Douglas Murray and Peter Boghossian - Full conversation on Woke ideology

[Music] so in the university system you have math you have whatever the subject areas may happen to be you have philosophy but then you also have a parallel architecture that's been set up in which insert word studies is set up gender studies and so gender studies isn't merely the study of gender it's the study of the study of gender and this these fields if and that's really among the most generous thing one could say about them these fields operate by their own rules they have their own methodologies they have their own ways that they advance so for example one thing that they use is lived experience in the literature it's called standpoint epistemology so we all have our own lived experience and we need to award their fond of privilege certain sorts of life experiences so we can i can never as assist whitehead or sexual male experience the the or have access to the lived experience of somebody who's has more oppression variables than i have so to understand that we need a field of study critical critical race theory critical studies which is just it's interesting by the way at portland state university there was an event in which white people could attend but couldn't ask questions so it was a listening event [Laughter] what could possibly go wrong but telling people to shut up based on their skin color first of all i was amazed that that was legal at a public institution so a long story short i found out that it was legal but it was inadvisable because if you do that then you could create another event for for white people where black people could attend but they weren't allowed to speak one of the most interesting things about this attempt to section off people according to group characteristics first of all is is that it makes a claim which is self-contradictory on its own terms it says simultaneously a group of people cannot understand another group of people because they have not had the same lived experience and it simultaneously says but you must devote your life to trying to do so right it's what i've described as the you must understand me you will never understand me conundrum but the the moral evil it seems to me underneath it is this is that if i cannot understand somebody who's black and somebody who's asian cannot understand me and i can't just understand a straight person a straight person can't understand me and on and on and none of us who are male can understand women and so then it's unclear how we should aspire to communicate in our lives yeah and it's unclear why we would bother to read or talk or think across lines it says we must be stuck in our silo i must only read gay white male literature because although i could try to read literature by other people it's really not worth it because i'll never understand it that suggests that we as human beings can never get beyond whatever trait we're born with it's profoundly anti-human and we know we know that that's false for a number of reasons for example you're gay and i'm straight but we both know what love is we both feel right and and i think there's nothing that either of us cannot understand about the other or their point of view i don't think there's anything you could say that i would say i just i can't wrap my head around that because i'm gay right and i don't think there's anything i would say that you'd say i just can't understand what darkness is talking about but it must be because i'm straight it's it's such on its own terms are ludicrous and poisonous it really it poisons interactions but we also know that that's false because we do it all the time we construct institutions we go to the bank and make change yeah we put in our order for lunch today yes we don't know the gender or the sexual orientation of the person who took our lunch so we certainly we do it with commerce but we do it with commerce in the broadest sense when we create systems to do these things yes and it also of course it it it among other things makes us retreat into the following problem which is that if we can't understand each other it's unclear how we could sort out any problems right other than through violence right because if either we can communicate successfully with each other as human beings or communication is in some way impossible because understanding is impossible and then what do we have other than violence now the thing they claim to be wanting to avert is precisely the thing that they're most likely to encourage right and when you think about that well what if someone is gay and black well then right so there are ever divisions in which you can only communicate more narrowly with people and who share yeah yes and and and all of these things because you know the intersectionists are fascinated by this aren't they they think there's nothing so interesting as finding interlocking oppressions and so on and this this in the identity politics and intersectionalist game is almost the heart of the game because of the assertion that is made that all all oppression in human existence is interweaved that that that it is all interlocked and that if you were to address one form of oppression you would have to address the others so the intersectionalists say it's not good enough to address remaining misogyny in society without addressing remaining misogyny in relation to black women in society and then it's not sufficient to address remaining misogyny against black women in society you must fixate on black trans women in society and on and on and on some of which is interesting so which but it's it's a long way away from solving any problems because among much else it says this is so completely interlocked that to unweave it to unlock it you would solve something and my suggestion is you can't because all of these things are more complex even on those terms for instance what do you do with somebody who has some of those characteristics but ducks out from another aspect of it what what do you do about a black woman for whom their femininity is very important to them but they don't have any interest in black issues or they identify as a black person they'd rather not be reduced to being you know a woman and on and on and on along this way you go and it seems to me that it's obvious that the intersections don't all resolve and find resolution they madden people because right there are all these tensions which are going to exist anyway imagine taking that upon yourself and thinking that if you think this way you are a better person that to me is what is particularly maddening it's the move from thinking about something to feeling it makes you a better person if you have this worldview if you're constantly looking at people inter so when you walk into a store and there's a mixed race couple that has to command a certain percentage of your attention the the the to steal man what they think they're doing they think that they're correcting injustices that have existed in the past by over-correcting in the present right so they think that because it's undoubtedly true that women have not always historically been able to achieve what they should have been able to achieve by didn't of being a woman because homosexuality was criminalized until the 60s because this country in america like many other countries in the world had terrible racial problems throughout a significant portion of its history which were not resolved until you know the latter part of the 20th century and some people think still not but it suggests that because of that historic injustice it must be rectified now by doing it the other way around at least for a period of time that's equity equity so because women undoubtedly didn't always have the opportunities they should have had will make up for it by insulting men now you can do the same thing on the lgbt bit but the most obvious one the most really rancid and divisive one now is black people undoubtedly had oppression in the past so we'll make white people feel like the bad ones and i think they think this is again this is steel manning and attributing good motive to it i think they think they'll only need to do it for a time the problem is the worker's never done the work is never done they don't know when they'd stop right they don't know who would call time and the crucial thing is they don't know when the doesn't end up swinging the other way like you know the question i always wonder on about this is is it wise for the portion of feminist studies that decided that the best way to advance women is to insult men do they think long term it's a good strategy to try to demoralize 50 of the population it seemed to me unwise and a hard way to get support long term if the goal is to reach some kind of a consensus if it's to agree to reach a consensus and the same obviously with racial issues if you agree that because black people in history have been disadvantaged is it wise particularly in a country like america where the black population is about 13 of the population is it wise to talk about the group that is the majority group still white people as if they are guilty beings who carry historic sin and can never be redeemed seems to me that if that is the plan in the over-correction i can see quite a lot of ways in which that goes wrong right when i first started looking at you know identity politics intersectionalism and all that sort of thing i i knew that i should try to engage with the fundamental texts what were the foundational texts and one of the ones that i heard about a lot is one of the most cited texts is i'm unpacking the invisible knapsack and i thought when i when i got this text i thought well you know there must be something there it will be it'll be something to contend with and no it's it's a few pages of assertions made by this academic many of which are erroneous many of which are false uh provably so and and yet this is one of the most cited texts as if what it says is true and and the problem with that is you set up then this hierarchy fight and the hierarchy fight involves people having to try to work out where they stand in a privileged structure all of which is unsolvable because nobody can do it with one person throughout their life nobody can do it with everybody from one class of person throughout their life because people don't fall out like that and aren't able to be summed up like that and you couldn't even do it hour by hour because it could change i mean you could have somebody who appeared to be at the very top of the hierarchy privilege pyramid who turned out for instance to have very serious mental problems and you didn't know that at 12 o'clock and at one o'clock you find it out and therefore you've got to move them around in the hierarchy of oppression nobody worked this out because it can't be worked out what a weight like she said what a way to to place upon someone as they walk through life to try to figure out what the oppression hierarchy is or the privilege hierarchy yes i mean just imagine like you're trying to navigate your life anyway and then you superimpose on top of that an additional structure of grievance yes which which also this is grievance is obviously the the key word here isn't it because to to teach somebody that they should feel grievance is in my view a quite wicked thing to do because we all in our lives could have grievances i mean most of us do have some grievances and um it's not always been seen as a good thing to have right it thwarts you in lots of ways so to be encouraged to have grievances is to set somebody off from the beginning of their life in a direction which is highly likely to lead them to unhappiness i mean i would say that although there are legitimate grievances that people have they should also be encouraged to try to reconcile themselves with the world to harmonize themselves with the world to recognize the things you can do things about and things that you can't the serenity prayer yes absolutely and this reason why this that particular bit of wisdom goes across all world traditions is because it's a fundamental insight that in the same way as we know that if we see somebody on an average day and they ask how we are we tend to say you know great or fine we don't say actually you know my bowels are playing up today and i've got that's fortunate that you know veruca's back and so on because not just because they may not want to know the detail um but because we intuit that to do so in some way would make their day worse you know it it would not only be a selfish thing to do it would be to spread around grievance in a world which already has a lot of unhappiness and which you don't need to add to and this is one of the fundamental things it seems to me that's so weird about this project to encourage people to be more at odds with the world than we all already are it's a fundamental moral error i think part of the problem with having a conversation with the end goal is that the work is never done part of the problem is also you can't identify the end goal because any disparity and outcome is is just assumed to be racist that's the day factor it's if there is a disparity in outcome race has to be at the but not in everything not in for example people who collect garbage or people who have higher risks of death you know truckers or something on death death row which is almost exclusively male 1 so i think that the yes nobody says we need more female representation on death row that's correct that's correct so i think that the key here is what does it mean to have an equitable system as opposed to what it means to have a system in which we treat people equally yes yeah this is the absolute heart of the issue isn't it um i mean we could get i don't understand pound glossing but we could get almost total agreement it seems to me in american society on the idea that people should have an equal shot in their lives i think that's a pretty good aspiration right and and i will i'll give them what they're looking for and this is where i think many conservatives have fallen the idea that we should we we can and should just pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps that's a good idea but it's far easier to do that if we have systems based upon fairness for example it's far easier to do that if we have everyone has a public education at the first rate allah john rawls so the the more there's a disparity in those starting conditions and i would argue that it's primarily economic which breaks down as a race as a proxy to that economic conditions the solution to me seems to be fairness [Music] the um equality the quality of opportunity as opposed to a quality of outcome that's what they're looking for though they're looking for equity they want to advance equity particularly the readjustment of shares as one's previous quote-unquote racial history factors into it yes so long as it's always in a beneficial light i mean this is we are so confused as a society now on all of this aren't we i mean we are so confused um most people i think would hear the words equality and equity as synonyms right i think joe biden in fact in the debate right didn't know the meanings of those terms i think i think it's really troubling when very very important distinctions are so little understood do we want an equal society yes in many ways do we want a society where every profession has exactly the correct representation within it depending on racial and other character traits of the general population so that if you have less than 13 of the of the workforce in any any sector of the economy you've got to would need some governing body to mandate that and that would separate people from their own proclivities and interests yes it means that if you didn't have exactly 13 um of black employees right you would have to make sure you fired some employees of other races and put some black people in it would also of course and this is the element that nobody ever wants to focus on it would mean that if you had 19 of black employees in your firm you'd have to get rid of some people who were black because they were black because otherwise the whole racial quota system didn't work which of course opens up the same thing which is highlighted by the lack of female engineers the lack of female fire fighters and much more which is you probably can't do that unless it seemed to be in an area which it's desirable to be in by society at this moment including highly remunerated jobs high prestige jobs and much more that's by the way one of the reasons why every time that the equity discussion comes up and it's around the media or hollywood i just put my head in my hands because i just think that these are the least typical professions imaginable and very bad places to play what remaining equality issues there are in society out because almost nothing can be played at that level it seems to be a bizarre way to just think about things in the first place i think we should try to find problems that we could agree on and could solve that's my view for instance i think we could agree on the following proposition across right and left such as those boundaries exist we could agree that for instance nobody in their lives should be held back from attaining a position they should or could attain simply held back because of characteristics over which they have no say but we could only agree with that if our starting value isn't equity yes absolutely and it would of course rely on well i mean there are other things it keeps certain people down who don't have the ability to to perform a task but the one i think we could we could agree on would be everybody capable of performing a certain task should be able to achieve that role in spite of any character traits of which they have no say so you know and and i all the polling data in in my own country in the united kingdom like here in america shows there's it's pretty much total agreement on this very few people still think that a woman who's the best qualified person for a role shouldn't get the role because she's a woman right very few people in this society now think that you know a choice of two people for a job one's white one's black the black person is clearly better qualified for the role you shouldn't give him the rocks he's black there's very little of this around in our societies now despite the catastrophizing claims of some of the social justice activists but if we said that's what we're aiming for we're just aiming to get to a place where immutable characteristics do not dictate what you can achieve in your life and it should not should not and once we've got there and if we're not there yet and you could argue that we're not but once we're there we'd like that ground to be held you know we don't want any snap back on it at any point we could agree on that the problem the really sincere debate that is going on in our time which we know with too few people identify is that there is a serious difference of opinion over how that is achieved and the broadly speaking portions of the left say it should be achieved by forcing quota systems for instance on everything from universities to boards of corporations and the rights answer is i say as myself an extent unsatisfactory which is to say don't push these things because it'll it'll it'll come out naturally anyway so long as the as you say the roles in preconditions are in place so long as people have got a good education they'll get there now as it happens i think both of those arguments have something to be said for them but if you only believe the first of those two then you create this world of pain the other thing is it causes poaching at the top of those minority communities so the best people within those communities they'll be highly viewed for fought over but the people who are not as proficient or adept or lack those skill sets what happens to them don't you think that there's something that's alienating socially that someone would say well they're only in that position because they're in certain immutable characteristics sure and the think about how one would feel as a talented black person for example yeah yeah absolutely this is um it's unbelievably humiliating and insulting this is one of my many reasons for objecting to all of this which is that it makes everyone suspicious of everyone else it means that everybody who is in a particular position their colleagues might be weighing them up as to whether or not they were a diversity higher or not somebody once pointed out to me that when at an american university in the 1960s or 70s when you saw a black student colleague if you were white you knew that student was damn right you know because among much else they'd had to get through more hoops right and then you get to the current state and the same person said they couldn't help thinking that exactly the reverse might be the case and couple that with the fact that they could never say that so we have many many people who are thinking that and it's festering and it's festering and they're thinking that and i happen to believe i don't know if you believe this but i happen to think that there's no such thing as a private belief if you intensely believe something like well and you can't speak about it you can't engage in a dialogue because then you could be accused of being a nazi or racist but you're thinking well geez why is that black person in that situation are they affirmative action then i can't help but to think the inevitable consequence of that would be you would treat them differently and that is a stain on all of us yes yes and and and then you get the problem of the hierarchies that you create in the name of justice that simply create greater inequality right i mean inequality is more of a concern to the political left than it is to the political right for all sorts of reasons but such as there is an argument about it this game the identity politics game is a horrible place to address inequality because you get the problems that i i identify as being for instance a board or a university needs to improve its black or female or lgbt quota the people they're likely to get that they're going to reach out to are for instance the woman who was about to be promoted anyway or highly likely to be promoted anyway the already very well educated black student or indeed in many of these cases an already very privileged an economic term student i say this in my own country as being the issue of reaching out for diversity and getting a black old etonian um interesting what have you actually done in this other than create what appears to be a diverse board or a diverse student body or a diverse workforce when in actual fact all you have done is just create a new privileged if in one way diverse class of person and you've got for instance zero class mobility no working class representation at all or you get to the stage where you have no viewpoint diversity because everybody is essentially from the same relatively privileged milia why do you think people are so hoodwinked by this because it's an answer to a number of very big questions in the gap left by religion it's an answer to the question of what should we be doing with our lives on earth that's a good question to address and if you say or anyone says i have the answer i know what you should be doing i know what you should be doing fighting for social justice you should be fighting for social justice you it's a reason to get up in the morning it's a reason to go out campaigning in the afternoon and it's a reason to fight over the dinner table and um tell your family that they're bigots this is um this is purpose of a kind and and by so one other thing which is of course it it says i mean this is the real attraction it says in a quasi-religious manner in fact it's better than religion isn't it because a religion says if you sort these things out then in a life to come you will find um salvation and the social justice activists and the intersectionists and much more say if you do all of these things we can get justice here on earth and who wouldn't want that if it was able to be achieved and if it was offered to you i mean the appeal of it is is extraordinary because here is i mean the world is wildly unequal may well always be i think probably always will be unequal in lots of ways it's unfair in a huge variety of ways our own lives all bear out that experience we know it collectively as well as individually and and these are all things we rail against or find peace against in our lives as the case is but if somebody comes along and says no we could solve all unfairness inequality inequity you've just got to join us ordinarily that's said by a cult sounds very baptist to me it's it's it's highly baptised it has so many resonances from the religious tradition which is why i say i think it's trodden into that gap so one of the reasons i think people are so hoodwinked i think they're hoodwinked by language i think they're hoodwinked by these words equity sounds really good inclusion sounds really good diversity sounds really good safe space sounds really good all of these words sound good and most people they don't really know what they mean it sounds good and it makes them feel good yes i mean just think anti-racism yeah who's not on board with that if you don't know the moral underpinnings of that or black lives matter well of course black lives matter yeah a movement with literally no open opposition and they got they hoodwink you through those words and then people say i think it was linda sarsour who put out a tweet antifa anti-fascist that's all you need what more is it than that it is the power of language there must be something in the brain's architecture or some evolutionary quirk or something that makes us susceptible to these well in group out group is is the obvious one is that it's it's once this stuff becomes the dominant theme of the time once once people agree on the reprehensible nature of racism homophobia bigotry misogyny once they agree on that then of course they want to be on the side of the people opposed to all of that the problem is and you jump onto the side of all the people who are opposed to all that and you discover they can do things as wicked as anyone else but one other interesting thing about that is that you mentioned language and of course i've always thought that one of the great advantages that any profession of faith or professed ideology has strangely enough is if if it looks more complex than it is um i think a lot of people have been intellectually intimidated by the studies movements by the grievance industry by the intersectionalists they they feel intellectually intimidated by it because the language these people write in is far more complex than the really rather simple ideas they actually espouse there's never a word they use they don't add syllables to unnecessarily you know problem a problem is never a problem it is a problematization you never have a narrative you always have a meta narrative and this is the case in every single term everything is made to sound more complex than it is which by the way as a writer annoys me because i believe the task of writing is to try to take the most complex ideas and make them simpler or at least simpler to understand than they might otherwise be and here are a whole set of academics in particular who take really rather straightforward and simple assertions which we could all understand and they make them impossible to understand they use such deliberately difficult language and i think a lot of people before that you know people whose children return from college and spout this stuff a lot of people picky parents become intellectually intimidated by it i think that it's the same thing with all of the implicit bias stuff and all that you know your boss tells you to do something that you feel isn't right but they've they've got a whole language to explain it and you don't really understand it and you you go along with it because you think you must be dumb and you're not dumb you're the cleverer person in the room if you've seen through that but there's there's not much to help you then very few people are going to reach out and there's a terrible opportunity cost if you're accused of all sorts of terrible things or even questioning it the question about the parallels to religion is so interesting to me so obviously we have to be woke this is to be born again blasphemy and political correctness certain speech codes the mechanism of enforcement there how do we prevent people from saying certain things well we have inclusion we have certain apparatus instead of apparatus of the state we have the apparatus of the university system for example that we can we can punish wrongdoers what parallels between woke-ism as a religion and either traditional religions do you see or do you think that woke-ism is a religion i think it's got all of the preconditions necessary to identify it as a religion it doesn't yet have an overtly clerical class but it's not far off it it's it's very clever i didn't think that after the main monotheism started to drift away as they did in recent decades perhaps you might say recent centuries i didn't think it was possible to come up with a brand new religion but wokism is about the best shot anyone has given it so far to come up with something original and and of course it borrows so much from the religion of the society which it's come up in you know it borrows the christian conception of guilt the difficulty of which is that it might be guilt without redemption for many exactly no redemption no redemption i was i was of course we were sitting in portland i was i was almost moved the other day at the courthouse to see that one of the massive bits of graffiti over the entirely graffiti-covered building said repent wow that's a that's a heck of a thing to see back and and repent for things you haven't even done and and um and pick up the religious right uh traditions of how to repent right i mean um uh here in portland there have been for instance ceremonies where white people prostrate themselves in the street in front of black people i was speaking to somebody uh yesterday who who was at one of these events and said that he didn't join in because he felt there was something a little off about it that you're damn right there is have you seen this stuff too which one's there they raise their hands and they but instead of the holy spirit they're raising their hands in front of black people ah i hadn't seen that one i thought the other one was the um the borrowing of the uh ash tradition in shia islam where you flay yourself and they have been sights in recent months of white people flaying themselves in the street and actually on one famous video black americans coming rushing over to them saying stop this we don't want you to do this right we never asked for this what are you doing quite rightly but i mean these are all this is all what happens when people stagger around an ideological wasteland looking for looking for things to latch onto and and remembering traditions that you might have thought have been lost and they want meaning meaning and they're they're kind of a little bit too i want to say savvy but to people walking on water to muhammad flying to heaven on a winged horse that's we realize that's largely silly by now but racism is real it's also interesting to me that love the sin hate the sinner that that you could we're all guilty of original sin and privilege is the original sin james lincoln i wrote a piece of 2016. you can have an entire system in which nobody's racist but the whole system is racist yes and that to me is a fascinating concept one of the ways we measure that is that we look at outcomes the disparities and outcomes so i i don't know i just i've been lingering on something that you said about in the old religions you have a better life better afterlife but this is even more wicked than that because there is the work is never done there is no amelioration there there is no or maybe there's just a minor gradation of solving the problem but the problem is perpetual it's perennial it's deep rooted and every single person has to actively work and we see this in education we have to actively work constantly to find racism and if you can't find racism in a situation it's your problem that's true it's very similar to sin except similar in that they're both imaginary but it's different in that eventually you can find the sin yes and of course at least with the christian concept of sin you also have the concept of hating the sin but loving the sin right in this scenario you hate the sin and the sinner so here's my question to you do you think and i fully admit i have struggled with this tremendously do you think we're all better off as a society with a benevolent form of christianity or with woke-ism as we see it today oh i much prefer the old gods to the new ones don't you so you knew where you were with them all right um the system was transparent they valued dialogue they had a correspondence theory of truth what you said corresponded to something in reality there was a way to redeem yourself i mean it's a fascinating situation in which i it's the substitution hypothesis it's the idea that people need something to believe yeah and as religion in general in christianity in particular has been on the decline something has substituted or come in for that and what that something is maybe people don't know the word intersectionality or the term critical race theory but it's those ideas that have come in and substituted for ideas that have have a long pedigree in western culture yeah and i do think that we may be far better off as a society with benevolent forms of christianity as opposed to the new religion which is just wickedness yeah i mean the problem is of course we don't have a choice in a way i mean these were all to some extent flotsam and jetsam on a larger tide one couldn't bring back a form of benevolent christianity or simply by willing it or saying the alternatives are bad you know we are where we are because history happened and there is something though about about somebody who's very religious and they see you and they say you're a sinner or they see me and they say you're gonna go to hell i've never respected that belief but i've always respected that person i've always respected the forthright speech that they have the fact that they commute they'll stand at you they'll look you in the eye they'll say that to you i don't see that with the new religion i see screaming cry bullies yes because it sets up problems which it cannot answer i mean that's that's the big problem isn't it christianity sets up problems which it answers right you have the fall of man then you have the redemption of man you have the first adam and then you have the second the real long-term evil of the woke ideology is among much else that it sets up problems which it cannot answer for instance i'm very interested in it as you know is in the theological and philosophical problem of forgiveness which i think is one of the most important things to think about in any society and you bet it's got to be the thing we've got to think about in a society where you've got social media and young people making mistakes in view of the whole damn world you know just to not think about forgiveness in a society like that is to set up an awful lot of people for very thwarted and unhappy lives so it preoccupies me quite a lot but here's the thing if you just take one aspect of the woke ideology the problem for instance of being a cis heterosexual white male what is the redemption mechanism for that they don't know other than shut up sit down let everyone else speak there's no way out of it other than that silence which isn't a solution don't take another one historical guilt i've written about this in two books now you know historical guilt is a very very tricky concept the sins of the father being meted out onto the sun goes back to the christian comparison the christian religion says the sins of the father cannot be visited on the son and the woke religion says know that the sins of his great-great-great-grandfather must be visited by the great great great great grandson and how do you separable and how do you expunge it you can't never never that uh seems to be an especially wicked set up i want to go back to something you said about forgiveness i think my own view is that sooner or later this ideology is going to be exposed as the fraudulent sham it is and the people who have been hoodwinked by it are going to be utterly enraged and what we need to do is to welcome back to forgive the proponents the race grifters who've gotten us into this [ __ ] mess and welcome them back into the very society they're they're they're attempting to dismantle so i think these people need to be forgiven there aren't many ways in which people can belong people can belong by religious affiliation national affiliation you've got family you might say clan or tribe the woke ideology says you can affiliate by sexual orientation gender sex and race we all know the problems we're starting to know the problems that can come from that the problem underneath this in terms of answering this question is we are all very familiar of the ways in which national belonging can go wrong we should be better at knowing how racial belonging can go wrong in every direction the obvious answer to all of this nevertheless lies in the other forms of belonging that exist in lieu of racial belonging or in view of religious belonging which you may come and go to ebb and flow the most obvious answer to all this stuff is national belonging and by the way i wouldn't give up on that entirely um really yeah i especially wouldn't give up on it in america but you you were from a small island well it's not that small and yet um i'm quite creative small [Laughter] but yet we're friends and you're sitting here and we're hanging out and we eat sushi and so that's that like transcend but the transcendent part of that of the relationship is i i would say it's a love of truth we have commonalities we have we should then well none of this is to say that that these things can't transcend nation i'm not saying that at all what i'm saying is that that as the late georgia scrutiny said that the national belonging is is is the widest possible application of the first person parole it's the widest possible application of we feeling um belonging in things that your nation has done even if you've not had any role in it belonging even maybe when your ancestors weren't in this nation but you still feel a sense of we about the nation the reason i say by the way i wouldn't give up on that in america in particular is that the american ideal many of the american ideals do have the capacity the capability even if it's a flawed one to transcend racial sexual and other lines because you can say it doesn't matter what race you are i mean again people will say this hasn't happened historically and i'd concede myself but you have the ability in this country to say look it doesn't matter what damn gender sexual orientation or race you are we're americans that that seems to me not to be something that should be given up lightly or given up on lightly it is one very good answer to that to say we are equal under the law for instance what a wonderful aspiration even if it's not always perfect in practice or exactly met in practice but my point is is since there are very limited ways to belong in groups larger than the family or the circle of friends we should revisit and think about all of these things and the only reason we don't is because we know all of the ways in which they can go wrong but as i always remind people everything can go wrong i mean you know love can go wrong love can cause wars love started the trojan wars we don't try to ban love we don't we don't remain totally suspicious of love as a consequence of that why can't we accept that everything can go wrong including racial affiliation gender affiliation national affiliation but they can also be the tools to get some things right and belonging in a nation it would seem to me certainly in america is a way to suppress some of these battles is to try to get beyond them again and not to split apart over them and what i uh obviously the non-american but as a lover and admirer of this country think is that it's so sad that so many americans seem to be giving up on that unifying ideal i think that ideal is the shining city on the hill [Music] i think that ideal is what america ought to stand for and and i think that's what's so difficult to me to see not only the physical acts of violence and physical acts of vandalism but the intellectual vandalism perpetrated by this grow and i don't think that this is a large number of true believers i think we're looking at a fringe percentage of the population in which they've sucked in a lot of these people to have the police but i want to go back and i want to answer that question directly so my response to that would be it's not a very glorious response but but it's a true one you have to attend meetings you have to show up at your workplace when they're having these conversations you have to know what people are talking about and when you engage these ideas the first order of business is for you to learn about them yeah your books have been fantastic but it's even beyond learning about them different people have different skill sets you're a writer you're a world famous writer you can bring a certain skill set to this that other people can't maybe some people are artists are you an artist okay well then you can't bring that skill set so maybe some people can do memes they can do art and maybe some people are not artists and they're not writers and they're terrified to speak before people but they have some financial means so maybe they want to make a financial contribution but make some kind of a contribution and know what it is that you're making a contribution to my other response to that is the greek value of parahisia speaking truth in the face of danger we cannot be held hostage to the delusions of other people we cannot be held hostage to the irrationality and dangerous divisive nature of this ideology everybody can say the truth as they see it everyone can raise concerns whenever they see them nobody should be silent nobody should feel intimidated nobody should put up with being bullied not a free society in a totalitarian society in a dictatorship sure people have to put up with being bullied they don't have to put up with it in america they really don't have to put up with it so when somebody in your workplace says you must read these books ask why and i ask them if they insist you read them and and there are government agencies in my country that have insisted the workforce read the following improving texts say okay if this is an exchange of ideas i'm willing to have an exchange of ideas here's some books i think you should read let's do a swap we can have a book discussion uh if you give them the madness of crowds i couldn't say it myself but um if your child is at school and they're being taught racial bias stuff if they're being told that they're intrinsically racist take your child out of the school or go to the school and say i will not have racism taught to my child not in any direction you don't get to do it now if enough people did that it would stop it would stop i have versions of the words people should use say to people trying to do this i will not take part in the re-racialization of my society i will not if you want to do it you can do it to your kids and they will suffer the poison from it not my kids not on my turf if every parent who was worried about this did that it would stop it would stop tomorrow the reason it doesn't is because of intimidation fear fear people are afraid and you know they there are lots of reasons historically for people to be afraid but in america today it isn't easy for people i don't by any means underestimate this but it's better than at any time in history to voice what you know to be true i think my answer is much simpler is to show up you have to show up you have to show up and you have to pay attention and you have to really understand what people are talking about and ask questions if you don't understand i would say the first thing to do is don't even challenge at all just ask questions well what what does that mean what do you mean when you use the word equity what does it mean to have an inclusive space because an inclusive space ultimately means that you have to have a speech restriction because if you didn't it wouldn't be people wouldn't feel welcome and then they wouldn't feel that they're included in the space so i think i think it's important to show up ask questions be on the same page about what people mean about words and i know that that must sound academic but it's not because that's one of the ways that people are being fooled by this is that they're being we're being beholden to these words that we don't know what they mean well of course there should be equity in the school system really what do you what do you mean by equity the other thing i think people should do is you're absolutely correct people will be ridiculed or they'll be treated with derision if they question this dominant moral orthodoxy and i think what they have to do is to not be intimidated by people who do that and among the ways that you can do that is you can find people who have similar views you can go online in person of course it's difficult now but i think as long as you have an ability and a sincere ability in yourself to be willing to revise the beliefs that you have to be willing to change your beliefs even if the people with whom you're talking don't have that i think that is a way for you to take the legitimate moral high ground hmm and not just moral high ground that an intellectual high ground too what else do you think people can do to fight back to say you know when people have had an either if they've had enough already or they're they're seeing it rise like the frog and the water the frog in the boiling water did you have that expression in the island okay so there we have froze okay we can boil this interview might be over very quickly [Laughter] so what what what do people do if they've either let me here's what i really want to say what do people do before they've had enough there they see the writing on the wall what do they do first thing is to trust their instincts trust their instincts and know that if there's something that makes them uncomfortable it isn't because what's happening is true but because what's happening may be false everything says to them if you are uncomfortable that's good that's your instincts to tell you i'm uncomfortable about that thing happening quite often it's because the thing that is happening is wrong trust your instincts right it's really interesting i would say trust your doubts too yes oh absolutely and and test them out and test them out against other people's organize definitely uh group speak up and i mean people also need to know the simple short the simplest shortcuts to try to undermine the reprehensibly demoralizing and divisive things of the time i suggest a number in the manners of crowds at the end one is one of the simplest the most effective is just always say compared to what what exactly are you comparing us to if you say we live in a racist society compared to what compared to where right name your country name your country if you say at this point we are living in x situation compared to what what what historic situation is it that you would like us to be aiming for and on that note i would say when you do have these conversations keep your cool oh gosh yes keep recording yeah yeah yeah and because invariably if people choose to have those conversations with you across that divide they are not keeping their cool no i've noticed and most of the time it's because they've come from a university system where they've never heard those ideas so they're they're brittle and so when they first hear them yes and i'd also add that the work ideology like all ideologies that claims to be totalistic and comprehensive has massive advantages because it tells people what they should be doing with their lives and it tells them the meaning of life and it gives them purpose and much more as we describe but it's also wildly simplistic it's both simultaneously both highly complex and wildly simplistic and my own view is that among other things we need to to reacquaint ourselves with the real complexity of life which is that people are complex that we are not in an existential fight between the children of light and the children of darkness it isn't an endless replay of the 1930s in which you are the anti-nazi and everyone on the other side is the nazi it's more complex than that and it runs through all of us that's why i particularly mind the cult-like thing of saying you know if your parents don't agree with you or your camp grandparents don't agree with you cut them off cut off relations with them apart from the fact that that is a cult behavior pure and simple it ignores one of the most important lessons in life which is people you love will think differently from you and that's okay it's okay that's probably good imagine how boring the world would be if everybody you loved and met in your life all fought exactly the same as you it shouldn't be the aspiration it shouldn't be the desire sure we can agree on things that we on some basic standards but right other than that you know you'll lose elections you'll win elections your guy will win your guy will lose and more often than not if somebody has a different belief if someone holds a different belief it's not because they're a bad person yeah it's either because they have different starting information or maybe they know something you don't know yes absolutely that's one of the most important lessons isn't it assume it's possible that the person you're dealing with particularly i have to say an older person you're dealing with may know something you don't you may know something about the world that you don't it's such an important thing for people to realize and to realize as you say it's such an important point is that they that people who think differently from you do not necessarily think differently from you because of malign motives right and and in that case that's really interesting to find out why they think the way they do and you may just go there the the worst case scenario is that you know you have a different view and the fact that they think differently helps you realize why you think as you think best case scenario is if they're right and you're wrong you should learn fast that that's the case so if you are setting up a system in which you believe you're solving every inequity on earth and actually you're creating hell you should find out about it fast you should find out about it fast don't waste a day more of your life on this crap and don't make people around you who love you and who you love suffer because you've given into a cult-like behavior and we've created that exact system we have agents of misery everywhere absolutely and you know just one other thing on that is we should realize this is not what we should spend our lives doing right you know we live at the most fortunate time in human history we have access to almost all of the world's information on a tiny device in our pockets we can listen to the world's music read the world's texts communicate to people on any other continent on the planet at any time we choose the idea that we're spending these years talking about race and character traits we could work out how to live on mars in this time we shouldn't be wasting this time we should be using it well [Music]

Channel: The Signal

Views: 209,317

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Id: -JWwcmjAqgI

Length: 61min 20sec (3680 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 27 2022