Douglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West | Lex Fridman Podcast #296
i think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past 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 oh we've also got this idea from the 20th century still about marxism and no no you will not have the entire landscape deracinated and then the worst ideas tried again 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 on the west how to prevail in the age of unreason 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 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 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 nevertheless these two episodes stand opposite of each other with very different perspectives on how we build a flourishing civilization together i leave it to you the listener to think and to decide which is the better way this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's douglas murray 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 so let's start with the basics historically and today what are the ideas that represent western civilization the good the bad the ugly i actually don't get stuck on um definitions precisely because as you know once you get stuck on definitions there's a possibility you'll never get off yes um i'd say a few things firstly obviously the western tradition is a specific tradition this 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 and indeed rome uh effectively creates west it creates european civilization which itself spawns the rest of the western civilizations america canada australia new zealand and others but these are the main countries that we still refer to as the west um so there's a specific tradition and all the things that come from it uh my shorthand cheat on this answer is to say um you know when you're not in it so if you've ever been to beijing shanghai you know you're not in the west somewhere else you know you're not in the west when you're in tokyo somewhere extraordinary but you know you're not in the west uh obviously there are um let's say borderline questions like it's russia in the west um which i sort of leave open as a question um possibly 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 would you guess you were in the west uh or not i think i was somewhere near it think getting closer i mean you know it's it's this is what tulsa asks the question doesn't it whether it's european and i think the answer to that is not really although massively influenced by europe but um and times wanting to reach towards it at times wanting to stay away but um but a part of the west possibly yes um but anyway it's a very specific tradition it's it's it's one of the number of major traditions in the world and um because it's hard to define doesn't mean it doesn't exist you know are there certain characteristics and qualities about the values and the ideas that define it is is the type of rule the type of governmental structure yes i mean the rule of law uh property owning democracies um and much more i mean these are of course things that were ended up being developed in america and uh then given back to much of the rest of the west um i'd say there are other um perhaps more controversial attributes i would give to the west one is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world which is not shared of course by every other culture um the late uh philosopher george steiner who said he could never get out of his head the haunting fact that the boats only seemed to go out from europe you know they didn't the explorers the the the the scholars the linguist that the people who wanted to discover other civilizations and indeed even resurrect ancient civilizations and lost civilizations these were scholars that were always coming from the west to discover this elsewhere by contrast you know there were never boats coming from egypt to help the anglo-saxons discover the origins of their language and so on 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 up on the consequences of that interest um because of course it's not entirely lacking in self-interest so it's not just the scholars it's also the armies the armies and they're looking to gain access and control over resources elsewhere markets and enhance the imperial imperative exactly to conquer to expand although that itself of course is a universal thing i mean no uh no um the civilization i think that we know of doesn't try to gain ground from its neighbors where can it withstand ability to go further faster um certainly gave an advantage in that regard do some civilizations get a bit more excited by that kind of idea than others possible it's possible because it you could say it's the western civilization because the technological innovation was more um efficient yeah doing that kind of thing absolutely but maybe he wanted it more too well the ottomans wanted it an awful lot and did very terribly well for many centuries and shouldn't forget that um as did others um i'd also say by the way and again it's a it's a very broad one but it's worth throwing out i think self-criticism um is an important attribute of the western mind uh one that as you know is not common everywhere not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics to become rich so you know criticism is a negative sounding word it could be self-introspection self-analysis self-reflection and it can be what you need you know and in the western system i'd argue that one of the advantages of the system of representative governance is that where there are problems in the system you can um attempt to sort them out by peaceable means um we listened to arguments i mean most famously in america in the late 20th century the civil rights movement achieved its aims by force of moral argument and persuaded the rest of the country that it had been wrong um that's not common in every society by any means so i think there are certain attributes of the western mind that you could say are um they're not entirely unique but they are not as commonplace elsewhere what about the emergence in hierarchies of asymmetry of power most visible most drastic in the form of slavery for example well i mean everyone in the world is slavery so i don't regard it as being a western the unique western sin it's rather hard to think of a civilization in history that didn't have slavery of some kind 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 alas this isn't true it's a sort of russoian mistake or at least one that's blossomed since rousseau that uh everybody else in the world was born into sort of udanic innocence and only we in the west had this sort of evil in us that caused us to do bad things to other people slavery was engaging by everyone in the ancient world of course and and through most of the modern world as well 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 um that's more slaves of course than there were in the 19th century um and i'd say on top of that that you know the interesting thing about the western mind as regards to slavery is that we were the civilization that did away with it and and by the way the the founding fathers of america who today are lambasted routinely for being acquiescent in the slave trade um engaging in it owning slaves um 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 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 so the founding ideas had within them the notion that we should as a people get rid of this the opening lines of the declaration of independence set up the conditions under which slavery will be impossible all men are created equal once you once you've put that that's like that's a time bomb under the under the whole concept of slavery that's ticking away okay and sure enough it detonated in the next century if we just step back and look at our the human species what does slavery teach you about human nature the fact that slavery uh has appeared as a function of society throughout human history there are two possibilities um one is it's what people think they can do when god's not watching another is it's what they can do if they think that god allows it really really well put and um the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation what does that mean well i mean it's pretty straightforward in a way um there are people who get to work for free there's economic in nature in some in some states yes but in order to do it i mean almost always uh there are dif 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 one of the things actually i've tried to sort of inject into the discussion through this book among other things is is a recognition that there was there were very major questions still going on in the 18th and early 19th century the one resolved which were one of the reasons why slavery was not as morally repugnant to people then as it was to us now as it is to us now and that's the question of polygenesis and monogenesis um at the time of thomas jefferson the founding fathers were were thinking and working they didn't know because nobody knew whether the human races were related or not um the there was there were arguments the monogenesis argument that that we were all indeed from the same racial stock apollogenesis argument was that we weren't we were you know black africans ethiopians they were often referred to at the time um because they provided some of the first slaves um were different from white europeans simply not related in any way and that makes it easier of course that makes it easier to enslave people if you think they're not your brother am i my brother's keeper no he's not your brother uh and there's it's it's a it's a very it was a very troubling argument in the in the 18th and 19th century also because there was a biblical question it threw up it threw up a theological question which was i mean people were literally debating this at the time um was there also a black adam and eve was there as it were in india now adam and eve the native american adam and eve i mean this was a serious theological debate because they didn't know the answer and it i mean people say that darwin um solved this it wasn't just darwin of course 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 that so it no longer was after darwin a theological question it became a moral question it was already a moral question but it clarified darwin clarifies it definitely and then you're in the same in a situation of you're not subjugating some other people you're subjugating your own kin and and that becomes morally unsustainable so given that slavery in america is part is part of its history how do we incorporate into the calculus of um policy today social discourse what we learn in school we can look at slavery in america we could look at maybe more recent things like uh in europe the other atrocities the holocaust how do we incorporate that in terms of how we create policy how we treat each other all those kinds of things what is the calculus of integrating the atrocities the injustices of the past into the way we are today that's a very complex question because it's a it's a moral question at this point and a moral question long after the fact um i say at one point in the war in the west that the argument for instance on a reparations now that goes on and it's not a not a fringe argument anymore some people say oh you're pulling up this fringe argument it really isn't i mean every contender for the democratic nomination for the 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 um i say that there's a there's a lot of problems with this but if i refine it down to one thing i'd say this um 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 it would have been it would have been that could have been that 200 years ago 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 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 that's impossible to do i'm completely clear about this there is no way in which you could organize such a wealth transfer uh on moral or practical reasons america is filled with people who are um 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 and then the country is also filled with ethnic minorities who have come after slavery who would not be um due for any reimbursement as it were the problem the problem with this is though is that there are i'm perfectly open to the possibility that there are um residual inequities that exist in american life and that's and that the consequences of slavery could be one of the factors that resulted from this the thing is i don't think it's it's a um i don't think it's a single issue answer i think it's a multi-dimensional issue something like black underachievement in america is obviously a multi-dimensional issue much of the left and others wish to say it's not it's only about racism and they can't answer why 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 yeah but don't get held back by it but actually flourish to the extent that asian americans uh have a higher household earnings and higher house household mean um uh uh equity than home equity and so on than than white americans uh 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 it's obviously a part of it could you say that even those things like fatherlessness and similar family breakdown issues are a long-term consequence of it possibly but it's it's being awfully generous to people's ability to make bad decisions for instance how many generations of the holocaust would you allow people to claim that everything that went wrong in the jewish community was as a result of the holocaust i mean is there some kind of term limit on this i would have thought so and i think most people probably think that's over i think the details matter they're the and um but it's very difficult oh i enjoy swimming out in the ocean so although i'm terrified of what's lurking underneath in the darkness you're right you're right to me um okay it's really complicated calculus with the holocaust of so the argument in america is that there are there's deep institutional racism against african americans that's rooted in slavery and so however that calculus turns out that calculation it still persists in the culture and the institutions in the allocation of resources in the way that we communicate in in this in subtle ways in major ways all that kind of stuff um how is it possible to win or lose that argument of how much institutional racism there is that's rooted in in slavery is it a winnable it's it's an unquantifiable argument um and i'd i'd i'd like to apply some shortcuts to some of this the following are for instance all um let's take the the one that's most often often cited 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 is it because of institutional racism no it's because they've made a calculus based not entirely on um 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 that's an ugly fact but as crime statistics in american cities after american cities bear out um it's not an entirely unreasonable one it's not reasonable every time obviously obviously but is it attributable to slavery that's a stretch if you're in a city like chicago where the homicide rates shot up in the last two years albeit again as has always has to be remembered mainly black on black uh gun violence and knife violence nevertheless if you're in a city like chicago and you make that calculus i've just suggested the the the the cliched one the street late at night there are other factors other than a memory of slavery that kick in um and i'm afraid it's uh 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 but i was actually just writing the what in my column in new york post today about a a very interesting case it sort of similar which is the the um question of obesity in the us as you know um america is the most overweight country in the world uh america has i think um 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 percent of the population so america is a long way ahead why during the cronovirus 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 why did almost no public health information in america focus on obesity 80 percent of the people who ended up hospitalized in america from with coronavirus were obese we locked the schools when there was no evidence that the coronavirus was deadly for children we all wore cloth masks when there was a very little evidence this was much use in stopping the spread of the virus we had massive evidence about obesity being a problem and we never addressed it why is it just because we worried about fat people no it's actually because about fat shaming as well no it's also because to a great extent it's a racial issue in america as well and actually i quoted this new publication from the universe university of chicago as it happens which makes that claim explicit says the reasons why people are have views that are negative about obesity is because of racism and slavery this is what everything is drawn back to america anything you want to stop you say it's because of racism it's because of slavery how about it's actually because you mind the hospitals getting clogged up you mind people dying your mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying and you'd like to say something about it once again as in everything in america it's cut off by some poorly educated academic saying it's about slavery 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 and it's being done by people who are wearing like mittens 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 first of all what's your what would you like to tell them 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 clubhouse is the social app yeah yeah i know and i really enjoy an absolute zoo of an app as far as i can see it i personally love it because you get to talk to as somebody who's an introvert and doesn't socialize much i enjoy talking to people from all walks of life so it got gave me a chance to first of all practice russian and ukrainian to get the chance to do that then you get a chance to talk about israel and palestine with people who are uh from 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 and this is as if you walked into a bar with custom picked regular folks in quotes regular folks just people that have quote 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 a physical fist fight so even though it really sounds sounds like people want like it's happening yeah and so you get to really listen to that feeling and for example it allows a white guy like me from another part of the world coming from uh the former soviet union to go into a room with a few hundred uh african americans screaming about joe rogan using the n-word oh yeah and i get to really listen there's very different perspectives on that in the african-american community and it's fascinating to listen so i don't get access to that by sort of excellent books and articles and so on you get that real raw emotion and i'm just saying there's a few of those folks listening to this with that real raw emotion and they one argument they say is you douglas murray and you lex freeman don't have the right to talk about race and racism in america it is our struggle you are from a privileged class of people that don't don't know what it's like to be a black man or woman in america walking down the street can you steal man that case first of all fuck that okay that's not listen i think we need to define steel steel manic okay can you try i know what this is um i really resent that form of argumentation sure i really resent it i have the right to talk about whatever the hell i want and no one's gonna stop me or try to intimidate me yeah or tell me that i can't simply because of my skin color and i think that if i said to somebody else the other way around it would be equally reprehensible if i said shut up you have no right to criticize anything that douglas murray says because you've not got my skin color okay it's not an exact comparison but seriously is that a is that a reasonable form of argument uh you haven't been through everything i've been through in my life therefore you can't comment no in that case nobody can talk about anything we might as well pack up go home and isolate ourselves 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 that can comment in a very specific way like for example holocaust survivors yes 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 that's simply writing about uh nuanced geopolitics of world war ii just should not interrupt the holocaust survivor we physically interrupt them if they're telling their stories with logic and reason that the experience of the holocaust survivor somehow fundamentally has a deeper understanding of the humanity and the injustice of the first of all again when even deeper water is now but in terms of wanting to listen to another person who has experienced something yes yes but not endlessly not endlessly i mean there are some people who've written about i mean there are people who've written about the holocaust who didn't experience the holocaust and have written about it better than people who did it's it's not this this this idea that the lived experience to use this terrible modern jargon as if there's another type this this this idea that the lived experience has to triumph over everything else is is not always correct it can be correct in some circumstances 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 yeah one of those people should be heard more than the other obviously obviously if there's somebody who's experienced racism first hand 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 i i don't think that it's the case that that is endlessly the case i'm also highly reluctant to concede that there are groups of people who by didn't of their skin color or anything else get to dominate the microphone now of course we're literally both speaking to microphones at the moment so there's an irony to this but let's skate over the irony 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 fine if you know best we'll argue it out and someone will win long or short term but the the um the the almost aggressive tone in which this is now leveled i don't like the sound of nobody's experience is completely understandable by another human being nobody's 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 faster who said it first but i've um 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 you should dedicate your life to trying to do that simultaneously you'll never understand me this is not an attractive invitation this is this is a an unwinnable game so if somebody if somebody has a legitimate um and an important point to make they should make it and they will win through whatever their character is whatever their race and by the way there are plenty of white people who experience racism as well there are plenty of white people who do and have done and increasingly so which is one of the things i write about from the war in the west i mean i i would argue that today in america the only group you're actually allowed to be consistently vilely racist against the white people if you say disgusting things about black people in america in 2022 you will be over you will be over 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 you'll be just fine you could be the chairman of joint use of staff you could lecture at yale university absolutely fine and the white people have to suck that up as if that's fine because there was racism in another direction in the past so white people can have racism as well 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 victim victims of racism no not particularly because what does that get us it gets us into an endless cycle of competitive victimhood am i saying that white people who've experienced violence have experienced historically anything like the violence that was perpetrated against black people in america historically obviously not but you know what kind of competition do we want to enter here 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 how do you work out the sincerity of the claim being made at one point uh in my book in this latest book i referred to a very useful bit in them in nature and genealogy of morals where as you know nietzsche always has to be treated carefully you know when people say um i love nietzsche which bits [Laughter] what exactly do you love about him but um a lot and a lot can be learned from the answer uh but there are moments in junior area tomorrow that was very useful for this book one of them was the moment when nietzsche uses a phrase that i've now stolen for myself appropriated you might say um where um where he refers to people who who tear at wounds long since closed and then cry about the pain they feel now how do you know how do you know whether the pain is real how do you know i'm not saying you can never know but it's hard 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 maybe they do feel that maybe they're right to feel that maybe they're making it up maybe they're using it as their reason for failure in life maybe they're using it as their reason to not even try maybe they're using it as their reason to smoke weed all day i don't know and who does know how can you work that out 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 on racial or other characteristics and as you write in this part [Laughter] i like your uh pro cultural appropriation of nietzsche uh and at the same time canceling uh nietzsche um in the same set of sentences but you write in this part about evil no i didn't cancel nietzsche wow can't cancel nature like i'm saying i'm saying treat him carefully to him carefully fair enough but you can judge a man's character by which parts of nietzsche he um he quotes fair enough i think when you meet people who do man and superman a bit too much now you're pulling in even deeper water referencing hitler here okay so you write in this part of the book about evil uh quote what is it that drives evil many things without doubt but one of them is identified by several of the great philosophers is resentment that sentiment is one of the greatest drivers for people who want to destroy colon blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserve more and you're saying this kind of resentment we don't know as it surfaces whether it's genuine or if it's uh used to sort of play games of power to evil ends um can you speak to this to this this because it's just a fascinating idea that one of the biggest drivers of evil in the world is resentment because if you look at boy if you look at human history if you look at hitler uh so much of the propaganda so much of the narrative was about resentment does that surface there's a level or is that deep there is that computer it can be any of the above let's first of all preface it everybody has resentment i mean i just i use the term horizontal which is thought very similar to present let's stick with resentment so we don't sound too pretentious um the let me give you a quick example of somebody in our own day who has who has a form of resentment vladimir putin did you see navalny's documentary putin's palace yes yeah you remember the stuff about uh putin as a young kgb officer in germany from the stuff about putin his first wife's resentment of one of his kgb colleagues who had a an apartment that was a few meters bigger than the putin's apartment yeah it's very interesting 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 him but in berlin or munich wherever he was this is a distinct possibility my point is my point is is that is that resentment is a factor in all human lives and we all feel it in in our lives and it's it's something it has to be struggled against resentment is in political terms can be a deadly i mean it's an incredibly deep thing to draw upon and you mentioned hitler obviously one of the things that hitler played on was resentment obviously uh almost every revolution he does i mean the french revolutionaries did as well and we're not without cause uh there's a good reason to feel that versailles was not listening to paris in the 1780s and feel resentment for um marie antoinette in her palace within the palace ignoring the bread shortages in paris um so resentment is is a very it's a very understandable thing and sometimes it's justifiable and it's also deadly to the person as it is to the society it's an incredibly deep deep sentiment somebody else is um got something that you should have and the the problem about it is that it's it has the potential to be endless um you can do it your whole life and one of the ways i've sort of sort of found myself explaining this to people is to say it's also important to recognize that resentment is something that can cross absolutely every boundary so for instance it crosses all racial boundaries obviously and i go without saying more interesting is it crosses all class boundaries and socioeconomic boundaries and if i was to sort of simplify this thought i would say i guess that you and i and everybody watching 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 and i think we probably have also or many of us would have met people who seem to have everything and who are filled with resentment filled with resentment somebody else has held them back from something their sister once did something they said she shouldn't she got this i should have got that and and on and on and on it's a human trait and what one of the things that suggests to me is that we therefore have a choice in our lives about this this is something which we can do something about not limitlessly but for instance i mean there are very good reasons that some people in their lives might feel resentment let's say you're involved in a car crash and a friend fell asleep at the wheel and that's why you are spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair that's a pertinent example of this in american politics at the moment um you would be justified in feeling resentment and at some point you have to make a decision which is am i going to be that person or a different person but even in that case you're saying at the individual level and that societal level is destructive to the mind even when you're quote-unquote justified it drops you it rots you because the best you can do is to eke out your days unfulfilled so the antidote as you describe is gratitude yes gratitude is the antidote to evil in a sense so gratitude is the individual level into societal level gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment i um i quote in the war in the west this this when i read it first time a few years ago i was absolutely flawed by um the brothers karamazov uh not everything in it by the way i won't get into it but i have i have some very big structural criticisms of the novel now now you're just sweet talking to me because i'm a does the esky fan but i appreciate this oh okay well we could get into what i see as the structural flaws in the brothers carrying out anyway um now i'm i'm offended and triggered yeah no i mean this is coming out of macbeth and saying i didn't think it was much good yeah there's structural flaws yeah i thought the ending stank yeah middle wasn't very good no um when i read that that novel i was i was flawed by a couple of things one is one is of course at the moment where we realize the devil appears the moment that ivan says to his brother you you know he visits me and you realize that he's talking about the devil whole novel goes into this totally different space anyway this is even more than you've already realized the novels about and then when the conversation occurs between the van and the devil remember i think he says describes him as dressed as a french friend it's redressed in the french style of the uh early part of the 19th century very strange the devil will be dressed like that but sort of um and and and if you remember that he and he's sort of cross-legged and rather a bane figure but but the devil mentions impassing to ivan that um he says i don't know why gratitude is not a uh an instinct that's been given to me and um yeah you're not allowed this is not uh given the role of being the devil this is not one of the things there's no other thing 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 only dostoevsky can just throw it away because it's such an abundance of riches that he still has to get through the structural problems aside but the the the uh the passive aggressive the the micro aggression in this conversation a little knife fight okay no yeah but but the reason i mentioned this because of course when i saw it this this is such a brilliant insight by darcy because why why would why would gratitude not be a sentiment the devil was capable of the answer is of course that if the devil was capable of gratitude he wouldn't be the devil he'd be somebody else he has to be incapable of gratitude do you think for dostoevsky that was as strong as an insight as as it is for you because i think that's a really powerful idea that with gratitude you you don't get the resentment that rots you from the core yes i think it was one of the just endless things that he saw in us and and the way i put it is that i mean i also think it in think of it in terms of the the era of deconstruction which is one of the things i'd like us to call the era that's now ending 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 let's pull it all apart um there are lots of problems with it one is it's quite boring you don't get an awful lot from it uh 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 um and the era of 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 i'm going to look at this society and i'm going to take it apart by showing systemic problems i'm going to at the end of that what have you got what have you done what have you achieved we need to interrogate this okay interrogate by all means ask questions but interrogate there's a deliberate his hostility to this i'm going to interrogate this thing and take it apart and again at the end of it what have you got whether you're interrogating a text or a piece of music or an idea or a society fine question endlessly question yes interrogate assumes it's all um a criminal in a cell and it's guilty and therefore it must be taken apart and that's what we've been doing for decades in the west and that's resentment that's one by-product of resentment you can't build the thing but you know how to take it apart is a little bit of resentment good so you have you know that i love tom waits and he has a song where uh a little drop of i like my town with a little drop of poison is it good to do that is it good to have a little bit of poison in your drink depends what poison is and it depends if you know not to have another drink it might be the case you find out some alcoholics do that one was too many and 10 is not enough so there's a natural in this case this kind of deconstruction is a slippery slope it becomes an addiction it becomes a drug and you just can't stop well you have you'd have to wean yourself off it and try to start creating again okay you'd have to start trying to put things together again um [Music] something [Music] i think might be in the throes of starting as it happens well speaking of taking things apart and not putting them together again the idea of critical race theory [Music] um can you to me explain so i'm an engineer and have not been actually paying attention much unfortunately to the these things none of the people in your field were until it comes along and smacks you in the face i you know i i've had that line of thinking and you know from mit i i said well surely whatever you folks are busy about yelling at each other for is is a thing at harvard and yale it's not going to yeah yeah of course yes people in the stem subjects thought it's not coming for us it can't come to us and bang well it's you know it hasn't quite been banged engineering is more safe than others yeah uh so not so let's draw a line now between engineering and science so i think engineering is uh i'm uh sitting in a castle in the tallest tower with with my pinky out drinking my martinis saying surely uh the the peasants below with their biology and their humanities we'll figure it all out no i'm just kidding there's no there's no pinky out i drink vodka and i hang with the peasants okay where is this this metaphor has gone too far uh can you explain uh to this engineer what critical race theory is is it a a term that's definable is there tradition is there a history what is good about it what is bad about it is it is a tradition it is a history as a school of thought it started in the law uh roughly in the 1970s and some of the american academy uh it's spilled out it always aimed to be an activist philosophy people deny that now but as i cite him in the war in the west and the foundational texts say as much this isn't this is an activist academic study we're not just looking at at the law we seek to change the law and it's built out into all of the other disciplines 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 on new games to play the psychologists got bored yeah i mean that well they needed tenure and they needed they needed something to do and i mean it's not an original observation plenty of people have made this but i mean neil ferguson said this some time ago for instance that in the last 50 years in american academia certainly in humanities departments when some when somebody dies out as a great scholar and something that's just not replaced by somebody of equal stature they're replaced by somebody who does theory or critical race theory they're replaced by somebody who does the modern games somebody dies out who's a great historian off say i don't know it's the ones on my mind um russian history or russian literature and they're not replaced by a similar um scholar his in his observation in in yours is this a recent development it's happened the last few decades for sure and it's sped up did is it because we've gotten to the bottom of some of the biggest questions of history no it's uh because we're willing to forget the big questions because it's more fun to big questions aren't as fun no partly it's partly no i should stress apparently isn't it this is in the weeds but partly as a result of the hype of specialization in academia um you know if you if you said you'd like to write your dissertation on hobbs uh if you wanted to e if you something central to cancer thought or or hegel or something i mean that's not popular that what's popular is to take somebody way down the line from that because there's a feeling that that's all been done 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 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 tendency by the way there's a very practical consequence of this i saw this at the end of my friend roger scrutin's life when he um 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 like he would he would he would go in and teach for a semester you know 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 so that had already happened and people were searching for new games to play and the critical race theory stuff forced its way in 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 the same way that all the things that are called studies i think everything called studies in the humanities should be shut down because of the activist it's an accomplishment they're all activists gay studies and queer studies um nothing good has ever come from it nothing good to push back is it is it obvious that activism is a sign of a flaw in a discipline so is isn't it a sign of the death of the discipline it's a sign that discipline's over but isn't it a good goal to have for discipline to enact change positive change in the world or is that to is that that's for politicians to do with the findings of of science i mean not why create an ideology and then set out to find disciplines that have weakly put together to try to back up your political ideology so ideology should not be part of of uh of science or of no i mean humanities why would you i mean anyone could do it you could decide to go in and be wildly right-wing about something and only do things that prove your right-wing ideas be fantastically anti-academic fantastically andy science fantastic it's an absurd way to to mix up activism and and and and academia and it's absolutely rife and critical race theory is one of the ones that completely polluted the academy yeah and there's been uh dark moments throughout history both for during world war ii with both communism and uh nazism fascism that um infiltrated science and then corrupted it yes i mean for instance also let's face it this in science as in everything else there are dark difficult things it's much better we know about them face up to them and try to find a way socially to deal with them than that you leave them in the hands of some activist who wants to do stuff with them some of my best friends are activists i'm just kidding okay yeah none of my best friends are activists that's how it should be well i was kidding because i don't have any friends but okay all right now i'm that's not true i'm trying to get gain some um pity points okay uh so to return i have your clubhouse friend screaming away like deranged maniacs now i've got anti-clubhouse by the way because the only time i heard it was that brett weinstein one when he did that i didn't if you heard that early in clubhouse i was invited to clubhouse by various people who said oh this is a really great civilized way to hang out and talk with interest interesting people and i like downloaded the app and i got one night because brett weinstein said um you know i'm doing this conversation and i listened and it was the maddest damn discussion i've ever heard was there something about biology something about was it uncovered times all that at some point brett said i'm an um i'm an evolutionary biologist and somebody else that is saying you're a eugenicist and he said no i'm an evil evil issue in my honesty and sometimes that's the same thing 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 they thought that was the same thing he'd come it horribly reminded me of a time some years ago in a british newspaper ran a sort of realizing that the only thing you can unite people on in sexual ethics is revulsion against pedophilia ran an antipedo campaign and uh shortly after um pediatricians offices were torched in north of england by a mob who hadn't read the whole sign yeah well to me um like i said a little bit of poison is good for the town so anyhow sorry i interrupted you with flattering you there people on clubhouse i have many i have i have of multiples of friends yes um okay we didn't get to some of the ideas of uh critical race theory what what exactly uh is it i'm actually in part asking this question quite genuinely yeah it's 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 i'm trying to give the most generous estimation to add race in as a conversation in a place where it may not have been in the conversation um and that means history too the history oh sure racism yeah yeah yeah all history and to look at it through these particular lenses um i mean there's a certain like all these things there's a certain logic in it like like with feminist studies or something i mean is is there a utility in looking back through undoubtedly male dominated histories and asking where the the more silent female voice was yes very interesting not endlessly interesting and can't be put exactly on the same par as but it has a utility um it's that endlessly sorry to interrupt that endlessly part that seems to get us into trouble because of this thing of where do you stop and that's that's that's always a i looked 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 where would you stop it's not clear because you've got a job in it you've got a pension in it you've got your only esteem in society is in keeping this gig going why i mean is is there any likelihood have you ever it's the old academic joke isn't it that you know the end of every conference the only thing everyone agrees on is that we must have another conference like this one so one thing they always agree on this conference has been so great we must have another one well that's the criticism you could apply to a lot of disciplines of course civil engineering bridge building at a certain point do we need any more bridges can we just fly everywhere you know so at the very least you need to keep the bridges up sure and they would uh critical race theory folks would probably make the same argument at the very least we need to keep the racism out uh we'll have to make sure we don't descend into uh the racism it assumes all the time that we are living on the cusp of the return of the kkk right which is totally wrong i mean it's a massive you say that now until the kkk armies march in we don't always we can't always predict the future we can't always predict future and you you can always say you should be careful but you've also got to be careful of people who've got their timing like totally totally wrong or their estimation of society they're in you mean like most of society before in the 1930s when hitler was i mean so many people got hitler wrong i'm sure they did and so most people some maybe it was nice to have the alarmist thinking there well beware of the man with a mustache if only it was that easy um it's not always above facial hair i mean i always say that i mean what what very often is these two clean shaven chaps both say 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 moustache getting people to goosestep for instance and that's not correct a much better understanding of it is it can come from all number of directions and keep your antennae as good as you can 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 where where people are so primed and think they're so well trained because they spent a term in school learning about the second world war in the holocaust think they're so well trained in hitler spotting that they can do it all the time look at all these phrases we now have in our societies like dog whistle you know as i always say if you hear the whistle you're the dog but people say that that's a dog whistle as if they're highly trained anti-nazis i mean you know there should be some humility in it we should we should be careful we should be wary for sure and we should also be slightly humble in our inability to to spot everything if not significantly humble right so if we can um there's something um funny if not dark about the the activity of hitler spotting if i just may take it aside but uh so critical race theory how much racism what is racism how much of it is in our world today if we were thinking about this activity of hitler's plotting how um and trying to steal man the case of if not critical race theory but people who who look for racism in our world how much would you say well let's it's a good thing to try to define i would say that racism is the the belief that other people are inferior to you you could say you could see a form where you thought people were superior to you that could also happen but more commonly you see a group of people as being inferior to you simply by dent with the fact that they have a different racial background and um that's sort of the easiest way to define racism uh as i say i mean there are types of racism i mean mainly anti-semitism actually perhaps it's the only one which weirdly relies on on a hatred of people who a certain type of person thinks thinks are better than them and that's a particular peculiarity one of the peculiarities of anti-semitism well anti-semitism somehow does both right yes well one of the eternal fascinating things about anti-semitism it can do it does everything at the same time it's like a quantum racism yes they're both superior and inferior you know that you do you know um vastly grossman's life and fate so in the middle of life and fate um which a persian friend of mine said was one of only two great novels of the 20th century she was very harsh literally critic what was the other one oh the leopard obviously the leopard the leopard of giuseppe de la producer yeah okay did she definitely write on that one uh life and fate is is learning so much today yes life and fate is a um is uh an extraordinary book mainly about well you know grossman was a um uh obviously jewish himself but he uh he he saw uh almost everything that he could have done in the second voice he saw stalingrad who was a journalist and he he wrote first-hand the account of stunning groudon he he was also the first journalist interviewed into blinker 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 anyhow i mentioned him because grossman at the beginning in the middle of life and fate which is about sort of a 900-page novel um in the middle of it which is about the dark axis around stalingrad uh he way at one point he amazingly sort of goes into the minds of earth hitler and stalin and he says he says stalin in his study feels his counterpart but then he says he feels very close to him at this moment wow around stalingrad like leading up to after stalingrad when the germans have lost he says he feels closeness of hitler but grossman in the middle of life and fate slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century suddenly dedicates a chapter to anti-semitism and i've seen anti-semitism something i've always been very interested in uh because i've always had the instinctive utter revulsion of it and um uh also partly because of having seen bits of it in the middle east and elsewhere but uh i mentioned this because grossman in the middle of life has takes time out and does this like three-page explanation three-page description of anti-semitism and it's extraordinary i mean it's the only thing i can think of that's equally good is um uh um gregor von retz sorry uh um who who wrote a luridly titled but um brilliant set of novels called the confessions of an anti-semite and about pre-war pre-first world war anti-semitism in eastern and central europe anyway grossman says in the middle of life and fate the the the the one of the extraordinary things about anti-semitism is that it does everything at the same time the jews get condemned in one place for being rich and in another for being poor condemned in one place for assimilating in another for not assimilating assimilating too much and assimilating too little for being too successful for not being successful enough so it's i think it's the only racism that includes within it a detestation for the real anti-semite a detestation of people that the person may perceive to be better than them correctly or otherwise by the way um i'm embarrassed to say i have not read this one of two greatest novels of the 20th essentially life in faith jesus and just to read off of wikipedia we see a gross many ukrainian jew became a correspondent for the soviet military paper krasnod having volunteered and been rejected for military service he spent a thousand days in the front lines roughly three of the four years of the conflict between the germans and the soviets and the main themes covered in uh how's it go life and fate i keep thinking 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 uh science like goes on in reality of war it's interest i need to definitely you need to read it you'll i think you'll really get a lot from it it's one of the other things the one reference but one of the other things he does is that he he has this extraordinary ability to to talk about the the the absolute highest levels of the conflict and then zoom in it's rather like the camera work they use and things like lord of the rings where he zooms down and then gets one person in the midst of all this and you get you you get on there what puts you in the study too so i i personally have read and reread the william shires the rise and fall of the third reich who's another journalist who was there but he does not do it interestingly enough given such a large novel kind of the definitive work on his definitive original work that goes to source materials and on hitler he doesn't uh touch anti-semitism really same thing to miss out well he just says it very calmly and objectively as he does for most the work that this was the fact of life there's a lot of cruelty throughout but he doesn't get to well one of the things is because they lost the war because of you anti-semitism i mean that's one quite important way to to view this andrew roberts another historian said is that you know in the end the nazis lost the war because they were nazis oh it sounds almost too neat but it's it's worth remembering that you know 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 well that's that's certainly a dark that's a dark possibility you know anyhow but to go back to racism in general racism in general apart from anti-semitism relies on the the um perception that another group of people a racial group other than your own are inferior to you that that's what i'd say is the easiest shorthand of racism and of course it's one of the stupidest things that our species is capable of i mean one of the stupidest that you can look at a person and guess them in their entirety in fact because of their skin color i mean it's like what a stupid idea that is as well as being an evil one but the the the 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 that's why i say we do need sort of we need our antennae working we just don't need them to be over active or under active you know 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 yes would you say that's the case would you say that there are significant racism towards white people in the united states i'd say that the white people in the united states are the only people who are told that they have hereditary sin and that's a big one just to start with based strictly based on their skin color 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 um grasp on the public attention that said that black people were born into evil because of something their ancestors had done like they had the mark of cain upon them 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 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 is there a difference and then and the following point the obvious point left unsaid but let's say it nobody in the public square says that 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 and does this mean that white people are more disadvantaged than black people know 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 is there something to be said about the feature aspect to sort of play devil's advocate about the asymmetry of um sort of accusations towards the majority so yes because so much easier to attack a majority it is much easier but is there something to be said about that being a useful function of society that you always attack um that the minority has disproportionate power to attack the majority so that you can always keep the majority in check well it's a dangerous game to play isn't it i think it's very dangerous that's a good summary of entirety of human civilization well yeah everything's dangerous um but it's a very dangerous game to play that i wrote about this bit in the matters of crowds when i was saying like gay rights people the ones that still exist the ones who don't have homes to go to uh who want to beat up on straight people in a way or want to make straight people feel like they're kind of unremarkable uncool you know boring straights so boring so not not like the magical pixie fairy dust gaze um that's a bad idea to push that one that's a bad idea and some gays push that highly unwise given the fact that about two to three percent of the population are actually gay although now there's like a additional 20 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 of the crowd is with with the feminist movement very unwise for half of the species to say that the other half of the species isn't needed and there were always third and fourth wave feminists willing to make that nuts argument uh not first way famous you didn't hear it in first wave feminism you didn't hear suffragette tended not to say we'd like the vote and men are scum it would've been hard to have won everyone over to their side not least the men they needed to win over their side but you do get third and fourth wave feminists who say like you know do we need men or men are all ex again it's a bad idea it's a bad idea tactically what if men richard wrangham somebody from harvard uh describes that men are the originators of violence physical violence in society and he argues that actually the world would be better off no just a very cold calculus if you get rid of men there would be a lot less violence in society is his claim but who says you need to get rid of violence in society well that's but shouldn't that at least be a discussion all right have a debate on a panel discussion violence pros and cons well that's the sort of thing if i can say so that something weak ass academic decides to do because he thinks that his area of boston would be nicer or whatever um he might decide it's useful if he was living in kiev today to have violent men i mean it might if if um if new york was invaded right now i'd need some violent men around here but it wouldn't be invaded if there's no violent men well that's the argos argument there's there's also at least there's some level of threat that you ought to exude that puts people off if i was in 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 but like 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 but at least it's a conversation to have isn't there uh is there aspect to the sort of the feminist movement that is correct uh you know in challenging the some forms of violence domestic violence for instance although women are capable of that as well i'm learning about this we're always learning about this in the moment i can't help but watch the entirety of it go down in this beautiful mess that is human relations okay but just to finish that thought it's it's very unwise for women to war against men as it would be for men to war against women it's highly highly unwise to war on a majority population and in america britain and other western countries white people are still a majority 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 i mean i'm not guilty of anything because of my skin color i'm not guilty of anything my ancestors didn't do anything wrong and even if they had why would i be held responsible for it so uh to go back to nietzsche is there some aspect to where if we try to explain the forces of play here is it the will to power playing itself out from individual human nature and from group behavior nature 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 that's certainly one um the desire to to grab is let me see if i find a quote for you on that the desire to grab that which we think we're owed and to do it often in the guise of um justice i mean justice is one of the great terms of our age and one of the very great bogus terms of our age people forever talk about their search for justice 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 you can burn down buildings in the name of justice well the the majority groups throughout history including those with white skin color have done the same in the name of justice we we came up with all kinds of sexy terms in our propaganda machines to sell whatever atrocities we'd like to commit one of the one of the quotes of uh from nietzsche that i liked and i quoted in this careful i'm judging you harshly yeah of course um anita 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 each other start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another it's a disgrace to be happy there is too much misery this is something to be averted for the sick says nietzsche must not make the healthy sick to or make the healthy confuse themselves with the sick well i think there again there's a lot of that going on how could i be happy when there is unhappiness in the world why should i not join the ranks of the unhappy i think dostoevsky has a book about that as well sure knows from underground um okay this has been very russian russian focused i'm very pleased with the number of times but doctor asking grossman and others have come in this is right i wasn't doing this as a sort of um yeah well it's always good to plug the greats um and good to know they're still relevant do you speak russian by the way at all which i did i'm told it's a ten-year language basically to learn from scratch as well my friends who have done it well there's the language and then there's the personality behind the language and the personality i feel like you already have so you just need to know the surface details [Laughter] okay uh in fact the silence to be silent in the russian language is something that's already important oh i should if we had a moment i'd tell you my story about stalin's birthplace should i tell you that no i once went to gory where stalin was born have you been no experience i was ages after the georgia war and i went to enter the no man's land in south ossetia and kazia and i said i really gotta go to gory or somehow because the shell had landed in gory rather weirdly from the russian side and gory is where son was born and of course gore is in georgia and uh um let me have the museum of stalin's birthplace they've been trying to change for some years because it had been unadulteratedly pro-stalin for years and the georgian authorities this is in uh um his time were trying to make it into a museum of stalinism and it was really tough the only place i've seen which is similar is the house in mexico city where trotsky was killed that also is like they're not quite sure what to do they they don't want to say he's a bad guy because they think that people won't come anywhere um stalin's house and glory had changed from the museum of star to museum of silence and there was this large georgian woman with a pink pencil who just had clearly been doing the tour for like 50 years and he just pointed all the fast and she did that classic thing i've also saw it once in north korea where they they're sort of that sort of communist thing where they say here is this is 147 feet high by 13 feet deep that gives you lots of fashion i don't care yeah why does it matter um they always give you facts yeah this is stalin's suitcase it is uh 13 inches wide by you know it isn't anyhow and uh this woman did all of this and it was all just wildly pro well not pro signs just to explain the science lives it was just a great local boy done good uh they didn't mention the fact he killed more georgian spaghetti than anyone else and we get get to the end and before being taken to the gift shop where they sell red wine with stalin's face on it and among other things and a lighter for styling on it uh they uh they took you to a little room under the stairs and they said this is a replica of interrogation cell to show uh uh represent horror of what happened in stalin time uh now gift shop there's no kind of night and i took the woman aside at the end i discovered she'd said this to other journalists and visited before i took her outside and said i said what do you think about commerce darling and she said um let's say she'd obviously done this during communist times she said it's not my place to judge you know sort of thing which is an interesting comment in itself i said yeah but he killed more georgians and everyone you know and all that sort of thing and she said it's not my place to judge or to give my views and those sort of things and the franchise ever what do you feel about it and she said um it was like a hurricane it happened [Music] that's interesting because uh if i may mention clubhouse once again i gotten a chance to talk to a few people from mongolia there's a woman from mongolia and they talked about the fact that they deeply admire stalin love she she sounded if i may hopefully that's not crossing line i think i'm representing her correctly and saying she admired him almost like um like loved them like the way people love like like a like jesus like a holy figure well isn't that still the case in large parts of russia yeah i mean he keeps stalin keeps on winning greatest russian of all time and 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 as yeah there's something about human memory that it just you forget the details of the atrocities of the past and remember that i mean think of the number of people we talk about as historical heroes napoleon yeah i mean british people don't talk about opponent as a hero but the french yeah exactly the culture now you're no you didn't think that dostoevsky now again tricky ground but everybody like the the the french enormously napoleon and uh they had many animal aspects it was also unbelievable brute and um killed many people unnecessarily and um there are lots of figures from history that we sort of cover that over with yeah yeah can we mention churchill briefly because he is one of the um you could make a case for him being one of the great representers or great figures historically of the western civilization yes and then there's a lot of people uh from not a lot i know i have like three friends and one one of them happens to be from london and they they say that he's a a uh um not a good person so listen this friend would 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 there's a backlash going on at the moment at the moment and in general there's a spirit like reflecting on on the darker sides of some of these historical figures like challenging history through it's it's not just critical race theory it's it's it's challenging history through well are the people we think of as heroes what are their flaws and are they in fact villains that are convenient um sort of uh we're there at the right time to accidentally do the right thing accidentally i hope this isn't the representative fair estimation of your friend in london's views no she's going to be quite mad at this but i didn't say the name so it could be any friends it could be but we know it's a she canada well see i i uh i've given that away well that's with of course i would not um i made that up completely it's it's all just like my girlfriend in canada she's completely a figment of my imagination nevertheless winston churchill uh is somebody i mean just looking at reading the rise and fall of the third reich is an incredible figure that um that to me so much of world war ii is marked leading up to the wars marked by stunning amounts of cowardice by political leaders and it's fascinating to watch hear this person clearly with the drinking and a smoking problem i don't understand why that's a negative no i didn't say you see yeah you throw it in as if it is no well it's it's called humor i'll explain it to you one day what that means but he still explained dry him he stood up he stood up to what we now see as evil when at the time it was not so obvious to see um [Music] you know so that that's that's just a fascinating figure of western civilization i'd love to get your comments the real criticisms i mean it's making you drinking the real christians of of church are quite easy to to sum up and i do so in the war on the west side so i say these are the things they now use against him uh didn't do enough to avert the bengal famine in 1943 for instance that's been shot down by numerous historians including indian historians uh in the middle of the war in the middle of a world war churchill did what he could to get grain supplies diverted um from australia to into bengal the famine was appalling it was caused by a typhoon it was not caused by winston churchill um 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 his just total calumny and when people claim some people claim that i mean there are a few very ignorant scholars nevertheless with some credentials who claimed that churchill wanted the indian population to like basically be genocided and it's complete nonsense not least by the fact that during the period which in question the indian population boomed um so that that's one of the main ones another one is that he had um some views that we now have regarded as racist he definitely regarded races as being of different characters um and that there were superior races and the the as it were the white european was a superior culture he was born in victorian england so he had some victorian attitudes um 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 positive side of the ledger includes he almost certainly did more than any one human being to save the world from nazism so that should counter something and one of the reasons i talk about churchill in this regard is this is to stress that if you get i'm not trying to stop anyone doing history at all 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 i find it interesting i find interesting not least because it's so sloppy on occasions but i find it interesting it's important and we should be able to see people in the round but that includes recognizing the positive side of the ledger and if you can't recognize that side you're doing something else you're doing something else it's not history it's um some form of politicking of a very particular kind and i think it's the same thing with the founding fathers there are some people for instance certainly since the 90s who have pushed the sally hemmings thomas jefferson story to show that thomas jefferson was some kind of brute as a result um you know we see jefferson statue being removed from the council chamber the city was sitting in last november by council members who said that thomas jefferson no longer represents our values if you can't if you can't recognize greatness of thomas jefferson and that he had flaws i mean that's not a grown-up debate and weigh them and weigh them in the context of the time but let me sort of throw a curveball uh a curveball at you then uh what about recognizing the positive and the negative of a fella with nice facial hair called karl marx sure sure i mean i i i have a section in the war in the west as you know where i go for karl marx with some glee so he seems to have gotten uh you know some popularity in in the west recently um not just recently yeah i mean he's had a resurgence recently yes resurgence well that's because that's because whenever whenever things are seen to go wrong people reach for other options and when for instance it's very hard for people to accumulate capital it's not obvious they're going to become capitalists and so one thing that happens is people say let's look at the marxism thing again see if that's a viable goer and my argument would simply be point me to one place that's worked 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 if there's a few people that kind of tried the soviet thing cuba tried it well they they basically it's an offshoot of this show they tried soviet yes they've tried it tried it in venezuela yes yes yes so but let's just let's just quickly say how did all these experiments go they they did not well they failed in fascinating ways they did but they failed yes they said and we should stress so grossly failed so grossly failed that they threw millions and millions of people into completely thwarted lives that were much shorter than they should have been yeah so the the lesson to learn there that you can learn several lessons one is that anything that smells like marxism is going to lead to a lot of problems now another lesson could be well what is the fundamental idea that marx had he was criticizing capitalism and the flaws of capitalism so is it possible to do better than capitalism 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 uh the qual the uh the machines start doing more and more of the labor all those kinds of things you start to ask questions if i finally might get to marx's dream of what the average day would look like yes what yeah well there's gonna be an awful lot of literary criticism then if you remember that said that we would be doing in the evenings the labor in the evening well he didn't know twitter was a thing or netflix so he would he would change are there things we could learn from marx plausibly possibly i can't think of anything myself off hand but um to have a critique of capitalism isn't by any means a bad thing in the society i'd rather that it was a critique of capitalism that showed how you improve capitalism a critique of a free market that showed how people could get better better access to the free market how you could ensure for instance that young people get onto the property ladder things like that those are constructive things so people who say we must have marxism i mean don't know what the hell they're talking about because that never leads to any of those things haven't led in the past it's never led in the past and at some point you've got just you've got to try to work out how many tri how many attempts you make at this damn philosophy before you realize that every attempt always leads to the same thing i mean we could pretend that fascism has never been properly tried and that it was unfortunate what happened in nazi germany but you know that wasn't real fascism and in mussolini's fascism you know didn't go all that well but it was you know a bit better and maybe we could try a bit more franco fascism nobody would have any time for this crap nor should they the people who try that are reviled and quite rightly so why do we tolerate it with the marxism thing and it's a great mystery to me the way that people do tolerate it always always in this stupid way of saying we haven't done it yet and if you keep trying the same recipe and every time it comes out as shit it's the recipe's shit 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 and the same it's the good it's weighing the good and the bad and being able to do so calmly and thoughtfully sure um you know do you know the famous george orwell uh comment on the style in an argument with a stalinist do you know that's one of my favorite quotes george orwell in the early 40s gets into an argument with a um a stylist he's obviously a marxist and the um uh this is after the show trials 37 uh this is this is when it's very clear what marxism in the russian form is and this uh uh all well is in the discussion with this this marxist and it goes on and on and eventually eventually orwell says well you know what about the show trials and he does and what about what's happened in ukraine and and then the famines and and much more and the purges and the purges and the purges and eventually the stalinist says oh well what oil knows he's going to say all along which is he says you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs and orwell says where's the omelette oh yeah so it's a good that's a really good because look at this by this stage okay how many where's my damn omelette how many just messy big bloody eggy piles have the marxists created by now in country after country yeah always next time they're going to produce the great omelet but they never have and they never will because the whole thing is rotten from the start but let me just also say one thing about that because of course marx isn't as nice as he sounds and that's one of the things that i 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 saying 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 pa pieces he was writing for the american press uh in the 1850s uh the way he has horrible views on slavery and and um colonialism and much more but the main thing is i mean the horrible things he says about uh black people and the constant use of the n-word in fact when i was doing the audio book for the war the west i had to decide will i read out the quotes from marks or not if i had read them out i'd have been cancelled because people would have just said you've been using the n-word so much in this passage and you know this is and i slightly thought of doing it so that i could say i was only quoting marks to try to hit the point home in the end of course i was sensible and decided not to but marx's letters are disgusting on these terms since i highlighted this in this book and some of the media picked it up um and um and have popularized this thing i'm trying to put into the system which is if you're going to accuse church of racism if you're going to choose accuse jefferson of racism washington of racism and so on what about marx the two things that marxists have said since this came out has been first of all why are you saying this about marx he was a man of his time like everyone else and the second thing they say is we don't go to marx for his horrible abhorrent views on race so talking about mixed-race people with guerrillas and so on we don't go to him for that we go to him for his economic theories i say okay well we don't go to thomas jefferson for his views on slaves we don't go to churchill for his the precise language he used that points in the 1910s about indians or his health advice or his health advice actually i do get him for that but that explains so much but let's have some standards on this and that's why that's why i'm very suspicious of the fact that the people don't do this with marx because i think what they're trying to what some people are trying to do and this isn't this may sound conspiratorial but i really don't think it is i think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past 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 oh we've also got this idea from the 20th century still about marxism or the 19th and 20th centuries and no no you you will not have the entire landscape deracinated and then the worst ideas tried again so basically destroy all of history and the lessons learned from history and then start from scratch and then then it's completely any idea can work and then you could just take whatever well and the thing is there are always some people with pre-preferred ideas and i mentioned this also with the post-colonialists the post-colonialists were really interesting because when the european powers were removing were removing from africa in the far east 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 which in some other places would have been returning to slave markets and slave ownership and slave selling and much more but put that aside for a second they could have said we have an indigenous culture which we will return to almost uniformly in the post-colonial era you had figures like franz 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 well it's not obvious to me that like the bad ideas would be the ones that emerge but it's more likely the bad ideas would emerge in this kind of context when you erase history when you're raised when you raise history and you leave some ideas deliberately uninterrogated i mean as i say find me one in a hundred american students who've heard of and any of the communist despots of the 20th century i mean name recognition in there was a poll done a few years ago in the in the uk and like name recognition among children school children for stalin let alone mao i mean mao who kills more people than anyone 65 million chinese perhaps how many students in america know what mao was who he was where he was nothing or the atrocities committed where the atrocities were committed oh don't worry about that because it mean it means that we might have learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century we we think we've learned one of the of the two lessons of the 20th century we actually haven't learned that lesson we've learned a little bit of it and we've not learned the other one at all because that's why we still have people in american politics and elsewhere actually talking about collectivization and things 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 what are the two lessons of the 20th century fascism and communism oh yeah i mean i'm not exactly sure what the exactly the lessons are no it's not clear if the lessons were very clear that we'd be better at it well one is your book broadly applied of the madness of crowds that's one lesson well so meaning like large crowds can display herd-like behavior yes be very suspicious of crowd yeah in general i mean you apply it in different more to modern application yeah in a sense but it's that that's rooted in history that crowds can when when humans get together they can do some uh quite radically silly things elias canetti is very good on that crowd some power um and eric hoffer who is a sort of self-taught amazing um not the ultra didactic writer the true believer and so on he was extremely good on that but the reason i mentioned the two things no i mean we should have realized the two nightmares of the 20th century fascism and communism that we should we should know how they came about and we're interested in learning how one of them came about fascism and we know some of the lessons like don't treat other people as less than you because of their race that's one lesson but when we've we've done some good at learning that um but the second one not to do communism again not to do socialism i i think we're way away from knowing because we don't know how it happened and the and the little temptations are still there always look at people saying i'm going to expropriate your property if people do things they don't like say well we can't wait to take your property well there's a sense there's an appealing sense okay every ideology has an appealing narrative behind it that sells the ideology so for socialism for communism is that there's a it seems unfair that the working class does all of this work and gets only a fraction of the output it just seems unfair so you want to make they do get a fraction of that but yes yes and so it seems to be more fair if we increase that if the workers own um all all of the value of their output and well the things that are more fair seems to be a good thing i'd say well yeah i mean fairness is is i like fairness as well no i much prefer fairness because it's a much easier thing to try to work out it's quite amorphous itself for the concept but everyone can recognize it so for instance um should the boss of the company earn a million times that of the lowest paid employee doesn't seem fair should they earn maybe five or ten times the the salary of the lowest yeah possibly that that could be fair there are certain sort of multiples which are within the bounds of you know reasonableness i i think actually that's the that's the much bigger problem in capitalism at the moment as i see it is is the 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 the the bit in the middle has become increasingly squeezed and is a danger always of falling all the way down to the bottom i mean i think in the snakes and ladders of american capitalism for instance it's it's a correct perception to say that the snakes go down awfully far if you tread on the snake you can plummet an awfully long way in america and the deal in the game was that the ladders took you high and there's a perception and again it's not entirely wrong that the ladders system on the board is kind of broken so what you're saying is you're a marxist i'm douglas i'm a marxist you heard that here first in the uh in in the out of context blog post you're going to write about this i can practice point the way to critique capitalism if it's gone bad is to get better capital yes free markets where they're not fair should be made fair never decide that the answer is the thing that has never produced any human flourishing i.e marxism so as you describe in the madness of crowds the herd-like behavior of humans that gets us into trouble uh you as an individual thinker and others listening to this how can you because all of us are mid crowds we're influenced by the society that's around us by the people that's around us how can we think independently how can we you know if you're in um in this 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 or 40s how can you think independently given first of all that it's hard to think independently just intellectually speaking but also that there's it's just becomes more and more dangerous so the incentive to think independently under the uncertainty uh that's usually involved with thinking is i mean it's a silly thing to say but on twitter there's a cost to be paid for yes for going against the crowd on any silly thing we can even talk about you know uh what is it will smith slapping chris rock you know there's a crowd that believes that uh that was unjustified or something i forget what the crowd decided but i don't crowd split on that when it's safe to have one opinion either way okay it is right but there is 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 michael jackson well oh boy i don't want to uh this is not this is not a legal discussion where i have lawyer i don't have my lawyer i don't even have a lawyer the man in question is dead but i think most people who are not just die hard fans would concede that michael jackson had a strange relationship with children yes and uh was almost certainly a pedophile is that was that did the crowd agree on that uh no the crowd hasn't agreed because he's too famous and we all love thriller yeah we do so you said people who are not fans i just don't no i'm a fan of michael jackson but i think he was almost certainly a pedophile and uh but i bet nobody wants to give up dancing to bad at weddings so uh they just kind of add it in it's fine seriously it's it's it's you're like geniuses apply to uh bill cosby oh that's well he wasn't he he was of course one of the most famous people in america but maybe he wasn't regarded as talented oh wow there's there's depth to this oh yeah there's a genius opt out in all cultures there's a genius opt out in all cultures look at lord byron lord byron shagged his sister doesn't affect his reputation in fact if anything it kind of adds to it but then again this kind of war against the west geniuses actually makes you more likely or no to get cancelled so if you look at the genius of thomas jefferson or well yes because if you haven't done anything remarkable nobody will come looking for you pastor obviously yeah societal genius can get you into trouble with your life okay sidle through life with nobody noticing be totally harmless and then and then die and hope you haven't used any carbon um uh but but you were asking about you were asking about how to survive the the era of social media as it were and the crowds yeah and and there's a very simple answer to that don't um don't over rate the significance of the unreal world oh come on but this is still human psychology because you want to fit in there's a you want to why because you're you like people and you're this is why not just like a small number of people and ignore the rest yeah that's that's what i do well i mean i actually like most people i'm not isn't a general thing i don't have detestation for most people at all most people like calculate enjoy speaking with and being with but um in terms of storing your sense of self-worth in absolute strangers big mistake yeah well me that's this and now let's turn into a therapy session because for me and i think i represent some number of population is i'm pretty self-critical i'm looking for myself in the world and uh there is a depth of connection with people on the internet i mean have seen the shallowness of it it's shallow connection interesting i put it this way if you um if you became very ill tomorrow would any of them help on the internet no no no good that's a good test yeah it's a good test but then at the end of the day yeah you're right you're very close friends with help family would help yeah yeah and perhaps that's the only thing you can't start you can't store um significant amounts of of trust or faith or belief or self-worth in places which will not return it to you okay so let's talk about the more extreme case the harsher case when you talk about the things you talk about in the war uh on the west and madness of crowds i mean you're getting a lot of blowback i'm sure uh as uh for the listener you just shrugged lightly with a zen light look on your face um so you don't all you need is sam harris to say that you're brilliant and you're happy i know it's i'm i'm very i love sam yeah i'm deeply pleased when he flanders me but i mean i'm and it's nice about me but no i don't just rely on that no i mean i i don't why would i mind if apart from it i mean maybe it's self-selecting if i didn't have the view i had about that or the whatever armory it is that i have on that i wouldn't do what i did maybe i mean have you been to some dark places psychologically because of the challenging ideas to explore some like significant self-doubt just kind of um i can't say i've been unaffected by about everything in my life by any means that would make me a an automaton of some kind um there's definitely times i've got things wrong and regretted that uh there's times i've there have there was a period around the time i wrote my book the strange death of europe which uh it was very very dark time and it wasn't because i was having a dark time in my life but because of the book i was writing oh because of the places you had to go in order to write yeah book and um well i was contemplating the end of a civilization so occasionally it's 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 a very depressing book to read however and i would say well you should have tried writing it um but it was because i mean i was it was it's it has chunks of it which i'm very proud of in particular about um uh the death of religion the death of god the the loss of meaning and um the the void and uh that's difficult stuff to write about and to grapple with and there is a sort of i haven't reread that book um since it came out but um 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 the detail um but yeah i i can't say i'm used i'm used to saying what i think and what i see and if there's any pushback i've got from that i'm completely controlled that i'm saying what i see with my own eyes that's your source of strength is that you're always seeking the truth as best you see it well i can't agree to go along with a lie if i've seen something with my own eyes 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 a as their example of a very smart person so given that a compliment um 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 this is kind of um 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 i get a certain thrill from the friction yeah that sometimes both your ego and the thrill of friction will get you to uh deviate from the truth and instead just look for the friction could do could do for sure um i try to keep alive to that i mean i try early in my career i realized that for instance i didn't want to to make on enemies unnecessarily any more than strictly necessary because there was a very large number of already necessary enemies and i remember once i went into the details but i already had one sort of thing i'd done that way and then another thing came out i just thought i can't i can't do it and i remember thinking don't be the sort of person who's forever creating storms and i'm trying to make sure i wasn't and i think i've pretty much stuck to that but to answer your question um well the first thing is i'm i'm as confident that i can be that um i wouldn't fall into the trap you described two reasons i mean one is that i don't think of myself as a wildly intelligent person um partly because i'm very very aware of things i know nothing about i mean for instance i have an almost no knowledge of the details of finance uh or economic theory um i mean the the real details i don't mean the big picture of the kind that we were just discussing earlier but uh i have if you put the um periodic table in front of me i would struggle to do more than um a handful yeah i am very conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge and where i have gaps or chasms i tend to find i have a disproportionate admiration for the people who know that stuff like i'm wildly impressed by people who understand money really understand it you know i think how the hell do you do that and the same thing with biologists medics stuff i just know very little about and that's the source of humility for you just knowing that yes i mean i think well i'm sure that stuff but jesus if you got me under general knowledge i'd say that thing some years ago there's a thing in universe in the uk called university challenge and my uh i was asked some years ago on to there's a sort of like celebrity one of former students of the universities or colleges asked to go back for the christmas special and um 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 and the only reason i actually wanted to do it was i discovered that louis theroux had been to my college before my time and he was on he'd agreed to be on the team and i thought i'd love to meet louie through that would be great fun and uh anyhow and i said well i really don't want to do it and they said come on you'd be great i said i wouldn't i'd show myself i'd be a total asshole and ignoramus and uh as it was i sat down my flat and i watched some past episodes of university challenge and i realized i'd have just sat and mute for the whole half hour um i just couldn't i mean the first question was about physics and the second one was about uh as it was i watched the the one and i could answer the first two or three questions of the one that actually went out because they they made it a bit simpler but 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 these unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer a whole range of things so i'm perfectly aware of my limitations and um you contemplate your limitations yeah and they're forever before me you know not hard to find in every day and and then on top of that i suppose it's um and in a way you know that line from rudyard kipling's um alternately brilliant and slightly nauseating poem f there's a there's a line you just enjoy a good bond can you well no it's not it's not i can enjoy a great poem yes but i mean a good poem yeah this is you know slightly off but this is this is this goes to your criticism of dostoevsky take take take uh douglas's criticism with a grain of salt so maybe i've heard it read at too many memorial services and things sure but uh that line of is a good piece of rice if you can learn to meet triumph and disaster and meet these greek these two imposters just the same yeah that's a good line it's a good line as it's kicking off and then he's an amazing turn of line but i do think that it's a very sensible thing to try to greet uh um triumphant disaster and regard them as imposters and greet them just the same and actually anyone who knows me knows that i never 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 um but it's also because i gen anyone who knows me knows i never have a moment when i say um that's just great i feel totally fulfilled and victorious i mean it happened to me recently when the war in the west went straight in and number one in the bestseller list how long did that last in terms of your self-satisfied didn't happen not even for a brief moment no when i first saw that it was selling i had that moment of relation i thought good i've done it it's out and i did have a moment of elation then definitely but it doesn't last partly because i tell myself it mustn't last because as you said fate hitches up its skirt is it is that skirts i don't this you you brits with your with your poetry even when it's nauseating as of 2022 this year what's your final analysis of the political leadership in the human mind and the human being of donald trump i sort of avoided this for years just talking about trump i tried to avoid talking about trump for years same reason i tried to avoid writing about brexit do you think that trump just sorry in a small tangent do you think the trump story is uh over are we just done with volume one i have no idea the people i know who know him said he's running and and i think that in in general republicans have to do have a choice in front of them uh one friend put it to me recently said you've got to go in with your toughest fighter and i understand that instinct and i also think it's very dangerous instinct because what is your toughest fight is also your biggest liability um what's the best way to get out the democrat vote than 2024 than to have donald trump running and the people that are doing the war in the west are pretty tough fighters they are and um i'm cautious about this because i know every way i tread it's dangerous but let me just just be tread gracefully i'll try it as gracefully as i can my wellington boots i am i galoshes uh i here's here's the thing uh i think everybody knows what trump is i think we all knew for years and i feel sorry for the conservatives who had to pretend that he was something he wasn't i felt sorry for the ones who had to pretend that for instance he was a some devout christian or a man of faith or a man of great integrity or uh all of these sorts of things because i'm not in the public eye for years i've been obvious that wasn't the case but but he has something extraordinary one thing is a method of me communication that you've just got to say is was unbelievable you know in one fundamental way that you can't look away for some reason i mean we i i've been watching him clear everyone out of the way in 2016. it was thrilling because those people needed clearing away you know sam is just horrified what america is going to give us another bush what's so great about this family um america is going to give us another clinton we're going to get to choose randy clinton on the bush mark stein said whatever we'll just wait for the day the clintons and the bushes in to marry and then we can really have a monarchy again um so i i i was very pleased to see him clear them away i was very clear to him please see him sort of raise some of the issues that needed raising i thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air and i wished it wasn't him doing it um and then there was a question of him governing and it was just perfectly clear he didn't know how to govern he what he did have however what he does have is an incredible ability to fight and some of the forces he was arraigned against were arraigned against him my gosh they would have taken down anyone else i mean if they'd have probably done some similar bs against ted cruz if he you know or marco rubio you know they'd have said some of some people admitted they'd have they'd have accused all these people of racism and misogyny and everything else as well just so they'd admit romney just said they did john mccain um but trump was the one ugly enough and bruisy enough to fight and also a willingness or a lack of willingness to play sort of the civil yes game of politics sort of you know at a party when um like politeness gets you in trouble yeah you show up and everybody's polite and you just out of momentum want to be being polite and all of a sudden you're on an island with jeffrey epstein and uh it gets you into a huge amount of trouble but so trump has these sort of extraordinary qualities but i just you know look he he he screwed up uh during his time in office because he didn't achieve as much as he should have done now you could say about every president but i refuse to acknowledge that two years when he had both houses in the first the beginning he just didn't know what levers to pull you know i mean he was sitting in the office behind the oval office tweeting watching the news sorry that's not a president and um 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 yeah and i i think and then we get onto the thing about and here we get on to the you know what of course is very very fractious terrain but you know i covered the 2020 election and i was traveling all around the states and i went to trump rally and and all sorts of stuff and i i mean i was in dc on election night and um when and it got very ugly at one point um in so-called black lives matter plaza when it looked like trump might win when florida came in and got really i could feel the air well very very heated and like some antifa people started getting into black lock and this sort of stuff and i thought this town's going to burn you know if trump wins and in the aftermath of the vote i was willing to hang around and watching for a bit and then i thought 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 and i'm afraid i'm one of those people who doesn't believe that the evidence they presented is good enough to justify the claim that he won the election and i and people say have you seen 2 000 mules and have you seen anything look the evidence isn't there that the the election was won by donald trump yeah and i think that what he did on january the 6th was unbelievably dangerous and you know here it is possible for us to hold two ideas in our head at the same time january 6 was not nothing nor was it an insurrection an attempt to stage a coup and there's a vanishing number of people in the u.s or as eric weinstein said that the it's like this is the the roof that you have to walk along and like the sides are very steep yeah if you fall off either side is there some sense given the forces that are waging war in the west he said this feeling perhaps because of antifa or something else that this town is going to burn and maybe a continued feeling that this town is going to burn with the january 6th events are you worried about the future of the united states in the coming years because of the the the feeling of escalation is that just a war of twitter or is there it's real is there a real brewing of something oh it's real and how well let me then respond to that how what is the hopeful if you if you 10 years from now look back at the united states and say we turned it around what would be the reason what would be the ways the mechanisms that we do so tell you um since i 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 things i've written about actually have more application than i realized one is um the gratitude issue a number of people have approached me who have gone through a.a more alcoholics anonymous they sometimes say have you ever been to aaa and that's a personal question um they say but the reason they ask it is because they say well because if you go to drug rehabilitation or alcohol anonymous um uh mcdonald's it doesn't sound very anonymous you stand up in a room you say your name and you tell everyone the worst things you've ever done that's the opposite of anonymous anyhow but they say uh look because if you go to these things apparently you're asked to as part of your recovery yeah say what you're grateful for like list what you're grateful for i didn't know that by the way until until until the book was out and so it turned out to have more application than i knew 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 and a couple of times since the book came out i've been approached by people with marriage counsellors um but if you've also said i mean you've ever been through marriage counseling again that's a very personal question stop asking me personal questions no but they then they said and i said why well because this is this is one of the things that we do in couples therapy is try to find things you agree on and i think this is very important in america and it's made much harder by the fact and i've said this many times but forgive me if i'm repeating myself but it's made much harder by the fact that having different opinions is very last century now we all have different facts or at least the two sides have different facts one half of the country roughly or let's say 40 30 whatever you want to put it with a you know tired minority in the middle um one segment of the country believes that hillary clinton won the 2016 election and that the russians interfered and got donald trump into power another half of the country believes that donald trump won the 2020 election if you can't agree on who wins elections it's very hard to see who you what you agree on as a country 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 you don't have to go on everything like the public square has to have public heroes who are agreed to be heroes to some extent warts and all um if you don't have that if actually you think friends like half the country thinks founding fathers were pretty good the other half thinks they were absolutely rotten racists and so on 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 i know nothing out there that would have been better and the other house pretty glad in the end that we've got america um you know you've got to agree on something and i just see in america so i do think we've got to try to find things we're going like a reasonable attitude towards the past that's why that matters i and again i stress i'm not trying to say that everything in the american past was good god knows that wouldn't stand up to a second scrutiny yourself scrutiny but nor was it all bad this wasn't a country formed in sin and in an eradicable sin it wasn't founded in 1619 in order to make the country wicked and incapable of escaping that wickedness 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 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 and some people say to me well that's okay and the genius of the founding is that it allows for that 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 and i see things like this bomb placed on america the other week with the supreme court league the draft league as being just a further example of that i'm very very worried about it in america and and because if america screws up everything everything else in the world goes yeah there's the degree to which america is still the beacon of these ideas on on which the c the country was founded and it's been able to live out in better and better forms sort of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles versus with the desire to improve yeah constantly an imperfect union 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 um it's a better life psychologically the resentment is a thing that destroys you from within so i just feel that people will um long for that and will find that that's that's the american way some of the division that we reveal now has to do with new technologies like social media that kind of 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 yeah which is relatively new um but we need to find reasonable attitudes towards these things and i that's why i say like it matters how you and my feedback on social media because we might we're all going through it to some extent we're learning and we're learning and we've got to learn how to do this without going mad you know i say this as my minimalist call to friends in this era was the main job is not to go insane yeah [Laughter] yeah and uh yeah like walk towards uh because you know i'm sure there's a hunter thompson quote in there like insanity and the weekends can be at least fun okay do you have advice for young people uh that just put down their tick tock 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 so april question but uh of course it i mean i can give specific advice for people who want to be writers and so on but that's a bit niche maybe um the writers will be very interesting sorry to interrupt also how to put your ideas down on paper and so the ideas develop them and have the guts to to go to a large audience especially when the ideas are sort of controversial or dangerous or difficult well the main thing to do is to breed when i was a school boy i'd ever have a book in my pocket um side pocket in my jacket or inside pocket and would read and um that wasn't just because i was swotish in some way but because i discovered probably at some point in my early teens i discovered something i wrote about this one i discovered that books were dangerous which was a thrilling discovery yeah i discovered that they could contain anything and also people didn't know what you were reading i remember i get far too young in age i read the doors of perception of aldous huxley um and um i i didn't make head or tail of it probably but i knew that it was about something really interesting and dangerous and i thought constantly when i read poetry or read history i was just constantly um thrilled and wanted to know more and and well if you want to become a writer you have to be a reader um you have to read the best stuff um and and you know obviously people disagree or agree on what that is and you'll find the people that really impress you but i know i just came across certain writers who just knocked me off my feet um and when you find those people like read everything and cling on to them and find other people like that find other writers like that or people are connected by history or scholarship or circles or whatever for you was it fiction or non-fiction is there particular books that you just remember or just give you pause well i remember that the first book that absolutely threw me was the lord of the flies of william golding which used to be a signed text and everyone's a bit snotty about because it's so popular um but i was thrown because i think it was the first adult book i read 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 you know and this was the first book i read where that's not the case the world turns out differently and i remember for days afterwards i was just in a state of shock i couldn't believe what i'd just discovered and partly because i sort of intuited it must be true and of course that's not to say that the lord's like there's lots of scholarship on what children do in the situation of being on the island when they do congregate and anyhow but yes that was a sort of introduction to the adult world and it was shocking and thrilling and um and i wanted more of it um it was dangerous and it was dangerous and then of course when i became interested in sex let alone when i was gay i realized books were a very very good way to learn about what i was and that was even more dangerous in a way and i thought i mean nobody knows what i know and he discovered sex that was an invention in books you just what do you mean no what i mean nobody no no no what i mean is that one of the things that gay people have when they're growing up is that you have this terribly big secret and you don't think the world will ever know you hope the world will never know and um it's been called by one psychologist the little boy with a big secret and um so if you discover that other people have the same secret there's a sort of thank god for that 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 i mean one of the greatest 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 it makes you feel a little bit less alone because somebody else feels yeah sees the world the same way is the same way that's what c.s lewis says it says said to have said we read to know we're not alone um but we don't only read no not alone we read to become other people um i mean i think i saw in books the version of the life i wanted to live and then i decided to live it and for i'm fortunate enough to have done so um i wanted to live in the world of ideas and um books and debate and i wanted to live in the debates of my time you know and i remember i remember when um like a lot of people i read alden when i was young and uh you know certain lines obviously stuck with me but i that poem of his which everybody you know knows on which he hated uh september the 1st 1939 i remember certain lines in that just like whacked me um what's that one sitting on a dive for the second street degrading it alone of the at the end of a low dishonest decade because 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 it sounds sort of cool in a way you know you're the only person who sees it but um so yeah anyhow that's a diversion but the point is if you want to be a writer you've got to be a reader apart from anything else you discover the the lilt of language and the the things you can do and i i've read people who and i still do who i think my god i didn't how did you do that in fact books books for me now and articles and other things fall into two categories one is i know how you did that uh and the other is i don't know how you did that and the and the best feeling as a writer is when you do the second one and i've and it happens occasionally in my writing life will you almost like return to something you've written or like right after you no the moment you write it you wonder how did i do that yes that's that's the most i've never said that before that's the happiest thing in writing yeah very occasionally it sounds but i mean i've occasionally finished something funny enough it happened some years ago in a long piece i wrote about the artist basquiat um uh i i finished the piece and i gasped i didn't know because because that's also a thing with writing is you you you it's not sometimes people say you need to write in order to know what you think that's not quite true sometimes you 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 [Laughter] very hard yeah sometimes it is true that you 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 typed it you you just go yes that's the greatest feeling of the writing almost like it came from somewhere else that's that's what um uh um bucunin says about you know what's the moment is tom stoppard's favorite quote about you know pecune is saying what happened to the moment where the right to other writers pen when he pauses where does he go in that moment um yeah that's so interesting that's 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 yes so that was advice for writers i didn't really give any advice for people in general but um is that oh you want to give health advice no to your channel a churchill and no i don't give health advice clearly because you implied that churchill was one of your early guides in that aspect so when you discovered your sexuality let me ask about love um two pers far too personal of a question to ask a brit but um what was that like and broadly speaking what's the role of love in the human condition sex and love and for you personally discovering that you were and maybe telling the world that you were gay i'm very perilously personal i do actually have a sort of rule that i don't talk about my personal life but uh oh rules are meant to be broken okay i'll break it a little bit um the uh the the one of the ways in which growing up and rising you're gay differs from going up and being straight is that it's almost inevitable that your first passions will be unrequited oh wow i never thought about that yeah now that's not to say i mean you know there's plenty of unrequited love among young men for young women young women of young men plenty of yeah we know that but it's almost inevitable if you're gay that your first uh you know passions will be totally unrequited because the odds are that the person in question will not be gay so the experience of love is mostly heartbreak it's heartbreak and disappointment that heartbreak can be beautiful too of course well as again it comes back to the thing is if you're a writer or something because you can always do something with it that's why all writers are sort of not to be trusted i i i didn't trust you the moment you walked in here no i mean it's a famous problem with the writers because you always think i could use uh it's dangerous it's a dangerous thing and all right it's almost like a drug right uh no it's it's not like a drug it's it's uh the fear that all things even the greatest suffering um it could be material what's that what's the danger in that exactly that seeing the material in the human experience you don't experience it fully you don't experience it fully and you might be using it 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 the moment he was told that his friend's death a tiny bit of him thought i could use this for poem and he did and the poem was wonderful but there's always that slight guilt for writers of am i going to use that anyhow that's a divergence 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 yes and a passion towards somebody that they had to lose so don't you know yes but there is a good sign maybe perhaps the more obvious perhaps problem is um reporting from war zones or bad places and wanting to find bad stories because it's useful and there's there is a definite guilt you get from that sort of thing like the worse the situation the more useful and anyhow um 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 [Music] came to sexual or romantic maturity later and there's lots of explanations of that um 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 that's that's one explanation but it it it's both a feature and a bug that you come to sexual flourishing later in life that could be seen as a yeah in the trajectory of human life that could be a positive or negative yeah but what's broadly speaking is the role of love in the human condition douglas well it's the nearest thing we have to finding the point what what is the point what's what's the meaning of life let's go there so what's the meaning is a hard one of course where is the meaning is slightly easier um and i'd say that everyone can find that um you gravitate towards the places you find meaning 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 yeah if if your ancestors are 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 um much more sensible than saying hey i don't know discover new ways of meaning um uh but love is um love is probably the nearest thing we can have to the divine um on earth and of course the problem of what exactly what type of love we mean is a is an issue well that goes to the fact that you don't like uh definitions anyway i do like definitions i just think they need to be pinned down but let's not let's not go there at the moment because it's uh does not pin down love at the moment well 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 yeah well but let's say human love with the greatest fulfillment in um uh sexual fulfillment in sexual love with another person is um probably the greatest intimation you can have of what um might otherwise only be superseded by divine love 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 place and that this is there's a beautiful beautiful poem of can i read it to you yes please um i'll try to find there's a beautiful poem of philip larkins which slightly says what i'm i'm i'm trying not to dock your question by referring to other people but maybe that's the best way to answer the question could be used to read we read a poem so there's a poem by um philip larkin called high windows which is um which is remarkable because he he um became sexual he was straight but he he and had a rather unhappy sex life but he um uh came to sexual fiction in the 40s and 15 with all the hell that involved and um he took us he took what i remember regarding as being a really remarkable and important view on the sexual revolution in the sixties which is the most people of his generation older people resented the young um they resented the freedom they had and actually they pretended the freedom was terrible and it was always getting likely to and laughing rather surprisingly a very conservative person took a different view and he says it in his poem and the opening of a poem is he says when i see a couple of kids and guess he'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 i wonder if anyone looked at me 40 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 he and his lot will all go down the long slide like free bloody birds 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 the divine he found it he found it in seeing a couple of young kids and knowing that one of them was wearing a diaphragm do you see what i mean it's first of all it's very counterintuitive but secondly this is the point that sex had been so tied up with misery i mean people don't remember this now when they talk about the past i mean that's one of my favorite books stefan zweig's the world of yesterday including the descriptions of what it was like trying to have sex in pre-first world war vienna you know all the men ended up going to female prostitutes you know so many of them got syphilis and this was their first experience of sex it was so goddamn awful and they were stuck with it all their lives i know so there's lots of stuff that's gone better in our last century and that's one of them but you ask about love yes i do think that love is basically um the the thing that gives us the best glimpse of the divine and by the way sex liberating sex doesn't buy you um love no i mean it throws in an entirely it it threw in another set of problems um if if there's any meaning on top of all that is we like to uh find problems and solve that as a human species and sometimes we even create problems douglas thank you for highlighting all the problems of human civilization and giving us a glimmer of hope for the future this is an incredible conversation thank you for talking today it's a huge honor thank you it's very kind of you to say that thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with douglas murray to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from douglas murray himself this agreement is not oppression argument is not assault words even provocative and repugnant ones are not violence the answer to speech we do not like is more speech thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you