Douglas Murray Opens Up on America, AI and LGBTQ
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Summary
Francis and Constantine are joined by writer and journalist Douglas Murray, who returns to the show for the 100th time in about a year. They discuss his new book, The Madness of Crowds and the War in the West, as well as his new novel, The Strange Death of Europe.
Transcript
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People who have the means to move around used to talk about moving abroad.
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If things go south in America, you know, we'll go to New Zealand.
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But I do notice that that has disappeared pretty much as a subject of conversation.
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So I think there's a sort of recognition now of that.
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If you don't save it here, it's not saved anywhere.
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I do think that it's obviously running, the treadmill is running faster than humans can run.
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I'm worried about what happens if America does put a pause on this,
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because America might put a pause on it, Britain might put a pause on it, but other countries won't.
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But in the end, you know, you can't actually hold back learning, is the truth of it.
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The entire thing, the LGBTQIA+, the fact that there's more and more people who are coming
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My view has always been there's no such thing as a gay community anyway.
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There is no bigger chasm in the world than gay men and asexuals.
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on the Road from the USA.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is a prolific author and journalist who returns to the show for
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I actually told the story on one of our Raw shows the other day
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Well, we were at this small conference in Oxford.
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oh, it's Douglas Murray. I want to get Douglas on the show.
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So I went outside and I was sort of on my phone.
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and when you came out, I was like, oh, Douglas, by the way.
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And that's actually how we did our first interview.
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So we've talked about the standard culture and all of that issue.
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And you, of course, have written about it extensively.
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Last book, The Madness of Crowds and The War in the West, your last two books.
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And, of course, The Strange Death of Europe before that.
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What are you seeing other than all the stuff that we all already know?
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I think the main thing that's preoccupying me at the moment
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but the thing that started to really preoccupy me is
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what would we be doing if this crap wasn't in our way?
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What are the things that are out there that should be bothering us,
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that we can address, that we can make progress on?
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That's really what's sort of on my mind most at the moment,
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because I just see this great clutter in front of,
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particularly young people, that's what really strikes me,
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particularly in the US, but it's the same in Britain
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you just have this clutter when you're growing up.
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Now, you always did, but there's just additional clutter.
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And I think for a lot of young people I speak to,
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a lot of them just are checking out the whole thing
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And as you say, moving beyond woke and anti-woke
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Well, I mean, it's obviously different for everybody.
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try very consciously, I've tried throughout my career
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get caught on that first one a bit too much I think but you know writers should write you know
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coders should code but the main thing is in innovation and thinking and then coming up with
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new ideas you know is is there so much time spent on this unwinnable game that we've spoken about
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before the unwinnable game of hierarchies of intersection and all this sort of thing and it
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hasn't yet got anyone anywhere. But imagine if that amazing amount of energy and insight and
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ability was actually directed onto something. And people have their own answers, as I say.
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Elon Musk's answer is, you know, we should go to Mars. And if you say to Elon, well, why? He'll say,
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you know, I think we should have a reason to get up in the morning. Mine is that I'd like to go to
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Mars. That's not particularly my thing when I get up in the morning. I mean, like Philip Larkin
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said about going to China, I wouldn't mind as long as I could come back the same day.
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But I admire him, for instance. One of the reasons I admire him is I admire somebody who realizes
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that. You've got to have a reason to get up in the morning. There has to be a vision. There has
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to be something you're going to do, something you're going to conquer. And the other thing to
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say about that is that the great temptation is to say, well, the conditions aren't optimal.
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You know, there's this in my way, there's that, there's the other. And I'm not discounting for a
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moment that there are problems. There are problems of young people accruing capital, that's a big
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one. We've talked about before getting on the housing ladder, owning property, all sorts of
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things, rewarding investment, rewarding savings, rewarding prudence, all sorts of things that
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definitely could be addressed better. But I've become very fond of a sermon that C.S. Lewis gave
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at the University Church in Oxford in the autumn of 1939, and I've quoted quite a lot recently in
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speeches. He said there, he says the conditions at the moment aren't optimal.
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A great example of British understatement. But he says the conditions at the moment are not
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optimal but they never were he says human life was always lived on the edge of a precipice and
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if our ancestors had put off the search for truth or beauty until such a time as conditions were
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optimal the search would never have begun and that is a very important thing for anyone who's
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watching particularly who's young and starting off that's a very important thing to realize it
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It wasn't always precisely like this, but in some general way, it's always been like
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The question is whether or not you can get over them.
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Douglas, isn't there another thing here that all of us who are attempting to chart a sane
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path through this are coming up against, which is part of the idea of liberalism was throwing
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off the shackles of the shoulds and the oughts, right?
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And we've now come to a point where people like you and people like us want to say there
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are some things that you can do that will, generally speaking, on average, make your
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But we've lost the vocabulary to be able to say it in a way that works.
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And so we are now in a position where we're afraid to say, like, it's hard to say, you
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know, generally speaking, for most people, family will be a good thing, right?
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But the moment you say that, then you're demonizing people.
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And that's why I think we're struggling to articulate that positive vision
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because we're now all in a position where we can't really say,
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here's 10 things you can do to make your life better
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Because we're all worried about being seen and being attacked for,
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Or you want, you know, the gays back wherever the gays were.
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where they belong no um yeah i i i mean two observations firstly what you describe about
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the state of liberalism is something which john gray who i'm sort of sometime admirer of um but
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he did write a very fine essay some years ago he's sort of one of the students by zaya berlin
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who may be a successor even to berlin if berlin had one um he wrote a very important essay some
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years ago now called modus vivendi about the two different types of liberalism it's a slight play
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on isaiah's two concepts of liberty but but the two ideas of liberalism was firstly the the idea
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of liberalism as an organizing principle which organized it then then left people alone
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the second form of liberalism is the sort of rampaging always wanting to go forward liberalism
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always seeking fights always seeking a campaign as it were and this is one of the problems of
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describing liberalism apart from the fact that it's a shapeshifter term. Many of us, I certainly
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believe in that first form of liberalism. Liberalism as a way to construct the social
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order and then you let people do their thing. The second form is the more prevalent form at the
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moment. It's always the noisier form and it's the one that's most tempting, particularly to young
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people because it says here's meaning, here's purpose. So that's the first observation. The
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Second one, I think people just gotta be a lot less scared.
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but I don't mind acknowledging that all the data shows
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that the religious are more likely to be happy.
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likewise I don't have kids but I'm not at all offended by the data that shows
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that you know having children is for most people the single most important
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thing that will happen to them in their lives as you know why does that why
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should why is that any skin off my nose why should that why should that I mean
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I mean I'm not going to construct the whole damn world around my own feelings
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And that's what people are trying to do. And I think we should be much less bothered by them.
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So what? I'm not screwing up reality or altering it or pretending to alter it just because
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you might be mildly upset about something. So what? I'm mildly upset all the time.
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Very angry, irritable, and much more. Lots. But I don't think the answer to it is to pretend
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Douglas, one thing that I found very interesting recently is,
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so for example, when I was growing up, my mother is Latin American,
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And when I think about those men, they were tough.
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They faced a lot of prejudice, they lived through the AIDS epidemic,
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they lost a lot of their friends and their lovers.
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And I'm looking at this new movement coming in,
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which is trying to turn gay men into victims.
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Yeah. And I think it's the absolute worst way to live and to identify us.
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Sure, of course. Well, living as a victim is always disastrous.
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I mean, I wrote about that in the War on the West, using Nietzsche carefully.
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As I always say, you have to. It's his strong stuff there.
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I mean, Nietzsche's great on the victimhood problem.
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The problem of victimhood is, I mean, it's basically a life that's not lived.
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and it also encourages people to cry about wounds
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I think you're right about that there is a generational thing on this.
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You're right, I can think of a lot of gay men older than me
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who, you know, tough as nails because they had to be.
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I think something like David Starkey, as he himself has said,
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was sort of created by the feeling of, you know,
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being thrown into the back of a police van
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if you were at a gay coffee shop on the King's Road, you know.
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My generation was a bit more fortunate than that,
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but the one that's underneath me is a bit more whiny, for sure.
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I mean, you can always complain about people younger than you,
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but I'd just say that I think some of those people
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We should have a bit more damn respect for their elders.
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But that's the case everywhere in the Western societies.
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We've become very weird societies in not respecting our elders
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And that's very strange because it means you're left only respecting youth.
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I mean, it's worth recognizing the virtues of youth,
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Why not look to older people in your society to help convey wisdom?
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It just doesn't seem to be something that much bothers our society.
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We say, oh, look, here's somebody new and young and hot.
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Well, that's like saying, you know, here's this old guy who knows a lot.
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but it this movement has and i don't think people make this this observation enough and it's
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something that i have started to say more and more it's deeply weird oh yeah of course yeah
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of course it's weird you just noticed but but the entire thing the lgbtqia plus the fact that
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there's more and more people who are coming onto this particular...
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And I'm just... One of the things that's very annoying in this era
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is that there are just these steaming piles of horse shit in front of us all.
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And we're all meant to sort of shovel our way through them.
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And I might pay somebody else to shovel the horse shit for me.
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I don't have time for people to keep adding letters to...
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I don't, my view has always been there's no such thing as a gay community anyway.
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Lesbians and gays don't get on famously, have very little in common.
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There is no bigger chasm in the world than gay men and asexuals.
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like the idea that in a bar in a gay bar like you know you're like hey you're hot i'm asexual
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uh i don't know they have their own hookup apps where they don't meet um there's just nothing
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that keeps you as far away from other people yeah exactly exactly and keeps people's clothes on
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And then there's one that's like the queer one.
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Well, queer, as far as I can see, is only...
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but it only means either, ooh, look at me, I'm fascinating.
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No, you're not, you dyed your hair purple, you're boring.
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Or it's, I'm straight, but I want a bit of the intersectional pie,
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There was a guy at Oxford who was teaching who said that,
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and he was like, oh, one of my students came over and said,
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It's so nice to see myself represented, you know, by a lecturer.
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And I think this guy, like, painted his nails or some crap like that.
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And he's a straight guy. He's married to a woman.
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And queer used to be an insult to gay people.
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And then it's appropriated by some straight guys and girls
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because they think it'll make them interesting.
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The alphabet people stuff doesn't really interest me.
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But there's also the fact as well that, do you not...
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And I've spoken to quite a lot of gay men about this
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that they actually find it profoundly irritating
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that is seen as the most heinous form of racism.
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Unless you're Justin Trudeau, in which case it's method.
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But, that being the case, if I come out and go I'm queer, and you know, I've never even
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had any form of sexual interaction with a man, that's fine.
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You can pretend to be a woman and it's not insulting to women.
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I don't agree, I think it's very insulting.
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But I can't spend any more of my life being upset by morons.
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Just particularly attention-seeking morons.
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But one of the things that I really wanted to ask you, Douglas,
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is you tackle some of the most contentious issues,
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the ones that a lot of people simply won't go near.
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I probably always was one of those people who people say,
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don't look at that, no, look, of that type of child.
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But also, the more you do it, the more you realize, it's fine.
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I don't like the whininess, even of the people who might be in agreement
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I don't like the whininess, this sort of self-pity of,
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oh you should see what i get on social media shut up it's boring uh oh i got so much blowback from
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this article but go and spend time with your family or friends stop reading people you don't
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know on twitter and i just there's just a general sort of boring self-pity in the culture and part
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of it comes from this sort of idea that if you transgress certain you know i don't know certain
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dogmas of the time that you'll be put under a lot of pressure. Some people are. And I've noted
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quite often that I seem to have some inexplicable ability to get away with things that a lot of
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people don't. And I noticed that my female friends in the UK, for instance, who have tackled certain
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issues I've tackled, get a horrible amount of blowback. And some of them are not as cut out
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for it as you know as say I am or some others including some female writers are but well you
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know okay each to their own everyone knows their own limits but I don't I don't have any I don't
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have any you know complaints about my life or you know moaning to be done I have a great life I say
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this is the most hot button out of all the hot button issues.
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That one is the one, yeah, I'm being slightly flippant
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because of the stuff I've done more recently as well.
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I mean, I think my chances of being beheaded
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and a purple-haired woman with a dick decapitates me,
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Yeah, all right, we'll keep that, we'll hold that back.
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I sort of feel like I said everything I have to say about that subject.
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But that was definitely tricky for quite a number of years in my life.
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Yeah, I mean, it certainly made my movements much restricted.
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But nevertheless, I think broadly speaking, the point that a small group of us in Europe wanted to make,
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which was that we still had the right to blaspheme any religion,
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I think we actually sort of, we didn't entirely win it, but we held some kind of line.
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It certainly could have been a lot worse, I think.
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And certain societies are more cowardly than others.
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I mean, Britain is really cowardly on the Islam one.
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You know, like the teacher in Batley, you know, I mean, the whole damn government should have come out for that guy, everyone, the police and so on.
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And the same with, you know, these intermittent, you know, appearances of sort of people who appear in places like Bradford and stop films by thuggish protests.
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You know, I don't think that should be allowed.
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I mean, I simply think if you don't understand our society, get out of it.
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If you don't like a liberal modern society, leave it.
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but I'm very struck by how weak the British authorities are again and again.
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And they're stronger in certain other countries.
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I don't know if you would have seen the interview Richard Dawkins did with Piers Morgan.
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And Richard Dawkins is a man, I think, irrespective of his views on religion,
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some people really like them, some people don't.
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If you're like me, you really like them, and now less so over time you change your mind.
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But he is a man who's been willing to speak up and be controversial
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And then you watch that and you, I mean, look, who knows?
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But I think the assumption for many of us is like,
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this is a very principled, decent man who, as he's getting on in life,
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And sometimes you don't have to agree with everyone's principle
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just to admire the principle they're sticking to.
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He's a man of science, so if he's asked to agree
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that there are people with multiple genders and sexes or whatever,
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he'll just say, no, I'm a biologist, there are two sexes.
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But I was struck by the fact that he didn't want to talk about Islam.
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Some years ago, we had a slightly unfortunate fallout.
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And it was quite a good joke, if I say so myself,
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because I knew the chasm which he was looking into at that moment.
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but I also should have been more sympathetic to Richard's own position at that time,
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which is that he didn't want his life to be completely thrown into disarray
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by becoming a public hate figure number one for the world's Muslims.
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And the fact that he now just said I don't want to do that was a loss, definitely, definitely.
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But other people must pick up that baton, you know, other younger people.
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They must. There'll be new young atheists coming along, you know, smart.
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They'll have been inspired by Richard Dawkins and things he said before.
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And it's time, you know, I don't see why 80 or whatever Richard now is,
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he should continue to have to carry such a load.
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I think people need to come along and share the damn burden.
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And Douglas, let's move on a little bit because an issue I've never heard you comment on
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and you may have nothing to say, which is fine.
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And you, I mean, people will say you're a political commentator, but I think of you more as a philosopher to a large extent.
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You think about society and the ways that it's changing and where it's going.
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Do you have thoughts on what AI may mean for humanity?
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Not many. I mean, as you say, I sort of straddle both of those divides that you just described.
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And I do think that it's obviously running, the treadmill is running faster than humans
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The recent letter signed by Elon and others was a sign of that.
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The one I'm worried about, frankly, is I'm worried about what happens if America does
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put a pause on this, because America might put a pause on it, you know, Britain might
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put a pause on it, but other countries won't. I think there's a risk that it'll become like
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stem cells, you know, like America ends up stopping certain research here for profound
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and, you know, important moral reasons. But go to Central America, and that's happening
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all over the place. So my worry with the AI one is that America and advanced democracies
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say, whoa. But, you know, China doesn't. That seems to me to be the worst of all worlds,
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is that the technology is developed by countries that are already not free, to say the least.
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But I don't know what to do about that. I don't know what the answer to that is,
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other than continuing carefully to do it in our own societies. But in the end, you know,
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you can't, you can't actually hold back learning is the truth of it, you know. I mean, it's
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like Gutenberg. Once it's out, you just can't hold it back. You can't stop the printing
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presses once they start rolling. You can't start the internet once it's turned on. And
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And again, it's probably always been like this, you know, probably felt the same when
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Do you feel there's a certain futility to thinking about these things?
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Well, not a futility, because it's very interesting, but I think people are misguided if they
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think that thinking about things like AI and being able to control them are the same thing.
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I mean, as I say, you can think about gunpowder, but it doesn't win you any battles.
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You can think about the discovery of the cannon or the invention of the automatic rifle.
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We could think endlessly about the nature of AI, but I think the likelihood that you'll be able to stop it is highly unlikely.
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I think the one thing that does worry me about it,
00:30:06.540
and it's something which various philosophers have talked about
00:30:10.800
in recent decades, is there is a sort of moment when...
00:30:16.260
I mean, arguably, you could trace the moment that we're currently in
00:30:21.840
when Garry Kasparov played the computer chess in Lost.
00:30:26.320
and the notes that Kasparov was making as he went along,
00:30:41.320
It's a very important moment in the development of what we now call AI.
00:30:46.320
There's another observation on that which Tom Stoppard wrote in his play
00:30:53.320
play the hard problem about the consciousness problem it's very
00:30:57.760
interesting profound play he mentions that the only time that he says there
00:31:01.540
were one of the characters says in the play something I've always been fond of
00:31:04.720
which is that the the machines only really beat the humans when the machines
00:31:09.880
mind losing because minding losing is such a huge human drive wanting to win
00:31:19.180
wanting to you know come back I think at this point the machines do mind losing
00:31:25.860
or very close to it the one that alarms me more is the issue of memory and human
00:31:35.000
memory because human memory and machine memory are clearly different things I
00:31:39.700
mean I know this from our own lifespans already as a sort of weird gap from
00:31:47.180
It was recently actually shown when Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin IRA was back in the news
00:31:51.580
and somebody mentioned that on the Wikipedia website for Gerry Adams,
00:31:56.300
the only controversy under controversies is when he used the N-word some years ago in passing
00:32:09.500
but he's been involved in more explosive issues in his time.
00:32:19.020
and Mr Adams can sue me if he thinks I'm wrong on this,
00:32:38.480
and shooting them in the back of the head,
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00:32:40.060
should be on Wikipedia as a potential controversy.
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00:32:44.300
My point is, not to get onto that hobby horse of mine,
00:32:47.840
but my point is that there is this sort of knowledge
00:33:04.860
But there's all of this forgotten memory of what was before.
00:33:10.320
Will the machines ever be able to do the things that we have up here?
00:33:16.540
Maybe someday, but it'll be different from human memory.
00:33:21.760
I don't relish the world in which the machine can compete with the greatest human mind.
00:33:29.920
um because to my mind one of the things that makes humans humans is is having a sense of memory
00:33:40.620
um collective familial and much more and it also brings for the discussion about AI art because I
00:33:52.660
was talking to Andrew Doyle about this and he said well AI can't create art because art is the
00:33:57.780
expression of the human soul but you see everything that is being created over it
00:34:02.440
with AI and it's already so advanced that you think to yourself is it going
00:34:06.120
to make the artist obsolete I don't think that will happen actually I mean
00:34:10.260
certainly what we've what has been produced so far doesn't fool me at any
00:34:14.160
rate it it's currently AI artists as far as I can see it a purely parasitic art
00:34:21.960
platform. It can only work off what's already there. So it can imitate, and it can imitate
00:34:28.460
pretty well. It actually is quite easy to spot, I would say, at the moment. Some people
00:34:34.360
watching will disagree and will doubtless send in examples that I couldn't spot. I still
00:34:39.440
think that if AI faked a Vermeer, I would be able to tell. I'd be able to tell the difference
00:34:47.820
between the fake and the real, maybe partly because there were so few Vermeers that one
00:34:53.060
would know. But certain artists might be easier to fake than others. It's not hard to fake
00:35:00.320
a Warhol because it wasn't hard to make. But will they be able to make advances in perception
00:35:11.460
of the kind that, say, in the 20th century, Picasso and Francis Bacon imagined? Will they
00:35:16.420
be able to push forward the the boundaries like that i i doubt it i think it would be like in
00:35:23.140
music i mean in in in music almost everything in film music for instance is already imitative
00:35:29.300
parasitic art ai can create more of it but can ai create stravinsky i doubt it i doubt it
00:35:39.140
douglas you mentioned northern ireland and it's it's a niche question but i know you've written
00:35:44.580
in the book, you wrote a book, one of your early books, about it.
00:35:48.380
And every time we talk about it, I'm not saying it's not an issue people shouldn't care about,
00:36:04.460
And I particularly mind, and it's a very straightforward one,
00:36:08.280
I have a residual deep dislike of the fact that the end of the conflict in Northern Ireland
00:36:16.680
consisted of rewarding the people who shot people in the back of the head for 30 years
00:36:21.780
and then said maybe we shouldn't and sidelined all the people who said from the beginning
00:36:30.800
don't shoot people in the back of the head. I really mean the way in which
00:37:14.840
came out the other side pretending to be wise men of peace
00:37:28.300
and I had lots of friends involved in the conflict
00:37:30.680
and I just know how many scars and wounds are still there and unhealed.
00:37:44.660
It always depends whether or not you want to reward violence.
00:37:55.420
Everyone just sort of celebrates what they call the men of peace
00:38:03.640
It's a niche point I would have done it another way.
00:38:07.560
and make them come to the negotiating table on their knees,
00:38:16.540
But I'm always struck by the fact that in an era
00:38:22.060
which talks about equality and kindness and fairness
00:38:27.700
Fairness is a much more important tangible thing
00:38:35.620
and it was totally thrown out the window in that.
00:38:40.940
to see the people who killed their families walking around.
00:38:53.400
about a woman who had been tortured and imprisoned
00:39:06.700
and she saw her torturer walking towards her in the street.
00:39:10.780
And he apparently looked at her and recognised her
00:39:28.300
I think at the very least people should have empathy for that.
00:39:33.440
And you spend a lot of time in the United States.
00:39:36.600
And people are saying that the United States is ever more divided,
00:39:39.580
that the country is on its way out and blah, blah, blah.
00:39:46.600
and you can't, unless you spend long periods of time here,
00:40:23.160
It was a sort of dinner party conversation, if you like.
00:40:29.000
I mean, none of these places have made themselves remotely appealing in the time since.
00:40:33.480
But I do notice that that has disappeared pretty much as a subject of conversation,
00:40:38.520
partly because of the way in which countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada dealt with lockdown and COVID
00:40:43.760
and showed extraordinary authoritarian tendencies,
00:40:50.400
But it's also gone away because what's happening in America
00:40:57.860
You know, a lot of my friends from California have been moving to Texas,
00:41:03.400
My friends in New York have mainly left when I came here.
00:41:08.160
and they've moved to you know Houston and Miami and some of the wealthy ones moved to Palm Beach
00:41:16.640
or they've to West Palm Beach and you know Florida in general and some people see this
00:41:22.700
as a terrible sign an example of the further fracturing of the society you can see it that
00:41:29.000
way but you can also see it as an expression of trust nevertheless in the United States of America
00:41:35.300
Or to put it another way, the recognition that if America goes south, you don't buy yourself any time in Malta.
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00:41:44.400
You know, if America goes south, you don't actually buy yourself any time in one of the countries that was effectively protected as a satellite part of the American era of dominance.
00:41:58.320
So I think there's a sort of recognition now of that.
00:42:00.880
If you don't save it here, it's not saved anywhere.
00:42:08.940
And there are people from the crazy extremes of the left and the right in America,
00:42:13.840
most recently on the right from the lunatic Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene,
00:42:18.400
who's the sort of gift that keeps on giving for the Democrats,
00:42:30.640
But, yeah, it matters enormously that people in America should be able to get along.
00:42:36.680
And if they can't, you know, there are many other problems that come from that.
00:42:40.540
But I think that, and I've said a lot whilst I've been here,
00:42:44.320
that people say, so what one thing can you do to fix the growing divide?
00:42:49.520
And I always say, you know, just agree on one thing.
00:42:57.140
Or agree on, you know, the inviolability of the Constitution
00:43:01.980
or just agree on the fact the founding fathers were great men
00:43:07.800
Just like agree that it was a good thing that Abraham Lincoln was born.
00:43:20.320
You know, just that would really help in America
00:43:25.420
is that the problem is in America in particular
00:43:35.800
which facts the person you're speaking to has got.
00:43:39.220
And the moment you get into one of the ones they've got,
00:43:41.560
which is one that you regard as not being true,
00:43:47.760
And you very rarely can get anywhere after that.
00:43:55.420
Or you have to go all in and, you know, kind of ruin the evening.
00:44:05.460
When you're talking about agreeing on something,
00:44:11.060
But I sort of feel it almost goes deeper than that,
00:44:13.200
which is, first and foremost, Americans and the West,
00:44:24.380
And there's quite a lot of people now who don't agree on that.
00:44:27.320
And I'm not just talking about the crazies on the left,
00:44:31.840
but your point about people saying we need a national divorce, all of that,
00:44:35.100
I mean, part of that is an idea, as you say, is crazy talk,
00:44:41.020
that would make sure that America doesn't survive and doesn't prosper.
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00:44:46.260
Yeah, I mean, the problem is that everyone can only see the world
00:44:53.600
and there's a limited extent to which you can say to people,
00:45:03.620
I mean, you've both spoken about this before, and we've spoken about it.
00:45:07.380
You can sort of tell people it's sort of hell over there,
00:45:11.860
but people are just living in the lives they've found themselves in,
00:45:19.140
they will quite often reach for a grandiose overarching explanation for it.
00:45:27.300
I mean, the oddity, of course, is that they tend to reach back for explanations that have failed
00:45:32.660
every time they've been tried. You know, like, I remember after the financial crisis in 08,
00:45:37.140
there was a glut of pieces by ignoramuses saying things like, should we think about trying socialism?
00:45:53.780
But that's only because these are ignorant people who think that there's a sort of binary,
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00:45:58.260
which is like capitalism when it's gone wrong, like it did in 2008, and the only other alternative
0.78
00:46:12.080
So again, I don't have much time for those people, and maybe we should sort of just ignore
00:46:19.960
They just don't know what they're talking about.
1.00
00:46:23.100
You can't open your mouth and be that stupid, I think.
1.00
00:46:27.120
But this is what I'm getting at, though, is I think more broadly in society, the very
00:46:31.340
idea, you know, how often do you hear on TV or in the paper someone saying what you and
00:46:37.840
have both said often, which is the West is great and we want it to survive and thrive.
00:46:42.960
But that isn't something that people say and I feel like quite a lot of people don't actually
00:46:47.360
have that concept in mind because they're so busy on the internal fight, they don't recognize that
00:46:53.840
there are external fights in which we are weakening ourselves by fighting amongst each other.
00:46:59.520
Yeah, I think it's partly, it goes back to the point I was making about the modus vivendi.
00:47:15.180
or at least this is the only system that allows for that
00:47:17.620
free market capitalism is the only system anyone ever invented
00:47:47.860
that allows for the endless criticisms and critiques
00:47:52.180
and my view is that that's all actually a feature of our society
00:47:57.660
the self-criticism is a definite benefit in Western societies
00:48:01.700
It's good until it turns into self-laceration, self-loathing, and then self-destruction.
00:48:07.120
And it's not hard to see where those degradations occur.
00:48:11.840
But I think that, yes, a lot of people don't understand the setting they're in.
00:48:19.680
I mean, it's like the fish in water thing, you know.
00:48:26.380
And the alternatives are all just being flung out into dry, parched land.
00:48:37.280
because of sort of frustrations that people are feeling
00:48:45.520
Unfortunately, everything nearby that they grab
00:48:50.360
And one of the things that seems to be a really contentious issue,
00:48:54.700
well, not really, it is a very contentious issue,
00:48:59.020
something that I think could definitely help to split this country up is the issue of guns
00:49:04.680
if the democrats go after the right to bear arms they won't they won't good
00:49:12.540
there are so many guns in this country you can never take them away it just I just don't think
00:49:23.460
it'll happen well that was the nature of the discussion we're having I don't say good because
00:49:26.900
I'm a massive fan of guns I just know what would happen if they did and I hope
00:49:30.500
they're smart enough not to do that. People are, it's very funny, all
00:49:33.900
societies have things about them which people from the outside just sort of
00:49:38.180
can't understand. And I always say that like in America the two things that
00:49:41.720
outsiders tend not to understand, particularly if they're from Europe or
00:49:45.200
Britain, are abortion and guns. And like the thing that Americans don't understand
00:49:51.080
about Britain is like monarchy for instance. I was here when the Queen died
00:49:54.920
and it was very interesting that you know a number of news anchors and others said to me off
00:49:59.640
off screen as it were you know i admired her but i don't quite understand the the intensity of this
00:50:05.400
like what is it and i i found myself explaining to them well well the queen is is like the living
00:50:10.360
embodiment of the flag in america you know it's something like that and it was interesting they
00:50:15.560
sort of they they they got there but of course it's strange if you don't live in a country where
00:50:20.680
there's a family which inherits a throne and a crown and a scepter and an orb and and all this
00:50:27.720
it's sort of strange hard to understand from outside if you're from a constitutional republic
00:50:32.020
but every society's got stuff like that you know france is hard has oddities that are hard to
00:50:37.800
explain unless you're french and all societies like that and there's always a slight problem
00:50:42.420
when an outsider as it were comes in and says i don't like this thing it's it's it's an it's an
00:50:49.060
issue which in particular in America is a problem in the South because the South has unfinished
0.67
00:50:55.260
historical issues. I was touring around the Carolinas and Virginia and other places recently
00:51:02.520
and I saw much of this firsthand. There's a sort of feeling of bitterness that people from outside
00:51:09.340
are coming in and telling them what they can and cannot venerate. And that's, my own view is that
00:51:15.580
that's acceptable to make those criticisms of it
00:51:20.640
But when you have somebody come from, I don't know, Britain
1.00
00:51:23.700
and say, I'm appalled at seeing this statue of general.
00:51:35.340
But there is a tendency of people to come to America
00:51:43.840
and the society says, sorry, we didn't lay it on for you.
00:51:51.680
I was a British guy telling Americans how to lead their lives.
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00:51:58.220
And so what do I really know about their gun culture?
00:52:02.820
and shouted at them louder and louder to try and get them to give up guns,
00:52:05.600
and they sold more and more guns because of my shouting.
00:52:08.180
They had the complete opposite effect to what I thought.
00:52:10.780
We'd been driven out with guns to get them independence in the first place.
00:52:15.780
Who's this snotty British guy with this British accent telling us what to do?
1.00
00:52:19.840
I don't want to hear this from this guy, and I definitely don't want to hear it from an accent.
1.00
00:52:22.960
It would be like an American coming over here and saying, I want to ban cricket,
00:52:37.660
Douglas, we've got to let you go because you've got important things to do.
00:52:42.740
Very quickly, before we head to our locals for the questions from our audience
00:52:48.620
what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we're really sure?
00:52:53.740
I forgot. I should have prepared some wise answer.
00:52:56.900
Seems to me we're talking about most things other than that thing I mentioned
00:52:59.680
at the very beginning, which is what we should actually be doing.
00:53:39.420
Douglas Murray, thank you for coming back on Trigonology.
00:53:42.720
Join us on Locals, we will ask you bonus questions.