PREVIEW： Book Club #66 ｜ James O'Brien's How Not To Be Wrong
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Summary
How Not to Be Wrong: The Art of Changing Your Mind by James O'Brien Book Club Edition. How Not to be Wrong is the final book in the How To Be Wrong Trilogy, and it's a dark one. It's the final chapter in the trilogy, and in this episode, we're taking a look at how not to be wrong.
Transcript
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Hello there, friends, and I think it's time to finish off the trilogy, shall we?
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It's time to look at how not to be wrong, the art of changing your mind,
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Now, I have covered with Carl and Josh now being replaced for this episode by Luca Johnson.
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Thank you. I think this is my real initiation, isn't it?
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Yes, this is the trial by fire, is talking about James O'Brien for half an hour to an hour.
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And this will be a shorter one because we've covered the other two books in this unholy trilogy,
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which are How to Be Right, which is his book on how to berate your friends and family
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into becoming an insufferable Britlib centrist, and How They Broke Britain,
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which I was hoping to give some kind of insight into the legitimate criticisms that leftists may have
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towards some right-wing figures, like actually going through their history,
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pointing out legislation and actions they've taken which have reasonably damaged the country
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in very legitimate ways, but it was instead just James O'Brien whining about people that he didn't like
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for personal reasons, this is going over the same kind of arguments.
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There's nothing in here in terms of like what he's talking about in the subjects that isn't
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well-trodden ground, especially there is a chapter at the end of here called Trans.
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It's the second to last chapter before the conclusion.
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And if you remember the How to Be Right book club, there was a chapter on Trans in that as well,
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What is more interesting in this book, outside of the arguments, which aren't what I'm going
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to be focusing on, just assume you'd be correct, they are the same
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bad faith, low information, low IQ arguments that we've seen in the other ones.
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Just a quick thing, is he still like putting transcripts of his LBC chats?
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Yes, what's most interesting about this book is in the way that How to Be Right,
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How to Be Right was about how to berate and morally grandstand to your friends and family.
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How not to be wrong is much darker than that, because it's how to berate and gaslight yourself
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In a really, really dark way, what you're reading here is essentially is a transcript of a mind
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Before I get into any more details on that, I will point out, as Carl said, there is still
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So not only is the overall page count lower, this one's 219 pages, about 30% of the book,
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65 roughly, of those pages are reproductions of the calls from his shows, or letters from
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One's a reproduction of a large promo that he delivered at the beginning of a show back
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So a lot of this is unoriginal material, like the same one.
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It might be a little bit off, because one of them, here again is where it gets very,
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very dark, is not a reproduction of a transcript of a call.
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One of these is a new original piece that he wrote for this, where he is creating a call
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between himself as presenter versus his own internal monologue, where he berates himself
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via this fake call into taking on more progressive, more liberal opinions, whereas clearly through
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his internal monologue, he would still be on the left, but there's a part of him that is
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still heavily influenced, somewhat at least, by his, like, Christian-Catholic upbringing into
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having some kind of traditional values, which he feels to be right, but which his alternative
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call presenter persona berates him into abandoning.
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I'll go through it chapter by chapter and highlight some of the stuff.
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Luca, if you'd like to just flip through, we've done this the last few times, I've made
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There's one here where you've just got a note that says, nope.
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Again, the actual arguments that he's presenting are the same that you've seen in all of his
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other books, so they can easily be dismissed through a basic rudimentary understanding of
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either human nature or the facts of what he's talking about, which is why it's very easy
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to just go through the margins and write, that's wrong, you're lying, various expletives.
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But so let's start off with the introduction is just him introducing everything.
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He's letting everybody know that he's such a good person.
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He's lampshading all of this with, if I get anything wrong, just know it's because I'm
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Yeah, I've not yet become as left-wing on some subjects as I should be.
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Yeah, the book on how not to be wrong hasn't yet been written, that's why I am writing it.
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Yeah, and it's this very strange perspective, which I think we can see through all Brit
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Libs, Lib Dem types like this, which is that your own instincts are inherently wrong.
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The instincts that you've been developing through generations and generations of hereditary
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and evolution are somehow honed to be the exact opposite of what they should be, because what
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they should be is towing the leftist regime line on every subject.
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And if, like James O'Brien, there's still just a small holdover bit of you, which is
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Like, for instance, one of the later chapters is called Tattoos, Private Schools and Marriage.
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And he says that he has this kind of instinct, it's chapter five if you want to go to it.
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He's got this instinctive feeling that he doesn't like tattoos and doesn't think they look
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He thinks that private slash public schools, as they are in the UK, are a good thing and
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shouldn't be taxed too much and they shouldn't be taken away from the options of parents who
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And he thinks that relationships based around marriage are more legitimate than ones based
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So he holds those views instinctually, and I can imagine they're a holdover from his Catholic
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If you can pass me the book, I'll just read it here.
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It seems unlikely that the three subjects under scrutiny here have ever been lumped together
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quite like this before, but for me at least, they have something important in common.
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So literally, literally, what you get there is this weakness in character, which is that
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I feel this way, but my liberal pals at afternoon dinner parties disagree with me and use my own
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tactics from how to be right to morally berate me about them.
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So I must go internally and convince myself that they must be right because I'm not being open and
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What's interesting there, though, is that a preference for private schools, tattoos...
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These aren't actually, like, yes or no questions.
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But, like, they're not, like, deductively true or false.
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These are more based in what we feel is the right way to do things.
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I mean, I would say with tattoos, and this is from somebody who is engaged to a woman
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But with a lot of people who I've seen with tattoos, you can tell from the kind of tattoos
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that they get and the reasoning that they give for them, even with my missus in a few
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cases, it's literally just spur-of-the-moment, quick judgment.
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Which can show a certain kind of character, which is that you are impulsive.
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You're impulsive, quick-to-snap judgments, which isn't always going to be a good reflection
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And that's why you can have those inbuilt prejudices.
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It's not that it doesn't have validity, but what it is is what we're aiming to accomplish,
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What we are aiming to accomplish is a certain level of standards, right?
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We're trying to cultivate a certain kind of character, right?
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But the kind of character we're trying to cultivate is exclusionary, right?
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It's like, no, we believe there are certain kinds of character that are superior to other
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Now, these are all aesthetic and prejudicial judgments of our own.
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Because, I mean, you know, technically, it's not necessarily that someone who has tattoos
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It's just a general indicator that there are other issues.
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But, like, logically or, like, mathematically, you know, you can't deduce one from the other.
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What we do is we take a kind of holistic approach to the subject and make these kind of prejudicial
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And it's generally correct for us to do this because we want to cultivate the certain kind
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He can't say, oh, you wanting someone who's, you know, married without tattoos, that's wrong.
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All you can say is, I don't share that prejudice.
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Well, he says inherently that, you know, he's got a couple of daughters and that he will be
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very unhappy and he won't be able to help it when they...
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It's just set, it's destined to happen, that they will get tattoos at some point.
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And that he will be unhappy, but he'll be wrong.
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He'll be wrong to be trying to set standards for his daughters, which is the opposite attack
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that you should take as a father, especially a father of daughters, which is you need to
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You can't just let your children walk all over you because, you know, children are very
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They'll just do what they want unless you set the boundaries for them, and they'll keep
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pushing those boundaries unless you enforce those boundaries.
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So actually, if he actually follows through with the kind of parenting that he's going
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to go through here, and this feels like a very personal way to go about it, but this
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He's going to be setting his daughters up to make bad decisions in the future if he doesn't
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set those and enforce those standards right now.
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And he also says that, you know, he feels bad that when he sees his friends who aren't
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married, that he feels like his relationship is in some way better than that.
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Yeah, you've made a far stronger commitment than they have.
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But again, he posts, unlike the last book where he's reproducing these calls in which he's
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the one berating the evil bigot, he's the one who's taking the soapbox and standing
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on it and letting everybody know what a good person is, he's the one taking the reactionary
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And he's going, oh, I'm not quite so sure about that.
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But there's something in my gut that tells me I disagree with you.
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And he's the one getting browbeaten about these positions.
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The Berkey in defense of prejudice is so true, though.
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So for anyone who doesn't know, basically, Burke pointed out that the stock of wisdom
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of any individual man is actually relatively small.
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It's informed by his personal prejudices and biases, particularly his prejudices, but his
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But prejudice is the collective stock of wisdom that's been passed down to us through the
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And so it's gone through many hands and through a long process of trial and error to find
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that actually that's probably not good, even if we can't rationally explain on a
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If the general trend has been against it, then there's got to be a reason for that.
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And so it's probably safe to actually trust the prejudice in that case.
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And actually, it's hard to think of a prejudice in which that's not kind of true.
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Even coming down to just different things being appropriate for one sex more than the other
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However, I can appreciate the fact that generally they're a masculine thing and that they've
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And but now it's because, you know, we can't, you know, we can't break.
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Well, it'd be sexist to say that, you know, they were more for one than the other.
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Then the women have to be entitled to them, too.
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Yeah, I was going to say, I personally like them.
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But the thing is, I actually agree with the prejudice against tattoos.
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Appropriately, because I think he is quite a Berkian himself, Thomas Sowell has a very
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similar defense of prejudice in his book, Discriminations and Disparities, where he's
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taking it from more of an empirical stance on the amount of information that you can
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And he says, listen, in your day to day, if you're going around doing the thing that
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you're supposed to, golden rule, judging everybody purely as an individual, then not
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only are you going to put yourself at risk because you're going to be putting yourself
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closer to people who might have bad intentions for you, you're also simply on a logical level,
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not going to have enough time in the day to be able to do that kind of thing.
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So the prejudices that we have built up based on stereotypes will be correct nine times out
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of ten because they do give you an indication of the character of somebody.
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So if you see somebody who is in broad daylight, say, got a face covering in a hoodie looking
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like they're trying to hide themselves, you're better off avoiding them rather than going and
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approaching them and trying to make them your best friend.
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It's just a more efficient way to pass the information that we experience in our day to
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So you look at somebody with tattoos and yeah, you can think of exceptions like my missus,
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your missus, people who have good character who've chosen to do them for their own reasons.
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But again, nine times out of ten, the kind of people, especially when they have them all
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the way up their neck and on their face, you can see that and go, okay, you're somebody
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who kind of doesn't respect your own body in a way and makes these snap judgments and
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also snap judgments that pile on top of one another because you run out of space on the
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So there's a way to judge people off the back of that.
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But James O'Brien has decided that it's wrong to do so because that would be judgmental.
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But the thing is, like most of what we do every day is basically habitual anyway, right?
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What did you have for breakfast this morning, Luca?
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No rational calculation went into it whatsoever, right?
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I'm like, oh, I've got some olives and some hummus in the fridge.
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I'll just have a few of those before I walk to work, right?
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And it's just, you would, like, Thomas Sowell's absolutely right.
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You would have to spend so much of your day actually sitting down right now.
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I have to weigh up the pros and cons of both things and calculate what I'm going to do.
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You're prejudicial about the small things, so it's even more important that you're prejudicial
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And again, the fact that stereotype accuracy is so accurate all of the time just bolsters
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Where he's like, oh yeah, I had to go talk to my white mum and say, why didn't you talk
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