Peter Hitchens | “I Have Given Up” | #CLIP

to explore this for a moment in terms of what it means for the future of the west it seems that this breaking down of any core consensus on values and how we might treat one another how we might respect one another's playing out particularly badly for young people they've if you like had very poor models of interaction and civility modeled by baby boomers yes their capacity to take that forward is turbocharged by social media and the anonymity of the keyboard and so you see them now and i'm not blaming young people for this so much as saying that i think it's a tragedy who are now capable it's almost as though we've rediscovered burning at the stake people can be so ostracized so cut off almost cancelled declared persona non-grata and as we've seen in australia it can result in terrible tragedy literally in kids saying well i just don't want to live anymore yes i would but cruelty never goes away it's only ever it's only ever restrained it's always present in in us in the kindest of us i think there's this cruel to you and once the opportunity to express it and get away with it is there then a lot of people will take it and and some will be victims of that it's true it's not the fault of this generation they have been to some extent abandoned there was a great line in leonard cohen's song stories of the street back in 1967 which haunted me when i first heard it at the time where do all these highways go now that we are free we didn't we were set we were free without the equipment to cope with our freedom and as uh well as parents as educators as people who as give us examples my generation must be one of the worst and most reprehensible in human history so that's a you raised a very interesting concept there that um it seems to me that we've turned freedom into licentiousness well freedom is faced with where it takes us freedom is life-consciousness if you don't have if you don't have a very strong moral structure that's it will inevitably be so so we give up the moral structures and then we regulate ourselves to death we outsource our consciences to regulation to law free speech is one of the areas in australia now we're we're trying to define it because the graciousness to accept that others have a right to put a point of views largely washed out of the system now everybody wants it defined narrowly and legally and the problem with that is it opens up the way for law fair rather than mutual cooperation and respect sure i think it's about right it's a worry well it's more than worry it's the end i i i'm amazed the the speed with which free speech is dying but even more amazed the almost total indifference of so many people to it and the willingness of people who imagine themselves to be civilized and reminded to go along with schemes which will which will close down the freedom of speech and people people applaud i was having an argument on the internet the other day with an academic who was applauding measures to restrict what people can say on twitter well and people say dreadful things on twitter but do do we really want to to make the price of that a set of regulations which mean people can be arbitrary silenced by some anonymous unaccountable committee of who knows sitting in some room in california i don't think that's wise now last year you you told me very frankly and it was the point was well taken that you weren't going to offer me some fools hope on a way forward um and yet i know that this conversation will be heard by quite a lot of young australians who are idealistic and want to make a difference to take you back to that um can we just i love uh you know that period of english history about the time when australia was being settled britain was a pretty ugly place deeply divided uh pretty crassly immoral i mean for heaven's sake the king's sons were racking up unbelievable gambling debts and the taxpayer was paying them off um you know it was jin soaked it was class divided freedom of speech was pretty lacking at that time it was pretty ugly but there were a bunch of reformers known as you know the clapping set william wilberforce and the thorntons and a whole bunch of others who set out to make a difference and britain changed massively as the day for that sort of hope gone what do we say to young people who say i actually want to continue to live in a free country i see the dangers i want to do something about it well they've also been the the re-evangelize re-evangelization of the country by wesley and several other uh very powerful and effective preachers which had preceded that and the the victorians reaped the benefit of of wesley and we in the early middle part of the 20th century took the benefit of the victorians but there is a direction of travel uh in the events you described there were people who seriously wanted to re-evangelize and re-christianize the country uh the um from from sunday schools to whatever you have and they successfully did it and as a result for instance crime rates in this country were falling precipitately towards the end of the 19th century and the levels of crime and disorder and the the levels were were extraordinarily low the levels of civility extraordinarily high right through the terrible economic crises which ran from the general strike through the the the 1931 uh collapse of the government and in which in other countries led to terrible convulsions did not do so here but that there had been a direction of travel that had been an attempt to re-evangelize the country i do not see anything remotely resembling that now look when i say i see no hope in temporal things that's what i'm saying i see no hope in temporal things i would be delighted to be wrong if anybody can come up with any serious evidence that that i'm wrong i would be the first to be pleased but nobody ever does uh and i i also i shan't live forever after i've died things may happen which i couldn't possibly foresee and haven't foreseen so i could then be shown to be wrong or that that's a problem for me but it's not a problem for anybody else i could be wrong but if you want to say that i'm wrong then you have to come up with some evidence to anything equivalent for instance to john and charles wesley as in being in britain or anywhere else at the moment i can't find anything i can i can understand your concern very deeply and i think a lot of people do uh nonetheless it's always invigorating and wonderful when noble people want to have a go and so well no doubt that it is but on the output also it's it's disastrous when people when when people lead people off on children's crusades where they will get slaughtered by uh by overpowering forces which they uh which were bound to slaughter them and the people who lead them off in in full soap have a very heavy responsibility on their shoulders if they do so let me drill in you just used so i would add this thing about striking blows and all the rest of it i i believe that i have over several years pretty i'm a one-man think-tank i've examined so many of the of the crisis of our society i've done an awful lot of research and i've established to my own satisfaction and i've never been contradicted by my opponents in terms of the research that i've done so many problems which i've delineated and come up with answers to and i might as well have spent the whole time on the beach or in the pub nothing that i have said has ever made the slightest difference there is no point of connection between anything that i've said or done and the political system i cannot make any impact whatsoever i might as well not have bothered and so it's it's hard for me to say to other people you go off and do this time wasting thing you off waste your time doing the work doing the research finding out what's wrong coming up with the answers to it and then being told uh that nobody wants to nobody wants to listen to you can't get air time the political parties have absolutely no interest in even hearing what you say and hearing people and this i repeatedly find particularly over the drugs controversy hearing people after i have spoken in the same room as them continue to say things which i established to be untrue as if they hadn't even heard what i said and you have to go through that to understand just how devastating it is to any kind of belief that any action that you might take will have any effect we all know the biblical injunction whatsoever thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might well i believe i've done that and the result of it in in material temporal terms has been zero or less than zero over many years well i draw a lesson from that i'm getting the temporal the temporal the temporal stuff is just a waste of time i'm going to very very very gently and very politely say to you please don't give up they will have conversations it's just i've just i've i have given up if i don't uh i don't anymore entertain the slightest hope uh that's the things that i do will will will result in any good outcome i had a young australian call me after watching our last listening to our last conversation to say that it had what you had had to say had massively impacted on him personally so there's one young australian out there who's deeply appreciative of the things that you say thank you for watching this episode if you value vital conversations like this one please like share subscribe and join the conversation you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 187,933

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, freedom, cancel culture, marxism, peterhitchens

Id: KSgK_DHPBfU

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021