Radical Ideology and the Nihilistic Void | Douglas Murray - The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast #S4E3

[Music] i have the great good fortune on this january 15th 2021 of talking to mr douglas murray the author of the madness of crowds gender race and identity douglas and i met a couple of years ago and got along quite remarkably well i think we did uh douglas was gracious enough to mediate a discussion that i had with sam harris in the in what was the olympic stadium in london if i remember correctly um and we haven't we've talked a little bit since then but it's been a couple of years say so i've just been reviewing the madness of crowds this week again i i read it when it first came out but i was looking at it again i'm looking forward to discussing a whole variety of things with you some associated with the book and some not um but let's start with the book at least some of the themes of the book if you don't mind you talked about you started by talking about the collapse of grand narratives and that's a theme that's very interesting to me and um i have a hypothesis that i'd like to run by you and see what you think i i've been talking to a friend of mine here and we've been hypothesizing that maybe there are two large-scale grand political narratives with an archetypal or mythological basis and one would be the promised land so that would be the the bright future that we're all headed to and different versions of that would be put forth by the right and the left but the what what the hook is is that something better awaits us and there are certain strategies that we could use to attain that and if that fails then we have something like the infidel which is us versus them and so one of the things that struck me when i was reading your book was that it isn't obvious that we have a promised land narrative that's functional in the west anymore partly i think perversely because things have improved so much on the material front that it's not really even obvious how we could uh extend our mastery of the material world to produce a better future you know we've plucked all the low-hanging fruit and so that for most people i mean i know inequality exists i know there's relative poverty but there's no straightforward solutions for those either or even solutions that necessarily would appeal to the imagination and so maybe we're stuck with some variant of the infidel which is not a very which is certainly not a grand narrative that's designed to bring about peace i don't know what you think about that but i'd also like your your take on grand narratives as such and why you think they've collapsed well first of all it's um really really good to see you jordan thank you can't tell you what a pleasure it is um and i've missed you uh as as very many people have uh so it's really wonderful to see you i appreciate that i've missed being around believe me and and all the things that i was engaged in hopefully that'll start up again with this as part of it i really hope so um yes it's been on my mind for a long time i've written around this subject in a couple of books now that that the oddity of the position of western man at this point is that he and she lack a grand narrative lack an overarching explanation of what on earth we're doing here and i think you and i probably haven't have the same experience that when we were allowed to still congregate in public spaces whenever you addressed anything around this issue the hall fell silent you know i've noticed for years that there's all sorts of minou shy that our societies are exceptionally good at talking about but we've become not only poor at talking about but apparently uninterested in the most important questions of all such as what exactly we meant to be doing with our lives what we meant to be doing with our time we all know we've got a finite amount of time so how should we occupy that time well and yeah well it's funny because i would say in the past to some degree that question was answered for us by deprivation you know it was obvious what we were lacking and so when it's obvious what you're lacking when you're hungry when you're truly hungry there's no question about what you should do you should eat and if you're freezing and if you're overheated and all of those things the the desirable future manifests itself automatically in front of you and in some sense we've been deprived of deprivation and and are suffering from um an enemy of of prosperity yes and and and um and i think for some people a form of boredom um and uh and yes and too much time on their hands and and much more there are different ways of circling around the same this the same answer to the problem but but it's been very striking to me for a long time that particularly in political terms the left has been really quite interested in this gap it's it's it's recognized the size of it and has sought to fill it um in recent years as i say at the beginning of the matters of crowds the most obvious way of filling it is with the horrible and dysfunctional and retributive replacement religion which is identity politics intersectionalism and all of this um as i point out it's it's in some ways a curiosity perhaps also an inevitability that let's say the respectable right at any at any rate um has been pretty uninterested in answering these questions and hasn't even nodded to their absence the right has in our lifetimes been very interested in issues of economics and that's of course crucial as you alluded to earlier i mean if the economics are going well you know a lot of other things go well as well when they go bad absolutely everything goes bad so in some ways it's understandable that the right has been interested in economic questions but it has left the i didn't as i said repeat the sort of respectable bit of the right has basically left identity and meaning questions uh to say well you know find the meaning of things where you will um if you come across it great we couldn't be happier for you but doesn't seek to address these questions well maybe it's partly because the collapse of religious belief hasn't been as uh thorough on the right as it has been on the left and still there's still more people who are oriented in the conservative direction who have some at least some vestiges of their traditional religious belief but you know yes well and i would say too though that it isn't the left that's been concerned with our questions of identity precisely i would say more this is definitely the case in the united states i think it's true in britain and canada too that it's the radical left because the moderate left i have a friend in la who's been working on messaging for the democratic party um he's been doing that pro bono as part of an independent group of hollywood writers who've produced about a billion dollars worth of advertisements they've been attempting to craft a centrist democrat message and it's quite difficult because well and the reason they've been doing that is because the the radical left has a narrative and regardless of what you might think about it it has motivating power and in the absence of any other narrative it tends to dominate and the problem with generating a centrist narrative is that it tends to be incremental and incremental narratives tend not to have much persuasive power and so you might say that what's happened is that there's still a subset of people who for whom for one reason or another and that might be race or gender or sexual identity or any of those things any any minority status that would bring about it a felt sense of alienation that the narrative is clear which is to either restructure society so that alienation disappears or to well like that is the narrative is to restructure society so that that alienation disappears yes and yes and even though that may not be a narrative that works for everyone the fact that nobody can construct one that's more compelling leaves a terrible void in the middle and it isn't obvious at all how that can be solved yes well by the way also we get back to one of the problems that always exists for people on the right or certainly for small c conservatives which is that they always end up fighting the next battle they're going to lose precisely because of this phenomenon that the left and the radical left advances ideas the right doesn't know conservatives don't know how to defend um things such as precedent tradition just doing things the way you've always done them and recognizing that there's a virtue in that um well it isn't it isn't that easy to sell a story that's that's well things are pretty damn good and try not to do anything stupid to muck it up like and the reason for that is that there's no real direction in it and that's especially true for people who aren't fully ensconced within the society and and feeling that they have an integral role to play so it doesn't work for conservatism doesn't work for felt outsiders yes it it it looks um among things self-satisfied i think it's one of the reasons why a certain radical young person uh rejects a conservative narrative because they say it it only works if things are going well for you i mean again i would dispute that but but it's it's a tendency people have um the other issue though on this is that conservatives in in general uh it's part of the conservative mind are resentful of and distrustful of people coming along with grand narratives um this is this is obviously a burkian insight why burke takes a view he does of the events in france and writes about in the reflections it's it's the most common trend for conservative thought is a suspicion of thought a suspicion of thinking and of philosophy and of grand ideas precisely because of an innate recognition that such ideas can go so very badly yes yes it leaves and i've always thought that this is that this is a both it's mainly seen as a disadvantage of conservatism in fact of course it can be a very distinct advantage um but it only works as an advantage if things are going very badly wrong in whatever the utopian grand narrative project is that's being proposed um you know it's only when everything goes badly wrong with the utopianism that people realize the virtues of the conservative system you know it's only after the french revolution when you when you've got the famines because you've killed all the people who know what to do it's only after the russian revolution when everyone's starving because the bolsheviks don't know how to do the most basic things in food production that people start to realize the virtue of the the kind of conservatism that i'm describing but until that moment of total collapse utopian radical left is always going to be at a distinct advantage he's got a it's got a sexier product to sell well the other problem is of course and this has to do i think with the way people are wired biologically with regards to their emotional responses is that if everything is going well everything that's going well is invisible yes because we're throwing we're so threats we we habituate to anything that's predictable and we're very sensitive to threat so even when many things are going wrong well we're going to pay attention to those things that aren't and we're not going to pay attention to everything that that is working to maintain say this amazing infrastructure around us which a conservative would say well it's very unlikely that this degree of stability and wealth can exist let alone be maintained and we should be very careful with it but yeah but that's that it's a hard to keep the the impulse going for that narrative because it isn't it that isn't how we work emotionally partly because it's not efficient to constantly be grateful for things that are predictable it takes too much mental energy now that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that the grand narrative that's put forth by the left and and you talk about this particularly in terms of let's say identity politics and intersectionality identity politics seems to be predicated on the idea that certain certain rather arbitrarily selected features of individuals constitute the core element of their identity i've never been sure exactly why it's those um it's the particular elements that are concentrated on race sexuality gender sexual proclivity say why those tend to be the hallmark and maybe it's maybe it's because there do you think it's reasonable to pause it that it's because that the leftists look at groups that have in fact experienced some degree of prejudice or alienation in the past and and then and then make that make whatever it was that produced the alienation the central characteristic of their identity yes and well there's that and there's also the other one which is the illusion that you can do very much about it i mean in our age uh and obviously they're the issues i write about in matters of crowds the the the presumption seems to be and the selection seems to be something around the idea of there's something you can do about it now by the way this is a very confused narrative because it both says that there are as i say in the book there are hardware issues and software issues and it pretends that the software issues the hardware and the hardware issues can be software and it doesn't really know what to do for instance it says that sexuality is definitely hardware whereas sex is software that just doesn't run as a simultaneous program um and it says we don't really know what race is and it gets into a hell of a lot of trouble and dodges it on race um it says that the only the only thing people are legitimately born into as an identity is being trans and so all of this is incredibly messily ill thought out but i i have wondered whether it has something to do with this thing of you can do something about it because if you selected height which is obviously one of the other ones you could do which has a profound impact on people's lives yes or attractiveness yes there's just there's just at some point you have to come across the thing that there's nothing you can do about it and um i would have thought that the age would be grown up enough or could be grown up enough to recognize that that is the issue on a set of identity questions as well that you know when a famous pop star says as he did recently that he'd like to be a mummy by the age of 35 the age treats him as the people doing monty python's life of brian and say where's the fetus going to just state um in a bucket um you know in a box in other words the the age wouldn't simply keep saying oh yes that's possible that's plausible so it's deeply confused i'm trying to analyze it is in some way adding adding confusion to it i simply i i'm simply struck by the fact that that there are a number of very major issues that occur in people's lives that are darked by the age um i don't know why they've ducked them other than and this is this is the best approximation i can do is that they've chosen the ones they've chosen because they know that they will cause maximal annoyance to conservatives that they have the best chance of breaking down some of the most reliable structures that we still have in our society and that they baffle and confound people well it could be it could be simpler than that though and maybe less in some sense less conspiratorial is that the identity politics identity politics coalesces around any group where there's sufficient where there's a sufficient number of people with at least one thing in common who do in fact feel alienated and resentful about the general culture for for for valid and invalid reasons and so it's a crapshoot in some sense it doesn't matter if there's consistency in category structure across the different categories of identity politics all that matters is that enough people will coalesce around each term and yes i think that's reasonable because many many terms have been generated like ageism for example although we haven't seen we haven't seen much of a politic of identity politics emerge around age but that's probably because it didn't coalesce you know you could think about it as a darwinian process in some sense is that there's a hundred terms of alienation and ten of them generate enough social attention to become viable sociological and political phenomena and and they continue to breed but that's because they breed whenever there's enough people to garner enough attention now the problem i have with that and this is something else i wanted to talk to you about in detail is that because i've been thinking about this for a long time is the notion of identity that lurks at the bottom of this because i think part of the problem with the identity politics grand narrative is that partly because of its incoherence it doesn't offer anything that that looks like a real solution so well and that's partly because of it's it has its definition of what constitutes identity seems to me to be almost incomprehensibly shallow especially for social constructivists so so the idea i don't think i'm parodying this the central idea seems to be that identity is something that you define yourself and it's a consequence of your lived experience and so no one has any right to state anything about your identity other than you because they don't have access to your own subjective experiences and look i don't i don't want to i i i wouldn't want to make the claim that there's no there's nothing in that because there is a domain of subjective experience that's unique and like pain for example and there's no doubt that it's real and and that it's vital and important but the problem with that seems to me to be is that identity isn't only a consequence of your subjective experience in fact it's not even a label for your subjective experience identity seems to me to be a a handbag of tools that you employ to make your way in the natural and social world so it's more like a pragmatic it's something more pragmatic it's like the rule you might play if you were playing a game with other people and you can pick your role you can pick your role but it has to be part of the game and that means that people have to accept you as a player and that there are certain functions that you have to undertake when you fulfill that role and that's actually beneficial to you right because partly what you want from an identity is a set of guidelines for how it is that you should act in the world and the problem with a lot of these newer categories and i think trans is a good example of that is that even if the category was accepted as valid on the grounds of its um proposed validity which is the felt sense of being a man if you're a woman or being a woman if you're a man it isn't obvious what that buys you you know and i just interviewed i just interviewed abigail schreier who wrote irreversible damage and she talks about some of the consequences now obviously her book is quite controversial in fact i was terrified to even talk to her to be honest um she's a very brave person and i've had a fair bit of that beat out of me i'm afraid um but it isn't obvious it's obvious that adopting the identity of trans and then pursuing that down the medical alteration route carries with it some vicious consequences oh yeah yeah so let's talk about identity yes i i am i agree it does it provides you it provides you with a path that's one thing that i've i've noticed i've noticed i noticed when i was interviewing various trans people for the madness of crowds um i noticed that it provides a path um of what you're going to do um and it's and this is one of the things i noticed sort of early about that question was it seemed to be an explanation of a kind uh for instance you feel um slightly alien in the world it will be solved in this manner and there's a place you can go and well all of us at some level and some people throughout their lives feel great disjunction with the world that we find ourselves in it isn't at all clear to me that there is any answer whatsoever to that no it's a permanent existential problem right that's man against society essentially and we're all crushed and formed by society to our detriment and to our benefit yes and and and not just what society does trust but our experience of life with or without society to the extent that we can study man outside of society it's what kierkegaard and others keep going around what it is that we cannot know what it is we intuit about our condition in the world which we still can find no way of expressing or finding our way to um there are great mysteries about ourselves which we intuit and we cannot answer and obviously it's what philosophy uh uh continually returns to it's what religion uh uh attempts to answer and these are the deep questions of of humankind it it's it's why all of this constantly crosses against and it goes across for instance aesthetics because because our senses our late friend roger scrutin are often described better than anyone um our sense of beauty is is so important because it gives us a sense of that thing we know and we know we cannot approach um something which is is telling us something from a realm which we know we cannot access or can never access fully these are these are central aspects of being a human being and and and and one of them as i say is the sense which exists in all our lives at some point and for some people semi-permanently that that the world is is totally um unknowable to them and therefore they are highly vulnerable to anything that comes along and says this is the answer and i i know well you you point out in your book this is something quite interesting that supports this line of reasoning which is you you talk about the stripping of a particular identity from someone who if they evince the wrong political platform so peter thiel for example can't be gay because he's a republican and kanye west can't be black because he came out in favor of trump and yes that does argue the fact that that occurs that stripping of the identity occurs does indicate that the identity has a function and and yes and a purpose right so it's a way it has a platform it has a party uh manifesto it's something to sign up to yeah and in the absence of nothing or in the absence of anything else it might be better than nothing absolutely the question is how tenable it is and and and and the the fundamental flaw that i see in identity politics is that even though it's predicated on the idea at least it's simultaneously predicated on the idea that so that identity is a social construct and that it's a felt sense and it can't be both of those and it is in fact a social construct with biological with biological root the fact that it's a social construct means that it's something that is by necessity negotiated with others not imposed upon them by fiat and it has to be negotiated with others because otherwise they won't play with you this is one of the reasons why to an extent i i think i say somewhere in the book that trying to find the exact methodology of the prevailing ideology of our era is to a great extent like trying to find meaning in the entrails of a chicken and we do just keep coming across the same set of unexplainable inexplicable contradictory self-contradictory ill thought out ideas um the most obvious ones i i i say somewhere is a number of other people pointing this out now as well is is you must understand me indeed your primary role in the world almost is to understand me if i'm in the right set of categories um and simultaneously you will never understand right right now i mean as i say i i think actually it's it's fairly obvious that if you can never understand where somebody else is coming from then there's no point in discourse there's no point in speaking with other people or of reading or of learning we just we are in solitude all these things that's a hobbesian state that's absolutely that's a state of war absolutely when conversation ceases war emerges exactly we can't understand each other there's no there's no recourse except for force and this is why this obviously this is why it worries me so much when i hear this done by particularly by identity politics people in relation to race and particularly obviously to do it if you happen to be black is if people say you can never understand my experience i think but if if if a person who is not black can never understand the person who is then we're in for a hell of a lot of trouble like step back from that we have to work hard at trying to understand each other including each other's historic pain including each other's current situations but we have to keep open the possibility that we can and will try to understand each other and to speak across these alleged vast divides which i don't think are remotely as big a divide if they are a divide as the various as i say people who believe this ethos of our time claim but but this is the one that worries me most and it's profoundly anti-human apart for anything else because if you say sign up be a part of one of these groups and then you've got this sort of as i say party manifesto set out it completely ignores what most of us find to be our experience i think if we're honest as human beings which is that we like to be able to absorb we like to be able to understand we like stories we like to hear about people who are not like us from the very beginning we read stories about people who have no connection with our kind why did children across the world read about princesses and princes and all sorts of other people who are nothing like in the state they are because we like to hear other people's stories it's not just that they're architects we want to find out about other people we don't just want the experience that we happen to have been or being born into that's because that's because that broadens our identities yes it gives us more tools to to use in the world and we're obviously very good at that and it is a matter of throwing your hands up in despair if you say that that's impossible it's difficult i mean we're each a solitude in some sense for multiple reasons for maybe multiple intersectional reasons for that matter but that doesn't mean that communication is impossible or that it should be forgotten unless you want the alternative and the alternative is conflict combat yes yes if i can't understand you you're nothing like me and there's no way that we can negotiate any peaceful way to occupy the same space that's right and so that's a maybe that's the catastrophe you're after but it's not it's not an optimal outcome no and um it's one of the reasons why my ears have been particularly pricked in in recent years by um a certain retributive rebarbative deliberately callous discussion of certain groups of people certain types of voters and much more a gleeful willful desire not to even bother to try to understand their pain which is of course as far as i can see it nothing more than an expression of assumed generally vengeance well that that brings us to another okay so let's let's dive into that a bit obviously at least to some degree you're referring to what happened in the united states with regards to trump voters and that's basically half the population yeah well let's let's start there because that's a good rat's nest to try to investigate so um what i see and have seen happening in the west but particularly in the united states in recent years is the beginnings of something that resembles a an out of control positive feedback loop and a positive feedback loop you know this but i'll just outline it quickly a positive feedback loop loop occurs when the inputs of a system and the outputs are the same and so you hear this when you hear feedback at a rock concert when a microphone gets too close to a speaker because the microphone picks up the speaker noise and then transmits it to the speaker and then runs it through the microphone amplifying it each time until the whole system goes out of control essentially and a lot of forms of psychopathology are positive feedback loops like depression when you get depressed your mood goes down and then you start to isolate yourself and and get estranged from the people that you love and your friends and that makes you more depressed and that makes you more estranged and then you start not going to work and that alienates you and makes your depression worse and you spin downwards and um positive feedback loops can erupt in societies too and you get that in societies that are in permanent feuds which is part of the reason that the state has to exercise a monopoly on violence it's to stop vengeful retribution from spiling out of control it's a real danger and what i see happening right now is that the right and the left are engaged in a process of positive feedback where one hits the other and the other hits back slightly harder and then well i don't have to belabor the point um and i think that if you're temperamentally inclined to be on the right you point to the left and you say well they started it and if you're temperamentally inclined to be on the left you point to the right and say well they started it and you or and here's how they're contributing to it and you can point to innumerable examples and where where it all started is a rather arbitrary choice on your part the question for me is how to dampen it down you know and conservatives have a real problem at the moment i believe because of what happened with trump in recent weeks and so let me tell you what i understand and you tell me what what you think okay i mean um i regarded trump as a reaction to clinton essentially and to her playing identity politics and i believe that trump didn't win so much as hillary lost and she lost because a sizable proportion of her base the the working-class white males basically the tr who were traditionally democrat when push came to shove choosing between her and trump chose trump mostly as an up yours to the democrats and so i don't see trump trump's a symptom although he's also a causal agent now unfortunately what's occurred in the last couple of weeks has made things unbelievably complicated because it does look like trump went down the rabbit hole of the stolen election um narrative and has caused a substantial amount of grief and misery as a consequence of that and so well so i'd like your opinion about all that and then we can discuss what might be done about that from the conservative perspective or indeed period yes i i i will just speaking agree with what you just said i um i was in the uh the states for a month and a bit more before the election traveling around covering it and i hadn't been to the u.s for a couple of years as it happened i travel a lot as you know in normal times but i hadn't been to the u.s for a couple of years and i was horrified by the fact that just normal discourse seemed to be impossible across political divides all dinner tables uh erupted uh um in exactly the the the fashion that you you would expect everyone's darkens in their own positive feedback loops but you did this first but your side did that and as you say you could start from anywhere but that was that was the nature of it but there was something else by the way which was i mean my fairest estimation of the critique that the left has of the right is that they hate the right for allowing trump to happen and that that isn't such a bad reason to dislike the right at the moment um how did you allow this man uh out how did you allow them to win that that seemed to be their their criticism and there is a criticism to make of the american right over that i think it could have been a hell of a lot worse um but but it's a reasonable criticism for the right to contend with uh the problem is well the right has to contend with the potential power of a kind of mindless populism just as the left has to contend with the constant potential to be swamped by intellectual like ideology and so if the left tends to go out of control in an intellectual direction an ideological intellectual direction and a lot of that is explicit in the in say in the identity politics ideology that's that's that's paramount now and and maybe it was explicit in the form of marxism earlier the right can easily respond to that with a pronounced implicit anti-intellectualism and i think that's exactly what trump represented i mean it's funny because he was a kind of elite obviously he comes from a wealthy background but he wasn't markedly part of the insider intellectual elite and he was able to express the frustration of the common person so to speak with the idiocy of the intellectuals um in the in the manner that he acted essentially and in whom he had contempt for i suppose and um you could blame that on the stupidity of the people who voted for trump but you could equally point to the red flag that was being waved in front of their face by the identity politics types and again that's another place where a positive feedback loop can easily become instantiated the issue is how to dampen this down well what so that one of the other things i noticed was of course on the right there was a certain type of voter on the right in america who didn't just make peace with trump which was something that you could do i i wrote about this a number of times you could say well these are the things he did which are reasonable or you know we're in power so we should try to make sure that we exercise it well and and have whatever impact we can to improve the administration these there was something else going on which was um people recognizing that trump hurt their opponents you know that he was a low tool to get back at the left now i i've heard that everywhere over weeks you know that like they've yeah definitely there was an element of vengefulness exactly it was up yours so the left have kept producing people who've been provoking us and prodding us and we on the right in america keep producing sort of you know third presses of the bush family or various other dynastic politics that corrupts america we keep producing them that and we're just not giving anyone of equal vengefulness lowness um a willingness to just hit people nastily if they come trump was willing to do a lot of that stuff if not all of it and a certain type of right-wing voter had had enough and was willing to was willing to get the only person willing to play the left on equal terms and one other thing from that of course he he did something that again the right has historically sort of not been very good at which is having a program of his own not just fighting the next battle you're going to lose you know if the battleground people tend to think of the battleground of politics as being sort of level and it isn't at times it tilts more one way than the other so at times historically it's harder to advocate left-wing proposals on certain things and then it suddenly becomes all downhill it becomes easy to do it um it's in the same way the right tends to be at a disadvantage constantly having to push uphill and inevitably what it does is it makes a compromise with the latest left wing command and therefore the left actually accumulates a bit more power a bit more influence a bit more furtherance of its ideology and and that that that slightly sloped uh situation had existed in american politics on in the views of a lot of people on the right for some years donald trump comes along and seems to do that to it he seems to be willing to say no no we're not just going to be on the back foot fighting the next thing the left's going to win we're actually going to do stuff of our own and that is a dynamic that had been missing in american politics and i think to that extent a certain type of right-wing voter was willing not just to be uh to make peace with trump but actually willing uh to give him the benefit of the doubt and indeed to allow him to use uh the tools of government when i channeled my inner redneck which wasn't that difficult given that i'm from alberta which is a rather conservative and sort of self-consciously proud redneck texas of canada i suppose and i'm not saying that in an entirely disparaging way there's certain advantages to that anyways when i was channeling my inner redneck i could certainly come into contact with feelings of exactly that type it was because i could imagine myself in the bellying chamber reaching out to put the check mark next to hillary's name and saying oh to hell with it which is a hell which is a hell of a thing to say in the ballot room and putting a check by trump's name you know and you can do that quite easily too when you think well it's just your vote it's one among you know millions of votes and what difference does a little impulsiveness on and a little vengefulness on my part make and trump was definitely a candidate of resentment although i think you could say exactly the same thing about hillary and the fact that we had candidates of resentment is a bad that's bad because resentment resentment is a terrible terrible motivation absolutely one of the worst and it is tended to be identified with the left on politics and i think now it is equally at least able to be uh identified with the right but here we come to the to what i regard as being the real challenge and to answer the the deep underlying question of how we try to improve this um in in america the thing that struck me most was this i and i wrote about this in spectator recently i was very worried by one thing in particular which is what happens when you don't just have different interpretations of events but the thing that you've just seen you disagree on the nature of what it was you saw oh yeah opinions nothing man it's disagreement about facts that's everything and that's perception now now in in political terms in democratic terms this is of course an absolute catastrophe because as i was saying some friends in britain recently you know the great one of the great things about democratic politics isn't just that it gives you a winner it gives you a loser you know by 1997 the conservatives have been in power for 18 years most of them under margaret thatcher and then under a weak successor and by 1997 the british public have had enough of the conservatives the best interpretation is that they have become weak and they were very very weak they also appeared to be slightly corrupt around the edges they seemed to be to be all sorts they seem to be hypocritical on morality issues and much more the country had had enough of them and they voted them out in a landslide and for 13 years conservative party is in the wilderness trying to work out how to be appealing to the electorate again and it manages it in the same way by 2010 the labour party the labour left have frankly become um have become a bore to the public they've been in office long enough we've got the successor to tony blair just like we had the successor to margaret thatcher we're on the weak and falling apart slightly slightly i don't use the word in a real sense but a sort of corrupted part of the political system it's late in the day and the public vote the conservatives back into office albeit only in a coalition at first but the important thing about this is what does the party do in the interim in the case of the uk the left after it loses the 2010 election goes slightly further to the left and then crazily far to the left and then last year in 20 20 20 the british public in its genius totally rejects the far left-wing politics of jeremy corbyn and now the labour party is in the process of trying to make itself electable again and coming into the center why do i give this most of your viewers um obscure lesson in the last few decades of british politics because the most important thing in a way was not who won but who lost and what they did when they knew they lost yes and yes as you know psychologically this is one of the most important lessons freud writes about this in um the essay on what's it on melancholia that that that you that you have to be able to recognize that the thing has been lost in order to be able to even love again you have to bury the thing that has been lost to recognize that it is gone and what i am horrified by in american politics is the fact that that mourning process is not allowed to occur they cannot bury the dead they cannot grieve for the loss because they don't think they lost you know half of the half and again i don't make there's a technical problem there too which is that the margin of victory wasn't much greater than the margin of error you know and that and that's been a problem for multiple elections now right four elections in a row it's been being too close to call and you know there is always a certain amount of corruption in every in any electoral process maybe it's half a percent or a quarter of a percent in a pristine system but when your margin of victory is of the same magnitude then yeah well then you can make a plausible case that corruption has has potentially undermined the validity of the process it's absolutely and you know both sides i i i'm not simply making an equivalence here but i mean both sides have tried this in american politics in recent years you know it's not like it was obscure democrats who pretended that trump was an illegitimate president who had not been legitimately voted in 2016 it was not obscure figures it was the woman who was defeated by him at the ballot box who was among the people who played with the idea first of all we had that the russians that actually manipulated the ballot machines remember that you know they all walk back from it now that they were or they pretend they didn't do it but they were literally pretending and claiming that the russians had managed to get access to the voting machines in america in 2016. and then they sort of slowly stepped it back and they had that the russians had sort of financed stuff and then it was russian bots but for four years the democrats played with that trump then totally reprehensibly takes that even further and says that the election results can't be accepted and he won't even leave office is is is the first reaction which obviously is playing with the most dangerous elements of the democratic process and so so now nine out of ten trump voters now still say they believe he won the election in terms of healing this the first thing i can come up with on this the first thing the most basic thing is that joe biden after coming into office has to make sure this never happens again how does that happen i'm not an american i can only make as it were friendly suggestions i would just make sure that the next president makes sure this can never happen again that there is some bipartisan non-partisan way in which they agree who wins the election next time around and that four years from now whoever hypothetically that's what the electoral college was supposed to be doing absolutely and i suppose it didn't perform that function but was still i i do think again it's a problem of of margin of error a technical problem of margin of error you know it's you can't you can't expect anything other than for there to be questions about the validity of an election when it's that close it's going to happen well you know you you you can have these questions but as long as you respect the outcome i mean you can have very close elections and still accept them yes in 1997 there was a conservative seat which i think was lost by nine votes and they got recount after recount and eventually actually there was a re-vote and the conservatives lost by about 20 000 votes because the voters were so fed up with the conservatives making them vote again now but the point is is that it was very close but but it would have been respected that it it isn't just it isn't just the closeness of the elections in america although i agree it's obviously no well i'm not trying i'm certainly not trying to justify it either i'm just saying that this eventuality is much more likely under those circumstances absolutely but but but this this process that they're now stuck in of just not agreeing on what they just saw is is is lethal so okay so let's let's talk about that for a minute too because this brings up another technical issue and the because you you opened the can of worms by stating that people now don't have differences of opinion about the facts they have different facts yes and the question is in part how is it under normal circumstances that people do see the same facts but then have different opinions it means there's a very deep consensus on top of which there's relatively trivial dispute that's a much better situation but part of the way that people do that is by using um well look look at it this way you have five senses each of which depend on a very different physiological mechanism and that's because you can see things that aren't there and you can hear things that aren't there and you can touch things that aren't there but you can't see hear and touch things that aren't there so you use this multi-dimensional process of of uh of triangulating you actually use pentangulating i suppose with your five senses and you determine what's real but even that's not enough then what we do is we seek consensus we say okay well here's what the phenomenon appears to be to me what do you see and then if you see it and someone else sees it and this would especially be good if we didn't share the same opinions but we could agree on what we saw then we think it's real now the technical problem is now no matter what you believe you can find a like-minded group that's discussing this avidly to to confirm your confirmation bias and what that means and i'm seeing this happening i can't believe how rapidly it's happening i'm seeing people degenerate into a conspiratorial paranoia and i'm seeing it in family members and in absolutely and in friends and like and as well as manifesting itself in broader society and it's really i think we're driving ourselves insane with the net yes i i absolutely agree i'm very very worried about where we are and i'm in political terms i mean it's obviously deeper but in political terms i'm worried about it because i think the right is about to go off in america like the left in america has gone off well that was that was the likely outcome five years ago it looked to me like that was it's why i tried to i was concerned back in 2016 that things were starting to degenerate and that the left would wake up the sleeping right you know the the radicals on the far end of the spectrum who prefer action to words let's say by a large margin and who are truly dangerous i could see them being prodded into awakeness and it was a very frightening thing it still is a very frightening thing i mean one of the things i've thought about a lot in recent years about this is of course is is is is not just there's that possibility of the the two sides fighting it against each other but but there ends up being no place to trust each other this is the i mean this seems to me in my conversations with people of different political types what i notice is that there is the most important thing if you're actually going to solve a problem and you know better than anyone how how much the political talk shall we say is actually not set up to solve problems it's set up for a performative thing it's set up for people to just play their part and read the script and and almost none of our political discussion is actually problem solving oriented almost none of it um but when you do when you do get close to solving a problem it exists and it exists the possibility only exists if the other person is is able to be trusted by you not to pull some funny stuff when you're not looking and i was thinking about this recently i was thinking about this reason i was in america and i was talking at one point with brett weinstein on his podcast and and you know i completely bret is brett is from a very different political uh um tradition from for me we have very different instincts on an awful lot of things and a lot of very similar instincts but when i talk with bret about problems like uh i know we talked about poverty and homelessness and things i i completely trust him and he allows me to concede where i'm not willing often to concede because i'm i'm slightly worried that you know for instance let me give the obvious one i worry about the inequality discussion like a lot of people on the right not because i don't believe inequality exists but i worry that the people who've been thinking about it most are the ones with the worst possible answer you know yes that's another thing we should discuss because inequality is a terrible terrible problem it's a society devouring problem the only thing worse than inequality are the purported solutions frequently exactly so and it's it's it's it's perfect example of it because um every political side has a version of this you know what you the i think i think well we've talked about this a bit in the past i think one of the reasons that the right finds it so hard to persuade the left to talk about immigration for instance is the left just doesn't want to acknowledge it's it's the serious debate it is because it notices the right is the side that's been thinking about it most and it doesn't trust the answers the right has so it's it's it's definitely something that both sides have as an instinct so how do you solve a problem in this situation only by people from across the political divide trusting each other that that they that they don't have something funny they're going to pull when you're not looking or to put another way they're not going to do something when you're beyond your own competency on the subject you're trying to solve so that that's how you actually solve a problem now of course as i say we're not solving any problems at the moment and i noticed this i i said that the last couple of years is like the eye of sauron our society particularly whipped up by the wretched social media companies that make them rich have turned our societies into a great eye of sauron which scours across the land and it looks at one thing dementedly and then it moves on to another thing and the problem about it is it doesn't solve a damn thing none of the things none of the things it focuses on you know it focuses on on um on oh what did we have we had oh we had a green issue in january it was meant to be a climate emergency of january of last year every every democratic government was meant to announce a climate emergency then we have the covid emergency then we have the blm emergency you know it's been emergency after emergency and we don't seem to solve them in fact we seem to we seem to make them worse when we address them because we can't agree on the thing that we're meant to be addressing so as i say if if if if i was to try to try to come up with the things to solve this it would be that that people from the left and right who could trust each other but and just just one other thing on that the thing about that is the reason why i think we haven't been able to do that particularly in america is this in my view the american left has an incorrect approximation of the proximity of fascism to the american political system you know or white nationalism to the center of the political system and obviously trump has given them a heck of a lot of ammunition but they were willing to use it anyway they've been using it for years they wanted to claim they basically that fascism was very very close now you see scenes like the reprehensible scenes at the capitol the other day and you see the ammunition that these reprehensible people have just given the left to continue to pretend that the american right all of the right you know cnn presenters and others have said all of the right is now with the nazis with the fascists with the the white supremacists and if that's the case you can't if you're on the american left communicate with anyone on the american right because when you're not looking they're going to smuggle fascism in and get you all and the problem is that an element of the right look sometimes it's a reasonable critique distrusts the left because it doesn't trust that its social welfare instincts aren't going to be then subsumed into their socialist instincts aren't then going to be subsumed by a deep desire to have communism so so the right doesn't trust now i think there are elements of the right that have particularly in america deeply overstated the proximity of communism to the american political system just do you think i'm one of those no i don't no i don't why not well i think it's something i worry about you know when i'm looking at this positive feedback loop situation arise you know i can't help but see similarities in the social identity movement and the marxist movement and i i mean you make that case in your book so maybe you're one of them too you know i and i don't know if this is a situation where you know the left purports to see fascism lurking behind every right-wing move and do you think the right is just as culpable with regards to seeing communism behind every left-wing move i mean i think it's complicated let me let me give you a statistic here a friend of mine just told me the other day um you know there's only two self-described democratic socialists sitting in the in the congressional house in the united states on the democrat side there's only two the rest of them are moderates and most of the moderates are moderate moderates you know now those two attract a disproportionate amount of attention partly because they're incredibly savvy social media users whereas the moderates aren't at all and and and our technology are blind technologically in that sense but you know i guess i wonder how much conscience scouring everyone's asking themselves that i suppose now how much conscience scouring is in order after the events on the hill last last week or two weeks ago well i think that would have been that would have been shocking to a lot of us and and should be and i mean it's it's it's it's obviously a con it's a concern i understand much more in the european context because i know it much better i do i don't know i think i think i have a fairly good idea of what what's hiding in the woodshed in america to use the coal comfort farm analogy i think i know that there is something nasty in the woodshed on the right but i've never believed that it's it's got any chance of persuading the gop to adopt its platform you know i think there are there are some nasty things in the woodshed in every society and on both political sides and the question of maturity in your political system is the extent to which you keep that woodshed locked right now it seems to me that in in britain for instance is a country i know best i've spent more time in than any other country in britain i'm fairly confident in our politics that that we have that would shed very closely locked you know when when when a maniac uh killed a labour mp several years ago the late joe cox and shouted britain first we had nobody in britain nobody on the political right who said i think we've got to understand the grievances of the attacker we had nobody there nobody nobody wants that anywhere near the political system so what about the grievances what do you think's happening in the us on the right with regards to the grievances of the capitol hill protesters well um here seems to me to be the problem but on the political left and i saw this myself that i was i was in portland and i was in seattle on my travels before the election and i saw the immiserated state that antifa and blm have turned those cities into i was disgusted by what i saw uh i was disgusted by the fact that i i spent several nights with antifa in portland and seeing them and being mixed up with them undercover obviously seeing what they were doing to attack federal buildings and so on i was just horrified i've seen quite a lot of the world i've seen a number of war zones i've traveled all across africa and the middle east and the far east i've seen a lot of things i've never seen a first world city like that i've never seen that in a democracy never and it's horrific and i was horrified once more by the fact that my left-wing friends with with noble exceptions like brett who i mentioned earlier my left-wing friends in america didn't want to hear about it or even concede that i've seen with my own eyes what i'd seen because they just feared that if you concede that's happening then you allow trump in and so they've been willing on the american left for years now to excuse and in many cases at a very senior level actually extol political violence we have we have cnn presenters and democrat representatives willing to say things like the protesters not only you know um mustn't stop they shouldn't stop they should keep going and these aren't these aren't obscure figures that they're people like kamala harris the vice president-elect who were willing to play with encouraging along the protests that were roiling america last night and so and so in that in that situation it wouldn't surprise me for a moment if there were people on the political right willing to say all make all sorts of excuses and say well the election is happening but that's where the right will go wrong that's where the right will go wrong and i think it has to be totally clear and instead of just pointing out a double standard has to actually do something different and say you know we are not going to excuse for a moment people assaulting federal agents and breaking their way into federal buildings and and and causing the death of a policeman we on our side will not in any circumstances give cover to people doing that we will say it's wrong and we will say it's wrong even if the left keeps on saying that it's form of violence isn't wrong because the only way out of this is if we show people by demonstrating by living by extolling the way out of it that is the only answer okay so so let me ask you another question you know i can i can two questions i guess i can hear the voice of a liberal friend of mine a good friend of mine in in my head while you're talking and saying it's disingenuous at a time like this two weeks after the capitol hill assault to talk about the antifa movements in portland and in seattle because they're of a different magnitude the what what happened in washington was on the order of an insurrection and so that's the first objection and the second one is that um i i had a brief discussion with my wife about um trump's claim that the election was stolen and so i've been running this margin of error problem over in my head say there was a he he he was defeated by a small margin relatively small margin now the the compelling piece of evidence that he lost in my estimation is the fact that and i believe this is right that of 90 court challenges that the trump administration has brought forward only one has been upheld and that includes the decisions of the judiciary where the judiciary was fundamentally republican in its in its in its nomination and in its origin and so but and her response was well you've been saying for years that the judiciary has become increasingly corrupted by left-wing activists let's say which is really something that's happened to a large degree in canada how do you know that the judiciary itself isn't irredeemably corrupt and but i mean i'm just i'm not willing to to go that far i don't believe for a moment that republican nominated judiciary members have been corrupted by left-wing propaganda to the point where they overthrew the american election but but it's the fact that that idea emerges is a real indication of breakdown in this trust that you've been you know in this fundamental level of trust that we've been describing all right so i'm going to let you riff on those well first of all yes in order to look i have uh i have endless messages as i'm sure you do now from um from people on the american right gop voters who want to persuade me that the election was stolen and that everybody has let trump down and in order to believe that you have to not only believe that all of those courts uh were wrong and were corrupted in some way but for instance vice president pence was corrupted and mitch mcconnell was right right exactly yes all the senior you know people who okay so it's worth dwelling it's worth dwelling on this for a moment because lots of viewers are going to have this as a question they're going to be wavering with regard to their attitude towards the election so what we're saying is that the fundamental here's the reasonable perspective it was very close no doubt there were irregularities however yes when trump challenged the integrity of the vote even the judiciary that would have been ideological ideologically tilted towards him and even nominated by him in some circumstances over ruled his objections in the vast majority of cases plus you just said you also have to hypothesize that mike pence was somehow got to and that all of the right-wingers the republican people on the right who are who refused to go along with trump's claim that the election was stolen all those people were subject to the same corruption so the only person that's allowed to be pristine from that perspective is trump himself everywhere or else there's betrayal and i would strongly urge people apart from anything else to look at the absurdity of that idea that the perfect the only perfect person in the united states is donald j trump really have you never had any doubts about his character have you never wondered about his priorities and have you never have you never uh allowed yourself to succumb to the temptation of gleefully using trump as a weapon against people that who have annoyed you in the past some and and is your attraction towards trump not generated in large part by a kind of resentment that you wouldn't be willing to pri proudly admit publicly you have to learn and and now you're in a situation where you have to think that he's he's the only paragon of virtue this is not a this is not a road that i would recommend traveling down absolutely and i worry i worry that among other things if the opportunity cost to the democrats of not can not recognize the democrats had four years where they could have realized that they lost to trump in spite of the american public knowing who he was yes not that they didn't know his character or his flaws but they knew all of them and they voted for him anyway that's a heck of a lesson to learn from and they should have spent four years trying to learn from it and they didn't and well i don't know i don't know if they didn't you know it i think this this tangles us back up with the problem that we were discussing to begin with like i've worked reasonably closely with the greg hurwitz is yeah who did these ads i met him with you that's right that's right you did you did that i forgot about that and we we've talked also about the collapse of the grand narrative like it's not easy for the moderates on the democrat side to get the stage partly they don't know how they're they're not social media experts by any stretch of the imagination and they may have some some of the contempt that is associated with inability with regard to using the new media forms they're not savvy in that regard and they may have learned at least in part but i don't think they know how to control the ideologues on the left and it's partly because they they don't know how to put forth an alternative narrative well here's one very straightforward one that the american left could do it could recognize you can be proud of your country and feel this broadly speaking been a great force for good in the world without being a reprehensible person yes absolutely that's a very good place to start well i would say the message messages the messages that have been put out by this particular uh group and the candidates that they have supported would agree with that statement and and okay so so they're yeah but but the problem the point is they could have worked more on that they could have worked to try to make the deplorables feel somewhat um alienated yes they that they heard that they didn't want to make their lives more painful they wanted to lessen the pain that could have been that could have been cheese but but but the point is that now there's a risk of the same opportunity cost on the american right that they're going to spend four years with this obsession over the election that's just passed that massive amount of attention of voters and of thinkers and of outlets and of money and much more is going to be dedicated first of all to this attempt to prove everyone other than the trump family let america down in the last few months and secondly that of course he's going to continue to be caught up with the trump train and that he will haunt not just american politics but specifically uh republican politics okay so let's talk about let's talk about this impeachment move then be so my sense was that my sense is that in some way trump is better ignored than persecuted yes and the reason i believe that is because of this move towards paranoid conspiratorial thinking that i see emerging everywhere and the last thing you want to do to people who are becoming paranoid is to persecute them and absolutely for the democrats have if the democrats are going to prosecute trump i shouldn't say persecute not in that context anyways if they're going to prosecute trump they need to figure out how to detach the prosecution of trump from the persecution of people who voted for him yes right that's a very tricky thing to do and so i think it would be better to let him go with a whimper than to let him go with a bang well he is here's one way by the way um i mean i know when i was writing about blm protests last summer i at any by the way i mean i make a suggestion here by the way the american media is much much more corrupted than the british media you know we still have a much wider variety of platforms in the uk and allow people a wider and better array of opinion than the american media which is almost totally sunk not completely but almost totally in britain we don't have quite simple why do i say that because no editor of mine would allow me to claim that everyone who went on a blm march looted no editor of mine would allow me to write that if i even tried it and i wouldn't i would immediately have my first edit back saying you can't claim that because everybody who was upset at the death of george floyd last summer did not go and loot the local nike store some people did it was too large a number and there were too many people giving cover for them and and so on but you can't say they all did right so let's play the same standard are you allowed to pretend that everyone who attended the capitol hill demonstration the other week was responsible for the most reprehensible people and their actions no you shouldn't do that are you allowed to pretend that all republican voters or trump supporters were responsible for it no you shouldn't be allowed to do that i mean we could try to encourage not unless you want to live with the consequences absolutely we could try to hold people to that standard it's a perfectly reasonable it would have been journalism 101 in america until a few years ago it's only as they say because of the totally corrupted nature of the american media that that it's possible for that to happen by the way can i just give a quick um as it were a parenthesis on that i was just writing a piece yesterday about uh andy no um and uh his forthcoming book unmasked which i blurbed and uh is now the number one best-selling book on amazon happily um but but i read one of the reports on the again i don't get stuck on the antique thing because the the left-wing uh the democrat friend in your head will be saying he's talking about antifa again i want to get this possible yeah point to an example of the corruption of the american media the american media reporting on the antifa protests outside the bookstore in portland and other places trying to force them not to stock andy's book the reports on that said things like and this with these weren't you know unusual or fringe publications but abc and other networks said things like andy no who claimed to have been assaulted and hospitalized by antifa in 2019 i said what is this claimed to be either the journalist in question was hospitalized or he was not it's not hard to find that out it's not hard to satisfy it so that you accurately represent to your readers what happened one day in 2019 you don't need to do these things that signal that you don't agree with the interpretation of the individual in question which you believe might be attributed to you if you accurately report the facts it's in these little slippages that the american media has gone so badly wrong and in as a result the american political debate has helped to go so badly so let me let me offer something that might be an analog to that maybe um and this might also be viewed by listeners or viewers as concentrating on rearranging the deck chairs when the ship is sinking but in any case um last week the biden harris uh organization put out a tweet with a little video and it was joseph biden discussing what he was going to do to small business owners that had been decimated by this terrible pandemic and then he listed all the identity politics groups that would be preferentially treated now he could have i watched that and i thought that was a big mistake he could have because he's at the height of his ability to set his own agenda and not to pander to the radicals on the left if he can't do it right now he's never going to be able to do it um he should have said people have been devastated by this pandemic small business owners we're going to do everything we can to help them starting with those who have been affected the most which is a perfectly reasonable place to start but he had to list asians latinos women uh people of color he may not have listed that particular category certainly blacks um yeah and it seemed to me to be completely super super super superfluous and and one of those small slips of the sort that you're describing that lead to this tip this positive feedback loop exactly i saw that video as well i was horrified i thought you if you you're the incoming president you won the election you have the most important opportunity now to help heal america and you're pulling this well and you also have something obvious to do in front of you all biden all biden has to do there's nothing he has to do except immunize the population as fast as possible it's like he's got a the clearest mandate of any president that i can remember because the problem is self-evident it's like the pandemic is terrible it's it's killing people and it's driving them crazy well that's that's absolutely i mean we should get on that because this is one of my other big fears that the era of the pandemic it's the worst possible time to have an overarching conspiracy narrative introduced to the system by the american president i mean the outgoing american president it's a very very bad time that's for sure donald j trump must know this it's it's one of the fears that conservatives always had about him was that he was going to pull some crap like this at the end you know it was one of the reasons why a lot of good people wouldn't join the administration why they wanted to keep a million miles away from him and this is a very very dangerous and reprehensible thing for him to have done in recently yes well you can see his you can see his essential narcissism manifest itself like it seems to me quite likely that a large that 75 percent of trump believes what he's saying can't conceive of the fact that he lost the election and and i'm i mean maybe that's not relevant although i think it's it i'm always trying to understand him from a psychological perspective but i think his narcissism is so great that he's willing to risk it appears that he's willing to risk everything in order to to maintain his belief in victory yes including the republican including conservative voters and and yes and more importantly the republic i think it's completely reprehensible and i know there will be people watching who support trump and will be furious i still think it's very very important well look we already we already we already walked through why supporting trump at the moment is something that needs to be rethought and we should i want to get back to that just for one moment look the problem is is that if you want to maintain your support for trump under the current conditions that you're going to make yourself a lot more politically radical than you were last week because you have to swallow so much more than you did two weeks ago say or three weeks you have to believe that absolutely every institution in american life is totally corrupted and that the only incorrupt uncorrupted thing is donald j trump and me right and both of those like each of those things is not true and the combined the combination of them is even less true yes so so so it's very very important that people realize that donald trump was in a in a society that was very close already to conflagration and he started playing with the matchbox in a very dangerous way from the moment of the evening of the election when he said that he thought he'd won it already and his insistence that he has won it still to this moment is a deeply corrupting influence on all of american politics and it's going to do enormous damage to everyone on the right of politics everywhere in the world for the foreseeable future so i i i think it was reprehensible he did however i add this to the fact that we're already in this era i mean since since we last spoke jordan if we had when we last spoke if either of us had said to the other that the citizenry of all of our countries will be confined to our houses throughout 2020 and 2021 and made not to see our friends and our closest family in many cases and not to be allowed to go to the funerals of loved ones and much much more and that just basic things like shopping for essential goods would become problematic if either of us had sent this to the other one when we last spoke we wouldn't be able to foresee the circumstances in which such a horror show occurred we've been in the middle of this horror show we're still in it in our respective countries and so again we already have a very dangerous situation occurring where we are all even more in our solitudes than the social media systems have already made us we've already lost almost all of our remaining social antennae we don't have the ability to feel exactly what it is in a normal situation like down the pub or talking with friends in a normal situation over a cup of coffee we've lost all of that in the last thing so it's a very bad idea there's nowhere that isn't a catastrophe and so it's very easy to believe that there's catastrophe everywhere even where there isn't because because and in this situation our most important our most important duty it seems to me is to hold on as much as we can in this very very choppy time and not fall into conspiratorial thinking or vengefulness or excuse of violence or resentment resentment legitimization of actual political or non-political means and much more that's what we could point out we could point out you know that the democrats are making a conservative argument with regards to the election they're saying look the institutions worked therefore we're the valid government but before they can make the claim that they're the valid government they have to accept the claim that the institutions worked and the conservatives shouldn't object to that because the conservatives believe that the institutions are valid and so it's up to everyone right now to maintain their faith in the validity of the institutions and to not overreact and to remember that we've all been driven half out of our out of our minds or maybe more by this enforced isolation and the fear that the pandemic has produced and that that's also opened the door to a political catastrophe on the heels of the biological catastrophe yes everyone needs to breathe deeply and wait for the damn vaccination it's only going to be a few more months before with any luck before this is brought under control we don't want to burn down the ship just before it gets into port this is this is one of the reasons why you know i i've again i mean you know you get criticism from making this point and largely at the moment from a an increasingly conspiratorially inclined right but you know i don't believe that the last the last year is simply some kind of prelude for democratic governments coincidentally across the entire world to fundamentally reprogram our species or something like that i i don't i don't see it i think there's all sorts of criticism i think that we've made the economy too secondary in a discussion on the public health for my taste but again if we had a mature political discussion in any of our countries it wouldn't it would have involved as you know i've discussed this before in aristotelian terms to do with immigration but i can do the same thing in relation to the pandemic which is you have competing virtues of eating almost seriousness you have the public health and you have the economy and for a time in all of our societies we over prioritize the public health maps and under prioritize the economy and if you don't have an economy then at some point you don't have a public health system or anything like it and you end up in the situation of a country where the the the poor and just just much more likely to just die right and so we sacrificed we sell what we're doing is sacrificing long-term public health for short-term gains on the hospital front and that's actually not surprising like i've thanked my lucky stars many times in the last year that i'm not in a position to be making those decisions because it must be hell what we need to all step back and think look we might get lucky there's a dozen vaccines that are that are making their way to market many that have already arrived and a few months is a hell of a long time when you're living through it but not very long time when you think about it in retrospect and so if we're smart we're gonna write this out here's an example of where the whole thing can both be mended and can go awry one thing i've tried to alert some people to in the last year has been um are we sure that it's are we sure that for instance it's worth our gdp's crashing and our and our state borrowing soaring in this fashion for this virus the answer might be yes but if it's yes then you have to be pretty sure that nothing like it's going to happen again and i'm not at all sure of that i'm not at all sure that among other things because the country that gave us this virus is led by a communist regime that has done everything it can to cover over how the virus came about and so here's one of the risks we have in in the era we're going into um the question of how to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again is likely to be subsumed and forgotten about among other things because a lot of energy is going to be expended by people in fruitless and conspiratorial pursuits which will include conspiratorial pursuits against everyone in government in their respective countries and we will we will lose the opportunity for instance to hold the ccp to account or to make sure that they don't give us another virus like this in a couple of years time because we also know from this this last year that we live in societies which are are dominated by risk aversion and a highly litigious i mean many of the firms that will will not come back will not come back because they were in fear that one employee might get the virus if they returned too early to the office and then sue their employer for instance all of these are they're not the deepest problems in a society but they're in terms of the technocracy of a society they are very serious problems and need addressing i re i worry that we're going to address none of this because of energy is expended in fruitless directions and i wonder if we can't just somehow again come and come across ways to solve problems and that can be done by trust being built across political divides well that so that's that's a big part of this is that i would say another if one piece of advice is to understand what you're sacrificing by continuing to support trump under these conditions another piece of advice would be to risk trust yes at the present time you know yes we've been through in the west we've been through crises of various sorts in the past and managed them quite successfully all things considered and you could point to the pandemic response and look at all the things that have been positive about it the biggest of those being the dozen or so vaccines or more that are in the pipeline and that have been produced with unbelievable speed and and apparent utility and i'm praying that that's the case knowing full well that you know vaccinating 100 million people with a relatively unproven chemical is a dangerous enterprise but i'm praying that it goes well and i'm praying as well that that trust i've been thinking increasingly i wrote about this in my book that's coming out in march about trust as a form of courage right rather than because naive trust is useless and anybody who's been hit is no longer naive and so maybe no longer trusting but you can replace that with a trust that's born out of courage and if you manifest trust even across a political divide you call to the best in the person across that divide by saying look i'm willing to trust you knowing full well that you're as big a snake as me so that's what we need at the moment and i and i'm i'm hoping biden well i mean i he has a he is a great burden and i hope that he can be pragmatic and concentrate on the real problems and and help us put i was looking i was reading your book and i kept thinking this sounds like the past to me because the pandemic has switched things around so dramatically it's like well this is so 2018 or or and and maybe it's not maybe it's still valid for today but maybe the pandemic has changed everything too and you know we can put some of these trivial and adolescent preoccupations behind us and concentrate on the real problems at hand so some people listening will have heard me say this before but when um when the pandemic first struck uh in 2020 i was under the i for a moment i mean i thought a lot of things like all of us one of my thoughts the secondary thought was um oh well at least that'll see off all the identity politics nonsense i thought well you know no one's going to have much time for playing gender games if we're all going to lose the significant swathe of our loved ones and i thought for a time i thought i thought well no that'll make the subject of the madness of crowds look like a sort of dated a dated book already like you know one of these books written just before a catastrophe which which wipes out the relevance of the book in question and i sort of had i had that feeling for for a few weeks and then i saw the same stuff coming in the same games being played and then of course after the death of george floyd i saw you know one of the subjects i take on in the book race just blow up and i say in the updated version you know that was that was my experience of it was in the way i was i was hoping my book was going to be irrelevant and then yeah and then suddenly it seemed to be right over the target again and um and and you know and it's it's strange because because i felt i felt already that what i'd seen and just and what i'd warned about had just exploded just after i'd warned about it and as you know you've had this experience i mean it's very worrying because you see the speed at which things pick up and the and the and the violence it just catches faster than you'd ever feared that's a characteristic of positive feedback loops they spiral out of control unbelievably quickly and before we knew it you know in britain suddenly winston churchill was a reprehensible figure yes overnight um um and i resisted that as i always do i resisted the attempt to smuggle in a new narrative about everything in my my society and country my country's history under cover of a terrible policeman's actions in minnesota but i think most people felt at that moment that they were on the back foot if they believed as i do that their society had a lot to be said for it rather than this horrible hostile rewriting that was being attempted on the behalf on the back of an incident awful as it was in minnesota and i and i just i but i saw the speed and the recklessness with which people tried to push in a new story and then i suppose one of the things i thought about was well what are the things that i suggest in the madness of crowds as being ways out and are they still working would they still be relevant in this situation and perhaps i would say this but i i do find that the answers i give i mean they're not the most specific in a way but i try not to be specific i try to give them the deepest most widely applicable answers i can you talk about you talk about forgiveness and i figured that would be a good way for us to close out this discussion you know and i think that that's you know i think that that's that's a topic upon which much meditation could be expended you know we have to live with each other the left wingers have to live with the trump voters and the trump voters have to live with the identity politics types and we have good solid institutions and i think we need in the next coming months to put out our put out our hands to our to those who oppose us knowing full well that we might be burnt in the attempt but to do it nonetheless and to keep doing it because the all the alternatives are much worse unless you want to see things burn and yes most people are moderate and reasonable yes and uh will feel deep embarrassment at some point if they allow their own political side to run to its extremes they will you know i i think this about i i don't get stuck in them again but very quickly i think this about about what has happened in recent weeks on the republican right there will be and should be some embarrassment that a president a republican president was able to stand in front of a very large crowd mainly comprising patriots and to say words which were if there were not incitement direct incitement but were real fighting talk and raised the question of exactly what it is he thought the crowd should do you know and i think he didn't ever want to make that too clear even to himself i think i read the speech carefully and yes there is it's it's it's here's what i think this is what i would suggest you do if you were true patriots right and i think this is this is a reckless reckless speech and i think that people should have the decency on any and all political sides to say that recklessness you don't have to go all the way to excitement the reckless speech you've got to be careful with and you've got to try to limit it and you've got to try to call it out where you can and not just enjoy it because at some point it will lead to something which will humiliate you and humiliate your side and much much more it will make you feel shame and you want to try to avoid that so in the manners of crowds one of the things as you say i i refer to is is this and i write a chapter on is the importance of forgiveness and and it's quite easy when you're caught up as you well know and you're caught up in the sort of day-to-day fights that are going on and the endless information and and new examples and new lows that are always being hit it's quite easy to to lose sight of the of the deep underlying answers to some of our present performers but i'm i'm absolutely persuaded that one of them lies in forgiveness and one of the reasons i i go there is obviously we live in this society and the social media has exacerbated it beyond all previous human belief we live in societies which are very eager to demonstrate us and them instincts uh without having to leave your bed you know you can shame somebody you can you can try to destroy them you can do your bit to pick up on something somebody said or once said and go for them and pummel them and destroy them and everything every future they've got you can do that but you should also know how dangerous it is and my hope has always been that the more people saw this the more they would step back from this manner of living but the thing the thing that that struck me and made me write about the forgiveness thing in particular actually was was something that hannah aaron who participated perhaps isn't a thinker i think over highly of actually um all sorts of criticisms of her like a lot of people have um but um there's a lecture that hannah aaron delivered in the 50s i happened to read a few years ago it just made an enormous impression on me because aaron says um in this lecture something i think will be highly pertinent to a lot of people listening which is that is that we've always as human beings had a one worry in particular which is how do we act in the world how do we act in the world how do we put one's foot in front of the other how do we put one word in front of them of another and and and say the next one and decide what our actions should be day to day never mind year to year and we all have the terror of action and young people in particular have it because they haven't tried it out enough they haven't they haven't yet made their mistakes and you've got to make your mistakes in order for anything else to lose some of the terror of the question of action in the world but hannah aaron says something so interesting in this lecture she says she says as human beings we only ever really found one mechanism to make the horror of acting in the world less horrific and that was the mechanism that we know is forgiveness which in in religious terms you can add to is also the possibility of redemption which perhaps in a highly secularized society we ought to also think about more not just forgiveness but redemption and and and i say that this is therefore something that we should all be trying to exercise in our lives because we sure as hell know that we as individuals do not want to ourselves be treated without ever having forgiveness demonstrated to us by other people towards us we don't want to live in a situation where when we want to slip if we once we're the wrong thing or make the wrong move or or make the wrong move on someone else or or or say the wrong thing we don't want to live in the world where we at any moment can destroy ourselves catastrophically and unmendably we don't want to live in that world ourselves so why would we expect other people to live in that world or to want to live in that world and the mechanism therefore that we all have to in our political and non-political lives because politics isn't that damn well isn't everything but in our our political and non-political lives we have to work at finding ways to forgive and and and there's a lot to say about this but this is this is seems to me to be one of the absolute keys in our time that we all need to work on how can i forgive a person who has done a wrong to me how can i allow somebody else who may have made a mistake to to live again for it to live again it's not it's not the same thing as you well know i mean it's not the same thing as being willfully naive it's not about just giving people uh you know second time it's the nature of the apology matters deeply as well of course the nature of the seeking for redemption or seeking for forgiveness matters you know we know that you can't just sort of say oh well yeah they're that sorry about that and and move on but it has to be deep and deeply meant but when when the feeling of that is deeply meant and is deeply offered it should not be retributively and deliberately willfully smashed away in order to win a short-term political or other point and so i think that's a good i think that's an excellent place to to end the conversation and for everyone who's listening to consider deeply in the upcoming months you know we want to extend an intelligent and compassionate hand across the political divide and hope that we don't rock the boat any further than nature has already decided to rock it and maybe we'll make it through this dire time and put things back together and for all the right wingers who've been tossed out of power in the united states as you'll get your opportunity again soon enough and in the meantime you better wish your new president well good talking to you douglas very nice to see you to see you i can't tell you what a pleasure it is to see you jordan thanks very much i'm i hope we talk again soon i really hope so [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, politics, JBP, Jordan, Peterson, douglas murray, education, podcast, openminded, nartives, rogan, peace, critical thinking, democrat, republican, brexit, america, trump, biden

Id: g_RrYz85E1A

Length: 104min 23sec (6263 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021