ACFM - ACFM Trip 51: Heroes

Episode Date: May 18, 2025

The ACFM crew offer a weird-left perspective on the role of the hero (and heroine) in politics and culture. Nadia, Jem and Keir assess theories of Great Men, the myth of the hero’s journey and the lure of the anti-hero with ideas from Weber and Hegel and music from Tina Turner and Sonic Youth. Find […]

Hello, and welcome to Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friends Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today we are talking about heroes. So guys, why do we want to talk about heroes now?

This was my suggestion. In fact, it was a comment by a friend of the show, Alan Finliss, and we were discussing something or other, and he was going on about the centrality of the idea of heroism and the hero's journey to the contemporary far right, which made me start thinking about heroes and whether the idea of heroes is like necessarily reactionary. And then at the same time, there's been these debates around on the left about,

you know, perhaps he should form a new party or something. And it become pretty obvious that Jeremy Corby must be central. He's probably the only figure who could sort of like bring different things together to form either new party or a new electoral alliance or something like that, basically, which made me think about, you know, the way people identify with political figures and whether we can have political heroes. And I realised I was quite confused about the whole issue. So that's sort of what I'm interested in.

One of the things I'm interested in is the whole absence of heroism from politics, especially from progressive politics, and especially actually from kind of liberal, centrist politics today. I'm in the process of developing this idea of careerism, not just as a habit, but as like a whole ideology, a whole world, view and form of subjectivity. And I think one of the features of the technocratic careerist is they have a completely unheroic view of themselves and of politics, because partly because partly because of the decline of nationalism amongst kind of liberal technocrats,

partly because they see themselves in terms of their own personal CV. So this problem we've got on the left is that we don't have figures like we would have had decades ago who might even come from the right, but when history calls, they see the opportunity to make themselves great figures. When we were doing preparations for the show, I was talking about Churchill. You know, Churchill's this like little, you know, racist, anti-communist, hates the working class, but then he gets sort of cornered doing World War II into the position of having to defeat fascism and allow, and give the Labour Party its opening to kind of build the welfare state. That's partly because he wants to be a hero. He wants to be a great hero of history more than he wants to be just like loyal to his class

and burnishing his CV. And I think to some extent the absence of that sentiment from the whole political class presents us with a unique challenge in terms of actually getting any sort of progressive politics. So I'm interested in that, that the fact that grey labour, as Alex Niven calls them, don't even want to be great men of history means that it's really hard to actually pushed them into doing anything. And then that raises a whole set of questions for me, obviously about our whole relationship to ideas of heroes and heroism. And obviously, as an avowed anti-individualist, and as sort of, somebody who's historically always had sort of anarchistic leanings, obviously I'm very dubious about the whole idea of the hero. And yet, you know,

on the other hand, I don't know if we can really have like radical visions of the future without any idea of heroism. So I want to think about that. What about you, Nadia? Yeah, that's really interesting stuff, both of you. I want to get into, like, dig into some of those ideas. So I'm also interested in gender and heroism and some of these basic questions, like, do women need heroes the same way as men under patriarchy? And can women be heroes and have they been allowed to be heroes?

And, yeah, just thinking about, like, all of the gendered aspects of that, and that will allow us also to think about what the image and the ideology of the hero is and how much engages with individualism, like you mentioned Jeremy, but also questions of the public and you know, a journey and spheres that traditionally women have been cut off of or those stories not been told. So like those are some reasons where I would like to think about heroes today together on this show. But before we get into this episode, we should mention that, you can go even weirder and leftier by subscribing

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as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. So with that, let's get back into the topic of heroes. All right, we played it before. We'll play it again. It's John Lennon, a working class hero. As soon as you're born, they make you feel small. By giving you no time instead of it all. Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.

A working-class hero is something to be. Maybe we should start by talking about whether we have any heroes. Well, what about you, Nadia? Do you have any heroes? I was thinking about that. I think I don't have any permanent heroes. Let's put it that way. I think my relationship to heroism is a kind of emotional and temporal one in the sense of you know, I will often read a story from history, especially about a woman or, you know, a left-wing activist who has done something that has some sort of spectacle to it or something that has created or, you know, set in motion some kind of important progressive social change. And I will have an emotional reaction to that. And I will think about that person as a hero. But I realize that I don't have permanent heroes. So I could. conjure up sort of a list of people. I will get onto talking about this more and thinking about it as we develop this idea when we talk about women and heroes. But I don't think there is

actually one person that I could say is my hero, I'd have to say. What about you guys? It's a tricky one, in it? Yeah, I'm not sure I've got heroes. I mean, there are a couple of answers you could give. One, you could go to like a classic character like Rosa Lexenberg, of course, who displayed many of the characteristics of heroism. We would probably go on and try to think through those characteristics, but somebody who took on history, basically, her life was sort of epic, you know. Real personal, physical courage, of course, he gets kidnapped and killed by the Freight Corps and thrown into the canal in Berlin.

Perhaps a bit too well known. Another figure who's a little bit of a hero of mine is a figure from Leeds, a guy called Tom Maguire, who led the Leeds Gas Workers Strike in 1890, I think it was. He's an interesting character. He was like a union leader. He's a member of the Social Democratic Federation. He joined William Morris's Socialist League. So like, you know, intellectual, et cetera, et cetera. But died when he was 30, basically, died of consumption. One of those myriads sort of people who was a real leader, but disappears into his. history. But of course, the real heroes, I think, are the listeners of ACFM, the people who give us five-star reviews. They're the real heroes, the people who can wade through two and half hours of our rambling. Let's unpack that later. That's a nice one. Yeah, nice. What about you, Jeremy? Well, yeah, I guess I do have heroes, I think, mostly, unsurprisingly, figures from political history. Alexander Cullen Ty, she's different.

a hero of mine. The people I really, really admire from history are often sort of communist leaders like Colin Tai. And in terms of British history, I'm not ashamed of saying to anyone really, really my political hero is Ken Livingstone, because I just think he managed to combine having a really radical analysis of class politics and gender politics and sexual and racial politics with a real political pragmatism, which meant he was often that he was able to get things done, even when those things were very limited. He was able to get some things done under specific historic circumstances. And he was also, honestly, he's pretty much the only politician in my entire lifetime

who was able to make socialism popular with these southern English white working class. They're examples of my heroes. It's a tricky question, isn't it? Because as soon as you, like, who are your heroes? And we start to get into the bigger question of, like, what is heroism? And what is a hero and whether those two things are the same? Yeah, because I think it has to involve some sense of risk. Perhaps we should think a little bit more about the roots of the concept of, like, hero.

It's got Greek roots, the actual word hero. So it's like an ancient Greek word for like defender or protector or something like that. You can root sort of classical heroes such as like Homer and Iliad or something like that. As people who face danger and then overcome it by displaying like courage or strength or something like that, or even ingenuity, I suppose, with the wooden horse, etc., etc. Those are people who were driven to heroism because they're sort of seeking glory or something like that, or perhaps honour is a thing that drives heroes in sort of like classical tales.

And more modern heroes, I think, have much more of a sense of self-sacrifice to them, you know. You're risking your life for the good of others in some sort of way, even if those others are just your fellow soldiers, your comrades, you know, in a war situation or something like that. That's the sort of thing that will get you a medal for heroism, I think. It's that sort of idea of some sort of self-sacrifice for the common good or something like that, you know what I mean? Which may well be missing from like early classical conceptions of heroism because you're actually there to make a name for yourself, to be glorious, basically. Even in those ancient sources, there's usually some sense.

that the hero is doing it, the hero becomes a hero because they're doing it on behalf of the community. I think you sort of, within the moral economy of those cultures, you can't really distinguish

between the individual pursuit of glory and putting yourself a personal risk on behalf of the community. It's a sort of post-Christian distinction in a way, I think. Yeah, it could well be, yeah. There's a sense of personal risk

and there's a sense that you could take a different decision that would keep you safe, like personally safe. And I think you're right about the differences, but I also think there's a continuity, and I think it relates to the concept of courage, the idea of what is courage. There's no question. In all of those contexts, the hero has to be brave. The estate has to display conspicuous bravery, whether it's Florence Nightingale, whether it's Mahatma Gandhi, whether it is just some unsung hero of the Labour movement.

It's interesting what you're saying there, because it's almost like it's, that's the payoff. the payoff for taking the risk is being recognized as this hero by the community. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. That's the point is that even if there are kind of different visions, which we'll get into of like what that hero is, if we're accepting that a degree of risk and definitely courage is definitely there in what makes a hero, then you get that label. And we see that, of course, with, you know, the importance of the labeling of heroism with, you know, the justification

for war. Like there has to be something for all of these young men who have died. There has to be something for their families. And it is that they could have called, they could call their son a hero, classically their son a hero, as a way of kind of being able to deal with the grief. So I think there's something there. The sort of cliched reason of why soldiers continue fighting in difficult situations. Classically, it's nothing to do with like fighting for the queen. It's like, you know, you've got a bond with the people around you, basically. And that's the sort of thing that drives you, to protect your comrades is a thing that drives you to, to displace of courage, etc. It's a cliche is, yeah, that men want to test themselves, you know, the only way you can

test whether you have courage or not is to be under fire and see how you react. If you think about military training, it's all about, it's all about, you know, trying to train your body to behave in a certain way, because when you're in, when you're in a position of real danger, you have, you have these affects you, which a pre-conscious decision, basically. You have, like, fear can grip you in a way that prevents you reaching a position of conscious decision, et cetera. So shock is a sort of similar sort of thing. And so it's a bit like a boxer trains themselves. You know, you train how to hit, but basically what you're really being trained for is how to be hit and not react with shock and sort of go into a corner and cry,

which is the normal reaction you would have, perhaps. It's that sort of testing yourself. How will I react? Which is really interesting and gives us something to think about in terms of heroes because from a woman's subject position, I don't understand why anybody would want to do that. Like, life is testing enough. Like, why would I want to put myself in that situation? So that makes me think about, well, what are the social conditions or, like, what is the political, economic, and social landscape that would make me want to, as a man, presumably, like, want to test those things. And that tells me something about boredom or social roles or like men's roles in society and what those incentives are. It does have something to do with people not having opportunities

in everyday life to feel like their courage is really being tested. Or recognised. Is it tested and recognised? Because I think people do courageous things all the time, but no one calls them a hero for it. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe it's just a sort of bourgeois individualism that turns it into this discourse about sort of self-improvement and self-testing. I think it's also interesting just to think here about the way in which one thing that links together all these different ideas of heroism is and this idea of courage as really being something you can't think any idea of virtue without that any idea of virtue has to imply some idea of courage, And this is true, whether you're like a Greek warrior aristocrat

who thinks it's absolutely cool to enslave people, including all women, and basically just go around making war on anyone for the sake of it, or whether you're a Christian who wants to be a martyr, like in the early days of Christianity or later, or even much, much later of someone who wants to dedicate their life to service in a way that's difficult. Or if you're a socialist.

When we were getting ready for the show, we were talking about the words of the red flag, the great British socialist anthem. Yeah, the most famous line is they cowards flinch and traitors sneer. We'll keep the red flag flying here. I think we'll probably come back to that. But there's always this implication that the worst thing you can be is a coward. There's this famous quote from Dr. Johnson that courage is the first of virtues because without them it becomes impossible to exercise all the others.

I think it's sort of right. And I think it also, it's important to think about, It's one of the points at which, really, really old and possibly almost universal cultural norms hit up against the ideologies of liberal capitalism. Because if the basic idea of capitalist liberalism, as we might put it, going about centuries, is actually the number one virtue is like looking after yourself, maybe looking after your family, basically protecting your property, extending your property, absolutely not putting yourself out for other people. at all and not letting anyone force you in fact to either join the army or pay your taxes like if that that really hit that idea which is still absolutely persistent you know it's absolutely persistent in contemporary sort of neoliberal ideology like it really is you know it's a very widespread idea in in english kind of petty bourgeois culture this idea that really like any form of

generosity even is sort of to be to be something people should be suspicious of because you not really being like an honest and proper person if you're not nakedly self-interested all the time. That hits up against this very widespread, very old idea. No, actually, you can't be a virtuous person if you don't show the willingness sometimes to show courage. And what courage means is actually putting yourself at risk for the sake of something else, some cause or the wider community, or just your immediate comrades in the battle, or your neighbours or something. And that's a permanent tension within capitalist culture, like going back at, at least a Shakespeare's time,

it's a permanent tension between the true bourgeois ideology, which says, no, actually, you shouldn't show courage, unless, basically, in that classical sense. You know, the only courage you should show is the courage to avoid, to not care about the bad opinion of priests and moralisers and poor people and do-gooders and bleeding hearts. And the only courage you should say really is the courage to pursue your own interest, irrespective of its effect on everyone else.

The tension between that and a much more universal idea of courage and virtue is necessarily involving the potential for self-sacrifice. It's one of the driving tensions of certainly European culture going back to the 16th century, I think. That brings us to a sort of contradiction, I think, in contemporary right-wing ideology. absolutely right. I mean, what is the idea of virtue signaling, but that, you know, the idea that anybody who has, shows any concern for anybody else, for instance, or who may even sacrifice themselves in some sort of way for anyone else, is in fact, like virtue signaling. And the idea of that... Yeah, they're just trying to accumulate status. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

They're just trying to, you know, benefit themselves, basically, by signaling virtue, but of course, that virtue is a myth. It's impossible because of your ontological, your belief, the What exists is just these individuals who are trying to accumulate utility for themselves, basically, and that's the only thing that exists. That's a difficult thing to resolve with the valorization of, like, heroism, traditionally in fascism, et cetera, you know, the youth heroism, et cetera, against the mundanity of life. Those two elements of, traditionally the elements of, like, right-wing culture butt up against themselves.

It's particularly, particularly stark at the moment because of this thing. that I mentioned at the beginning, this idea that heroes are perhaps even like the myth of the hero's journey, that stories have a particular structure to them and that you should basically conform your life to the structure of the hero's journey is really central to the contemporary right through figures such as Jordan Peterson, etc, these sorts of things. That is in a real, a real sort of, or an apparent contradiction with this, with the rejection of any sort of sense of self-sacrifice, heroism and that sort of self-sacrifice. For me, this is the great British anthem of the sort of the unsung, the people who do faithfully hidden lives, the class heroes.

It's a song that always brings a tear to my eye. This is Billy Bragg, Between the Wars. I was a minor. I was a darker. I was a Val Weiman between the wars. I raised the fame. family in time of austerity with sweat and the foundry between the wars. I paid the union and as times got harder, I look to the government to help the working man. I don't know whether it's worth going into this idea of the hero's journey a bit more. It's mostly associated with this book by Joseph Campbell called The Hero of a Thousand Faces, which is from like 19. 49. And we talked a little bit about Joseph Campbell. We did the episode on myth. Actually, I have to search back through our archives for that. But he sort of tries to identify this, this what he calls

a mona myth. Loads and loads of mythical stories have a very similar structure. I think basically folklorists, when they go into that, say, look, he's just got that selection bias. And there's lots of stories that disagree that don't fit with this model. But he outlines this model of the hero's journey. And then, like, scriptwriters pick it up. And, like, you know, they consciously follow this structure, this sort of like the arc of a heroic, of a hero's journey. And the hero's journey is something like this. You're beginning the ordinary world and then you're called to adventure somehow. And normally that call to adventure is rejected.

You reject it at first and then you accept the call, perhaps because you've talked to some sort of mentor. It's all sorts of stories you could have in mind when I'm telling you this. Star Wars is the first ever Star Wars, is a famously written. with the hero's journey in mind, of course. You could think about the Matrix as well, when Neo gets the phone call and says, you know, do what I say, and he rejects it, basically. He goes out onto a balcony, he rejects it and walks back in again.

And then later on, he's presented with this red pill or blue pill, and you make the decision to take the red pill. And that's the decision to exit the world, the ordinary world into the world of adventure, basically. The first transition, as Joseph Campbell talks about. this all sort of leads up from a series of tribulations, etc, to a final confrontation with the great enemy. And then you have to have the return to the ordinary world. But when you return, you have greater knowledge, etc. And it's a greater mastery of the ordinary world. That's the

sort of hero's journey. You'll probably recognize that from like a thousand films. The reason this is not just some sort of sideline in film studies or something like that is because it's become really central to the world's view of the contemporary. pretty far right, principally through a figure such as Jordan Peterson, basically. And so the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell's idea, you know, relates to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung's idea of archetypes, etc, etc. And that's what Jordan Peterson began as a sort of Jungian scholar. Perhaps I'm doing inverted comments when I say scholar. But like Jordan Peterson's taken to hear your journey is to set up this sort of trans-historical struggle between chaos

and order, and chaos is like the unknown, basically. Chaos is the unknown world, nature, perhaps quite often, the female for Jordan Peterson, and order is like the known world, the mapped world, etc. And the hero is someone who can leave the known world, venture into the chaotic world, slay the dragon of chaos as this classic thing, talking about, you know, St. George or something like that, and then return with new knowledge. And to understand how that turns into right-wing ideology, you've got to think about it in, you have to translate it into this sort of glib, sort of pseudo-psychological conception of how beliefs get changed, or how you change beliefs, basically, how important it is to challenge

accepted beliefs. So it's this idea that, you know, if you have an important belief which gets challenged, we get very defensive because having an important belief challenge can lead to some sort of inner chaos, basically, and the heroic figure is someone who can face that inner chaos, overcome it, overcome the dangers that go with that, such as social stigma of choosing unusual ideas, etc. You can see why cancel culture is like a very important part of the worldview of this. Face up to the chaos, the internal chaos and come back with like, you know, renewed or more knowledge than the person who hasn't got the, the liberal or whatever,

who hasn't got their courage to face the chaos of rejecting their precious ideas, etc., etc., etc. Now that's a very particular form of courage and heroism or the conception of the hero, basically. It's a conception of the hero that you can, or a hero's journey that can be undertaken without leaving your mother's basement. That's very useful for the type of young men who might be embraced that. But you can sort of like, you can understand that. You can understand why like red pilling is this conception of people who choose to embrace like misogynistic ideas or something like that or fascist ideas. increasingly, basically. And then overcome the social stigma that might come with that because they can face that inner courage. And it's these liberals who can't face up to the chaos,

that rejection of their precious nostroms would entail in them. And so what tends to happen with that is that you choose problems or you construct problems that can be overcome by an individual hero's journey. So the problems of the world get reduced to something like woke culture, which you can overcome by being a sexist, racist, racist, trick, basically, and then find another sexist racist pricks on the internet to reinforce that. Or, you know, so you construct problems in such a way that they can be overcome from your mother's basement. Cuen on it, you know, these sort of conspiracy theories where you have these huge, great, massive, huge conspiracies. Yet the way to overcome them is to sit in your mum's

basement and watch YouTube videos. I get what you're saying, but also maybe this is going slightly into, you know, like a different podcast. But like, I'm very sympathetic to, or like, I'm interested rather in like why that appeals to people. Like part of it for me is actually about trying to get men out of the basement. And that's why if Jordan Peterson gets men out of their basements, then that's a reason why they're going to stick with him. I think it's really important to understand that part of that is not just about the hero's journey. It's about structure, which is, I think, the thing that the left misses out on being able to talk about and is not maybe spoken about explicitly in those terms, because you're right, of course,

that is the way you've encapsulated it here. Like, that is the story. But what a lot of people need is the understanding that, in my view, human beings need structure. And so I think Jordan Peterson does get men out of the basement, out of their mum's basement. And I kind of like, it's really important for me politically to try and understand what's going on there, I think. I'm not saying you guys are ridiculing them, but I think it's like a really serious, like, issue to understand why he has appeal. You know, I've read the front and back of his books in the first few pages, and it all makes total sense to me. Like, you know,

it's not ridiculous at all. It has huge appeal, and I understand why. It's partly about agency, isn't it? I don't think you can separate concept of heroism from concept of agency, actually. I mean, the hero, going back to ancient mythic ideas, right through to the contemporary superhero is a sort of as an ideal agent. There's someone who has agency. So someone who is capable of affecting change in the world through their deliberate actions. And part of the problem with the idea of the hero, one of the intrinsic problems is that it, you know, the hero is someone else individual agency. And really, as a socialist, I don't really think, I don't really think individual agency properly exist a lot of the time. And then there are leaders, you know,

I've talked about Colin Tytte, about talking about Ken Livington, sometimes. there are people, there are unique singular people upon whom certain responsibilities have to devolve necessarily because of the processes of history. But the people who do that the most effectively, from my point of view, are the people who are always trying to exercise agency in the context of a mass movement. One of the absolute lived contradictions around time, as we're always saying, in different ways on the show, is the fact that people like these guys in the basement are interpolated absolutely as individuals. That's the same. That's the That's a bit of Marxist theory jargon.

When I see interpolated, I just mean they are addressed as individuals by the media, by the culture, by the social institutions they have to engage. They're not addressed primarily as members of groups. And so it's understandable that the only way they can contextualize themselves having any agency, despite the fact that they live lives, which, you know, as is the case for most of us, you know, they experience themselves as really not having much agency most of the time, is through these sort of heroic narratives. I'm hardly the first person to observe that part of the appeal of Jordan Peterson's Jungian conservatism is the resonance between this sort of heroic epic imagery and a lot of what people experience in gamer culture, for example. You know, for a lot of these guys, like the only time in their life, they've really felt like they had agency was when they were doing well on some computer game.

You know, of course, these are all symptoms of the crisis of democratic agency. the fact that really the only way you can have real agency in a world, in a society as complex and as highly populated as ours, is through some form of democracy. And really it has to be some form of democracy that it's capable of making the attempt to reorganise economic relations

as well as just political relations. And that is why we are all socialist because we recognise that. But in a situation in which, for the most part, the institutions of democratic agency that were established over the 19th, up into the late 20th century, have been weakening and the attempts to create new ones have been beaten back repeatedly over the past few decades.

And people are going to feel this real deficit of agency and they're going to turn to these myths, these fantasies. And I mean, from that point of view in a way, I mean, we want to think about not just men, want to think about gender differences, don't we? But of course, the persistent fantasy of neoliberal femininity is the idea of the girl boss. The idea that how a woman experience his agency

is through conforming completely to the norms of a neoliberal subject in a way that exceeds the capacities of her male rivals to do so. But is the girl boss a hero? Is the girl boss a heroic figure? I'm not sure. It's an interesting question.

Yeah, it is a really good question, actually. It is a really good question. And I think, yeah, I think we've set the stage for us to be thinking about these questions about, like, trying to drill it, drill down into this imagery of like, what, yeah, what is the hero? Like, we've just talked a bit about the kind of right-wing Jordan Peterson vision. And I think it's really important what you said, Jeremy, about agency. Because I think agency is something that we should stick with when we talk. about, okay, well, what is the role of women here or how have women been seen historically? So I think to get into that, from my subject position as a woman, I would start by paraphrasing

Maya Angelou by saying, when a woman stands up, she stands up for all women. And I think that kind of is quite a central difference, I think historically, like in a gendered world and under patriarchy, because, you know, classically, any woman, who says anything, and it doesn't necessarily need to be, you know, about the collective, particularly, but anything of significance publicly is shot down. Like, that's like one of the classic realities of patriarchy. So when a woman does stand up publicly, she's doing something for all women. That I think is most feminists will tell you with a level of consciousness that that is kind of a really moving quote.

So we can start by looking at Simone de Beauvoir, right? And in the second sex, she does this critique of the heroic man, where she has this, she develops this idea that kind of that transcendentence that we're talking about, of, you know, like moving into, as Keir put it, like the other world or, you know, or going on the quest, etc., is something that classically is reserved for men. And whereas women get to be relegated to this space, of passivity and repetition. And I guess what we would call these days social reproduction, right?

And so women in general are denied this ability to be called heroes. I mean, I wouldn't say the ability to be heroes, but to be called heroes in a public sphere. And that is key here. So I think when we're thinking about women and the position of women in trying to define what a hero is, I think the public is really, really important here. And which is why I would say the Giselle Pelico case is kind of so stands out because, I mean, it's because it's so stark the levels that she is able to kind of transcend in that kind of classic heroic way. And in a fact, we could say, okay, well, is she adopting a masculine model of heroism in the face of patriarchy here is, I guess, the question. because Simone de Beauvoir would be talking about, okay, well, are there new paradigms in a sense that need to be created to understand what the hero is?

So I think looking at Giselle Pellicoe in this case would be an interesting way to kind of think about that. Similarly, if we think about, you know, spy corps and thinking about, for example, Helen Steele, specifically, like, Helen Steele is a hero to all women. Like, that's how I would see it. And so is Giselle Pellico. To all humans, Nadia. Heninstein is a hero, it's all humans. Well, hopefully to all humans, if that's also the male perspective. For me, it's to do what she's done, not just in McLeop, but in the spy cop's case, to be able to literally go after the guy to stand up to a man, and I mean face-to-face

in a very literal sense, this is a very difficult thing for a woman to do, because we are obviously socialized in both conscious and unconscious, and unconscious levels to like, you know, not face up to men because, frankly, we could get hurt, right? So, so the way, you know, for people who haven't seen the ITV drama on spy cops called undercover cops or whatever, like, please go see it because I didn't think it would affect me in this way, because I know the story about spy cops, but like, it really does. It really, really did. And I was, when we're thinking about this question, I was thinking about, to me, at this moment in time, and as I'm recording right now, and I can feel the emotion

you know, rush through me. I'm like, those women are heroes, right? But then I think we should be asking the question, like to move away from like the feelings around that or the affect, I guess, like on me or like on women and potentially on other people in general is to be thinking, okay, well, are they heroes because they're taking that kind of masculine approach to heroin in the face of heroism in the face of patriarchy? Or is there a, I don't only say, but are they kind of proving Simone de Beauvoir's kind of argument that they're playing into a different kind of model of heroism? So that's one way we can start thinking about this. Both those cases are not quite similar, but they're both sort of a very particular form of bravery,

aren't they? They're both sort of forms of heroism in which you're overcoming, perhaps it's the shame that's associated with being raped or being violated, etc. That's part of the heroism. Yeah, I'm I'm trying to get at what is the heroism, which is different to, like, yeah, they're sort of like charging into the machine gun thing. I can't quite grasp it. I think it is. It's overcoming that sort of shame that's projected onto women, particularly around sexual violence. Completely. I think you're right in picking that up here, especially because basically the discourse or the norms say, if you've been subjected to kind of harassment or violence, you shut up, right? Which is why I actually think it's different, not just singling Helen.

out saying, like, no other women did this. But to be able to stand up publicly with your face, right, I think it's a huge part of it. I think this is going back to what I was saying earlier. I think the need, which most women do, I mean, rape is a hugely underreported crime. Like, hugely, why? Because to be able, as a woman, to be raped and to walk into a police station is a really fucking difficult thing to do, right? Now, it doesn't mean that women don't do it, but often there are stages, stages, stages where you have very good reason to want to remain anonymous. And this is what happens, you know, with women standing up for all sorts of things, not just sexual violence, where the choice is made understandably that they want to stay anonymous

because their lives are often made hell. And so I would say in all sorts of different ways, so I'd say there is special bravery given to women who are standing, they're not going into hiding because it is a really tough thing to do for a woman under patriarchy. So I think you're absolutely right. I think shame is really important there, which, of course, I don't think comes into the male story. Although, you know, what is this conception of honour, but like the avoidance of shame in some sort of way?

It behaves very, very differently between men and women, I think, that conception of shame and honour or something like that. I can't quite grasp it. I'm trying to think it through it. It's not clear to me. Well, well, maybe Carol Gilligan can help us here. So she's a feminist and a psychologist, right? And so she's also got this interesting idea where the conception of heroism,

the classical kind of male conception of heroism, is about prioritizing justice, like individual justice and autonomy, right? And that in it needs to reinforce, that necessarily forces the male hero, although it's interesting what we said earlier about this idea of bringing the idea that there is a collectivity per se. So I'm not entirely sure what she says about that. But what she's trying to introduce is this idea of the ethics of care and the collective, right, which she says once you look at it in terms of the ethics of care, then that removes the individual from kind of our understanding of heroism. And it allows us to see it as a kind of collective

endeavor. And then, of course, there's the Sylvia Federici kind of view, which is talking about, well, I mean, she says like the obvious thing, which is what about all the daily unglomerous bravery that is not public, right? It's the true heroism of, you know, the daily struggles of hair. Like, what does that do to heroism? And that's interesting for me to think about, because I do think that we tend to not call people who do, like, amazing things, if they are not done publicly, then we don't tend to call them heroes. Like, I don't know how we think about that. Yeah, I think everything you're saying is right in an idea. Of course, if we keep referring back to like classical Mediterranean mythology and epic, then, of course, there is, there is a role

for women in those ancient ideas of heroism, provided they are playing the dutiful role of the daughter, the sister. So there's been like gallons and gallons of ink spilled over the past few decades talking about Antigone, who is a figure in the Trojan War. She goes out, basically, she goes out onto the battlefield and risks being killed so she can give the last funeral rights to her brother. I once had a list of things I carried around with me that I didn't ever want to hear about at an academic conference again, and it included Antigone. And I told this to someone at a dinner and found out she was giving a paper on Antigone the next day. And I felt really, really bad.

I felt it's really guilty. But I'm sorry to that person if they're out there. And of course, there was this idea of the dutiful mother, you know, the dutiful mother who basically has no thought of herself, whose job is to basically recreate the species. And that runs right through indeed ancient Athenian ideas about dutiful femininity right through to the Nazi obsession with, Yeah, the ideal Nazi woman's going to be a mother.

Sorry to interrupt you, Jeremy. Just to like, complexify that, I think that's really important what you've just done there because that shows the example of like basically women as female rather than women as people. Because the contrast there is you're talking about women being a female rather than acting out as people in the world. And that is, you know, the central issue in sexism. Like that's what it's a definition per se. In classical myth as well, it's like there's another role for one. women, which is the temptress. The temptress who's trying to tempt the hero off his hero's journey

back into the pleasures of the ordinary world or something. Perhaps it's like the flower eaters in the lotus eaters in the Iliad or something like that. It's a moment on the hero's journey that they would go through. This does raise important questions for us, though, doesn't it? Because, of course, and this is one of De Beauvoir's main point, de Beauvoir is fully aware of all of the problems with liberal individualism. And yet, as she rightly points out that, you know, the demand for women's equality, the demand to end the tyranny of patriarchy, is partly just a demand for women to be allowed to be subjects who have agency. In the way that the whole idea of heroism as a male preserve and as the the key example of

what it means to be a free subject and an agent in some way, like mitigates against. We should play no more heroes by the Stranglers from 1977. They're a punk. band, although they started before punk, and they never quite fitted into the whole punk new wave. They're all sort of a little bit outside that, that sort of scene, but they're definitely of the time. It's an interesting song, though, No More Heroes. It fits with that punk rock rejection of the guitar hero, etc. That's sort of that. And in fact, the whole conception of punk is, you know, anti-heroic in the way, you know, the punk, the punk who is like the person who was picked on in a jail or whatever or perhaps even the homosexual in a jail

in a prison in the US, etc. is one of the words of punk. So it's like taking on that objection on top of yourself. But like the no more heroes, the lyrics, they refer to like, whatever happened to Leon Trotsky was the famous one I remember, he got an ice bit pick. And they talk about Sancho Panza and stuff like that. And it's almost, you know, the age of the hero is over is the sort of message. Liam Trotsky He got an ice pick That made his ears burn

Whatever happened to Dear old Lender The Great O'Mira And Central Panzer Whatever It's interesting, actually, that at the same time, that same year, in 1977, David Bowie releases his song, Heroes, from the album of Heroes. It's written with Brian Eno, I think.

They wrote it in Berlin when the Berlin War was still there, and it's sort of, I think even that the lyrics were improvised, actually. Bowie sort of improvised the lyrics on music that Brian Eno was creating, improvised it at the microphone in the recording studio, but it tells this story, the lyrics tell this story of two lovers, one from East Berlin and one from West Berlin. Even in that sense, even though it's related to, you know, big structural things of the time, that's not a big epic hero, big epic heroism. It's much more of an intimate sort of heroism. And you put those two together and you can see this 1977 as a period in which perhaps the epic heroes

of like Che Guevara, etc. fading out for somebody I will be king and you will be clean and nothing

for dying break up just for one day we can be us just for one day I was just wanted to return to Carol Gilligan it sets up this problem of autonomy

and probably individual autonomy that would be, wouldn't it? And versus like care, which made me think about that conception of care. I think it was David Graeber who said, like care is work to enhance the freedom of others, basically, you know. So it's like there's a collective element to that.

That individual autonomy is one of the things I think that that, if we go back to sort of like that sort of the male or even like, you know, the toxic male conception of heroism, there's a sort of tragic element to that, isn't there? Because I think it goes back actually to this discussion of like Jordan Peterson and that sort of like far right sort of element, which is that basically people are trying to to exercise some autonomy, some like individual agency in the face of forces which are basically cannot be dealt with by individual agency. Do you know what I mean? Like, you know, the things that are constraining these young men's lives in them of his basement are these big economic

forces. They cannot be attacked by individual heroism. They have to be dealt with in, in a collective way, basically, by creating different systems, economic systems, etc., different ways in which weekend, address social reproduction, these sorts of things. That leads to an impasse, basically, which I think leads to that impasse of trying to have individual agency, not being able to have exercise individual agency. I mean, I can go in two different ways, can it? One of the ways it can go is like an explosion of violence, like the school shooter or something like that, basically. But the other way it can go is this idea that, in fact, well, we just recreate the world, we create an imaginary world of our own, you know, and I suppose that relates to

To the actual heroes of neoliberalism, which is like the myth of the heroic entrepreneur who takes risks and builds their own world, creates the world in their own image, which I think is the other part of that. So you've got that idea, which either flees from the realities of the world or just reacts to the impasse in like an explosion of violence against that. I like the idea of heroism through care, which does relate to self-sacrifice, isn't it, in some sort of way. But self-sacrifice in order to enhance the freedom of others. and, you know, in principle, also enhance the freedom of ourselves, perhaps. Completely. And also what's interesting there is that what is sustaining the in-cells in the basement is collective care and the heroism of other people.

Because, you know, who's making the food and, like, you know, cleaning the toilets and whatever that are allowing people who are... What is the system who's allowing human beings to not need to take care of? of themselves in a very physical and practical way is because other people are doing that, because there is a community around you, even if you subscribe to an ideology, which means that you're completely lonely and you live alone in the world and you can't relate to other people except online, which is a lot of people, you know, I don't know what the statistics are, but for that, for that community, ironically, that community of people who see themselves

in that individual way to be sustained and to be able to like read the Jordan some stuff, and to be able to then think, okay, well, I'm going to go out there and be a total misogynist and rape women or, like, do a school shooting, is because somebody's been cooking your dinner, at least buying you, your pot noodles, do you know what I mean? So it's like, when we think about, like, heroism within that kind of ethics of care, it kind of almost shows up, like, the structures anyway, which are keeping the other kind of supposed hero or, like, dream of the hero alive. That reminds me of that classic meme, which says that, um, ring libertarians are like house cats basically. They think they have fierce individuals

and reliant on anybody else. But in fact, they're completely reliant on all of these systems of reproduction in which food appears before them, that they are completely ignorant of those systems of reproduction and completely ignore them. Yeah. I want to go back to this idea that I had in the beginning, which while you guys were talking about the myth of the hero or like heroic acts, et cetera. It made me think of, well, I think for women or, you know, people in other positionalities, you know, often it's not about doing something extraordinary. It's just doing the ordinary, which you were not previously allowed to do within your positionality, so that that brings us an ability to speak about, for example, Rosa Parks, or what did Malala do?

Like Malala's like, I'm going to school. Rosa Parks, like, I'm going to sit in this part of the bus. And so these are not extraordinary events, but it shows up the extraordinary oppression around them when that ordinary act is taken. And I think that's really important because we call those people heroes, but only because they're showing a mirror up to what a shitload of people want to ignore, which is, you know, those structures of oppression around them. Yeah, because it's like, yeah, so it's like you're behaving as though you're in a freer world, basically, aren't you? but by that way you're bringing it about. Yeah, well, you're bringing about or you're bringing on really extreme oppression, like, you know, being shot in the face or, you know, being detained or whatever, you know, which is what many people who we call heroes have faced.

And it's like, it's extraordinary because of the position that they were in, not because of the kind of act itself. It's important to acknowledge that have been plenty of women. He also just conformed to a more classic. idea of the hero. You mentioned Angela Davis in the notes. I mean, he is definitely a hero of mine in a fairly conventional sense, but that doesn't contradict anything we've been saying, which I think is really important. Yeah, but I think the question is, is that the argument has been made by feminists is that if you look at the terms that are banded round these

women, whether it's, you know, Angela Davis or like, left, especially left-wing women, and they tend to be called, like, you know, militants or whatever, rather than heroes. So it's interesting that even when they do take those, like, quote-unquote, classic male hero kind of roles in terms of the action they've taken or whatever, they're not given the same kind of labelling. There's a famous book about terrorism and women called Shoot the Women First, basically, and it's all about, you know, this idea that female radicals are, you know, they're, because they're going against their feminine traits, etc., they're the ones with the real radicals and, you know, the absolute fanatics, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. No, and I think there's also like an argument that's been made that if you look at so like women, quote, quote, quote, heroes in culture as well, like especially in film, there's often, especially like with, you know, like horror or crime, etc. There tends to be this idea that, you know, women are, you know, they're heroes because they've survived or they have some kind of. endurance and they have, you know, rather than specifically like strength or conquest, which is also like an interesting other idea is that women can be called heroes in a way that men

won't because men are expected to be able to do all of these things. But when women do them like in the face of, you know, whatever, like in a patriarchal world, then they have survived and that makes them a hero. So it's a different kind of heroes. So it's interesting to think about all these things because you can like think about it, you know, with all of these different prisms. There's an interesting point that probably has some relevance to thinking about contemporary ideas that are like toxic masculinity, because I think in some sense, from the point of view of what you just said, Nardia, arguably it's easier for women to think about their own agency in the world as always, to some extent, collective, as bound up with

the relations of care, a sort of being part of distributed networks. This is linked to the idea that women, you know, are socialised more into being able to support each other, they're socialised more into certain kinds of emotional literacy. And, you know, if men in particular, if they're socialised into this idea that what agency means is not like just struggling, getting by, helping your friends, looking after people, looking after each other, it's not that. It's some great deed, like, which, you know, makes a permanent mark on the world, purely through its own intrinsic action. Then coming up against the actual reality, that we've been describing, the social reality

is going to be, in some sense, more traumatic. Reality, they're going to bounce off the reality of social existence harder than women are under those specific circumstances. And I think that is part of the pathology of so-called toxic masculinity. When we mentioned sort of heroism through endurance, though, it makes me think about something

like the Vietnamese people during a Vietnam War. Do you know what I mean? The huge heroism, or even the... Palestinians today, you know, exactly today, the ability to endure this horrific, horrific violence, basically, without your will-breaking. In some ways, that perhaps that's the sort of the heroism of the weak. I don't mean weak in a pejorative sense. I mean, those who have not got access to these huge means of violence. In fact, if you think about it, the classical heroes, they're all privileged people, aren't they, basically? Kings and

princes or warriors with wealth, etc. Yeah, and of course that was, it's not like it was ever true. We need to point this out as well. I mean, you know, the Iliad is like, it's the fantasy. It's the phantasmatic self-conception of this warrior elite. At the time when those stories are being popularized and canonized, the way they fight wars is like through the fan is that they all just go in a massive group and like try and push each other out of the way.

The fantasy and like the idiot is that you don't do combat like that combat's all through just personal these basically like the armies like rock up and face each other but then each side just puts a guy up to fight another guy and that decides who's won that battle

and it's I don't think I think archaeologists and historians are quite divided over whether that ever was the way anyone did warfare or whether it's just purely a fantasy I would say I think you, why would you? Why would anyone ever actually do?

What's the point of having a load of armed guys? It's actually just going to be these like individual fights, like in a gladiatorial ring or something. But that's the fantasy. You know, the actual, what we do know is, we don't know, we don't know the answer to the question, was there ever really a heroic age when people just fought battles for individual combat?

What we do know is those stories became that massively popular with a warrior elite who were absolutely not. living or fighting wars in that way, particularly, at all. And like, there never was Gilgamesh. There never was, like, a culture hero, like, going up against, you know, the forces of chaos. There were, like, dictatorial kings and, like, war leaders in ancient Mesopotamia, but they were completely dependent upon having masses and masses and masses of soldiers, you know, whose creative and destructive capacities they were able to organise.

So it's always been a fantasy, this idea of, like, agency. I mean, to some extent, this is a whole other podcast, really, but the idea of magic, you know, which is partly always about sort of connecting with the gods, but it's also a kind of fantasy of a kind of personalised agency, which no one has ever really had, no one has ever. I think it's important to stress this. It's more to stress, it's just, we're not,

there's not like there was a time when you could have personal agency. And the fantasy of personal agency, it predates capitalist individualism, which builds on it in very particular ways, partly, as you say, through the idea of the literary entrepreneur and all kinds of other ways. But it is interesting that it is associated with masculinity in these really problematic ways. Yeah, I mean, and it is very interesting what you're saying, Jeremy. I'm just trying to think through this idea about, like, women, like, accepting that their agency is collective, you know, perhaps more than men because of, you know, how the world is constructed under

Patriarchy. I mean, I'm not, I would say that I would defend the position that there are women out there who like want to be heroes or like remembered for something in their field. That's absolutely nothing to do with care or quote unquote, you know, some kind of like feminine, feminine role. And I think that's the interesting thing to think about is like are they like are those women in a contemporary world? Like are they called heroes or is it that for, you know, maybe for a good reason. They are. They literally are. Yeah. If you've got kids. today, it's a necessary part of literature for kids around seven or eight. Like these books which are just lists of female heroes. And they are presented as that way. Like, Rosa Park is a hero. Mary Curie

was a hero. Joan of Art was a hero. That is just, that is the language that's used. So I think they are, yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of one side of it. But then also, like, we've started talking around, and I know every time, it was not every time, but we often make an

episode of this podcast and we come back to this idea of freedom. And I would say that what I've taken from this discussion about the relationship between women and heroes or women and heroism is there is something about freedom. But in the case of women, like, it can be about your personal, I don't say individual, but your personal freedom because a woman making that argument publicly is helping women everywhere. Right. Whereas I don't think that necessarily necessarily maps for, and for men. Like, I don't, and I'm not seeing this within an individual prism. So, like, if we go back again to, like, what both Helen Steele and Giselle Pellicoe did,

that is a fight for all women, even though it is about themselves, specifically in that specific case. Like, they are forwarding women's rights. Let's play Kill Your Idles by Sonic Youth, quite an early song for them from 1983. So Sonic Youth, this band who came out of the New York, New York noise scene, sort of to the side of no way for people like Lydia Lunch, et cetera, quite into tuning their guitars in unusual ways, etc., these sorts of things very much coming out of their sort of like art rock scene, particularly in their early days, they later turned

into fairly conventional rock band in the 1990s, etc. Kill Your Idols is interesting, the lyrics go like this, I don't know why you want to impress Chris Gow, let that shit die and find out the new. Girl, Kill Your Idol, Sonic Death. Chris Gow in that is like the rock journalist Robert Crisgau. And the song was originally called I Killed Chris Gow with my big fucking dick. And they wrote the song basically because he did a bad review or something like that of their first album. But obviously it fits into that sort of like punk or post-punk thing of like, let's kill these figures from the 1960s, these rock journeys, this huge rock

journeys, etc. Let's kill your idols and find a new goal. and find out the new dawn Some sort of ways There's an epic sense to heroism, isn't there? Epic as in the rejection of just conforming to the prevailing view and instead taking on the prevailing view and trying to move things forward. Like that would get us into debates around,

in historiography around, you know, the great man theory of history. Is history about great men? Or is it about inhuman form? horses, et cetera, et cetera. It made me think about Hegel describing Napoleon as world spirit on horseback, right? You know, somebody who figures the zeit guys, but also he's like a world historic figure who, you know, through his very actions, shifts the world.

And there was a little bit of a, just after Trump got elected for the second time, there were a few people on the left, in fact. He was sort of talking about Trump as like, you know, world spirit on a Tesla perhaps these days, is history driven by these great men, perhaps great women, but traditionally great men, you know, who stand outside contemporary historical forces and, like, bend the world to their will, which is, I think, that sort of right-wing conception of a hero, or somebody like, you know, Trump or even Elon Musk, perhaps, somebody who is like, you know, are they building the real world or are they just building an imaginary world in their heads that then, you know,

we have to conform to, I'm not quite sure. The Haganian idea of the world historic individual also is sort of that that individual is not actually bending the world to their will. It's that somehow they become a sort of crystallisation of social forms. Yeah, they're figuring the world spirit, yeah. And in that sense, Trump is like a world historic and individual, and that's not in any way to accredit him with any kind of agency. It's just to say that that is like we live in such an absurd age, the person who represents it is, Trump. There is something there, though, about action from what you're saying, because what makes Trump kind of successful, which in a way, I feel like I almost have to respect, is that on day

one of his presidency, like he got shit done. It might be crazy shit, but he pressed some buttons, right? In a way that often governments are not able to do. And that, I think, that kind of action. And he's, of course, like, you know, creating this kind of circus around it as being like the hero of the electorate or, you know, whoever he sees his people are. There are real actions there. Obviously, that's politically, totally absurd. But in terms of the optics of it, I can understand why that's the case, you know, like signing all of these executive orders, like literally the next day. Like, obviously, everybody from old school social democracy and from the 20th century was like, this is terrible. There are no checks and balances.

I get that, you know, that in a democracy you would want to have actual processes, but it is impressive to a lot of people that he took action on day one. Well, let's be clear. Let's be very, very clear. The liberals and technocrats are pissed off about it. Your true Social Democrat isn't necessarily surprised because the person that you basically invented getting loads of stuff done with executive orders was Franklin Danani Roosevelt. You don't get the new deal that I've fucked on executive orders.

It's like just telling the government to do things. We should remember as well that Trump definitely didn't do that in the first presidency. Basically, they've planned this for a while, and it's a performance, a performance of man of action, basically. And what it's offering to the people for whose benefit it's being performed is there's some relief from the permanent frustration of not only not having any personal agency or any collective agency on the ground, but not, but seeing the people, who are supposed to exercise agency on your behalf of the community, constantly telling you, there was nothing we can do, shrugging their shoulders in the face of civilizational collapse. I don't think that's fair, Jeremy.

Just today I've seen the heroic figure of Rachel Reeves stride out of the treasury, tried and say to it to the world, I am taking the brave choices of doom loop, continuity, austerity. I will make economic forecasts conform to fiscal rules and the forecast of the OBR. I will do it. I mean, it is true her excuse for why she has to do these things. It is because of this imaginary world that the OBR has invented. Let's be clear for this.

The OBR is the Office of Budget Responsibility, which is an institution created only in very recent history within British government, which has been now been elevated in a classic, classic example of Marxian alienation and reification, has been elevated to the status of the most important institution of government. So the governments are now saying they cannot do anything, they cannot undertake any form of fiscal policy, which is not basically approved by the OBR. And of course, the OBR determines what is or isn't going to be acceptable according to a very narrow set of rules which are pretty much consistent with those which the British Treasury, the finance department has been trying to impose upon governments since the 19th century at any time anybody has

allowed them to. So we've got this situation where Rachel Reeves indeed is saying we have to make all these cuts to welfare spending. We have to do that because we have to meet and targets and those targets are all being effectively set by this institution which didn't even exist 10 years ago and is now being treated as if it's like the raison dutre of the British government. I was trying to set up an image of the far right as like these people who have like, who want to set up these fantasy worlds and make us conform to it. But that's exactly what centristism is, isn't it basically? You have this simulated version of what the future would be, and then you treat it, yeah, in a fetish-sized way, as though it is the actual future.

Come back, Boudriard, all is forgiven. This is like the simulation has taken over, and we're trapped within it, basically. But there is a different, let's go on and return to heroism. Like, we could return to, like, the idea of, like, from Weber about the different sort of of forms of leadership or sources of authority, basically. he splits up into like three sources traditional legal and charismatic so let me just say that rachel reeves does not bear charismatic authority neither is keir-starmer they have like legal authority yeah we sort of like we lied our way

into power we lied away into control of the labor leadership we lied away into power now we're going to exercise leadership by doing the same as the tories did basically well i think trump is different i think he does have like this i bet this third thing is charismatic leadership. And that does relate to heroism, some conception of the hero, because Weber says charismatic leaders derive of their authority

from the perception that they possess some exceptional power or quality. They're an exception to the norm, basically. The exception to normal people, that's where they get their authority thrown. So that's a sort of idea of, yeah, somebody who is not just like your technocrats in some sort of way.

a resort to charismatic, to charismatic leadership. And, of course, that sort of power has played a big role in the left, basically. And in fact, you know, there's been the danger of a cult of personality around Lenny, but most famously around Stalin, of course. You know, that is a persistent theme in the left, the critique of charismatic power. But like, the left is full of people who've acted as figureheads and who have mobilized their charisma as a way of instituting change, but also giving people some sort of faith that the change is going to, the change, this process of, this chaotic process of change is going to

have a good outcome. Yeah, completely, it's a real issue. It's a historic issue for the left that broadly, as Democrats and as collectivist and as egalitarians, we're necessarily sceptical of ideas of leadership and maybe ideas of heroism. We're necessarily skeptical to assert, unless it's a completely collective, solidistic, from peritism, of the kind we've been describing earlier. So, but we're necessarily skeptical. We have to be skeptical of there

because we don't believe in the idea of authority being vested in one individual, as in a monarchy or some kind of authoritarian situation. That's one of the major things that we totally against. On the other hand, historically, it's very hard to find examples of successful, radical movements in which something like charismatic leadership didn't play any role whatsoever. Historically within radical movements, progressive, democratic movements, I think there's

something specific to the way in which leaders acquire authority and it does have to do heroism. The leaders acquire authority because they are perceived to have put themselves at personal risk at some point or at repeated points for the sake of the wider cause, for the sake of the struggle. So there is something here about earned authority. The earning of authority necessarily has to involve some kind of heroism. And I do sort of think that I think it's an important, I think it's an important part of the decisions of the left and the Labour movement, actually, that there is a sort of, there's a spontaneous deference towards people who are perceived to have endured struggle, whether because they were long-time trade unionists and poor people, or because

they're women or because they're people of colour who've endured, you know, racism and misogyny over many years. There's a, there's a tradition, a sort of spot relatively spontaneous deference like older people in the traditions of the Labour movement, in my experience. And that all does come from a sort of understanding that you earn authority through struggle, through experiencing struggle. And what's, and struggle necessarily means, the whole, we use this word struggle all the time, actually. And I think it's what we're thinking about what we mean by, that maybe we need a whole show just about struggle but it's that thing of like that's that psychoanalytic idea of projection that people are projecting things onto onto leaders basically

you know that's the psychoanalytic sort of conception of how of how the crowd solidarity forms we're all projecting something onto onto the leader who becomes our ego ideal as Freud says and because we're all sharing this one point of projection then we feel that you know the solidarity between us in the crowd. There's something to that. I don't think it exhausts the way that crowds form, basically. I'm thinking about this as you're speaking here, because while I don't see myself as a hero, I am the person who's likely to stand up and say things when other people won't. So I almost think that, you know, following on from what you're saying, part of like, you know, the crowd or the group wanting somebody to be a leader is basically saying, we want you to do it

so we don't have to, in a way. That's kind of what I hear. That's kind of like my 20 years' experience of this. It's almost like you become a sacrificial fetish object in a sense as well, you know. And that's necessary to sustain, you know, the campaign or the movement or the thing that's happening. Okay, we could not have an episode about heroes without playing this mid-80s soul pop classic. This is Tina Turner. song from

from Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome but I've always chosen to hear it as a feminist critique of heroic masculinity This is Tina Turner We don't need another hero Living on another

fear till nothing else we have We don't need another hero We don't need to know the way I want is like we are I wanted to talk about that picture of Che Guevara

that picture by Corder of Shee looking incredibly heroic which has launched a thousand t-shirts and poses on student walls, etc. Like Jameson has this article somewhere periodising the 60s in which he sort of talks about that you know, the figure of Shea Gavara really struck in a political imaginary of like probably the left of the 1960s basically,

the sort of revolutionary libida. And I think it's interesting to think about that and compare that picture of Shea with a picture of subcommandante Marcus, which went around everywhere in the 1990s for subcommandante Marcus. I've got it on my wall. I thank you. It played a sort of Shea sort of role, didn't it, in the 90s, nearly 2000s, I think. And that picture for people who don't know.

also subcommandante Marcus. Not the commander, but the sub-commander, even though he was in charge. He was the leader of the Zapatistas who had an uprising in Chiapas in 1995. I can't quite remember. And the thing about the difference between the picture, image of Shea, that's his face there.

With subcomendante Marcus, he wears a mask, basically, but there were some coordinates of that. So it was like a mask, a pipe. So Balaclava, a pipe, and this sort of like hat, this sort of like Mao hat sort of thing. was like the iconography of it.

And then I think it was Naomi Klein, who made this point about, like, or perhaps it was just me, I can't remember. If I've invented this argument, whether it's Naomi Klein's, the model of revolution for Shea would be, you know, you must leave where you are, go to the mountains, or wherever,

the Sierra Madre, into a liberated zone and then create the new person, basically, whereas Subcomandante Marcus' thing was always, you must struggle where you are. I can't remember what the question. quotas now. Marcos is a gay man in San Francisco. I don't know why. I'm out of six in my head. That's the best place to be a gay man. Why is that? That was very funny at the time. Yeah, well, I mean, the idea of Zapadizmo, as it was being codified at the time, and the thoughts

of some commandant of Di Marcos, who was this guy who, the whole deal with some commandant Di Marcos was that he was the main spokesperson and theoretician of the Zapatis. But the Zapatis were primarily an indigenous struggle. They weren't a worker's struggle. And his whole story was that he was supposedly, he was a Marxist intellectual from the cities, somewhere in Mexico. Nobody even knew his real name.

Some command of demarcobos, his real name. Nobody knew his real name for years and years and years. And he had come into the indigenous region of Chiapas, thinking he was going to bring proletarian revolutionary consciousness to these indigenous people. And instead they taught him their longstanding traditions of collective solidarity and participatory democracy, et cetera, et cetera. So, and the whole deal was supposed to be that there was this sort of, indeed,

this sort of anarchistic idea of completely getting away from the idea of the individual hero, the macho hero, the machinism, of the hero worship of a soldier like Che Guevara. Che Guevara becomes a big hero because he's one of the key figures in the Cuban Revolution, but he doesn't want to hang around trying to build communism. He goes off to help lead guerrilla struggles elsewhere, and it's partly because he didn't really enjoy the political business of trying to build a socialist state in Cuba. He wanted to just keep winning guerrilla wars elsewhere. And then dies in Bolivia, which is good for somebody who's going to be a hero.

Martyrdom. Martyrdom's a whole other thing, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we haven't even talked about Martyrism. Martyrism is very important because it's the ultimate self-sacrifice, so it's very connected to ideas of heroism. No one can be as human. heroic as a martyr, I think, in a certain sense. But it's also, it's kind of, it's always kind of problematic as his whole deal, is he's a sort of professional soldier, rather than someone who actually wants to do the more, the more boring work of building socialism in Cuba. I'm not judging the guy for that, but indeed, subcommandad de Marcos, and he, the whole idea of subcommoder de Marcus was it was this complete reversal of all this. It was radically democratic.

It was non-teleological. It wasn't class essentialist, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, we could do a whole episode or a whole micro-related at some point about Zapatismo and the role it played in that kind of 90s radical imaginary. Because on the one hand, it's very inspiring, and it seems like the absolute logical conclusion of the feminist, the 1968, the libertarian, the new left, even the post-structuralist critiques of Marxism and communism and Stalinism without making any concessions whatsoever to liberal individualism or capitalist ideology. And it was very, very important for a lot of thinking.

But also, in practice, it then turned out to be completely unoperationalizable in any social or political context other than Chiapas or Barcelona. Like, if you're not in one of those places, what you can actually do with this stuff? It's always fucking part of Barcelona, isn't it? I mean, Barcelona, but it doesn't work with Barcelona, because they had Adelao, who had to take on the role of, becoming the figurehead and then the mayor of Barcelona, basically.

Yeah, that is true. Which is partly why, you know, the idea of the, the return to popularity of the idea of the Revolutionary Party, communism, Leninism, in the 2010s, is precisely, it's a direct reaction to the fact that people like us had all been mad for subcombe Dente Marcos from like 1995 and had not been able to do anything with it. I can get anywhere or win anything. So a slightly younger cohort of radicals start saying, well, we better start reading Lenin again after all.

It was quicker than that, though, because it was basically that's that idea of like, you know, subcomanté-a-Marcus can do it, and he can be the figurehead, but mast, etc. But, like, you know, if you do the anti, we're not going to have figureheads in the UK around the anti-globalization movement, even. Well, the press is just going to invent one.

And I remember that they invented, one of the leaders they invented for the anti-globalization movement was Zach fucking Goldsmith, basically. They invented him as one of the leaders. I remember this article, Zach Goldsmith, one of Britain's leading anti-capitalist, but that doesn't mean he's anti-business. For fuck, say, there we are.

There we are. That's why you cannot do the subcomandanti-Marcos thing in the UK because, you know, there are structures surrounding you, basically. Also, because we don't have like a 3,000-year-old tradition, of Indigenous participatory democracy. That's also, that's the basic reason you can't do it here. Ah, well, you see,

the, the, the, the, the, um, the Saxon moot. Bring out the meads, guys.

But, um, but yeah, but of course, but that is, I mean, it's really, that is really good to think about, because some kind of democracy was absolutely, the whole idea was it was non-heroic. It was anti-heroic would be the wrong term, but it was sort of

counter-heroic. That was the whole idea of it. And we don't want to throw out the importance of the critique of the hero that really comes to women's liberation. I always say, for example, you can't really understand what's going on with punk, in my opinion,

without understanding that in some even though most of the people doing punk are young men with too much testosterone, as you can tell from some of the music. But they're trying to process the feminist critique of heroism, which is why, like, the figure of, like, the guitar heroic rock singer

is the figure they hate the most, and they're trying to figure some other way, some other way of being in the world in response to that. So, and of course, and this, and I don't think we should, you know, we can't entirely reject the value of Zapatismo. You know, you can also think about the ways in which are actually quite similar ideas end up forming the politics of a Kurdish radicalism, People there are reading Murray Buchan and who's an American anarchist thinker and they're also trying to really get away from ideas of charismatic leadership

and the personality cult which they see as having historically bedeviled like the communist movement. Of course it's also interesting to reflect my understanding is in some contemporary historiography in history of the USSR, there's a view that the starning cult was actually the creative

by enemies of Stalin, because of you were trying to sort of undermine the heroic position of Comrade Stalin. Oh, hello, hello, Tanki Gilbert. I wondered when you'd show up. I have no, this is one of those issues, right? I feel like I just don't know who, you know,

I would have to go through the archives myself to have an opinion about it. But it's interesting, it's just an interesting as a hypothetical position that, it's interesting as a hypothetical position because it, because it demonstrates, the extent to which I think, sort of, even people who are now massively apologists for Stalin want to say, well, you know, recognise that the idea of the personality cult is an inherent danger

in any sort of mass politics on a certain scale, but it's one that socially can't really endorse. You always have to try and get away from. And so I think that is really interesting. I think we should play a track by one of Leeds finest. This is a classic slice of British post-punk. We have played songs from this band, from this album even, I think, before. We probably will again. This is the gang of four. History is not made by great men.

The books at home. The strongmen who have made the world is treated on. The books at home. The books at home. It's not made for great men. It's not made for great men. It's not made for great men. It's not made by great men.

One thing that's related to these ideas around leadership and heroism is the idea, the socialist, communist, anarchist, radical idea of the class heroes. Someone being a hero to their class. I feel like we really, we have to mention that there's another podcast, I definitely recommend people listening to, Bryn Griffith's Labour Left podcast, which has been going to. for a year or so now, which I think is really good. Brin comes out of the Labour briefing, sort of tradition with Labour Left politics,

and they had a feature in their magazine for many years in Labour Left briefing. It was a class traitor of the month. They would feature some bureaucrat, some careerist who had betrayed the working class. And in a more positive vein, Brin now asks his guests to name it a class hero of the month. Usually people mention some famous socialist, or just say Jeremy Corbyn. But I had to really think about it. He said he was your class hero. Who's my class hero?

Did you say Kea Melbourne? No, he said Mr Stats, obviously. No, I talked about this woman who was my neighbour when I lived in Skalmersdale, in West Lancashire, one of my early teams in Pat Carson. As I said on the show, she was a Labour counsellor for many, many years. She was our neighbour, she was a counsellor, she was somebody who hadn't been to university, who was kind of working class auto-died out, but had a really, really hard life, but was really committed or dedicated to the community and to the struggle.

She was active in CND, she was on the left of the Labour Party. To me, she was one of the most heroic people I ever met. And, you know, she really impressed me as a kid. And I just think it's worth acknowledging that. It's worth acknowledging that. Heroism can make a real impression upon us. And I think the kinds of heroism we've been talking about in the show as kind of progressive forms of heroism,

which are often more typical of what women's lives require them to express them. Men's lives and they're typical of working class struggling in the community. They're real. They really live things and they can make powerful impressions upon people. It did make a very powerful impression upon me. Perhaps one way, because you brought up the sort of class traitor of the week, we could ask the question of like, well, what is the opposite of the hero? Because the anti-hero doesn't quite do it, does it?

Because I think the anti-hero is like somebody who acts heroically, but perhaps not for the morally right reasons or something like that, isn't it? That's the sort of anti-hero frame, somebody whose motivations are like not moral, but, like, perhaps, yeah, I'm not quite sure. But I've got an answer for that that is, in relation to what Jeremy was just talking about, class heroes, is that, like, I reserve a lot of my vitrials for cowards on the left, people who, like, did not speak up or did not support people

who are, like, on the right side of history. I keep a ledger of all of these people. Just wait for the book. It's coming out in 20 years. Like, you know, there are people who have not spoken up, because my number one value that I care about is integrity, and I really don't like it when people are cowards. I want to talk to both of those things, actually.

I want to talk to speak to this idea of the anti-hero, which I think is interesting, and the question of what is actually the opposite of heroism. Because I think Kears made a good point about that notion of the anti-hero. And I would have to say it's a term that gets thrown around quite flippantly, actually. It's a term that gets used for characters in fiction, and who are sometimes, who are actually just villains and they're bad, but they're still the central figure.

They're the protagonist of the story. And they might be sort of attractive in certain ways. And it also gets used for people who are just sort of reluctant heroes. The question of what really is the opposite of a hero, I think, yeah, Nadi has raised really important points. Well, I referred already to that line from the British Socialist anthem, the Red Flag, they cowards flinch and traitors sneer. will keep the red flag flying here.

That is a very powerful line because there is this, I think, a deep intuition for a lot of people that those two things, cowardice and treachery, are very closely related to each other. And they are, in some ways, they are the sort of opposites of heroism. But they're also, calling back the things we were talking about earlier,

they're just the opposites of virtue in a certain sense. They're like the things you can do that are sort of reprehensible. and then probably reprehensible within every sort of moral code in history that you can, almost everyone that you can think of. Even for the bourgeois, actually, even the, I mean, the, you know, the sort of, if you think about the classical bourgeois self-conception, even the bourgeois is supposed to operate according to the dictum that, you know, my word is my bond.

That was the slogan of the city of London for a really long time. There's a notion of telling the truth, honouring one's. commitments. That's the idea of the coward or the traitor or the person who, like you said, Nadia, doesn't speak up for their comrades. Is there someone who, you know, their bonds of solidarity or their bonds or their responsibilities to others don't stand, don't withstand some kind of external pressure, which makes it uncomfortable to keep them. And that comes back to that idea of testing yourself in battle, actually. Well, I think that's a really good, it's a really good point, because I would argue that that concept of what is, you know,

if we're going to put some kind of like value judgment on it of like what is right or wrong, like doesn't hold in the 21st century. Like I don't think that we've got the ideological underpinning for people to actually say like it's a terrible thing to be a coward. I actually think like the technocratic, like neoliberal environment that we live in basically rewards people who are cowards, like people who stand up and speak for something that is, larger than themselves, like, in, you know, in culture and media get shot down. And I think

that has actually influenced some people on the left. Like, I don't know whether that's a kind of centrist vision or, like, what it is. But, you know, that, that, that image or that story which you've encapsulated, Jeremy, like, I don't think it necessarily holds, like, in contemporary life. That could take us back to this idea of the anti-hero, actually, because when I think of an anti-hero, I sort of think of like the protagonists in like film noir or something like that. The distinction of film noir to like the normal detective's story, the normal detective's story, like the detective is like the hero because you can think of it like this as crime has been committed and he goes and acts and basically lawful world is re-erected basically and film noir is

where the whole world is completely corrupt, you know, an evil in some sort of way. And so, like, you know, the protagonist in that, he exists in a thoroughly corrupted order, et cetera, so he's partly corrupt as well, do you know what I mean? So that conception of heroism in which, you know, you can be honourable, etc, just doesn't exist in a thoroughly corrupted world. I'm going to quibble over film noir, and I think it's a useful category, but I would say within film noir, there are very different ideas about heroism specifically. So Humphrey Bogart, for example, is always playing a character who does, who ends up being morally virtuous. despite knowing that he's living in a world in which that won't be rewarded and the system is corrupt

and so he's this sort of he's a Camuian sort of existentialist hero he's not really and people sometimes talk about those characters as anti-heroes but that's what I mean they're not really they're really like very heroic they're just they're not obviously

upholding some exterior code yeah well in a way it's like that idea of like can you have heroism in a world which is thoroughly, thoroughly corrupted and in which individual heroism can't have an effect, basically, it cannot write the world in some sort of way. But I think it's a good point, actually. I mean, I think clearly we would all, I think,

and nearly everyone listening to this, also would probably agree that people can make moral choices about how they live their lives. And to a large extent, our understanding of what the main moral choices that most people are going to be faced with in their lives are revolved to some extent around the extent to which you're going to capitulate to the capitalist incentive to pursue personal wealth

of the expense of all other objectives. And to what extent you're going to try to live a life which is in some way committed to the improvement of general well-being or just the care of others. Look, it's interesting actually when we talk about, I mean, I think when we talk about heroism, I think it's really interesting that I think in contemporary culture, certainly in a society like Britain,

there are some social groups who everyone thinks are heroic. If you look at opinion polls, like which group of people do the most people admire, firefighters and nurses, you know, and it's a really, and it's a kind of killer argument, which we, I think I've said this before on the show, and like we don't, it doesn't get used nearly enough, in my opinion, you know, by the left.

It's an absolute killer argument that living in a society that rewards nurses as poorly as ours does for their work is just not acceptable. It's not okay. Like something is clearly broken and needs fixing. And your soft Tory just thinks, oh, well, nurses should be paid a bit more probably. And we should cut immigration so the market demand for their labour goes up. That's what they think. I think you probably have to. you probably have to abolish capitalist social relations

before you get nurses paid properly, probably, given all the other circumstances we're in now. But that is something that people really do quite spontaneously recognise, I think. This sort of speaks to what Nardi was saying earlier, and it's something I often find myself thinking about is the fact that there's just no, like no culture in history, no culture, no religion ever, no philosophical code has ever actually said,

Yeah, like being really, like being really sneaky, like lying to everyone and just making yourself rich, that's cool, that's a good way to be. And yet, indeed, like, we live in the whole, one of the problems with capitalism is it quite self-evidently, like incentivises exactly that behaviour. It incentivises lying, it incentivises theft, incentivises cowardice. And it's celebratory about it on both ends. It's both incentivising it and go like, yeah, well done, well done. you got away with doing it just for yourself. It's fucking shit, man. Could I object to the idea that there's to be no philosophical school which has celebrated that?

Could I present you the great philosophical hero Ayn Rand? But even Ayn Rand thinks, what Ayn Rand thinks the heroic individual is doing, it's like standing up for truth against conformity. Yeah. Even Ayn Rand thinks, even Ayn Rand's heroes are truth-tellers who at personal, at the risk of personal, cost to themselves. Do what is right. The classic example, though, of a right-wing libertarian as a house cat, rejecting the nurses while taking healthcare and, in fact, signing on and receiving unemployment benefit for many years. This is sounding quite anti-cat podcasts. I'm not sure

what's going on here. We've had cats as liberals twice. I'm going to have to go and think about this. I don't blame cats for their ignorance. I do blame right-wing libertarians. I do have a line on cats, to be clear. I've had cats nearly all my life, and I've got cats now. I love having cats, and I love my cats. But I also, I have this line that cat fetishism is a symptom of neoliberal ideology.

Because as a cat owner, I'm going to come out and say, cats are not as intelligent as dogs. they obviously not because as a cat owner I know perfectly well if my cat could process the information that if it did a little trick it would get an extra treat it would definitely do it like it doesn't do it because it's too cool it doesn't not do tricks and like come when you call it and bring you toys and fetch stuff it doesn't not do it because it's too cool it does it because it's too thick and it's because they're not social creatures and they're not pack they're pack creatures dogs are more intelligent because they're social creatures but this This mystique around cats, this idea that somehow their inability to process social information actually means they're more intelligent than dogs is like ridiculous, and it's a symptom of neoliberal individualism. I don't know, man. Deleuze was a notorious cat person who called dogs overeatopalized.

So we are definitely getting... I'm just saying they're not more intelligent than dogs. I'm just saying this mythology, they're more intelligent than dogs. It's a symptom of individualist ideology. are their cat heroes though you'll have to wait for the superheroes microdose listeners I think it's not just like people who are actively on the left either you know I think it's something it is an understanding that really runs around society like you know I can think of people I know who are actual who are Tory voting like liberals who are working the

private sector working business they disagree with a lot of what we say on this show but if you talk to them about what their understanding is, about what it means to be a good person in the world, it still basically does come down to the question of, well, how far do you resist, you know, the implicit compulsion to just be a completely selfish, you know, moral void, and how far do you actually try to judge your actions according to how far they might help other people to some extent sometimes? And I think that is really powerful, and it is related to ideas of, it is related to ideas of heroism. And I want to come back to the thing I talked about right at the start then around this question of, you know, grey labour,

the wonderful term of Alex Nivens we keep referring to, grey labour, the current Labour party, the current Labour leadership is incarnating this completely like non-heroic, like counter-heroic vision of politics, according to which just by definition, by definition, you can't really change anything. So if you even try, all you're going to do is mess stuff up. and make things worse with people and show to the world what a deluded idiot you are. And therefore, you shouldn't be allowed. Therefore, it's morally legitimate to do anything necessary to stop you, trying to even do anything serious with the government or the state or the party.

Therefore, it's morally legitimate to, like, go around, you know, completely flouting democratic rules to make sure the people who get selected as MPs, or people who aren't going to demand governments trying to do anything really significant, etc. And it is, I think it is a problem for like mainstream democratic politics, actually, not just for the left. It's one of the things I really find that people who are not very politically engaged, this figure I have in my mind based on lots of people I do know who I often sort of refer to these days, like the soft left dad. Britain is full of soft left dads, you know, people who sort of, they sort of, they loved, they really like Ted Midi Band and they remember Blair really fondly, but they sort of understand that it never really went far enough. changed enough. They were really suspicious of Corby. He seemed a bit weird. He had these weird followers. And hadn't they learned at university that Marxism was dead? So Corby must be bad.

And so like, oh, well, if he's anti-Semitic, that explains why I don't like him then. Now, that's good. And then they really like Keir Stama at first. And now they're totally furious at what Starmer's been doing. But the thing these guys really, really can't get their heads around this, their deep assumption is anyone who went into politics must have done it because they want to make the world a better place and even if they're real egotists they must want to like make historically significant changes they must want to be the kind of people you end up learning about in history books in school in future decades like atley or churchill or one of those guys and the real thing

the thing that's really problematic in some ways about hulkswood contemporary political culture is the broader public, even when they mistrust politicians and think of them as these self-serving egotists, I think a lot of people, what they don't get is that is not how these politicians think about themselves at all. They do not think about themselves in those terms. They actively don't want to ever have to be put in the position where they might actually even have the chance to do anything of world historic importance because that would put them at a huge risk, huge risk of failure, which they absolutely are not. interested in, huge risk of compromising just their personal earning capacity, which they're

very concerned with maintaining. The real objective for one of these people, the real objective for Starma and Reeves is to become, is to be like Blair or Obama, a sort of Uber consultant who can go around getting paid like seven figures for advising like central, you know, Central Asian dictators or big corporations or what have you, or to get a plumb job at one of the big international institutions. Like, I'm absolutely sure now someone at some point in the past five years has told Stama, if he plays his cards right, he can get a stint as Director General of NATO.

Nobody knows what those guys get paid incidentally. I looked that up recently. Nobody knows what director, or was it, Secretary General of NATO, gets paid. They want to get one of those jobs. to actually try to do something heroic, to actually try to change things, to actually try to build some new institution, to initiate some new historic phase, or even like a Thatcher, they don't want to do any of that. That's the last thing they want.

They didn't come into the job to do that. They came into the job, you know, with the intention of getting a really impressive CV that culminates in them getting one of these global scale positions that earns you like a million quid for a couple of years' work. That's what they want. and it's totally counter-heroic. They're not even heroic in a kind of right-wing sense, but it's the fact that that is their ideology,

that is their self-conception, which means they're totally impervious to demands. It's no good telling them, if you carry on like this, everyone's going to hate you. If you carry on like this, you're going to news select election because they don't care about that. And in a way, it's the absence of heroism from their self-conception, which is really a problem.

Part of that might be just that the collapse of a situation. sense of history, perhaps, the collapse of the sense that the future could be different from the present. The real tragic irony of it, of course, is, as we well know, is that like that anti-heroic rejection of the idea that things can change, etc., is so out of place in contemporary conjuncture, partly because of climate change, basically, where, you know, the big change is happening, whether you want it or not, basically. It's going to happen in in whichever way it's going to happen if you do deal of it, and it's going to happen if you don't deal with climate change, basically.

I just think you look at the current issues in British politics, where the fundamental issue is that government doesn't have enough money to run the country, and partly it doesn't have enough money to run the country for all kinds of fiscal reasons, but it's partly just the – I was reading just a report by the Institute of Physical Studies the other day, hardly a left-wing body, and they make the point. Privatization has shrunk government incomes, like quite a lot, compared to, say, where they were in the 60s and 70s. So we just, and the consequence of all this, I think,

I said this to someone last year, you know, a friend who's sort of Blairite in the Labour Party, he said, look, we're just sooner or later someone is going to re-nationalise, you know, the energy grid. It's either going to be an atli or it's going to be a Mussolini. Yeah, that's the true. That's where we're at now. Yeah, and like the Mussolini's of this world, the Farages of this world, you know, they are people who want to move away from technocracy.

and add affect and charisma. I'm not saying that Farage is particularly charismatic. I'm sure he is to some people. But if you think about Trump as, you know, the charismatic leader, etc., they are much more in tune with the times than the centrist, which is why, of course, the Labour Party are on a absolute Pasoq speed run. They've auto-failed themselves within a couple of months, basically, and are incredibly, incredibly unpopular.

And it brings us back to that, the question, which is sort of hung over this, which is, you know, well, why is the left not got its act together? And to be honest, the left hasn't got its act together and created an alternative, partly because people are waiting on people such as Jeremy Corbyn to move or to make, to pull something together. Well, it's also because when it comes to the theme of heroism, I mean, again, you know, this is a bit, it's a bit conspiracy Gilbert, it's a bit anecdotal, I can't prove anything, But, you know, I've been being told by resources I consider reliable for years that, for example, when Gordon Brown, who everybody was hoping, would take Britain in a much more clearly social democratic direction when he became Prime Minister in 2007, when he looked like he was about to do that, he was issued quite direct threats by people like Murdoch, that they would just make his kid's life in absolute misery if he did it. And people do, you will get threatened. I mean, I don't think there's any question. Like if you're if you're in the position of being a left leader, I think you look at

someone like Starma, Starmer's kids are exactly the same age as mine, right? My daughters are the same six-form as his son actually. And honestly, I just think if you, you probably, you can't be like a left-wing leader and the current media environment if you've got teenage kids. They would just find some way of like absolutely destroying their lives and destroying yours and they would threaten you with doing so, basically. That's partly why leaders probably do have to be people they're either people who's very young who haven't done anything or they're going to have to be people like Corbyn and Bernie are really old and like everything they've ever done

and said is known and publicised already and their kids are grown up because it just isn't anything they can hold over them and my point here is it is I think we shouldn't like ignore the fact that it's really really scary like to be a left wing leader in the contemporary circumstance

is really really scary and I think it is worth keeping in mind like how much it demands of those people demands of people to be political leaders who are in any way radical today.