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The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity, and his most recent book, The War in the West, How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.
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He s a brilliant, fearless, and often controversial thinker who points out and pushes back against what he sees as the madness of our modern world.
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I should note that the use of the word Marxism and the West in this conversation refers primarily to cultural Marxism and the cultural values of Western civilization, respectively.
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This is in contrast to my previous conversation with Richard Wolff, where we focused on Marxism as primarily a critique of capitalism and thus looking at it through the lens of economics and not culture.
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Nevertheless, these two episodes stand opposite of each other with very different perspectives on how we build a flourishing civilization together.
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I leave it to you, the listener, to think and to decide which is the better way.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Check them out in the description.
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It s the best way to support this podcast.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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And now, onto the full ad reads.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
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I love using it more than any other browser, including Chrome, Chrome being my second favorite browser.
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I fell in love with Chrome first and then I met Brave.
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It s like that meme, you re with your girlfriend but you re checking out the new girl.
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But in this case it wasn t just that the grass is greener on the other side.
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It turned out when I went to the other side, the grass was still greener.
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So it s from one love to a bigger love.
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Overall, as a fan of technological innovation and given all the history of browser wars, it s just exciting and inspiring to see that a new browser comes along that really pushes all the other players to do better.
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I should also mention they have the Brave search engine which is great.
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Get it at brave.com slash Lex and it might become your favorite browser too.
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This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
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I almost struggle spelling help.
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It s not your fault, Will.
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If that doesn t at all ring a bell for you, that s from Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite movies, one of my favorite sort of therapist-patient relationship that s not really an actual healthy therapist-patient relationship, but more like a father-son relationship.
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Yeah, and also just the human relationship, and that s what great therapy is all about, to a degree.
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But actually just the first step of doing therapy, I think, for a lot of people is really helpful, or at least something worth trying.
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The next sponsor is Bio-Optimizers.
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They have a new magnesium supplement.
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When I fast or I m doing keto or carnivore, sodium, potassium, and magnesium are essential, and magnesium is a tricky one.
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You should listen to Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab podcast also.
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a good friend of mine just texted me.
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Actually, I need to respond to him, and I should probably pause this ad read and respond to him.
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But instead, I m gonna finish the ad read.
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And the ad read goes that there s a magnesium breakthrough from Bioptimizer that you should check out.
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They solve this problem of magnesium, because most supplements, this is the part of the ad read where we talk trash about the others.
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They only do one or two forms of magnesium, like glycinate and citrate, or perhaps as pronounced citrate.
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The point is, the chemistry is still the same.
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In reality, there are at least seven that your body needs and benefits from, and you can get all of this with BiOptimizers, their Magnesium Breakthrough, and plus a special discount, all at magbreakthrough.com slash lex.
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This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool.
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It combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more into one space that s simple, powerful, and beautifully designed.
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And when I ask on the internets, on Reddit, Google around looking for reviews and stuff, when I ask friends and you re talking about note-taking apps, like what is the cutting edge?
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It s certainly not the thing I ve used for most of my life which is Emacs.
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Now, if you re legit, you will still use Emacs or Vim for some things, but surely not for collaboration or for rigorous organized note-taking.
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For that, you need something like Notion, which is what everybody loves, but they also want you to know that if you re in a startup, you can use Notion for that as well.
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You can get a thousand bucks off the team plan, which is almost one year free for a team of ten, if you go to notion.com slash startups.
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This show is brought to you by ExpressVPN.
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I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
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You should know, friends, that the ISPs, the internet service providers, can still track you even if you use basic protection like incognito mode on Chrome.
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They can still get your data and see all the shady websites you ve been going to, which I know you ve been going to because I ve been watching you.
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Like the song from the police, which I wonder if that s a love song or a stalker song.
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Every breath you take,
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Every move you make.
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Probably a stalker song.
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Well, you could think of your ISPs as a kind of stalker.
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There you go.
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You can also change your location, watch your favorite shows.
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My favorite aspect is that it s just a VPN that works really well.
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It works on almost any device that I m aware of, an operating system, including Linux, my favorite operating system.
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Anyway, you can sign up, download, install it if you go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod for an extra three months free.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Douglas Murray.
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You recently wrote the book titled The War on the West, which in part says that the values, ideas, and history of Western civilization are under attack.
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So, let s start with the basics.
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Historically and today, what are the ideas that represent Western civilization?
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The good, the bad, the ugly.
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I actually don t get stuck on definitions precisely, because as you know, once you get stuck on definitions, there s a possibility you ll never get off them.
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Yes.
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I d say a few things.
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Firstly, obviously the Western tradition is a specific tradition, a specific tradition of ideas, culture, well known to be perhaps easily defined by the combination of Athens and Jerusalem, the world of the Bible, and the world of ancient Greece and indeed Rome.
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that effectively creates European civilization, which itself spawns the rest of the Western civilizations, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others.
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But these are the main countries that we still refer to as the West.
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So there s a specific tradition and all the things that come from it.
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My shorthand cheat on this answer is to say, you know when you re not in it.
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So if you ve ever been to Beijing, Shanghai, you know you re not in the West.
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Somewhere else, you know you re not in the West.
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When you re in Tokyo, somewhere extraordinary, but you know you re not in the West.
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Obviously, there are
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let s say borderline questions like, is Russia in the West?
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Which I sort of leave open as a question.
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Possibly.
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If you were placed into Moscow blindfolded and you woke up and you couldn t hear the language or maybe you didn t know what the language sounded like, would you guess you were in the West or not?
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I think I was somewhere near it.
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getting closer.
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I mean, you know, Tolstoy asks the question, doesn t he, whether it s European?
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And I think the answer to that is not really, although massively influenced by Europe, but at times wanting to reach towards it, at times wanting to stay away.
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But a part of the West, possibly, yes.
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But anyway, it s a very specific tradition.
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It s one of a number of major traditions in the world.
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And
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Because it s hard to define doesn t mean it doesn t exist.
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Are there certain characteristics and qualities about the values and the ideas that define it?
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Is the type of rule, the type of governmental structure?
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Yes.
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I mean, the rule of law, property-owning democracies, and much more.
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I mean, these are, of course, things that ended up being developed in America and then given back to much of the rest of the West.
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I d say there are other perhaps more controversial attributes I would give to the West.
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One is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which is not shared of course by every other culture.
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The late philosopher George Steiner said he could never get out of his head the haunting fact that the boats only seem to go out from Europe.
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The explorers, the scholars, the linguists, the people who wanted to discover other civilizations and indeed even resurrect ancient civilizations and lost civilizations.
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These were scholars that were always coming from the West to discover this elsewhere by contrast.
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There were never boats coming from Egypt to help the Anglo-Saxons discover the origins of their language and so on.
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So I think there is a sort of ravenous interest in the rest of the world which can be said to be a Western attribute, although it of course also has, one should immediately preface it, some downsides and many criticisms that can be made of some of the consequences of that interest.
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because of course it s not entirely lacking in self-interest.
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So it s not just the scholars, it s also the armies and they re looking to gain access and control over resources elsewhere.
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To market.
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And hence the imperial imperative.
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Exactly.
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To conquer, to expand.
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Although that itself of course is a universal thing.
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No civilization I think that we know of doesn t try to gain ground from its neighbors where it can.
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The Western ability to go further, faster, certainly gave an advantage in that regard.
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Do some civilizations get a bit more excited by that kind of idea than others?
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Possible.
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It s possible.
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Because you could say it s the Western civilization because the technological innovation was more efficient at doing that kind of thing.
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Yes, absolutely.
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But maybe you wanted it more, too.
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Well, the Ottomans wanted it an awful lot and did terribly well for many centuries.
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One shouldn t forget that, as did others.
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I d also say, by the way, and again, it s a very broad one, but it s worth throwing out that I think self-criticism
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is an important attribute of the Western mind.
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One that, as you know, is not common everywhere.
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Not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics to become rich.
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So, you know, criticism is a negative sounding word.
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It could be self-introspection, self-analysis, self-reflection.
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And it can be what you need.
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You know, and in the Western system, I d argue that one of the advantages of the
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system of representative governance is that where there are problems in the system you can attempt to sort them out by peaceable means.
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We listen to arguments, most famously in America in the late 20th century.
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The civil rights movement achieved its aims by force of moral argument and persuaded the rest of the country that it had been wrong.
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That s not common in every society by any means.
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So I think there are certain attributes of the Western mind that you could say are, they re not entirely unique, but they are not as commonplace as well.
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What about the emergence in hierarchies of asymmetry of power, most visible, most drastic in the form of slavery, for example?
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Well, I mean everyone in the world is slavery, so I don t regard it as being a unique Western sin.
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It s rather hard to think of a civilization in history that didn t have slavery of some kind.
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One of the oddities of the Western ignorance of our day is that people seem to imagine that our societies in the West were the only ones who ever engaged in any vices.
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Alas, this isn t true.
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It s a sort of Rousseauian mistake, or at least one that s blossomed since Rousseau, that everybody else in the world was born into sort of Edenic innocence, and only we in the West had this sort of evil in us that caused us to do bad things to other people.
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Slavery was engaged in by everyone in the ancient world, of course, and through most of the modern world as well.
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Of course, there are 40 million slaves in the world today, so it s clearly not something that the species as a whole has a problem with.
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That s more slaves, of course, than there were in the 19th century.
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And I d say, on top of that, that the interesting thing about the Western mind as regards to slavery is that we were the civilization that did away with it.
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And by the way, the founding fathers of America who today are lambasted routinely for being acquiescent in the slave trade, engaging in it, owning slaves, there s not, people almost don t even bother now to recognize the facts that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington all wanted to see this trade done away with.
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couldn t hold the country together at the origins if they d have made such an effort, and believed and hoped that it would be something that would be dealt with after their time.
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So the founding ideas had within them the notion that we should, as a people, get rid of this.
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The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence set up the conditions under which slavery will be impossible.
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All men are created equal.
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Once you ve put that, that s a time bomb under the whole concept of slavery.
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That s ticking away.
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Okay.
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And sure enough, it detonated in the next century.
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If we just step back and look at the human species, what does slavery teach you about human nature?
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The fact that slavery
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has appeared as a function of society throughout human history?
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There are two possibilities.
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One is it s what people think they can do when God s not watching.
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Another is it s what they can do if they think that God allows it.
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really, really well put.
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And the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation, what does that mean?
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Well, I mean, it s pretty straightforward in a way.
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There are people who get to work for free.
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It s economic in nature in some sense.
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Yes, but in
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In order to do it, I mean almost always, there are some examples in the ancient world where this wasn t the case, but almost always it had to be a subjugated people or people regarded as different.
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One of the things actually I ve tried to sort of inject into the discussion through this book among other things is a recognition that there were very major questions still going on in the 18th and early 19th century that were unresolved.
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which were one of the reasons why slavery was not as morally repugnant to people then as it is to us now.
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And that s the question of polygenesis and monogenesis.
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At the time of Thomas Jefferson, the founding fathers were thinking and working.
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They didn t know, because nobody knew, whether the human races were related or not.
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there were arguments, the monogenesis argument, that we were all indeed from the same racial stock.
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Polygenesis argument was that we weren t.
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Black Africans, Ethiopians, they re often referred to at the time, because they provided some of the first slaves, were different from white Europeans.
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Simply not related in any way.
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And that makes it easier, of course.
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That makes it easier to enslave people if you think they re not your brother.
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Am I my brother s keeper?
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No, he s not your brother.
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It was a very troubling argument in the 18th and 19th century, also because there was a biblical question.
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It threw up a theological question, which was, I mean, people were literally debating this at the time.
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Was there also a black Adam and Eve?
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Was there an Indian Adam and Eve, a Native American Adam and Eve?
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I mean, this was a serious theological debate, because they didn t know the answer.
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And people say that Darwin solved this.
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It wasn t just Darwin, of course.
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But by the late 19th century, the argument that we were not all related, as human beings had suffered so many blows that you had to really be very, very ignorant, deliberately willfully ignorant to ignore it by
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So it no longer was, after Darwin, a theological question, it became a moral question.
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It was already a moral question, but it clarified, Darwin clarifies it definitely.
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And then you re in this, as I say, you re in this situation of you re not subjugating some other people, you re subjugating your own kin.
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And that becomes morally unsustainable.
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So given that slavery in America is part of its history,
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How do we incorporate into the calculus of policy today, social discourse, what we learn in school?
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We can look at slavery in America, we can look at maybe more recent things like in Europe, the other atrocities, the Holocaust.
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How do we incorporate that in terms of how we create policy, how we treat each other, all those kinds of things?
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What is the calculus of integrating the atrocities, the injustices of the past into the way we are today?
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That s a very complex question because it s a moral question at this point, and a moral question long after the fact.
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I say at one point in the war in the West that the argument, for instance, on reparations now that goes on, and it s not a fringe argument anymore.
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Some people say, oh, you re pulling up this fringe argument.
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It really isn t.
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I mean, every contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2020 was willing to talk about the possibility of reparations, some very eager that this country, America, goes through that entirely self-destructive exercise.
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I say that there s a lot of problems with this, but if I could refine it down to one thing, I d say this.
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It s no longer about a wealth transfer from one group of people who did something wrong to another group of people who were wronged.
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It would have been that 200 years ago.
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Today, it s not even the descendants of people who did something wrong giving money to people who were the descendants of people who were wronged.
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It s a wealth transfer from people who look like people who did a wrong thing in the past to another group of people who resemble people who were wronged.
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That s impossible to do.
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I m completely clear about this.
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There is no way in which you could organize such a
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a wealth transfer on moral or practical reasons.
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America is filled with people who have the same skin color as us, for instance, who have no connection to the slave trade and should not be made to pay money to people who have some connection.
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And then the country is also filled with ethnic minorities who have come after slavery.
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who would not be due for any reimbursement as it were.
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The problem with this is though is that there are, I m perfectly open to the possibility that there are residual inequities that exist in American life and that the consequences of slavery could be one of the factors that result from this.
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The thing is, I don t think it s a single issue answer.
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I think it s a multidimensional issue.
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Something like black underachievement in America is obviously a multidimensional issue.
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Much of the left and others wish to say, it s not, it s only about racism.
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And they can t answer why
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Asians who ve arrived more recently don t, for instance, get held down by white supremacy, but actually, I say white supremacy in quotes, obviously, but don t get held back by it, but actually flourish to the extent that Asian-Americans have higher household earnings and higher household mean equity than, home equity and so on, than white Americans.
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So I don t think that on the merits the evidence is there that you know racism is the explanation for black ongoing black underachievement in some sections of the black community in America.
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It s obviously a part of it.
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Could you say that even those things like fatherlessness and similar family breakdown issues are a long-term consequence of it?
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Possibly, but it s being awfully generous to people s ability to make bad decisions.
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For instance, how many generations after the Holocaust would you allow people to claim that everything that went wrong in the Jewish community was as a result of the Holocaust?
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I mean, is there some kind of term limit on this?
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I would have thought so.
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And I think most people probably think that s over.
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I think the details matter there.
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But it s very difficult.
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I enjoy swimming out in the ocean.
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Although I m terrified of what s lurking underneath in the darkness.
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You re right, you re right to be.
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Okay, it s really complicated calculus with the Holocaust and with slavery.
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So the argument in America is that there s deep institutional racism
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against African Americans that s rooted in slavery and
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So however that calculus turns out, that calculation, it still persists in the culture, in the institutions, in the allocation of resources, in the way that we communicate in subtle ways, in major ways, all that kind of stuff.
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How is it possible to win or lose that argument of how much institutional racism there is that s rooted in slavery?
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Is it a winnable?
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It s an unquantifiable argument.
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And I d like to apply some shortcuts to some of this, the following.
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Are, for instance, all, let s take the one that s most often cited.
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If a white person is walking down a street in America and they see a group of young black men coming towards them and it s late at night and they cross the road, is it because of slavery?
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Is it because of institutional racism?
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No.
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it s because they ve made a calculus based not entirely on unfounded beliefs that given crime rates it s possible that this group of people might be a group of people they don t want to meet late at night.
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That s an ugly fact but crime statistics in American cities, Afro-American cities bear out.
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It s not an entirely unreasonable one.
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It s not reasonable every time, obviously, obviously.
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But is it attributable to slavery?
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That s a stretch.
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If you re in a city like Chicago, where the homicide rates shot up in the last two years, albeit again, as always has to be remembered, mainly black on black, gun violence and knife violence,
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Nevertheless, if you re in a city like Chicago and you make that calculus I ve just suggested, the cliched one, the street late at night, there are other factors other than a memory of slavery that kick in.
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I m afraid it s something which people don t want to particularly acknowledge in America for obvious reasons, because it s the ugliest damn debate in the world.
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But I was actually just writing in my column in the New York Post today about a very interesting case, it s sort of similar, which is the question of obesity in the US.
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As you know, America s the most overweight country in the world.
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America has, I think, 40% of the population is obese in medical ways, and the nearest next country is a long way down, that s New Zealand, at 30% of the population.
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So America s a long way ahead.
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Why during the coronavirus era when we know that obesity is the one clearest factor that s likely to lead to your hospitalization if you also get the virus?
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Why did almost no public health information in America focus on obesity?
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80% of the people who ended up hospitalized in America with coronavirus were obese.
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We locked the schools when there was no evidence that the coronavirus was deadly for children.
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We all wore cloth masks when there was very little evidence that this was much use in stopping the spread of the virus.
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SPEAKER_00
We had massive evidence about obesity being a problem and we never addressed it.
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Why?
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Is it just because we worried about fat people?
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SPEAKER_00
No, it s actually because about fat shaming as it were.
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No, it s also because to a great extent it s a racial issue in America as well.
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And actually I quoted this new publication from the University of Chicago as it happens, which makes that claim explicit.
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It says, the reasons why people have views that are negative about obesity is because of racism and slavery.
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This is what everything is drawn back to in America.
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Anything you want to stop, you say it s because of racism, it s because of slavery.
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SPEAKER_00
How about it s actually because you mind the hospitals getting clogged up, you mind people dying, you mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying, and you d like to say something about it.
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SPEAKER_00
Once again, as in everything in America, it s cut off by some poorly educated academic saying it s about slavery.
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SPEAKER_00
So we re really not, I mean, this requires a kind of form of brain surgery to perform it on a society, probably one that s not possible without killing the patient.
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And it s being done by people who,
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are wearing like mittens.
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So I m sure that there s a few folks listening to this that are rolling their eyes and saying, here we go again, two white guys talking about the lack of institutional racism in America.
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First of all, what would you like to tell them?
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So our African American friends who are looking at this, and I ve gotten a chance to talk to a bunch of them on Clubhouse recently.
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Clubhouse is this social app.
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And I really enjoy it.
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It s an absolute zoo of an app as far as I can see.
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I personally love it because you get to talk to, as somebody who s an introvert,
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and doesn t socialize much, I enjoy talking to people from all walks of life.
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So it gave me a chance to, first of all, practice Russian and Ukrainian, so I get the chance to do that.
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Then you get a chance to talk about Israel and Palestine with people who are from,
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that part of the world, and you get to hear raw emotion of people from the ground, where they start screaming, they start crying, they start being calm and collected and thoughtful.
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This is as if you walked into a bar with custom-picked regular folks, in quotes, regular folks, just people that have
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quote unquote, lived experiences, real pain, real hope, real emotions, biases, and you get to listen to them go at it with no, because it s an audio app, you re not allowed to start getting into physical fist fight.
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SPEAKER_01
So even though it really sounds like people want it.
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SPEAKER_00
Sounds like it s happening, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and so you get to really listen to that feeling.
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And for example, it allows a white guy like me from another part of the world, coming from the former Soviet Union, to go into a room with a few hundred African Americans,
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screaming about Joe Rogan using the N-word.
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And I get to really listen.
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There s very different perspectives on that in the African American community, and it s fascinating to listen.
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So I don t get access to that by sort of excellent books and articles written and so on.
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You get that real, raw emotion.
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And I m just saying, there s a few of those folks listening to this with that real, raw emotion, and one argument they say is you,
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Douglas Murray and you Lex Freeman don t have the right to talk about race and racism in America.
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It is our struggle.
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You are from a privileged class of people that don t know what it s like to be a black man or woman in America walking down the street.
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SPEAKER_01
Can you steel man that case?
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SPEAKER_00
First of all, fuck that.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, that s not, I think we need to define steelmanning.
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SPEAKER_01
Can you at least try it?
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SPEAKER_00
I know what steelmanning is.
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SPEAKER_00
I really resent that form of argumentation.
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SPEAKER_00
I really resent it.
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I have the right to talk about whatever the hell I want and no one s gonna stop me or try to intimidate me or tell me that I can t simply because of my skin color.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think that if I said to somebody else the other way around, it would be equally reprehensible.
1
SPEAKER_00
If I said, shut up, you have no right to criticize anything that Douglas Murray says because you ve not got my skin color.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, it s not an exact comparison, but seriously, is that a reasonable form of argument?
1
SPEAKER_00
You haven t been through everything I ve been through in my life, therefore you can t comment.
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SPEAKER_00
No, in that case, nobody can talk about anything.
1
SPEAKER_00
We might as well pack up, go home, and isolate ourselves.
1
SPEAKER_01
Strong words, but can you try to steal me on the case, not in this particular situation, but there s people that have lived through something,
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that can comment in a very specific way, like for example, Holocaust survivors.
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SPEAKER_01
There is a sense in which, maybe a basic sense of civility, when a Holocaust survivor is speaking about their experience of the Holocaust, then an intellectual from a very different part of the world is simply writing about nuanced geopolitics of World War II, just should not interrupt the Holocaust survivor.
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SPEAKER_00
We would physically interrupt them if they re telling their story.
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With logic and reason that the experience of the Holocaust survivors somehow fundamentally has a deeper understanding of the humanity and the injustice of the Holocaust.
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SPEAKER_00
First of all, again we re in even deeper waters now, but in terms of wanting to listen to another person who has experienced something, yes.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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But not endlessly.
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Not endlessly.
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I mean there are some people who ve written about the Holocaust who didn t experience the Holocaust and have written about it better than people who did.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not this idea that the lived experience, to use this terrible modern jargon, as if there s another type, this idea that the lived experience has to triumph over everything else is not always correct.
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SPEAKER_00
It can be correct in some circumstances.
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SPEAKER_00
If you are sitting in a room with a Holocaust survivor and somebody who d never heard about the Holocaust and wanted to kind of, you know, shoot out their views on it,
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, one of those people should be heard more than the other, obviously, obviously.
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SPEAKER_00
If there s somebody who s experienced racism firsthand and there s somebody else who has never experienced it, then obviously you d want to hear from the person who has experienced it firsthand, if that is the discussion underway.
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I don t think that it s the case that that is endlessly the case.
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I m also highly reluctant to concede
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that there are groups of people who, by dint of their skin color or anything else, get to dominate the microphone.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, of course, we re literally both speaking into microphones at the moment, so there s an irony to this, but let s skate over the irony.
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SPEAKER_00
What I mean is, people saying, you don t have the right to speak, I have the right to take the microphone from you and speak because I know best.
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SPEAKER_00
Fine.
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If you know best, we ll argue it out.
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And someone will win, long or short term.
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SPEAKER_00
But the almost aggressive tone in which this is now leveled, I don t like the sound of.
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Nobody s experience is completely understandable by another human being, nobody s.
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SPEAKER_00
And what many people are asking us to do at the moment, us collectively, is to fall for that thing, I think it was Camille Foster who said it first, but I ve adopted it in recent years, is to say, you must spend an inordinate amount of your life trying to understand me personally, my lived experience, everything about me.
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You should dedicate your life to trying to do that.
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Simultaneously, you ll never understand me.
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This is not an attractive invitation.
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This is an unwinnable game.
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SPEAKER_00
So if somebody has a legitimate
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And an important point to make, they should make it and they will win through whatever their characteristics, whatever their race.
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SPEAKER_00
And by the way, there are plenty of white people who experience racism as well.
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SPEAKER_00
There are plenty of white people who do, and have done, and increasingly so, which is one of the things I write about in The War on the West.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I would argue that today in America, the only group who are actually allowed to be consistently vilely racist against the white people,
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If you say disgusting things about black people in America in 2022, you will be over.
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SPEAKER_00
You will be over.
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SPEAKER_00
If you decide to talk about people s white tears, their white female tears, their white guilt, their white privilege, their white rage, and all these other pseudo-pathologizing terms, you ll be just fine.
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SPEAKER_00
You could be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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You can lecture at Yale University, absolutely fine.
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SPEAKER_00
And the white people have to suck that up as if that s fine because there was racism in another direction in the past.
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SPEAKER_00
So white people can have racism as well.
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SPEAKER_00
Does that mean that I think that I have a right or other white people have a right to dominate the discourse by talking about their feelings of having been victims of racism?
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SPEAKER_00
No, not particularly, because what does that get us?
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SPEAKER_00
It gets us into an endless cycle of competitive victimhood.
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SPEAKER_00
Am I saying that white people who ve experienced violence
2
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have experienced historically anything like the violence that was perpetrated against black people in America historically?
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Obviously not.
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But, you know, what kind of competition do we want to enter here?
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And this is very, very important terrain now in America, because there s one other thing I have to throw in there, which is, how do you work out the sincerity of the claim?
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SPEAKER_00
How do you work out the sincerity of the claim being made?
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SPEAKER_00
At one point in this latest book, I referred to a very useful bit in Nietzsche on the genealogy of morals, where, as you know, Nietzsche always has to be treated carefully.
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SPEAKER_00
When people say, I love Nietzsche, you have to, which bits?
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SPEAKER_00
What exactly do you love about him?
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But a lot can be learned from the answer.
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But there are moments in the genealogy of morals that were very useful for this book.
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One of them was the moment when Nietzsche uses a phrase that I ve now stolen from myself, or appropriated, you might say, where he refers to people who tear at wounds long since closed and then cry about the pain they feel.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, how do you know, how do you know whether the pain is real?
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SPEAKER_00
How do you know?
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SPEAKER_00
I m not saying you can never know, but it s hard.
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SPEAKER_00
So when somebody says, I feel that my life hasn t gone that well, and it s because of something that was done to my ancestors 200 years ago.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe they do feel that.
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Maybe they re right to feel that.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe they re making it up.
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Maybe they re using it as their reason for failure in life.
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Maybe they re using it as their reason to not even try.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe they re using it as their reason to smoke weed all day.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
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SPEAKER_00
And who does know?
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SPEAKER_00
How can you work that out?
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s why I come back to this thing of who are we to constantly judge in this society other people who we don t know and attribute motives to them based on racial or other characteristics.
2
SPEAKER_01
And as you write in this part, I like your cultural appropriation of Nietzsche, and at the same time canceling Nietzsche in the same set of sentences.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you write in this part about evil.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, I didn t cancel Nietzsche.
2
SPEAKER_01
Can t cancel Nietzsche, I m saying.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m saying treat him carefully.
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SPEAKER_01
Treat him carefully, fair enough.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you can judge a man s character by which parts of Nietzsche he quotes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Fair enough.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think when you meet people who do Man and Superman a bit too much.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now you re pulling in even deeper water referencing Hitler here.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so you write in this part of the book about evil.
2
SPEAKER_01
Quote, what is it that drives evil?
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SPEAKER_01
Many things without doubt, but one of them is identified by several of the great philosophers is resentment.
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That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers for people who want to destroy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Colon, blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserve more.
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SPEAKER_01
And you re saying this kind of resentment, we don t know as it surfaces whether it s genuine or if it s used to sort of play games of power to evil ends.
2
SPEAKER_01
Can you speak to this?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because it s such a fascinating idea that one of the biggest drivers of evil in the world is resentment.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because if you look at, boy, if you look at human history, if you look at Hitler, so much of the propaganda, so much of the narrative was about resentment.
2
SPEAKER_01
So is that surface or is it level or is that deep, the resentment that drives people?
2
SPEAKER_00
It can be any of the above.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s first of all preface it, everybody has resentment.
2
SPEAKER_00
I use the term resentment which is thought very similar to resentment, let s stick with resentment, so we don t sound too pretentious.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let me give you a quick example of somebody in our own day who has a form of resentment, Vladimir Putin.
2
SPEAKER_00
Did you see Navalny s documentary, Putin s Palace?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
You remember the stuff about Putin as a young KGB officer in Germany?
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SPEAKER_00
Remember the stuff about Putin and his first wife s resentment of one of his KGB colleagues who had an apartment that was a few meters bigger than the Putin s apartment?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s very interesting.
2
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, I m not saying that, you know, Vladimir Putin became the man he has become and invaded Ukraine because he didn t have an apartment he liked in Berlin or Munich, wherever he was.
2
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But it s a distinct possibility.
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My point is that resentment is a factor in all human lives, and we all feel it in our lives, and it s something that has to be struggled against.
2
SPEAKER_00
Resentment is, in political terms, can be a deadly, I mean, it s an incredibly deep thing to draw upon.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you mentioned Hitler.
2
SPEAKER_00
Obviously, one of the things that Hitler played on was resentment, obviously.
2
SPEAKER_00
Almost every revolutionary does.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the French revolutionaries did as well, and not without cause.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a good reason to feel that Versailles was not listening to Paris in the 1780s and feel resentment for Marie Antoinette and her palace within the palace, ignoring the bread shortages in Paris.
2
SPEAKER_00
So resentment is a very understandable thing and sometimes it s justifiable and it s also deadly to the person as it is to the society.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s an incredibly deep sentiment.
2
SPEAKER_00
Somebody else has got something that you should have.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the problem about it is that it has the potential to be endless.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can do it your whole life.
2
SPEAKER_00
And one of the ways I ve sort of found myself explaining this to people is to say,
2
SPEAKER_00
It s also important to recognize that resentment is something that can cross absolutely every boundary.
2
SPEAKER_00
So for instance, it crosses all racial boundaries, obviously, it goes without saying.
2
SPEAKER_00
More interesting is it crosses all class boundaries and socioeconomic boundaries.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if I was to sort of simplify this thought, I would say, I guess that you and I and everybody watching,
2
SPEAKER_00
knows or has known somebody in their lives who has almost nothing in worldly terms, and is a generous person, a kindly person, a giving person, a happy person even, a cheerful person.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think we probably have also, or many of us would have met people who seem to have everything,
2
SPEAKER_00
and who are filled with resentment, filled with resentment.
2
SPEAKER_00
Somebody else has held them back from something.
2
SPEAKER_00
Their sister once did something.
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SPEAKER_00
She shouldn t, she got this and I should have got that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And on and on and on.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a human trait.
2
SPEAKER_00
And one of the things that suggests to me is that we therefore have a choice in our lives about this.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is something which we can do something about, not limitlessly.
2
SPEAKER_00
But for instance, I mean there are very good reasons that some people in their lives might feel resentment.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s say you re involved in a car crash and a friend fell asleep at the wheel and that s why you re spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a pertinent example of this in American politics at the moment.
2
SPEAKER_00
You would be justified in feeling resentment.
2
SPEAKER_00
And at some point you have to make a decision which is, am I going to be that person?
2
SPEAKER_00
or a different person.
2
SPEAKER_01
But even in that case, you re saying at the individual level and at societal level is destructive to the mind, even when you re quote unquote justified.
2
SPEAKER_01
It rots you.
2
SPEAKER_00
It rots you because the best you can do is to eke out your days unfulfilled.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the antidote, as you describe, is gratitude.
2
SPEAKER_01
Gratitude is the antidote to evil, in a sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
Gratitude at the individual level and at the societal level.
2
SPEAKER_00
Gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment.
2
SPEAKER_00
I quote in The War on the West, when I read it the first time a few years ago, I was absolutely floored by the brothers Karamazov.
2
SPEAKER_00
Not everything in it, by the way, and I won t get into it, but I have some very big structural criticisms of the novel.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now you re just sweet talking to me because I m a Dostoevsky fan, but I appreciate this.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, we could get into what I see as the structural flaws in The Brothers Caramels, but anyway.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now I m offended and triggered.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, I mean, this is coming out of Macbeth and saying, I didn t think it was much good.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there s structural flaws.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I thought the ending stank and the middle wasn t very good.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, when I read that novel, I was floored by a couple of things.
2
SPEAKER_00
One is, of course, at the moment where we realize the devil appears.
2
SPEAKER_00
The moment that Ivan says to his brother, you know he visits me, and you realize that he s talking about the devil, the whole novel goes into this totally different space.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s even more than you ve already realized the novel s about.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then when the conversation occurs between Ivan and the devil, I think he describes him as dressed in the French style.
2
SPEAKER_00
of the early part of the 19th century.
2
SPEAKER_00
Very strange that the devil would be dressed like that, but sort of, and if you remember that he s sort of cross-legged and rather a vain figure, but the devil mentions in passing to Ivan that, he says, I don t know why, gratitude is not an instinct that s been given to me.
2
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, you re not allowed, this is not, given the role of being the devil, this is not one of the things.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you think, and of course, only a genius of Dostoevsky s stature could, I mean, a lesser genius would have made a whole novel out of that insight.
2
SPEAKER_00
Only Dostoevsky can just throw it away, because there s such an abundance of riches that he still has to get through.
2
SPEAKER_00
structural problems aside.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the... The passive-aggressive, the microaggression in this conversation is palpable.
2
SPEAKER_00
a little knife fight going, no.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the reason I mention it is because of course, when I saw it, I thought, this is such a brilliant insight by Dostoevsky, because why would gratitude not be a sentiment the devil was capable of?
2
SPEAKER_00
And the answer is, of course, that if the devil was capable of gratitude, he wouldn t be the devil.
2
SPEAKER_00
He d be somebody else.
2
SPEAKER_00
He has to be incapable of gratitude.
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you think, for Dostoevsky, that was as strong of an insight as it is for you?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because I think that s a really powerful idea, that with gratitude, you don t get the resentment that rots you from the core.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I think it was one of the just endless things that he saw in us.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the way I put it is that, I mean, I also think of it in terms of the era of deconstruction, which is one of the things I d like us to call the era that s now ending.
2
SPEAKER_00
The era of deconstruction was the era that started, let s say, from the 60s onwards, and was originally an academic game that then spilled out into the wider culture, which was, let s take everything apart.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s pull it all apart.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are lots of problems with it.
2
SPEAKER_00
One is it s quite boring.
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t get an awful lot from it.
2
SPEAKER_00
You also have the problem of what children find when they try to do this with bicycles, which is they can take it apart quite easily, but they can t put it back together.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the era of taking things apart as a game is one we ve lived through and it s been highly destructive, but you can do it for quite a long time.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m going to look at this society and I m going to take it apart by showing systemic problems.
2
SPEAKER_00
At the end of that, what have you got?
2
SPEAKER_00
What have you done?
2
SPEAKER_00
What have you achieved?
2
SPEAKER_00
We need to interrogate.
3
SPEAKER_00
This okay interrogate by all means ask questions, but interrogate as a deliberate hostility to this I m going to interrogate this thing and take it apart and again at the end of it.
3
SPEAKER_00
What have you got?
3
SPEAKER_00
Whether you re interrogating a text or a piece of music or an idea or a society fine Question endlessly question.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes interrogate Assumes it s all a criminal in a cell
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s guilty, and therefore it must be taken apart.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s what we ve been doing for decades in the West.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s resentment.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s one byproduct of resentment.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can t build the thing, but you know how to take it apart.
3
SPEAKER_02
is a little bit of resentment good?
3
SPEAKER_02
So you have that, I love Tom Waits, and he has a song where a little drop of, I like my Tom with a little drop of poison.
3
SPEAKER_02
Is it good to do that, is it good to have a little bit of poison in your drink?
3
SPEAKER_00
Depends what the poison is, and it depends if you know not to have another drink.
3
SPEAKER_00
It might be the case that you find out, as some alcoholics do, that one was too many and 10 is not enough.
3
SPEAKER_02
So there s a natural, in this case, this kind of deconstruction is a slippery slope.
3
SPEAKER_02
It becomes an addiction, becomes a drug, and you just can t stop.
3
SPEAKER_00
You d have to wean yourself off it and try to start creating again.
3
SPEAKER_00
You d have to start trying to put things together again.
3
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Something, I think, might be in the throes of starting as it happens.
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Well, speaking of
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taking things apart and not putting them together again.
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The idea of critical race theory.
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Can you, to me, explain, so I m an engineer and have not been actually paying attention much, unfortunately, to these things.
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None of the people in your field were until it comes along and smacks you in the face.
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I ve had that line of thinking from MIT,
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I said, well, surely whatever you folks are busy about yelling at each other for is a thing at Harvard and Yale.
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It s not going to.
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Yeah, of course.
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Yes.
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People in the STEM subjects thought is not coming for us.
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It can t come to us and bang.
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Well, it hasn t quite been bang.
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I m not sure.
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Engineering is more safe than others.
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Yeah.
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So let s draw a line now between engineering and science.
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So I think engineering is, I m sitting in a castle on the tallest tower with my pinky out drinking my martini saying, surely.
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The peasants below with their biology and their humanities will figure it all out.
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No, I m just kidding.
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There s no pinky out.
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I drink vodka and I hang with the peasants.
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Okay, where is this?
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This metaphor has gone too far.
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Can you explain to this engineer what critical race theory is?
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Is it a term that s definable?
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Is there a tradition?
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Is there a history?
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What is good about it?
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What is bad about it?
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It is a tradition.
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It is a history.
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It s a school of thought.
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It started in the law roughly in the 1970s in some of the American academy.
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It s spilled out.
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It always aimed to be an activist philosophy.
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People deny that now, but as I cite in the War on the West, the foundational texts say as much.
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This is an activist academic study.
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We re not just looking at the law, we seek to change the law.
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And it s built out into all of the other disciplines.
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I think there s a reason for that, by the way, which is it happened at the time that the humanities and others in America were increasingly weak and didn t know what to do, and they needed more games to play or new games to play.
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The psychologists got bored.
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Yeah, I mean, well, they needed tenure.
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They needed something to do.
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And I mean, it s not an original observation.
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Plenty of people have made this, but I mean, Neil Ferguson said this some time ago, for instance, that in the last,
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50 years in American academia, certainly in humanities departments, when somebody dies out who s a great scholar in something, they re just not replaced by somebody of equal stature.
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They re replaced by somebody who does theory or critical race theory.
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They re replaced by somebody who does the modern games.
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Somebody dies out who s a great historian of, say, I don t know, it s the one that s on my mind, Russian history or Russian literature, and they re not replaced by a similar
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scholar.
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In his observation, and in yours, is this a recent development?
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It s happened in the last few decades for sure, and it s sped up.
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Is it because we ve gotten to the bottom of some of the biggest questions of history?
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No, it s because we re willing to forget the big questions.
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because it s more fun to, big questions are as fun?
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No, partly it s, no, I should stress that partly this is in the weeds, but partly it s a result of hyper-specialization in academia.
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You know, if you said you d like to write your dissertation on Hobbes, if you wanted to, if you,
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something central to Kant s thought or Hegel or something.
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I mean, that s not popular.
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What s popular is to take somebody way down the line from that because there s a feeling that that s all been done.
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So you take something way, way, way down the line from that that s much less important and then you sort of play with that.
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And I think most people, anyone who s watching who s been in a philosophy department or anything else in recent years will know that.
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tendency.
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By the way, there s a very practical consequence of this.
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I saw this at the end of my friend Roger Scruton s life when he would occasionally, he didn t get tenure at universities, but he would occasionally be flown in even by his enemies to teach courses in various universities in basics of philosophy because there was no one in the department able to do it.
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Like, he would go in and teach for a semester, you know,
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Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer and others because there was no one to do it because they were all playing with things way, way, way down the road from this.
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So that had already happened and people were searching for new games to play and the critical race theory stuff forced its way in.
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partly in the way that all of this that s now known as anti-racism does which is in a sort of bullying tone of saying if you don t follow this.
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It s the same way that all the things that are called studies, I think everything called studies in the humanities should be shut down.
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because of the activist element.
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They re all activists.
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Gay studies and queer studies, nothing good has ever come from it.
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Nothing good.
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To push back, is it obvious that activism is a sign of a flaw in a discipline?
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So isn t it... It s a sign of the death of the discipline.
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It s a sign the discipline s over.
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But isn t it a good goal to have for discipline to enact change, positive change in the world?
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Or is that for politicians to do with the findings of science?
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I mean, why create an ideology and then set out to find disciplines that are weakly put together to try to back up your
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Political ideology so ideology should not be part of of of science or of no i mean why would you.
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I mean anyone could do it.
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You could decide to go in and be.
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wildly right-wing about something and only do things that prove your right-wing ideas, be fantastically anti-academic, fantastically anti-science.
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It s an absurd way to mix up activism and academia.
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And it s absolutely rife.
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And critical race theory is one of the ones that completely polluted the academy.
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Yeah, and there s been dark moments throughout history, both for, during World War II, with both communism and Nazism, fascism, that infiltrated science, and then that corrupted it.
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Yes.
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I mean, for instance, also, let s face it, in science, as in everything else, there are dark, difficult things.
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It s much better we know about them, face up to them, and try to find a way socially to deal with them,
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than that you leave them in the hands of some activist who wants to do stuff with them.
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Some of my best friends are activists.
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I m just kidding, okay.
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None of my best friends are activists.
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That s how it should be.
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Well, I was kidding because I don t have any friends, but okay.
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Sure, that s not true.
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I m trying to gain some pity points.
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Okay, so to return- You have your clubhouse friends.
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Screaming away like deranged maniacs.
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No, I m anti-Clubhouse, by the way, because the only time I heard it was that Brett Weinstein one when he did that.
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I don t know if you heard that early in Clubhouse.
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I was invited to Clubhouse by various people who said, oh, this is a really great civilized way to hang out and talk with interesting people.
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And I downloaded the app, and I got on one night, because Brett Weinstein said I m doing this conversation, and I listened, and it was
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The maddest damn discussion I ve ever heard.
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Was it something about biology?
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Something about... Was it during COVID times?
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At some point, Brett said, I m an evolutionary biologist.
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And somebody else started saying, you re a eugenicist.
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And he said, no, I m an evolutionary biologist.
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And somebody said, that s the same thing!
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And it just went on like that and Brett desperately tried to explain that s not the same thing as being eugenicist and he lost the clubhouse room.
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They thought that was the same thing.
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It horribly reminded me of a time some years ago in a British newspaper.
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ran a sort of, realizing that the only thing you can unite people on in sexual ethics is revulsion against pedophilia, ran an anti-pedo campaign, and shortly after, pediatricians  offices were torched in the north of England by a mob who hadn t read the whole sign.
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Yeah, well, to me, like I said, a little bit of poison is good for the town, so... Anyhow, sorry, I interrupted you with flattering you with our people on Clubhouse.
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I have many, I have multiples of friends, yes.
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We didn t get to some of the ideas of critical race theory.
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What exactly is it?
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I m actually in part asking this question quite genuinely.
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Yeah.
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It s an attempt to look at everything among other things through the lens of race and to add race into things where it may not be as a way of adding.
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I m trying to give the most generous estimation.
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To add race in as a conversation in a place where it may not have been in the conversation.
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And that means history too?
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The history of racism?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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All history.
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And to look at it through these particular lenses.
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I mean, there s a certain, like all these things, there s a certain logic in it.
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Like with feminist studies or something, I mean, is there a utility in looking back through undoubtedly male-dominated histories and asking where the more silent female voice was?
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Yes.
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Very interesting.
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Not endlessly interesting.
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And can t be put exactly on the same par as, but it has a utility.
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It s that endlessly, sorry to interrupt, that endlessly part that seems to get us into trouble a lot here.
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Well, because of this thing of where do you stop?
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And that s always, I talked about this in my last book, In the Manners of Crowds, it s one of the big conundrums in activist movements and particularly in activist academia.
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Where would you stop?
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It s not clear because you ve got a job in it.
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You ve got a pension in it.
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Your only esteem in society is in keeping this gig going.
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I mean, is there any likelihood?
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It s the old academic joke, isn t it?
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The end of every conference, the only thing everyone agrees on is that we must have another conference like this one.
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It s the one thing they always agree on.
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This conference has been so great, we must have another one.
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That s a criticism you could apply to a lot of disciplines.
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Civil engineering, bridge building.
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At a certain point, do we need any more bridges?
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Can we just fly everywhere?
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At the very least, you need to keep the bridges up.
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Sure, and critical race theory folks would probably make the same argument.
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At the very least, we need to keep the racism out.
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We have to make sure we don t descend into the racism.
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It assumes all the time that we are living on the cusp of the return of the KKK, which is totally wrong.
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It s a massive... You say that now until the KKK armies march in.
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We can t always predict the future.
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We can t always predict the future and you can always say you should be careful but
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you ve also got to be careful of people who ve got their timing like totally, totally wrong or their estimation of society.
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They re in totally, totally wrong.
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You mean like most of society before in the 1930s when Hitler was, I mean, so many people got Hitler wrong.
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Sure they did.
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Most people.
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Maybe it was nice to have the alarmist thinking there, beware of the man with the mustache.
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If only it was that easy.
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It s not always about facial hair.
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I mean, I always say that.
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I mean, it very often is.
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These two clean shaven chaps both say.
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One of the problems of everybody knowing a little bit about Nazism is that they think that they know where evil comes from and that it comes from like a German with a small mustache getting people to goose step, for instance.
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And that s not correct.
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A much better understanding of it is it can come from all number of directions and keep your antennae as good as you can.
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But once you end up in this society, which I would argue certainly parts of America, where you re always in 1938, that s not healthy for a society either.
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Where people are so primed and think they re so well-trained because they spent
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a term in school learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust, think they re so well trained in Hitler spotting, that they can do it all the time.
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Look at all these phrases we now have in our societies, like dog whistle.
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You know, as I always say, if you hear the whistle, you re the dog.
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But people say, that s a dog whistle, as if they re highly trained anti-Nazis.
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I mean, you know, there should be some humility in it.
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We should be careful, we should be wary for sure.
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And we should also be slightly humble in our inability to spot everything.
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If not significantly humble, right.
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So if we can, there s something,
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funny if not dark about the activity of Hitler spotting, if I just may take it aside.
3
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So critical race theory, how much racism, what is racism?
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How much of it is in our world today?
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If we were thinking about this activity of Hitler spotting,
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how, and trying to steel man the case of, if not critical race theory, but people who look for racism in our world, how much would you say?
3
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Well, it s a good thing to try to define, I d say that,
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Racism is the belief that other people are inferior to you.
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You could see a form of it where you thought people were superior to you.
3
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That could also happen, but more commonly it s you see a group of people as being inferior to you simply by dint of the fact that they have a different racial background.
3
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And that s sort of the easiest way to define racism.
3
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As I say, I mean, there are types of racism, mainly anti-Semitism, actually, perhaps it s the only one.
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which weirdly relies on a hatred of people who a certain type of person thinks are better than them.
4
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And that s a particular peculiarity, one of the peculiarities of antisemitism.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well antisemitism somehow does both, right?
4
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Yes, well one of the eternal fascinating things about antisemitism is it can do, it does everything at the same time.
4
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like quantum racism.
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You re both superior and inferior.
4
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You know that, do you know Vassily Grossman s Life and Fate?
4
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So in the middle of Life and Fate, which a Persian friend of mine always said was one of only two great novels of the 20th century.
4
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She was a very harsh literary critic.
4
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What was the other one?
4
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Oh, The Leopard, obviously.
4
SPEAKER_00
The Leopard?
4
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The Leopard of Giuseppe De Lampedusa, yeah.
4
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Okay.
4
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I m definitely right on that one.
4
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Life and Fate is a... I m learning so much today.
4
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Yes, Life and Fate.
4
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Life and Fate is an extraordinary book, mainly about, you know, Grossman was obviously Jewish himself, but he saw almost everything that he could have done in the Second World War.
4
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He saw Stalingrad, he was a journalist,
4
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He wrote firsthand accounts of Stalingrad.
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He was also the first journalist into Treblinka, and his account, which you can read in one of the collections of his journalism, his account of walking into Treblinka is just one of the most devastating, haunting pieces of journalism or prose you can read.
4
SPEAKER_00
Anyhow, I mention him because Grossman, in the middle of Life and Fate, which is about a 900-page novel, in the middle of it, which is about the dark axis around Stalingrad,
4
SPEAKER_00
where at one point he amazingly sort of goes into the minds of both Hitler and Stalin.
4
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He says Stalin in his study feels his counterpart in Berlin, he says he feels very close to him at this moment.
4
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Wow, around Stalingrad, like leading up to the battle.
4
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After Stalingrad, when the Germans was lost, he says he feels the closeness of Hitler.
4
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But Grossman, in the middle of life and fate, slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century, suddenly dedicates a chapter to antisemitism.
4
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And antisemitism is something I ve always been very interested in, because I ve always had an instinctive utter revulsion of it.
4
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And also partly because of having seen bits of it in the Middle East and elsewhere.
4
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I mention this because Grossman, in the middle of Life and Fates, takes time out and does this three-page explanation, three-page description of antisemitism.
4
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And it s extraordinary.
4
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The only thing I can think of that s equally good is Gregor von Redsori, who wrote a luridly titled but brilliant set of novellas called The Confessions of an Antisemite.
4
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about pre-First World War antisemitism in Eastern and Central Europe.
4
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Anyway, Grossman says in The Middle of Life and Fate that one of the extraordinary things about antisemitism is that it does everything at the same time.
4
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The Jews get condemned in one place for being rich and in another for being poor.
4
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Condemned in one place for assimilating and another for not assimilating.
4
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for assimilating too much and assimilating too little, for being too successful, for not being successful enough.
4
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So I think it s the only racism that includes within it a detestation, for the real antisemite, a detestation of people that the person may perceive to be better than them, correctly or otherwise.
4
SPEAKER_01
By the way, I m embarrassed to say I have not read this one of two greatest novels of the 20th century, Life and Fate, Zhizni Sedba.
4
SPEAKER_01
And just to read off of Wikipedia, Vasiliy Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew, became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper Krasna Zvezda.
4
SPEAKER_01
Having volunteered and been rejected from military service, he spent 1,000 days on the front lines.
4
SPEAKER_01
Roughly three of the four years of the conflict between
4
SPEAKER_01
the Germans and the Soviets, and the main themes covered in, how s it go, Life and Fate, I keep thinking, Zhizni Sudba, is a theme on Jewish identity in the Holocaust, Grossman s idea of humanity and the human goodness, Stalin s distortion of reality and values, and science that goes on in reality of war.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s interesting, I need to definitely read it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think you ll really get a lot from it.
4
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One of the other things he does is he has this extraordinary ability to talk about the absolute highest levels of the conflict and then zoom in.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s rather like the camera work they use in things like Lord of the Rings, where he zooms down and then gets one person in the midst of all this and you get on that.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ll put you in the study too.
4
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So I personally have read and reread the William Shires  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, who s another journalist
4
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who was there, but he does not do it.
4
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Interestingly enough, given such a large novel, kind of the definitive original work that goes to source materials on Hitler, he doesn t touch anti-Semitism really.
4
SPEAKER_01
So.
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Big thing to miss out.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, he just says that
4
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very calmly and objectively, as he does for most of the work, that this was the fact of life.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of cruelty throughout, but he doesn t get to... Well, one of the things is, of course, they lost the war because of anti-Semitism.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s one kind of important way to view it.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s how Andrew Roberts and other historians say it, is that, you know, in the end, the Nazis lost the war because they were Nazis.
4
SPEAKER_00
It sounds almost too neat, but it s worth remembering that, you know,
4
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At the end of the war, when the Germans need to be transporting troops and they need to be transporting very basic supplies, Eichmann makes sure he gets the trains to transport the Jews right up to the end.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s certainly a dark possibility.
4
SPEAKER_00
Anyhow, but to go back to racism in general, racism in general, apart from antisemitism, relies on the
4
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perception that another group of people, a racial group, other than your own, are inferior to you.
4
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That s what I d say is the easiest shorthand of racism.
4
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And of course, it s one of the stupidest things that our species is capable of.
4
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I mean, one of the stupidest.
4
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That you can look at a person and guess them in their entirety, in fact.
4
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because of their skin color.
4
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I mean, it s like, what a stupid idea that is, as well as being an evil one.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I would say that one of the, I think it s a dangerous thing in our era that there are bits of it coming back.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s why I say we do need sort of, we need our antennae working.
4
SPEAKER_00
We just don t need them to be overactive or underactive, you know.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now the book is War in the West, but speaking of racism, racism towards different groups based on their skin color, you ve said that there s a war on white people in the US.
4
SPEAKER_01
Would you say that s the case?
4
SPEAKER_01
Would you say that there is significant racism towards white people in the United States?
4
SPEAKER_00
I d say that white people in the United States are the only people who are told that they have hereditary sin.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s a big one just to start with.
4
SPEAKER_00
Based strictly on their skin color.
4
SPEAKER_00
Based on their skin color.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I would find it so repugnant if, and I hope everybody would join me in feeling this, I would feel so repugnant if there were any school of thought in America today that had any grasp on the public attention that said that black people were born into evil because of something their ancestors had done.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like they had the mark of Cain upon them.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think it would be such a vicious way to try to demoralize a group of people and to tell them that the things they would be able to achieve in their lives are much lessened because they should spend significant portions of their lives trying to atone for something they didn t do.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is there a difference?
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And the following point, the obvious point left unsaid, but let s say it.
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Nobody in the public square says that.
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I mean, they re the maniacs of the far fringes, but nobody in the mainstream would dare to say that or I think even think that about any group of people other than white people.
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And
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Does this mean that white people are more disadvantaged than black people?
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No.
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And again, let s not make this a competition, but let s not get into, I just desperately urge people not to get into the idea of hereditary sin according to racial background.
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Is there something to be said about the feature aspect, to sort of play devil s advocate, about the asymmetry of sort of accusations towards the majority?
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So, because whites- Yes, of course.
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It s much easier to attack a majority.
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It is much easier, but is there something to be said about that being a useful function of society, that you always attack
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that the minority has disproportionate power to attack the majority so that you can always keep the majority in check.
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Well, it s a dangerous game to play, isn t it?
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It s a very dangerous game to play.
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I think that s a good summary of entirety of human civilization.
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Oh yeah, everything s dangerous.
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But it s a very dangerous game to play that.
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I wrote about this a bit in The Madness of Crowds when I was saying gay rights people, the ones that still exist, the ones who don t have homes to go to, who want to beat up on straight people in a way, or want to make straight people feel like they re
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kind of unremarkable, uncool, you know, boring straights.
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So boring.
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So not like the magical pixie fairy dust gaze.
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That s a bad idea to push that one.
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That s a bad idea.
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And some gays push that.
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highly unwise given the fact that about two to three percent of population are actually gay although now there s like a additional twenty percent who think they re like two spirit or something and all that bullshit but they re just attention seekers so let s not spend too much time on that but equally as i ve said i said the man is a crowd with
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with the feminist movement.
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Very unwise for half of the species to say that the other half of the species isn t needed.
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And there were always third and fourth wave feminists willing to make that nuts argument.
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Not first wave feminists, you didn t hear it in first wave feminists, you didn t hear suffragettes tended not to say, we d like the vote and men, a scum,
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It would have been hard to have won everyone over to their side, not least the men they needed to win over to their side.
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But you do get third and fourth wave feminists who say like, you know, do we need men?
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Or men are all X. Again, it s a bad idea.
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It s a bad idea tactically.
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What if men, Richard Wrangham, somebody from Harvard, describes that men are the originators of violence, physical violence in society, and he argues that actually the world would be better off.
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No, just a very cold calculus.
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If you get rid of men, there would be a lot less violence in society is his claim.
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But who says you need to get rid of violence in society?
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But shouldn t that at least be a discussion?
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The pros and cons have a debate, a panel discussion, violence, pros and cons.
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Well, that s the sort of thing, if I can say so, that some weak-ass academic decides to do because he thinks that his area of Boston would be nicer or whatever.
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He might decide it s useful, if he was living in Kiev today, to have violent men.
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I mean, it might, if New York was invaded right now, I d need some violent men around here.
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But it wouldn t be invaded if there s no violent men, as the argument goes.
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There s also, at least there s some level of threat that you ought to exude that puts people off.
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If I was in,
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You know, I m very glad that the men and women of Ukraine are capable of and more than capable of fighting for their country and for their neighbors and their families and much more.
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But it s better that that there was violence ready to unleash when violence was unleashed upon them than that the whole society had been told that they should identify as non-binary.
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But at least it s a conversation to have.
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Isn t there aspect to the feminist movement that is correct in challenging the... Some forms of violence, domestic violence for instance, although women are capable of that as well.
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I m learning about this.
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I can t help but watch the entirety of it go down in this beautiful mess that is human relations.
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It s very unwise for women to war against men, as it would be for men to war against women.
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It s highly, highly unwise to war on a majority population.
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And in America, Britain, and other Western countries, white people are still a majority.
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And so why would you tell the majority that they re evil by dint of their skin color and think that that would be a good way to keep them in check?
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I mean, I m not guilty of anything because of my skin color.
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I m not guilty of anything.
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My ancestors didn t do anything wrong.
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And even if they had, why would I be held responsible for it?
4
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So to go back to Nietzsche, is there some aspect to where if we try to explain the forces at play here, is it the will to power playing itself out from individual human nature and from group behavior nature?
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Is there some elements to this which is the game we play as human beings is always when we have less power, we try to find ways to gain more power?
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That s certainly one, the desire to grab is, let me see if I find a quote for you on that.
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The desire to grab that which we think we re owed and to do it,
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often in the guise of justice.
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I mean, justice is one of the great terms of our age, and one of the great bogus terms of our age.
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People forever talk about their search for justice, and it s amazing how violent they can often be in their search for justice, and how many rules they re willing to break so long as they can say they re after justice, and how many norms they can trample so long as they can say it s in the name of justice.
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You can burn down buildings in the name of justice.
4
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Well, the majority groups throughout history, including those with white skin color, have done the same in the name of justice.
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We come up with all kinds of sexy terms in our propaganda machines to sell whatever atrocities we d like to commit.
4
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One of the quotes from Nietzsche that I liked, and I quoted in this book.
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Careful, I m judging you harshly.
4
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Yeah, of course.
4
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Nietzsche says that one of the dangers of men of resentment is they ll achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves, to shove their misery in the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy, and this is quoting Nietzsche, start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another, it s a disgrace to be happy.
4
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There is too much misery.
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This is something to be averted, for the sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too, or make the healthy confuse themselves with the sick.
4
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Well, I think that again, there s a lot of that going on.
4
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How could I be happy when there is unhappiness in the world?
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Why should I not join the ranks of the unhappy?
4
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I think Dostoevsky has a book about that as well.
4
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Sure.
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Notes from Underground.
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Okay.
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This has been very Russian-focused.
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I m very pleased with the number of times both Dostoevsky and Grossman and others have come in.
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I wasn t doing this as a sort
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with them.
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Yeah, well, it s always good to plug the greats.
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And good to know they re still relevant.
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Do you speak Russian, by the way, at all?
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Wish I did.
5
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I m told it s a 10-year language, basically, to learn from scratch, as my friends who have done it.
5
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Well, there s the language, and then there s the personality behind the language, and the personality I feel like you already have.
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So you just need to know the surface details.
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Okay, in fact the silence to be Silent in the Russian language is something that s already important.
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Oh, I should if we had a moment I tell you I saw about Stalin s birthplace.
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I don t know No, I once went to gory where Stalin was born Have you been no, that s finished.
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I was there just after the Georgia war.
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I
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I went to the no man s land in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and I said I ve really got to go to Gori or something because a shell had landed in Gori rather weirdly from the Russian side and Gori is where Stalin was born and of course Gori is in Georgia and anyhow the museum of Stalin s birthplace they d been trying to change for some years because it had been
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unadulteratedly pro-Stalin for years.
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And the Georgian authorities, this is in Dzhekevili s time, were trying to make it into a museum of Stalinism.
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And it was really tough.
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The only place I ve seen which is similar is the house in Mexico City where Trotsky was killed.
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That also is that they re not quite sure what to do.
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They don t want to say he s a bad guy because they think that people won t come anyhow.
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Stalin s house in Gori had changed from the Museum of Stalin to the Museum of Stalinism.
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There was this large Georgian woman with a pink pencil who just had clearly been doing the tour for like 50 years.
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and just point to all the facts.
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If you did that classic thing, I ve also saw it once in North Korea where they, that sort of communist thing where they say, here is, this is 147 feet high by 13 feet deep.
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They give you lots of facts.
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I don t care.
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Why does it matter?
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They always give you facts.
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This is Stalin s suitcase.
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It is 13 inches wide by, you know.
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Anyhow, and this woman did all of this, and it was all just wildly pro, well, not pro Stalin, it just explained Stalin s life.
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He was just a great local boy done good.
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They didn t mention the fact he killed more Georgians per capita than anyone else.
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Local boy done good.
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And we get to the end, and before being taken to the gift shop where they sell red wine with Stalin s face on it, among other things, and a lighter with Stalin on it,
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They took you to a little room under the stairs and they said, this is a replica of interrogation cell to represent horror of what happened in Stalin time.
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Now, gift shop.
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And I took the woman aside at the end.
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I said, what do you think about Comrade Stalin?
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And she said, as I say, she d obviously done this during communist times.
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She said, it s not my place to judge, that sort of thing.
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Which is an interesting comment in itself.
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I said, yeah, but he killed more Georgians than anyone, and all that sort of thing.
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She said, it s not my place to judge or to give my views, that sort of thing.
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And eventually I said, well, what do you feel about it?
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And she said, it was like a hurricane, it happened.
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That s interesting because if I may mention Clubhouse once again, I got a chance to talk to a few people from Mongolia.
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There s a woman from Mongolia, and they talked about the fact that they deeply admire Stalin, love.
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She sounded, if I may, hopefully that s not crossing the line, I think I m representing her correctly, in saying she admired him almost like, you know,
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like loved them, like the way people love like Jesus, like a holy figure.
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But isn t that still the case in large parts of Russia?
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Yeah.
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I mean, Stalin keeps on winning greatest Russian of all time.
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And that s perhaps, maybe there s a dip, but if we were to think about the long arc of history, perhaps that s going to go up and up and up and up.
5
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There s something about human memory that it just, you forget the details of the atrocities of the past and remember the
5
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I mean, think of the number of people we talk about as historical heroes.
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Napoleon.
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I mean, British people don t talk about Napoleon as a hero, but the French.
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You did the thing with Dostoevsky, now you re on tricky ground.
5
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But the French are enormously admired, Napoleon, and they had many admirals.
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He was also an unbelievable brute and killed many people unnecessarily.
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And there are lots of figures from history that we sort of cover that over with.
5
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Yeah, yeah.
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Can we mention Churchill briefly?
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Because he is one of the, you could make a case for him being one of the great representers or great figures historically of Western civilization.
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And then there s a lot of people from, not a lot.
5
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I have like three friends and one of them happens to be from London and they say that he s not a good person.
5
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So listen, this friend, we did not discuss, I just, this is an opinion poll of the three friends, but I do know that there s quite a bit, you know.
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There s a backlash going on at the moment.
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At the moment and in general, there s a spirit like reflecting on the darker sides of some of these historical figures, like challenging history through, it s not just critical race theory, it s challenging history through, well, our,
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the people we think of as heroes, what are their flaws?
5
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And are they in fact villains that are convenient, sort of were there at the right time to accidentally do the right thing?
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Accidentally.
5
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I hope this isn t the representative, fair summation of your friend in London s views.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, she s going to be quite mad at this, but I didn t say the name, so it could be any friend.
5
SPEAKER_01
It could be, it s like my girlfriend in Canada.
5
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But we know it s a she.
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Well, see, I... You ve given that away.
5
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Well, that s, of course, I would not, I made that up completely.
5
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It s all, just like my girlfriend in Canada, she s completely a figment of my imagination.
5
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Nevertheless,
5
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Winston Churchill is somebody, I mean, just looking at, reading the rise and fall of the Third Reich is an incredible figure, that to me, so much of World War II is marked, leading up to the war is marked by stunning amounts of cowardice by political leaders.
5
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And it s fascinating to watch here
5
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this person clearly with the drinking and a smoking problem.
5
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Was it?
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I don t understand why that s a negative.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, I didn t say, you see.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you throw it in as if it is.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, well, it s called humor.
5
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I ll explain it to you one day what that means.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I ll explain dry humor.
5
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He stood up.
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He stood up to what we now see as evil, when at the time it was not so obvious to see.
5
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You know, so that s just a fascinating figure of Western civilization.
5
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I d love to get your comments.
5
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The real criticisms, I mean, other than smoking and drinking, the real criticisms of Churchill are quite easy to sum up, and I do so in The War on the West, actually.
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I say these are the things that they now use against him.
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Didn t do enough to avert the Bengal famine in 1943, for instance.
5
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That s been shot down by numerous historians, including Indian historians.
5
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In the middle of a world war, Churchill did what he could to get grain supplies diverted from Australia to Bengal.
5
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the famine was appalling, it was caused by a typhoon, it was not caused by Winston Churchill and the idea that some basically Indian nationalist historians have pumped out in recent years and just anti-Churchill figures that he actually wanted Indians to die is just total calumny and when people claim, some people claim that, I mean there was a few very ignorant scholars and nevertheless with some credentials
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who claimed that Churchill wanted the Indian population to basically be genocided.
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And it s complete nonsense, not least by the fact that during the period which in question the Indian population boomed.
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So that s one of the main ones.
5
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Another one is that he had some views that we now regard as racist.
5
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He definitely regarded racists as being of different characters.
5
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and that there were superior races and that the, as it were, the white European was a superior culture.
5
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He was born in Victorian England, so he has Victorian attitudes.
5
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These are things in the negative side of the ledger and as with all history you should have a negative and a positive side of the ledger.
5
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Positive side of the ledger includes he almost certainly did more than any one human being to save the world from Nazism.
5
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So that should count as something.
5
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And one of the reasons I talk about Churchill in this regard is to stress that if you get
5
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I m not trying to stop anyone doing history at all.
5
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I don t think the revisionism of recent years about Churchill or the founding fathers of America or anyone else is anything I want to stop.
5
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I find it interesting.
5
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I find it interesting not least because it s so sloppy on occasions, but I find it interesting and it s important.
5
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And we should be able to see people in the round.
5
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But that includes recognizing the positive side of the ledger.
5
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And if you can t recognize that side,
5
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You re doing something else.
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You re doing something else.
5
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It s not history.
5
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It s some form of politicking of a very particular kind.
5
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And I think it s the same thing with the founding fathers.
5
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There are some people, for instance, certainly since the 90s, who have pushed the Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson story to show that Thomas Jefferson was some kind of brute.
5
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As a result, you know, we see Jefferson s statue being removed from the council chamber in the city we re sitting in.
5
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last november by council members who said that thomas jefferson no longer represents our values if you can t recognize greatness of thomas jefferson and that he had flaws i mean that s not a grown up debate
5
SPEAKER_01
and weigh them and weigh them in the context of the time.
5
SPEAKER_01
But let me sort of throw a curveball at you then.
5
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What about recognizing the positive and the negative of a fellow with nice facial hair called Karl Marx?
5
SPEAKER_00
Sure, sure.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I have a section in the War on the West, as you know, where I go for Karl Marx with some glee.
5
SPEAKER_01
So he seems to have gotten some popularity in the West recently.
5
SPEAKER_00
Not just recently, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s had a resurgence recently.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, resurgence.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s because whenever things seem to go wrong, people reach for other options.
5
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And when, for instance, it s very hard for people to accumulate capital, it s not obvious that they re gonna become capitalists.
5
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And so one thing that happens is people say, let s look at the Marxism thing again, see if that s a viable goer.
5
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and my argument would simply be, point me to one place that s worked.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, the argument from the Marxist or the Marxian economists is that we ve only really tried it once, the Soviets tried it, and then there s a few people that kind of tried the Soviet thing.
5
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Cuba tried it?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, they basically, it s an offshoot of the Soviet, yes, they ve tried it.
5
SPEAKER_00
They tried it in Venezuela.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes, yes.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, let s just quickly say, how did all these experiments go?
5
SPEAKER_01
They did not, well, they failed in fascinating ways.
5
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They did, but they failed.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, they failed.
5
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We should stress, so grossly failed.
5
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So grossly failed that they threw millions and millions of people into completely thwarted lives that were much shorter than they should have been.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so the lesson to learn there, you can learn several lessons.
5
SPEAKER_01
One is that anything that smells like Marxism is going to lead to a lot of problems.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, another lesson could be, well, what is the fundamental idea that Marx had?
5
SPEAKER_01
He was criticizing capitalism.
5
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and the flaws of capitalism.
5
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So is it possible to do better than capitalism?
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s, if you take that spirit, you start to wonder, that might actually become relevant in, I don t know, 20, 30, 50 years when the machines start doing more and more of the labor, all those kinds of things, you start to ask questions.
5
SPEAKER_00
You finally might get to Marx s dream of what the average day would look like.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s gonna be an awful lot of literary criticism then.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you remember, that s what Marx said that we would be doing in the evening, the laborer in the evening.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, he didn t know Twitter was a thing or Netflix, so he would change.
5
SPEAKER_00
Are there things we could learn from Marx, plausibly, possibly?
5
SPEAKER_00
I can t think of anything myself offhand.
5
SPEAKER_00
to have a critique of capitalism isn t by any means a bad thing in the society.
5
SPEAKER_00
I d rather that it was a critique of capitalism that showed how you improve capitalism, a critique of the free market that showed how people could get better access to the free market, how you could ensure, for instance, that young people get onto the property ladder, things like that.
5
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Those are constructive things.
5
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The people who say we must have Marxism, I mean, don t know what the hell they re talking about.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because that never leads to any of those things.
5
SPEAKER_00
Haven t learned in the past.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s never let in the past and at some point you ve got to try to work out how many attempts you make at this damn philosophy before you realize that every attempt always leads to the same thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
We could pretend that fascism has never been properly tried.
5
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and that it was unfortunate what happened in Nazi Germany, but that wasn t real fascism.
5
SPEAKER_00
And in Mussolini s fascism, it didn t go all that well, but it was a bit better and maybe we could try a bit more Franco fascism.
5
SPEAKER_00
Nobody would have any time for this crap, nor should they.
5
SPEAKER_00
The people who try that are reviled and quite rightly.
5
SPEAKER_00
So why do we tolerate it with the Marxism thing?
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s a great mystery to me the way that people do tolerate it.
5
SPEAKER_00
Always, always in this stupid way of saying, we haven t done it yet.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you keep trying the same recipe and every time it comes out as shit,
5
SPEAKER_00
It s the recipe s shit.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, sort of, I m trying to practice here by playing devil s advocate, practice the same idea that you mentioned, which is, when you say the word Marxism, should you throw out everything or should you ask a question, is there good ideas here?
5
SPEAKER_01
And the same, it s the good, it s weighing the good and the bad and being able to do so calmly and thoughtfully.
5
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you know the famous George Orwell comment on the Stalinist?
5
SPEAKER_00
That s one of my favorite quotes.
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George Orwell in the early 40s gets into an argument with a Stalinist, who s obviously a Marxist.
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And this is after the show trials, 37.
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This is when it s very clear what Marxism in the Russian form is.
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and Orwell is in the discussion with this Marxist and it goes on and on and eventually Orwell says, what about the show trials and what about what s happened in Ukraine and the famines and much more and the purges and the purges and the purges and eventually the Stalinist says to Orwell what Orwell knows he s going to say all along which is he says you can t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
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And Orwell says, where s the omelette?
5
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Oh, yeah.
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So it s a good, that s a really good.
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Look at this by this stage.
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Okay.
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How many, where s my damn omelette?
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How many just messy, big, bloody eggy piles have the Marxists created by now in country after country?
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Yeah.
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Always next time they re going to produce the great omelette.
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but they never have.
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they never will because the whole thing is rotten from the start.
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But let me just also say one thing about that because of course Marx isn t as nice as he sounds.
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that s one of the things that I try to highlight in the book is if we re going to do this reductive thing of people in history and saying well they had views that were of their time and we must therefore condemn them for them say fine let s do the same thing with Marx and there are things I quote in this book from Marx s letters not least letters to Engels and indeed in his published writings in pieces he was writing for the American press in the 1850s
6
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He has horrible views on slavery and colonialism and much more.
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But the main thing is, I mean, the horrible things he says about black people and the constant use of the N-word.
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In fact, when I was doing the audio book for The War in the West, I had to decide, will I read out the quotes from Marx or not?
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If I had read them out, I d have been cancelled because people would have just said,
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You ve been using the N-word so much in this passage.
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And I slightly thought of doing it so that I could say I was only quoting Marx to try to hit the point home.
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In the end, of course, I was sensible and decided not to.
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But Marx s letters are disgusting on these terms.
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Since I highlighted this in this book and some of the media picked it up,
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and have popularized this thing I m trying to put into the system, which is, if you re going to accuse Churchill of racism, if you re going to accuse Jefferson of racism, Washington of racism and so on, what about Marx?
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The two things that Marxists have said since this came out has been, first of all, why are you saying this about Marx?
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He was a man of his time, like everyone else.
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And the second thing they say is, we don t go to Marx for his horrible, abhorrent views on race.
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They re talking about mixed race people as guerrillas and so on.
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We don t go to him for that.
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We go to him for his economic theories.
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I say, okay, well, we don t go to Thomas Jefferson for his views on slaves.
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We don t go to Churchill for his, the precise language he used that points in the 1910s about Indians.
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Or his health advice.
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Or his health advice.
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Actually, I do go to him for that.
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That explains so much.
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Let s have some standards on this.
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And that s why I m very suspicious of the fact that the people don t do this with Marx.
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Because I think what some people are trying to do, and this may sound conspiratorial, but I really don t think it is.
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I think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past.
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in order to say there s nothing good, nothing you can hold on to, no one you should revere, you ve got no heroes, the whole thing comes down, who s left standing?
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Oh, we ve also got this idea from the 20th century still about Marxism, or the 19th and 20th centuries.
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And no, no, I will not have the entire landscape deracinated, and then the worst ideas tried again.
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So basically destroy all of history and the lessons learned from history, and then start from scratch, and then it s completely, any idea can work, and then you can just take whatever.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, and the thing is, there are always some people with pre-preferred ideas.
6
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And I mentioned this also with the post-colonialists.
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The post-colonialists were really interesting.
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Because when the European powers were moving from Africa and the Far East,
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Post-colonial movements had one obvious move they could have done, which was to say, since the European powers have left, we will return to a pre-colonial life.
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which in some of their places would have been returning to slave markets and slave ownership and slave selling and much more.
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But put that aside for a second.
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They could have said we have an indigenous culture which we will return to.
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Almost uniformly in the post-colonial era, you had figures like Frantz Fanon, you had European intellectuals like Sartre, who said the Western powers are retreating from these countries and therefore we should institute in these countries what but Western Marxism.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s not obvious to me that the bad ideas would be the ones that emerge, but it s more likely that the bad ideas would emerge in this kind of context when you erase history, when you erase tradition.
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When you erase history and you leave some ideas deliberately uninterrogated.
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I mean, as I say, find me one in 100 American students who ve heard of any of the communist despots of the 20th century.
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I mean, name recognition in, there was a poll done a few years ago in the UK, and like name recognition among children, school children for Stalin, let alone Mao.
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I mean Mao who kills more people than anyone, 65 million Chinese perhaps.
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How many students in America know what Mao was, who he was?
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where he was, nothing.
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Or the atrocities committed.
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Where the atrocities were committed.
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And I worry about that because it means that we might have learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century.
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We think we ve learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century.
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We actually haven t learned that lesson.
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We ve learned a little bit of it.
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And we ve not learned the other one at all.
6
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Because that s why we still have people in American politics and elsewhere actually talking about collectivization and things.
6
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as if there s no problem with that and as if it s perfectly obvious and they could run it and they d know exactly where to start.
6
SPEAKER_00
What are the two lessons of the 20th century?
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SPEAKER_01
Fascism and communism.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I m not exactly sure what the exactly the lessons are.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, it s not clear.
6
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The lessons were very clear that we d be better at it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, one is your book broadly applied of madness of crowds.
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SPEAKER_00
That s one lesson.
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Meaning like large crowds can display herd-like behavior.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes, be very suspicious of crowds.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, in general.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, you apply it in different, more to modern application, in a sense, but that s rooted in history, that crowds can, when humans get together, they can do some quite radically silly things.
6
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Elias Kinetis is very good on that, crowds and power.
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And Eric Hoffer, who is a sort of self-taught, amazing, not to say autodidactic writer, the true believer and so on, he was extremely good on that.
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But the reason I mention the two things, no, I mean we should have realized the two nightmares of the 20th century, fascism and communism.
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that we should know how they came about.
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And we re interested in learning how one of them came about, fascism.
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And we know some of the lessons, like don t treat other people as less than you because of their race.
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That s one lesson.
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And we ve done some good at learning that.
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But the second one, not to do communism again, not to do socialism, I think we re way away from knowing, because we don t know how it happened.
6
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And the little temptations are still there always.
6
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Look at the people saying, I m gonna expropriate your property.
6
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If people do things they don t like, we can t wait to take your property.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s a sense, there s an appealing sense
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay, every ideology has an appealing narrative behind it that sells the ideology.
6
SPEAKER_00
So for socialism, for communism, it seems unfair that the working class does all of this work and gets only a fraction of the output.
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SPEAKER_00
It just seems unfair.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you want to make it- If they do get a fraction of the output, yes.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_00
And so it seems to be more fair if we increase that, if the workers own all of the value of their output.
6
SPEAKER_00
And things that are more fair seems to be a good thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
I d say, well, yeah, I mean, fairness is, I like fairness as a term.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, I much prefer fairness because it s a much easier thing to,
6
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try to work out.
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SPEAKER_01
It s quite amorphous itself as a concept but everyone can recognize it.
6
SPEAKER_01
So for instance, should the boss of the company earn a million times that of the lowest paid employee?
6
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t seem fair.
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SPEAKER_01
Should they earn maybe five or ten times the salary of the lowest paid employee?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, possibly.
6
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That could be fair.
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There are certain sort of multiples which are within the bounds of reasonableness.
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SPEAKER_01
I think actually that s the much bigger problem in capitalism at the moment as I see it, is the not untrue perception that a tiny number of people get a lot of the, accrue a lot of the benefits and that the
6
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that the bit in the middle has become increasingly squeezed and is at danger always of falling all the way down to the bottom.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think in the snakes and ladders of American capitalism, for instance, it s a correct perception to say that the snakes go down awfully far.
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SPEAKER_01
If you tread on the snake, you can plummet an awfully long way in America.
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SPEAKER_01
And the deal in the game was that the ladders took you high.
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and there s a perception, and again it s not entirely wrong, that the ladder s system on the board is kind of broken.
6
SPEAKER_00
So what you re saying is you re a Marxist.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m not saying I m a Marxist.
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SPEAKER_00
You heard that here first in the out of context blog post you re going to write about this.
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SPEAKER_01
I get back to this point.
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The way to critique capitalism, if it s gone bad, is to get better capitalists.
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Free markets where they re not fair should be made fair.
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SPEAKER_01
Never decide that the answer is the thing that has never produced any human flourishing, i.e.
6
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Marxism.
6
SPEAKER_00
So as you describe in The Madness of Crowds, the herd-like behavior of humans that gets us into trouble, you as an individual thinker and others listening to this, how can you, because all of us are amidst crowds, we re influenced by the society that s around us, by the people that s around us, how can we think independently?
6
SPEAKER_00
How can we, if you re in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 20th century, if you re in, I don t know, Nazi Germany at the end of the 30s and 40s, how can you think independently?
6
SPEAKER_00
given, first of all, that it s hard to think independently, just intellectually speaking, but also that there s, it just becomes more and more dangerous, so the incentive to think independently,
6
SPEAKER_00
under the uncertainty that s usually involved with thinking is, I mean, it s a silly thing to say, but on Twitter, there is a cost to be paid for going against the crowd on any silly thing.
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SPEAKER_00
We can even talk about, what is it?
6
SPEAKER_00
Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.
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There s a crowd that believes that that was unjustified.
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SPEAKER_00
I forget what the crowd decided, but I don t- Crowd split on that one.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s safe to have one opinion either way.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay, it is, right.
6
SPEAKER_00
But there is this, you put it very nicely, that there s clearly a calculus here and that you can measure on Twitter in particular, you can measure kind of the crowd, a sense of where the crowd lays.
6
SPEAKER_00
Michael Jackson.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, oh boy.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t want to, this is not a legal discussion.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t have my lawyer present.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t even have a lawyer.
6
SPEAKER_01
The man in question is dead.
6
SPEAKER_01
But I think most people who are not just diehard fans would concede that Michael Jackson had a strange relationship with children and was almost certainly a pedophile.
6
SPEAKER_00
Did the crowd agree on that?
6
SPEAKER_01
No, the crowd hasn t agreed because he s too famous and we all love Thriller.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we do.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you said people who are not fans, I just don t know.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m a fan of Michael Jackson, but I think he was almost certainly a pedophile.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I bet I bet nobody wants to give up dancing to bad at weddings.
6
SPEAKER_01
So they just kind of added in.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s fine.
6
SPEAKER_01
Seriously, it s your law to apply to Bill Cosby.
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh, well, he wasn t he.
6
SPEAKER_01
He was, of course, one of the most famous people in America.
6
SPEAKER_01
But maybe he wasn t regarded as talented.
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh wow, there s depth to this calculation.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s a genius opt-out in all cultures.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s a genius opt-out in all cultures.
6
SPEAKER_01
Look at Lord Byron.
6
SPEAKER_01
Lord Byron shagged his sister.
6
SPEAKER_01
Doesn t affect his reputation.
6
SPEAKER_00
In fact, if anything, it kind of adds to it.
6
SPEAKER_00
But then again, this kind of war against the West, genius actually makes you more likely, or no, to get canceled.
6
SPEAKER_00
So if you look at the genius of Thomas Jefferson,
6
SPEAKER_00
Or?
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, yes, because if you haven t done anything remarkable, nobody will come looking for you, possibly.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
6
SPEAKER_00
A genius can get you in trouble eventually.
6
SPEAKER_01
Sidle through life with nobody noticing, be totally harmless, and then die and hope you haven t used any carbon.
6
SPEAKER_01
But you were asking about how to survive the era of social media, as it were, and the crowds.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there s a very simple answer to that.
6
SPEAKER_01
don t overrate the significance of the unreal world.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh, come on, but this is still human psychology, because you want to fit in.
6
SPEAKER_00
Why?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because you like people.
6
SPEAKER_01
Why not just like a small number of people and ignore the rest?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s what I do.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, I actually like most people and this isn t a general thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t have detestation for most people at all.
6
SPEAKER_01
Most people I enjoy speaking with and being with.
6
SPEAKER_01
But in terms of storing your sense of self-worth in absolute strangers, big mistake.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, me, that s, listen, let s turn it into a therapy session, because for me, and I think I represent some number of populations, I m pretty self-critical, I m looking for myself in the world, and there is a depth of connection with people on the internet.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I have some.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think there s a shallowness of it.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s shallow connection, interesting.
6
SPEAKER_01
Put it this way, if you became very ill tomorrow,
6
SPEAKER_01
Would any of them help?
6
SPEAKER_00
On the internet?
6
SPEAKER_00
No.
6
SPEAKER_01
No?
6
SPEAKER_01
No.
6
SPEAKER_01
Good, that s a good test.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s a good test.
6
SPEAKER_00
But then at the end of the day, yeah, you re right, your very close friends would help, family would help, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
And perhaps that s the only thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
You can t store significant amounts of trust or faith or belief or self-worth in places which will not return it to you.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so let s talk about the more extreme case, the harsher case.
6
SPEAKER_00
When you talk about the things you talk about in the war on the West and madness of crowds, I mean, you re getting a lot of blowback, I m sure.
6
SPEAKER_00
for the listener, you just shrugged lightly with a zen-like look on your face.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you don t, all you need is Sam Harris to say that you re brilliant and you re happy.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, I m very, I love Sam.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m deeply pleased when he flatters me, but I mean, and he s nice about me, but no, I don t just rely on Sam.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, I mean,
6
SPEAKER_01
Why would I mind?
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, maybe it s self-selecting.
6
SPEAKER_01
If I didn t have the view I had about that or whatever armory it is that I have on that, I wouldn t do what I did, maybe.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, have you been to some dark places psychologically because of the challenging ideas you explore?
6
SPEAKER_00
Like significant self-doubt, just kind of?
6
SPEAKER_01
I can t say I ve been unaffected by everything in my life.
6
SPEAKER_01
By any means, that would make me an automaton of some kind.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s definitely times I ve got things wrong and regretted that.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s times I ve, there was a period around the time I wrote my book, The Strange Death of Europe, which was a very, very dark time.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it wasn t because I was having a dark time in my life, but because of the book I was writing.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh, because of the places you had to go in order to write the book.
7
SPEAKER_00
And, well, I was contemplating the end of a civilization, so.
7
SPEAKER_00
Occasionally, now, I have maybe slightly too pat at this stage, but sometimes readers come up to me in the street or whatever and say, you know, I love The Strange Death of Europe, and will say, you know, it s a very depressing book to read, however.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I would say, well, you should have tried writing it.
7
SPEAKER_00
But it was because it has chunks of it which I m very proud of in particular about the death of religion, the death of God, the loss of meaning and the void.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s difficult stuff to write about and to grapple with.
7
SPEAKER_00
And there is a sort of, I haven t reread that book since it came out, but I think there are passages in it which reveal what I was thinking very clearly in the poetry of it as it were, as well as the detail.
7
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, I can t say, I m used to saying what I think and what I see.
7
SPEAKER_00
And if there s any pushback I ve got from that, I m completely consoled that I m saying what I see with my own eyes.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s your source of strength, is that you re always seeking the truth as best you see it.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, I can t agree to go along with a lie if I ve seen something with my own eyes.
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you ever, so speaking of Sam Harris, and I mentioned to you offline, a lot of people, I talk to a lot of smart people in my private life on this podcast, and a lot of them will reference you as their example of a very smart person.
7
SPEAKER_01
So given that compliment, do you ever worry that your sort of ego grows to a level where you re not, what you think is the truth is no longer the truth?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is this kind of,
7
SPEAKER_01
it blinds you, and also, on top of that, the fact that you stand against the crowd often, that there s part of it that appeals to you, that you like to point out the emperor has no clothes.
7
SPEAKER_00
I get a certain thrill from the friction.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
that sometimes both your ego and the thrill of friction will get you to deviate from the truth and instead just look for the friction?
7
SPEAKER_00
Could do, could do for sure.
7
SPEAKER_00
I try to keep alive to that.
7
SPEAKER_00
Earlier in my career I realized that, for instance, I didn t want to make enemies unnecessarily.
7
SPEAKER_00
any more than strictly necessary, because there was a very large number of already necessary enemies.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I remember once, I won t go into the details, but I already had one sort of thing I d done that week, and then another thing came out, and I just thought, I can t, I can t do that.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I remember thinking, don t be the sort of person who s forever creating storms.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I tried to make sure I wasn t.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think I pretty much stuck to that.
7
SPEAKER_00
But to answer your question,
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, the first thing is I m as confident as I can be that I wouldn t fall into the trap you described for two reasons.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, one is that I don t think of myself as a wildly intelligent person, partly because I m very, very aware of things I know nothing about.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, for instance, I have almost no knowledge of the details of finance or economic theory.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the real details, I don t mean the big picture of the kind that we were just discussing earlier, but if you put the periodic table in front of me, I would struggle
7
SPEAKER_00
to do more than a handful.
7
SPEAKER_00
I am very conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge.
7
SPEAKER_00
And where I have gaps or chasms, I tend to find I have a disproportionate admiration for the people who know that stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
I am wildly impressed by people who understand money, really understand it.
7
SPEAKER_00
They think, how the hell do you do that?
7
SPEAKER_00
and the same thing with biologists, medics, stuff I just know very little about.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s a source of humility for you, just knowing that.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I mean, I think, well, I m okay on that stuff, but I mean, Jesus, if you got me on the general knowledge.
7
SPEAKER_00
I was saying that thing, some years ago, there s a thing in the UK called University Challenge, I don t know.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I was asked some years ago on to, there s a sort of psych celebrity, one of former students of the universities or colleges, asked to go back for the Christmas special.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I was asked to be one of the people from my old college to go back and compete in the sort of celebrity alumni one.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the only reason I actually wanted to do it was because I discovered that Louis Theroux had been to my college before my time and he d agreed to be on the team.
7
SPEAKER_00
I thought I d love to meet Louis Theroux.
7
SPEAKER_00
That d be great fun.
7
SPEAKER_00
And anyhow, and I said, well, I really don t want to do it.
7
SPEAKER_00
And they said, come on, you d be great.
7
SPEAKER_00
I said, I wouldn t.
7
SPEAKER_00
I d show myself up.
7
SPEAKER_00
I d be a total asshole and ignoramus.
7
SPEAKER_00
And as it was, I sat down in my flat, and I watched some past episodes of University Challenge.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I realized I d have just sat in mute for the whole half hour.
7
SPEAKER_00
I just couldn t, the first question was about physics and the second one was about, as it was, I watched the
7
SPEAKER_00
the one and I could answer the first two or three questions of the one that actually went out because they made it a bit simpler.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I mean, I m terribly conscious of the, and I said to the producers, I said, I can t go on because I mean, I just couldn t answer the questions.
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These unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer on a whole range of things.
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So I m perfectly aware of my limitations.
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And- You contemplate your limitations.
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Yeah, and they re forever before me, you know.
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They re not hard to find in every day.
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And then on top of that, I suppose it s, in a way, you know that line from Rudyard Kipling s alternately brilliant and slightly nauseating poem, If?
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There s a line.
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You just enjoy a good poem, can you?
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I can enjoy a great poem, but I mean, a good poem.
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This is slightly off.
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This goes to your criticism of Dostoevsky.
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Take Douglas  criticism with a grain of salt.
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Maybe I ve read it too many memorial services and things, but that line,
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It s a good piece of advice if you can learn to meet triumph and disaster and meet these, greet these two imposters just the same.
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That s a good line.
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It s a good line, as Kipping often, an amazing turn of line.
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But I do think that it s a very sensible thing to try to greet triumph and disaster and regard them as imposters and greet them just the same.
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And actually anyone who knows me knows that I never,
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And partly it s because I have a sort of belief in the old gods, and at the moment that I thought that I was at the moment of triumph, the fates would hitch up their skirts and run at me at a million miles an hour.
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But it s also because, anyone who knows me knows, I never have a moment when I say,
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That s just great.
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I feel totally fulfilled and victorious.
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I mean, it happened to me recently when the War on the West went straight to number one in the bestseller list.
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How long did that last in terms of your self-satisfaction?
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Didn t happen.
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Not even for a brief moment?
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No.
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When I first saw that it was selling, I had that moment of elation.
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I thought, good, I ve done it, it s out.
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And I did have a moment of elation then, definitely.
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But it doesn t last, partly because I tell myself it mustn t last.
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because as you said, fate hitches up its skirt.
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Is that skirts?
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You Brits with your poetry, even when it s nauseating.
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As of 2022, this year, what s your final analysis of the political leadership and the human mind and the human being of Donald Trump?
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I sort of avoided this for years.
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Just talking about Trump.
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I tried to avoid talking about Trump for years.
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Same reason I tried to avoid writing about Brexit.
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Do you think that Trump, just sorry on a small tangent, do you think that Trump s story is over or are we just done with volume one?
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I have no idea.
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The people I know who know him say that he s running.
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And I think that in general, Republicans have to, do have a choice in front of them.
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One friend put it to me recently said, you ve got to go in with your toughest fighter.
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And I understand that instinct.
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And I also think it s a very dangerous instinct, because what is your toughest fighter is also your biggest liability.
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What s the best way to get out the Democrat vote in 2024 than to have Donald Trump running?
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And the people that are doing the war in the West, they re pretty tough fighters.
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They are.
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And I m cautious about this because I know every way I tread is dangerous, but let me just...
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Just be frank.
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Tread gracefully.
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I ll tread as gracefully as I can in my Wellington boots.
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In my galoshes.
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Here s the thing.
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I think everybody knows what Trump is.
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I think we all knew for years.
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And I feel sorry for the conservatives who had to pretend that he was something he wasn t.
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I felt sorry for the ones who had to
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pretend that for instance he was some devout Christian or a man of faith or a man of great integrity or all of these sorts of things because in the public eye for years it d been obvious that wasn t the case.
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But he has something extraordinary.
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One thing is a method of communication that you ve just got to say was unbelievable.
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In one fundamental way that you can t look away for some reason.
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Can t look away.
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I mean, watching him clear everyone out of the way in 2016 was thrilling, because those people needed clearing away.
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I mean, it s just horrifying.
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What, America s going to give us another Bush?
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What s so great about this family?
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America s going to give us another Clinton.
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We re going to get to choose between a Clinton and a Bush?
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Mark Stein said, we ll just wait for the day the Clintons and the Bushes intermarry and then we can really have a monarchy again.
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So I was very pleased to see him clear them away.
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I was very pleased to see him sort of raise some of the issues that needed raising.
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I thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air and I wished it wasn t him doing it.
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And then there was a question of him governing and it was just perfectly clear he didn t know how to govern.
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What he did have, however, what he does have is an incredible ability to fight.
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And some of the forces he was arraigned against were arraigned against him.
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My gosh, they would have taken down anyone else.
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If they d have probably done some similar BS against Ted Cruz if he, you know, or Marco Rubio, you know, they just said some people admitted they d have accused all these people of racism and misogyny and everything else as well, just like they did Mitt Romney, just like they did John McCain.
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But Trump was the one ugly enough and bruisey enough to fight.
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and also a willingness or a lack of willingness to play sort of the civil game of politics.
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You know, at a party when like politeness gets you in trouble.
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You show up and everybody s polite and you just out of momentum wanna be being polite and all of a sudden you re on an island with Jeffrey Epstein and it gets you into a huge amount of trouble.
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But, so Trump has these sort of extraordinary qualities, but I just, you know, look, he screwed up during his time in office because he didn t achieve as much as he should have done.
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You could say that about every president, but I refuse to acknowledge that two years when he had both houses in the beginning, he just didn t know what levers to pull.
7
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You know, I mean, he was sitting in the office behind the Oval Office tweeting, watching the news.
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Sorry, that s not a president.
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And he couldn t fill and didn t fill positions because people knew, I mean, people who were very loyal to him, he would just, you know, he d get them to do something loyal and then destroy them.
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And I think, and then we get onto the thing about, and here we get onto the, what of course is very, very fractious terrain, but I covered the 2020 election and I was traveling all around the states and I went to Trump rally and all sorts of stuff.
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And I was in DC on election night.
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And it got very ugly at one point in so-called Black Lives Matter Plaza.
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when it looked like Trump might win, when Florida came in, it got really, I could feel the air, it got very, very heated and some Antifa people started getting into Black Lock and this sort of stuff and I thought, this town is going to burn, you know, if Trump wins.
7
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And in the aftermath of the vote, I was willing to hang around in Washington for a bit and then I saw what it was going to drag on and I saw some of his people and others and people told me they had great evidence of vote rigging and all this sort of thing.
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And I m afraid I m one of those people who doesn t believe that the evidence that they presented is good enough to justify the claim that he won the election.
7
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And people say, have you seen 2,000 mules?
7
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And have you seen anything?
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Look, the evidence isn t there that the election was won by Donald Trump.
7
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And I think that what he did on January the 6th was unbelievably dangerous.
7
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And, you know, here it is possible for us to hold two ideas in our head at the same time.
7
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January 6th was not nothing, nor was it an insurrection, an attempt to stage a coup.
7
SPEAKER_00
And there s a vanishing number of people in the US, or as Eric Weinstein said, it s like, this is the roof that you have to walk along.
7
SPEAKER_00
And like, the sides are very steep if you fall off either side.
7
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Is there some sense, given the forces that are waging war in the West, you said this feeling, perhaps because of Antifa or something else, that this town is gonna burn, and maybe a continued feeling that this town is going to burn with the January 6th events.
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are you worried about the future of the United States in the coming years?
7
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Because there s a feeling of escalation.
7
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Is that just a war of Twitter?
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Or is there a real brewing of something?
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And how, well, let me then respond to that.
7
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What is the hopeful?
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If you,
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If you, 10 years from now, look back at the United States and say, we turned it around, what would be the reason?
7
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What would be the ways, the mechanisms that we do so?
7
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Since I wrote this book, there are two things in particular that I ve been really pleased that a specific type of specialist has approached me on to say that,
7
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things I ve written about actually have more application than I realized.
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One is the gratitude issue.
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A number of people have approached me who have gone through AA, Alcoholics Anonymous,
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They sometimes say, have you ever been to AA?
7
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And that s a bit personal question.
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But they say, but the reason they ask it is because they say, well, because if you go to drug rehabilitation or alcohol anonymous, Norm McDonald said, it doesn t sound very anonymous.
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You stand up in a room, you say your name and you tell everyone the worst things you ve ever done.
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That s the opposite of anonymous.
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Anyhow, but they say, look, because if you go to these,
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things, apparently you re asked to, as part of your recovery, say what you re grateful for, like list what you re grateful for.
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I didn t know that, by the way, until the book was out, and so it turned out to have more application than I knew.
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The other thing, though, is that I say that it s absolutely crucial in America that we try to find things that we agree on.
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And a couple of times since the book came out, I ve been approached by people who are marriage counselors,
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But you ve also said you ve been through marriage counseling.
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Again, that s a very personal question.
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Stop asking me personal questions.
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No, but, and I say, well, why?
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Because this is one of the things that we do in couples therapy, is try to find things you agree on.
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And I think this is very important in America.
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And it s made much harder by the fact, and I ve said this many times,
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Forgive me if I m repeating myself, but it s made much harder by the fact that having different opinions is very last century.
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Now we all have different facts, or at least the two sides have different facts.
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One half of the country, roughly, or let s say 40%, 30%, whatever you want to put it, with a tired minority in the middle, one segment of the country believes that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and that the Russians interfered and got Donald Trump into power.
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Another half of the country believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
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If you can t agree on who wins elections, it s very hard to see what you agree on as a country.
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That s one of the reasons I mind the war on American history and Western history, is one of the things you have to agree on is at least some attitude towards your past.
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You don t have to agree on everything.
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But like, the public square has to have public heroes who are agreed to be heroes to some extent.
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Warts and all.
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If you don t have that, if actually you think for instance like half the country thinks the founding fathers were pretty good, the other half thinks they were absolutely rotten racists and so on.
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If half the country basically thinks it would have been better if Columbus had taken a different turn, never found America, gone back home and said nothing out there, that would have been better.
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And the other half is pretty glad in the end that we ve got America.
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You know, you ve got to agree on something.
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And I just see in America... So I do think we ve got to try to find things to agree on, like a reasonable attitude towards the past.
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That s why that matters.
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And again, I stress, I m not trying to say that everything in the American past was good.
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God knows that wouldn t stand up for a second of scrutiny or self-scrutiny.
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But nor was it all bad.
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This wasn t a country formed in sin.
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and in an eradicable sin.
8
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It wasn t founded in 1619 in order to make the country wicked and incapable of escaping that wickedness.
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You know, these are things that will matter enormously in the years ahead because if you can t agree on anything, including who your heroes are,
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Like the whole thing is just one massive division, and we ll see what I think we re already seeing, which is people basically going to states where it s more like the life they want to live.
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And some people say to me, well, that s okay, and the genius of the founding is that it allows for that.
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That s possible, but it s also, it eradicates part of what has been American public life, which is the ability to look at each other and discuss face-to-face.
8
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And I see things like this bomb placed on America the other week with the Supreme Court leak, the draft leak, as being just a further example of that.
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I m very, very worried about it in America.
8
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And because if America screws up, everything, everything else in the world goes.
8
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Yeah, there is the degree to which America is still the beacon of these ideas on which the country was founded and has been able to live out in better and better forms, sort of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles versus like- And with the desire to improve.
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Yeah, constantly.
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An imperfect union.
8
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Yeah, well as I generally have hope that people want to sort of, in terms of gratitude, people are aware of how good it feels to be grateful.
8
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It s a better life psychologically.
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The resentment is a thing that destroys you from within.
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So I just,
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feel that people will long for that and will find that.
8
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That s the American way.
8
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Some of the division that we reveal now has to do with new technologies like social media, that kind of,
8
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is a small kind of deviation from the path we re on because it s a new, we got a new toy, just like nuclear weapons.
8
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Which is relatively new.
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But we need to find reasonable attitudes towards these things.
8
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That s why I say it matters how you imbibe feedback on social media because we re all going through it to some extent.
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And we re learning, and we ve gotta learn how to do this.
8
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without going mad, you know.
8
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I say this as my minimalist call to friends in this era was the main job is not to go insane.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And yeah, like walk towards sanity.
8
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Because, you know, I m sure there s a Hunter S. Thompson quote in there.
8
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Insanity on the weekends can be at least fun.
8
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Okay, do you have advice for young people?
8
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that just put down their TikTok and are listening to this podcast in high school and college about how to have a career, how to have a life they can be part of.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a very broad question, but of course, I mean, I can give specific advice for people who want to be writers and so on, but that s a bit niche maybe.
8
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The writers will be very interesting, sorry to interrupt.
8
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Also, how to put your ideas down on paper and think that the ideas, develop them, and have the guts to go to a large audience, especially when the ideas are sort of controversial or dangerous or difficult.
8
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Well, the main thing to do is to read.
8
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When I was a schoolboy, I d ever have a book in my pocket, a side pocket on my jacket or a side pocket, and would read.
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And that wasn t,
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just because I was swattish in some way, but because I discovered, probably at some point in my early teens, I discovered something.
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I wrote about this once.
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I discovered that books were dangerous, which was a thrilling discovery.
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I discovered that they could contain anything.
8
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And also, people didn t know what you were reading.
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I remember, I got far too young an age, I read The Doors of Perception of Aldous Huxley.
8
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Um, and, um, I didn t make head or tail of it probably, but I knew that it was about something really interesting and dangerous.
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And I thought constantly when I read poetry or read history, I think I was just constantly, um, thrilled and wanted to know more and.
8
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And if you want to become a writer, you have to be a reader.
8
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You have to read the best stuff.
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And obviously, people disagree or agree on what that is.
8
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And you ll find the people that really impress you.
8
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But I know that I just came across certain writers who just knocked me off my feet.
8
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And when you find those people, read everything.
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and cling on to them and find other people like that, find other writers like that, people who are connected by history or scholarship or circles or whatever.
8
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For you, was it fiction or nonfiction?
8
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Is there particular books that you just remember or just give you pause?
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, I remember that the first book that absolutely threw me was The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, which used to be a signed text and everyone s a bit snotty about because it s so popular.
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But I was thrown because I think it was the first adult book I read.
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in that I had been used to the world of children s literature, of everything ends up fine in the end, the lost all get found.
8
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And this was the first book I read where that s not the case, where the world turns out differently.
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And I remember for days afterwards, I was just in a state of shock.
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I couldn t believe what I d just discovered, and partly because I sort of intuited it must be true.
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And of course, that is not to say that the Lord of the Flies has lots of scholarship on what children do in the situation of being on the island and when they do congregate and anyhow.
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But yes, that was a sort of introduction to the adult world and it was shocking and thrilling and I wanted more of it.
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It was dangerous.
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And it was dangerous.
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And then, of course, when I became interested in sex, let alone when I realized I was gay, I realized books were a very, very good way to learn about what I was.
8
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And that was even more dangerous, in a way.
8
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And I thought, blimey, nobody knows what I know.
8
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You discovered sex?
8
SPEAKER_00
That was an invention in books?
8
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What do you mean, nobody knows what I know?
8
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No, what I mean is that one of the things that gay people have when they re growing up is that
8
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You have this terribly big secret and you don t think the world will ever know, you hope the world will never know.
8
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And it s been called by one psychologist, the little boy with a big secret.
8
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And so if you discover that other people have the same secret, there s a sort of, thank God for that.
8
SPEAKER_01
Um, but I mean, that s just a version of what everybody gets in reading in a way, which is the thrill of discovery that, um, somebody else thought something you thought only you d thought.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, one of the grass, one of the greatest thrills in all of literature is when a voice comes from across the centuries and seems to leave a handprint, you know.
8
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It makes you feel a little bit less alone, because somebody else feels, sees the world the same way, is the same way.
8
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That s what C.S.
8
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Lewis said, said to have said, we read to know we re not alone.
8
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But we don t only read to know we re not alone, we read to become other people.
8
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I mean, I think I saw in books a version of the life I wanted to live, and then I decided to live it, and I m fortunate enough to have done so.
8
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I wanted to live in the world of ideas and books and debate.
8
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I wanted to live in the debates of my time.
8
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And I remember when, like a lot of people, I read Auden when I was young.
8
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And certain lines obviously stuck with me.
8
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But that poem of his, which everybody knows and which he hated, September the 1st, 1939, I remember certain lines in that just whacked me.
8
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sitting on a dive, degraded and alone at the end of a low dishonest decade.
8
SPEAKER_01
Of course, there s a problem with that line, which is you kind of want to be living at the end of a low dishonest decade as well.
8
SPEAKER_01
It sounds sort of cool in a way.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, you re the only person who sees it.
8
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But so yeah, anyhow, there s a diversion.
8
SPEAKER_01
But the point is, if you want to be a writer, you ve got to be a reader.
8
SPEAKER_01
Apart from anything else, you discover the lilt of language and the things you can do.
8
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And I ve read people who, and I still do, who I think, my God, how did you do that?
8
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In fact, books for me now and articles and other things fall into two categories.
8
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One is I know how you did that.
8
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And the other is I don t know how you did that.
8
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And the best feeling as a writer is when you do the second one.
8
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and it happens occasionally in my writing life.
8
SPEAKER_00
We almost like return to something you ve written, or like right after you write it.
8
SPEAKER_01
No, the moment you write it.
8
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You wonder, how did I do that?
8
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Yes, that s the most, I ve never said that before, that s the happiest thing in writing.
8
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Very occasionally this sounds, but I mean, I ve occasionally finished something,
8
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Funny enough, it happened some years ago in a long piece I wrote about the artist Basquiat.
8
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I finished the piece and I gasped.
8
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I didn t know, because that s also a thing with writing.
8
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Sometimes people say you need to write in order to know what you think.
8
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That s not quite true.
8
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Sometimes that s a very bad piece of advice for some writers who don t know what they think and it s not going to become clearer if they just start typing.
8
SPEAKER_01
But sometimes it is true that you
8
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there s a thought that s just waiting there, and a clarity that comes across, and suddenly the sentence emerges in your brain, and by the time you ve typed it, you just go, yes.
8
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That s the greatest feeling.
8
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Almost like it came from somewhere else.
8
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That s what Bakunin says about, you know, what s the moment.
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It s Tom Stoppard s favorite quote about, you know, Bakunin saying what happens in the moment where the writer s pen, when he pauses, where does he go in that moment?
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Yeah, that s so interesting.
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That s so, because I think the answer to that question will help us explain consciousness and all those other weird things about the human mind.
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So that was advice for writers.
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I didn t really give any advice for people in general.
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Is that, you want to give health advice to Churchill?
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No, I don t want to give health advice.
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clearly, because you implied that Churchill was one of your early guides in that aspect.
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So when you discovered your sexuality, let me ask about love.
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Far too personal of a question to ask a Brit, but what was that like, and broadly speaking, what s the role of love in the human condition?
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Sex and love.
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And for you personally, discovering that you were, and maybe telling the world that you were gay.
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I m on very perilously personal, I do actually have a sort of rule that I don t talk about my personal life.
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Rules are meant to be broken.
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Okay, I ll break it a little bit.
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One of the ways in which growing up and realizing you re gay differs from growing up and being straight is that it s almost inevitable that your first passions will be unrequited.
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Oh wow, I never thought about that, yeah.
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Now, that s not to say, I mean, there s plenty of unrequited love among young men for young women, young women for young men.
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There s plenty of that.
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But it s almost inevitable if you re gay that your first passions will be totally unrequited.
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Because the odds are that the person in question will not be gay.
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So the experience of love is mostly heartbreak.
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It s heartbreak.
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and disappointment.
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The heartbreak can be beautiful too, formative.
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Well, again, it comes back to the thing of if you re a writer or something, because you can always do something with it.
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That s why all writers are sort of not to be trusted.
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I didn t trust you the moment you walked in here.
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No, I mean, it s a famous problem with writers because you always think, well, I could use that.
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It s dangerous.
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It s a dangerous thing and all writers should be aware of it.
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It s almost like a drug, right?
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No, it s not like a drug.
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It s the fear that all things, even the greatest suffering, could be material.
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What s the danger in that, exactly?
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That seeing the material in the human experience, you don t experience it fully?
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You don t experience it fully, and you might be using it.
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I had a friend who wrote a poem about a friend who died in a motorcycle accident in Sydney in the 60s, and he said he knew at the moment he was told about his friend s death, a tiny bit of him thought, I could use this for a poem.
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And he did, and the poem was wonderful, but there s always that slight guilt for writers of, am I going to use that?
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Anyhow, that s the divergence.
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Life is full of guilty pleasures, and I think that s one of them, because if you feel that guilt, really what you re doing is you re capturing that moment, and you re going to impact the lives of many, many people by writing about that moment, because it s going to stimulate something that resonates with those people, because they had similar kinds of memories about a loss and a passion towards somebody that they had to lose.
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Yes, but there s a good sign perhaps.
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More obvious.
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perhaps problem is reporting from war zones or bad places and wanting to find bad stories because it s useful and there is a definite guilt you get from that sort of thing like the worse the situation the more useful and anyhow no so that s that s sort of the only difference that happens from growing up being gay and it means that most certainly in my generation most gay men came to sexual or romantic maturity later
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And there s lots of explanations of that maybe being one of the reasons for perceived or otherwise promiscuity among gay men, which is I think more easily persuaded by the fact that gay men behave like men would if women were men.
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That s one explanation, but it s both a feature and a bug that you come to sexual flourishing later in life.
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That could be seen as a, in the trajectory of human life, that could be a positive or a negative.
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But what s, broadly speaking, is the role of love in the human condition, Douglas?
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Well, it s the nearest thing we have to finding the point.
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What is the point?
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What s the meaning of life?
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Let s go there.
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So what s the meaning is a hard one, of course.
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Where is the meaning is slightly easier.
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And I d say that everyone can find that.
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You gravitate towards the places you find meaning.
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Now there s a conservative answer to this, which is quite useful, and it s certainly more useful than any others, because the conservative answer is find meaning where people have found it before, which is a very, very good answer.
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If your ancestors have found meaning in a place of worship or a particular canon of work, go there because it s been proven by time to be able to give you the goods.
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Much more sensible than saying, hey, I don t know, discover new ways of meaning.
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But love is,
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Love is probably the nearest thing we can have.
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to the divine on Earth.
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And of course, the problem of what exactly, what type of love we mean is an issue.
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Well, that goes to the fact that you don t like definitions anyway.
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I do like definitions, I just think they need to be pinned down.
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But let s not go there at the moment because it s... That s not pinned down love at the moment?
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No, because as you know, I mean because of the different varieties of love and the fact that we have one word for it in our culture and that it means an awful lot of things and we don t delineate it well.
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But let s say human love.
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with the greatest fulfillment in sexual love with another person is probably the greatest intimation you can have of what might otherwise only be superseded by divine love.
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um and it s the um the sense that all young lovers have which is that they ve just walked through the low door in the garden and found themselves in bliss and that this is there s a beautiful beautiful poem of
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Can I read it to you?
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Yes, please.
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I ll try to find it.
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There s a beautiful poem of Philip Larkin s, which slightly says what I m, I m trying not to duck your question by referring to other people, but.
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Maybe that s the best way to answer the question.
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Could be.
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Is to read a poem.
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So there s a poem by Philip Larkin called High Windows, which is remarkable because he came to sexual, he had a rather unhappy sex life, but he came to sexual fruition in the 40s and 50s and all the hell of that involved.
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He took what I regard as being a really remarkable and important view on the sexual revolution of the 60s, which is that most people of his generation, most older people, resented the young.
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They resented the freedom they had, and actually, they pretended the freedom was terrible, and it was always kind of like, and Philip Larkin, rather surprisingly, he was a very conservative person, took a different view, and he says it in his poem, and the opening of the poem is, he says,
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When I see a couple of kids, and guess who s fucking her, and she s taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise, everyone old has dreamed of all their lives, bonds and gestures pushed to one side like an outdated combine harvester, and everyone young going down the long slide to happiness endlessly.
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I wonder if anyone looked at me forty years back and thought, that ll be the life, no God anymore, or sweating in the dark about hell and that, or having to hide what you think of the priest.
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He and his lot will all go down the long slide like free bloody birds.
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And immediately, rather than words, comes the thought of high windows, the sun comprehending glass, and beyond it the deep blue air, that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
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The Divine.
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He found it.
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He found it in seeing a couple of young kids, and knowing that one of them was wearing a diaphragm.
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Do you see what I mean?
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First of all it s very counterintuitive but secondly this is the point that sex has been so tied up with misery.
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I mean people don t remember this now when they talk about
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The past, I mean, one of my favorite books, Stefan Zweig s The World of Yesterday, descriptions of what it was like trying to have sex in pre-First World War Vienna.
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All the men ended up going to female prostitutes.
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So many of them got syphilis, and this was their first experience of sex.
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It was so goddamn awful, and they were stuck with it all their lives.
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There s lots of stuff that s gone better in our last century, and that s one of them.
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But you ask about love, yes, I do think that love is basically the thing that gives us the best glimpse of the divine.
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And by the way, sex, liberating sex, doesn t buy you love.
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No.
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I mean, it throws in an entirely, it threw in another set of problems.
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If there s any meaning on top of all of that is we like to find problems and solve that as a human species.
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And sometimes we even create problems.
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Douglas, thank you for highlighting all the problems of human civilization and giving us a glimmer of hope for the future.
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This is an incredible conversation.
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Thank you for talking today.
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It s a huge honor, thank you.
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It was very kind of you to say that, thank you.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Douglas Murray himself.
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Disagreement is not oppression.
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Argument is not assault.
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Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence.
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The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.
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Thank you for listening.
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I hope to see you next time.