"They Want to Change HOW We Think. It's Pure Orwellianism" Brendan O'Neill

foreign [Music] is you'll be a bit of a heretic if you're anything like me which means that the book we're looking at this week uh will be right up your alley um it is a Heretics Manifesto essays on the unsayable it is written by Brendan O'Neill who is author uh writes for everything from the Daily Mail uh many many papers appeared on us Australian television British TV very regularly also being on this show and I'm prepared for not for a very long time so I'm delighted that he's with us now um Brenton uh great to see you um and congratulations on the book um because you know you go through these various different topics which we discuss a lot on this channel you know we we've got the climate so-called climate crisis we've got um obviously trans issue we've got kind of self-hatred white self-hatred Western self-hatred all in the book but I just wanted to sort of start off with something you say which is that in fact the way we describe what we're living through at the moment is not adequate I think that really sort of basically left out to me what most people would call cancer culture uh you're saying that this isn't really adequate to to actually discover what really is happening yeah so that's in the introduction to the book so that's really the first point I make which is basically that the term cancel culture isn't good enough to describe what we're living through and I say it would be similar to referring to if we refer to Salem as accountability culture or you know uh the Inquisition as Information Management it doesn't quite sit with me comfortably in terms of having capturing the gravity of the moment that we're currently experiencing I mean I use the term cancel culture it's a very convenient term importantly it's understood by lots of people members of the public politicians journalists so it's a handy phrase I'm not saying we shouldn't use it but I think it's become a bit too um small to describe what we're going through and what I argue in the book is that the problem we have today is not just the occasional cancellation of a controversial speaker or the attempted cancellation of JK Rowling or the the cancellation of University speakers whatever else it might be as terrible people as those things are there's a broader culture of intolerance authoritarianism and anti-enlightenment there's a revolt against the gains and the knowledge and the progress of Western Society itself I think we're living through an extraordinary moment of counter Enlightenment and one which is destroying freedom and destroying some of the great ideas of the past so cancel culture isn't quite enough I think to describe that kind of at that kind of climate no I I would absolutely agree with you that it's not dissimilar to woke you know using the term woke uh I mean you know you you talk about this as being as you say an attack on the enlightenment um or as you or Enlightenment but also an attack maybe on on Western culture or well which is broadly the same thing we're talking about um similarly with woke it just doesn't it's too well first of all people don't understand what it means um but it is a much wider thing um you talk throughout the book which I found you know fascinating it covers so many areas you talk about throughout the book um about the importance though of language and words um and I was towards the end of the book I was very struck by something as I want to ask you about now which was that you say that essentially um people who are against the council culture they tend to sort of play down the importance of words they should say oh it's just words you know and you're saying actually we're taking the wrong approach can you explain a bit what you mean by that yeah so that's the final chapter of the book which has caused a bit of controversy among some people who've been reading it and that chapter is called words wound and my argument in that chapter is that words do wound you know there is a tendency among those of us who support freedom of speech I'm pretty much a free speech absolutist I think it's the most important value in a Democratic Society um I oppose all forms of censorship and there is a tendency among people on my side to say you know sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me and that's just not true words do hurt people and I think we have to acknowledge that and recognize that not in order that we will then censor words because we don't want to hurt people but just to recognize the extraordinary power that words have you know every great revolution in history started with words started with ideas all the great leaps forward in the enlightenment which were very disorientating for society very disorientating for communities that were more traditionally inclined they all started with words if you look at the Reformation one of in that chapter on on Words wound I talk about William Tyndale and his efforts to translate the Bible into English in the early 1500s it was absolutely forbidden to translate the Bible into English it was only available in Latin because it was assumed that only well-educated Latin speaking priests would have access to the Bible and the plebs that the Sheep who would sit in the church and would their only job was to take on board what the priest said to them and William Tyndale said no I think everyone should be able to read the Bible it was one of the most revolutionary ideas in history and it's no exaggeration to say that without his struggle to translate the Bible we wouldn't have seen the development of the idea of freedom of conscience freedom of speech and the rights of ordinary people to understand things for themselves and of course for doing that he was an outlaw he was eventually found by the ecclesiastical authorities he was strangled to death and then he was burnt at the stake and reduced to a pile of Ashes that was his punishment for daring to translate the Bible um and the point I make is that his words his English language Bible were quite hurtful they were hurtful to the ecclesiastical order they would have felt quite wounding to lots of people who existed in the early 1500s they probably would have felt just as wounding as a a Jermaine Greer article does to trans activists today when she refers to trans women as big knuckle hairy knuckled men in dresses that that makes people feel heard and wounded so the point I make in that chapter is we have to recognize the Power of Words and that is the basis on which we should defend freedom of speech it is precisely because words have this extraordinary power to change Minds change societies make things better drag us forward to better understanding of the world we live in it's precisely that power of what words that disorientating impact they sometimes have that we should defend them from all forms of Earth censorship do you think it's that when people do just simply say sticks and stones may break my bones you know names will never hurt me do you think it's also because they don't quite understand the seriousness of the situation it could well be I mean I know I know I fully know why they say that I'm sure I've said it myself many times over the past few uh years and Decades of uh the kind of creeping culture of censorship I know why they say it that they're making a distinction between violence and words and I do think it's important to maintain that distinction so when I say words are powerful and words can be hurtful and words can change things in a radical way I'm not equating them with violence at all and that it is important to maintain that distinction between words and physical acts violent acts and I think one of the dangerous ideas of our time in fact is the idea that words don't only hurt you and make you feel bad or challenge your ideas or or you know make you or offend you we all feel offended by things all the time but there's this idea from the from the cancel culture mob that words are the same as violence so trans activists for example will say that a gender critical speech is an act of violence it it threatens to erase them islamists islamist activists will often say that criticism of Muhammad or mockery of the of the Quran is a form of violence against their spiritual beliefs it's a it's a it's an Abomination against God and the danger in that argument is that if we treat words as violence we encourage people to use violence in response to words because if we encourage people to believe that a word is an act of violence then they will say okay I will meet those words with my own form of violence that's what we see saw in the massacre at Charlie hebdo in 2015 I think that's what we see in other instances as well that when you see these kind of violent mobs that try to prevent gender critical women from speaking all those people believe that they've been violently assaulted by speech and therefore they return with their own kind of violence so it's important to maintain that distinction but at the same time we shouldn't get ourselves into a situation where we are downplaying the importance of age and the power of speech and the thing that does concern me about some friends of mine on the pro-free speech side is that we end up actually saying words are just words you know they're meaningless it's water off a duck's back and I think actually we should say listen the reason we defend freedom of speech is because speech is such a powerful tool for understanding the world and potentially changing it and I think it's on that basis that we should make the argument do you think actually one thing that struck me you know Brendan is that we used to hear in this country I'm speaking to you're in Ireland at the moment aren't you but we used to hear a lot in this country over this phrase It's a free country you know it used to just be just one of those things said quite casually you never hear it anymore I mean do you think there still is Free Speech in this country um I don't think there is and um this can be a difficult argument to make sometimes because I'm speaking to you we could pretty much say anything we want as long as we don't say anything that falls outside of the law which in itself is problematic some of these laws are problematic um I think many people feel they have freedom of speech but my argument is that if any form of speech is censored then we don't have freedom of speech what we have is licensed speech what we have is a system where you're free to speak so long as you don't say anything that the authorities or the Moral Majority or rather the moral minority these days um so long as you don't say anything that offends them or upsets them so that is just that means you have a license to speak so long as you stay within certain parameters and that means that we don't have freedom of speech across the board a country with free and people say to me how can you have complete freedom of speech such a country could never survive it would be Mayhem and I just say well look at the United States they have a a constitutional provision for freedom of speech the state is forbidden from restricting freedom of the press and freedom of speech of course they've never they haven't always lived up to that standard but it is a country built on the idea that speech should never be threatened by officialdon um and I think that's something we should aspire to as well I think in order to have full freedom of speech the gender critical feminist needs to be as free to express herself as you know the boring guardianista with Pro kirst armor views is free to express themselves if we only have a situation where safe um comfortable middle of the road views can be expressed but edgy and supposedly controversial views can't be expressed certainly not without an extraordinary reaction or the police knocking on your door then um that's not freedom of speech that is um then you're you're allowed to speak so long as you say things that the state agrees with yeah in fact the position the Constitutional position in America you mentioned might be one of the reasons why they don't have the extent of or any hate speech laws in the way that we do yeah I mean you know this has been something which is intensifying and things that seem to be a joke a while ago for example about misogyny for example being a hate crime it's now very much in The Ether isn't it it's very much that you can see where the drift of these things are going um you say in your in the book as well though and again this is when you you're coming to the end of it um that basically heresy always finds a way um I people who feel the way maybe that we do about the situation find how do you see that playing out in the future how what will our way be yeah that's a good question I think um I would make two points about heresy firstly I would say that um you know Harris is a scary word to some people they think of you know Heretics in the 1500s or whatever saying crazy things and being dragged to the stake and burnt alive or you know we conjures up those kinds of images but I do think it's worth reminding ourselves that virtually every freedom and comfort we enjoy is a consequence of heresy it's a consequence of someone daring to say something that they weren't supposed to say so that goes right back to William Tyndale and his English language Bible the reason you have the reason you can go into a shop now and buy a pocket Bible in your own language is because he invented the pocket Bible in the English language and he was murdered for doing so if he hadn't done that we wouldn't be able to enjoy that freedom today or certainly it would have come much later um or if you think about the Heretics who said that the Earth is not the center of the universe that was an awful thing to say it was unspeaking it was as bad as these days saying that trans women are men you know is that it was the thing that shouldn't be spoken in public and yet the fact that they did that helped to expand our understanding of the universe and our understanding of science or you know right through to the modern era you know in the in the late 1800s and the early 1900s the people who said you know what I think women should have the right to vote they would have been looked upon as hysterics and idiots and in fact that's how they were referred to off very often or people in the early to mid 20th century who said I think men should be able to have relationships with that with other men without being dragged off to prison that was a dangerous thing to say you you seriously risked being ousted from polite Society if you uttered those kinds of um social profanities but people did say them they did make the case they did stick by their guns they did suffer as a consequence whether with torture and death 300 400 years ago or with social ostracism in more recent times and the fact that they did that allowed the Overton window to open a bit more and allowed freedom to be expanded and allowed social progress to develop so it it irritates me when I see youngish people in particular on University campuses fuming against freedom of speech mocking freedom of speech saying that contrarianism or heresy and all those things is is just the luxury of rich white men which is a complete fallacy and we don't really need freedom and I think to myself listen the reason you people have such wonderful lovely knowledgeable Lives full of Freedom full of choice is because people put their necks on the Block literally uh for for those freedoms and I think it's really important to understand that and that might actually be the starting point to the second part of your question which is how we um push for heresy today how we make the case for Freer more experimental ways of thinking and talking and and having open discussion I think it's important firstly to remind ourselves that it's only by doing that that we live in relatively modern free societies and also it's only by doing that now more and more that we can hope to expand Freedom even further expand Choice further and make life even more comfortable the more that we restrict Freedom John Stuart Mill makes this point in on Liberty the more we restrict Freedom the more we restrict the possibility of coming up with new ideas and new ways of organizing things and that's got to be the starting point of the argument for heresy and Free Speech it's it's only through those things that we can hope to have a greater understanding of our world but I mean I wonder whether you're worried in a way that I am you mentioned universities I know that by the way excuse me you've been de-platformed on a number of occasions haven't you uh in the past and indeed you did a report did you not Brendan about Free Speech actually in universities some time ago but um what borrows me is apparently if you believe surveys young people actually don't really care actually pretty much about free speech that to me is the the biggest threat they don't they really do think that offense for example does Trump any notion of re-expression free speech um and they don't they supports the problem so what you know I mean that is a real mountain isn't it that's going to be a real mountain to climb to get over that oh absolutely no question about it and I think um I I always feel slightly torn on this issue so you're right I've been no platformed a few times um I was banned from speaking at Oxford in 2014 I think uh me and Timothy Stanley from The Daily Telegraph was supposed to have a debate about abortion and the student said it's not right for two men to discuss abortion so they threatened to invade the event and then Christchurch College in Oxford agreed to call it off and I wrote a piece at the time for The Spectator I did a cover story for them called The Stepford students which was about this kind of trend among students to be these rather robotic conformist individuals who um wanted to shut down everything that made them feel bad or made them feel offended and um I think one of the issues is that there can be this temptation to blame it on young people you know the blue haired mob the 20 year olds the 21 year olds that they're naive they're wet behind the ears they're often from the upper middle classes I have to say the same problems are not so apparent in red brick universities or former polytechnics they're much more pronounced at the um top universities Oxford and Cambridge Durham places like that which is very interesting I think it's because one of the problems though if we expand it beyond the issue of young people themselves I think it's the problem is the culture that they tend to be educated in and socialized in so these are young people who are far more Molly coddled than we were when we were young these are young people who are told that um if they get if they lose a friend in the playground or get get into an argument that's bullying it's terrible they have to report it to the teachers and have it resolved by pair adults they don't go out as often as we did they don't get into scrapes they don't fall over and they are protected from the vagaries of Everyday Life by um adults parents and teachers who think that they are frail fragile creatures and I think that that gives rise to a culture future in which they it gives rise to the safe space mentality and you actually see safe spaces on campuses now where students will go into a safe space with um coloring books and sometimes little little dogs that they can pet on the head and um bean bags that they can sit in and this is their safe space where they can hide away from such demonic figures as Kathleen stock you know the most moderate one of the brightest philosophers around who's treated as this kind of satanic figure who will ruin their self-esteem so um it's tempting to blame the young I certainly have derived much pleasure from making fun of these young sensors who are often very ridiculous but it is I think worth looking at the broader culture and the question of what we as adults did or didn't do which created this new generation of rather intolerant activists well yes I mean one could say child-centric learning you know one could you know the way parents now just see their kids as kind of this Immaculate creation that can't be challenged in any way um is it a chapter in the book by the way called her penis um which in some ways is wonderful way do you describe because that is the kind of heresy at the moment to actually say that it's impossible to say this it's impossible it doesn't make sense it goes against common sense of biology um so that has actually become a heresy actually to to point that out I suppose but what struck me about it really Brendan was that you talk about the trans activists you know their their point on this but they seem to be completely aged and about it by journalists and broadcasters or whatever who continue to use that term you know it almost in defiance I mean what's going on there do you say I mean why why should you know newspapers local newspapers you you point many of these examples out you know actually use this term often about a rapist or a herp you know her her penis um why is there such acceptance is this just down to fear yeah it really is extraordinary I think in many ways that's that's the big question why is why has it been embraced by so many people in the media in politics in the Judiciary I point out in that chapter that you even in a court of law even police forces around the UK will now record offenses as having been committed by a woman if the man who had committed them identifies as a woman and some police forces even do that for rape they will even record a rape as having been committed by a woman if the man says he's a woman which is just delusional it's it's absolutely hysterical that's not how a civilized society should organize itself we've got to appreciate the importance of Truth and objective truth rather than constantly caving into people's um subjective delusions about themselves but I think um the reason I wrote that first chapter called her penis is because yeah so you'll you'll see news reports in which it will say uh a woman flashed her penis or a woman went into a changing a spa changing room in Los Angeles which happened and showed her penis to other people and you just think what are they talking about these are obviously not women these are men and that I think really cuts to the orwellian nature of the era that we live in because of course Winston Smith's job in 1984 in the ministry of Truth was to rewrite old newspaper articles in order to make them Accord with the ideology of the party and we're seeing that now in real life you know the New York Times and the BBC they both ran a piece uh last year saying that an 83 year old woman murdered a woman in her 60s and decapitated her and I was reading this thinking hold on 83 year old women don't do this 83 year old women tend to be quite small and and fail and certainly not murderous I can't think of any instance in my lifetime when an 83 year old woman has done that and you read it and you get to the last sentence and it says uh this 83 year old woman identifies as a woman so in other words it's a man so the whole news report on the BBC and the New York times was a lie they sacrificed Truth for at the altar of ideology and when we live in a society in which the press and politicians and the cultural Elites think that they have the right to Define reality itself in defiance of the things that we can see with our own eyes in defiance of the light of our own reason they think they can say what is reality that is the purest form of tyranny in some ways when they think they can redefine the world as it exists so that it Accords better with their eccentric ideological beliefs and it's so important to push back against that and to if you ever hear the phrase her penis it's so important to say no you mean his penis that's the only acceptable thing to say in this situation uh it is Alice in Wonderland um no no question um finally uh Brandon you make a very interesting point in the book as well when you say that and also that this is a kind of in attack on our internal life you know can you just explain that a bit because I found that I know exactly what you mean but I think it'd be interesting for you to explain it a bit more yeah so I think this is one of the most important things about wokeness or political correctness or whatever we're meant to call it it can be hard to Define this culture but I think many people instinctively know what you're talking about when you talk about these things it's kind of the authoritarianism with no name but people have a sense of what you mean I think one of the most important things about this culture is that it it actually wants to change how we think and so one of the arguments I make throughout the book in in most of the chapters in fact is that the key trend of our times is the manipulation of language to manipulate how we think to change our actual minds and our thoughts so on every issue from climate change climate change is now referred to as climate emergency or climate apocalypse those that's the manipulation of language designed to make us think that the end of the world is nigh designed to limit what we can think on these issues or if you look at islamist terrorism police forces are now saying let's call it Faith claimed terrorism let's stop using in words like jihadist and Islamic and islamists that's and they openly say this is a way of changing how people think about community relations and the same thing on the gender ideology they will openly say that encouraging preferred pronoun use is about changing the way people think about sex and gender that again is entirely orwellian George Orwell made the point that people who control language control thought and that's the authoritarianism we are currently living under and it is so important to push back against it because what it does it's an invasion of our inner life it's an invasion of our inner self and uh you know Stewart Lee the comedian once referred to political correctness as institutionalized politeness he said it's just about being polite it's not about being polite since when did politeness involve being complicit in the lives of the establishment since when did polite be mean saying things that you know are not true in fact what political correctness is is institutionalized Conformity and it's not actually enough in their eyes for us to be polite for us to politely refer to a man who identifies as a woman as she that kind of politeness as they refer to it is not enough they want you to think of that man as a she and if you don't they will call you a thought criminal so we've got to understand that this goes deeper even than freedom of speech this is an attack on freedom of conscience yeah and and the an attack on the liberty of the mind and we really need to stand up against that no uh beautifully put Brandon I think is absolutely right now the book um Heretics Manifesto essays on the unsayable is available in bookshops or Amazon Amazon uh it's in some bookshops you can get it via the spiked website as well so yeah if you Google people will find it well look all the very best with it Brendan I mean I do hope next time you with your next book you come back and talk about that um but all the very best thank you very much for joining us um hugely important book thanks very much indeed thanks Peter um that's it from the show this week and we shall see you next time hello if you're enjoying the new culture Forum Channel and you believe in our mission may I invite you to join our membership scheme at the link below or on our website newcultureforum.org dot UK our work is more important now than ever and we have great plans ahead for the future but we can't do it without your support from as little as three pounds per month you 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Channel: The New Culture Forum

Views: 42,203

Keywords: New Culture Forum, Peter Whittle, So What You're Saying Is..., Culture Wars

Id: cW0Ls4hyeSY

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023