So all the liberal ideals that emerged in the 18th, 19th century are seen from a negative perspective

00:19:17.900 by these kinds of movements. And what's happened is that, unfortunately, they've been complicit

00:19:22.940 in creating this polarized political environment where, under the guise of multiculturalism,

00:19:30.860 we basically created a monstrous situation where there's no single culture that binds people together,

00:19:38.300 that creates the basis for any kind of national solidarity. And instead, what you've got

00:19:44.060 are a very kind of ghettoized conception of public life, where people only talk to people like themselves,

00:19:50.540 and where there's no possibility of a liberal meeting of minds.

00:19:55.900 Well, it's my understanding that this prior state of being, if you will, is only really possible when you

00:20:03.660 have what is dubbed a high trust society. And I think that you get to that sort of society,

00:20:11.660 although it's quite a woolly concept, in my opinion, through being able to create a sort of mental

00:20:17.980 notion of what other people are thinking. And any way you can really do that in any reliable sense

00:20:23.500 is if you have a certain degree of certainty as to what that other person is thinking. And I grew up

00:20:30.140 in a part of sort of almost rural South Devon, where everyone sort of knew each other, people said hello

00:20:37.020 to each other on the street. It's the sort of thing that people accuse reform of wanting to go back to.

00:20:44.540 And I think part of the reason that existed is that everyone knew that we were on the same sort of

00:20:51.980 page in living in a community. And it was quite a static community that didn't change too much.

00:20:57.660 And I think these are the sort of conditions that you can breed a society where this is possible.

00:21:02.780 And with things like mass immigration, as well as just having economic problems that compel

00:21:11.900 people to move within a country to certain areas, you see lots of people moving to London

00:21:16.700 from areas similar to where I grew up and adopting that local culture. That seems to be what seems to

00:21:23.900 be contributing to this sort of thing. What do you think?

00:21:26.860 I mean, I wouldn't go as far as you do. I think that you can have what you call a high trust

00:21:33.660 environment, which is another way of saying that people that you meet are people that you almost know

00:21:42.060 instinctively what they're thinking. There's a taken for granted assumption. You take for granted that

00:21:48.380 if I do this, that's how you're going to react. And you take for granted that when you go in the shop

00:21:54.060 and you smile at somebody, they're going to smile back. And old ladies take for granted that if they're 1.00

00:22:00.860 carrying a lot of shopping, you're going to help them out. So there's all these different

00:22:04.940 sort of ways of being that are integral to that. Now, I don't think that you need to have a static society

00:22:12.780 for that to be perpetuated. You can have a dynamic society that is evolving and developing. So long as

00:22:20.460 the cultural underpinnings are there, and there's no reason why those cultural underpinnings of a

00:22:27.580 taken for granted environment need to be detached from a new world. The problem occurs when, and this is

00:22:34.860 what happens in Britain, for example, when the people that ought to be the guardians of those cultural norms

00:22:40.700 and cultural ideals, wake up one morning and decide that they are no longer signing up to it. They no

00:22:47.500 longer are prepared to uphold those ideals. On the contrary, they play an important role in demonizing

00:22:54.540 it and undermining it and pathologizing it. And I think that what we're forgetting is that when you have

00:23:00.780 the guardians of society essentially opening the doors to what are in effect alien ideals

00:23:07.420 and alien values, then you have a lot of trouble. And the trouble comes from their decision to play

00:23:14.940 that role. And then later on, the very same people who open the doors will then promote multiculturalism

00:23:21.580 and will see that as being somehow more superior than what they call monocultural life in Devon.

00:23:28.300 As if somehow people in Devon are so narrow-minded that they are incapable of appreciating other cultures,

00:23:37.420 or even of engaging with other cultures, which is obviously a caricature.

00:23:43.100 I will concede that it doesn't need to be as static as I perhaps emphasized, but I'm interested

00:23:49.100 who you might put the sort of label of cultural guardians. Who do you mean by that sort of term?

00:24:01.500 Well, what I really mean by that is if you look at the British case, we used to have what was called

00:24:07.900 the British establishment. And the British establishment was more or less intact until

00:24:13.500 the late 1980s. And it consisted of people who, in a sense, went to the same kind of schools,

00:24:21.260 went to the same universities. And even if they didn't go to the same schools and universities,

00:24:27.260 signed up to a particular cultural outlook about who they were, what it meant to be British. They would

00:24:34.060 understand that the history of Britain was something to be proud of, that the ability of Britain to

00:24:42.780 to fight Germany in the Second World War and to resist fascism was really a worthwhile episode. And

00:24:50.620 they could look back it prior to a lot of other achievements. And they would kind of run all the

00:24:55.820 different institutions, everything from universities to schools, to the media, to our theaters, and then

00:25:04.300 also in the private sector in business and banks and all these other institutions. And they would be one big

00:25:11.900 established. Now, within that, you had people who specialized in dominating our cultural institutions.

00:25:18.780 And I think that these people in particular, somewhere along the line, particularly in the late 60s,

00:25:24.460 early 70s, took the decision that they would no longer transmit the ideals into which they were

00:25:32.140 socialized, internet for children. And all of a sudden, the schools changed what they were teaching.

00:25:40.140 Instead of telling children that they should be proud of being British, they began to indicate that

00:25:46.300 being British was problematic, that there was something deeply flawed in our history. And in the theaters,

00:25:53.900 in the cinemas and in music and elsewhere, a very similar script was being written and promoted to

00:26:01.500 the point at which there was almost a self-conscious attempt to distance society from its historical legacy,

00:26:09.980 to really kind of detach young people from any connection with what had gone on beforehand,

00:26:15.660 and create a situation almost like a moral vacuum, into which all their newfangled ideals could kind

00:26:23.500 of, you know, sort of rush into. And I think that's what created the situation where

00:26:28.300 that a relatively homogeneous set of cultural assumptions gradually unraveled, and people who

00:26:35.100 held onto those cultural assumptions were always ridiculed and made fun of. Somehow they're nostalgic,

00:26:42.940 they are unable to change, and they are really living in the past. They have outdated ideas. Instead of

00:26:48.780 understanding that there was something inherently valuable about those kind of links, about those connections,

00:26:56.220 and certainly that our younger generation had to learn from the experience of the past,

00:27:01.500 instead of just simply in a one-dimensional way rejected.

00:27:04.460 No, I think that's a perfectly reasonable perspective. And in fact, I can look at

00:27:11.100 media from, say, the 70s or 80s, even back to the 60s, that explicitly pokes fun, even in a sort of

00:27:20.380 good-natured way. But it sort of adds up to what your average person might identify with, culturally

00:27:28.940 speaking. And it did seem to start some sort of change in culture, as you're alluding to. And

00:27:42.300 on the topic of culture, actually, I wanted to talk about one of the topics of one of your books,

00:27:47.500 a culture of fear, which you wrote in 1997, as well as you've also written quite extensively about

00:27:53.500 fear as a concept, because you wrote in 2018, how fear works as well. And I wanted to bring in

00:27:59.820 something from the psychological literature that I'm familiar with, that evoking fear makes

00:28:07.260 individuals both more susceptible to political messaging, as well as increases their desire for

00:28:14.220 authoritarian leadership, more generally. And this seems to be a sort of quirk, if you will,

00:28:19.900 of human psychology that has increasingly propagated in the sort of public consciousness. People are

00:28:28.700 aware that this exists. And first of all, do you agree with this characterization? And second of all,

00:28:36.220 do you think that this is actually being increasingly knowingly capitalized upon by political elites today?

00:28:44.220 Yeah, I'm always very suspicious of arguments that see fear as working in that kind of

00:28:53.820 causal way, that it's a very obvious effect, because the important thing is that fear itself can have

00:29:03.420 many, many consequences. Fear can bring people together. As you know, the fear of the enemy, for

00:29:10.700 example, or even in, you know, from disaster studies, when people really are scared,

00:29:16.300 communities exhibit far greater solidarity than when everything is all right. So the consequences

00:29:22.540 of fear are manifold. But I think what is a problem, what is distinct about our regime of fear is that

00:29:31.500 fear has acquired this free-floating dimension where it can attach itself to anything.

00:29:36.140 And therefore, when you have so much talk about fear and the obvious side of that, when safety

00:29:44.940 is elevated into this foundational value in our society, then what it does is it kind of dispossesses

00:29:52.140 people of their agency, dispossesses people of their capacity to deal with the challenges of our time.

00:30:03.020 Because fear is normalized. More or less, we're told that unless you fear, you're not responsible,

00:30:09.180 you're not a responsible individual. And I think in my writings, what I've tried to sort of look at is

00:30:13.820 the way in which this kind of fear culture has become institutionalized. And it's this empowering

00:30:20.780 effect is what I'm really concerned about, because it basically means that we now have this funny

00:30:26.300 situation, well, not funny, grotesque situation, where like this morning on the Today program, people are arguing that it's wrong to examine kids

00:30:35.500 because it makes them stressful and they become fearful, not understanding that sometimes it is not a bad thing

00:30:44.620 to fear the results of an exam, especially if you haven't done very much work for it. Those are entirely

00:30:49.900 okay, normal kind of reactions. But when we're told that fear has this paralyzing effect upon you,

00:30:57.900 then we're almost inciting people to feel weak and vulnerable and powerless.

00:31:02.540 And that's really what I'm particularly concerned about, because that kind of powerless psychology,

00:31:09.900 that sense of not being in control, is what encourages people to become members of identity

00:31:16.940 groups who all feel that they're victims. They all feel that they've been put upon and they haven't got the

00:31:21.980 power to change the world because they've been history's victims. So I think in that sense,

00:31:29.100 it's in that way that the culture of fear today has this very corrosive effect on public life.

00:31:37.340 Because to sort of reiterate what you're saying and sort of to clarify part of my question,

00:31:44.620 fear response, of course, is located in the amygdala, which is pretty close to the brainstem.

00:31:50.460 And as a sort of rule of thumb, the closer to the center of the brain something is,

00:31:54.460 the more core and the older it is to human functioning. And therefore, it's fair to say

00:32:00.540 that it's a very deeply rooted aspect of our psychology. And therefore, it can be quite

00:32:07.740 difficult to override. Although that's not to say it's impossible, because of course, I quite like

00:32:13.500 this almost Buddhist notion, it's sort of an Eastern philosophical notion, that once you start to

00:32:19.420 understand the circumstances of an emotion, it's particularly true of anger, I think. Once you

00:32:24.780 understand all of the factors surrounding it, then the emotion starts to disappear in a sense.

00:32:32.620 At least this is something I've found in myself. I don't know whether you necessarily agree,

00:32:36.860 but I think the same is true of fear. Once you understand the situation, it's far easier to resist

00:32:44.060 that initial harmful aspect of fear. And I think that were people to approach fear in that way of

00:32:51.900 it's a challenge to be overcome, and something that once you understand it, it seems manageable,

00:32:57.660 and it restores agency, then this problem would probably diminish, I imagine.

00:33:04.460 Yeah, I think you're right. I think that if fear is the challenge to tackle,

00:33:08.060 especially when it's very clearly focused on the target of what's scaring us, that I think it is

00:33:18.540 entirely manageable. The problem to me is not fear. It's what we call anxiety. And anxiety is much more

00:33:25.260 diffused than fear, because anxiety is something that is intangible. You just worry about things,

00:33:32.060 all kinds of different things that are in the air. And that is much more difficult to deal with,

00:33:37.500 because you cannot really, it's like a bar of soap that goes right through your hands,

00:33:42.380 whereas fear has got a tangibility that you can engage with and deal with.

00:33:46.860 I know within my sort of research specialization of behavioral decision-making that

00:33:53.980 risk taking under uncertainty, those conditions are sort of optimal for maximizing irrational responses,

00:34:01.420 and that uncertainty and risk do seem to play a very important role in human decision-making. And I

00:34:09.900 think that with increasing understandings of this, I think that there is going to be some degree of

00:34:17.180 political utilization of it. I know that the behavioral insight team in the UK, which was set up in I think

00:34:25.740 2010 by David Cameron, and now it was sold off. It was a government apparatus sold off

00:34:32.700 as a private enterprise, which is already a little bit concerning, but now it operates within the space

00:34:40.060 of 14 years in 50 different countries. In my mind, that sort of skyrocketing of that enterprise seems to

00:34:46.540 suggest that there's perhaps great utility in the minds of ruling elites to use these behavioral economic insights

00:34:58.220 to control populations. It sounds a little bit conspiratorial. I don't think it's necessarily in that sense,

00:35:05.100 but simply it's a new way of understanding how to govern is perhaps a more sensible way of putting it.

00:35:12.700 But it is also concerning because that suggests that there's going to be behavioral interventions that

00:35:20.300 are beyond our awareness, and that raises lots of ethical questions. Is this something that

00:35:24.300 would perhaps concern you? Not as much as you. I mean, I think the politics of behavior is a very real

00:35:32.060 phenomenon. And I know that the Nudge Unit, which is what you're discussing, has got all these ambitions

00:35:41.500 to not just to do things that we might not otherwise do. And they make all kinds of claims as to how

00:35:48.940 effective they are in terms of influencing our individual decision making. And obviously, it is

00:35:58.700 obviously a concern when you have governments doing that kind of manipulative sort of activities, which

00:36:07.820 goes against the whole spirit of open democratic debate and discussion, because basically trying to

00:36:14.300 avoid having an argument or winning the argument for this particular policy by going around it.

00:36:20.460 So I totally agree that those things are a problem. I happen to think that they're not nearly as effective

00:36:27.180 as many people think they are. I mean, we saw that in the discussion with Cambridge Analytics, that

00:36:32.300 despite their gross claims that they have influenced this and that, that was a

00:36:36.140 a bit of a fantasy. So I don't think that that kind of psychological manipulation is what I really worry

00:36:45.660 about. What I do worry about is something else, which is that, you know, with the politics of

00:36:52.460 behavior, you've got other aspects of it, which are potentially much more corrosive. For example,

00:36:58.540 as you saw during the COVID experience, you had a situation where public health became entirely

00:37:06.300 politicized and political life became medicalized at the same time. And when you basically use health

00:37:15.420 in that kind of instrumental way, you kind of weaponize health and health concerns,

00:37:21.820 then their effect is potentially sort of much more effective for a very simple reason that it's,

00:37:31.180 you know, when you, when you basically medicalize political life, you can't really argue against it.

00:37:37.500 And then when it isn't medicalized, because when it's not medicalized, you just say, well,

00:37:41.500 they're wrong. I'm right. It's a debate. Let's, let's have a debate. When you have the so-called experts,

00:37:49.100 you know, scientists and everybody else saying that this is what science says, this is,

00:37:53.740 this is what you need to do if you're going to have a healthy society, and you come back saying,

00:37:58.780 well, I don't agree with you. How can you, Frank Ferretti, who's, who can, you know,

00:38:03.980 knows nothing about medicine, claim to have the same moral status as we do. So that kind of

00:38:11.740 social engineering, you know, is much more dangerous for me than the,

00:38:15.660 the, the nudge aspect of it, which I think is, you know, is a problem, but by no means as,

00:38:22.380 as corrosive and as, as, as, as dangerous as the use of public health for, you know, political purposes.

00:38:30.220 You actually presaged my next question there, because I was going to ask about the COVID pandemic and

00:38:37.020 the sort of use of those sorts of methods and, and the use of fear in particular. And I was going to

00:38:45.660 mention the fact that there was a project called Project Fear. And I thought that was rather on the

00:38:53.340 nose, really. And I was going to bring up BBC coverage in particular, and there were things

00:38:59.500 that I spotted at the time with my sort of, um, psychology background and particularly, um,

00:39:06.060 focus on research is that they provided figures of cases and deaths without a frame of reference.

00:39:12.380 And this sort of capitalizes on the human inability to understand probability, particularly rationally.

00:39:18.060 And this is something that has been demonstrable in lots of different domains. And it's quite

00:39:22.780 unfortunate, but once you sort of gain a level of expertise, you'd be, you're much more able to

00:39:28.780 quantify certain likelihoods, but there were examples of things like 40,000 dead and where

00:39:35.180 that might be useful, um, in comparison would be against say flu deaths in previous years, because

00:39:41.260 then that allows people to, um, sort of have a frame of reference to understand it. But 40,000 as

00:39:47.100 a number in isolation sounds scary. It's a, it's something that it sounds like a lot of people. It's

00:39:55.580 more people than, you know, and I think that were it to be put into perspective of percentage of the

00:40:03.340 population, say people might be able to have a bit more of a rational understanding of it. And this was,

00:40:09.820 I think, knowingly done, um, to encourage people to adhere to the lockdown policies.

00:40:17.740 Yeah. I mean, the lockdown policies were, uh, very, very clearly, uh, uh, sort of choreographed in such

00:40:24.620 a way that, uh, uh, it had the maximum effect on people's anxieties that you, you basically made

00:40:33.260 people anxious, as anxious as possible in order to, uh, get the right kind of results from your

00:40:39.820 perspective. Um, but yeah. And, and, and to that extent, that was a very unique, uh, almost like a

00:40:46.300 laboratory like moment when you had the systematic application of the politics of fear used in such

00:40:54.220 a way. And, and every psychology being used and cultural politics being called upon, it was very,

00:41:01.260 you know, uh, kind of a very kind of, uh, uh, academically and intellectually, uh, sort of founded

00:41:09.500 project, uh, that people are still finding out about.

00:41:13.580 Yeah. And one of the things that surprised myself and lots of other people is just how

00:41:19.660 much adherence to the rules there were. Yeah. Just the, the level of adherence to these,

00:41:25.500 these policies seem to suggest that these, um, methods are incredibly effective. And I think that

00:41:31.660 that this is something that is going to be used as an example for governance in, in the future,

00:41:37.100 I think, um, because of, uh, the unprecedented level of obedience, I suppose you could call it.

00:41:46.940 Maybe not. I mean, I, I think you're right. You know, there were, I was often quite surprised by

00:41:54.140 how a sectional society was almost, uh, demanding even more lockdown measures than existed.

00:42:01.900 But then, uh, the other side of this is if you, I don't know if you remember, they were saying that

00:42:06.540 when this is all over, it's not going to be over. This is the new normal. And they were saying that

00:42:12.300 we may well be, you know, carrying on wearing masks. You know, we're not going to be shaking

00:42:17.340 hands with each other anymore. We're going to do like, you know, behave like in Asia, where people 1.00

00:42:21.500 don't have any physical contact with each other. So they kind of had this very dystopian view of the

00:42:26.220 future. And the interesting thing is that now when you talk to people, they almost forgotten about

00:42:32.060 COVID. It's like a memory, a bad memory. Yes. But it no longer influences most people's behavior,

00:42:41.500 which I think is a really good thing because it indicates that in the end we're human beings

00:42:46.860 and the love of life and the need to communicate and come close to each other

00:42:51.980 tends to override these technocratic attempts to insulate us from one another.

00:42:59.020 That is certainly a nice silver lining to draw from it because I suppose I hadn't really looked

00:43:03.020 at it before, but it does show you that human beings are adaptable enough and versatile enough

00:43:08.700 that we can deal with very adverse circumstances and then sort of return to the norm for want of a

00:43:16.140 better way of putting it, which I suppose is quite an optimistic thing in a way because it suggests that

00:43:22.300 however wrong things can get, we can at least return to some semblance of what we know, which

00:43:29.820 I suppose there's a whole host of psychological things I could unpick there, but I'm going to move

00:43:35.260 on to something slightly different. So in one of your interviews you were talking about

00:43:41.580 I suppose what might be described as the woke left and that's one of those terms that I think

00:43:47.580 is also ill-defined and is very difficult to pin down that is used by the right leftwards,

00:43:56.540 as well as some people in the centre ground as well. But conceding that aside, one of the things that

00:44:04.220 I've noticed is that as part of this hatred of the West and a sort of a rejection of the notion that

00:44:17.340 strength is a good thing is that these supposed woke types have begun to venerate what amounts to

00:44:25.180 weakness in a sense. I'm not entirely sure whether this is what you were alluding to when I heard you in

00:44:31.660 a previous interview, but it seemed to ring true with some of my readings of their own literature, if you will.

00:44:43.740 Yeah, well I think this is based on the fact that from their point of view the meaning of personhood

00:44:52.460 is very different than the classical definition of what it needs to be a human being.

00:44:57.500 So from their definition of a person who they see people as not being able to deal with challenges,

00:45:05.820 that challenges they see as principally harmful or at the very least traumatic,

00:45:12.940 at the very least deserving of some kind of psychological diagnosis. So they have a

00:45:18.220 very medicalised view of a human being which is more like that of a potential patient

00:45:23.980 as opposed to an agent. And I think that kind of definition of what a person is means that they

00:45:32.540 tend to regard people's weaknesses as the default way of being, as the normal way of being. And not

00:45:41.260 only that, but they sometimes go a step further and they basically argue that to even talk about normal

00:45:47.180 is wrong because it assumes that there's something wrong with being abnormal. And then having eradicated

00:45:53.980 the distinction between normal and abnormal, they then go on a step further and they say there's

00:45:59.660 something actually quite attractive and nice about being abnormal or rejecting heteronormativity

00:46:07.020 or rejecting marriage or rejecting your family or rejecting all those things that you thought

00:46:14.380 were part of normality. And I think in that sense, there is ultimately this

00:46:21.900 almost like this moralised conception of weakness where the weaker you are, the more you can claim victim

00:46:29.900 status. The more put upon you are, the better person you are. So there's a kind of an attempt to gain

00:46:37.820 moral authority to the amount that you supposedly have suffered. I think that the moral aspect of it is

00:46:46.620 very central to it because in this day and age, it seems like having moral authority is, at least at an

00:46:56.700 interpersonal level, one of the best kinds of authority you can have. Because generally speaking,

00:47:03.420 people are suspicious of people who wield authority in more traditional senses. And so there's a certain

00:47:14.140 utility to it. It gives you a greater right, for example, to lay claim to resources, both cultural,

00:47:23.740 emotional and financial. And some of the psychological researchers seem to indicate that, in fact,

00:47:30.460 that there are people who have noticed this trend and are predisposed to be a bit, I suppose,

00:47:37.500 Machiavellian in the pejorative sense. And they use it to their own ends because they're more like

00:47:43.980 to have these dark triad traits that indicate some form of psychopathy. And I'm not saying that's all of

00:47:49.580 them, of course, because that'd be a blanket generalization. But it seems to be that there

00:47:54.300 is an element of that that people notice and capitalize upon as well.

00:47:58.300 Yeah, I think there is that. And that's really why identity politics has become so important,

00:48:08.460 the whole politicization of identity. And the reason why you then have so much

00:48:13.820 care being devoted towards building this hierarchy of different identities. So I think that's really

00:48:23.260 very, very significant. And there is this, what in sociology we call moral enterprise, where you basically

00:48:31.900 are trying to gain virtue points by the way you operate within public life itself.

00:48:37.900 Yeah, of course, the kind of moral dimension of this is more superficial than real, because what it's

00:48:47.020 based upon is a kind of moral authority that's not really founded on any kind of system or morality,

00:48:55.980 but just simply on the demand that, you know, I demand, you know, because of all my suffering,

00:49:03.260 I demand to be taken more seriously than you or anybody else who has not had undergone that fate.

00:49:12.780 Well, I think that moral claims to resources tend to be seen as more legitimate than other ones. It's

00:49:19.500 sort of similar in a way to how we refer to our military as the Department of Defense,

00:49:27.100 that's because we're framing it as if to say, well, we're defending ourselves. So we're preempting

00:49:34.220 the fact that we're going to have to justify our actions. And I think that history of

00:49:42.700 the 20th century and even Iraq and Afghanistan seems to suggest that it's not always the case that

00:49:51.740 it's a matter of defense.

00:49:53.900 Are you saying that you'd rather it was called the war office like it used to be?

00:50:00.060 I think it's a lot more honest.

00:50:04.540 Yeah, I think that there's some linguistic subversion going on there. And I think it's

00:50:09.420 already presaging the need to justify one's actions. And I think it's a very deliberate thing.

00:50:17.820 You've discussed before the over-medicalization of normal human behavior.

00:50:21.580 And this is something I agree is quite extensive and is actually quite commonly discussed as an

00:50:28.780 ethical point in clinical psychology. And yet we don't really see much change in practitioners'

00:50:35.420 approach to this problem. You still see similar rates of, say, antidepressant prescriptions in

00:50:42.140 places like the United States where it's rife.

00:50:44.220 Do you think that this is a matter of a practice being entrenched within current medical professionals?

00:50:51.340 Or is this due to what could be called, I'm sort of making this up, although I'm sure it's been used before, a medical industrial complex?

00:50:59.740 Yeah, it used to be argued that it's because of the medical industrial complex. I reject that. I think that

00:51:08.780 there's an inner drive within our culture towards the medicalization of human experience where we

00:51:16.860 are redefining what used to be called existential problems as psychological ones. And I think in

00:51:22.780 particularly within psychology itself, there's an imperative towards a kind of concept creep where you

00:51:30.540 basically find more and more sort of issues that you can create a diagnosis around. So the number of

00:51:41.740 diagnosis is constantly proliferating and the number of presentations for psychological problems is ever

00:51:50.220 expanding to the point at which year on, year on, you know, it's almost like the more we talk about

00:51:56.700 psychological problems, the more we invest in psychological resources, the more psychological

00:52:02.140 problems we have. It's like an ever expanding kind of process. And in my writings, I make the point that actually

00:52:08.860 psychology or the medicalization side of psychology, not the scientific one, has been complicit in

00:52:16.540 creating a public health problem. Because I think our mental health crisis is a case of self-fulfilling

00:52:23.260 prophecy. If you tell people that they are ill, then inevitably, sooner or later, they will feel ill.

00:52:29.340 And particularly if you tell young people at the age of 6, 7, 8 or 9, that their reaction is really a

00:52:40.940 lack of attention deficit or that they've got a variety of other kinds of diagnosis, then they're

00:52:46.300 going to play the part that's been assigned to them. And I think that's one of the most damaging,

00:52:51.260 most corrosive influences that's working away in our society.

00:52:55.420 Yeah. And I think that there's also an aspect, and I've noticed this talking to people who have

00:53:01.340 been diagnosed with mental illnesses, that once you provide them with a label, they externalize it

00:53:09.100 in the language that they use. And this was something that was a bit jarring to me at first, because people

00:53:14.940 would say, my anxiety, or my depression. But they're adding a word to their own psychology there, aren't

00:53:27.020 they? They're saying, this is something other than me. And I think it's that they obviously feel

00:53:33.660 negative emotion about their circumstances. They want to distance themselves. Their ideal self doesn't

00:53:39.900 have this anxiety or this depression. And so you can understand why people are susceptible to it,

00:53:45.100 because they're trying to use language to almost save face, if you will. But in doing so, they're also

00:53:54.540 stopping themselves from taking agency. It's up to them, ultimately, to make the changes that will

00:54:03.260 improve their situation. And I think that there's also, once you think in those terms, then a book on

00:54:10.140 philosophy might have just as much healing power, if you will, as anti-psychotic medication. In fact,

00:54:18.940 I would say it's more healthy in some cases. I know certainly when I was a teenager, I didn't really

00:54:25.500 know what the point of doing anything was at this point. I was a bit myopic. And rather than going to

00:54:30.860 a therapist, I picked up French existentialist philosophy instead, which probably didn't help

00:54:35.900 the problem much, particularly reading Sartre. But approaching it in that way, I think, is far

00:54:43.820 more healthy. And having come out the other side, I can appreciate the benefit of seeing it as a problem

00:54:49.500 to be solved just by tackling it. And I think that that's something that we've moved away from as a

00:54:55.180 culture, which is a bit of a shame, really. Well, it's more than a shame. It's a tragedy.

00:55:00.860 Because when you basically adopt that kind of orientation towards life, then you basically

00:55:09.100 undermine your own capacity to deal with issues. And instead of trying to cultivate your strengths,

00:55:15.500 you're cultivating your weaknesses. And I think that's what sections of the medical profession are

00:55:21.020 doing. And maybe not consciously, but they're making us feel fragile, rather than trying to get

00:55:31.180 us to look at our strengths and find out how we can be resilient in the face of a lot of difficulties.

00:55:38.060 And for the future of society, we need to somehow have a paradigm shift away from the paradigm of

00:55:46.060 vulnerability towards one of resilience where we can, we expect to cope with things and to bounce back

00:55:53.100 and to deal with disappointment and to deal with pain.

00:55:58.060 Can I just say, I got to go now?

00:56:00.220 That's okay. No, I was only expecting you to stay about an hour. So I would like to thank you very

00:56:07.340 much for your time. And thank you for talking to me. This has been really interesting. I've really enjoyed

00:56:12.300 the conversation, hopefully. Those were some interesting questions.

00:56:17.660 Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to you. It was great. Yeah.

00:56:19.980 Thank you very much. And you have a lovely day. And goodbye.

00:56:24.460 Take care. Bye bye.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 15, 2024

Interview with Professor Frank Furedi

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