TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About the Nazis

00:00:00.000 So it's a conflict of groups, and these groups are unequal, and respecting other people's 0.91

00:00:06.360 freedom to do what they want with their lives and tolerating differences, that's just completely

00:00:10.220 alien. The world is seen as a dark place of conflict, and it's either your group is going

00:00:16.520 to prevail or my group is going to prevail.

00:00:24.680 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:28.640 I'm Constantine Kissinger.

00:00:30.020 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:35.440 A fascinating guest we have for you today.

00:00:37.640 We're delighted to say that we're joined once again by one of our favorite ever guests,

00:00:42.240 Professor Stephen Hicks.

00:00:43.440 Welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:00:45.120 Hey, thanks, guys.

00:00:46.240 It was a real pleasure last time, so appreciate the re-invitation.

00:00:49.840 It was a real pleasure last time.

00:00:51.420 We talked, of course, about postmodernism.

00:00:53.360 You explained where it comes from, where it's going, and so on.

00:00:55.960 But I was saying to you in our emails about coming back on that we here at the studio were watching a documentary you made, as you explained, about 20 years ago.

00:01:06.340 I must confess the production values reflect the fact that it was 20 years ago.

00:01:11.380 Pre-HD in the video world.

00:01:14.880 So, yeah, quite.

00:01:16.420 But nonetheless, despite that, it was a documentary you made about Nietzsche and the Nazis.

00:01:21.520 And in that, you talked about what motivated the Nazis, what motivated the people who supported the Nazis, how that is misunderstood, and of course, some of the philosophers who inspired some of the things that they did and also the differences between them.

00:01:35.860 But the real reason that we wanted to talk to you about that is, you know, the Nazis in the discourse, at least, they're back. 0.73

00:01:43.400 There's a Nazi around every corner. 0.75

00:01:45.200 They're on the rise if you're on this side of the political spectrum.

00:01:48.160 And people talk about it in the context of COVID now, of course, and all of that.

00:01:53.120 So can you talk to us about, first of all, one of the things that really struck me in that documentary is you talked about the fact that the ideas that motivated the Nazis, they saw themselves as heroic.

00:02:05.280 They saw themselves as doing something for the greater good.

00:02:08.180 Can you just give us, because I think will be a shocking perspective to many people in

00:02:11.900 the modern world.

00:02:12.460 Can you give us a flavor of what their ideas were, why they believed they were doing the

00:02:17.760 right thing?

00:02:18.180 What drove them?

00:02:19.480 Yeah, yeah, that's an important question.

00:02:21.880 I mean, comparisons to fascists and Nazis and so on are all over the place in contemporary

00:02:26.180 discourse.

00:02:27.420 And we should be trying to learn from history and those comparisons can be made.

00:02:31.760 But we do have to, of course, be very careful in how we do it. That's dropping the hand grenade into the conversation. And it needs to be contextualized.

00:02:43.620 But yes, one of the interesting things is the one that you're flagging here, that we have this image of the Nazis as thugs and as brutes and as just the most evil people almost in all of human history. 0.77

00:02:58.400 and they were thugs, they were brutes, and this was a mass movement, and so there's a huge number 0.80

00:03:05.400 of people in the movement who are operating on that low level of humanity or anti-humanity. 0.92

00:03:14.280 But I think it's a mistake just to write off the Nazis, particularly the intellectuals,

00:03:19.460 the activists, the politicians, merely as brutes and thugs, as amoral individuals,

00:03:26.120 that when you read the literature they did see themselves as idealists and the hard thing for us 0.81

00:03:33.680 particularly those of us raised on western civilization with a very different set of ideals

00:03:39.140 is to understand that there are people who can have dramatically different philosophies of life

00:03:46.260 including an understanding of what is good what is bad what is moral character who the good guys are

00:03:54.100 who the bad guys are and really believe it and be strongly committed to realizing those values in

00:04:01.340 the world. It's a philosophical collision that comes out in political battles and then ultimately

00:04:09.280 in war-like battles. But unfortunately, most people don't get enough philosophical education

00:04:17.820 to realize the values that undermine or animate their own civilization. They kind of have

00:04:24.080 a sort of understanding of them. They pick it up through osmosis, much less being taught the major

00:04:30.940 competitive value frameworks and really get inside them and to see how someone raised in a very

00:04:37.200 different culture could come to believe completely different sorts of things. So we talked about

00:04:42.580 Hitler and Goebbels and Goering and Hess and all of these guys, and they were politicians. Initially,

00:04:49.300 they were activists. But my focus as a philosopher and as an academic is to say,

00:04:55.740 these guys didn't just pop out of nowhere. Anytime you are going to rise to the top

00:05:01.760 in an educated, philosophical nation like Germany especially. And in the 1920s, the Germans were the 0.93

00:05:10.020 most educated people in the world. They thought of themselves as the most cultured people in the

00:05:15.320 world. And there was a lot of evidence that they can cite in order to support that. And it's not

00:05:21.760 just that. Millions and millions of people voted for the Nazis from all walks of life. It's also

00:05:29.120 the case that mainstream intellectuals, even intellectuals at the top of their professions,

00:05:35.660 Germany was a highly philosophical nation. German philosophy especially had the highest reputation

00:05:42.060 around the world at that time. You get a PhD from a German university, that means something.

00:05:49.440 You get a PhD from a German university in philosophy, to use one of our metaphors,

00:05:55.500 you are a rock star. In the same way that we now know, you guys are British, so you probably follow

00:06:04.160 the football over there. You know who all of the main names in football, and you know who are the

00:06:11.360 The second tier ones are, and you know a lot about their personal lives and so on.

00:06:15.740 That's what it was like to be a high profile academic in Germany at the time.

00:06:21.120 And the fact is that the PhDs and PhDs who were professors were widely supportive of the Nazis, not only after the Nazis came to power.

00:06:34.280 And then you might say, well, after they come to power, people are cowards or people want the goodies that the politicians can distribute to them.

00:06:41.580 But before the Nazis came to power in the 1920s, the brightest stars in the German academic world, many of them are on board with some philosophical, ideological variation of the National Socialist Program.

00:06:57.720 And then pushing things back even further, all of them are educated.

00:07:04.840 Hitler read voluminously.

00:07:07.120 He knew his Kant.

00:07:08.260 He knew his Hegel.

00:07:09.320 He knew his Marx.

00:07:10.400 He knew Friedrich Nietzsche.

00:07:12.420 Anybody now around the world, if you are getting a first-rate education in the humanities, you know something about Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche.

00:07:22.660 These were not unintellectual thugs.

00:07:24.900 They were well-read.

00:07:25.860 Goebbels had a Ph.D.

00:07:27.720 and was widely educated at several universities around you.

00:07:32.920 And that's just the politician activists.

00:07:35.680 So they had heavy duty support.

00:07:38.060 Now, the thing then is, and this is where it becomes very difficult,

00:07:41.280 is if we're an educated person now in the early part of the 21st century,

00:07:47.080 we've heard of Nietzsche, of course.

00:07:48.920 We've heard of Marx.

00:07:50.280 Maybe we've heard of Hegel.

00:07:51.820 Maybe we've heard of Kant.

00:07:54.080 But maybe we can't put too much together.

00:07:56.200 But the point is going to be that there is a philosophical universe that was staked out by the most brilliant intellectuals almost of all time, all of them German philosophers.

00:08:09.040 And the reason why they were so influential and are still so influential two centuries later is because of their brilliance and the power of their arguments.

00:08:17.420 And that's not to say whether the arguments are right or wrong. It's that they are brilliant. They are deep. They are shaping the entire intellectual culture of Germany in the 1800s. And they believe themselves to be high moralists and deep thinkers, the inheritors of all of the great cultural traditions and pointing the direction toward the future.

00:08:41.020 They have it worked out. And of course, what comes along then is idealistic and ambitious and energetic young people in every generation.

00:08:49.080 They want to reform their society to make it to make it better.

00:08:53.180 They want their own lives to be meaningful.

00:08:55.940 They turn in their culture to their most famous philosophers.

00:09:00.080 They read them. They absorb them.

00:09:02.180 Then they go into law. They go become teachers.

00:09:04.900 They become journalists. They become medical doctors.

00:09:07.440 They become parents. They shape a culture.

00:09:10.020 And the point is going to be that the philosophical groundwork by Germany's deepest thinkers was laid for the National Socialists.

00:09:19.000 It was a philosophical movement. It saw itself as an idealistic movement.

00:09:23.640 And they were very effective also at organizing and doing the nitty gritty of politics and then successful in the in the political sphere.

00:09:31.860 Now, the point of contrast is going to be for, you know, so I'll use some examples since you guys are British, but I was born and raised in Canada.

00:09:39.220 So we're kind of like the little brothers, culturally speaking, so do you.

00:09:44.920 I'm now working in the United States.

00:09:47.040 But the biggest names that most of us will have heard of are going to be people like John Locke and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

00:09:55.800 And if you're an educated person, then these are the guys that you read and you read them deeply.

00:10:01.660 You read the two treatises of government and on the wealth of nations and on liberty.

00:10:05.820 And it becomes part of your intellectual furniture. And you come to believe that some sort of liberalism broadly construed is deeply decent and moral. And we need to have moral fervor to reform all of the illiberal cultural traditions that have come down to make society a better place. And we become committed as cultural activists and political.

00:10:27.400 But the idea is that we are channeling John Locke and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and so on, and we think that we are right.

00:10:36.660 And the point is going to be at that level that John Locke and Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith and someone like Karl Marx and Nietzsche and someone like John Stuart Mill, entirely different philosophical universes.

00:10:51.320 It's a collision of philosophies, a collision of values.

00:10:55.320 And then one of the things that happens, of course, by the time we get to the 20th century is that collision of philosophies becomes a collision in the trenches.

00:11:06.620 So, I mean, there's a reason why the French and the English had their guns pointed at the Germans and the Germans had their guns pointed at the other way and so on.

00:11:16.460 And so the roots are deep and we do ourselves, I think, a disservice if we don't take the ideas seriously, however repugnant the ideas are.

00:11:27.760 We just say, oh, they're just a bunch of thugs or they were just lucky somehow.

00:11:32.520 And we're able to fool a lot of people. The philosophy is hard, but it's important.

00:11:38.060 Stephen don't you think that the reason we call them thugs the reason that we call them brutes 0.89

00:11:43.420 is we do actually the same thing with people like sex offenders and rapists and pedophiles 0.97

00:11:48.980 where we go these people are monsters they're nothing like us we dehumanize them by going 0.93

00:11:54.500 they're nothing they're nothing like us therefore they're different to us therefore I'm never going 0.78

00:11:59.560 to be capable of those particular acts whether they're nazis whether they're rapists etc

00:12:04.080 Now, that's exactly right. Your moral framework is absolutely important. What standard you use to say this is good and this is bad. And then when you apply that to other human beings, those human beings that you see who are most assaulting your standard of the good and most embodying your standard of the bad, those people, you see them as less than human.

00:12:27.820 So the dehumanizing languages is very important. And then once you see them as dehumanizing, then you think it's appropriate for me to start treating them with less than fully human respect. And then that goes all the way down to I am willing to put these people in prison and or I am willing to kill these people.

00:12:47.040 So the establishment of your standards of right and wrong, that's a very difficult, high-level philosophical project becomes absolutely important because ultimately that's going to be the basis for your laws.

00:13:00.060 That's going to be the basis for the circumstances under which you are willing to fight other people, either aggressively or self-defensively.

00:13:08.020 What does your life mean? And you are going to be willing to kill, ultimately, people you think are evil and you are going to think that you are doing it in a good cause because you are upholding your standard of value.

00:13:23.100 And Stephen, you talk about the clash of values and value systems.

00:13:26.640 And I think that's really where this is important, because one of the values, it seems to me, of the Western liberal project, which we obsess about almost to a fault now, is the idea of equality.

00:13:39.400 And the philosophers that motivated and whose work the Nazis relied on were explicitly from a different way of looking at the whole issue.

00:13:48.960 Can you talk a little bit about that?

00:13:50.680 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:13:51.460 Absolutely. So the concept of equality, of course, is a rich one. But in that liberal tradition, we also have the values of liberty, the values of individuality. We expect that people as individuals are free to run their own lives, their own romantic lives, their sex lives, their artistic lives, their business lives, and so on.

00:14:15.460 So all of this liberty, and we think that everyone should have that liberty correctly, but then we recognize that since people are individuals, they're going to have different secondary values and make different choices, and the universe is complicated, and so we're going to have different ways of conceptualizing it and so on.

00:14:34.880 But if your bottom line is the liberty of individuals, and that's an equal principle that should be extended to all human beings, then tolerance becomes a very important social value as well. So those form a bedrock network, as I see it in the liberal tradition.

00:14:51.980 And the idea is that, of course, we're going to have our differences with each other. But by and large, people are decent. And, you know, if you go off and you do your thing in the artistic sphere, you're likely to come up with some creative, you know, artistic things and you'll be fulfilling yourself.

00:15:09.640 But I'm going to enjoy reading your novels or listening to your songs and so on.

00:15:13.800 Or you might be a little bit of a weird, you know, eccentric inventor kind of guy.

00:15:18.700 And you're going to go off and make some sort of a gizmo.

00:15:21.300 And I don't really know what you're doing, but it's and it's kind of weird.

00:15:23.960 But ultimately, you're going to be making something that I'm going to say, oh, that's cool.

00:15:27.180 That can benefit my life. And so I'm going to be willing to give you some money in order to have one of those gizmos.

00:15:32.320 And so the idea is that we will live and let live.

00:15:35.920 but if we live and let live people are going to go off and do interesting things that are

00:15:39.640 ultimately going to benefit themselves and then then us and of course if i don't like your kind 0.77

00:15:43.840 of music or the gizmo that you're made i'm free not to buy it and so on and destroy it on twitter

00:15:48.600 as well well yes so the the free speech element absolutely even if that's going to get a little

00:15:57.040 bit a little bit nasty but there's a kind of benevolence in that that ultimately we're going

00:16:01.760 to have a peaceful society, and we're going to be doing a win-win trade. Now, if you then reject

00:16:09.500 all of that fundamentally, the equality, the liberal freedoms, the idea of tolerance,

00:16:19.320 even the idea that people are first and foremost individuals, you're going to enter into a very

00:16:23.500 different philosophical space. And so what we find in the 19th century, particularly thinkers

00:16:31.000 like Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche is a very deep assault on all of those liberal values. For all

00:16:38.900 of them, first and foremost, people are not individuals. They are all of them seeing people

00:16:44.400 as born into various sorts of cultural groups, and that those cultural groups have their own

00:16:50.540 internal dynamic that is completely different from other cultural groups. And those cultural

00:16:55.880 groups. They can't understand each other, really. They have completely different values that are

00:17:01.400 antithetical to each other. So they are not only unequal, but they're also not really individuals.

00:17:08.080 All of us really are just members of these different groups with completely different

00:17:11.820 values. And those values are so antagonistic that any sort of tolerance just seems impossible as

00:17:20.200 well. So it's a conflict of groups, and these groups are unequal, and respecting other people's

00:17:26.820 freedom to do what they want with their lives and tolerating differences, that's just completely

00:17:30.640 alien. The world is seen as a dark place of conflict, and it's either your group is going

00:17:36.960 to prevail or my group is going to prevail, and so to speak, all's fair in this bottom line.

00:17:43.820 The world is not fundamentally fair. The world is fundamentally conflict and whoever has the most power is going to dominate. So I just want to cite for many of us who have our undergraduate brushing up against thinkers like Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche, that all of them are violent conflict theorists.

00:18:05.600 All of them say explicitly that individuals belong to the group. They have different ideas of what that group is, that individuals should be serving the group, that individuals can be used by the group, sacrificed by the group.

00:18:19.340 And if you are in an out-group, you are a fundamental mortal enemy, and anything can be done to destroy the out-group enemy. And that is the inheritance of early 20th century German intellectual life, and the Nazis are just a particularly effective player of that cultural framework. 0.79

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00:19:42.760 about technology privacy and censorship steven so we're talking right now and to me it strikes me

00:19:52.140 as dare i say a very darwinian way of looking at the world in that there are winners and there's

00:19:57.400 losers and that you have to strive you have to be the best in order to defeat your rivals in order

00:20:03.720 to get to the top of the hierarchy yeah sure yeah so at that level of abstraction yes and and that 0.93

00:20:11.700 being the case they're they're called nazis national socialists what does that mean were

00:20:16.480 they actually socialists were they actually right-wing were they left-wing or was it its

00:20:21.180 own philosophy entirely yeah well that's uh good so then we get into all of the great debates about

00:20:28.740 what is a socialist really and uh you know it's like that we've had long centuries of debates

00:20:34.600 about what's a christian really or what's a liberal really and so on so i'm happy to jump

00:20:40.400 into into into that debate but let me say that the uh the nazis uh and it's a short form for

00:20:46.700 National Socialist German Workers Party is the full name of the party. The party was originally

00:20:53.800 founded in 1919 by, this was before Hitler joined the party, and it was called the German Workers

00:21:02.680 Party. And as that name suggests, it says that we are in favor of the workers against all of the

00:21:09.040 other classes in society, and it is this zero-sum adversarial struggle, and they saw themselves as

00:21:15.320 a revolutionary party. They were anti-capitalist. They thought that the government was in the

00:21:22.700 pocket of the big bankers. And most of the big bankers, of course, were Jews from their 0.98

00:21:27.380 perspective. And that the way capitalism and free markets work allegedly is in terms of liberty and

00:21:34.340 so on. But really, it's just the rich exploiting the poor. They're charging interest and living

00:21:39.300 parasitically off the interests of other people. So all of this is worked out as an ideology. And

00:21:44.980 at that level, it sounds like a very left-wing ideology. And all of the early members of the

00:21:50.100 party were very well read in Karl Marx. Adolf Hitler in 1919 goes to a big rally and hears a

00:21:58.860 speech by Gottfried Fader, one of the founders and intellectuals of the movement. Very impressed

00:22:05.760 with this guy. And then he, on the basis of being inspired by this speech, decides to join the party

00:22:12.180 in 1919. Now, what you have then is what sounds like a left-wing socialist version of class

00:22:22.180 warfare, adversarialism, anti-capitalism. And that was part of Hitler's background. Now, 0.81

00:22:28.940 the other part, though, then is the anti-Jew, anti-Gypsy, anti-Black people, basically anti-anybody

00:22:37.140 who doesn't fit our understanding of what the best kind of human being is. And that's another

00:22:42.080 kind of collectivism. That then is to say it's not so much economic groups that are in this

00:22:47.780 brutal conflict with each other, but it's ethnic groups and it's racial groups and it's religious

00:22:53.080 groups and so on. And there's all various mixes of that that's going on. And we happen to be a

00:23:00.060 part of this group and we have within our midst all of these other subgroups that really should

00:23:05.440 not be a part of this overall community that we are thinking of as Germany. And this is the 0.69

00:23:11.500 nationalism part of the program. And it says from that perspective, economic matters are part of

00:23:19.200 the package, but they're only one part of the package. We're more interested in cultures and

00:23:24.540 societies as a whole, you know, their language, their traditions, their religions, their racial

00:23:30.460 groups and so forth, along with all of their economic arrangements as well. Now, the point

00:23:35.520 of this is that this is sometimes seen as a more right-wing approach to doing political views,

00:23:42.680 and that's fine in a European context. But what is important here is that that also is a

00:23:49.480 collectivism. It is also saying individuals are not free agents, individuals don't have their

00:23:55.960 own lives, liberties, pursuit of happiness, and all of that sort of thing. Individuals are part

00:24:01.020 of ethnic groups, or individuals are part of racial groups, just as the people on the left

00:24:07.100 are saying, no, individuals really are part of economic groups. And both of them then are saying

00:24:12.680 there is no individualism. Individualism is totally shaped by and should be submerged to

00:24:19.660 various groups. And so what the Nazis are doing, you might say this is very clever as a political 0.96

00:24:26.340 move, but they also believed it truly, is to say, we believe both are correct. It is an economic

00:24:33.700 clash. It is a racial clash. It is a religious clash, and so on. We need to put it together, 0.62

00:24:38.900 and that is why they renamed the party in 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers Party.

00:24:46.300 And they took the nationalism seriously in this collectivistic fashion. They took the socialism seriously in this collectivistic fashion. And they did see themselves still on the side of the German workers.

00:24:59.260 Now, at this point, Hitler had become a serious mover and shaker in the party. He was a highly energetic guy. He was very well read, very well read for a politician, even if we would disagree with just about everybody he was reading. 0.60

00:25:18.700 And then, coincident with the renaming of the party, they published a 25-point party program.

00:25:26.480 So to come to the question about whether they were socialist or not, what's interesting is if you go through these 25 points,

00:25:33.720 that by my count, 14 of those points focus on economic matters.

00:25:41.000 And then 11 of those points focus on other kinds of matters.

00:25:44.940 How do you define the nation appropriately?

00:25:49.100 Should we be dictatorial or parliamentary?

00:25:51.660 Should there be freedom of the press right and so on?

00:25:54.040 But those 14 points, and I would put it to you as a hypothesis,

00:25:59.200 that if you read those 14 points,

00:26:02.120 every socialist in the world would agree with those 14 points.

00:26:07.380 And that's a strong claim, but check it out and verify it for yourself

00:26:10.960 at Wikipedia, any number of other points that are out there.

00:26:14.940 The policies with respect to government price controls, nationalizing of certain key industry and various kinds of controls all the way down, the development of government education and running of the education system and so on.

00:26:31.600 You just go right through the list. It's all socialism.

00:26:33.940 So I think what we very quickly we're going to get into, though, is the debates over how pure does your socialism have to be?

00:26:42.140 And does your socialism need to be nested in a broader context, or should the economic socialism be fundamental?

00:26:50.460 So what the Nazis are pushing for is not going to be a Marxist version of socialism.

00:26:55.860 It's not going to be a Saint-Simonian version of socialism or a Fourier version of socialism or a Rousseauian version of socialism.

00:27:03.940 They thought of themselves as socialists, and they thought of themselves as better socialists than the other socialists that are out there.

00:27:10.760 So I will just leave it at this point. But the debate strike me as very similar to the Catholics and the Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox, all having their centuries long arguments about who the real Christians are.

00:27:25.960 It's the exact same sort of thing. They are socialists, but there are lots of different subspecies of socialism. The Nazis are in that mix. 0.77

00:27:33.240 So why do we call them the far right, Stephen?

00:27:35.100 I think that comes out of, that's always struck me as a North American, as extraordinarily alien, because when I was a young guy, I was educated in classical liberalism. And so what left and right mean is always culturally specific to the political landscape.

00:27:52.440 Right. So in Canada, right, where I grew up, right, what was left and what was right means something different than what was left and what is right in the United States and so on.

00:28:03.620 So I think what you have to do for that is to go back to the 19th century European intellectual context.

00:28:10.500 And this is the continental European because the British are somewhat exceptional on this score here.

00:28:16.440 And what you find when you look at the intellectual landscape, particularly by the time you get into Central Europe, is right is a nationalistic form of collectivism, that you are part of this ethnic group. 0.95

00:28:30.400 So you're a German, you're an Austrian, you're a Schwabian or whatever it is that you happen to be.

00:28:35.540 That's the first and foremost thing about your identity.

00:28:39.240 And with that comes a certain language, a certain number of cultural traditions with a certain number of religion.

00:28:44.040 So you are formed, your nation is formed by all of those, that constellation of group membership identities.

00:28:53.420 And then the people on the left have a more economic understanding of your collective identity.

00:28:59.320 So it's two versions of collectivism.

00:29:01.680 One making fundamental economic matters, the other making fundamental cultural matters as well.

00:29:08.220 And so that's the debate.

00:29:09.120 Now, obviously, they disagree with each other on all sorts of applied issues.

00:29:13.600 But what they do agree with each other is on the collectivism and that and they are all anti individualistic and they also agree with each other that there's not going to be a harmonious negotiated resolution of the differences between these various groups.

00:29:29.980 The conflict is deep and fundamental. And as a result, the conflict is going to be resolved by power, not by means of negotiation, agreement, democratic and parliamentary procedures and so forth.

00:29:45.600 It has to be ultimately through revolution, fighting and suppression of the of the other group.

00:29:52.180 So I want to say any time you use right or left or even liberal and conservative now, they're almost useless in contemporary discourse unless it's a journalistic shorthand.

00:30:05.840 And you know that you're talking for the British context or the Japanese context or the Russian context.

00:30:11.260 Makes sense. And like you say, we all fall into that trap very often nowadays, I think, in our conversations. The other thing I was going to ask you, and this is just us getting some of the definitions out of the way, really, is I think in the modern culture, we use the terms fascist and Nazi interchangeably. Can you explain what that is all about and the differences and what we should know about that?

00:30:36.840 Yeah, that's another fascinating issue because, you know, technically, and the academic in me wants to say that you should not distinguish national socialist and fascist, that they do have ideological membership inclusion criteria, but they also have historical differences that should be important.

00:30:57.600 So the point about fascism is that fascism originated in Italy, and the most important person here, obviously, is Benito Mussolini.

00:31:07.840 But the important thing here, this is often overlooked, is that Mussolini was a man of the left until he was 35 years old, a man of the far left until he was 35 years old.

00:31:19.580 He was a card-carrying Marxist and saw himself as working with the unions, organizing the workers, that the Marxist picture of the world was by and large correct, and what we needed to do was bring Marxism to Italy, that it's not an ethnic rivalry, but rather it's a class rivalry, that it's the Italian workers versus the Italian capitalists, and it's the same.

00:31:45.400 So it's all of that line that we know. And he was a true believer until he was in his middle 30s. And then World War I happened. And World War I, he was shocked to realize was that the Italian workers whom he'd been arguing his whole life and working with them said they're being oppressed by the capitalists.

00:32:02.180 that World War I was, on the Marxist analysis, supposed to be this capitalist war,

00:32:07.680 and that really what should happen is that all of the workers in all of the different nations

00:32:11.320 around the world should get together and overthrow their capitalist oppressors and so forth

00:32:17.280 and bring about the revolution, that instead what was happening was that first and foremost

00:32:21.880 in all of the Italian workers' minds was their loyalty to being Italian.

00:32:26.940 They thought of themselves as part of the Italian ethnic group,

00:32:30.380 And they're against the French, and they're against the Germans, and they're against all of the other ethnic groups. So what Mussolini realized was that this idea that economic interests come first was wrong, and that it's a different collectivity that needs to be stressed.

00:32:45.920 And so what he wanted to argue is, rather than international socialism, that workers of the world should be uniting, what we need to do is have socialism for the Italian people. And it's going to have a different flavor than the socialism for the French people and the socialism for the German people. And that's where the label fascism comes from.

00:33:06.160 And it's partly hearkening back to ancient Rome, where you take a bunch of rods and you bind them together with a cord.

00:33:13.880 You can't bend them.

00:33:14.840 Any individual rod, you can bend and snap pretty easily and put a bunch of them together.

00:33:19.300 So we need to come together as a collectivity, as an individual.

00:33:23.460 You are part of this collectivity.

00:33:25.440 You're supposed to serve this collectivity, even sacrifice yourself and die for this collectivity.

00:33:31.120 But the right collectivity is the Italian cultural group.

00:33:34.720 So it's socialism for Italians, and that's what fascism is. And the same story needs to be told here. Mussolini was a very well-read man, and he was a very articulate man. He made a living as a journalist and as an editor of a newspaper for many years.

00:33:51.740 He knew the ins and outs of arguing all of the fine points of theoretical detail from his years as a Marxist, and he was working with first-rate philosophers in Italian universities, Gentili and others, who were reading Nietzsche, reading Marx, reading Hegel, reading Kant, it's all the same guys again.

00:34:12.920 And then taking that philosophical framework, putting it through an Italian collectivist lens and outcomes fascism with with with Mussolini at the leader.

00:34:22.300 So if fascism is Italian socialism, then when we go a little bit north, then what we have is Hitler and the others arguing, well, we need to have national socialism for Germans. 0.61

00:34:36.620 So they are siblings in the collectivist, socialist, nationalist universe.

00:34:45.440 Absolutely fascinating, Stephen.

00:34:47.300 So coming forward to the present day, because in our culture, you know, when Brexit and Trump happened, everyone started calling everyone a Nazi and a fascist.

00:34:56.960 Now with COVID, vice versa.

00:34:59.440 And, you know, even I jokingly as a comedian, sometimes, you know, I see a later story out of Austria, you know, making vaccines mandatory.

00:35:07.160 And I am sort of tempted to make the historical connection as well.

00:35:10.740 So how do we, you know, everyone seems to be worried about the rise of this thing.

00:35:16.480 How do we know? Because what I'm hearing is a thread through everything you're saying is collectivism.

00:35:21.380 It's all about the collective is more important than the individual.

00:35:25.340 And therefore, maybe you don't have the right to take or not take the vaccine because your body isn't quite yours as an individual.

00:35:32.160 We, the collective, need you to do something very specific.

00:35:35.600 How do what would be the telltale signs that Nazism or fascism is making a comeback?

00:35:41.280 Yeah, well, I would say, yeah, that's a hard question.

00:35:45.240 So I think very quickly you need to get to know the person you are labeling well as an individual.

00:35:53.660 And I think just taking one data point, you know, that the person is in favor of a more authoritarian political policy on this particular issue is not enough to bring out the big gun.

00:36:06.460 I think it's fair to say, you know, if someone is in favor of, say, mandatory COVID vaccinations for children before they can go into school.

00:36:16.180 Well, that clearly is an authoritarian measure. And the right label to use at that point is to say that is an authoritarian measure. But then to go on to say that that is a Marxist measure or a Nazi measure or a fascist measure, that's going to then bring in a whole bunch of other baggage.

00:36:33.800 That rest of that baggage might be appropriate, but you would need to know that that particular individual advocating that particular program also signs on to, by and large, the rest of that particular program.

00:36:46.520 If you don't do that, then I think you are just engaging in name calling and doing cheap shots.

00:36:52.140 And that's an intellectual irresponsibility.

00:36:55.160 So it's not just, you know, fascist and Nazi and so on, you know, the same sort of accusations with respect to calling someone a sexist.

00:37:03.800 or calling someone a racist because, you know, their nuanced understanding of these complicated

00:37:09.840 issues is slightly different from yours. That's too much cheap shot. You need to do your homework.

00:37:16.260 I also do think, and this is the liberal tolerance coming out here, treat people as

00:37:21.100 individuals, not as avatars for various shadowy movements that are going on there. And just as

00:37:27.000 we do in a court of law, you need to give that person a chance to explain. You need to know about

00:37:33.360 the person's broader context before you uh you start using the condemnatory language

00:37:38.560 steven i remember talking to my grandfather who volunteered to fight the nazis and i remember

00:37:46.080 when he was still alive when i was a young boy having a conversation with him asking him why is

00:37:51.140 it that people voted for hitler why was it that people supported him and he said to me and i always

00:37:58.140 remember this he said you have to remember francis at the time that germany was in a really bad

00:38:03.340 way economically, Hitler was a working man's friend at the time. Is that a fair statement 0.98

00:38:09.140 to make, Stephen? I think it is a fair statement to make. So, you know, when you start asking about

00:38:16.280 the nature of the support for the National Socialists, the same sort of dynamics that

00:38:22.220 we would talk about right now in any democratic, republican, political context, an election is

00:38:29.960 coming up. And then what your party strategists do very quickly is they look at their demographics

00:38:35.860 and they start dividing them into different groups. And the different groups do have

00:38:40.520 different interests and things that are more or less important to them. So the Nazis did have, 0.77

00:38:46.620 by the time we get into the late 1920s, and they're starting to get increasingly more votes

00:38:51.720 and then on into the 1930s, things go up and down until they're successful in 1933. And they get

00:38:58.240 Hitler appointed the chancellor. But it's parliamentary politics, and we have to 0.93

00:39:04.020 understand it that way. So a lot of people are working week-to-week jobs. They are laborers,

00:39:11.880 and so that's a huge demographic. And so the question every party is putting to itself is,

00:39:17.560 how can we appeal to this demographic, appeal to their interests, and make them election promises

00:39:23.140 so that they will vote for us.

00:39:25.340 And so the Nazis, to a large extent,

00:39:27.460 did see themselves as economic socialists.

00:39:31.140 You know, we haven't said anything yet about Goebbels,

00:39:35.380 aside from the fact that he was highly educated,

00:39:37.740 but he loved Karl Marx

00:39:39.480 and kind of channeled Karl Marx in much,

00:39:42.840 you know, he's an anti-capitalist,

00:39:44.720 money and interest is making slaves of all of us.

00:39:48.720 We are friends of the workers and so on.

00:39:50.660 So there's the workers, there's the teachers,

00:39:53.140 there's the professors, there's the newspaper people, there are, you know, people in all

00:39:57.560 different walks of life, and you tailor your program to appeal to as many people as you

00:40:03.560 possibly can in those groups. So people who are workers, by which we mean shorthand tag,

00:40:13.320 manual workers, whose employment prospects are somewhat uncertain, you know, things are going

00:40:19.900 up and down. Weimar Germany, you know, it was up and down. Devastations, obviously, following World 1.00

00:40:26.220 War I, vicissitudes of the market and all kinds of government controls that were going on. So

00:40:31.740 it was not a stable, comfortable place to be employed. And in that context, it's very easy

00:40:37.940 to say, we will give you all sorts of goodies, right? And we've got scapegoats. So anytime you

00:40:44.500 have a problem, these are the bad guys who are causing all of your problems. And so we should

00:40:48.280 hate those people and vote them out. So the Nazis, like many other groups, were very clever at 0.98

00:40:54.020 putting together a package that was appealing to many people in that subgroup for whom economic

00:41:01.240 matters on a week-to-week basis are very important. What's interesting is that they saw themselves as

00:41:07.260 being in direct competition with the Communist Party. And if you follow, and this gets very

00:41:13.960 nitty-gritty through the late part of the 1920s and on into the early 1930s. So you go into

00:41:19.660 specific neighborhoods in Berlin, in Germany, in Munich, in Hamburg, and so on. So working-class

00:41:27.160 neighborhoods. And what you find is in this election in 1928, 80% of the workers are voting

00:41:34.880 for the communists. In the next election, those same 80% are voting for the Nazis. And then in

00:41:41.380 the next election, they switch back to the communists and then to the Nazis. They're going 0.83

00:41:44.960 back and forth. So they're competing for exactly the same turf. And it becomes a matter of very

00:41:49.640 fine detail, sometimes at the level of personality politics. You know, this guy was caught in bed

00:41:54.600 with the wrong person's wife. And so we lose that particular election and so forth. Or we're able

00:42:01.680 to sweeten the economic pot and make slightly more economic promises than these guys are in

00:42:07.140 this election so they've switched over and vote for us uh vote for us as well so i would say yes

00:42:12.360 absolutely your grandfather was right economic interests do drive uh elections significantly

00:42:20.300 but i want to say that's not the only issue and it's perhaps not the most important issue

00:42:24.980 what were the most important issues that that caused people to to vote for hitler and for the

00:42:30.740 90s in 1933 and before that? Well, I think there were religious issues. There is the long

00:42:38.520 sordid history of anti-Semitism in Germany. So whoever is most able to paint the Jews as bad

00:42:47.140 people, as the poison in our midst, and get people riled up on religious and anti-Jew matters, 0.94

00:42:54.540 they're going to be more successful in particular elections. And that's a long-standing issue.

00:43:00.740 And it's also striking that if you look at the leading philosophers, I'm coming back to the philosophers again, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche to a lesser extent, they are all anti-Semitic. 0.57

00:43:13.120 It's shocking to the of us raised in the liberal tradition. We read John Locke about tolerance back in the 1690s, arguing that we should be tolerating the Jews and Adam Smith.

00:43:27.500 and just becomes part of our ethos, that we might disagree with them religiously and see

00:43:32.480 their cultural habits as different from us, but they're human beings living their lives,

00:43:37.080 and they should have the same rights as the rest of us. You don't find that in Germany. There's a

00:43:42.340 very tiny classical liberal movement there, and all of the big names are anti-Semitic in various

00:43:50.580 degree. So that religious matters, the longstanding ethnic feuds, right? What do you think about the

00:43:57.620 Russians? What do you think about the French? What do you think about the English? Do you see them 1.00

00:44:03.520 to the extent that international commerce or international politics is the dominant set of

00:44:09.220 issues in this particular ethnic cycle? You know, the same way that right now, you know, we need to

00:44:15.360 be worried about the Russians or we need to be worried about the Chinese. It's easy to get that 1.00

00:44:19.340 whipped up into national consciousness and get a swing vote based on that particular issue.

00:44:26.360 I think it also is important is what people are reading in the newspapers.

00:44:31.420 And if you've got a generation of journalists who've graduated from high school and gone on

00:44:38.200 to university, they absorb a certain ideological view of the world, and that comes out in their

00:44:44.160 newspapers. So what are the newspaper editors deciding and so on? The other group would be,

00:44:50.540 and this is another shocking one when I started reading about this, is what are people learning,

00:44:55.320 not in universities, but in primary schools? And one of the striking things in the 1930s,

00:45:02.860 slightly before the Nazis came to power, if you look at all of the teachers teaching in primary

00:45:08.740 schools all up and down Germany. And you look at their political party memberships. There were

00:45:15.200 more teachers who were members of the Nazi party prior to Hitler coming to power than any other

00:45:20.720 party in Germany. So it's a cultural revolution. So people are absorbing this ideology in schools.

00:45:29.660 They're reading about it in their newspapers. In many cases, they're hearing it in their sermons.

00:45:34.400 And then when they have their, you know, their after dinner conversations or after work conversations at the pub over a few beers and so on, and then the union organizers come in and they preach a certain economic message, you get it from all angles. And I think ultimately that's what shapes people. So it's not going to be one thing. It's the whole ideological package that's put together.

00:45:56.180 at what point was it that Hitler decided that he needed to spread Nazism around the world or was

00:46:04.740 that always a goal for him yeah well uh that's that's an interesting question so what I would

00:46:13.600 say is here I think Hitler is channeling the great philosophers and what you find in I'll just 0.89

00:46:22.620 cite two here is just Hegel and Marx. Hegel in the early part of the 1800s, but he becomes perhaps

00:46:29.780 the dominant philosopher of the early part of the 19th century. And then Marx writing in the middle

00:46:36.340 part of the 19th century, and his influence starts to be manifested more in the early part of the

00:46:43.180 20th century after the success of the revolution in Russia. But what do both of those have in

00:46:51.080 common, despite the fact that they are somewhat different in some of their metaphysics and their

00:46:55.200 epistemology, some of their value frameworks, and so on. What you find in Hegel is the idea

00:47:00.740 that the state is the manifestation of a kind of divine providence on earth, and that through the

00:47:09.180 state, all individuals need to realize their personal identity to serve the state and to be

00:47:17.280 willing to be sacrificed for the state so that the state can realize its divine providential

00:47:23.660 mission. And it's going to happen. Divine providence happens, no matter what you or I

00:47:28.540 as individuals say. And there are certain great men who come along, who are chosen by these divine

00:47:35.220 providential forces to embody the state and thereby to embody the entire culture, to bring

00:47:42.120 that culture forward to the next stage. And it just so happens that Germany is, of all of the

00:47:50.860 cultures around the world, the one that is most evolved, and that Germany has this providential

00:47:56.360 mission to take all of the world in a certain direction. Now, that's a two-minute summary of

00:48:03.760 Hegelian philosophy and political philosophy. But imagine yourself as a young, thoughtful,

00:48:10.000 well-read politically ambitious german reading hegel what is your inspiration going to be right

00:48:18.440 well i want to be the embodiment of the state and to take germany in the in the in the right

00:48:24.040 direction so all of that collectivity and a little bit of religion and might makes right

00:48:29.420 at the international level all comes to be fine and uh it necessarily has to be a conflictual

00:48:35.740 warlike fashion that's going to bring this about. So Heidegger, another German philosopher of the

00:48:43.860 1920s, Carl Schmitt, probably the most intelligent legal mind, also a PhD. All of them are reading

00:48:52.520 Hegel and are arguing that Germany has this special mission. And both of them end up being 0.59

00:48:59.580 very strong supporters of national socialism and providing the intellectual and academic

00:49:04.040 ammunition for it. You find the same thing in Marxism, in a more left-wing or economically

00:49:10.540 socialist version, that the whole world is in this economic clash of cultures and classes,

00:49:18.180 and that it's a die-hard struggle of alienation and exploitation, and it's only going to be

00:49:24.160 through this violent revolution, that this manifestation of the proper way of society

00:49:32.880 being organized is going to happen. And there needs to be a dictatorship of the proletariat, 0.99

00:49:38.700 a small vanguard of individuals who embody their class interests and know what is best for the

00:49:45.440 society as a whole, who are willing to ram things through and make the revolution happen,

00:49:50.660 no matter how bloody that it gets. So whether you're absorbing a more right-wing Hegelian

00:49:56.320 understanding or a left-wing Marxist understanding, by the time you get to these guys, that's the

00:50:02.540 political zeitgeist. And I was going to ask Stephen, we've got a few minutes left before

00:50:09.060 we ask you our final question. Moving slightly beyond the Nazis specifically and into the

00:50:15.600 philosophical underpinnings of that, again, coming back to collectivism and liberalism,

00:50:20.720 one of the things we've explored on the show somewhat is the lack of meaning in modern society

00:50:27.600 that we have and the absence perhaps of religion, but also just the whole liberal world seems to

00:50:34.340 create that sort of, you know, we are all an island of one person in some way. That's how

00:50:40.680 it can feel sometimes to a lot of people. On the other hand, collectivism, you've just charted,

00:50:45.320 you know, the terrible ways it can lead people to think and behave. So is there some kind of

00:50:51.320 golden middle or is it just classical liberalism all the way? Is there a good way to organize

00:50:58.900 society? Yeah. Well, I don't think there's a golden middle when you frame things that way.

00:51:03.960 I'm a liberal all the way down, all the way down in the philosophy. But you're right. I mean,

00:51:10.880 it is a very good criticism of liberalism to say that fundamentally you are on your own,

00:51:17.000 that you are an individual you have your life and you are a free agent you have the right to life

00:51:23.200 liberty and the pursuit of happiness now what's distinctive about liberalism though is to say

00:51:29.060 that making your life is a do-it-yourself project not to say that you won't be very social and other

00:51:36.100 people won't help you and you'll have wonderful support networks right and so forth but there is

00:51:40.560 a bottom line responsibility that liberalism puts on each individual. And then we do find a big

00:51:49.300 divide among individuals in a liberal society, those who are grateful, who are energized,

00:51:57.820 who are delighted by the fact that I am a free agent and I can do whatever I want with my life

00:52:02.880 and I'm going to go out and do something pretty special with it versus those who feel that as a

00:52:08.920 burden, as a weight, as I'm not sure that I'm up to the task, and that sounds a little bit scary.

00:52:17.420 And for that psychological type, I'm just going to call it a psychological type right now,

00:52:21.800 I do think the collectivisms are going to be more psychologically attractive, setting aside any of

00:52:26.880 the intellectuals. Because what all of the collectivisms do is to say there is a ready-made

00:52:34.140 group with a ready-made set of values, and there is this set of institutions where all of it is

00:52:42.940 worked out, and all you need to do is just be part of this group, and we will provide meaning for you

00:52:49.160 and give you a cause and mobilize all of your energies in a certain direction. So the idea then

00:52:56.820 is for the collectivisms it's going to be through politics and absorbing yourself into

00:53:05.140 pre-existing social institutions that you are going to find meaning uh and that's going to

00:53:11.540 be very comforting to uh to a large number of people and the individuals uh in on the in the

00:53:17.140 liberal tradition they're given a lot of hard work to say you have to make your life it's not

00:53:24.020 something that you can just take off the shelf or be absorbed into. So I think that really is

00:53:29.480 the great challenge for any sort of liberal philosophy broadly conceived, is to say that

00:53:35.460 we need, when we are dealing with young people, to be able to raise people who are, by the time 0.92

00:53:41.940 they're adults, they're welcoming and able to take on that great challenge of going forth

00:53:48.940 into the world and making their own meaningful life. And I think the reason why there are so many

00:53:54.880 animistic and atomistic individuals floating around in liberal society is that

00:54:00.820 we've not done a very good job of that. And the way you talk about mobilizing groups and giving

00:54:07.980 groups a sense of purpose and, you know, people can identify themselves by their group.

00:54:13.480 it sounds a little bit like identity politics you know what we see now yeah yeah this is not

00:54:22.560 a cheap shot but this is 2021 if you were to go back to germany in 1921 it's exactly the same

00:54:31.800 thing only only the names have changed it is a form of identity politics and notice that the

00:54:38.100 the point here is not first and foremost political. It's what is your identity? Am I an individual?

00:54:45.800 I have my own mind. I can form my character and my values. And it's up to me as an individual

00:54:51.900 to get up off the sofa and go out into the world and make my life into what I want it to be.

00:54:59.320 That's my core identity. Or is it the case that I, as an individual, I'm born into certain groups

00:55:05.880 and I have a ready-made individual, a ready-made identity that I can just put on like a suit of

00:55:12.360 clothes. And that's who I am. And my values and my goals and what I'm supposed to do in my place

00:55:19.180 in society is all worked out. That's my collectivized identity. So, you know, if you

00:55:25.820 think about the ethnic versions of this, so, you know, you guys are, again, I'll use some British

00:55:32.700 examples here, but you know, you say, so part of your identity is to be British. And then you can

00:55:38.700 say, you know, we are the nation of Shakespeare, and John Milton. And just, you know, saying those

00:55:45.440 names, you sit up a little straighter in your chair, and you feel some measure of pride. That's

00:55:51.640 a point that needs to be unpacked very carefully. So was it the fact that you just happened to be

00:55:57.100 born in this particular place in the world, that because other people who were born in that

00:56:03.520 particular place in the world centuries ago did some amazing things, that that makes you a better

00:56:08.660 person, that you don't need to do anything additional. Just by virtue of being British, 0.74

00:56:13.380 you are special. I think that's a danger. I think the right way to do that then is to say,

00:56:19.940 yes, Shakespeare was great. John Milton was great. And why I can feel pride of that is not

00:56:26.480 due to the happenstance of my birth, but I as an individual have become an educated person

00:56:32.380 and I have learned to appreciate Shakespeare and John Milton and all of the others

00:56:39.200 who have done some pretty amazing things. And so I'm the kind of person who is worthy of

00:56:45.520 being related to in some way Shakespeare. So it's got to be tied to your individual achievement,

00:56:54.220 not just happenstance of birth.

00:56:57.480 See, it's really, really fascinating,

00:56:59.720 particularly the point that Francis brings up

00:57:01.620 about collectivism and collectivist ideas in modern society.

00:57:06.260 And I take your point that the job of educators like you,

00:57:09.220 and I'm sure you do a brilliant job at it,

00:57:11.620 is to prepare people not to have to get an off-the-shelf solution

00:57:15.240 to living a fulfilling life and making meaning for themselves.

00:57:20.380 what do we do with the fact that there's a lot of people who who who want the off the shelf thing and

00:57:27.240 that that's that's you know we failed as you say to to provide that how do we manage that in the

00:57:32.580 current political moment yeah well i uh i think we have to think for the long term right by the

00:57:38.500 time people are 25 30 35 40 and so on uh they can change they can reform you know people who are

00:57:45.640 are alcoholics who have various kinds of addictions they can change but it's a rare

00:57:50.200 person who does so uh and my particular interests are in university age people but in this last

00:57:56.920 year or so i'm doing a lot in in philosophy of education and applied philosophy of education

00:58:02.200 because you know this is not an original point to me by any stretch uh how we educate children

00:58:08.120 is the most important long-term thing. So if, for example, I've written on this, if from day one,

00:58:18.220 for example, we teach children to be afraid of the world, that we're killing all of the animals

00:58:23.400 and everything is going to be poison and you probably aren't going to see age 25, if we start

00:58:28.680 teaching people that at age five, then we're not going to raise a generation of people with the 1.00

00:58:35.100 emotional resilience to handle important, say, environmental challenges. That's an indoctrination

00:58:41.300 education method that sabotages people's emotional resilience. If we dumb down mathematics and

00:58:49.200 science because we say it's too hard for boys or it's too hard for girls or it's too hard for

00:58:54.040 members of this racial or ethnic group, and so we do math for dummies, so to speak, at a very early

00:59:00.280 age, then intellectually, by the time we are graduating so-called high school graduates,

00:59:05.360 we're going to be putting out millions of people who do not have the intellectual resilience in

00:59:10.380 order to be able to take on the challenges of modern technological and scientific society,

00:59:15.420 much less the broader intellectual project. So my view is that formal education, there are some

00:59:22.420 islands of excellences in some places that are pretty good, but the average has been very low,

00:59:28.240 And in some cases, it has been outright sabotage of people, young people's intellectual and emotional capacity for taking on modern living.

00:59:37.300 So that's where I think we need to be focusing our education, reforming existing educational institutions.

00:59:45.120 And the one thing that I am encouraged by is a large number of people who are recognizing the low to abysmal results in much of mainstream education and who are engaging in literally thousands and thousands of different entrepreneurial experiments to try different educational models.

01:00:03.980 So by the time we have this conversation, hopefully 20 years from now, we're dealing with a different young people demographic.

01:00:11.200 Stephen it's been absolutely wonderful thank you so much for coming on the show the hour has quite

01:00:17.720 literally flown by uh yeah but uh we always end our interviews with the same question which is

01:00:25.100 what's the one thing we're not talking about but we really should be uh well I I would just return

01:00:31.320 to the point uh that I just made but make it in slightly different form uh I'm trying not to be

01:00:37.980 one of those curmudgeonly old professors talking about kids these days. But I do notice a

01:00:45.940 generational shift in the young people who show up in my university classes. And it's not just

01:00:53.100 the young women, it's also the young men. By and large, it does seem that the young women are

01:00:58.780 coming out of high school a little better prepared for university life than the young men are.

01:01:03.600 But I'm still a little bit discouraged that we're not talking enough about what's going on in the high schools, how we are kind of minting people with a degree that to a large extent is not actually an honest credential.

01:01:26.500 There's a huge amount of dishonesty saying, we give you this diploma, we send you forth,

01:01:31.280 you are ready for adult life when everybody knows that is not true.

01:01:37.180 We revere educators, teachers, we've given them a huge amount of money.

01:01:44.080 And there's been a certain amount of benevolence on the part of everybody to give them the benefit of the doubt on all sorts of scores.

01:01:51.500 but I think we do need to have an honest reckoning

01:01:54.720 about what's actually going on

01:01:56.840 and a serious effort at reform.

01:02:00.980 Fantastic.

01:02:01.600 Stephen Hicks, thank you so much for coming back.

01:02:03.560 I really recommend people check out

01:02:05.140 not only the documentary that we mentioned,

01:02:07.080 but also you've written a number of books

01:02:08.940 and I know you've got a couple.

01:02:10.520 This is the book that came out of the documentary.

01:02:13.680 So let me do a commercial plug for that one.

01:02:16.660 Nietzsche and the Nazis.

01:02:18.100 You came very well prepared, Stephen.

01:02:20.520 And of course, we look forward to having you back on the show when the new books.

01:02:23.320 It would be a pleasure.

01:02:24.240 Let's plan on it.

01:02:25.160 Thanks a lot, guys.

01:02:25.960 Great question.

01:02:26.740 We're going to ask you a couple of extra questions, not from us, but better ones from

01:02:30.500 our local supporters.

01:02:31.620 But in the meantime, we're going to say goodbye to our audience.

01:02:34.140 Thank you so much for watching and listening.

01:02:35.960 We'll see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or Raw Show.

01:02:40.120 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.

01:02:41.720 And if you like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:02:46.100 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:02:47.880 we hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview remember to subscribe and hit the bell button

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TRIGGERnometry - December 13, 2021

The Truth About the Nazis

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