TRIGGERnometry - The West’s Struggle With Reality - Doug Stokes

00:00:00.880 Those moments of struggle where you are pushed and steel sharpens steel and pressure creates a diamond,

00:00:08.980 those are fundamentally important because those are the moments of real deep personal transformation.

00:00:16.200 They argue that there's no such thing as objectivity and truth,

00:00:19.320 and they place a theoretical and philosophical primacy on epistemology, how we know what we know.

00:00:25.280 They move away from an ontology, what actually exists.

00:00:27.960 There's no such thing as truth or objectivity or science, and therefore everything is about contestation.

00:00:34.200 Power.

00:00:34.720 Power.

00:00:35.620 What you see is what I call a trauma shield, a trauma bubble.

00:00:39.140 It's now become a weapon in order to shut people up.

00:00:42.500 Yeah. On the campus, you can have these ideas, but when they spill out,

00:00:48.140 you can begin to see the human costs of some of this stuff.

00:00:52.440 And we're doing this in the context of an increasingly multipolar international system

00:00:56.380 as an influence operation, a psychological operation.

00:00:59.360 I'm not saying it's all the rest of the heat, the defeat of Chinese or Russian propagandists.

00:01:04.660 The idea that there's not influence or psychological warfare taking place is for the birds.

00:01:09.040 Trust me.

00:01:09.420 Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:22.520 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:23.780 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:24.880 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:29.800 Our guest today is a professor of international security at the University of Exeter

00:01:33.760 and a fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and senior advisor at the Legatum Institute.

00:01:38.300 He writes about American foreign policy, geopolitics and the culture wars,

00:01:42.460 and his writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Critic, the Spectator

00:01:46.380 and many other outlets.

00:01:47.840 His latest book is called Against Decolonization, Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West.

00:01:53.200 Doug Stokes, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:54.560 Thank you very much.

00:01:55.480 It's great to have you on the show.

00:01:57.080 We're going to talk about the decline of the West, a favoured theme on this show, as always, 0.95

00:02:01.600 which pleases both of us for different reasons.

00:02:03.520 But before we do, tell us a little bit about who are you, how are you, where you are,

00:02:08.180 what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:02:11.980 Well, I was born and bred in London, in East London, Hackney, East London, lived there for 24 years.

00:02:17.460 I then left the UK for about a year.

00:02:20.680 I lived and worked in Bosnia, quite close to the, just after the war had finished.

00:02:25.620 I lived in a place called Britsko in northern Bosnia.

00:02:28.200 It's still a very contested space.

00:02:30.440 I lived there for about a year, joined two halves of what was called, what still is, the Republic of Srpska.

00:02:35.100 So I lived there for a year.

00:02:37.060 And then I came back.

00:02:38.400 I lived in the West Country.

00:02:39.780 I was at Bristol University, my master and PhD at Bristol University.

00:02:43.200 Then I moved around the UK quite a lot.

00:02:44.980 So that's my kind of, obviously, it's potted history.

00:02:47.680 That's my personal history.

00:02:49.820 And now I'm a professor at the University of Exeter, been there for 10 years.

00:02:54.060 And I do various other things, work on lots of different projects, the new books obviously are.

00:02:59.000 And I'm also a senior advisor to the Lugartum Institute.

00:03:02.520 And one of the things we were keen to talk with you about is, essentially, the question that we like to throw at all of our guests is, what's going on, Doug?

00:03:10.280 What's going on?

00:03:11.000 What's going on?

00:03:11.720 Yeah, what's going on?

00:03:12.640 Wow, okay.

00:03:13.520 What's going on?

00:03:14.320 Well, what I'll do is I'll link it back to the book.

00:03:18.460 Of course you will, because you're here to promote the book.

00:03:20.560 Well, I'm here to have a conversation with you two.

00:03:22.700 I mean, that's the important thing for me.

00:03:24.560 So the book makes different sets of arguments.

00:03:28.140 I mean, what motivated me to write that book was, you know, I've always seen universities somewhere where we can have open and rational debate and open inquiry, in an ideal world at least.

00:03:41.420 And really, universities are sort of the motors of human civilization, you know, contestation, you can have these incredible ideas taking place.

00:03:50.700 So wonderful cultural centers, really.

00:03:55.040 But what I really, really found was over the last sort of, there's been a period of time, especially over the last five years, and especially after, you know, post-George Floyd, there was a sort of increasingly creeping illiberalism and authoritarianism on the campuses.

00:04:10.200 Manifested around various types of issues.

00:04:14.420 And in particular, this kind of idea of decolonization, decolonizing the curriculum, which itself is kind of quite a contested ideology, draws from a specific sets of theories, post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism.

00:04:30.420 But it was increasingly being imposed by university authorities, and executive teams.

00:04:37.600 And I thought that that was a grave threat to our universities and to liberal values of pluralism and openness and free inquiry.

00:04:47.620 So the book is really about that process.

00:04:50.880 It looks at the ways in which there's been these kind of increasingly moral panics within Western politics, and the ways in which what I sort of identify as sort of professional managerial elites, technocratic elites, if you want to put those in those kind of terms, have often sort of latched on to this.

00:05:09.520 And a sort of politics of vulnerability, where they're enabled to sort of control the narratives to some extent, but also to lead alleged oppressed minorities, et cetera, to some sort of technocratic solution or salvation.

00:05:24.940 And the power ultimately rests with them.

00:05:28.620 So the book looks at that, and then it unpacks some of the theories, some of the philosophical ideas of that, then relates it.

00:05:34.880 I'm very keen to relate to a much bigger picture.

00:05:37.380 Well, this is why I asked you what's going on, because everything you've said so far will be a very familiar story to our audience.

00:05:43.300 These are questions we've been looking at for several years now.

00:05:46.520 But what I found interesting about your work and your book is that you talk about the bigger picture, what's going on, that these things are more of a symptom of, rather than just being the problem itself.

00:06:00.840 So what is at the core of everything that's happening?

00:06:04.420 In terms of the kind of the broader culture war, well, there's multiple levels that you can analyze it, right?

00:06:10.320 So I think one of the first big things we need to understand is that what takes place in popular culture or in our life here in the UK, many of it draws from much deeper philosophical currents.

00:06:26.160 And I think I find it very frustrating, people that talk about the culture a lot.

00:06:30.600 Essentially, I see those discussions about specific issues, you know, diversity managers in the National Health Service or, you know, various cultural issues.

00:06:42.980 You really, I find it frustrating because you're ultimately talking about a sort of tactical elements of a much broader cultural and philosophical malaise.

00:06:52.420 Which is what?

00:06:53.380 Well, so what is it?

00:06:54.740 So essentially what I would say is the wellspring of a lot of this stuff comes from various theoretical elements that we've seen developing in the humanities and social sciences, in the Anglophone universities in particular, over the last 20 to 30 years.

00:07:10.200 So what you ultimately had is essentially you had a critique of Western civilization.

00:07:17.760 And in particular, you had post-structuralist and post-modernist philosophers, so Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said.

00:07:24.500 I'm sure you're familiar with those kind of those thinkers.

00:07:27.740 And the essential critique that they make and they move away.

00:07:31.040 And it's also a direct attack on Marxism, which is quite interesting because often the sort of some of the analysis says that the culture wars are kind of a neo-Marxist thing.

00:07:39.720 But in many senses, and the book tries to draw this out, it's also it's also a radical critique of Marxism.

00:07:44.380 Marxism minimally, at least, had a teleological view of history.

00:07:48.200 It was kind of an arc of progress and it was a materialist philosophy.

00:07:51.760 It's rooted in material structures and a notion of the world, an ontological realism, i.e. the world exists.

00:07:57.680 And we can come to understand it and therefore transform the world.

00:08:01.240 So the post-structuralist ultimately critique that.

00:08:04.020 They argue that there's no such thing as objectivity and truth.

00:08:07.100 And they place a theoretical and philosophical primacy on epistemology, how we know what we know.

00:08:12.780 They move away from an ontology, what actually exists.

00:08:16.840 So I think on a metaphilosophical, almost a transcendental level in Western civilization, in the Anglophone world at least, that has been one of the big cultural shifts we've seen.

00:08:26.900 There's been a conveyor belt process of graduates being educated in these ideas that have then come out into broader culture.

00:08:33.420 And so the essential argument is a social – it places primacy on social constructivism.

00:08:40.760 Essentially, the real world doesn't exist.

00:08:42.920 Reality doesn't exist.

00:08:44.500 All reality is essentially are sets of contested, discursive or ideological constructs endlessly at war with each other.

00:08:52.920 And so there's no way of ultimately adjudicating the truth between these different social constructs, given that there's no such thing as reality.

00:09:03.240 And therefore, all of human life is characterized by this endless philosophical struggle to impose one's truth.

00:09:08.700 In other words, if we're looking at the background, the set of the show, and I claim that the wall is made of brick and you claim that it's made of, I don't know, glue, who is right or wrong isn't a matter of the truth.

00:09:23.260 It's a matter of which of us has more power, status, influence in current society.

00:09:28.760 And therefore, that person gets to impose their will on everybody else.

00:09:31.680 Exactly.

00:09:32.260 And so in the book, what I do is I identify that social constructivism as a fundamental, philosophical, transcendental value that is now at the heart of Western civilisation, in particular, Anglophone civilisation.

00:09:46.520 And that's exactly what it argues.

00:09:48.600 There's no such thing as truth or objectivity or science, and therefore everything is about contestation.

00:09:53.860 Power.

00:09:54.420 Power.

00:09:54.700 And essentially, so if I – and so the decolonising critique is that you had formal colonialism, extraterritorial acquisition, and what's happened is in Western civilisation today, which is fundamentally based upon colonial discourses that construct the world in a kind of – often as a duality, it draws on Derrida.

00:10:20.960 It says there's a dominant and a subordinate.

00:10:24.800 There's the white, black, male, female, yeah, Western, non-Western. 0.80

00:10:29.640 And there's an inferiority and a superiority, which, again, Derrida completely contested.

00:10:35.120 All this stuff, by the way, is fundamentally philosophically contested.

00:10:38.860 It has very little veracity.

00:10:40.520 Interesting in and of itself, no doubt about that.

00:10:43.080 But anyway, so it argues that.

00:10:45.440 So that social constructivism has really escaped the campus petri dish and now spilled out into broader culture, okay?

00:10:53.600 In the book, I argue that we have to hang on to a sense of reality, and I argue for ontological realism, scientific realism.

00:11:01.680 And what I try to do in the book is to sort of unpack that and relate this to some of the bigger issues about geopolitics and decolonising and the broader malaise in Western culture.

00:11:11.280 And essentially what it argues is we have to refocus our philosophical or value primacy on what exists, what is real.

00:11:21.580 So, Constantine, you may say that that's made of brick, and I may say it's made of glue.

00:11:26.980 But because of the mind independence nature of that wall, you're more right than me because there is such a thing as ontological reality.

00:11:35.900 Francis, you may believe that you can fly, you can flap your arms and you'll be a bird, and you can jump out this window right now, and every single time you're going to hit the deck.

00:11:46.520 Don't be transpecious.

00:11:49.140 You're going to hit the deck.

00:11:50.540 And you're going to hit the deck because there's an ontological reality of gravity.

00:11:55.040 In other words, there is a world that exists independently of our consciousness, okay?

00:11:59.600 And because of that, it creates a boundedness on what is true and what's not true.

00:12:05.100 In other words, there's a rational adjudication.

00:12:08.000 You may believe that, you know, earthquakes are the angerers of the gods, or I may believe it, but we know that it's the tectonic movement of the plates of the earth.

00:12:18.280 Do you see what I mean?

00:12:18.740 So because of the primacy is placed on ontology or reality, it's why Kathleen Stock's book, she's a philosopher, her subtitle was Why Reality Matters.

00:12:29.180 It's a material reality.

00:12:31.380 So I argue that we must return to basic values, not in terms of imposition, but we have to ultimately return to the rational adjudication of different claims as to one's truth.

00:12:46.140 Some are more true than others.

00:12:47.460 Otherwise, we end up in that social constructivist stew of judgmental relativism.

00:12:53.760 You can't have an opinion.

00:12:55.340 How dare you think that?

00:12:57.360 My truth is as valid as your truth.

00:12:59.300 You say it's brick.

00:13:00.640 It's not brick.

00:13:01.300 That's a mere imposition of your colonial mindset on me.

00:13:04.860 And who are you to say that to me?

00:13:07.140 My truth is my truth.

00:13:08.620 I can define who I am.

00:13:10.600 I can be whatever I wish to be.

00:13:12.860 There's no such thing as truth.

00:13:14.080 And your desire to put that on me is a mere imposition.

00:13:19.840 How dare you?

00:13:22.040 You see what I mean?

00:13:22.820 So you begin to see.

00:13:23.740 So that's a big part of it, of the old cliche, politics is downstream of culture.

00:13:30.440 You've heard that hundreds of times, no doubt about that.

00:13:33.300 But that captures something.

00:13:36.400 The stew that we stew through unconsciously, not even knowing it, it's just reproduced unconsciously, often does come from a much deeper philosophical, theoretical base, conceptual base.

00:13:48.860 So Western civilization, I'll wrap up in a couple of seconds.

00:13:51.920 Western civilization is characterized by a generic judgmental relativism and social constructivism, which is fundamentally antithetical to the values that came before.

00:14:02.360 And I would argue some of the values that really helped to progress all of human civilization.

00:14:06.680 Doug, there's a lot to unpick there.

00:14:10.280 But firstly, this is really dangerous.

00:14:13.920 And I'll give an explanation as to why.

00:14:16.860 I remember, I think it was Clinton, actually.

00:14:18.620 I saw an interview with that non-problematic figure, Bill Clinton.

00:14:21.860 He was talking about peace talks between the Arabs and the Israelis.

00:14:27.600 And he said, the first thing is, right, we disagree on everything here.

00:14:32.720 Can we agree that it's Monday?

00:14:34.660 And they went, yeah, yeah, we all agree with it's Monday.

00:14:37.000 The problem is, if you can't even agree that it's Monday, then you're never going to come to any type of agreement on the more complex or important things.

00:14:47.080 Exactly.

00:14:48.140 And so what that does is that that's exactly right.

00:14:51.200 That foregrounds a judgmental relativism.

00:14:53.560 It says there's no such thing as truth and human interaction is always, therefore, characterized.

00:14:59.860 It's a classic Foucault, Foucaultism.

00:15:02.160 Human interaction, therefore, is always characterized by a form of discursive struggle.

00:15:07.860 Human interaction, essentially, is always about the imposition of power and knowledge and truth.

00:15:13.260 I'm imposing my truth onto you.

00:15:15.300 So you can really, once you understand that concept, you can really begin to unpack a lot of what we see in the cultural war.

00:15:25.500 There are other elements to it, of course.

00:15:28.440 You know, the kind of the weaponization of bureaucracy and technocratic regimes, the complete incapacity of so-called conservative party to even get ahead of any of this or get its head around it.

00:15:42.720 The generic sort of general philosophical drift that we've seen.

00:15:46.340 But it's very dangerous that these ideas are quite dangerous because on the campus, you can have these ideas.

00:15:54.220 But when they spill out, you can begin to see the human costs of some of this stuff in relation to what it does to social relations.

00:16:03.580 The trans issue is a massive one.

00:16:05.640 You've seen a lot of this take place.

00:16:07.700 It's kind of almost a, you know, the self-identification.

00:16:10.060 You have that.

00:16:12.320 But then there's also the bigger issue in relation to what this means about the future of Western civilization in the context of an increasingly multipolar international system.

00:16:22.440 The rise of China, the rise of other states, you know, and those states aren't characterized by that.

00:16:30.620 If we can agree, you might disagree with me here, if we can agree that one of the big progressors of human civilization has been arriving at a kind of a system that we can might call the truth.

00:16:46.620 It's never always going to be the truth, but it's the best explanation that we have at that point in time.

00:16:51.800 It might be a medical breakthrough.

00:16:53.060 And what happens is standing on the shoulder of giants from that truth, we can continue our inquiry, our open, rational inquiry to find a better truth that when technological breakthroughs, for example, happen, we move forward.

00:17:08.860 You see what I mean?

00:17:09.440 If we can never even get to that foundational place in any way, if everything's a contestation, everything's a power struggle constantly, we're never going to advance.

00:17:19.740 You see what I mean?

00:17:20.080 We're going to sort of almost collapse into a relativist stew.

00:17:23.680 And again, if you think about the rise of China, related geopolitics, I'm sure we'll come on to talk a bit more about that in a bit.

00:17:30.080 But if what has really helped instantiate a broadly kind of open economic system, economic advancement, innovation, and increasingly multiracial and multicultural societies predicated on liberal values of openness and tolerance

00:17:49.920 and pluralism, if you introduce this concept of constant tribal discursive warfare, that can do great damage to the social contract, but also to politics in general.

00:18:03.920 And in the context of the rise of highly authoritarian and highly illiberal states, that's a very, very dangerous thing, because what we have in the West is not natural.

00:18:16.420 We've had a – in Europe, minimally, essentially, we've lived on the institutional architecture of the post-war international settlement, the victory of the West, first over Nazi Germany, and then over the communist Soviet Union.

00:18:32.580 Those are contingent things.

00:18:35.440 They're not – there's no necessary progressive arc in human history.

00:18:40.000 So the institutional settlements that arose from those forms of victory aren't natural.

00:18:45.640 They have – they've been imposed to some extent and they have to be defended.

00:18:49.680 And within those things are sets of values that I would argue, broadly speaking, are very pro-human values.

00:18:57.240 And – but those aren't necessarily the values that other states share.

00:19:01.880 And in an increasingly multipolar international system of increased geopolitical competition and great power competition, interstate war, and the end of the end of history,

00:19:14.580 we really should perhaps be slightly more cognizant of the kind of values that hold us together, because we're going to need them going to the future.

00:19:21.660 Hey, guys. Trigonometry needs your help.

00:19:26.220 We took a big risk creating the show.

00:19:28.600 And for us to keep doing the incredible work that you all love, we need your support.

00:19:34.460 That's the only way we're going to stay independent and create content that you won't be able to find anywhere else.

00:19:40.220 There is no other podcast where you'll hear interviews with Nigel Farage one week, and the next week you've got Aaron Bastani,

00:19:46.680 the founder of Left Wing Show and Navarra Media, on the same platform.

00:19:50.080 You know the mainstream media aren't honest.

00:19:52.940 You know they've been caught lying again and again.

00:19:56.100 You know they can't be trusted.

00:19:58.460 The only way to change that is to make a stand and support independent content creators,

00:20:04.240 like Trigonometry, to produce better and more honest content.

00:20:08.180 We have big plans and we'll shortly be announcing exciting new shows and more terrific interviews with huge guests.

00:20:14.300 That isn't going to happen without your help.

00:20:16.520 When you support us, you also get incredible extra content, such as extended interviews with none of those irritating adverts,

00:20:26.540 and they'll be released 24 hours early just for you.

00:20:30.240 We'll have exclusive bonus interviews that only you get to hear.

00:20:33.700 Click the link on the podcast description or find the link on your podcast listening app to join us.

00:20:40.380 Support us and help change the way we have conversations and make the world saner.

00:20:44.960 The woke argument that I am most sympathetic to out of all of them is lived experience.

00:20:52.080 Because the reality is we all have a different lived experience.

00:20:55.760 If, for instance, you're a 5'1", very attractive woman in her early 20s,

00:21:02.400 your experience in life is going to be very different from me.

00:21:05.280 You're going to be offered and given things and have opportunities that I simply won't have.

00:21:09.960 But also as well, I'm not going to be, you know, intimidated by a bloke in a pub pestering me and wanting to have sex with me and not listening to know. 0.84

00:21:21.000 Do you see what I mean? 0.97

00:21:22.560 I do.

00:21:22.920 But I think what you're saying there is basically we all have our own viewpoints based on our history.

00:21:28.220 And that's an entirely fair point, absolutely completely fair point.

00:21:32.600 But what I think, again, you tend to get this a lot in often progressive movements in particular.

00:21:40.360 You get a nice little word like lived experience or equality.

00:21:43.340 And who can, you know, who can dislike, you know, who can disagree?

00:21:45.660 But then it becomes, it's this empty signifier that becomes filled with something much more often quite illiberal and authoritarian.

00:21:52.620 So lived experience.

00:21:53.500 What you're essentially saying is we all have our own viewpoint depending on where we come from.

00:21:58.060 That's pretty much, yeah.

00:21:59.160 That's kind of a fair point.

00:22:01.240 But what lived experience has become in reality, it's like communism.

00:22:05.340 It's all about equality.

00:22:06.480 Eh, not quite.

00:22:07.280 So what lived experience has become is a kind of authoritarian power job insofar as when I talk about my lived experience, that's my truth.

00:22:17.520 And how dare you question my truth?

00:22:19.220 And you get that quite a lot in, I've seen that a lot.

00:22:23.120 You know, so essentially what lived experience is as a kind of operative power play concept is really about.

00:22:29.940 It's about saying this is my lived experience invariably from a historically maligned or oppressed minority. 0.91

00:22:37.280 And therefore, I have greater truth and greater social power.

00:22:40.820 So therefore, you need to shut up and listen to me and basically do what I want.

00:22:46.280 Now, I'm from a really poor working class family in Hackney.

00:22:49.220 I'm, you know, my demographic in terms of white working class kids in university.

00:22:53.560 If I start going around to people and say, well, I'm from a poor working class family and I want this and you've got to do this because that's my lived experience.

00:22:59.820 So lived experience is all well and good.

00:23:02.560 But again, essentially, you've got to be cognizant of the capacity to instrumentalize these concepts and weaponize these concepts for power.

00:23:13.800 And a lot of this stuff we see is all about power, about institutional power, making money and that kind of stuff.

00:23:20.640 So lived experience is one of them.

00:23:21.880 You've seen scientists talk about lived experience.

00:23:23.820 For me, it's one of those kind of very odd flip authoritarian, totalitarian concepts where essentially it goes from what you said, entirely fair enough and then completely agree, to being shut up, do what I say because I'm an oppressed minority and that's my lived experience.

00:23:40.100 And what you're saying doesn't count.

00:23:41.680 I've seen that time and time again.

00:23:43.020 It is used and that's the thing that I hate about it.

00:23:45.900 Instead of it being a point of discussion where someone can go, look, I understand that, but you need to understand that as a black bloke growing up in 1980s Brixton, I was targeted.

00:23:59.880 I was denied opportunities and we need to talk about this and we need to be honest about this.

00:24:07.480 Instead, it's like you said, it's now become a weapon in order to shut people up.

00:24:12.060 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:13.960 And even then, one hopes that if you're talking about the lived experience to ultimately open up the human heart, this is what you're really talking about.

00:24:26.180 You're saying, I had this pain or I had this oppression and I'm giving you my heart here, my personal experience, then one would hope that that rests on an openness and a human grammar of compassion and empathy.

00:24:40.160 But so often it's not.

00:24:43.780 This is the problem.

00:24:44.840 It becomes weaponized and instrumentalized.

00:24:47.620 And I think I've seen this time and time again.

00:24:50.960 So essentially, it's not a cruel point I'm making, but it's a banal point, which is banal in the nice sense in terms of an obvious point, lived experience, personal experience, of course.

00:25:01.960 But then when that starts to become an operative value at the apex point of institutional cultures, then you're going wrong.

00:25:13.280 Well, what you're talking about really is that some concepts can be misapplied.

00:25:17.540 If you and I are having a conversation about what it was like in 1980s Soviet Union, I can be, well, I actually grew up there.

00:25:26.280 Here's what my take on it was.

00:25:28.500 But if you and I were talking about economic statistics about 1980s Soviet Union and you were saying to me, well, did you know that blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:25:36.160 And I was like, well, actually, my lived experience, well, that doesn't apply in the realm of statistics, observable realities of that kind, et cetera.

00:25:46.580 So I think sometimes it's just a concept that, as you say, has been expanded way beyond its remit and people will use it to achieve ends that it can't be used to achieve.

00:25:55.440 Yeah, or to stick with your example, you say, oh, I grew up in the 1980s Soviet Union and that was my lived experience, right?

00:26:02.680 And I make a point, oh, no, I don't want you to speak because that's my lived experience.

00:26:07.060 And, you know, so what you see is what I call a trauma shield, a trauma bubble.

00:26:12.780 You know, you sort of talk about it.

00:26:14.240 And, again, it speaks to this kind of this politics of vulnerability and this sense, the weaponization of trauma we see as well.

00:26:23.060 It's a very common thing and victimhood.

00:26:26.060 And the sad thing about that is genuinely, you know, it may well be true.

00:26:31.000 But when it's weaponized, instrumentalized as essentially a power play for me to say, well, yeah, I was born in the 1980s Soviet Union and therefore it gives me, I'm on a higher moral perch than you to sort of give you my truth and it trumps your truth.

00:26:48.100 And under that then is an emotional power play.

00:26:50.800 Okay. So let me chart this in simple terms because I want to get from what you're saying, which is erosion of the concept of truth, tribalism, accelerated by the very idea that we all have our own unique perspective and mine is more valuable than yours because I have a certain blah, blah, blah, to the concerns you have about geopolitics and geostrategy, etc.

00:27:13.580 Right. And so the idea, correct me on any of this if I'm incorrect, is because Western societies are increasingly divided along these arbitrary lines between groups that are drawn not by a contestation of what reality actually is,

00:27:32.580 but simply about who can make the most noise, who can have the greatest claim to victimhood, who can have the biggest complaint, whatever it might be.

00:27:41.440 We actually can't agree about what our values are and therefore when we are engaging in the battle of civilizations or at least in geopolitical competition, we don't know what it is that we stand for.

00:27:55.720 And so we're living off the fumes of the values that were created in the post-war period that we no longer as a society actually universally believe.

00:28:03.740 Yeah. I mean, so think about this, right? In terms, if we take this desire for diversity, inclusion and equity.

00:28:17.440 So equity is a concept that obviously conflates equality of opportunity, which is a completely optimal way of running society in many senses.

00:28:27.180 You want the best people, irrespective of their sexuality, their gender, their race, to get as best chance as possible to then move forward.

00:28:35.300 And ideally, when you aggregate that at the societal level, you're going to get great outcomes from that.

00:28:39.880 So that concept has really been conflated and collapsed into equality of outcome, where essentially you get often technocratic elites who will essentially engineer and engender forms of inclusive cultures to make sure everybody gets the same.

00:28:59.240 So that then is obviously in many senses that then is kind of fundamentally antithetical to Western politics.

00:29:08.020 In fact, it's more commensurate, ultimately, the equality of outcome argument to sort of a Soviet system.

00:29:15.680 This is why my next book I'm currently working on is why the West lost the Cold War.

00:29:19.760 We thought we won it in geopolitical terms, but we lost it in metaphysical terms.

00:29:24.560 So that's fundamentally.

00:29:25.740 And so essentially, so when you aggregate that out to a societal level where you have technocratic elites that are kind of taking it on their holy mission to uplift people, often people don't even want it.

00:29:40.300 And if you aggregate that out to a societal level where people are potentially doing jobs, not because they're the best people to do the jobs or not because they're the most qualified or et cetera, i.e.

00:29:53.360 diversity is a sub variable of a much higher apex value, which is one of merit and selection on the basis of merit.

00:30:02.960 If diversity becomes the apex value in the institutional selection process, when you aggregate that out, i.e.

00:30:09.900 the intersectional characteristic of the individual doing the job, it becomes more important than the capacity to do the job.

00:30:15.520 Well, there was a brilliant article.

00:30:16.780 I think the magazine, online magazine is called Palladium, called Why Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competence Crisis.

00:30:22.740 And it talks all about, I really recommend everybody read it.

00:30:25.300 It talks all about how, basically, in America, a lot of very complex systems like aviation safety and the military, et cetera, are actually being very badly affected by these diversity initiatives. 0.81

00:30:37.040 So, I mean, so essentially, there's nothing wrong with diversity per se in any way.

00:30:41.280 And there's nothing wrong with inclusion in any way.

00:30:43.240 But the thing is, those things must be ultimately outcomes of a much more important process, which is the selection on the basis of capacity and merit.

00:30:56.460 The problem with that argument, Doug, is that I don't know that that is possible because not all groups have the same talents, aspirations, skill sets.

00:31:07.140 And that has been true throughout history.

00:31:09.600 So, some diversity will be a natural consequence of selection on competence.

00:31:15.900 But I also think we have to recognize that not all people want the same things or are good at the same things.

00:31:22.780 And so, I am increasingly persuaded by the argument that artificially created diversity is not a good thing.

00:31:30.640 But also, I completely agree with your point.

00:31:33.120 The other thing about that is often the equity, equality of outcomes thing, again, it underplays or completely erases human agency and therefore human dignity.

00:31:44.540 If you've got a squirrel, I'm going to give a really banal example here.

00:31:47.760 If you've got a squirrel that goes out in the winter or in the summer and gathers all the nuts up and puts it all away, you know, and hides it away and works hard,

00:31:56.140 and then another one sits there just sunbathing and smoking a blunt or whatever, a squirrel, whatever, right?

00:32:02.480 How fair is it then if you go along to the squirrel number A that's saved up the nuts and say, well, you know what?

00:32:08.060 Our friend over here has got no nuts now.

00:32:09.660 It's winter now.

00:32:10.100 He's cold and shivery.

00:32:11.520 Give me half your nuts to give to him. 0.62

00:32:13.120 I mean, that's not – that's not – so, in other words, human agency, people's choices, application, self-discipline and hard work are really also fundamental value.

00:32:22.960 So, in many senses, this kind of woke dispensation, we'll put it in crude terms, erases the innate dignity of human agency.

00:32:32.560 And it erases the incentive to create, build, strive, achieve, which is what you're talking about when it comes to geopolitics.

00:32:41.920 So, when we go back to your original question about geopolitics, if some of the – it's very much about values and metaphysical, almost transcendental values.

00:32:53.980 We'll put it in those kind of terms.

00:32:55.000 If we've had the subversion of the transcendental or the metaphysical values of Western civilization, where new sets of values are replacing the old ones, and that's – we then aggregate that at a societal level, a civilizational level.

00:33:11.620 And we're doing this in the context of an increasingly multipolar international system, the rise of incredibly powerful civilizational states that have extraordinary sense of nationalist purpose, national pride, also feed off a decolonizing narrative, and also now spreading around the world.

00:33:32.680 And as an influence operation, a psychological operation, I'm not saying it's all the rest of the heat, the defeat of Chinese or Russian propagandists, but the idea that there's not influence in psychological warfare taking place is for the birds.

00:33:46.280 Trust me.

00:33:47.000 Trust me on that.

00:33:48.940 Why do you say – why should people trust you on that, then?

00:33:51.800 I've worked in the security, intelligence, military fields, academic fields, for many, many years.

00:33:58.320 My PhD was on counter-insurgency warfare, for goodness sake, psychological operations.

00:34:03.820 I'm not – it's not – and why wouldn't they do that?

00:34:08.340 Of course they'd do it, and there's nothing wrong with it.

00:34:10.260 If you think about it in terms of this is basically great power politics, this is my bread and butter.

00:34:16.560 Great power competition is my bread and butter.

00:34:19.360 And states will do what states do, right, in their national interest or national security interests.

00:34:24.320 Of course China, using its incredible economic leverage with the Belt and Road Initiative, is running all over the Caribbean, investing tens of billions of dollars in the Caribbean infrastructure projects.

00:34:36.820 And of course they're going to say you need reparations against the colonial masters to sort of create this soft power.

00:34:47.180 Of course.

00:34:47.880 And you know what?

00:34:49.020 That's natural and normal.

00:34:50.680 I mean, states will engage in psychological operations and warfare.

00:34:55.460 But coming back to the other – so we can come up – but come back to – if we then think that what we have in the West isn't natural, we didn't just roll out of bed with a pina colada and a nice sort of international – no, not much war here is there, not been invaded since 1066 because we're an island stopping power of water, et cetera.

00:35:12.720 But none of this is natural, right?

00:35:15.560 And it rests on an international dispensation, an international order underpinned by American power, American military power in particular.

00:35:23.280 Ukraine would be most probably singing from the Russian national anthem absent the very early intervention of the Brits but in particular the Americans.

00:35:30.700 I mean, that's really – so America remains the key linchpin power in the broader liberal – it's called the liberal international order.

00:35:39.520 If it keeps being characterized by this process of denigration and being torn apart, you do have these very capable states out there.

00:35:49.180 And human history doesn't just rest some way.

00:35:54.900 It's a constant process of flux and change.

00:35:57.540 So that comes to the big point of the book.

00:36:01.220 Don't take what we have for granted.

00:36:04.100 I mean, it sounds really trite to say, but freedom isn't free.

00:36:08.240 Freedom isn't free.

00:36:09.360 It has to be defended and loved and cherished.

00:36:13.500 And just being nice to people, being kind is not enough.

00:36:18.360 Unfortunately, you need people like me and others to sort of guard against stuff.

00:36:29.320 And what we have is to some extent under – the outer edges of it, most people don't see it, rests on a hard power basis.

00:36:39.140 You have a – I know you're on Russia and Ukraine.

00:36:43.300 You see it really brutally there.

00:36:45.340 But great power competition in the fields of Ukraine is very raw, and we see it in the flesh there.

00:36:54.380 Do you see what I mean?

00:36:55.020 Yeah.

00:36:55.400 So that's a really big thing.

00:36:57.000 And so I try to tie it all together in the book.

00:36:59.620 We have to see this stuff in a much broader civilizational context.

00:37:05.040 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:37:11.560 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:37:16.820 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:37:20.820 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:37:27.540 Now through June 7th, 2026, at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:37:31.840 Get tickets at mirvish.com.

00:37:35.900 But, Doug, you made a really good point, which is freedom needs to be defended, loved, and cherished.

00:37:43.140 First, my issue, I don't think there's enough people in this country, there's more in America,

00:37:50.860 but there's not enough in this country who defend, love, and cherish it.

00:37:53.900 And once that happens, we're in a pretty parlous state, aren't we?

00:37:59.500 That's a great point.

00:38:00.820 I mean, a depressing point for me was during the pandemic.

00:38:07.620 By the way, Doug, this is what I do in this show.

00:38:10.980 I just make everyone miserable. 1.00

00:38:12.100 And kill the viven. 0.99

00:38:13.820 That's what I used to do in my youth, and I do it now. 0.99

00:38:16.020 No, it's great.

00:38:17.240 So, essentially, you know, I think the British, there's a kind of cultural DNA of the Brit.

00:38:24.600 Pugnacious.

00:38:25.660 There's an element to the British culture that doesn't like to be told what to do.

00:38:30.360 There is this kind of almost innate DNA of freedom there.

00:38:33.940 You know, you can trace it back.

00:38:35.760 People take the mickey out of it, but, you know, Magna Carta.

00:38:38.460 And there's that, you know, standing up against Nazi Germany, standing up against communism.

00:38:42.880 There is that kind of very strong sense in the British people.

00:38:45.760 But on the flip side of that, there is also that finger wagging and follow the rules and the curtain twitching.

00:38:51.720 So, I found the pandemic to be really, really depressing because it really brought out that element, that part of the British character, moral policing and, you know, dobbing in your neighbour and stuff like that.

00:39:05.400 And then we saw that in British politics, you know, with the Conservative Party.

00:39:10.320 I think the Conservative Party, I hate to say it, but I think they do bear a large chunk of responsibility because I just don't think they quite get the stakes that are involved in this.

00:39:22.200 And if this rests, if the ultimate meta value of a Conservative Party is the preservation of a specific civilisation or dispensation, they've really dropped the ball on that.

00:39:36.000 Well, the only objective of the Conservative Party at the moment is the preservation of the Conservative Party, and they're not even doing that very well.

00:39:42.640 No.

00:39:43.440 No.

00:39:44.060 It's an endless psychodrama.

00:39:45.600 Go, if you want to stick, just a quick point about...

00:39:47.420 Carry on.

00:39:48.140 Sorry, I didn't mean to...

00:39:49.060 No, no, no, not at all.

00:39:50.020 But, I mean, this is also the frustration, is that people say that the Conservative Party are sort of weaponising the culture war, and they're using the culture war as a kind of, like, weapon to divide the working class or...

00:40:08.200 My thing is it's complete nonsense.

00:40:11.300 The Conservative Party, as far as I can tell, on the culture war, are utterly strategically clueless.

00:40:17.520 I'll give you an example of it, right?

00:40:20.020 In the last three months of the Blair government, OK, they passed the Equality Act.

00:40:25.080 Now, the Equality Act is a really innovative piece of legislation, but what it essentially does is it mandates public sector bodies, National Health Service, any public sector body, to promote equality of opportunity between people of protected characteristics, sexuality, gender.

00:40:41.900 So it sounds, you know, and it sounds, you know, but what that's actually done is it's underwritten the massive growth of EDI and bureaucracies across the public sector.

00:40:53.180 So you see today there's headlines today, you know, about the woke civil service, right?

00:40:57.920 So you have that across the British public sector, and it legally mandates public sector bodies to promote equality of opportunity.

00:41:07.460 Now, what's the metric for equality of opportunity?

00:41:10.140 Outcome.

00:41:10.660 So you get all these EDI bureaucracies, the commissars in the public sector, the woke commissars, if you want to use crude language, who have used the innovations around the Equality Act to push this stuff through.

00:41:24.420 So it's a constant frustration of mine to see these headlines in the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph or wherever, constant culture war, whack-a-mole headlines about the culture.

00:41:35.940 Oh, isn't it terrible, diversity management, isn't this? 0.96

00:41:38.980 And yet these public sector bodies quite rightly can turn around and say, well, it's our legal duty to do this.

00:41:46.140 So the idea that the Tories have been fighting a culture war, when they've left this on the books, left for them like a grandmaster's chessboard, the last three months of the Blair government, and have left it completely unreformed, and then the pernicious and authoritarian and liberal elements of that act, you know, the unconscious bias, the macroaggressions, all this stuff we see, that all comes from that act too.

00:42:10.400 Why? Because one of the ways in which employers in the public sector can discharge their duty under the Equality Act is to say, well, we've run these training programmes, and all of our employees have gone through these training programmes, and therefore we've discharged our duty.

00:42:23.560 Do you see what I mean? So it's all the pernicious elements of that act.

00:42:26.860 You know, I've gone off a little bit there from geopolitics, but it just underlines the point about we have to understand the deeper tactical and strategic terrain upon which a lot of this stuff that we talk about in the culture wars and geopolitics,

00:42:40.340 it rests on a much deeper infrastructure.

00:42:43.500 Do you have a website? Or do you plan to have a website? Because if you do, then EZDNS is a company for you.

00:42:51.900 EZDNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you.

00:42:56.120 They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be cancel culture, de-platform attacks, or overzealous government agencies. He knows about that.

00:43:06.560 So will you in a second. EZDNS have rock-solid network infrastructure and fantastic customer support.

00:43:13.520 They're in your corner, no matter what the world throws at you, unless it's your ex-girlfriend, in which case you're on your own.

00:43:20.740 You know about that.

00:43:21.780 Move your domains and websites over to EZDNS right now. All you've got to do is go to EZDNS.com forward slash triggered. That's EZDNS.com forward slash triggered. Use our promo code, which is also triggered, and get 50% off the initial purchase.

00:43:38.240 Sign up for their newsletter, Access of EZ, which tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy, and censorship.

00:43:47.360 But it also speaks to just a lack of common sense. It's just a complete lack of common sense.

00:43:54.200 If you're not going to get the best person for the job, the job isn't going to be done as well.

00:43:58.700 If you're going to get rid of meritocracy, the whole industry is going to crumble,

00:44:02.300 because you are not going to be doing the job that you're meant to be doing as effectively, nothing's going to work.

00:44:11.140 I don't understand why this is a particularly difficult point to grasp.

00:44:15.360 Well, again, I think you've hit the nail on the head.

00:44:19.080 But the dangerous thing about that is by being inclusive and be kind and be empathetic,

00:44:25.720 which is underpinning a lot of the drive for that stuff, which is wonderful.

00:44:29.420 It sounds great. It's a wonderful thing, right?

00:44:31.980 That it's the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

00:44:35.660 Again, if you aggregate that out across a societal level,

00:44:40.500 you're going to have suboptimal outcomes inbuilt into institutional cultures time and time and time again.

00:44:46.260 And when you aggregate that out, that the quality of your life, the functioning of your services,

00:44:52.080 the way your money as taxpayers is spent will constantly be suboptimal.

00:44:58.160 Now, and it goes back to my original point, in the context of great power competition,

00:45:04.900 do you think for one second that the Chinese, who are an incredible civilization, thousands of years of history,

00:45:13.420 I mean, what an incredible country, what an incredible culture.

00:45:17.840 It's just amazing.

00:45:18.720 But, you know, do you really think they are going to be saying,

00:45:23.920 well, little Johnny didn't pass his exam, but we'll give him the job anyway?

00:45:27.460 Or, you know, we want to make our kids feel better, so everybody's going to get a gold star here.

00:45:34.740 It just doesn't work, does it?

00:45:36.080 So that's not happening.

00:45:37.200 So if we have this kind of broader Western malaise, kind of America,

00:45:41.640 which is the key linchpin state in the Western-led international system,

00:45:45.280 we need America's military power, intelligence powers, all that kind of stuff, right?

00:45:49.400 If it's fractured along these increasingly tribal lines,

00:45:53.700 and in the context of increasingly economic power shifting a multi-parallel international system,

00:45:59.100 the collapse of Western self-confidence, the collapse of Western civilization,

00:46:02.100 in terms of the values that have made it successful and made it so strong,

00:46:07.640 and the best place, really, for genuine diversity, for tolerance, for pluralism,

00:46:12.460 for openness, for liberal values, there's a reason why millions of people come to the West.

00:46:18.800 It's the benefits.

00:46:20.620 Well, it's the benefits, basically.

00:46:22.420 Yeah, I'm joking.

00:46:22.880 No, absolutely.

00:46:23.940 No, but it's the benefits of the deeper stages that we have,

00:46:28.300 an emphasis and a primacy placed on human dignity,

00:46:31.300 the capacity for freedom to allow you to realise your dreams.

00:46:35.300 Yeah, no reason we're going to win a gold star,

00:46:37.860 but broadly speaking, what other part of the world,

00:46:42.120 where else would you want to live?

00:46:43.540 Where else would any minority wish to live in human history? 1.00

00:46:48.180 Is it perfect?

00:46:49.180 Of course it's not.

00:46:50.580 But it's not a million miles from, you know, it's pretty good, pretty good.

00:46:54.500 Doug, how much of this is about feelings?

00:46:58.060 Because you mentioned, you know,

00:47:00.800 the little Johnny in China isn't being praised for getting a D.

00:47:07.220 But here, little Johnny is being praised for the effort that he put in to get a D.

00:47:12.960 And, you know, I have a young son,

00:47:14.280 and my wife and I sort of argue about this,

00:47:16.300 or certainly, we don't argue,

00:47:17.580 but it's a constant, ongoing conversation.

00:47:19.940 Because, on the one hand, yes, you want your children to grow up feeling happy,

00:47:24.520 and they may differ, and blah, blah, blah.

00:47:26.500 On the other hand, as we talked about,

00:47:28.760 the wall is either made of brick or it's not.

00:47:30.660 And you either got an A or you didn't.

00:47:32.620 And your civilisation is either successful or it's not.

00:47:35.320 And your militaries are either capable of fighting or it's not.

00:47:38.500 How much of this is about the obsession with our own constant obsession about our well-being

00:47:47.900 and our emotional well-being?

00:47:49.860 Because some of the most meaningful things I've done in my life have been created and done

00:47:56.000 in spite of periods when I've had to suspend my immediate feelings about how I feel in this moment

00:48:01.640 and go and do something that's difficult or go and do something that's unpleasant

00:48:05.600 or go and do something that's hard, right?

00:48:09.140 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:09.500 So how much of it is about that?

00:48:12.940 Well, I understand the struggle that, as a parent, you feel.

00:48:16.960 I am a parent as well.

00:48:19.120 And that is, you want to nurture and love your children.

00:48:22.780 And it's a fine line between making sure little Johnny's feelings aren't too hurt

00:48:28.380 and you protect their precious self-esteem and you love them so much,

00:48:32.340 but between also exposing them to values that are real independently

00:48:36.900 of where we may be in our civilisational moment.

00:48:39.620 They just are.

00:48:40.360 The values are ultimately.

00:48:41.540 Reality bites in that sense, right?

00:48:44.340 But I think I completely agree with your broad point, and that is I'm the same.

00:48:49.480 I mean, I feel anxiety a lot.

00:48:52.780 But I, you know, feel, I've felt like my periods of most intense growth

00:49:00.560 have come when I've been put under incredible pressure.

00:49:05.260 I won't go too personal, but, you know, I used to have somebody

00:49:11.260 who was close to me academically, senior to me, that supervised me.

00:49:14.600 I won't go too much into it.

00:49:16.360 And he was brutal, absolutely brutal.

00:49:20.800 He would tear it down, you know, really brutal.

00:49:25.620 But he sort of tore me down.

00:49:28.040 But in that process, I grew as an adult.

00:49:30.780 You see what I mean?

00:49:31.600 So there's a sort of psychological, a lot of stuff is placed on psychological safety

00:49:37.280 and we need this, right?

00:49:39.820 But what we're doing ultimately is what ultimately makes you grow,

00:49:45.680 become an adult, and really thrive internally, spiritually almost, right?

00:49:53.380 Are those moments of struggle, deep struggle, deep emotional struggle?

00:49:58.420 I was born in Hackney.

00:50:00.860 I went to some schools, inner-city schools you couldn't begin to imagine.

00:50:04.440 Maybe you could from the former Soviet Union.

00:50:05.980 I don't know.

00:50:06.540 I think yours were a lot worse, man.

00:50:07.880 I mean, I'm talking about guns.

00:50:09.240 If you're talking about safety, like the Soviet Union was actually pretty safe.

00:50:12.900 Yeah, well, my schools were characterized by constant violence, knives, CS gas, guns.

00:50:20.760 It was terrible, right?

00:50:23.840 So, and a lot of my peer group are dead or in prison or, you know, whatever, right?

00:50:30.200 So that was that.

00:50:34.980 But the way I've tried to deal with it, I don't want to get too autobiographical here,

00:50:38.260 but those moments of struggle where you are pushed and steel sharpens steel

00:50:45.260 and pressure creates diamond, those are fundamentally important

00:50:49.700 because those are the moments of real deep personal transformation.

00:50:54.820 Those are the moments where you think you are who you are

00:50:59.000 and that transforms you and it mangles you, but you come out on the other side

00:51:05.060 and you're different, but different often in a good way.

00:51:07.580 Agreed.

00:51:08.120 Yeah.

00:51:08.560 I think that's such an important point and it was something that I wanted to talk to you about.

00:51:12.460 And look, we can bemoan these ideas.

00:51:15.400 We can talk about the universities and all of it is relevant.

00:51:19.720 But to me, that's just a symptom.

00:51:23.580 That's just a symptom of the fact that we've become softer as a society.

00:51:29.880 We just have and therefore we're more prone to these ideas

00:51:33.480 because actually if we had a little bit of backbone and we said,

00:51:37.180 to put it in colloquial terms, no, I don't believe this.

00:51:39.280 I think it's a load of bollocks. 0.98

00:51:40.380 Piss off. 0.98

00:51:40.840 Yeah, well, absolutely. 0.89

00:51:44.480 I mean, at the same time, I'm not arguing.

00:51:47.680 I mean, where I came from was brutal in the home and outside the home

00:51:52.720 and I would never, ever wish anybody to experience that.

00:51:56.180 So I'm not arguing that for a second.

00:51:57.840 And I'm also not taking saying there's any great shakes in having that level of dysfunction.

00:52:04.140 No way.

00:52:04.940 And as a parent, you'd never wish that upon your children.

00:52:08.580 So that's categorically not what I'm saying.

00:52:10.900 But what I am saying is I think that we do need to move back to resilience,

00:52:20.020 some degree of personal resilience.

00:52:22.380 And what I think is the broader point we can take from this

00:52:25.780 is what I find very distressing is when institutions led by adults that should know better

00:52:33.180 don't then draw the line in the sand of what you've just said

00:52:36.720 or what Constantine has just said.

00:52:38.820 They kowtow. 0.97

00:52:40.400 They collapse because they don't want to hurt the feelings of these people.

00:52:43.860 Okay.

00:52:44.520 But see, this is, and I'm exploring this with you.

00:52:47.240 I'm not arguing with you.

00:52:48.380 It's just something I'm thinking about myself

00:52:50.300 because I'm sure you've seen this thing about how hard men create good times,

00:52:54.940 good times, you know, create weak men, weak men create hard times,

00:52:59.060 and it goes round and round and round.

00:53:00.240 And the problem I see the way that we all talk about it is my childhood wasn't easy either,

00:53:05.340 and my wife's childhood wasn't easy either,

00:53:07.020 and neither of us wants to create that childhood for my son, right?

00:53:10.820 But if he's going to have a really comfortable, happy existence where every need is taken care of

00:53:17.120 and he's never upset and he's praised for the effort at school and his mum, all of that,

00:53:23.760 then he's going to become weak.

00:53:25.420 And it's inevitable.

00:53:26.400 How do you build resilience without being challenged, without having that difficulty?

00:53:30.900 What would be the counter-argument?

00:53:32.040 Well, I think you need to challenge your son, and I'm not going to make it post,

00:53:36.500 but one needs to challenge, obviously.

00:53:38.820 It's the construct of those, isn't it?

00:53:40.340 We do live, I mean, the childhood I had, you couldn't, I mean, you wouldn't replicate it now.

00:53:45.160 There's different sets of values, and I think that is to be celebrated to some extent.

00:53:48.980 I'm not, I think, I'm not saying the hardness in terms of physical.

00:53:56.840 But that's not what I mean.

00:53:57.980 Francis, what's that quote you talk about the boxer who says it's hard to?

00:54:01.700 Oh, right, it's the old Jack Dempsey quote, which is, it goes,

00:54:05.160 it's very hard to get up and train at 5 o'clock in the morning when you're wearing silk boxers.

00:54:10.560 Yeah, when you sleep on silk sheets.

00:54:12.900 This is my point is, is it, I almost start to wonder whether the decline of the West is inevitable

00:54:19.460 because we are so successful, we are so comfortable.

00:54:24.420 Think about, you know, the Ukrainians now, for example,

00:54:27.400 are sending their young men to go and fight and be maimed and die on the front.

00:54:31.700 If you live a life where you're going to live to 100,

00:54:37.160 you're going to have every material creature comfort taken care of.

00:54:41.600 You know, the latest polling shows most of the country thinks that the government's job

00:54:45.320 is literally to provide everything for them and wipe their bottom or whatever.

00:54:48.840 Why would you, why would you, why would I send my son to go and fight on the front line?

00:54:54.580 Why?

00:54:55.360 He can live to 100, have everything he needs, right?

00:54:58.480 Why?

00:54:59.020 Why would any of us do that?

00:55:00.480 Why would we fight for anything?

00:55:02.200 Well, I think a couple of things.

00:55:03.760 I think that first and foremost, I think that whilst I don't wish to denigrate that,

00:55:10.400 the love that lays at the heart of that, what we're talking about,

00:55:15.920 and it is love, really.

00:55:18.620 I don't wish to denigrate it for a second,

00:55:20.680 but to sort of draw it slightly out of the personal realm a bit more

00:55:23.640 and relate it back to the bigger arguments,

00:55:25.420 what I would say is this, it goes back to my institutional point,

00:55:28.780 and that is we've swung too far that way.

00:55:31.320 I'm not saying we need less love, but I think what's happened in the West

00:55:36.300 is we've got too comfortable, but we've got too comfortable.

00:55:39.800 In that process, we've forgotten the fundamental values

00:55:45.080 that we need to sustain ourselves, right?

00:55:48.540 You see what I mean?

00:55:49.360 I do, but what I'm saying to you is that I wonder whether it's possible

00:55:53.880 because if we are so successful and so comfortable

00:55:57.600 and so protective of our children and so on,

00:56:01.640 I'm not saying we need less love for our kids at all,

00:56:04.720 why would they be strong?

00:56:07.100 Why would they be willing to deal with conflict?

00:56:10.720 Because that's part of what we're talking about, right,

00:56:12.740 is willing to be able to put something valuable on the line

00:56:15.960 to risk life and limb to protect what you have.

00:56:19.240 But if you've always had it, if your parents have always had it,

00:56:23.520 you don't even recognize the connection anymore.

00:56:25.900 This is where I think the West is.

00:56:27.900 So my concern is you talked about how those formative experiences

00:56:32.320 are often quite difficult and challenging and traumatic.

00:56:35.120 I don't know that you're going to get young people,

00:56:37.480 people even in our generation, to wake up to that reality

00:56:40.860 without a really big hard slap in the face.

00:56:43.360 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical,

00:56:47.760 A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:56:50.600 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more,

00:56:54.140 featuring all the songs you love, including America,

00:56:57.180 Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:56:59.880 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here,

00:57:03.960 the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:57:06.620 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:57:11.220 Get tickets at mirvish.com.

00:57:13.560 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical,

00:57:17.740 A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:57:20.860 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more,

00:57:24.400 featuring all the songs you love, including America,

00:57:27.440 Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:57:29.540 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here,

00:57:34.200 the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:57:36.960 Now through June 7th, 2026, at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:57:41.160 Get tickets at mirvish.com.

00:57:44.760 I completely agree with what you just said,

00:57:48.060 but I think that reality sometimes bites.

00:57:54.820 So that's a hard thing.

00:57:57.100 You're right, I mean, on the one hand we have a very comfortable existence

00:58:02.160 on the one hand, even on an absolute level,

00:58:05.920 on a relative level, you know, in the UK.

00:58:08.680 So we have that, but at the same time, you know,

00:58:11.700 you want to sort of maintain some degree of these things.

00:58:16.740 So, I mean, it's a very hard question to answer,

00:58:18.880 because on the one hand we have what we have,

00:58:23.420 but then we need to sort of, I guess it's kind of like what you'd think,

00:58:29.100 it's kind of not the best metaphor,

00:58:30.680 but imagine that we have a shotgun in a cabinet,

00:58:34.740 a dusty old cabinet somewhere,

00:58:36.140 and we keep that for our sort of home protection,

00:58:41.500 and there's cobwebs all over it.

00:58:43.140 But nonetheless, we still prize it, and we take it out of the cabinet.

00:58:46.900 Every now and again, we oil it down like a very precious thing.

00:58:49.420 It's the last line of defence, ultimately, we live in a rough place,

00:58:54.060 but we keep it there, and it's cobwebs,

00:58:55.620 and we thank goodness we never, ever have to use this thing.

00:58:58.980 But nonetheless, we still are cognizant that it's there.

00:59:01.900 It's an anchor point for us.

00:59:03.640 It's our final...

00:59:05.420 So I think maybe, therefore, then a greater awareness of those values,

00:59:12.920 I think maybe a philosophical reboot of the value of Western civilisation

00:59:17.420 and some of the values that have sat at the heart of its success.

00:59:21.240 I would also like to see, you know, at the same time,

00:59:24.500 I'm not against this kind of parenting that we've discussed,

00:59:29.020 but I think that what's happened goes back to my institutional point.

00:59:32.640 There has been a complete moral failure and the collapse of leaders

00:59:37.060 and adults in our dominant institutions,

00:59:41.160 where they have ultimately, in the name of being kind

00:59:44.480 and being inclusive, not held the line,

00:59:49.700 or not even not held the line,

00:59:50.800 they've literally thrown themselves onto the floor and gone like that.

00:59:54.680 The Church of England being a classic example,

00:59:57.140 but across, you know, the National Trust,

00:59:59.300 all of our institutions seem to wish to genuflect

01:00:04.680 and deconstruct themselves

01:00:06.520 and ultimately repudiate the very nature of Western civilisation.

01:00:11.320 And I think this comes to another big point,

01:00:14.340 and that is the kind of potential backlash

01:00:16.020 that that kind of institutional signalling can create in the UK.

01:00:21.540 We're seeing it now, there's some polling data recently

01:00:23.640 about sort of issues around trans issues.

01:00:26.260 We're seeing it in the politics of America too.

01:00:29.840 And so whilst these institutions think they're doing God's will

01:00:33.240 or they're deconstructing and this sort of thing,

01:00:37.380 I think that they're potentially storing up

01:00:42.040 a great deal of trouble down the line,

01:00:44.240 potentially, for British politics,

01:00:46.340 because it does rest on a script of national repudiation,

01:00:51.460 the undermining of institutions,

01:00:54.080 the constant belittling of ordinary people.

01:00:56.200 You saw it in the Brexit debates, for example, all the time.

01:01:00.440 And so that's another element too

01:01:02.900 that I think we should be aware of.

01:01:04.500 And it's also, as well, the absence of leadership.

01:01:08.300 It seems that we are completely devoid of leaders.

01:01:12.280 And it's not just in politics.

01:01:13.980 If you read about sport,

01:01:15.840 there's people in sport saying

01:01:18.420 it's more and more difficult to find captains,

01:01:21.340 to find leaders,

01:01:22.060 because it doesn't seem that anybody wants to take on that mantle

01:01:25.320 because people collapse,

01:01:28.260 they crumble at the first start of criticism.

01:01:30.420 But this is what I'm saying, guys.

01:01:32.040 This is kind of my point,

01:01:33.540 is that we can blame institutions,

01:01:36.280 we can blame the people at the top of sporting organizations,

01:01:38.840 but if you have generations of people coming through

01:01:41.700 who've been trained to think in a particular way,

01:01:47.260 who've been trained to think

01:01:48.160 that their feelings matter more than reality,

01:01:50.220 who've been trained to think

01:01:51.220 by the experiences around them,

01:01:53.880 not because someone,

01:01:55.220 a woke teacher is indoctrinating them,

01:01:58.140 but they've grown up from the age of three

01:02:00.500 with everything that they need catered to.

01:02:03.440 Why would they be resilient?

01:02:04.840 But that's why I think

01:02:06.400 that there has been a failure on multiple levels,

01:02:09.100 not least in the universities.

01:02:11.000 Universities, when I first started, for example,

01:02:13.540 were somewhere where still kind of very late teen brain children,

01:02:17.880 children, 18 years but still young would go

01:02:21.140 and would be subject to those kinds,

01:02:25.000 to sort of very strong critical debate,

01:02:28.000 pushing them, pushing them outside the comfort zone,

01:02:31.540 being exposed to a broad set of ideas, contested.

01:02:36.520 It was a much more sort of politically heterogeneous as well

01:02:40.200 20 odd years ago.

01:02:42.060 And those kind of values that I spoke about

01:02:43.400 were more in the university context.

01:02:44.940 There was a sense that you go to university

01:02:47.660 and you're pushed hard, right?

01:02:50.660 So I think that there's various reasons

01:02:53.740 why universities have moved from that model

01:02:56.420 to being essentially a sort of continuation of school

01:03:01.340 and therefore the kind of commodification

01:03:04.660 but also the diversity inclusion.

01:03:06.720 I mean, that often revolves around issues

01:03:08.760 around self-esteem and making people feel good, right,

01:03:11.440 rather than pushing people outside their comfort zone

01:03:13.560 so they grow.

01:03:14.200 They grow as people, they grow as adults

01:03:16.200 which is ultimately truly liberational, is it not?

01:03:20.360 So I think in the university context

01:03:22.320 that has really fallen down.

01:03:24.920 So if we think that there are kind of transmission points

01:03:28.020 in one's maturing journey

01:03:30.000 in terms of what you've said,

01:03:32.180 so your son is, you know, love

01:03:34.640 but then the sets of institutions that he will move through

01:03:38.140 is a process of maturation.

01:03:40.660 But that maturation process, I think,

01:03:42.140 has been lost to quite a large extent.

01:03:44.200 Universities have really dropped the ball on that.

01:03:46.520 Doug, have you ever been punched in the face?

01:03:48.500 I've had my nose broken about 11 times.

01:03:50.440 Right.

01:03:50.920 And so have I.

01:03:51.820 I've been punched in the face.

01:03:53.700 I've been beating up whatever else.

01:03:55.400 only someone who has never been punched in the face

01:03:59.960 would use a sentence like words of violence.

01:04:02.680 Yeah.

01:04:03.120 And that comes from someone who has had

01:04:06.100 a completely modicoddled life

01:04:09.480 because if you have been punched in the face

01:04:11.780 you will know that words are not violent.

01:04:13.600 Someone saying something nasty about you

01:04:16.180 is not the same as having your nose broken.

01:04:18.820 And I think that's at the very crux

01:04:20.520 of what we're talking about here.

01:04:22.300 Absolutely.

01:04:22.900 Well, because that draws on what we spoke about

01:04:25.380 at the very beginning.

01:04:26.800 If you believe that there's no such thing as truth

01:04:30.460 and words have the capacity to conjure

01:04:33.820 into being a reality, socially construct reality.

01:04:37.420 If I talk about something

01:04:41.140 and it's intersubjectively agreed upon

01:04:43.620 that thing becomes real.

01:04:46.220 Right.

01:04:46.540 So for people that are saying words are violence

01:04:48.620 they are unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly

01:04:51.680 invariably implicitly drawing from a deeper

01:04:54.600 a philosophical value set

01:04:56.680 that comes from that kind of deconstructivist

01:04:59.760 post-structuralist, socially constructivist

01:05:02.480 epistemology theory of truth.

01:05:05.380 Words are violence according to their theoretical perspective

01:05:08.400 because by saying this

01:05:10.220 you're bringing into being the reality of it.

01:05:13.300 You're narrating that into being. 0.96

01:05:15.040 It's complete garbled nonsense 0.68

01:05:16.200 but that's their position. 0.90

01:05:18.460 So for them, but I completely agree 0.75

01:05:19.920 I mean the realism of actually getting punched in the face

01:05:25.280 getting your nose broken or whatever

01:05:26.660 versus that

01:05:28.200 but then again I guess that speaks to the dalliance

01:05:31.160 and again it's perhaps an overused metaphor

01:05:33.680 but you often hear this about the late days of Rome

01:05:37.220 where there'd be cross-dressing

01:05:39.620 and mass orgies and sexual degeneracy 0.91

01:05:42.900 and all this stuff taking place

01:05:45.200 and essentially the argument is

01:05:47.080 they were at such a comfortable point

01:05:49.040 and then the elites, the institutions

01:05:51.480 and the marital valour

01:05:54.480 and the honour

01:05:55.500 and the integrity was lost

01:05:57.520 and it became increasingly

01:05:59.200 they were bored

01:06:00.280 and they had this luxury

01:06:02.160 the elites had this aristocratic

01:06:03.860 and the elites, the Roman people

01:06:05.640 had this luxury

01:06:06.480 Decadence

01:06:07.120 Decadence

01:06:07.660 and they started

01:06:08.900 it was a frippery

01:06:09.820 and before you know it

01:06:11.040 the barbarians are through the gate 0.99

01:06:12.860 and people inside Rome

01:06:14.900 have opened up the gate

01:06:16.060 to let the barbarians in 1.00

01:06:17.400 it's all fun

01:06:18.740 it's a wonderful, joyous occasion

01:06:21.500 we're being inclusive

01:06:22.600 or whatever

01:06:23.000 I don't want to extend the metaphor too far

01:06:24.780 but you see what I mean

01:06:25.720 I completely agree

01:06:27.460 Well on that happy note

01:06:28.600 we're going to wrap up this part of the interview

01:06:31.120 Doug

01:06:31.440 we're going to move to locals in a second

01:06:33.260 and ask you some questions from our audience

01:06:35.220 and continue the discussion as well

01:06:36.720 Before we do though

01:06:37.780 we always wrap up this part of the interview

01:06:39.480 with one final question

01:06:40.660 which is

01:06:41.080 what's the one thing we're not talking about

01:06:42.880 that we really should be?

01:06:43.700 We've covered it to some extent

01:06:47.600 but the one thing I think

01:06:49.400 that we need to think more about

01:06:50.660 is the contingent and fragile nature

01:06:52.800 of where we are

01:06:53.880 in the West

01:06:55.440 If there's one takeaway point

01:06:58.980 I try to do in the book

01:07:00.360 and that is to say

01:07:01.820 that what we have in the West

01:07:03.500 is not natural

01:07:05.120 it's an institutional outcome

01:07:08.120 it's a social outcome

01:07:09.160 it rests on values

01:07:10.780 and the will to power

01:07:14.240 to defend it

01:07:15.640 and it's not too bad

01:07:18.300 it's really not too bad

01:07:20.480 so we need to

01:07:22.380 be cognizant

01:07:24.120 the primary takeaway

01:07:25.120 we have to be cognizant

01:07:26.520 of what we have

01:07:27.840 and the contingent

01:07:28.720 and fragile

01:07:29.320 and precious nature of it

01:07:30.720 and we throw it away

01:07:32.460 we let it destroy itself

01:07:33.920 at great

01:07:34.940 great peril

01:07:36.000 Doug

01:07:37.600 it's been an absolute pleasure

01:07:38.940 thank you so much

01:07:40.060 for coming on the show

01:07:40.900 follow us now

01:07:42.540 on Locals

01:07:43.340 where we're going to be asking

01:07:44.300 Doug

01:07:44.680 more questions

01:07:45.920 and some of your questions as well

01:07:47.780 see you there guys

01:07:48.840 so why are you doing this

01:07:52.000 why are you putting your head

01:07:53.180 above the metaphorical parapet

TRIGGERnometry - October 22, 2023

The West’s Struggle With Reality - Doug Stokes

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript