Free Speech and the Satirical Activist | Andrew Doyle | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E32

[Music] andrew doyle is with me today andrew is a british comedian playwright journalist political satirist and author who co-created the fictional character jonathan pie and the equally or perhaps even more fictional character titanium mcgrath he recently published his first book free speech why it matters which came out in 2021 but previously published two more as the aforementioned titanium mcgrath the first of those was woke a guide to social justice published in 2019 and the second was my first little book of intersectional activism published in 2020 i haven't met andrew before i'm looking forward to talking with him about free speech and about his satire and about the intersection between those two and and whatever else comes up thank you very much for coming on today i'm looking forward to speaking with you thanks so much for having me so shall we start perhaps with the discussion of your book i finished it yesterday um i've become notorious i suppose for my particular take on free speech and so it was a book that interested me tell me why you wrote it and and and what you learned in all of those things well it's not the sort of book i ever envisaged that i would have to write um you know i think if you go back 10 15 years the idea that free speech which is obviously what the seed bed of all our liberties would be something that we would we would have to defend would have probably seemed a little bit ridiculous to me because i basically took it for granted i thought that everyone was on on that side um but i fear that something has happened uh particularly over the past 10 years or so and it is connected i feel with the rise of this social justice movement what we might call critical social justice or however we want to call it a lot of people call it the woke movement what however you want to label that ideology which at it heart at its heart has a real mistrust of free speech and you hear it all the time in the kind of phrases that the activists use phrases like words are violence or oh this kind of language normalizes hate or legitimizes hate or all this kind of thing and there's a real genuine mistrust of the power of language to effectively corrupt the masses and what i wanted to do i suppose was try and marshal a defense for this uh for this principle that i had always always taken for granted but at the same time attempt to grapple with the concerns that people might have because i i my worry with the culture war as we call it is that you have two sort of extreme poles uh arguing against each other and most people are caught in the middle i think most people are broadly for the idea of free speech but they have a few reservations for instance when it comes to demagogues espousing hate or or hate against a particular minority group or something like that or people are concerned about the ways in which language can cause harm and i don't think anyone would deny that words can be hurtful so most people i think are somewhere in between and are open to persuasion i think my my point my principal argument in the book is that uh absolute freedom of speech is always going to be better and in fact by promoting free speech you're doing something to help those very people that you are concerned about so recently the scottish parliament passed a hate crime law that has its supporters and also its detractors and i'd be interested in your feeling about that now you said i believe in this book if if i remember the statistics correctly that there have been 120 000 incidents of police investigated speech hate crime in britain in how long since yeah that's been over the last five years or so it's it's it's worse than that the statistic i quote is between 2014 and 2019 there are 120 000 recorded incidents of non-crime they call them non-crime hate incidents and this is something which is now routine in the uk i mean obviously i'm going to be talking about the uk and the us and canada is a very is a very different kettle of fish i'm sure and i'm sure a lot of the people who are watching won't be familiar with with the problems we have in the uk of course we don't have constitutional protection for free speech we don't have a first amendment uh we don't have anything like that so we are particularly vulnerable and at the moment unfortunately in the uk uh the police who are uh trained by the college of policing who do issue very specific guidelines about this and anyone can check this because if you go to the government's website on hate crime and hate speech they make very clear what they're talking about what they say is that there are five protected characteristics and these fall into race gender sexuality gender identity and disability uh i think i might misquote that but there's one missing but anyway there are five protected characteristics and if a victim and they do use the word victim rather than complainant if a victim perceives that any speech or crime was motivated by hatred towards any of those five protected characteristics then it qualifies as a hate crime if it's criminal if it's not criminal if it's just speech or something like that it qualifies as a non-crime hate incident police will investigate that they will record that and although non-crime incidents don't lead to prosecution they do go on a criminal reference check that many people take we call it a disclosure barring service here so it can affect your employment prospects uh and is that without a trial that was recorded without a trial of course so you get a quasi-criminal record you get something flagged up when you particularly if you're applying for a teaching job say something like that where you're working with children it's very important and you get this thing flagged up so it does have serious ramifications but even beyond that we have hate speech laws which are encoded into the public order act which is one example but the other the main example is the electronic communications act 2003. in this country and i do quote the statistic in the book as well we have roughly uh 3 000 people arrested a year um for um offensive things that they have said online that's that's so in other words nine people a day roughly the police in the uk are arresting and that people in the uk will be familiar with this because if you see the twitter accounts of various police forces various police departments across the country they often put things out like you know make sure you don't say anything offensive or thoughtless online or we will be knocking on your door they say these very kind of frightening things there was a uh a recent police um display outside a supermarket um in the uk it went viral this image it was them next to a big digital billboard and the slogan on the billboard was being offensive is an offense and this was flanked by police officers who were socially distant but they were there in their masks which made it seem slightly more sinister um they got in a lot of trouble for that because people were saying well being offensive surely isn't a crime um but actually the problem with that is that the police clearly thought it was a crime and they you know they were acting on that basis they'd obviously hadn't just concocted this billboard out of nothing they'd really considered what it should say and more to the point actually they were right in this country you can uh go to prison for jokes for offensive remarks um and people have gone to prison have been arrested uh routinely for for causing offense and of course the notion of offence is incredibly subjective in fact in fact the the legal stipulation in the communications act is that you will have broken the law if the judge and jury deem that you have communicated material that is quote unquote grossly offensive well i don't know how you define that i i i wouldn't also who defines it is the real question as far as i'm concerned i mean i've looked into this legislation to some degree and one of the things that struck me about it was that it seems to be purposefully left up to the hypothetical victim to define offense which has become a subjective reality if if and and you can understand why that might be to some degree because how would you define hate and how would you define offense without especially the latter without making recourse to someone's subjective experience but then of course well we'll delve into that in a moment i should start with the hard question i suppose which is well clearly people can say hateful things and those things can be damaging psychologically and physiologically i suppose if people are stressed enough and the borderline is very difficult to identify um why is it that people shouldn't just assume that you're a mean loudmouth and that they shouldn't pay any attention to you at all because you're concerned about this i mean which is that's the general criticism of critics of of hate speech let's say and so why in the world aren't we aren't the people who are putting this forward just trying to make the world a nicer place what's the big problem here well i think a lot of people do assume that i'm a mean loudmouth i think they assume that about most people who who defend freedom of speech um but and and i'm sure the latter part of your question is is absolutely right insofar as i imagine a lot of the people who are skeptical about free speech are in fact trying to make the world a better place so i don't think that's mutually exclusive i mean the the the problem here is that the legislation as it currently stands here means that for instance if you say something critical about me and i perceive that it was motivated by hatred towards me on the basis of my sexuality for instance i could phone the police and that would be recorded uh and would appear on hate crime statistics in this in this country because it's all about perception that word is used about five or six times within the one passage in the in the hate crime legislation the word perception of the victim and again i say victim not complaining which suggests a complete disregard for due process but i suppose we can leave that aside but the most common the most common and the most frightening misconception i have found when it comes to people defending free speech is that they are doing so because they want to have the right to say appalling things about people uh with no comeback whatsoever and they want to go back to some imaginary good old days you know where you could just be casually homophobic and racist and sexist and all the rest of it and no one would call you out for that now i don't know anyone who falls into that category and and most people who are um you know advocating for free speech are doing so precisely because they are aware that in countries where free speech protections are meager minorities tend to suffer the most and in fact there is a a a it seems to be a corollary to me that those who are genuinely for free speech are also for equal rights and protecting the vulnerable in society and this perception which i really find unpleasant this perception that if you are standing up for this most foundational of principles of for freedom of speech if you're standing up for that you can only be doing so if you have a nefarious motive i mean what a horribly pessimistic view of of humanity and and it seems to be well it seems to be a direct derivation of the hypothesis for example that all western social organizations western are based on power and are best conceived of as tyrannical and so if that's your view why would you not assume that most use of speech is essentially an exercise of power in the service of tyranny but then why would you assume uh that the government in control of any particular uh country isn't part of that tyranny that you're describing it it seems odd to me to be um mindful of the potential for tyranny but then to outsource all your individual liberties to the state it seems contradictory to me um well i guess the way that that is uh um elided over is by allowing the hypothetical individual victim to define the offense this is the problem though this is i mean the problem i've run into and this is why partly why i appreciated your book is that increasingly people are called upon to defend fundamental assumptions that were so taken for granted that virtually no one has an argument that's fully articulated at hand when no one questions free speech no one has to defend it thoroughly as soon as it's questioned well it becomes an extraordinarily complicated problem the same with gender identity when it's when no one's paying attention to it it's obvious but as soon as you have to think it through it becomes a rat's nest to say the least when i was in the uk a few years ago i saw a number of things that i felt were disturbing um people seem to have accepted the omnipresence of cctv cameras to a degree that i found horrifying frankly i don't like cctv cameras i don't like the the message they portray which is that everyone is criminal enough so they should be surveyed all the time and someone needs to be watching i noticed too in london in particular that many buildings had instituted airport level security so that you had to pass through a metal detector and have your bags checked etc while you were moving in and out of buildings and it it struck me as quite horrifying given that as far as i'm concerned great britain and it's legal and parliamentary traditions are the epicenter or at the epicenter of western freedoms i mean you could make a case for france i suppose but not a strong one as far as i'm concerned yet this your citizens seem to have accepted this with virtually no problem and now on the heels of that we have this multiplication of of hate crime that's as much a surprise to me as it as it is to you i mean you won't have seen all of the cctv cameras believe apparently they're absolutely everywhere you can't walk anywhere uh in the uk without being potentially monitored um you know i'm not saying someone's watching you all the time but things are being recorded and digitized um yeah and it's it's interesting to me because i remember back in the uh in the early 2000s when the government was trying to push through its id card scheme and broadly speaking the left were unanimously against it and they didn't like this idea of living in a society where there's someone on the corner saying papers please no one really wanted that but we've become very docile and very accepting of the idea that we need to be coddled and monitored by the state i mean i know there's a recent debate about vaccine passports and people seem very blase about this idea that that we might have to have uh our id embedded and encoded onto a card to get anywhere or to do anything so i think there's there's something going on there and it is connected with what you've brought up in terms of hate crime legislation we've just become accustomed i mean you mentioned specifically the problem in scotland and and seriously it relates very closely to what you're saying because the snp who are the only really party with any clout in scotland that's the scottish national party um and it's never a good idea is it when you have one political party which doesn't really have an opposition um they have a reputation for quite nanny statueish policies you know they they introduced a uh what was it called the named person scheme it didn't go through in the end but they wanted to assign every child born in scotland with a state guardian you know they effectively didn't trust uh the parents to raise their own kids they have other examples you know minimum pricing on alcohol or a ban on two for one pizzas because they don't trust poor people uh not to gain weight um so all sorts of these sorts of policies but in this current hate crime bill which has just sailed through because there's no opposition uh hamza youssef the justice secretary has pushed through he specifically included an element to this bill which says that they can criminalize you for things you say in the privacy of your own home i mean that to me is i mean that's just a given i would have never thought that anyone in this country would not consider that to be an incredible invasion you can make a strong case for scotland as the uh ground zero for many of the developing many of the concepts that undergird the entire western notion of freedom and to see that emerging in scotland is absolutely stunningly terrifying as far as i'm concerned you think of mel gibson with a face covered in woad shouting freedom as he's executed you know in braveheart you do think of scotland as being associated with it but honestly scotland for some reason and i don't know what it is and it might be to do that it's effectively this one-party state it seems to have this incredible sense and they've really bought into this idea uh that unless they can police the thought the thought and speech of their citizens then they will just run run a mock it's there's another element to that bill i don't know if you know about this there's a specific element on the bill which talks about the public performance of a play so they've effectively said that they will criminalize uh public performances so say if it can be deemed that those performances were designed to stir up hatred that's the formulation stir up hatred i'm not quite sure what that means necessarily but the when when hamza youssef was questioned about this in parliament he actually said well theoretically a neo-nazi or someone from the far right could get together with a group of actors and put on a play to to recruit people to his cause and as i said at the time you know i don't know any neo-nazis but they're not into amateur dramatics that's not their thing they don't do that they wouldn't get involved and yet he's got this idea in his head that that is a feasible i mean it seems ridiculous but it's not really because the ramifications are quite are quite serious and and it and the way it's just gone through without any opposition really really troubles me i mean there have been modifications i should say in fairness in the initial bill in the initial draft of the bill they had said that you could be criminalized irrespective of intention in other words yes that was terrifying awful i mean if you wrote a play that then stimulated someone to join the far right then you were still responsible whether you intended it or not now the problem is you know with theatrical representation or any kind of artistic representation is sometimes you want to represent the worst aspects of humanity because that's part of drama and literature and all the rest of it i mean you would be there would be no artistic freedom if that went through so unfortunately that element of the bill was modified well and also the attempt to reverse the idea that intent is important is that's even that's even more uh catastrophic it it's always been a miracle to me that our legal system ever became psychologically sophisticated enough so that intent rather than outcome was what mattered because you have to be a sophisticated thinker to see that someone has done damage to someone else but and so the damage is real and marked and and troublesome and costly all of that painful but because the intent wasn't there the severity of the action is dramatically mitigated that's a sign of maturity and sophistication to note that and the fact that it's built into the legal system is nothing short of remarkable and then to remove that and to make the the felt consequences the the arbiter of the reality of the situation is a dreadful assault on the integrity of the law as such as far as i can tell well moreover it's something that everyone in intuitively understands we all understand the difference between murder and manslaughter you know we all understand that intent actually does like you say escalate the the severity of a crime and and and it's bigger than that isn't it it's because this like this idea that intention doesn't matter is actually built into so much of this what we call social justice discourse if you think of critical race theory uh it's just a given uh that there are racist structures and you can be racist without intending to be racist and i really do dispute that because i think in order to be racist intention has to be at the heart of that otherwise it's incoherent to me um but but this is this is really uh a degraded view of humanity i feel where we are effectively like marionettes um and that we we're just being played and that we don't have any agency anymore and therefore uh we can't be responsible for our own words not not just our actions we can't be responsible for our own words and the ramifications so we have to be controlled and we have to be stifled by the state and it's very it makes me very nervous so i've been thinking through um the importance of free speech i suppose from a psychological perspective and it seems to me that well we can walk through some axioms and you can tell me what you think about them if you would so i mean the first thing we might posit is that it's useful to think it's better to think than not to think and that might seem self-evident but but thought can be troublesome and and stir up trouble and your thoughts can be inaccurate so it's perhaps not that um unreasonable to start the questioning there but i think it was alfred north whitehead who said that thinking allows our thoughts to die instead of us and so he was thinking about the evolution of thought in some sense from a biological perspective so imagine a creature that's incapable of thought has to act something out a representation of the world or an intent it has to be embodied and then if that fails well it fails in action and so the consequence of that might be death it might be very severe whereas once you can think you can represent the world abstractly you can divorce the abstraction from the world and then you can produce avatars of yourself sometimes in image like in dreams let's say or in literature and fiction and movies and so on produce avatars of ourselves that are fictional and then run them as simulations in the abstract world and observe the consequences and we do that in our stories we do that when we dream we do that when we imagine in images and depict a dramatic scenario playing itself out but then we also do that in words because we encode those images it's one more level of abstraction we encode those images into words and those words become partial dramatic avatars and then the words can battle with one another so thought seems to work let's say verbal thought you ask yourself a question you receive an answer in some mysterious manner there's an internal revelation of sorts that's the spontaneous thought you know when you sit down to write a book thoughts come to you perhaps because you pose yourself a question and no one knows how that works but we experience it that thoughts manifest themselves in the theater of our imagination so that's the revelatory aspect and then there's the critical aspect which is well now you've thought this and perhaps you've written it down can you generate counter positions are are there universes that you can imagine where this doesn't apply are there situations where it doesn't apply are there better ways of formulating that thought and but i would say with regard to critical thought and to some degree with regard to productive thought an indeterminate proportion of that is dependent on speech i i don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech and that the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech so you and i are engaging in a dialectic enterprise you'll pause it something and i'll respond to it and you'll respond to that and we're we're we're in a kind of combat there's some cooperation about it as well and we're attempting to formulate a truth more clearly at least in principle if we're being honest we do that when we're speaking so our thought the quality of our thought is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds absolutely and then go ahead well i i couldn't agree more because i think speech is the way in which we collaborate on our thoughts you know that that's how it how it works you you refine those thought processes that you've described i mean i'm no i'm no psychologist but i understand this basic premise that that we have these various thoughts that are continually in conflict within ourselves unless we're able to articulate them and to engage in others through that process through that transactional process of speech then those thoughts are never refined and they remain in this kind of infancy and this is yes they're as refined as we can make them as individuals but that's also assuming that you even have the words which you also learned in the dialectical process right exactly it's not as though the truth is ever uh fully graspable but we can we can get nearer to it through that collaborative process of speaking and articulating the thoughts and in fact even in the act of like you say writing or articulating yourself uh as with your self-authoring program for instance the act of writing things out is what clarifies the points of view for you i've actually found that the the the the way that i think about these issues now is largely a product of of the fact that i've written so much about it and change my mind through the act of learning how to express myself on these points and and and the and the consequence of not having that opportunity i think is uh something i would barely want to contemplate and i think that to give an example of of uh of the moment which is that because any kind of attempt to have a discussion or debate about the perceived conflict between trans rights and gender critical feminism because to even attempt that discussion at the moment will have such uh grave social consequences and certainly in terms of career prospects major consequences people will not have that discussion i have people i know in politics in the media and they say to me quite honestly i will not talk about this i have concerns i have qualms i want answers to questions but i absolutely will not open my mouth about this and if you don't do that uh this is why no one understands the issue this is why no one has reached any kind of consensus on this issue all we have is a sense in which to have the quote unquote wrong opinion makes you a pariah uh and therefore i'd better not have that opinion well then that's not a sincerely held conviction that's just if the definition of wrong is continually transforming and in an unpredictable manner then it's best just to sidestep the issue entirely and then that leaves it murky and ill-defined and assuming that you believe that thought has any utility and so when you're sitting down to write when i'm sitting down to write and i produce a sentence you know it might have come from some theoretical perspective maybe i'm approaching something from a freudian perspective or a marxist perspective or or an enlightenment perspective etc i mean it's it's a it's a it's a psychological trope i suppose that we all think the thoughts of dead philosophers right we think we have our own opinions but that's really rarely very very very rarely the case it's not that easy to come up with something truly original and generally make incremental progress at best and so your ability to abstractly represent the world and then to generate avatars that can be defeated without you dying is dependent on your incorporation of a multitude of opinions and that in itself is a consequence of i mean that works to the degree that communication is actually free and that you can get access to as much thought as you can possibly manage so i can't see how you can deny the centrality of free speech as a fundamental right or the fundamental right perhaps unless you simultaneously deny the utility of thought but maybe if you are also inclined to remove the individual from the central position of the political discourse then maybe you can also make the case at least implicitly that individual thought doesn't matter and that mostly it's just causing trouble but i think individual thought is key and actually even in the the the outline you've described there there isn't there is individual agency in reaching a conclusion that has been articulated before insofar as if you are engaged with a multitude of writers and philosophers and artists and ideas and you've come out with a perspective well that perspective may not be original to you but the process that you've gone through to reach that viewpoint is individual to you you know it there is a power in that there's something important about that you know there's something crucial it's if you're a practicing psychotherapist one of the things you have to learn is to not provide people with your words too much what you want is for them to formulate the conclusion and you can guide them through the process of investigation you talked about the self-authoring process and which is online at selfauthoring.com that it steps people say through the process of writing an autobiography of analyzing their current virtues and faults and of making a future plan the utility of all of that is dependent on the the person who's um undertaking the exercise generating their own verbal representations right and that seems to cement it somehow as yours if you've come up with the words and so it's that it's the uppermost expression of personhood the ability to have the words that you should speak reveal themselves to you and to have the right to express them as you see fit yes in which case if you if you are merely repeating an accepted script then then to what extent can you say to can you even say to be an individual at all you know this this to me well i think that's part of the philosophical conundrum is that if you believe that all people do is repeat predigested scripts especially if your view is that the fundamental human motivation is power and the entire social landscape is nothing but a competition between equally what would you say selfish and single-minded powers drivers then there is no individual there's no individual in that conceptual world and it seems to me that that's the world that we're being pushed to inhabit and are criticized for on moral grounds for criticizing and i'm still trying to get my hands around this i mean when i went to britain i saw the cttv cameras and the increased security and it isn't clear to me how that's related to the social justice issues the so-called social justice issues that we're discussing but they seem to me in some very difficult to comprehend way part and parcel of the same thing the same dangerous thing well i think it's probably connected just in terms of this distrust of humanity or this belief that that um people need to be shepherded uh other otherwise left to their own devices uh chaos will reign i think that's i think that's the connection it's not directly connected as far as the issues relating to liberty and cctv obviously predate uh what we now call whatever the current social justice movement is called uh but i think there is there is something there i mean th the censorship the the impulse to censor what people read and this is something that particularly hits home to me in the arts is based on this view that ultimately it's the people are the or the populous is uh liable to corruption if they're exposed to the wrong materials and and what's very interesting to me about that i mean you've written a lot about the way in which literature uh for instance informs our experiences because it is in a sense like when you read philosophers your you're feeling your way through other lives and other experiences that are trans historical and cross-cultural and they inform the way that you react in your own individual experience but if you start to say as an artist no you can only represent for a start what you personally are or have experienced and you cannot represent anything which is morally problematic to use the phrase that they absolutely adore then art fails to and literature in particular fails to uh function in the way that it should because you can't explore those things this is why i often when it comes when it comes to censorship of the arts i often go back to what oscar wilde said about this he said there's no such thing as a moral or an immoral book books are well written or badly written that is all and that and that actually art and morality uh sometimes are not one in other words art shouldn't just be about promoting whatever the uh ethical trend is of any given time it's much bigger it's not art at that point at all as far as i'm concerned if you if you can state the purpose of the art in explicit terms especially if it's in accordance with a uh let's say an ideology that's shared by a multitude of people it's not art at all it's propaganda it's it's totally bernard i mean this is why so many people are getting sick of hollywood i mean to bring it down to a different level that people are sick of the entertainment on their tv on their streaming services and on hollywood because they have this constant feeling that they're being hectic by some moralistic person in a studio saying you know we our focus here is on diversity our focus here is on a um the right moral message that the the message of the story is one that would be approved by a group of intersectional activists and you get this all the time seeping into mainstream entertainment and people get really really sick of it it's not that when you see a lesbian kiss in star wars that offends you because you're a homophobe most most sci-fi fans are they've never had a problem with diversity or anything like that what bothers them about it is this sense of someone saying to them we think you're all evil bigots and you need to be educated and that's why we're going to shoehorn in a lesbian kiss into the end of this film that's why people have a problem i mean you you had it yourself recently with that ludicrous marvel comics thing where you became the red skull uh and that to me was a perfect example of the banality of uh an artistic endeavor that becomes an exercise uh in political pedagogy because that was quite clearly i mean you couldn't even say it was satirical because it it cannot be satirically effective if the thing that they are comparing you to is the precise opposite of the thing you believe i mean of all the sort of public figures i can think of you have uh the most clear track record of opposing tyranny in all its forms which anyone who knows anything about your work will know you've spent years lecturing about the evils of authoritarianism including nazism so the idea that you would then become this super magic nazi is is is propagandistic it's it's it's totally banal artistically firstly you can't you it's not satirically right um but also it's just it's just it's just you know what it reminds me of actually i don't know if you if you remember after the fatwa against salman rushdie um there was a film made in pakistan called international guerrillas where they turned salman rushdie into this evil um villain playboy who was colluding with the israeli military services and at the end of the film these flying copies of the quran float down and shoot laser beams into his head and kill him off but and that is such a ridiculous laughable film you know you put your enemy as the main villain and you just misrepresent him in that way well that's just what they did to you it's as banal as that and that's i think people are sick of that well the response thankfully seems to indicate that no it didn't did people it didn't do me any harm as far as i can tell i mean it was very um shocking to me that it happened it took me about 12 hours to sort of regain my composure because i actually couldn't believe it to begin with i i was sure that it was a fabrication yeah especially but then it was even more shocking when i found out who who authored it you know it wasn't it was someone who had an intellectual reputation and so but he's an activist isn't he he's a he's an intersectional activist he definitely his opinions definitely place him on the radical on the side of the radical left so it it's very difficult to so there's there's a there's an attack on on the essence of free speech i mean i remember reading dereda darada criticized our culture western culture has foul logo centric yeah and it's really actually quite a precise word so the phallic part of it is masculine obviously related to the phallus to the and logos is well that's the central concept of greek rationalism but it's also the central concept of christianity and the logos is something like the magical power of genuine and true speech it's something like that and there are representations of the magical power of speech that predate greece and christianity you see it in mesopotamia that this the equivalent to the savior and ancient mesopotamian uh religious thinking was marduk and he could speak magic words he had eyes all around all the way around his head which meant that he paid attention to everything but he could speak magic words and um and and so that idea of the of the centrality of speech to the and its association with the very fabric of reality that that's been an idea that has strived to make itself manifest for thousands and thousands of years i mean in in the judeo-christian tradition in the biblical tradition the word is given cosmological status as the thing that brings habitable order out of chaos and it's identified with divinity itself and so the assault on free speech is an assault on a principle that's fundamental beyond say it's centrality it's central importance to the enlightenment and is it it's it's an assault on the on the idea of the logos itself i agree this is why i always mistrusted the the the post-structuralist when i was studying for english it was the daradan foucault and liotarden these were taken as a given and this idea that there's no there is no truth beyond language you know language is all language the way in which we construct our perception of reality and our perception of truth and and actually there is no truth at the heart of it i just found it so depressing depressingly pessimistic because it also means that you construct can construct any kind of reality you like and it and and maybe that's part of the motivation for it is the the the hypothetical lack of constraint by anything that that seems to imply right i mean if there's no canonical reality well there's no responsibility that's for sure you could argue that there's no meaning and it's deeply pessimistic but maybe the payoff for that is no responsibility but there's also no constraint of any sort there's certainly no ethical constraint and i mean i keep trying to dig to see what's at the bottom of this uh this anti-logo sentiment and it's a very it's a very difficult thing to make to make it right maybe it's not even as deliberate as the way that it sounds maybe it is just the fact that that these theories for whatever reason became fashionable in universities about 20 years ago and now for whatever reason they have um escaped into the mainstream and and you know i mean most of the people that push this stuff don't read foucault and they don't know about the the people whose ideas they've they've imbibed and actually very much misunderstood you know i mean the whole point of the post-modernist was to to to to trash the notion of grand narratives and what we have now in the social justice movement is an incredible grand narrative you know we are we are on the right side of history we are the righteous ones and everyone else needs to be uh you know decimated and it's it's it it it seems to me that this stuff i i don't think it's as conspiratorial as that i think it's just sort of circumstances of history one thing after another and this is where we we're at now but the end result that we have to deal with which i think you've alluded to is this idea that if there is no such thing as reality beyond language then you are at liberty to just to construct whatever a pseudo-reality that you desire or is easiest for you and we see elements of this reverberating i think in a lot of the discourse at the moment of things like lived experience you know you can present as much data as you want but it will be disregarded if it doesn't tally with what lived experience really means which is what i want to be true well there's also this insistence that seems part of it that i mean i i objected to some legislation that was passed in canada and that's sort of what propelled me into public visibility let's say and to begin with i was mostly concentrating on the violation of the principle of free speech that the legislation seemed to me to represent because it compelled certain utterances and i was never a fan of hate speech laws to begin with and and this was something beyond hate speech laws because hate speech laws stop you from saying things whereas compelled speech laws force you to say something which is much worse even though the first one is also inadvised ill-advised as far as i'm concerned but i i've realized more recently that i was also disturbed although in a less explicit manner with the theory of identity that was an implicit part of the legislation so with gender identity for example and we're engaged in a discussion across our culture about gender identity i mean i know as a personality psychologist that there are females biological females who have masculine personalities and there are biological males who have feminine personalities that the link between personality as such and and biological structure is suggestive but not absolute and there's a lot of variability um but the idea that identity is something that you define yourself and that you can change at will at any point seems to me to be entirely counterproductive and dangerous because it's inaccurate so your identity isn't merely your membership in whatever group you happen to identify with at that moment it's certainly not merely your sexuality or merely your race in fact your identity is barely your race because your identity is something more like how you conduct yourself in the world and if you define yourself as black let's say that doesn't give you much of a map to encountering and approaching the world it's not nowhere near detailed enough and and then the idea that you define it i i've been thinking about that a lot you never define your identity by yourself you can't because you're surrounded by other people and they have to play along with you and if they don't play along with you voluntarily which means they appreciate the quality of your game and they understand it then you're either going to be alienated or you have to impose your identity by force but that's also not a very good solution i mean i just spent some time interviewing one of the world's foremost authorities on aggression and that'll be released in in a bit perhaps it's been released before this will be released he's done longitudinal studies of aggression and if the idea that our social structures are predicated on power was true then children would start out not being aggressive and they would become more aggressive with time and the more aggressive children would be more successful and none of that is true children start out more aggressive than they are on average by the time they're adults aggressive aggression levels decrease with age rather than increasing and there's no evidence whatsoever that it's a a useful long-term strategy in the social world identity is something you negotiate the way you negotiate a game yeah it's more it has to be that way it's just there's something rather sinister isn't there about the way in which present day identity politics is about imposition on to others uh rather than an assertion of who who i am or whatever that might be i mean i i always mistrusted him so i can see the the uh utility of identity politics politically speaking uh in in scenarios where people are marginalized you know i understand why gay people collectively came together back in the 60s to fight for their rights because there was a obviously a serious problem or the civil rights movement in northern ireland in the 60s and 70s and that kind of thing uh where catholics weren't able to to have the vote or to get housing so that sort of makes sense to me the current identity politic or what we might call identitarians a lot of it strikes me as about as about power in fact i feel like they would be an incredible subject for foucault if he were alive today because i've noticed this correlation and a lot of people have noticed this correlation and i never get an answer about this but why is it whenever online whenever i'm viciously attacked or threatened something particularly pernicious the person doing it always has their pronouns in their bio or a rainbow gay flag in their bio why is there a correlation that i've experienced again and again i mean it's it's almost inevitable at this point between uh the need to self-identify in terms of sexuality and gender and a kind of cruelty or viciousness or a need to attack an aggression one of the things that that disturbs me constantly about ideological representations of of the world broadly speaking is that their fundamental danger is that they always contain a too convenient theory of evil and malevolence and for me any theory that locates the fundamental problem of evil somewhere other than inside you is dangerous now that isn't to say that social structures can't be corrupted and aren't corrupt it's that's an existential problem in and of itself it's it's always the case that our social institutions aren't what they should be and they're outdated and they're predicated to some degree on deceit and people who use power can manipulate them sometimes successfully that problem never goes away and it never will but the when when the evil can be easily located somewhere else then you have every moral right to allow your unexamined motivations to manifest themselves fully because you can punish the evil doers and always remain on the moral side of the fence there's a huge attractiveness in that i think i mean this is something you've explored a lot with the idea from the soldier nitsan's idea about the good and evil cutting through the heart of every human every human being because that that to me uh it really gets to the heart of a lot of of what i would call a kind of infantile culture i think this is a symptom of of of of childishness you know whenever i was learning about literature and and what constituted more sophisticated literature and what didn't disney films childish films let's take tolkien for instance good people look oh sorry bad people look bad they look like orcs they're ugly and they are villains and then there are heroes and they are good there isn't complexity and if you have a more complex novel like a mervyn peak novel where people aren't necessarily good or bad they're both they struggle within themselves and with other people that is a mark of a kind of adult novel as opposed to a a childish novel right and that that's quite an important distinction and i think most of the political and ideological battles that i find myself in the middle of and i'm sure you do as well are because people are just reducing everything to this binary of good versus evil and putting themselves on the side of good it it is a very infantile almost um almost like a caricature of religion you know it's it's uh it's and i see it again and again we had it in this country with the brexit vote effectively what happened in the vote here and the reason why it became so toxic and families fell apart and you know you wouldn't believe i know it wasn't reported very much elsewhere but it was like a kind of ideological civil war here but not a very sophisticated one because it came down to this narrative that if you voted to leave the eu you were evil racist stupid and if you voted to remain you were you were good and progressive and and all the rest and noble and virtuous right and of course there are all sorts of good reasons to have voted either way and and this kind of caricature and it happens again with well you described you described it as a caricature of of religion and i think that's what an ideology is and this is one of the reasons that i've been inclined let's say to go to have my shot at the rational atheists much as i'm a fan of enlightenment thinking i mean i was convinced as a consequence of reading jung as primarily but also dostoevsky and also nietzsche primarily and solzhenitsyn i would say as well that and then biology as well as i studied that more deeply there's no escaping a religious framework there's no way out of it and you if you eliminate it say as a consequence of rational criticism what you inevitably produce is its replacement by forms of religion that are much less sophisticated i mean well it's not a religion it's it's a it's a fundamentalist really it's you know if i look back to my catholic upbringing actually acknowledge acknowledging your own capacity for sin is at the heart of catholicism that's why we have the confessional that's why you sit there and tell this stranger all these things you've done wrong because it's recognizable well that and that's that's far from trivial it's unbelievably not trivial and because it was so common like a common part of catholicism it can be passed over without notice and so religious the religious structures that we inherited i'm going to talk about christianity most specifically because it's the dominant form of it's the it's the form of religious belief that primarily undergirds our social structures it's our operating system my my producer came up with that term the other day and i thought it was apt um and it does localize the drama between good and evil inside and makes you responsible for that and and makes you encourages you let's say to attend to the ways that you fall short of the ideal and when you criticize a structure like that out of existence you don't criticize the questions that gave rise to it out of existence and the questions might be well what's the nature of the good what's the nature of evil those are religious questions what's the purpose of our life how do you orient yourself if you're trying to move up let's say rather than down how should you conduct yourself etc etc those questions don't go away and they can't not be answered and so the way that a traditional religious structure answers them is in a mysterious way it uses ritual it uses music it uses art it uses literature it uses stories all these things that are outside the realm of easy criticism and then some of that's translated into you know comprehensible explicit dogma and that's the part that's most susceptible to rational criticism but when that disappears i've been thinking about this a lot this week because of what happened to richard dawkins recently you know and i have my differences with dawkins and the rest of the russian atheists because i think that they underestimated the danger of dispensing with what they were attempting to dispense with and i see the influx of religious fervor associated with political ideas as a direct consequence of of the lack of separation let's say between church and state psychologically but but dawkins has fallen foul of this new religion but a religion but his case actually really is his testimony to what we're talking about that this is not a religion in a traditional sense it is an infantile religion that only sees things in binaries of good and evil because he was effectively he was posing a question about identity he was saying if it is possible for rachel dolezal to identify as black why is she universally uh condemned and derided uh but somebody can identify as the opposite sex and they are celebrated and all he was doing was posing the question he wasn't even actually making a claim yeah well he was doing he was doing what a scientist actually does i mean i've been shocked frequently in my interactions with journalists because i've worked as a scientist for three decades and i'm accustomed to the way that scientists think and speak and when i'm sitting around with my graduate students and there's a problem or an issue what they do my colleagues as well is generate a bunch of hypotheses about why that might be they don't necessarily believe them but that the first trick is to generate as many um what would you say hypotheses i said that already that might account for it ranging from biological through social etc and that is exactly what dawkins did he even said that's what he was doing that puts you on the side of the devil i mean there was a viral tweet this week from a teacher saying i will never allow my pupils to play devil's advocate i will never allow that in the class because some some views are oppressive and and are not to be entertained i mean but that's the point that's why the vatican will call in a devil's advocate when someone is potentially being canonized well if you can't play devil's advocate you can't think that's it you have to have devil a devil's advocate in your head if you don't have a devil's advocate in your head torturing every thought you generate you're not you're not engaged in critical thinking right that's for sure that's the scientific process to disprove yourself i mean that's that's what surprises me about uh richard dawkins response because i think what he didn't realize is that he was caught in this good versus evil binary and he had he had he was the heretic now uh he had been branded he posed the question you're not you're not meant to pose uh and therefore he's he's now outed himself as one of the demons he's there in pandemonium with the other demons now the so he then he of course backtracked and apologized and said well i didn't want to offend anyone and of course in a in an adult rational world that would be taken in good faith and and what but he didn't i don't think he fully appreciates what's going on here is that he's already uh marked himself as well here's his here's his apology let's say now what he should have said as far as i'm concerned here's what he said okay um i do not intend to disparage trans people i see that my academic disgust question has been misconstrued as such and i deplore this it was also not my attempt to ally in any way with republican bigots in the u.s now exploiting this issue and so okay it's so interesting that that's what he did because well it's buying any tribalism thing you know well it's also it's it's not a it's not the best response for to defend him what he should have said was something like look people here's something to think about that i was posing that's what scientists do and you didn't understand that but that's not my problem it's your lack of sophistication but he instead of saying that he immediately removed himself from the bad people and that was the republican bigots which just seems to me to pour fuel on the fire and and then he also said that he didn't intend to disparage trans people which isn't the issue at all well also there's no implication in what he asked that he had ever intended to disparage trans people but to be fair to him to be fair to him i understand when you're caught in the middle of a twitter storm you you just want it to stop and i've heard you talk about this as well it's actually your response probably isn't going to be the best the best one you just want it to go away oh well look i mean one of the things that's really worth pointing out here and i it's not like i don't have sympathy for dawkins i have sympathy for dawkins i sent out a tweet defending him yesterday i mean dawkins is an admirable scientist in my estimation i learned lots from reading his books um that doesn't mean i don't have my criticisms of dawkins but just because you have criticisms of someone doesn't mean that they've never done anything worthwhile or that you haven't learned something from them and that's especially true in the scientific realm um i just don't understand why okay so back to the twitter issue so what i've seen repeatedly and and this is worth some discussion is when i'm watching twitter when i'm watching these attacks on people what i've seen the most general pattern of response to be is that it doesn't take very many people attacking you on twitter before it's seriously psychologically disturbing yeah you know and that is interestingly related to this whole issue of hate speech that we've been discussing because it is the case that vicious attacks have a quite a pronounced psychological effect especially if they're personal and people generally fold and apologize instantly if my my sense has been if the twitter mob is 20 people it's sort of like they're reacting to 20 of their neighbors showing up on their doorsteps with pitchforks and and um torches and i think it's it's actually an admirable response in some sense because a well-socialized person actually does care what their neighbors think and if you offend 20 of your neighbors it's possible 20 of your tribe it's possible that you've done something wrong you might ask yourself that now on twitter you're connected to hundreds of thousands of people and if you would offend 20 it's not clear what that means it might just mean that you said something it feels a lot worse than it actually is as well it feels amplified because there's all these people who are strangers who know absolutely nothing about you and it's particularly frustrating because more often than not when it's happened to me it's always been an imagined grievance it's not actually something i've said it's something that they've assumed that i've said or or a way that they have interpreted this and and the more you try and fight back against it or try and explain your actual position the more they double down on their you know and you've had this as well people are going after a figment of their own imagination that's impossible to fend off you know and and it does do psychological harm and i've never denied that and this is something i addressed in the book because i i quoted i can't remember her name now but the writer talking about how hate speech uh could be said to be violence insofar as the psychological impact can have it can have a physiological impact it can make you sick it can make you unwell the the impact of words but of course that well the example i use is uh is taxation i could become full physically sick because i'm under stress from being overly taxed by the government does that mean that the government has committed an act of violence against me it could be applied to absolutely anything i think well an anarchist would argue yes right sure exactly but but that wouldn't be me um and but that but you could apply that to absolutely any conceivable scenario where anything that has happened to you has led to uh stress and and physical degeneration and so i don't think it's right to single speech out and say speeches that but we can say it's a one-sided argument because dangerous as speech free speech is we don't ever have to deny that there's such a thing as hateful speech or damaging speech or corrosive speech or untruth speech or pathological speech in in every possible direction that isn't the issue the issue is what's more dangerous to regulate it or to leave it be despite its dangers that's the only rational argument the only even if you have the most uh repugnant character who is advocating the most vile ideas about society and attempting to proselytize even someone who's attempting to recruit people to his or her cause um even something as vicious as neo-nazism or something like that the question isn't you know do i support what that person is saying because obviously we don't the question is do you take a few instances of people behaving in this way uh and use that as a reason a justification to empower the state to make a decision about what people can say and think that's the bigger principle that's at stake here i worry that with with social media and twitter as well is that we we end up buying into the illusion that there are more hateful people in the world than there actually are because even the people who send these hateful things probably wouldn't behave like that in real life there's something about the online world and what it does is absolutely i mean this is the heart of cancer culture this is why it works like you said it's just a few tweets that's all it takes i've seen situations where companies and corporations will backtrack on a policy just because of one or two tweets because they fear this this deluge of of of people they it has such disproportionate power and often with this this kind of council culture it is often about something that someone hasn't even said the example of dawkins is is perfect because a lot of the people and some prominent people i saw were saying look dawkins has now outed himself as a transphobe if you said if she said where are you tomorrow buckle well quite because if if someone is transphobic simply because you've decided that you know i mean it was the same with jk rowling uh it became suddenly quite normal for commentators on the mainstream media to say that she has said transphobic things well where because i've read her comments and her essay on the trans issue that she posted on her blog and it was a long uh essay which was very compassionate and nuanced and at no point it's the opposite she says that she supports trans rights and she would stand there against any discrimination if you and i've been in these fights all the time if ever you ask someone to say can you just quote the transphobic thing that she said they never can and an adult would say okay i can't find the evidence of my preconception so therefore i should revise my view but they don't they they they double down on it and they find these sort of they use kazoo stream whatever linguistic uh semantic tricks they can to come back round to the to the conclusion they'd already decided same with with dawkins i mean not just the american humanist association i saw a major blogger saying that anyone who is defending him is transphobic and like well if that's all it takes to be smeared in this way if it doesn't matter what you say if all that matters is what people decide that you believe then then i suppose this goes back to this pseudo-reality we were discussing i guess what what dawkins got in trouble for let's take it apart a bit okay because it's worth it's worth doing he said this is his original tweet in 2015 rachel dolezal a white chapter president of naacp was vilified for identifying as black some men choose to identify as women and some women choose to identify as men you will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as discuss okay so we put forth a set of propositions but the proposition has a point and the point is what is it that you can and can't identify with and what what power do people have to enforce their decision on others and that's really that's really the question he's asking if you strip it down and that is actually a question that's very threatening to well let's see who would it be threatening to what would be threatening to anyone who insists that you can choose an identity say in the realm of of gender and that you should have the right to enforce your choice despite other people's opinions let's say he's asking why is there an inherent contradiction in the intersectional discourse why is it why is it that racial identity is not malleable and in fact has to be strictly police hence why we have all these debates about cultural appropriation why is that so rigid and yet even if the lived experience let's go back to that the lived experience of the person tells them otherwise i mean rachel dolezal wrote a whole book in which she outlines how she feels that she has always been black it isn't just i choose to be black one day it is something her lived experience is that in essence she is so why is that to be vilified universally without question and there's no discussion to be had here and yet someone who chooses uh in other words what that gender identity is something that is malleable and open to options and actually infinite uh options why and i i think maybe he's vilified because he asked a question that's at the heart of the problem with identity politics period it's i mean particularly because when it comes to race i mean virtually all intersectionists would accept that race is socially constructed this is something they're always talking about and so therefore in a sense there is more of a case for transracialism if if you want to say that you can you that it is an identity that that can be mixed well in some sense we already accept transracialism as a given and so here's something i might as well get in trouble for this um well if your ancestry is 95 caucasian and 5 non-caucasian asian black let's say you're not caucasian right generally speaking you can identify with the minority group and so at some point the question becomes well it's a ridiculous question which which is why the whole notion of group identity construed in this way is so pathological but we obviously accept some degree of trans-racial identification if your racial group is disproportionately in one category but you identify with the other and that's instantly not only accepted it's it's standard practice right and i'm with the intersectionists on this insofar as race is we're all the same i you know ever since we've broken down the human genome we know there are no differences between us so this idea uh that it must be so rigidly police this this this social construct these arbitrary ideas and yet gender i mean i think it's something okay so now we know why now we know exactly why dawkins got himself in somewhere well true okay you know he put his finger well no it will for sure for sure but but the magical super nazis are always in trouble so you are exactly you know exactly but then what but with with the question of uh of the tr the gender identity debate but this is the debate we need to be having is actually the other thing he put his finger on there is that actually people are arguing with different definitions in their heads you know for for uh um for the identitarians the idea of a woman a woman is an identity it isn't a biological reality uh but for most for most people the classification of woman is biological reality not identity so in other words and why can i why why is it that we cannot have that discussion so okay so you believe this thing we believe the other uh and that's why we're at loggerheads uh but but let's let's have the discussion why can that not happen why does it have to be if you've decided that's what we're that's actually what we're trying to unpack is what's the motivation at the root of this and it seems to me i do believe it's something like a pronounced infantilism i mean one of the things i've been toying with is the idea that the the gender that the demand for gender fluidity in late adolescence let's say is something like the consequence of insufficient fantasy play in childhood that that i remember for example when my son was little his sister and her friends used to dress him up as a fairy princess they did this with some regularity and i kind of cast a dim eye on that but i thought it through and you know it sort of disturbed me and then i thought it through and i thought wait a second here leave the kid alone leave the girls alone he is playing out what it means to be female in dramatic play and he needs to do that because otherwise he can't understand what it means to be female that's how children understand that's how adults understand things for god's sake we go to a movie and we watch someone play out of female and we identify with that because otherwise we wouldn't be enjoying the movie and we get we get a bit of a clue about what it's like to inhabit someone else's skin so there's this necessity for play in gender roles and that has to manifest itself and if the play has been interrupted let's say by electronic equipment for example or or or any of the other things that might be interrupting it well maybe that desire comes back with a vengeance later and i i have to be whoever i say i am i have to be able to play with this and well if it's a developmental requirement there's going to be a lot of insistence behind it and it looks immature and it is because it should have happened earlier most people stabilize their gender identity by the time they're three or four but it doesn't always happen so there isn't infantilism in this demand for for fluidity of identity uh this insistence that other people play the game that i insist they're going to play and then what about the idea that the gender critical feminists would come in and say well the idea of dress a boy dressing up in a dress there's nothing inherently female about that or feminine about that in any case that all of this is a construct anyway and why can't we let the kids just some kids are not gender conforming and they can just do what they want i mean the the the concern i have with the current identity obsessed ideology is that they see a boy in a dress and they will say well he could potentially be a woman and by doing so are reinforcing the most conservative views of of gender to begin with um and that to me see well that that i i'm intuitively against that because i wasn't a gender conforming i didn't play football with the other boys you know i didn't i mean i didn't dress up in dresses but i may have done if they were lying around you know i i i i've i've i find it very odd that this supposedly progressive radical movement uh is so dependent on the idea of of very very traditional unyielding notions of what it is to be male and what it is to be female yeah but only in the case where the identity is across the the sex it that that it so you can be if if you're a man who believes he's a woman that's inviolable and has a biological reference point but if you're a woman who thinks she's a woman it doesn't it's completely malleable and so you know that's an inherent contradiction again and that's that's and it's work and it's worthy of discussion surely and and the contradiction doesn't just go away because you won't allow the conversation to happen which no the contradiction gets played out in in actuality if you don't allow it to be dealt with in abstraction so then the question is how do we break through and i mean this is something i've been really really thinking about is that it isn't no it's no longer just a matter of trying to persuade people it's almost trying to de-radicalize people at this point how do how do i explain to someone the world isn't this fantasy world that you've created in your head where it's just it's full of transphobes and neo-nazis and all these and good versus evil the world is actually much more complex and nuanced and requires discussion and thought how do you break through someone's fantasy so that we can have that discussion well it used to be that you sent them to the university so they could study the humanities that's the last thing you should do now well that was the answer i mean that was the whole point right to to make people more sophisticated in their conceptions and in which cases is it the case that it's over now if if people were to be educated out of those problems and now that actually the the higher education itself has become so ideologically driven that to go to university means you end up more indoctrinated than when you went there what what hope is there i feel like i'm i sound a bit frustrated here but i feel like i'm bashing my head a bit against a brick wall because half most of the time when i'm caught in an argument with with these ideologues they are arguing like i said with a monster they've created in their own heads i'm not the person they think i am i don't have the values they think i have and and therefore the the discussion is stymied from the outset and it does make me very frustrated and that's probably the real reason i wrote the book actually because i want i want the idea of free speech to be elevated again as a sacrosanct principle so that we can have these conversations and so that people don't get demonized and attacked for things they don't believe and and so that we can reach some kind of consensus uh on these issues that we've been describing these contentious issues because when you have an issue that's particularly tendentious you it requires more conversation it requires more discussion and more understanding and i don't think we're getting that at the moment yeah well i guess i'm somewhat optimistic about that because i can see all the possibility that long-form conversations of this sort bring well there's an appetite for them isn't it but but is there an appetite for them from the activists and the ideologues who have seized so much control in our major education i think i think so i think so i mean i've been struck by how how deep the hunger is for for genuine conversation and and very much heartened by it and so that's a counter movement i hope you're right i i just don't see any evidence of that from the people i'm talking about i don't see it from the people who will say educate it's never the same people and that that plays with us psychologically because of course we are built to more or less assume that we're interacting with a continuous community yeah and and we aren't we're we're we're interacting with a discontinuous community on twitter and so we're led astray in our presuppositions constantly and but it's worse than that it's like because it isn't i know it's i know it's different people all the time but they all have the same views on absolutely everything it feels like you're arguing with the borg you know it feels like just one one mind speaking through many many voices yes well it is that then that's the hallmark of an ideology it is precisely that and then i guess it's a matter of it's certainly and it's a matter of trying to understand the ideology ever more deeply to see what it's actually focused on but i do i do read their books and i do read their articles and i do try to understand i don't believe the people i'm talking about return the favor they they always use the phrase educate yourself and what they mean by that is read these select books and digest them uncritically that's what they mean by educate yourself you know they don't mean read widely and and tackle the various views and come to a conclusion yourself the last thing they want is critical thought critical thought is the enemy uh you know ironically it's the enemy of critical theories no it's a hallmark of white supremacy culture as far as i can see right that's what they say well that's because it's amazing too to see that set of ideas propagate itself across the culture so quickly the the canadian federal government in its diversity inclusivity and equity training program now uses those concepts like associating white supremacy with punctuality for example they use those in the training of their civil servants it's it's been accepted wholeheartedly to that degree i've seen them i've seen the screenshots that often get leaked of these training sessions bullet pointed uh hallmarks of white supremacy punctuality politeness hard perfectionism yeah all these noble things and i'm thinking well if i was a person of color i would be outraged by this this idea that this is this is a culture that's alien to me this is it's so offensive uh and this is what it's so absurd even i mean it's so observed that you you can hardly mount an argument against it i mean conscientiousness is is a is a personality trait and there's no racial differences in conscientiousness right and it it wouldn't matter to me if it was just a few idiots on twitter or these extreme it wouldn't matter to me but these people have disproportionate power institutional power political power i mean the biden administration is is on on side with an awful lot of this kind of of stuff and and the end so is the trudeau government i mean to have this in the in the training uh training documentation that's produced by the federal government it's just absolutely stunning it's also the document that i was referring to i tweeted about it yesterday it's so badly written that it's it's it's it's stunning it's maddening with him we don't know and how is it he's got away with his history of blackface for instance how is it that there is no consistency there like you know lack of effective opposition is a big part of it it's insane i mean if you look at those old videos it looks like he spent more time in blackface than out of it and yet he he isn't the one who's being attacked and vilified for that it's okay he's got a free pass it's weird to me yeah well the the opposition in canada and this is a problem in general is a real problem for our entire culture is that the woke narrative is very romantically attractive it's got this rebelliousness about it and this impetus to go out and march in the streets and you know to work on a global cause and like traditional conservatives and even traditional liberals can't mount a counter narrative they they don't have the imagination and it's a huge problem the trouble is though the cause that they're fighting for is large largely illusory and that that to me is is is very frightening we've had people in this country claim that our major universities such as oxford and cambridge are structurally institutionally racist all of the data tells us this is just simply not the case oh yes well that's just happening constantly in canadian universities the mcgill physics department has now put out a diversity inclusivity and equity statement and that that's predicated on exactly those views well i think we need to push back against the this particular hyper racialization of society because it is reinscribing old racial tropes even to the extent of fear of miscegenation this old racist idea of this fear of mixed couples you know there was an article in the garden here recently talking about how finding mixed race people attractive is problematic you know this idea it's almost just taking old racist ideas and just giving them a kind of hint of respectability and of course the end point of that is segregation you saw presumably the story at the in in california the brentwood school the elite school that segregated its parents but on their their what was it a dialogue session with the teachers and you would have white parents in one you're seeing that in convocation ceremonies at universities too how can this not how can this be anything other than racist you know it's interesting that the the group fair you know the the group um foundation against intolerance and racism a lot of those those people who are doing great work i think are starting to call this neo-racism there needs to be a label for it um and i think maybe that's the right way to go about it because the word racism has almost become meaningless because the the people who use it the most they throw it around so liberally you know that that i never believe it when i hear someone branded that way i assume it's someone not being honest and not being truthful so what do we call this what do you call it when people are advancing the cause of racial segregation in the name of anti-racism what do you call that i don't know what i think i think that's going to be the real struggle it's not it's not just breaking through the fantasy world i don't like this idea of having to negotiate someone else's dreamland there's that thing firstly but also there's the linguistic minefields how do you convince people the other reason i mean you mentioned the rebellious aspect of it i think the other reason why it's so appealing is because the language sounds like you're doing good social justice anti-racism who wouldn't be anti-racist black lives matter of course they do who would disagree with that but but but these that these phrasing can be used to push through some very pernicious uh ideas and i mean when it comes to anti-racism for instance i mean ibrahimovic candy makes absolutely clear in his book that he feels to be not racist is simply another form of racism that this that this dichotomy doesn't exist well what and that's why i find it very hard when i'm having these arguments because if i say i have a real problem with anti-racism people will say oh i see so you're for racism and then you have to explain what anti-racism means when used by these academics in these very niche fields such as whiteness studies you have to explain first what that means why that's dangerous for society and how in order to genuinely oppose racism you have to oppose the discourse of anti-racism i mean when you say it like that it's it's it's maddening isn't it it's it's like it it it it's it's it's the stuff of nightmares because there is no coherent sense and and because so much of it is rooted in language and misdirection through language and and and shielding what is actually meant it it becomes impossible to win the argument and and maybe that's the point you know maybe maybe this they gave the word to us gaslighting you know when they when they gaslight all the time and say the culture war is a right-wing myth or cancel the people who are the the chief practitioners of cancer culture saying that council culture doesn't exist when they when they say the opposite of what what is the observable reality i i don't know how to uh break through that how to how to break through those arguments because not only have they constructed a pseudo-reality in their own minds they've constructed the language with which to sustain that pseudo-reality so no one else can be drawn out of it and that that to me is going to be the challenge let me ask you let's go sideways for a minute now and and i suppose this is an exploration of potential solutions as well this has been a very serious conversation but you're a satirist and a comedian as well and so terrible how unfunny i am in real life isn't that awful you know it's when i'm doing stand-up if i've got a script i can be funny but i can't be funny spontaneously people are very disappointed about that i'm sorry well i'm i'm curious about your motivations let's talk about titanium mcgrath why don't you define describe her first for everyone so tony mcgrath originated as a twitter character um in around april 2018 and the idea of the character is that she is a very um privileged po-faced uh young white intersectional activist who is determined to be offended by absolutely anything she can problematize absolutely anything you know you could give her you know a pair of shoes or a hat or a a holiday in my gate and she would find a way to say that it is a irredeemably transphobic and white supremacist or something like that she can do those things that the activists always do so nothing is ever good enough for her she's also immensely privileged she comes from well independently wealthy background she lives in you know one of those uh sort of gated communities which is 99 white um but she uh she she has a deep mistrust of the working class um and um she but she she thinks that she is virtuous and noble and good and she goes on twitter uh and uh goes on the attack all the time uh trying to uh isolate things trying to save the world with in her through through uh intersectional theory um and it's a very recognizable type of act even if you know nothing about intersectional intersectionality or anything of the stuff that came out of the the school of thought of kimberly crenshaw or any of those academics even if you know nothing about that you will recognize this type of figure because this figure is ubiquitous on twitter on social media they always have their pronouns in their bio they always use the same terminology such as hegemony or discourse or or problematic or phallogocentric if you want to go back to deredar you know and she knows the right jargon to use lived experience cultural appropriation mansplaining toxic masculinity all of those kind of things and we know and all of these things tend to be slogans in substitute of thought you know they they're just things that get thrown out there and and so what i wanted to do with the characters you know what slogan means what you mean is uh etymologically no i don't slough garam it means battle cry of the dead i love that oh god for sure i mean that doesn't send a chill up your back you didn't understand it well that's this is it that i'm gonna use that that's great because that it is a kind of uh it's almost like a battleground of zombies who who don't have any capacity for independent thought anymore i mean you you try to get into a conversation with with someone like this and i have slept many times very publicly and the slogans that come back at you all the time and and and the lack of interrogation of those slogans you know but what i find so frustrating and so horrifying in some sense i mean i think a great canonical example of that is the interview that helen lewis did with me for the for gq which is it's now more popular online than the channel 4 interview which i think the gq interview has like 32 million views or something preposterous but i never did talk to helen lewis i just talked to the ideology and it it's not i don't like that i like to talk to the person and find out what they think but i heard you saying as well that before the interview uh she was very uh frosty and and and oh yes almost as though she had decided what you were in advance finally oh there was no almost right yeah she definitely decided what i was before the before the discussion yes exactly and she's been beating the same drum more recently as well which has driven many people to the interview because she published an article in the atlantic monthly and in another locale as well um so when when you're faced with those i mean it i just see it all the time so often and to give another recent example that we had the um obviously since the harry and megan interview with oprah winfrey uh and there was a controversy over here because piers morgan who hosts a show called good morning britain got into an argument with another colleague on the show man called alex beresford i think and um it was really interesting watching once they had the argument they sat down they tried to talk through the issues and piers morgan pointed out that some of the things that megan had said in the interview were factually wrong and had been proven to be factually wrong his response was alex berefort's response was but that's her lived experience and then he said yes but we have the evidence here that it is factually incorrect and again he said but it's her lived experience so in other words she that's that insistence that the fantasy world the subjective world trumps everything right so so and that once you've it's almost like these these phrases if you use the right if you use the phrase lived experience or toxic masculinity whatever you're in the club what you've signaled that you're you're you're right you know and i know that academics have always done this you know the jargon you're you're in the group you're in the in group if you've got the right if you know how to deploy the right words but there's something more sinister about this because it is morally right in these situations that that's the sinister thing it's morally incontrovertible you've made the statement and that's it and there's no further discussion that's right you're not evil that's what you're saying right i'm not evil so i think so with so the reason with titania i wanted her to be obsessed with this language and so and and and why i read so much of this stuff so that i knew the way that they speak is because i thought the best way to expose the the inherent contradictions of of of that position and the thoughtlessness moreover the thoughtlessness of that position is is is to to embody it in a character right so you were playing you were playing a dramatic game essentially which is a form of thought in doing so i've actually uh come to understand the people i'm satirizing a whole lot more and look let's face it every now and then they'll hit on a point that is actually right and and you know even when i read white fragility by robin deangelo which i think is a terrible book and is is so flawed throughout every now and then she'll hit on something and you think for a moment oh there's something in that and then she'll undercut it by saying well everyone's a racist and all the rest you know and it just goes back to being absurd but um and that book and of itself is a very good example of this you know setting up a reality that cannot be penetrated because she will say that any kind of uh critical questioning of her position is evidence of the very pervasiveness of white supremacy that she's identified so you can't win because even engaging in a discussion is proof of your malevolence according to her theory it's absolutely hopeless um but i thought i thought i thought because the movement is so written with contradiction actually the more effective way of tackling it isn't through dialogue firstly because the people i'm talking about seem are impervious to reason uh they mistrust dialogue they see debate as a form of violence so you're never going to get through to them that way yeah and that that's actually an explicit part of the theory it really is so then in creating a satirical character right it's not that they're anti-free speech there's no such thing as free speech in that theoretical framework it's a misapprehension all the way down to the bottom which is why i get so frustrated i've often been in debates where i've tried to invite these very people to participate in the debate to hear them out and they would say that to even appear would be to dignify the position so it's an absolute nightmare um and it also protects themselves from from potential criticism which is of course the whole point but i but i thought by creating a satirical character that embodies those contradictions that thoughtlessness it might reflect back onto them i suppose how they look to normal people because i don't think they appreciate i think they're so caught up within their own little bubbles within their own little groups they they never hear an alternative point of view i mean i i used to work with academics like this who were so within their little groups and they're constantly quoting each other and supporting each other and giving the illusion that their views uh cannot be disputed uh but if you're but what if you you're suddenly confronted with how other people perceive you and will that give you pause for thought okay so when you started to tanya you didn't announce that she was a satirical character you started playing on twitter tell me tell me the story exact what exactly what happened because sh that twitter account became extraordinarily well known and very rapidly so i'm curious about what how you did that and how you responded once it started to you know amass some cultural significance i was very surprised that it took on um it became so popular so quickly and i'd started it uh because more to entertain myself more than anything i was so frustrated with this and i wanted to try and expose the absurdity of i mean my background is a stand-up comic and as a stand-up comic i'm not necessarily satirical i will stand there on a stage and ridicule the thing that i perceive to be a problem with society with satire what you're doing is you're often embodying it with a kind of ironic detachment or you are you know you're addressing it you're always going after what you perceive to be the vices and follies of society and i thought that was a good way of doing it right so you had to stay on a kind of edge you had to be believable enough as the character right so that you could pass but you had to push it just past the point of of of what of rationality or believability it's a funny edge i i was continually getting into arguments with people and staying in character i've always stayed in character uh even to today and i've actually if you go to the titanic account now my pinned thread is a thread of conversations that i've had with people in character who are angry about the things i've tweeted and these can go on for pages and pages and it's fascinating to me because um it's close enough to the truth she says really ridiculous things really absurd things like um like is speaking or writing in english as an act of colonial violence she'll say that you know the only way to guard against uh fascism is if the state are allowed to arrest people for what they say and think you know stuff like this which is so obviously absurd and yet it's close enough to what people actually say um that people believe it and get annoyed about it and what i've always liked to do is to stay in character and have those conversations with these people um and um and then i posted the screenshots of the conversation so but part of the point of that is not to humiliate the people who had fallen for it because actually the point i'm making is i understand why they would fall for it because it's so close to what people actually say um and and and by doing that my hope is i suppose that it it exposes uh the folly of this stuff sometimes even when i'm in those arguments i will say something that is so out of the out of you know just completely out of the realm of possibility so stupid um and yet they still don't things have become so absurd that they don't twig i mean even today there was a story today in the uk uh a museum a jane austen museum is now going to interrogate jane austen's use of sugar in her tea because it has connections to plantations and white supremacy and slavery you know something like that which is just so absurd all the the recent controversy of a bluey the australian cartoon dog because it doesn't have enough dogs of color and and gender diverse dogs in the cartoon now that sounds like something i would make up as a joke um but it's real it's it's actually happening and people are taking it seriously and so therefore in a sense it's become harder with titania because anything that i come up with uh is going to be topped by by real life very very quickly um what have you learned about the people that titania annoys so she's a hyper politically correct avatar and but she tangles up people who are opposed to that sort of thing and so that must have also shed substantial light for you on people on the other side of the it does and so what have you learned well one of the things is that the people on the other side who might even be quite um might even be of my opinion about these things uh a lot of people are very quick to anger and and verbal abuse as a as a goat as an instant response um so a lot of the people who get angry with her really go after her looks and and i mean she's not real um a friend of mine lisa created the image of the woman she's a composite of four different women so it's not a parodies it is a thing it's not a parody of any particular person it's a it's a type of of person um and yeah the the the people who get angry with her the people who are genuinely angry about the social justice movement are absolutely furious about the way it is impinging on every aspect of their lives they are sick of it so when they see someone as extreme as to tania they really let rip and i don't think that's healthy you know i it's not in my nature to go and abuse someone online or to get angry online it's but i've seen the extent what it what it shows i suppose is that that kind of uh uh instinct to immediately go for the abusive or the vicious or the attack or the ad hominem is present across the political spectrum it's uh it's it's it's everywhere or maybe that's just a sign of twitter maybe that's just a symptom of of social media um and i've learned a lot about how social media works i think that's that's another thing about it is that i've really uh for one thing the the fact that she's she's been banned a number of times and i've learned how to avoid the bands and about about the way that big tech sensors and how they censor and why what is she being banned for so uh the tweets that she was banned for a couple of times she's had a number of one day suspensions a number of seven day suspensions once or twice it's been inexplicable to me why why she would be banned it seems a bit like someone at silicon valley has twigged that their precious ideology is being mocked and they don't like it that that's the only explanation i can think of however on a couple of instances it's when she's uh i suppose what they would say incited violence um and of course she hasn't done anything of the kind there was one tweet where she said she was gonna go to a uh a ukip rally ukip is a right-wing nationalist political party in the uk and she said i'm going to go to this ukip rally to punch people in the name of compassion or love or something like that you know which is the idea that a lot of these activists have that actually whereas words are violence and awful actual physical violence can be defended uh you know in their view it's so perverse and of course i was making a comment about the perversity of that idea that that you think microaggressions are are actual violence but you're perfectly content uh to go out and set fire to cars and beat people up if they have the wrong opinion or pepper spray people in the face if they voted for trump you know there's an obvious there's an obvious contradiction there that i was trying to expose so she had a ban there i think that might have even been the one where she was permanently banned i had an email from twitter saying this is a permanent ban you're not getting back on and then there was a bit of an outcry from from uh from people who follow some prominent people who follow her and twitter rescinded that changed their minds and and brought her back and as a result of that inevitably her follower account left because of course when you try and censor something you draw attention to it but you're always treading a fine line i mean my friend lisa who i mentioned lisa graves used to have a twitter account called jarvis dupont who was one of my favorite accounts on on twitter and he was um banned completely permanently banned they actually went on a bit of a purge of satire accounts there was one afternoon where twitter purged 12 or 13 satirical accounts and deleted them titania came back for some reason i think it's because she was the bigger account but a lot of them just got ditched and that i think shows that you know the the powers that be at silicon valley they don't like to be mocked they don't well no one in authority likes to be mocked it's the best way to undermine authority isn't it and it's it's why every despot in history has killed the clown well that's why we have to be so careful when any of our laws start making comedians nervous they're the ultimate canary in the coal mine even more so than artists i think the artists are next probably but absolutely i mean you all know in canada mike ward was fined i think forty two thousand dollars uh by the quebec human rights commission for a joke that he told if and by the way if you you know this yes montreal of course has one of the world's great comedy festivals and and some of that humor i've been to the comedy festival a couple of times and at midnight you can go and hear particularly outrageous comedy which i actually think it was in one of those where he said what he got fined for and i you know i don't even know the context because because he said it in french for one thing so i didn't fully understand but i read the transcript and i spoke to him about it and what was interesting is that he's not some you know open mic act who's who hasn't been on the he's an established famous successful uh comedian who was uh who was fined for a joke that if you actually break it down and analyze it there's nothing remotely offensive about it you know i mean it's perfectly pop there i don't think comedy can it can exist without the potential to cause offence neither can truth right quite comedy is almost always truth almost always that comedian says something funny and it's true in a way that people didn't expect and they know it and and well it's also that it's also that thing of of of uh of teasing the boundaries of tolerance of of of almost almost having that kind of cathartic effect the way that the the ancient greeks would watch a tragedy and and hear about this dismemberment and all sorts of i think to philosophically to purge themselves of the of of that evil that lay within uh in a sense when you hear a comedian say something utterly outrageous uh it it can have that effect on you and you laugh in spite of yourself and then you laugh again because you are saying to yourself why did i laugh at that that makes me i shouldn't have done that so you're almost laughing at your own response as well it has a double effect and we are really losing that i mean i don't know how it is in canada but but but in the uk a lot of this kind of mistrust of comedy and mistrust of jokes and the idea that certain jokes normalize hatred is coming from the comedians themselves and a lot of comedians uh take it on themselves to police other comedians material and they get very angry when people broach certain subjects i've i consider it very very unhealthy um and not all comedians by the way i'm not saying that all comedians i'm just saying certainly the more establishment comedians absolutely uh would fall into this category and it's it's really shocked me this has been since i started tatania in particular a lot of comedians have been very angry that i mocked the social justice movement or you know that i you know which to me is absurd because you know i spent years three years writing co-writing the jonathan pie character and because that predominantly mocked trump and the right and conservatives and and you know it went those were the targets that was okay so i never got uh this kind of venom about about that but as soon as i was mocking social justice ideology which i perceive to be an extremely powerful ideology you know this isn't i don't think i'm punching down i think i'm punching up at these at these these people who have captured these institutions and and are ruthless by the way absolutely ruthless and bullying i think the social justice movement utterly legitimizes bullying and i don't like bullies and i like to stand up to bullies and that titania is my attempt to stand up against the bullies but what they will do is misrepresent my intentions and will say oh no you just want to have a go at gay people or whatever or have a go at minority groups and and i've been very shocked by that because that that kind of response has even come from comedians and my viewers that if you've got half a brain you know that's not what i'm doing you i mean you absolutely have to know that that's what not what i'm doing and yet maybe they do know maybe that maybe this is a willful misinterpretation as a means to attack me because i've because i've mocked the ideology i'm not meant to mock but i tell you what whenever there's whenever there are consequences for mocking someone then i think that's the person you ought to be mocking right i think that's a sign do you would you what effect has producing titania had on your life and and if you could go back and decide whether you were going to do it again would you i mean it must be shocking i would think it's shocking to have have seen what happened to be at the center of what happened when you created that character but i'd like to know i well for one thing i didn't yeah i didn't expect the reaction that i got also you've got to remember that for a long time the character i was anonymous um because i i part of the effects of the character was that people thought she was real that was so sort of integral to it and then i was outed by a newspaper over here the week that her first book came out um and that although that was very good for the book because it generated a lot of publicity because then the story became that i was the person behind the character um in effect it had an innovating impact on the on the on the character because now what happens people know it's me behind the character people however what i will say is even to this day there's always some people who fall for it whenever i tweet something there's always some people who fall for it so it has that so so there's that but then there's the impact on my personal life well i would do it again because i feel very passionately uh that the the movement that i'm mocking the ideology that mocking is a dangerous one and i i feel very passionately that it is uh uh divisive and damaging to society as damaging as any ideology can be i think it has the potential to go to those lengths um and and so that i think i would almost be in dereliction if i if i didn't mock it it would be it would be i tell you what it would be it would be an act of self-censorship if i didn't go after these targets and that's by the way how most comedians i mean a lot of comedians think this stuff is ridiculous they won't go near it because they know that if they do they won't get on the bbc and they won't get booked by certain clubs so they just leave it well alone but i think i i i couldn't do i could i i just that's not in my nature so i so i don't regret that the fact that so many friends of mine former friends on the company circuit no longer talk to me that's something which i suppose i could say is unfortunate on the other hand how many times has that happened to you how many friends do you think you've lost it's in double figures it's certainly in double figures and i think um and it's not just titania it's also partly i suppose my politics it's also um it's it's effectively being honest about what i think uh and saying opinions that might not be the establishment of fashionable opinions and it gets people very angry i mean one particular incident i could think of was when i met for a drink with two friends very old friends of mine a married couple and uh he started screaming at me in the pub call i won't swear on your podcast but calling me an effing nazi and then another word which i probably shouldn't say at this point um but but and and i thought he was joking at first and and we had this conversation and it was true he'd he'd completely bought into this fantasy of who i was and and there was no going back from that um and i know it was fueled by alcohol but no apology was forthcoming or no no you know it's and then every now and then there'll be i mean it happened to be a couple of months ago where a comedian i've known for many many years from the circuit suddenly sent me this abusive message online on twitter and started attacking me and saying i was he said i was funded by dark foreign powers or so or something utterly absurd you know and um and i thought well okay so this is now that is what you'd say if you were funded by dark foreign powers well this is this is the problem like i said i said you know i've said it before if uh you know if i am getting all this dark money it must be very dark because i haven't seen any of it it's not you know that'd be great fine but i'm not and this idea that i'm this sort of it's that going right back to what you said at the start like that i'm defending free speech because i i because i'm an evil person who wants to say evil things and so there's all of that all that i'm mocking i'm mocking minority groups through to tania which is absolutely not what i'm doing it's the opposite i'm i'm mocking those very affluent and powerful people who uh very patronizingly assume that they they know what's best for minorities you know it's the opposite of what people say it is um but these kind of experiences uh on the one hand i think it's a bit sad isn't it because there are people now i've had to go through my phone and delete lots of numbers because i know we'll never talk again but on the other hand were they my friends to begin with i'm not so sure you know if they can if they can suddenly become so bigoted and that is the word well it's an indication of how profound the divide has started to become in our culture right that i mean 20 years ago i never lost any friends because of my hypothetical political opinions but um changed you must have lost your case must be much more severe than mine you know because you're so much more famous and so much more known has have lots of friends turned on you no actually not not a lot some there's some outstanding exceptions although even in those situations i would say there was extenuating circumstances no i've been i've been really fortunate in that regard that my my close circle of of intimates my family and and my my close friends have been staggeringly loyal to me under which is wonderful severe distress yes that's wonderful so is it maybe the case does that tell us that actually what it's really about is the fact that i was working in an industry which is you know the so the comedy industry is so on board with the woke ideology to such an extent that in fact so many of it's it's uh so many comedians are now really just uh advertised for that for that ideology maybe maybe i mean my professional colleagues certainly haven't leapt to my defense well that's that's what i was going to ask actually surely no that's been no that's pretty much done with i mean i i would say my name i've decided this recently because of the slurs that have been associated with me i can't in good conscience accept graduate students anymore because right if they go out you know you talked at the beginning about this register where that's been set up in britain where if you are charged accused of a non-crime hate act yeah it's recorded without a trial i mean i've been on hiring committees many many times and especially in academia there's an oversupply of highly qualified people of radical oversupply and so if there's anything in your record at all that's the least bit uh contentious it's like you're you're done and so being my student that's not a little bit contentious that's really really contentious and so it's now become impossible for me to to uh to serve my proper function as a as a scientist and as a university professor so that's it's taking a lot of adjustment on my part to get accustomed to that and i don't practice clinically anymore as well and there are a variety of reasons for that but certainly the i've become very very susceptible to attacks through the college of psychologists the governing board they can make the life of a practitioner brutally miserable with a single letter and that's very very punishing and it's also perhaps not necessarily good for my potential clients to be associated with someone who's controversial they already have enough trouble so although i've been fortunate on the family and friends front the on the professional front things have have been you know more dismal isn't that just suggestive of the of the the power of this movement and and the effectiveness of the effectiveness of cancer culture in fact the way the ease with which people can become stigmatized you know all it takes is a few accusations of your far-right or alt-right or whatever and it's there you know any prospective employer can google that and it comes up and who's going to take the risk you know the accusation is sufficient to damn you and and that's that's what you put the finger on the on the absolute catastrophe of the non-crime hate index it's like well it's it's a permanent stain especially in a in a technological universe where nothing is ever forgotten no matter how long the lag and it's worse because the government here feels no compunction to address this or or to no politicians seem to has well i suppose they are well because the strategy is that if you oppose hate speech laws you're obviously a hateful person why else would you oppose hate speech you know it's the old thing and a politician doesn't want to stand up in parliament to be the one who is seen to be siding with the the evil guys the bad guys well you have to make a very very subtle argument to stand up against hate speech laws because you're faced with the problem that there is such a thing as hate speech yeah obviously so when it's pernicious and terrible it's like okay so you're arguing uphill this is again why it's such a bloody miracle that we ever had free speech to begin with it's almost inconceivable to me that we managed to generate the baseline presumption of innocence that's a miracle the the fact that you can go bankrupt and start again that's a miracle the idea that you ever had free speech and that that was genuinely the case that's a miracle and none of this is is given the appropriate respect and awe that it deserves because it's so unlikely it's hugely unlikely i mean i know in the book i i talk a give a kind of very very short history of a free speech from the ancient greeks to today and it and it the point of that is to accentuate this point that actually the fact that we have it is astonishing and unlikely so unlikely and and all the more reason why we need to defend it we need to be really really vigilant about any cracks that appear in this in this because it will go away very very easily you know if we don't defend it and it's hard particularly when it comes to the idea of that's why i wrote a chapter on hate speech because and and and took the op the other side's view seriously because just trashing the opposing argument isn't going to help we have to talk about it and explain you know why it's important nevertheless well for one thing like you say hateful speech exists let's start from that point let's acknowledge that that hateful speech exists and it can be hurtful and it can do damage but then the alternative is a state that might in the future be completely unscrupulous that is going to decide for you what what you can say and those are the things that we have to tackle and no but and the other key thing is that no one knows how to define hate speech you know unesco the european court of human rights they they've all agreed there's no way to define hate speech every european country that has hate speech laws has different hate speech laws different definitions subjective abstract concepts such as hate such as offense such as a perception you know and these are on the statute books and you don't want this stuff on the statute books because it's all very well i mean i know the we talked about the smp and their hate crime bill the defense i'm always running into is people are saying yes okay technically someone could be arrested and imprisoned for saying some an offensive joke technically yes but no one in their right mind no jury no judge uh is going to we've got common sense it's okay well that's so myopic i mean what because you don't know who's going to be in charge in 10 years time you don't know who that judge is going to be you how can you possibly just you can be certain that someone will be in charge that doesn't approve of you and that you don't approve of that will in right that will in certainly happen you don't want vague vague wording on the statute books it's going to be exploited at some point even though even if it's not today there's absolutely no way that you can guarantee it against future against the future abuses of that and i don't it is as you say it's a certainty so i i'm i'm yeah i think it's i think it's actually one of the most important arguments that we should make uh and that and that we need to do you know free speech needs to be defended in every successive generation it's not something that you you know you know this you get it and then it's there forever no that's not true but there's something about human nature there's something about people in power there's something about the way that we are uh that it will collapse it's an edifice that is not secure at any given time and but it's hard it's that thing of of being smeared the risk is you're going to be smeared you're going to be associated with the worst possible kinds of people because of course it's only really controversial speech that ever requires protection uh and people are going to say well then you must support what what these awful people are saying and it's it's hard to make the case but it's a case that nonetheless has to be made and particularly by politicians i've been incredibly disappointed uh by the way in which uh politicians in this country have not made any kind of effort to to if anything as from what i can see uh there are moves even in the in the english parliament to push through further hate speech laws we should be repealing them not pushing for them but but no one wants to have the argument no one wants to be tainted yeah well they get identified one by one and taken out that's what happens well you get put on a list this is it the the the the identitarian left if that's what we're going to call them i don't know what to call them that's the problem is they're very clever about evading even a label um but they like making their lists they like observing and saying you know you you you are you are problematic uh you have sinned and and and now they have a an electronic trail they they these are the people that absolutely love going through all of your old tweets and messages and anything they can find uh and of course the point about that is you can do that to anyone there is no one alive who if you had complete unfettered access to everything they've ever written online or in their emails or text messages that you couldn't construct a case to damn someone that's actually one of the things that's more or less saved me is right well by the time i made my political statement which was a philosophical statement or even a spiritual statement not a political statement i already had 200 hours of lectures online and so essentially everything i'd ever said to students was recorded and there wasn't it wasn't possible to pull out a smoking pistol so this was very smart and also i mean but this is why it's also astonishing i i find it unendingly astonishing the way you are mischaracterized because because it's all there everything you think is out in the open you've been very very very clear and explicit about your point of view and so when they try and demonize you and turn you into this thing people can check and they'll realize that you're i think what they're doing is they're relying on the reputational damage being a kind of barrier to people even investigating who you really are yeah well to some degree that that works but it it doesn't really work because what genuinely generally happens is that you know for every person who wouldn't open a lecture because of my reputation there's three or four who do because they're curious and and then it has an even more perverse effect on in some cases on the true believers because they're primed to find anything i said offensive but that doesn't happen or maybe they even find it useful and then that's not good at all it's like well he's interesting when you meet the people when you get into conversation with people and you and you can see that you're not what they thought you were and they don't know quite what to do with that you know and that that to me is that to me is why another reason why we need more speech not less we need to have the conversation so that people can be disabused of the fantasies that they've been wallowing in you know but i do very much enjoy that when when uh people expect one thing and then they actually actually speak to me and and they they don't see that that there's no evidence of it because it doesn't exist yeah well it's interesting to watch that unfold in the public domain too i mentioned those two interviews the channel 4 interview that has been viral and and the interview by by helen lewis at gq and those interviews basically consists of consist of nothing but the attempt by the interlocutor to have a conversation with the person that exists in their imagination right because there is almost no relationship to me at all that was particularly the case with with uh kathy newman and yeah i was less so with helen lewis but it was still that was still essentially the issue it's quite reassuring though isn't it that that once it's out there people can see through it you know it's very reassuring is and what's what's saved me and this has given me an endless supply of hope i would say is that all i've ever had to do is be is just show everything it's like here's the situation no edits like this is what happened and every time so far so far you know i haven't been fatally damaged um yeah i mean one of the things one of the things i've learned most i think since since uh titania kicked off and and it became a known thing is i've learned simply never to trust uh the perception of someone as as as constructed in the media or online or you know i i it's not it's never the same person i've i've ended up meeting coming from the background i did most of my friends were always on the left i didn't really know uh conservative people and now i have a lot of friends who are conservatives you know and they're just not this villain that they were made out to be and even some famous conservatives who people have said they're absolute monsters they're evil they want to eat babies basically the equivalent you know and and you you get to know them and you realize oh my goodness the the the perception is so removed from the so far removed from the reality that even i once had had bought into it myself because everyone's telling you this oh yeah the same thing is i've certainly had that experience repeatedly repeatedly i never trust it now i like whenever i hear the way people talk about people online i just i i never trust it unless i know someone personally i'm never going to trust that again i think that's it's an important lesson for me so what's next for you and also how how do you make a living you can't make a living as titanium mcgrath oh well i mean you're locked down still so it's got to be hard being a comedian right so i mean well comedy came to an end i mean the last i did a tour i did a stand-up comedy tour in 2019 early 2019 and that was really uh the last big thing i did because as soon as i was about to do some more live performances the lockdown the lockdown came and it's the same you know i'm not complaining because absolutely every live performer has has the identical experience and we've we've all you know i'm not in a position to complain uh and what yeah it's a very good question i like it because it's also very direct how do i make my money well i um i write articles for various publications i um there's the the titania books uh have have kept me going um i obviously used to work on the jonathan pie character we had a couple of television shows and live tours those those were particularly lucrative and for a long time i did just make my money as a stand-up comic so literally just the money i would make from um from from the circuit uh now i've i've just got a job with well it's it's you know i gave up being a full-time teacher for this and i uh was on a regular wage it was a good it was a good salary and uh i left it at great risk you know because i don't come from a wealthy family i don't have the means to support myself without this kind of stuff so i uh i went well i actually went part-time first and was on the stand-up circuit and then i started earning enough from the stand-up to to get by and so i went full-time stand uh but i was i was really i was genuinely struggling financially for a long time and then um then jonathan pie happened which was very successful uh particularly because we had a big viral hit around the time of the donald trump election which actually went viral in america as well and that really helped broaden the character and then we did live tours and all the rest of it we we played the london palladium and the hammers with apollo and so it was a big thing for me and then titania happened and the book did very well and the second book did well and how many copies do you and you don't have to tell me obviously but i don't know actually the truth is i don't know i i i that's something i should ask at some point it's the sort of thing i don't look into you know it's i i i i got a royalty check the other day and i thought that i thought it was done and actually this was quite a lot of money i thought well okay that so that's good this is something that can keep me going but i've also just got a new job um as a broadcaster on a new channel called gb news in the uk uh and that will be a pretty full-time full-on uh presenter job um so i will be but what's good about that job is uh you know i think we have a real problem in them with the news media in this country is that we don't have enough diversity of thought and and the conversations that we ought to be having this gives me an opportunity to do that so it's very much related to the work i've been doing but in addition i'm going to continue with my comedy work and titania uh we're doing a uh some live shows with titania played by an actress we did that just before the lockdown we had to postpone the tour now we're going to do another one um so i will yeah it's it a lot of people get very scared by um making a living as a creative person because you're always like you it's a tough way to make a living man it really i mean you're taking a massive risk and most creatives i know are very very poor you know it's it's simply not and most have other jobs you know there's a tiny fraction that are hyper-rich and everyone else starves virtually no one and i consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to do this full time the stuff i love full-time because for most of my adult career i couldn't and i was you know i had to have a full-time job and as well as go out in the evenings uh and do all of this stuff and and so it's a real uh you have to really commit and and you also have to be aware in the back of your mind of the likelihood of failure that's it you know that's the other thing that you have to be fully aware of um and i'm i'm by no means take it for granted you know i i think i'm here it's the stuff i've done comedy and titania and the book i've just written none of this stuff would make me rich it would it would it would keep me going uh the new job i've got is going to be a more regular income which is something i miss i haven't had this since i was a teacher i missed that you know there was i missed routine and all the rest of it um yeah but i think another complicating factor is not only if you're trying to exist creatively not only is it a very high risk proposition financially but you lack that psychological uh comfort that comes from routine which you know people artistic people often are hyper critical of routine but god alive man routine keeps you sane and trying to invent yourself every day that's that's not for the faint-hearted i've seen very few people manage that successfully across decades no absolutely and i i think particular you know particularly in comedy you know you because you have to work for about three or four years on the circuit without getting paid anything in fact you're losing money because you're paying for your travel expenses and then you get somewhere and you don't get you don't get paid for it and and it's this is why a lot you'll find a lot of comedians particularly in the uk are from from quite wealthy backgrounds or privately educated because they you know they have rich parents who can help them out put them up in a flat and they don't have to work during the day and they escalate much quicker through the ranks but but if you come from my sort of background you can't do that you have to have the job and then and you have to it's like having two jobs uh and so you have to really care about it my advice is always i do believe although it comes with that insecurity if it is a vocation for you you have to do i mean for me i couldn't have done anything it is a genuine vocation for me even if i were making no money whatsoever out of comedy or writing or the rest i would still be doing it because i would feel unfulfilled if i were not doing it i think there's something also quite i mean i take your point about the practicalities of living in the business of living but my god i think uh depriving yourself of your vocation can be so soul-destroying no it is well for for i've i've spent a lot of time studying creativity scientifically and um the first thing that's useful to note is that creativity is not common i mean everyone isn't creative that's wrong some people are very creative a minority of people are very creative and i mean it's it's a continuum but you don't get you know you don't get creativity till you get out to the point where what you're doing is original and that's very difficult so it's a minority proposition and then of those original people there's only a tiny fraction that can make a successful financial go of it because it's just you have to be creative plus you have to have some sense for marketing and sales and business and you have to be reasonably emotionally stable and etc etc it's very very difficult but if you are creative by temperament well that's you and to not do that is to not be you it's like asking an extroverted person not to be around people or an agreeable person not to engage in intimate relationships or a conscientious person not to be driven by duty it's like that's what you're like and so yeah you're stuck with it it's a double-edged sword creativity it's vital it's entrancing it's necessary um it's transformative it's disruptive but it's a high risk high high risk high return game and the probability of failure is overwhelmingly high even if you're an entrepreneur and you know more practically oriented in your creativity the probability that you'll make money from your innovation or your invention rather than other people is very very low but but you need to find a way i mean it's also very difficult if you're a creative person to a lot of creative people don't think in practical terms they don't think in terms of uh money actually they're hopeless a lot of them might i know are hopeless in this now they also tend to be casually contemptuous of that to regard as practical concerns as selling out it's like you should be bloody happy if you have the opportunity to sell out so i think that the ideal is to find a way to pursue your vocation but have one eye on the reality that you know you will have to earn money somewhere and yeah i mean yes and i think it it's it's that's why i think i'm lucky in so far as with titania i hit on something that had commercial viability but it was very true to what i desperately wanted to do and i think that's so rare i think uh some of the stuff i've written some of the plays i've written for instance i don't think would have any commercial success whatsoever but i wrote them because i needed to write them and and and some of them didn't even get on and maybe one day they will and that would be great but well just think what you have to accomplish though right you have to have your creative endeavor aligned with market demand at exactly that time it's impossible yes it's very very unlikely actually that's why i always say don't attempt to to anticipate the zeitgeist because you won't you like the best thing an artist can do is do what they believe and hope because a lot of it is luck i mean there's actually there's a technical literature on that too i mean what essentially what you do is continue to produce ideas and right it's a darwinian competition essentially they're like life forms these ideas and now and then one will find a niche that it can thrive in but but the best way to uh maximize your chances that that niche will manifest itself is to be um is to over produce because i look yeah for i'll give you an example i answered a bunch of questions on quora so that's a website where anybody can ask any questions and anybody can answer i answered about 50 when i was playing with quora and one of them was a list of everything people should know of things people should know in their life and i derived my books out of that list yes it was disproportionately successful most of the answers i generated got virtually no views but it got it must be hundreds of thousands now but even before i wrote the books it was tens of thousands but had i not written 50 i wouldn't have got that one the other 49 failures so to speak were the the answers weren't necessarily worse they just didn't hit the zeitgeist like that answer did and and i think that's a great piece of advice over production because it's the same with the beatles they they they look like an overnight success it's because they've been playing endlessly in those dingy clubs in in europe you know before before it happens it you you you produce they say it takes ten years to become an overnight success that's that's it so it you know of most of the things i've written have done nothing and gone nowhere and had no success whatsoever it's just but but the one thing occasionally when it hits that's that's what sustains all the rest of it it's also why creativity is is continues to be selected let's say from a biological perspective it's like that's why i said it was a high risk high return game almost everything you do creatively will fail but now and then you're disproportionately successful and so that keeps the whole game going you didn't have any sense did you that when you put the lectures on youtube that it would explode in this way i mean not in this way this was completely i still i i'm still shocked constantly by my life i'm shocked out of out of sanity by my life i just can't this is why i asked you about titania you know you you get at the center of a whirlwind like that and there's something very surreal about it and i mean yeah i i keep getting hit by surreal things and it's very hard to wrap my head around it like this red skull episode was just one of many equally surreal occurrences but yes no i had no i had no idea i knew i was working on something important back when i was in my 20s when i wrote my first book and it was out of that that all my lectures came and i spent 15 years working on that book and i worked on it about three hours a day and so i re i and i thought about it all the time and so i knew there was something to it not necessarily because they were my ideas but because of the people who i had read and and delved into while i was writing the book i knew the ideas were significant and and i could see the effect of the ideas when i was lecturing on my students so i had some sense that there was something vital that i was involved in something vital but sure but had you uploaded those videos a couple of years before or a couple of years later you probably would have missed the zeitgeist and nothing would have happened you know i mean it doesn't matter i always think with any kind of creative endeavor and or intellectually it doesn't matter how good you are in a sense it has to be good and the timing has to be right and and like you say if you just keep i think persistence is it if you just keep doing it not only does your craft get better and and you are when if it does hit you're in a position there's no doubt look if you if you okay so in in scientific literature the hallmark of impact is citations and so if your work is cited it means that someone who's written another scientific article makes reference to something you wrote and that's all tracked and it's used for promotions and it's used to judge scientific merit it's it's it's it's its own science uh citation tracking um a very small number of your published papers accrue most of the citations so that's the first thing so what that means is the more papers you publish the more likely it is that one of them will become highly cited and my highly cited papers aren't necessarily the ones that i thought would be most impactful so yeah um you but the other uh piece of information from literature on creativity is that the best predictor of quality and so you could index quality by impact let's say or by citations is quantity yeah it's not a great predictor but it's the best one and so and this is good advice for everyone out there who's a musician or an artist it's like produce produce produce produce as much as you can because you do get better at it right you absolutely do and and so there's that but there's also i think the other important thing is to to actually be true to yourself with in in your artistic endeavors in safaris don't be trying to anticipate the desire guys don't be trying to anticipate what other people are doing my big concern in the current climate that we live in is that a lot of artists are choosing to self censor because the penalty for risk taking has got too high uh you know you can be completely uh i mean if i think about that think about what kind of catastrophe that is because we've already discussed the fact that the impediments to creativity are almost insurmountable and so then you add an additional one which is self-censorship because of social pressure it's like you just decimate the creative enterprise by doing that we wouldn't have anything we we the western canada would be decimated it's ridiculous i mean an example i often think of is one of my favorite playwrights is edward albee and when he came to write his play the goat which was a very controversial play because it was about a man having an affair a sexual affair with a goat behind his wife's back and obviously that doesn't sound palatable well at least he went beside behind his wife's back exactly at least it wasn't sort of an open sort of paganistic thing absolutely but um i mean it's it's a shocking play and it's meant to be it's about where our lines of tolerance are where they lie and why um and all of his friends told him don't do this you've got a a valuable career an incredible reputation you're turning 80 you're 80 he was roughly 80 years old when this play came out and they said you're just going to scupper everything and he said that one when that he got that response that's the reason he did it he went out there and he put the play on and it turned out to be a huge success it won i think the tony award for best player was critically and commercially successful it was absolutely massive so um it just goes to show i think uh to an extent i mean i'm not saying disregard uh feedback from other creative people or people who who have suggestions what i'm saying is if you're true to your muse whatever that that is uh the rewards will come actually or they are more likely okay so that brings us back to free speech too because you know the problem with laws that abridge free speech is they abridge creative endeavor and that's a terrible thing because it's the source of endless renewal and it's the thing that fixes corrupt structures and so to to take aim at that is to take aim at the very process that would rescue you from the conundrum you you you are pretending to be obsessed by i mean has there been any innovation not just in artistic terms but in scientific terms without the risk of offense without you know i mentioned i mentioned the example of galileo in the in the book because you know he wasn't he caused a great deal of offense but oh hell darwin who offended himself so badly that he was sick he was sick for like a decade because of the implications of what he'd thought up which were thoroughly offensive to himself as they would be in in with his belief system at the time and and but but that's that's the we can see in hindsight what we would have lost if people weren't willing to risk offending others in fact even what you said to kathy newman in that interview about you're risking being offensive by disagreeing with me now in this way like it's how it's important to risk offending people it's because otherwise you just end up in this kind of you know this hive mind and and and for the arts it becomes utterly stultified it becomes so boring when everything is predictable and everything is in line with a a viewpoint and no one wants to you know the art is the best way that we interrogate the complexities of humanity it's it's it's i i love what sometimes what the filmmaker lars von trier he said in an interview once that sometimes when he's making a film he will take an indefensible moral position and attempt to defend it through the film which i think is such a fascinating idea dostoevsky did that all the time in his great novels and so brilliant i mean that's what what made dostoevsky so staggeringly brilliant was he would take positions that he that he despised with all his soul and make the people putting those beliefs forward that strongest characters in the book i mean he was so brave it's the best thing to do it's it's uh i wrote a play once where i i complete i it was a one-man play where i completely tried to embody the kind of person i despise it was someone who enjoyed relished watching by acts of violence and he would take uh uh scour the internet for clips of real life violence and it's something i could you know whenever i've had that whenever someone's tried to show me a beheading or something i've i know i never want to see that kind of thing i know i never want that in my head and so i wanted to write a character who who relished it but from a position from a non-judgmental position i've never put that play on i've written it it's done but but the act of doing it was so incredibly liberating and interesting um and the idea that you can you know you keep hearing this all the time um you know whenever a new film or a play comes out of a book um is this sending the right message david lynch's last series the latest twin peaks series was criticized i read a review saying well there's violence against women in this and he needs to be called out for this well representing violence against women isn't an endorsement of violence against women you know maybe that's what the character does and maybe we're supposed to hate him for it or whatever you know and or if you read an autobiography of a complete reprobate there can be something really interesting about that and and imagine all of this gone all of this potential but that is the end point of of that's why i believe that this this current social justice ideology is anti-art i think it's it's it's opposed to the the artistic spirit quite quite fundamentally opposed to it uh which is why i feel we must push back against it so that's a great place to end no no that's great that's great well thanks a lot e uh much appreciated it was a pleasure and the time flew by which is a good marker of a engaging exchange of free speech let's say absolutely thanks so much for having me jordan my pleasure good luck eh thank you [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 633,093

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, free speech, anthony doyle, titania mcgrath, andrew doyle, richard dawkins, Titania banned twitter

Id: aoH1g5GYhPw

Length: 143min 4sec (8584 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

On this Season 4 Episode 32 Episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, Jordan is joined by British comedian, author, playwright, journalist, political satirist, and voice of Titania McGrath, Andrew Doyle.

Andrew Doyle and Jordan discuss his new book, “Free Speech and Why It Matters”, the hate crime law in Parliament, the attack on free speech and its importance, Twitter attacks, creativity, Titania McGrath’s story, and much more.

Find more Andrew Doyle on his website https://andrewdoyle.co.uk, and check out his book, “Free Speech And Why It Matters.” The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast can be found at https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/

FreedomOfSpeech #Antiracism

[0:00] Jordan introduces this episodes guest; writer and comedian Andrew Doyle [1:30] Why Andrew wrote the book "Free Speech And Why It Matters." [3:30] The hate crime law in parliament. [8:30] Why should people be paying attention to him? What's the problem here? [13:00] Jordan's experience in the UK. CCTV cameras, in London many buildings had airport level security; bills in Scotland; The importance of intention [20:30] The importance of free speech and thinking; self-authoring [31:30] The link between CCTV & social justice and the propaganda in Hollywood. [35:30] Red Skull [37:30] Attack on the essence of free Speech; Derrida, Foucault [43:30] Identity [47:00] The ideologies of good vs. evil and caricatures of religion. [53:00] Richard Dawkins and attacks on Twitter [58:30] Twitter attacks [01:04:30] Dawkins recent controversial quote on Twitter [01:07:00] Transracial association [01:09:00] The infantile demand in the fluidity of identity [01:13:30] How do we de-radicalize ideologues and the importance of these long-form discussions. [01:19:00] The woke narrative and the language that is being used to defend these ideas [01:24:00] Titania McGrath saving the world through intersectionality [01:26:30] Jordan's interview with the British GQ [01:32:00] What happened with Titania McGrath [01:35:30] What he has learned about people who are angry with Titania [01:37:30] Why Titania got banned on Twitter [01:43:30] What effect did producing Titania McGrath have on his life, and would he go back and do it all over again? Doyle and Peterson’s experience with [01:52:30] Defining hate speech laws and defending free Speech [02:02:00] What's next for Doyle [02:07:00] Creativity [02:13:00] Jordan's rise of popularity on YouTube

[u/letsgocrazy]

One thing that annoys me when people talk about freedom of speech is that they always forget that we already have hard limitations on it - copyright, defamation etc.

Then you get this hand wringing when we talk about limiting hate speech etc, and inevitably someone says "but who gets to decide?" as if it's some purely rhetorical question.

There are already complex legal mechanisms for deciding these sorts of things; from the courts (the British common law with Peterson loves so dearly), and various legal and political tests.

I think there are easy areas where we can draw lines.

Remember the infamous images of people gathering to scream hate at black school kids attending school?

Imagine if that was happening to one of your children every day. Maybe you have a kid with a learning disability and a group of people just decided that kids like that going to their school was contagious. None of that seems particularly far fetched in this day and age.

I'm pretty sure that most right thinking members of society (the usual test for what is normal or sane in UK law), or "the man on the Clapham Omnibus" wouldn't regard that as a form of speech worth protecting, in that it was an expression against government tyranny - and something more valuable to us than say, the right of Disney to stop you having some music playing in the back of a Youtube video.

It's definitely possible to have robust laws protecting thought and political expression and draw the line around some areas.

Because we've existed that way for decades if not centuries already, and look at the progress we made.