Douglas Murray on Why Identity Politics is Dangerous
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 11 minutes
Words per minute
160.66124
Harmful content
Misogyny
33
sentences flagged
Toxicity
47
sentences flagged
Hate speech
50
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of Trigonometry, we speak to Douglas Murray, journalist and author of The Madness of Crowds, about intersectionality, identity politics and identity politics in general. We discuss what identity politics is, why it's important, and why it needs to be talked about.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin. And this is a
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show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing
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about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our fantastic
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guest this week needs very little introduction. He's a journalist and an author of an upcoming
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book. In fact, it's out already, The Madness of Crowds. Douglas Murray, welcome back to
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trigonometry it's a great pleasure to be back with you well here we are we spoke to you only a few
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months ago and it seems things have evolved not only with you but with the world in general
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and one of the things we wanted to talk to you about the book which is absolutely fantastic i
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recommend it to anyone who's watching or listening to this is some of the bigger issues behind what
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you're talking about because you break it down you go into the gay the women the trans the race
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stuff but the bigger issue i think behind what you talk about in the book is we now we almost
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it's not that we don't we live in a post-truth society we almost live in an anti-truth society
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you know in a society in which saying things which are patently true scientifically verifiable
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has become dangerous yes yes that's right that's um that's really why i wanted to write the madness
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of crowds because i'm aware just as you're aware that there's an awful lot of things that we're
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expected to believe and certainly a lot of things we're expected to say which basically people don't
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believe. And, uh, I think that's a very unhealthy thing for society to do. I think it's an unhealthy
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state for any group of people to be in, but that's, that's good terrain for a writer like
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it is for a comedian because, you know, I, I've, I've developed this realization while writing the
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book that almost everybody is vulnerable. Um, when I started writing the madness of crowds and
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looking into all of the intersectionalism and all of this madness. I knew it had spilled out
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a long time ago from the American Academy, from Berkeley and these places. I knew it had gone
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a long way into the popular culture. I knew all of that. One of the things I was surprised at was
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the extent to which it has just washed across the corporate world, washed across places which you
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would think, you might not like, but you would have thought would have been grown-ups. Oh my
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Like, oh, no, they've all imbibed the whole thing.
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And what I realized was then that almost nobody could speak the truth.
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Nobody could even think aloud apart from, as it turns out,
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the small number of people who don't have a wobbly hierarchy above us.
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Because basically in this society at the moment, if you have a hierarchy above you,
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It is likely to, if a new demand is made of everyone today, to do it by tomorrow.
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And if you stand up against that, you're toast.
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So this weird thing is emerged where people who don't have a wobbly hierarchy are the only people able to say what everybody knows.
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And that turns out mainly to consist of writers and comedians.
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That is a, that's a perilous thing for a society.
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We might be really screwed if that's who we've got to rely on, but I think it is.
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And I think that people like you, people like me, have a strange, disproportionate burden
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And I'm just thrilled by the fact that that is happening.
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you know just in recent weeks we've seen dave chappelle break out on some of these things
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and we've seen a few other people do it and you know fine if if if the adults in the room all go
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mad and they tell the young people to go mad as well then maybe it's just a few comedians and
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writers who can say not doing it do you think that this in a way is a sort of divide and conquer
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There is one part of this that is a very straightforward post-Marxist agenda,
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The working class never did come up with the revolution properly.
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And they failed to totally transform human society
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and indeed made the biggest mess in history everywhere they tried it.
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And they're very, again, until I was reading all the texts on this, I was surprised that I was surprised I discovered them how frank some of the Marxists were in the 80s, even straightforward.
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They stated in terms, and I quote them, the working class let us down.
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And these will include women, sexual minorities, racial minorities, and we need to make them the vanguard of the revolution.
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so that's one group that's one group of things that are going on another group i would say are
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people for whom this is just brute politics you know the people who say you're not gay
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if you're gay and not a revolutionary marxist uh the people who say people aren't black anymore
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i have by the way i i i give in the race chapter a set of what i just regard as being
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unbelievably hilarious examples of this i think my favorite of which is you know the assumption
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that black is about being political which is such a racist idea and all these sort of woke figures
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do it um but my favorite my favorite one by the way i should tell you is is um the london school
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of economics has a um review of a book by thomas soul the um the amazing american academic and
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of a book of his, I think it was Society and His
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because there is this amazing, amazing thing where people get told they're not black if they
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have the wrong politics, just like some people told them they're not gay if they have the wrong
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politics. And some people are told they're not women if they have the wrong politics. Because
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of course, you would expect 50% of the species to have entirely lockstep views. And this is
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brute politics. This is nothing more. This is using identity groups as a battering ram for
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political gain. And I think it's disgusting, but we need to call it out. But the other group,
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so the final group on that is, and this is the one I know where I want to most address,
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is young people who believe this for perfectly good reasons. As in, you know, you're starting
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off in life. You are told that you live in an incredibly oppressive society. You don't have,
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as we don't have when we're growing up, much sense of historical comparison to make. You do tend to
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believe the things you're told by authority figures. And if the authority figures tell you
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that you live in an unbelievably patriarchal, racist, cis, sexist society, and so on, then
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you'll sort of imbibe that. And then you're told, you know, to find meaning in your life,
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you should fight against that and take on those forces and you should triumph over them and you
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should destroy them. I can see the attraction in it. And one of the necessary tasks, I think,
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will be to try to de-escalate those people and help them reorient their lives onto lives of
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greater meaning. Do you think part of this is the fact that we do live in a society where
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people talk about intergenerational unfairness? We live in a society post the crash, for example,
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where it's very difficult, and I've been saying this for a while now, to expect young people to
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be capitalists when they don't have a chance of having the one form of capital, the historically
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ordinary people have ever had, which is to own their own home. If we live in that society,
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I think it's going to be quite difficult to de-escalate and convince young people now that
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they don't live in that kind of society. Because if they look around, they feel like, well,
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maybe life is unfair in this way. Yeah. I say this in the introduction,
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that it's not clear why people who don't have any ability to accumulate capital will love
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capitalism. It's not clear why... Oh, it is clear to me, however, why if you don't think you,
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for instance, ever have a chance of owning a flat and apartment, you might find an ideology which
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claims that it can solve every inequity on earth has an appeal. It's obvious what the appeal could
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be. And I don't particularly blame people for falling into that, at least for a period.
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I think they should fall out of it if they can. But yes, I mean, the assumption, historically,
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I think we've all understood, haven't we, that if the economics goes bad, other things go bad
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in quite fast order. And one of the things I think I try to show in the madness of crowds is
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the economics went bad and we sort of pretended that that wouldn't have consequences.
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But I think that among the consequences of it is that bad ideas that were waiting in the wings
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flooded into the system because our immune system was low and we are we are suffering for that you
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know all this stuff when i started reading a few years ago the sort of the basics of what we now
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call intersectionism the academic bases for it i assumed i'd find you know impenetrable badly
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written, not that well argued, but serious texts. No. I mean, one of the most prominent
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foundational texts of intersectionism is by Peggy McIntosh. It's called Unpacking the Knapsack.
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And I urge people to have a look at it because it's a few pages long and it is just a list of
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assertions. It's not even an argument. It's a list of assertions. And that's where our idea
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I'd have thought they'd have done a bit of work.
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And you can show this in online activity among other things.
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In the last five years, it becomes absolutely the weaponized tool of politics.
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But as I say, it's happened for what I think is a clear historical reason, which is that we were vulnerable to such a movement.
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i mean we couldn't be the first human beings in history who had no explanation for what we should
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be doing on earth i mean you can get by with that it is my view you can get by with not having an
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explanation for what to do so long as the economics are going quite well as long as basically you're
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always getting richer and you you know every generation's richer than their parents and
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there were various ways around that we sort of coped with for a while or put out there for a
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while such as, well, it's true, it might be harder for this generation to get on the housing ladder
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than their parents, but they've got iPhones. Some of that might do it, some of it clearly doesn't.
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But this thing about meaning, about what are we actually doing, you can have the distractions,
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you can enjoy yourself. God knows I'm not being a Puritan about this, but that's probably not
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enough. And so anything that has an appeal to meaning has a good chance in such an era.
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And here is probably the, it's not a great idea system, the intersectional social justice warrior
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identity politics system. It's not a great idea system, but it's probably the most ambitious
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and plausible one to come up since the end of the Cold War. There hasn't been another newish
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simple solution to that, it's because you're
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I think we talked about this a little when we last met
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wanting to be like oh my god have you seen what I get
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and that there's no particular advantage to heroism
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And this sort of downward aspiration is a number of things,
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but one is obviously that it's a flag sent up to ask the mob to pass over you.
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You know, I think there's some survival mechanism in some of this
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which is really fascinating um i talk about this in the book in terms of the cuttlefish
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um which uh fascinated me i was having this discussion with i was one of the chapter on
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women is to some extent the one that probably well may get me into most trouble
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surprise yeah because i mean the trans one is already getting me into some
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trouble for saying in a really, I think, an honest and humane way. I'm not trying to just
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insult you or anything. Well, actually, before you go on, that's one of the things that struck
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me about the chapter on trans. Anyone who would read your critics, Douglas Murray's right-wing
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bigger, blah, blah, blah, I think would be quite shocked by how compassionate and thorough and
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careful you are to delineate a lot of these things and to show that you are actually trying to
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in the demand because at the moment they're all put in
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the same thing so that somebody born with genital abnormalities is put in the same category as you
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know say the big bearded man with the penis is a woman or or you're a bigot and that's not fair
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it's not a fair to the fair to the first group just to begin with so yeah i do try i try really
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hard to in all of these cases to to look at what the plausible bit is and then say what are we
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leaning too heavily on and what are we pretending we know about which we really don't know about
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And I think there's twin problems, which I try to identify in this book and to answer,
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which is we have in our society the problem of pretending we know about things that we don't really know about.
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We pretend to be really sure now, and we shouldn't be sure because we're not.
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But the flip side of that is we also pretend not to know about things we all knew till yesterday.
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And I mean, maybe we're not allowed to say this, but because this is three men talking,
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obviously men shouldn't talk about women because what interest could men have in women?
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But a lot of the stuff about relations between sexes, it's complicated, but it's not that complicated.
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There are a load of things we pretend we don't know, which we knew till yesterday, and we could do with remembering.
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And I, as I say, I think some of this might get me into most trouble because there's a lot of women who have quite enjoyed the overcorrection.
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and quite enjoyed not looking at some of the, let's say,
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more difficult things that we actually need to think about.
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I was hoping for the bit that's going to get us demonetized.
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No, but seriously though, on the men and women thing, it's been one of the staples of comedy throughout the decades, the differences between men and women.
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The pathetic, silly man who can't do the stuff and the woman has to show it.
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The exciting thing about that in comedy is that is once hack.
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You go on stage, the difference between men and women, there's a tension in the air.
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Particularly for both of us, because we live with women.
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you go home and you go, no, no, we're not exactly the same.
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And if you have a son and a daughter, you'll notice it.
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But what are we not talking about there, Douglas?
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And everything in the ideology we've been imbibing relies on the idea there's only one form.
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Well, firstly, that power is the single most important thing in the world.
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And it's the means through which you understand everything.
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And I think we got this through a version of Foucault and other things and really ugly reading of the past and indeed of the present.
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Power is the one thing that matters, the one means by which we understand the world.
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I think this is wrong because, as I've probably said to you before, I think that for most
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people, if you said to them, what's the thing in their life that matters most, they'd probably
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My husband, my wife, my children, my family, my God, you know, all sorts of things.
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But very few people, unless you've got an absolute maniac in front of you, would say
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Well, then that would be the thing that would tell you they're a fucking maniac.
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Absolutely. So it's a dementing thing for a society to take a maniacal view and assume it's true.
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But the first thing is we have this idea that power is the thing.
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But then secondly, we've fallen into this thing that there's only one real type of power in the world.
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And it is white heterosexual male power, mainly old.
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now of course we all know some of the ugly things that that leads to such as the presumption that
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you know the unemployed steel worker in the north of england is just unbelievably privileged and
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powerful you know and can be lectured to by a millionaire so long as they are black or a female
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or gay and the power structure is still that way around um but one of the things i address in the
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chapter on women which is as i say i mean this is this is when all men get nervous but
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what if there are other types of power what if what if there are types of power that only women
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wield what if they actually have more power and okay not in every situation in some situations
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and you know one way i might refine this is to say
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again just got to hope people recognize this because if they don't you're toast
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but is there any form of male power any form of legal male power equivalent to the power that
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a very attractive woman in her late teens early 20s has when speaking to a man two to three times
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her age um i'm uncomfortable are you yeah carry on why it's it's a fact isn't it yeah it is a fact
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we all we all know it because we've all seen it okay how about like a ceo the the epitome of white
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male power wealth uh with two people in front of him one an incredibly beautiful attractive
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woman who knows how to use it and the other one a man with not much in the looks department
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do we actually think that the powerful male looks at these two people in exactly the same way
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do we think that no woman knows what she might have in that scenario and none of them have ever
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weaponized it or would seek to weaponize or use it or in any way i don't think so i think we all
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know that there are things you can do. I don't think, by the way, there's almost any male
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equivalent of that. A very successful woman in her 50s is much less likely, if meeting
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a hot guy in his early 20s, let alone late teens, to risk everything in her life and
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career in order to have a few minutes of fun. It's almost impossible. And it doesn't have to
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be that sinister either. I mean, my wife and I, for example, whenever we need to go and talk to
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someone to get a favor or whatever, she'll always go and do it because she's going to have a better
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time of it. Yeah, absolutely. Would you mind speaking to him because I think it'll come out
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better. Yeah. And it's just a fact. And it's not necessarily a sinister form of power. It's just
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how human beings relate to each other based on our sexual evolution,
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But it's amazing that this narrative has been created,
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and we all know that parts of this narrative, or a lot of it, are false,
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and yet we talk about this fear constantly about exposing the narrative.
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And the dementing thing is it's in front of us all the time.
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um and particularly i mean i want to say some of this stuff and explain some of this stuff and
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write about some of this stuff because i know how difficult it is for instance for a young
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heterosexual male to do any of it and i think it needs to be done in a way on their behalf
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um to make it easier um but you know we have this thing at the moment where
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a young man is assumed to be the one wielding power in any relationship with a woman, that the
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woman has no power, and that a set of things happen which I think are impossible to do. I mean,
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one of the things I do through this book is, what are the impossible demands that are being asked of
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us? And one of the impossible demands, perhaps one of the, in some ways, one of the least
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significant because there's some of them that are total but one of the one of the demands that's
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that's still important is um i should be able to be sexy without being sexualized
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and that's that's a really interesting modern uh demand because actually we all know that basically
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if you're being sexy you're in the sex game somehow you're in you're playing with a thing
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you know about the other party knows about it doesn't mean the other party can do whatever
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they like obviously not but stuff is in the air now the current thing is that if a woman puts that
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in the air the man is barely allowed to respond unless the woman gives the absolutely clear
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sign and indeed explicit sign that that is what is being asked for now i am i go into this in the
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book via the perhaps surprising route of nikki minaj um i'm told by the way that people who've
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bought the audiobook for this which i did myself are particularly pleased with my recitation of
00:26:53.320
That's worth paying for, to hear you do the Kim Menard lyrics.
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because there's one video in particular of hers called Anaconda,
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which really shows this demand that's being made.
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And then at the very end, he puts one hand on her hip.
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She turns, whips around, smacks him away and walks off.
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It's, I will play the sex game as much as I like and you have no right unless I ask you to, to even put a hand like that.
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I mean, it is actually saying to the male, well, summed up in the words, make him drool.
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I have an interest in these memes that we all know about, but which we pretend we don't.
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Make him drool is a particularly fascinating one because you can see this online.
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If you type make him drool into Google, and this is a well-known sort of meme, derange the man, make the man mad with desire for you,
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whether it's high heels or, you know, famous examples of lipstick
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You're going to iron your polo shirt particularly well?
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um uh the the dishes that make her make her drool comes up with how to stop yourself drooling in
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bed when you're asleep and one searches for cats that drool and i'm saying i'm not saying there's
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no way of obviously there are ways for men to make women find them more attractive but
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it's not quite the meme of dement the woman we're not the same as the point right yeah but it's not
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And also, I mean, there's a counter argument to this would be, look, this is just a readdressing of the balance.
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They could get away with, you know, grabbing a woman and nothing would ever happen.
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And now it's our turn to feel a little bit of it.
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So this argument, I do hear it, is it's an overcorrection, but we're due an overcorrection.
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And this goes on in the gay argument and it goes on a little bit in the racial argument as well.
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In each of these cases, it's a really dangerous one, this.
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I would argue in each of these cases, we have wittingly or unwittingly gone to better.
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We think we're doing better for a time to make up for lost time, to overcorrect.
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But my question to that is, how do you know when the overcorrection's gone on long enough
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How long do, for instance, young men have to be made
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And will the overcorrection industry be interested in saying,
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Does everybody who benefited from the overcorrection
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I mean, again, we have these ones that we've agreed on.
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Well, Douglas is saying he's a lot younger than us.
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Not just equal, a little bit better in some ways,
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Are women exactly the same as men or better?
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Now, we're running several programs at once in our society.
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Women are absolutely the same and a bit better.
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that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman sisters,
00:32:21.500
either women are have equal competence to men in the financial system or they're different
1.00
00:32:29.080
or they're different and better so which is it christine lagarde head of the imf
00:32:35.020
keeps on pumping out this idea they're better we wouldn't have financial crashes if we had
00:32:40.020
women uh more prominent in finance uh it's very hard to sustain all of these ideas in your head
00:32:47.920
at the same time and not go a bit mad well that's the point isn't it because that that her argument
00:32:52.000
is actually one that i personally agree with which is i think if we had more women in those
1.00
00:32:56.560
industries in the top positions right because women are less they're more risk averse right
1.00
00:33:02.540
on average right and there are other differences between men and women on average you may well end
00:33:08.520
up with with a company behavior that is different if you have more women in those positions but what
0.99
00:33:14.300
And what that requires you to accept, of course, is that men and women are different.
00:33:18.780
Great bit of virtue signaling there, Constance.
00:33:22.420
I'm going to get in trouble just for saying it.
00:33:24.160
But also, I mean, again, if we got to that stage, you then have to work out, do we want
00:33:32.980
And if so, is it the case that we need to pump women in in order to do that more?
1.00
00:33:40.920
This isn't a new motif, the idea of the pacifying female force to stop the rampaging male.
00:33:47.940
But where are, for instance, the occasions when we might need the rampaging male?
00:33:59.140
And we have all of these endless painful, dementing campaigns to get more women in the fire service and, you know, persuade them that this is the career for them.
1.00
00:34:10.440
And then we're just horrified at the fact that the stats don't seem to be going up in enough order.
00:34:15.280
And and I just think it's again, it's it's it's it's it's something we know, it's something we can't talk about.
00:34:23.400
And so we've decided to lie about. But but one of the interesting I'm going to get on the cuttlefish if it kills me.
00:34:33.040
Douglas has been trying for 35 minutes to get to the cuttlefish.
00:34:35.860
But it's a great example. And I do want you to talk about it.
00:34:39.060
Because I think the clever people, the socially advantaged people as well, you might say, work out how to get through dementing eras a bit faster and can do so and then lambast the people who didn't make it, didn't catch up in time, didn't alter their behavior and their language fast enough.
00:35:03.200
and uh the most the clearest example of this i would say is in the behavior of males towards
00:35:13.180
women in the sort of post me too era and uh i when i was researching the madness of crowds i
0.95
00:35:21.740
had the great pleasure of speaking through some of the themes of it with a bewildering array of
00:35:26.940
friends in a bewildering array of different disciplines one of my favorite conversations
00:35:31.660
was with a friend who was a biologist who just one day was describing to me
00:35:37.360
the behavior of the cuttlefish as a form of this, which is a mimic octopus as well.
00:35:41.340
But the cuttlefish have an extraordinary interesting thing about them,
00:35:48.400
which is that there is a type of cuttlefish where,
00:35:51.580
because the male-to-female ratio is bad, it advantages the females against the males,
00:35:56.500
and because the females tend to go around with their male cuttlefish,
0.98
00:36:01.660
it's hard for the male cuttlefish who are single,
00:36:16.500
But they have a strategy, and their strategy is
00:36:18.880
that because the female cuttlefish is smaller than the male cuttlefish,
00:36:23.220
the male cuttlefish, in search of a bit of action,
00:36:31.660
and they they become smaller and because the woman is going around with her consort male
00:36:38.020
cuttlefish and the male cuttlefish is alert for other cuttlefish competition um they pretend to
00:36:44.980
be smaller they go around the female the male thinks that they're not a threat and by being
00:36:49.320
small and diminutive they get through and then they have their wicked way now the the the moment
00:36:58.600
this friend said this to me i just said oh my god it's i know so many men doing that i know so many
00:37:06.640
men it's a creepy male feminist yeah that's what it is this is the creepy male feminist and by the
0.98
00:37:13.060
way i had a very specific example of it a colleague of mine the spectator freddie gray
0.98
00:37:16.820
uh had covered the um uh pussy hat protests the anti-trump uh protests the women's march
00:37:23.680
just immediately after the inauguration in 2017.
00:37:27.040
And he had told me that among very interesting things that happened that day,
00:37:33.360
what people were complaining about, that Donald Trump wasn't, you know,
00:37:40.200
You know, I think we can probably all agree that wasn't the case.
00:37:43.900
But what was interesting to me was what this colleague told me
00:37:48.200
about something that happened at the end of the day,
00:37:49.860
because all these young men from the sort of, you know,
00:37:53.680
Ivy League young men, among others, who are on the Women's March.
00:37:58.460
And there's a party afterwards that this colleague friend turns up at.
00:38:06.320
I can't do the American accent, but I can do the British equivalent,
1.00
00:38:09.380
which is like, yeah, yeah, so totally on board with this, like, yeah, fuck Trump.
0.99
00:38:13.820
And they're all doing this, and like, yeah, yeah, I totally support, like, yeah.
1.00
00:38:23.680
And when the last woman leaves this particular group to go off and get some beer,
1.00
00:38:32.660
oh, my God, dude, I can't believe how much pussy there is in this room.
1.00
00:38:41.720
We're recording this in the moment of Justin Trudeau being chased and harassed and whatever for...
00:39:02.680
well he actually said he doesn't know how many times
00:39:18.420
I don't think we need to actually destroy Justin Trudeau for that reason.
0.81
00:39:22.120
But the hypocrisy of it, this woke chieftain of the universe being the guy who's been doing the blackface, to me, is an inevitable reality.
0.93
00:39:34.320
Don't you find it might be evidence of the existence of God?
00:39:41.300
We've all been searching for it and it comes in the form of Justin Trudeau blackface.
00:39:48.420
Well, actually, none of the three of us are believers, of course,
00:39:50.400
but perhaps we'll be converted by this very incident.
00:39:54.320
The iconography would be really confusing in future generations.
00:39:57.780
Well, he does work in mysterious ways, so there we go.
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douglas the one thing i'm worried about with this is is the backlash because it's going to
00:42:33.880
be a backlash, and it could actually be incredibly
00:42:41.860
overcorrection, if that's what it is, as I think it is,
00:43:33.540
race one. Because, again, I mean, this is just a really hellish subject, but
00:43:41.960
there is something very dark starting to go on with this. And it comes, I think you see the
00:43:52.040
start of it in what is called whiteness studies. Whiteness studies is the only such study in the
00:43:59.260
American Academy, which studies something not in order to, in some ways, celebrate it,
00:44:06.060
but in order to destroy or denigrate it. It's a very, very sinister movement. It's been going on
00:44:12.120
for a few decades now. And it comes out of other forms of studies. But you see, gay studies came
0.53
00:44:22.180
up because there was a feeling, I actually oppose all such studies. I don't think any of them have
00:44:29.160
quite a lot of provable harm. But gay studies
1.00
00:44:31.340
for instance came up with the idea that there were authors who had
00:44:35.160
they were gay. They'd been sort of forgotten and that
00:44:55.240
age had not been able to get the attention they deserved. Now, there is something in
00:45:02.700
this, undoubtedly. But once you get to a certain point where like, James Baldwin is just one
00:45:10.020
of the great writers of the 20th century. And you wouldn't want him to be in a canon
00:45:14.520
of black writers. You'd want him not even to be in a canon of American writers. You
00:45:19.420
just want him to be in the canon of 20th century writers. And, you know, again, there
00:45:27.560
are lots of gay writers. There's not been a paucity of them in history, as it happens.
00:45:34.240
But you don't want them to be in the LGBTQ section. You want them to be in everyone else.
0.99
00:45:41.420
Maybe there's a little bit of correction that was needed there in its day. But all of these
00:45:45.140
things were designed to try to bring out something that had otherwise potentially been suppressed in
00:45:50.460
some way and to celebrate it all of them do that except for whiteness studies and whiteness studies
00:45:58.080
is explicitly an attempt to problematize being white this is really toxic stuff and i show in
00:46:08.400
in the chapter on race, the sort of consequences, because if you problematize any group of people,
00:46:16.440
if you problematize any skin color, it means you are problematizing some people,
00:46:21.960
the people who have that skin color. And you see this in the culture now, the use of the term
00:46:29.560
white as a derogatory term. You see these ones with gammon and things like that, you know,
00:46:36.140
hilarious hilarious you know when racism is hilarious um and i'm not i'm not saying you know
00:46:45.580
people say oh well you're probably just saying this because you're a white gamony uh so on so
00:46:49.600
no i i'm noticing it because it disturbs me and i don't like the tone of it and what's more i can
00:46:57.420
start to see what's going to happen back because just as surely as with any group of people
00:47:05.180
if you say your skin color is a problem there will be some people who will go along with that
1.00
00:47:13.080
and there will be a lot and i would suggest the majority actually who say excuse me excuse me
00:47:21.400
this is a hardware thing it has nothing to do with my character or my life choices it's neither
00:47:29.460
good nor bad. It is a moral nothing, just like, I would submit, the position we should be in
00:47:36.860
on issues to do with sexual identity and issues to do with being a man or being a woman. It is not
00:47:43.740
the way to look at me, and it doesn't say anything either good or bad. But with the whiteness studies
0.98
00:47:53.120
thing, it pushes this idea, no, being black is better. Being anything is better than being white.
0.63
00:47:58.940
And I just know already what's going to happen with this.
00:48:06.780
I give the example of the Harvard case of the Asian students suing Harvard University for discriminating against them.
00:48:15.160
But I see it from the fact that in the last, I'd say, three years in particular, everywhere in the world I go,
00:48:23.040
I'm in a different country every week and have been for the last few years.
00:48:27.960
um i travel very widely and i get to speak i'm very fortunate i get to speak to an awfully large
00:48:33.260
number of people one of the things i have noticed is that everywhere i go there are people starting
00:48:39.180
to ask questions about iq and it um if it doesn't come up in q a and it almost never does then it
00:48:48.320
comes up afterwards or somebody afterwards in a pub or in a bar somebody will ask about it
00:48:54.000
And I know what's happening, and I say this explicitly in the book.
00:48:58.380
I think this is a sign of the sort of grabbing for weapons, ideological weapons, to hit back at the problematization of whiteness.
0.54
00:49:11.500
We don't need to get into it, but whatever view you take on the debate about IQ and hereditary characteristics, it's a really ugly, ugly thing.
0.66
00:49:27.960
And David Reich at Harvard and others have explained very clearly why that is.
00:49:35.140
But there are reasons why things come to the surface
00:49:49.880
It is saying, right, we're going to find the weapon nearest to hand that hurts you the most in our view, and we're going to wield that back.
00:50:00.080
So I say, on this, as on all of these other subjects, please let us step back from leaning on them this much.
00:50:16.800
let's go back to not caring about the characteristics if we can
00:50:23.900
because it's definitely preferable to what's coming otherwise
00:50:29.520
and can we go back is there a way to solve this because this is what i've been worrying about and
00:50:34.660
you know the fact that we're all in these tribes and in order to be black you have to be liberal
00:50:38.760
and if you're not what you know woe betide you is there a way to go back i try to towards the end
00:50:44.300
of the book, I try to explain what I think are some of the ways out. And I'm particularly concerned
00:50:48.960
about this for what I said at the beginning was that third group of people, young people growing
00:50:53.000
up in this very confusing world, wanting to do good and thinking this is good. I'm very keen to
00:50:59.380
try to encourage them out of this way of thinking. And so I try to give some of the examples of what
00:51:06.140
you might do to try to get out of it. One of them, one of them is to do, I have a chapter on this
00:51:12.840
about forgiveness and this is a really this isn't a great subject for comedy but it's a great
00:51:17.880
subject we um we live in a very very unforgiving society and you know some people talk about
00:51:25.960
things like snowflakery and someone of the generation coming up and i uh i think that
00:51:32.940
it's slightly unfair unkind if you live in a world where acting in the world can come back
00:51:39.760
at you at any stage, and you never, ever have any mechanisms to be forgiven, you are going to fear
00:51:46.300
everything, because everything is so damn dangerous. Every word is undoable, is un-undoable.
00:51:53.400
Every action is un-undoable. And nobody wants to help you out. Nobody. And we all have a little
00:52:02.180
bit of this, you know, when somebody errs and strays or does something terrible, we are inclined
00:52:11.160
to forgive them if we already agree with them, if they are of our group or tribe, or if they are of
00:52:17.180
our political view. But when it happens with our opponents, we destroy, destroy and make sure they
00:52:26.200
never come back that's why the trudeau thing is actually quite a useful moment because i'm quite
00:52:34.640
encouraged by some of the response some of the partisan response which is saying don't let's do
00:52:41.560
this but don't let's do back to him what we know he would do to us so it's true that if donald trump
00:52:52.260
We were just talking about this before you got here.
00:52:57.700
I reckon that an apology wouldn't have quite done it.
00:53:46.500
And a lot of Canadian politicians are doing that.
00:53:51.640
The wiser ones will realize that this is a very important opportunity to show magnanimity in victory.
00:53:59.920
To say, you, Justin Trudeau, wanted to make us play these silly, reductive political games.
00:54:10.340
And, you know, God knows there's reason enough to dislike the guy.
0.63
00:54:43.260
uh some you know poor nice young woman is just asking a question you know i mean like have some
00:54:49.480
decency and just basic you know i mean there's a power dynamic that's gone wrong anyhow but
00:54:54.380
at such a point whenever that guy gets this wrong by turning out to have a bit of a thing for
00:55:01.580
doing blackface i just i can't believe our luck still but you know we could do the dishonest thing
0.67
00:55:10.660
to him that he would do or we could say okay let's use this as an opportunity to learn about
00:55:15.940
how we could have a better better thing going forward and i i give this example with the with
00:55:20.720
the in the forgiveness chapter with the how do we how do we how do we try to read other people's
00:55:27.280
words including the words of people who we might disagree with in a more honest light
00:55:31.540
we've had this thing i may have said to you before we've had this strange thing in our society in
00:55:35.780
recent years writers comedians and others used to operate on the basis that we spoke and acted
00:55:43.280
in a way that no honest critic could honestly misrepresent and then we entered at some point
00:55:50.060
in recent years this era in which we had to try to speak and act in a way in which in such a way
00:55:56.180
that no dishonest person couldn't dishonestly misrepresent our actions and that can't be done
00:56:02.620
or at least it can't be done without driving yourself mad and so we need to we need to work
00:56:09.360
out how with our opponents as well as our allies and friends and and so on actually behave in a
00:56:17.340
more reasonable manner and i by the way just a quick example i had a i had an example of this
00:56:20.940
the other day somebody told me uh uh that it was a social some social thing it's quite a very wide
00:56:28.400
array of people of different backgrounds and all that sort of thing and somebody said to me who
00:56:32.780
happened to be um happened not to be white themselves said that somebody at the same thing
00:56:38.780
had referred to that the you know you know the colored girl um and this this uh this friend
00:56:46.580
mentioned this to me and was clearly just sort of like um do you think he was being a bit you know
00:56:54.420
do you think he's a bit racist and i didn't know the person well but i said from my little
00:56:58.760
interaction with him i said i know i wouldn't i don't think so and and i sort of we sort of
00:57:06.920
talked about it a bit because it was interesting that i said to her well i reckon he's just of that
00:57:13.320
generation where you still said colored people not people of color which i think is a distinction
00:57:20.000
without much of a difference but you know fine you know um he probably didn't get that memo and
00:57:25.660
why don't we assume he just misspoke and doesn't know the latest thing but doesn't hate black
00:57:32.800
people why don't we assume that rather than oh my god there was a racist incident at that party
00:57:39.720
i just think that's probably for all of us a more that doesn't mean you don't call out bigotry when
00:57:46.180
you actually find it but we should we should probably try to find a more reasonable way along
00:57:51.500
those lines well some of so much of it is about intent i had a an incident very much like that
00:57:57.380
in my comedy club which i run uh after a show which i book uh an older gentleman came up to me
00:58:04.320
and he said oh i loved the first act that you had on the you know the colored chap
00:58:09.020
and and and i thought about it yeah in this modern way and then i went well hold on what
00:58:15.060
is his intention there yeah his intention is quite clearly to compliment this person and their
00:58:19.880
performance right they just haven't been updated on the language yeah and this is what i don't
00:58:24.760
understand is when did racism stop being about what you said which is hating black people right
00:58:29.360
and became this failure to comply with the linguistic code issued two weeks ago by the
00:58:35.740
the commissariat do you know what i mean yeah i think well obviously the most common explanation
00:58:41.320
is it's being done by people who want to win on something else.
00:58:45.720
And it's very much the left, the vanguard of this.
00:58:49.460
I'm on the left, a trade union member, former teacher, all the rest of it.
00:58:54.260
And I've just been driven to despair by their behavior.
00:59:04.720
And as I say, we need to lean back from what we're trying to lean into at the moment.
00:59:11.320
I mean, here's a tricky one to say, but why didn't I do it anyway?
00:59:17.280
You know, I grew up in London in the 80s, and London was already very diverse.
00:59:24.440
And maybe, you know, we're never the best analysts of our own actions.
00:59:29.300
But when I look back, I can say with absolute honesty, I didn't think skin color was of any significance.
00:59:36.240
In fact, I remember one of my parents telling me that one of my grandparents was rather
00:59:42.820
struck once by mentioning that, you know, I was in primary school or something, and that
00:59:46.000
when I was, I had mentioned a friend to this grandparent, and he said, which friend is
00:59:53.140
that? And I tried to describe that when I was describing this girl, I didn't at any
00:59:56.980
point say she's black. And he was just very struck by that, that it was like, oh, you
01:00:01.800
You know, I was like, you know, the girl with black hair that, you know,
01:00:05.020
and glasses or something, but it didn't, that wasn't.
01:00:14.680
you don't think it's of any importance or that interesting.
01:00:20.420
So I sort of particularly resent the re-racialization of society
1.00
01:00:26.540
because I think it is making everybody notice things.
01:00:35.280
You know, Martin Amis once said that his father, Kingsley,
01:00:42.240
And Martin Amis once said that he said to his father,
01:00:45.920
who was a self-confessed, slightly anti-Semitic person,
01:01:18.900
if you grow up around a lot of people and none of them are jewish you wouldn't know if you grew up
01:01:27.540
with a lot of people and some of them were jewish the likelihood you just wouldn't notice that and
01:01:32.900
i remember again i mean took i was quite old before i knew what a particular name would be
01:01:39.260
that that would probably denote that the person was jewish you know i mean because it wasn't a
01:01:44.400
thing now the reason i mention this is because increasingly in recent years the way in which
01:01:50.700
race has been weaponized i noticed that everybody is becoming a little bit like that thing that
01:01:56.280
kings of the amos was trying to describe so people now take the advertising thing all adverts have
01:02:04.960
mixed race couples and the children are black or mixed race and it's a very common meme in
01:02:13.740
advertising in fact if you have an advert where there's no one everybody's white like that company
01:02:19.680
is going to be in serious trouble and the thing is it makes perfect sense in one way because first
01:02:24.800
of all you're trying to reflect an increasingly diverse society and secondly you you know you
01:02:31.120
want to sort of show people look this is this normal to have you know mixed race marriages
01:02:35.040
which it is and so but there's something sometimes about it where you go oh come on just lay off it
01:02:41.520
bit you know where you can predict exactly what they're going to do in terms of the racial quota
01:02:47.280
for the advert and i just noticed that everyone ends up noticing race yeah and it's because it's
0.98
01:02:55.180
something we didn't notice strangely enough by trying to correct it in this way we all notice it
01:03:01.680
and i just speak for myself i think it's horrible yeah yeah i just think it's horrible you used a
01:03:08.100
very interesting example in your book with the google searches oh yeah google that's terrifying
01:03:15.580
people can do it themselves at home although maybe if enough attention is paid to it google
01:03:20.700
will change the algorithm i mean i discovered whilst i spent some time in silicon valley whilst
01:03:26.020
researching this book and um uh you know i got very interested in this thing called machine
01:03:30.240
learning fairness which is mlf is uh um how you assuming because human beings i do have
01:03:37.200
some instinctive prejudices and biases and so on and if you're programming you don't want to
01:03:43.020
put your biases into the program so if it is the case that most physicists historically have been
01:03:50.380
men you don't want all physicists that come up on the search to be men because that might suggest
01:03:55.720
to a young woman who might want to be a physicist if she searches that she can't be because they're
01:04:00.060
all male in the physics business. So the good bit of this problem is you don't want to put
1.00
01:04:07.380
off people with a competency and an ambition from doing whatever they want. The problem
01:04:13.280
is that the MLF thing comes up with some very weird things with history. It produces, for
01:04:18.580
instance, surveys of the past that are just not reflective of the past, which suggests,
01:04:25.300
for instance, that Europe was basically a highly multicultural society throughout, you
01:04:29.800
know the last millennium which is just it's just not the case i mean you might people might wish
01:04:34.760
it's the case or not wish it's the case but it just it just wasn't the case but there is something
01:04:41.420
which i identify which is machine learning fairness plus some human agency and it clearly
01:04:46.080
happens with google image searches so that and as i try this at home uh um search for uh gay couples
01:04:55.120
on google image search and you get lots of happy healthy gay couples some of them are men male
01:04:59.380
couples some of the female couples and there's an awful lot of adoption and you know uh children
01:05:04.340
as well just to show happy gay families sort of thing but they're basically no sort of nice
1.00
01:05:09.200
cute sexy sweet couples do straight couples and you get gay couples a lot a lot this gets darker
1.00
01:05:21.880
um do black couples or black families and you get lots of nice photos of nice happy healthy
01:05:29.380
black couples and black families do white couples or white family no no no you don't get it you get
01:05:38.400
a lot of black couples interracial couples you get a lot of gay couples you if you type white
0.80
01:05:46.980
couple you will get a black gay couple why silicon valley has decided that only a bigot
1.00
01:05:57.040
would be searching for white couples or straight couples and they're saying fuck you fuck you
1.00
01:06:02.920
we'll show you we'll taunt you we'll dement you we know what you're about be good now the thing
1.00
01:06:10.660
about this is like we didn't we don't know this is happening mainly and it's only a sped up version
01:06:19.680
of something that is happening elsewhere in the media and politics i lay that out the slow version
01:06:24.040
of it is happening elsewhere the fastest version is the online one but this again this is dementing
01:06:29.780
and this is very very bad for a society to unwittingly be imbibing a very distorted
01:06:38.260
picture which selects groups of people who do not deserve to have the thing they might be searching
01:06:45.720
for but deserve instead to be punished and demented and told they can't access it and again
01:06:53.560
Asian couples, you'll get happy Asian couples.
0.86
01:07:02.360
Because we know in Silicon Valley that there are some people who are bigoted,
01:07:06.040
and we know who they are, and we're going to get them.
01:07:09.040
Well, it's almost like the tech companies have an agenda for us.
01:07:11.580
We wouldn't know anything about that, obviously, on the show Douglas.
01:07:16.560
I mean, you'll probably, for this show, you'll have to pay them money.
01:07:20.480
You'll get money taken from your bank accounts,
01:07:23.000
and given to youtube in order to allow you this as our time always is with you is such a pleasure
01:07:28.200
we would be prepared to pay it on this again yeah you're flatterer just the truth you you speak
01:07:35.240
about the importance of truth and i'm giving it to you unvarnished um but thank you so much for
01:07:39.860
coming on the last question we always ask is what is the one thing that we're not talking about that
01:07:45.120
we should be talking about i know it's weird to ask you given you've just written the whole book
01:07:48.680
about things that we should be talking about but uh give us something last time you said it was
01:07:52.880
your book so we've talked about your book for an hour i i think the thing we should be thinking
01:07:58.620
about is that that one i i raised earlier which i've tried in recent days to put out there a bit
01:08:06.320
and with with a lack of success with some of my opponents in this discussion but i really urge
01:08:10.520
them and everyone else to think about it what what would what would overcorrection look like
01:08:21.940
How could we escape better and get back to equal
01:08:26.920
It's got to be possible and we've got to think about it.
01:08:31.220
And so we should work out what the warning signs would be
01:08:34.140
that we've overreached and work out the way back
01:08:38.660
to basically having the equalities that most of us want
01:08:44.640
and then get on with doing better and more interesting things with our lives
01:08:50.340
and more meaningful things because it's just not going to be good for this generation
01:08:57.800
to be playing these games of privilege there is so much for them to do
01:09:03.920
and so much good that can be done and i think we should be getting on with that
01:09:10.220
I think that's a very good message to leave the interview on thank you so much
01:09:13.980
for coming on make sure you get the madness of crowds it's an absolutely
01:09:16.940
brilliant book we both really enjoyed it we will see you very soon and leave us a