The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 453. Potential Solutions to Fix Mass Indoctrination | Eric Kaufmann
Episode Date: June 6, 2024Dr. Jordan Peterson sits down with author and professor of politics Eric Kaufmann. They discuss where the instinctive feminine ethos goes wrong, when beliefs solidify in cognitive development, how the... loss of cultural power comes about, and how to potentially fix the corruption of education. Eric Peter Kaufmann is a Canadian author and professor of politics from the University of Buckingham. He was appointed in October 2023 following his resignation from his post at Birkbeck, University of London, after two decades of service, citing political differences. He is a specialist on Orangeism in Northern Ireland, nationalism, and political and religious demography. - Links - “The Third Awokening” (Book) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D459XT8N/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1IRUVF15JQLKQ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hX4h5NrOyN1lCkRuKp4UM-I2wmwiOo7jUKUzhijCGUqplpOicK_sf92FtJ-RfvQCkLb-J3v7R1LQttqtXd5p5aWQAk85EIH09e3OkVAOcMs_NnMSC3RjN7eb80EPEy9BQ68ymHIEb7YchloiwzoiKXIrEl-vfbGxutr5w4AInTpEZKg8-dJcRmaR_aptULkpp81Ls-j0vvPn2q_MWHEQTjxAoJ5MPzlk5VvsAe_R7Wo.dZIyu_PWY2izuf3jBSYhx-wobgzxqiUuNJYOKjrbgmM&dib_tag=se&keywords=Eric+kaufmann&qid=1715744487&sprefix=eric+kaufmann%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-3 Entitled “Taboo” in outside of the U.S. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Taboo-Making-Produced-Cultural-Revolution-ebook/dp/B0CKFD8Z16 University of Buckingham course - Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/courses/occasional/woke/?_gl=1*5vuahc*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTMzNzMwNDE3Ny4xNzE2ODQ3MjIy*_ga_PWEL0GXNN9*MTcxNjg0NzIyMi4xLjAuMTcxNjg0NzIyMi4wLjAuMA.. Centre for Heterodox Social Science https://www.heterodoxcentre.com/ Website www.sneps.net On Twitter https://twitter.com/epkaufm?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello, everybody. I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Eric Peter Kaufman. He's a
Canadian author and a professor from the University of Buckingham. He's written a new book. It's come out in two different forms.
The Third Awakening, or Taboo, How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution.
Eric is also the author of a number of other books.
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, The Orange
Order, etc.
He's a rare bird, you might say. He's a relatively conservative social
scientist, and there aren't very many of those. In fact, I think the two of us talking are about
the only two that there are. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. We talk about a lot
of things today. We talk about the sacred dimension of the victim-victimizer narrative. We talk about the
state of modern universities and what's being done to, what would you say, stem the tide of
the radical leftists. We talk about Dr. Kaufman's, well, his presumption that much of what's happening
on the culture war front isn't precisely due to
the invasion of Marxists that you often hear about, or even about postmodernism per se, but
more about progressive literalism with its roots in the early 20th century. And so he makes that
case. We talk about sex and the different political beliefs that are emerging, especially
between men and young women. join us for the conversation.
You're concentrating on the culture war, which continues to rage madly, especially in, well,
academia and everything it touches.
Do you want to tell, I thought we'd start with two things.
Do you want to tell people why you entitled your new book, The Third Awakening, and then
maybe fill everybody in a little
bit about the history you've had with cancel culture and academia and how that ties in
with your broader body of work.
Yeah, George, it's great to be on the show. And yeah, I've got a new book, The Third Awakening,
the title in Britain is called Taboo. And what this book really is
about, what it really argues is that what we're seeing, cancel culture, for example,
attacks on the past, on history, this is actually a continuation and an acceleration of a pre-existing
set of ideas. It is not a deviation from this. There are people who will say everything was fine in
the 2000s and suddenly we've had this post-2015 deviation. My argument is actually no. What we're
seeing is really a continuation of a set of ideas which arguably go back a century. And so these are
the ideas really of left liberalism. And we have to understand ourselves as living within an
acceleration of left liberalism, a set of ideas that kind of come together in the first
decade of the 20th century as liberal progressivism. People like John Dewey, Jane Addams in the
United States, the origins of pluralism, the origins of the critique of ethnic majorities and national
identity. And then this is sort of accelerated and every generation, but really from the
late 1960s, we get a sort of takeoff. And then we've kind of had with social media,
another acceleration. And so the third awakening simply means that we're not in the first one,
that we've had three
of these emotional outbursts and ideological awakenings.
Just like in Protestantism, you have the first and second great awakenings in American Protestantism.
These are sort of emotional upsurges.
So the first one was in the late 60s and people forget that you had Black Panthers occupying
buildings armed to the teeth. You
had students demanding, you know, 50 Black professors be studied, every Black student
be admitted. Black studies, this is how Black studies got started, for example, is through
demands by people who occupied the offices of administrators. So the late 60s, we have
a number of these things. Then there's another awakening, which is in the late 80s, early 90s, that's sort of probably when you and
I were coming of age, we had political correctness, Afrocentrism, speech codes, for example, hey
ho, Western Civ has got to go. Changing the curriculum, purging it of dead white males,
that talk in the late 80s, early 90s. And then we have another wave which comes
in post 2010. So these are, in my view, continuous. They really touch on the same set of ideas,
which is really making sacred a couple of things, which is identities are made sacred.
So I define, for example, woke. One sentence definition, people always ask, what is the
definition of woke? Well,
the definition of woke, as I mentioned in the book, is the making sacred of historically
marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. That's it. That's the one sentence
definition. And that is also what I would say, what I would describe as the kind of big bang of our moral order. And out of
that emerges a kind of very fuzzy folk ideology, which says, so these are the sacred groups.
Those groups cannot be offended. So anything you say that might be interpreted by the most
sensitive member of such a group as offensive marks you out as a blasphemer. You're profaning the sacred, you must be excommunicated, i.e. canceled.
The other part of this is absolute equality in terms of prestigious positions and resources
between these groups. So for example, you can't have a race gap or a gender gap in terms
of the boardroom, in terms of admittance to elite universities and so on. It's got to be zero. So equality
plus emotional safety, these are the two pillars of this ideology. But the point I make is
this ideology is not some kind of system like Lockean liberalism or even Marxism that is,
it is more of a bottom-up empathizing rather than a top-down systematizing cognitive thing.
It's much more emotional. We're attached concretely
to the black civil rights movement, to the indigenous, to the LGBT movements, and it's
our romanticization and sympathy for these concrete groups that provides our meaning.
And that's primary in the system. It's not a set of ideas like Marxism. It's actually a set of emotional
attachments. And so this is very much emotional and it's driven from the ground up.
Okay, so let me ask you some questions about that. Okay, so I guess you pulled out two
strings there. You did associate the system of ideas with liberal progressivism, let's say, starting
in the early 20th century.
But then you were also stressing the more emotional side of it.
Let's call it the compassionate side.
So I want to ask you, and you talked about it as bottom-up and emotion-driven.
So it seems to me that there's the analysis of the woke phenomena has revealed a number
of potentially fundamental causal elements.
You pointed to liberal progressivism and compassion and the role of emotion, let's
say.
Other people have pointed to the role of like a kind of a metamarcism.
So it's the Marxists, of course, divided the world into victim and victimizer, essentially
on economic grounds.
The difference now is that that same narrative seems to play out.
There are victims and there are victimizers, but there is a number of dimensions along
which that axis of inequality can reveal itself.
And you talked about race, gender, and sexuality.
There's other axes as well, but those are likely the primary ones.
And then with regards to the emotional side, this is something I can't help wondering about.
And no one is talking about it. something I can't help wondering about, and no one is talking
about it, and I can understand why.
We did a series of studies that were published in 2016, which was pretty much when I left
the university, so it never got completed.
But we identified a group of ideas that hung together statistically that we call politically correct authoritarianism
deviated to some degree from, say, the liberal progressivist ethos in that the people who
adopted the set of ideas were perfectly willing to use compulsion and force, that being perhaps
the primary distinction.
The predictors that we found that determined whether or not people
adopted those beliefs were first of all low verbal intelligence. That was a walloping
predictor. And the second one was being female. And the third one was having a female temperament.
And the fourth one was having ever taken even one politically correct course. And so one
of the things I'm very curious about, see I've been thinking that one of the things that we're seeing is the increased female domination of the university system, especially in the humanities and the social sciences.
And I think there's a fundamental feminine ethos that's instinctive, that can be made more sophisticated with genuine education,
but that has a proclivity to divide the world up
into predators and infants,
and woe betide you if you happen to fall
into the predator camp.
It's very tightly allied with the victim victimizer narrative.
And you do point out in your book
that there is a predilection for women
between the ages of 18 and 34,
and this has been shown everywhere.
They're way out of lockstep with every other demographic
group, way more progressive, far more radically left,
way more likely to identify, for example,
to even claim that the Hamas terrorists are victims
in some sense, which is just an absolute miracle
of interpretation.
So we've identified a number of streams.
There's a Marxist influence, there's a postmodern influence, which we haven't talked about,
there's a liberal progressive influence, there's an emotional influence.
And then I don't know if you have any specific thoughts about how the increasing female domination,
especially of the humanities and the social sciences plays into that.
Because that's a major league cultural revolution.
The fact that the universities are dominated,
for example, administratively as well by females.
And so I know that's a hell of
a thing to ask you to talk about right off the bat.
I think that's actually really interesting,
and I think it is a contributing factor,
but I just want to sort of put in a couple of caveats.
The first is we only see this female effect amongst young people.
So older women, we don't find greater support for cancel culture.
It very much seems to be among young women.
The second thing is if you were to go back to 1970, for example, women were, you know, there's
a survey done every year in the US, HRI, Higher Education Research Institute, 100,000 freshmen,
18-year-olds entering American universities. In 1970, women were somewhat more conservative
than men, 18-year-old women, 18-year-old men. And it's really not until 2004, we start to
see those 18-year-old women starting to beyear-old men. And it's really not until 2004 we start to see those 18-year-old women starting to be
more liberal than the men.
And that's now widened to about 15 points.
And so some things happen to women in the recent period.
That's the first point to note.
And the other thing is that FIRE, which Foundation for Individual Rights and
Expression does an annual survey in the US, 55,000.
So there's a lot of survey data in the book.
I try and ground this as much as possible in the data.
So they ask questions, for example, is it okay to shout down or block somebody from
speaking?
And on those questions, actually, especially using violence to prevent somebody from speaking,
women are less likely than men to support that on blocking.
They're about as likely.
Where women really stand out is, should a speaker come to campus who wants to say something
that might be offensive to themselves?
For example, that says BLM is a hate group, that says trans is a mental disorder. There
you see a big gender gap. And you see it also amongst Republican women, by the way, versus
Republican men. So it seems like the attitude, there's the authoritarian, I want to do violence,
which is, I think, not gendered, or it may even be somewhat more male. But there's this
protective, oh, I don't want anyone's feelings to be hurt. And that, I think, is more female. So I think there are some nuances here. What
I would say, I mean, the way I think about it is women will tend to back up the whatever
is the moral order. If the moral order is a woke moral order, they'll back that up.
If it's a religious or patriotic moral order, they'll be more likely to back that up. Whereas
men will be more likely to be the contrarians. I think because it's, you know, people will
talk about, well, women are more compassionate, but the point is compassionate to who? Like
compassionate to-
Well, that is the point. That's for sure that's the point.
So compassionate to the transition or the de-transitioner? Compassionate to the biological
male wants to enter a woman's shelter or a woman's prison or the women-transitioner, compassionate to the biological male wants to enter a woman's
shelter or a woman's prison or the women in the prison? I mean, the ideology is what tells you who
to be compassionate towards. So if we go back to the liberal progressives, Jane Addams was relatively
pro-lynching or at least thought that wasn't a bad idea because she was very, very empathetic
towards white women. And so she was willing to accept that
there were these black male predators and buy into that framing. So what I'm just saying
is I think what's happened is an ideology has crept in and told women who to be compassionate
towards and who not to care about.
So, okay. So your point fundamentally is that, I believe, is that the ideology specifies the victim-victimizer
dimension and identifies the victim. Now, do you think it's... So when we did our study,
it was agreeable. I said it was being female and having a female temperament. Those were
both predictors. We never saw that in any study we ever did looking at what predicted beliefs, for example. Generally, if we controlled for temperament,
sex had no effect. But that wasn't the case in this specific situation, which I thought
was extremely telling. And it's also very interesting, as you pointed out, that it's
young women in particular. And I can't help, as someone psychoanalytically influenced,
I can't help but think that a fair chunk of this
is misplaced maternal instinct.
I believe that the young women who are by and large childless
in the years when they shouldn't be
are unbelievably sensitive.
Well, let's talk about what happened in 2004.
You said that's when women started to shift
their political priorities.
Now, I know from people who've been investigating this
that TikTok is a particularly pernicious influence,
especially with regards to the campus protests
that are occurring right now.
And the TikTok short videos that are fostering
that the campus protests, at least among women,
focus on compassion for the war victims
to the ultimate degree.
And they seem to be extraordinarily effective.
But there's a real problem here that needs to be wrestled
with because if it is the case that young women
are differentially sensitive to a certain kind of propaganda
and they also increasingly occupy the majority positions
in university institutions, for example,
then we have a whole new kind of social problem
on our hands, because we've never had,
it's only been in the last 30 years
that we've had the opportunity to see what female dominant
large institutions would look like, right?
That's historically unprecedented.
We have no idea what pathologies
or advantages those systems might have. So what do you think happened in 2004? Like,
why did the tide start to turn then?
So my interpretation, there's other data sort, data series that we can see changing. So political
donations shifting towards the Democrats, for example, around roughly the same time.
Now political donations come from people who are highly educated, relatively well off, for example.
I think what happens in the US anyway is you get George W. Bush, who's more of a populist,
not an elite style conservative who's just about tax and spend, for example. And I actually
think you see, you know, he's also to some degree advancing the agenda of the religious
right, to some degree. I think this of the religious right, to some degree.
I think this populist style cultural conservatism doesn't work as well with the elite opinion
formers, and so they start to drift away in terms of political donations.
If you like the kind of background, the ambient noise, the mood music that is coming through
the elite institutions, the schools, the culture,
just starts to turn against Republicans and conservatism, for example. So I actually think
women are a kind of roof, they kind of reflect what is the dominant ethos in a society, or at least the prestige ethos in a society. So if we actually swung the ethos against wokeism,
I think women would be in the forefront of that. I don't think
there's anything biological. So I am more of a sociologist than a political scientist.
So I tend to approach these things from a kind of sociology of emotions perspective,
which says that ideas can tell you which emotions to turn off and which emotions to express.
And now, of course, that's refracted through things like gender. So in this case, I think
women will just back up and reinforce the dominant values, dominant ideology of
the elites in a society. So I'm not as convinced.
Why the elites? Why do you think it's okay? Why would women specifically back up the dominant
ideology of the elites? Do you think that's a consequence of something like hypergamy?
Or what's your
theory about that? Because it's weird if they're also standing up for the underdogs, is it
that they accept the elite differentiation of who's an underdog and who's a power monger
and then why is that associated with youth, let's say, with women? I'm trying to disentangle
all that.
Well, I think there are a couple of things. I mean, one is the education system, which I think
shifts in this direction in a big way. I mean, it was there in a few radical centers like Berkeley
and the Toronto District School Board, Greater London Council. So you had these crazy places,
but what's happened is a scaling up. So what my book talks a lot about is these ideas actually go back quite a long way, but it's the scaling up. Now it's
in every school. So I did a couple of studies with the Manhattan Institute. 90% of 18 to
20 year old Americans that I interviewed, sent the survey to, said that they had encountered
at least one critical race theory concept from an adult in school. In Britain, it was
about, you know, it was a majority as well, not as high, but a majority. So it's hitting
saturation level. So that's what women are getting in class. And then they see it in
the institutions that may be in the workplace, in the government. So they're seeing this
thing, DEI everywhere. And so they think, yeah, this is the way you have to be a good
moral person. And they simply reinforce those values. So I think that is the biggest driver.
And I don't think it's just self-interest. So if we take a question like, you know, should
one of the questions that I ask is should JK Rowling be dropped by her publisher? Amongst
young people, it's 50-50. Drop her, not drop her. Amongst anyone over 45, it's 50-50. Drop or not drop, or amongst anyone over 45, it's in low single digits.
So we've got a big issue with young people.
But what's really interesting is that if we take this sort of, should JK Rowling be dropped
by her publisher question, you know, women are considerably more likely to say that than
men.
Now you might say, well, shouldn't women be sticking up for women and women's spaces and with female authors? And we'll know actually. So women are actually
going against their own interests as a tribe by supporting the gender, you know, the trans
activist case on women's sports, women's shelters, women's prisons, you name it. Doesn't make any
sense from a purely feminist perspective. So I just think they're reflecting,
these are the values that good people are supposed to have,
and we're going to reinforce them.
So do you think, OK, well, it's perfectly reasonable
to suppose that something like the default young female ethos
is self-sacrifice in relationship
to the marginalized, right?
I mean, infants are marginalized.
They're in danger all the time.
They have to be attended to.
Everything they demand has to be granted to them.
So perhaps it's not surprising that women would sacrifice their own interests in relationship
to the marginalized because that's actually, and certainly self-sacrifice is part of what
you might regard as a core in relationship to any moral ethos.
The problem seems to be that it can be gamed,
and it's gamed so effectively now.
And then you also talked about the fact
that these young people have been exposed to these courses,
so we could flesh that out a little bit.
We did find in the study that I described,
which was a very good study, by the way.
It was only published as a master's thesis,
because my research career came to a rather
crashing halt.
But the fact that even one course had a significant effect over IQ and temperament and sex was
telling, right?
So now, I don't know if you know this, but you might know it.
You know that in virtually every state and province in North America, a teacher has to
be certified and
that's basically the faculties of education have a hammer lock on that, which is appalling
as far as I'm concerned because I don't think there's a more corrupt branch of academia
than the faculties of education.
Terrible research, counterproductive research, whole word learning, self-esteem, social emotion, name a stupid
fad and the probability that it came out of an educational psychologist in a faculty of
education is extremely high.
Do you know that the K through 12 education system eats up 50% of the state budgets in
the United States?
Really?
So that means that 50%, sometimes more.
So that means that since the 1960s,
we have handed 50% of the state budgets
to the most woke graduates of the worst possible faculties.
We've done that for four generations.
And now, well, and as you said now in your surveys,
you're finding that the vast majority of students
have been exposed to, well, what's essentially,
I don't know how to characterize it,
post-modern metamarsis propaganda, something like that,
although you're stressing more the emotional side of it.
And so, well, I guess that all,
we'll discuss that a little bit too when we get to your,
I'm so interested in discussing your solutions because, you know, I think the solutions to the
universities is to let them perish by their own hand because they're certainly struggling mightily
to do so. So, but you're more optimistic and so I, okay, so that's the facts on the ground with
regards to state budgets.
50% of their budgets has been handed over to these propagandistic institutions.
Well, I think the schools are critical.
So one of the things we're finding, for example, is that students largely are formed by the
time they come on campus.
And a lot of the studies of university show people's views don't actually change a great deal
between when they come on, step onto campus
and leave the university.
However, so we really have to focus on the school.
So one of the things we found in the study
that Zach Goldberg and I did was we looked at
how much exposure to critical race and gender theory concepts
students had had in high school.
And we take, for example, somebody who didn't
get any exposure to any of these critical race concepts like white privilege, systemic
racism, unconscious bias, or the gender concepts, many genders, patriarchy, for example. Someone
who got no exposure to that is sort of 50 to 100% less likely to express, for example, white guilt, think that whites are racist
and mean, to favor racial quotas and affirmative action. All of these things jump 50.
50 to 100% less.
Yes.
Wow. Mind-boggling.
And so, that's between somebody having no concepts and the maximum of six concepts.
Similarly, by the way, for partisanship, you
know, someone with a Republican mother who is exposed to no concepts, there's essentially
60% of them identify as Republican. Exposed to six concepts, it drops to below 30%. So
one of the points that I try to make in the book is that K-12 education, public education
is absolutely massive and must become a top priority for
certainly conservative politicians.
If you want to have a hope in the future in terms of turning this around, we've got to
get at K-12 education.
Okay, so let me ask you about that.
I just saw a study the other day, just a graph of a study showing across a variety of different age groups,
when people believe that the culture, their culture, peaked in terms of quality, music,
entertainment, food, peace, etc.
And the general proclivity was for people to focus on the time between they were about,
say, 15 and 19.
And you know, there's a tremendous amount of neural reorganization
that goes on at that point.
So there's a big die off of neurons between two and four.
Right. So you're born with more neural connections
than you ever have again in your life.
And a lot of what happens when you learn is actually pruning.
There's a major pruning in late infancy, and then there's a major pruning
in teenage,
in the teenage years. You kind of die into your adult personality. That's a reasonable way of
thinking about it. Now people have known for a long time that if you want to get men into the
military in the proper way, you have to do that when they're young adults. The earlier the better.
By the time they're 23 or so, like, forget it. You can't
tribalize them, right? So that we, and we don't know exactly the critical period for
the establishment of tribal identity, but you're suggesting that your research is indicating
that it's actually prior to university. You know, I bet it's the same time that people
develop their musical preferences. Right. Right?
Right?
Well, yeah, I think that's such a key point that you make about the neurons and brain
development kind of ending in a certain way in the early 20s.
That tends to manifest itself.
I mean, a political scientist like myself would tend to look at these as cohort effects.
So you kind of, your beliefs crystallize,
to some extent, in your early 20s, and you carry those through life. Because right now,
I think there's a complacency amongst a lot of people who say, well, young people are woke,
but they'll grow out of it. They'll come back, they'll have kids, they'll own a house,
and they'll suddenly become conservative. And I think that's quite naive in many ways. I think
that may be true in
terms of self-interest paying taxes, but in terms of these core values, I don't think
that's likely.
And you can see that, by the way, with religion. So secularism, non-religion started with young
people and those beliefs were sticky and they maintained non-religion through life. And
now we're seeing record levels of non-religiosity in the US and Britain, for example.
One of my contentions is, yes, there's no question that Woke has kind of peaked.
We've seen a rollback of DEI in corporations to some extent.
We've seen, to some extent, reduced targeting.
We'll see about that.
They're pretty slippery, man.
Just because they don't have the same name doesn't mean they're not up to the same tricks. Exactly. But be that as it may in the New York
Times and the Washington Post editorializing in favor of free speech and against mandatory
diversity statements. What I say is that's true. And I think those senior liberals have road back,
but I think we've got to look at this in terms of cohort change generational turnover. When the median voter and the median employee in an organization
is a millennial or a zoomer, they're going to carry the beliefs they have with them into
midlife and that is going to change our culture. So for example, if I say here's a question
that we asked, you gov asked to hundreds of thousands of British
respondents on its panels, do you favor political correctness because it protects people from
discrimination or do you oppose political correctness because it stifles free speech?
No, in the British public, it's sort of 47 to 37 against political correctness. Amongst academics, it's maybe 75-20 in favor. Amongst
social science, humanities, academics. Young people take after that. They're about two
to one in favor of political correctness. And what I would sort of predict is if we
run the clock forward 20 years, the median in society is going to shift from essentially
being opposed to political correctness to being supportive
of political correctness. So something like speech codes, for example, in universities
will have majority support. And so I think we really have to turn this ship around while
we still have a sensible population because we can't guarantee that that's always going
to be the case. And so that's why I think the schools, changing the culture in schools
has to be so central.
Yeah. So, okay. So, you, I want to bring a couple of other issues here before perhaps
we turn to your solutions. Now, when we began our conversation, you said that part of this
movement was the establishment of sacred identities. And I just brought that up because you brought up the religious issue as well.
And I know you've done some writing about that additionally.
No, so there's a variety of... I like the idea of sacred...
See, I think what... I think religion... religious ideas are axiomatic starting points, like the Euclidean axioms for Euclidean
geometry.
There's very many different forms of geometry, right?
You just have to switch the axioms.
The axioms of a cognitive system, I think the word sacred is exactly right, is that
you have to accept a certain number of things on faith and then you can
build a logical edifice on top of that, maybe even a functionally logical edifice.
But there's going to be axioms at the base and so I think that any assumption, for example,
on the part of people like Dawkins that we can replace the religious enterprise with
something that's purely secular is nonsense.
I think what we'll get is a different set of sacred axioms.
And you pointed to race, gender, and sexuality.
And so why do you, first of all,
I wanna know what you think about that
and why you use the term sacred.
But I'm also curious about your thoughts
with regard to why it was that when we shed
our previous set of sacred presumptions, let's say, that it was race,
gender, and sexuality that rushed in to fill the void. So why them? Why those axioms?
Right. Well, I mean, there is a sort of earlier history, which I don't go into as much in the
book for reasons of space. So to some degree, you know, this was directed
against immigrant groups were sort of slightly protected by the liberal progressives, not
as extreme as race post 1960s. But I think to understand this, we have to go and one
of the reasons I make the argument that this is about left liberalism is that the civil
rights movement, starting in the mid 5050s, but really it's in
the mid-60s. This occurs with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, which are things
that I support. But as Shelby Steele in his book White Guilt, which I recommend to everybody,
he's an African American. He grew up in the South, experiences what he called a dramatic
shift almost overnight where the
cultural power goes away from whites, where black people had to kind of genuflect to whites
to suddenly white people having to sort of virtue signal that they are one of the good
whites to black people. So the cultural power flows to black people. That doesn't mean economic
power initially, but cultural power. That's what he said. And in fact, American institutions, in order to,
they lost their moral legitimacy by admitting that they engaged in the sin of racial discrimination.
Once you admit, he says, you give up cultural power. Now, you have to admit because these
were real things. But that loss of cultural power means that you now have to fight for
your moral legitimacy. Now, how do you do that? Through virtue power means that you now have to fight for your moral legitimacy.
Now, how do you do that? Through virtue signaling. So, you're kind of virtue signaling that you're
one of the good whites, that your institution still has moral legitimacy, so you're going to
have an affirmative action program, for example. You're going to have some kind of racial sensitivity
training, which is the precursor to diversity training. So, a lot of these things really begin
in the 60s and
70s, which is one of the reasons. And these are not Marxist things. This isn't Herbert Marcuse
saying we failed on class, we got to move to identity because they might do the radical
revolution. Those people were there. Don't get me wrong. You had Ruffo is correct and Lindsay,
that at least in terms of the ideas, those ideas were there. But really what drove this?
President Johnson was an anti-communist, he was bombing Vietnam. This is not some kind
of a neo-Marxist. What this was really about was kind of virtue signaling and saying, I'm
not one of the bad people and we're one of the good people. So white guilt, guilt, compassion
for these groups, and a certain exaggerated, catastrophizing fear of the right of
conservatives. They're going to drag us back to Jim Crow, back to 1933 Germany, that constant
ginning up of that alarmism. These are the three elements of the left liberal stool that are
developed. And so that's kind of the emphasis. So I put the civil rights movement as kind of the
So that's kind of the emphasis. So I put the civil rights movement as kind of the big bang of our moral order, and it is sort of the center of our moral universe. Now, once you've
got this sacredness around race, that you have to very tiptoe around black Americans
because you've done wrong and you feel a bit guilty, then you sort of can take that sacredness.
It's a bit like kryptonite, and you can wield it. And you can, if you're a feminist movement, you can grab a bit of that power and use it. If you
are an indigenous movement, you can use it. And so, and then you can stretch it. So it's
now mispronouncing somebody's name or the Moynihan Report, 1965 about the black family,
that becomes a bit offensive and you have to shelve it, right? So the stretching, it's a bit
like putty, you can then stretch it across to different groups, outwards to microaggressions,
and this is where all the power comes from. And I think we're not...
Well, there's another interesting dimension there too that's worth thinking about,
that's more psychological than sociological. So there's a group of personality disorders that are
extraordinarily resistant to treatment and should have probably never been medicalized
in my estimation because they're not illnesses. So antisocial personality disorder is one
of them. Criminality is not an illness even though it's diagnosable.
The associated pathologies are borderline personality disorder, which is perhaps the
female equivalent of antisocial personality disorder, although I would argue it's even
more toxic.
Histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, that kind of fleshes
it out. Now, the people in that cluster, let's say,
the personality traits they show are, they're Machiavellian.
So they use their language to manipulate.
So if someone like that is talking to you,
the only thing they're using their words for
is to obtain power over you for their immediate needs.
That's it. There's no dialogue. There's pure manipulation.
They tend to be psychopathic and so psychopaths are predators and parasites. They are
and parasites. They are histrionic, so prone to high levels of emotional display, especially negative emotion. They're narcissistic, which means they want
unearned social status. And, just to top it off, because that's not bad enough,
they have a proclivity to be sadistic, which means they take pleasure in the undeserving
suffering of others. Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is because that group of people uses
claims of victimization to harness guilt to obtain power. So there's an additional twist here that I
think is stunningly dangerous. And you see, it's tied in with your notion
that the progressive liberals have enabled the radicals.
Because here's the problem.
If you're empathic and progressive,
you don't believe that cluster B people exist,
because everyone's a victim.
But the problem is they do exist.
And it's in times when that small minority of people,
maybe that's 4%, something like that, when they get the upper hand, and they do, they got the
upper hand after the French Revolution, they got the upper hand after the Russian Revolution,
it is no fun for anyone because they're chaos worshippers, their best means of obtaining power and even reproductive opportunity is in the ashes.
And so I spent five years working with Democrats in the US, and it got frustrating, and so I stopped doing it.
But part of the reason it got frustrating is because I could never get any of the ones that I worked with, and that was a lot, to say to me, when does the left go too far?
And I would point out the dangers of the cluster B psychopaths, and they just hand wave.
It's like, oh no, they don't really mean what they say.
They don't mean what they say when they're talking about equality of outcome, for example.
Kamala Harris, she doesn't mean equality of outcome.
She just means equality of opportunity.
It is stunning the degree to which that's an axiomatic belief of progressive liberals
that that radical left fringe doesn't exist or they don't mean what they say.
That's universal.
I've literally not talked to one of them who, including Robert Kennedy, by the way, who
was willing to say, for example, what you said in your book, which is that we better
watch out for the demand for equality of outcome.
Because I do think that's where the pathology really manifests itself.
It's like, really, you want equality of outcome, do you?
Along all dimensions.
And you're going to, how are you going to obtain that exactly except by force?
Well, maybe we want force.
It's like, yeah, yeah, maybe you do.
Yeah.
So, well, so there's this interplay between sociology and thought and psychopathology that
people aren't attending to.
And it's very dangerous because the other thing that's terrible is that social media
seems to enable the cluster B types because
in normal conversation they're subject to the restrictions that face-to-face interaction carries with it.
Like the possibility of getting hit, for example.
But none of that is there on social media and that enables, as far as I can tell, that enables this
psychopathic manipulation to have essentially free sway.
Yeah, I mean, that's really an interesting set of observations. I think you're right.
And I guess we're agreeing, but from different ends of the telescope, because I think that
what's happening is this large group. So in a university, the median academic is liberal left, soft left, not far
left. It's 50 to 60 percent of the university. And this is why, for example, by a two to one
ratio, social science academics and elite universities support mandatory diversity
statements. So this is not something they're being forced to do by a few crazies. But of course, as you say, there's a symbiosis between the authoritarian left and this large
group of liberal left.
So my view is if we could work on at least convincing some of those liberal leftists
to change course, then that will reduce, it's like unplugging a guitar from the amplifier.
The liberal left is the amplifier and the radical left is the guitar player.
But you make another good point, which I've heard before, which is when does the left
go too far, the unwillingness?
And there's really a couple of strands to this, and we might call them equal outcomes,
diversity is another, and inclusion is another, the EDI triumvirate.
And I would say that on all of those dimensions, left
liberalism really has no boundaries. So left liberalism isn't, is in my view, sane on the
economy. It believes in a mixed capitalist economy. And so left liberalism really emerges
as the victor through two world wars and the Cold War as the ideology of sort of the elite
cultural ideology. It's not communist, actually. I don't think it is communist. I think it believes in a maybe a higher tax rate perhaps than the free market, right? But
I'm not really that concerned about the economy. It's on the cultural side. There are really no
guardrails at all. It's just, we're not diverse enough. We're not inclusive enough. We're not
equal enough. There's no bound to that. So whenever someone comes along and says,
we should be more equal, it's like, yes.
So what we have is this ratcheting.
And that's really where, I mean, Hananiah's book on affirmative action in the United States
moving to this idea of, well, starts out as, well, we want equal treatment.
That's what affirmative action meant.
Pretty soon it was goals and timetables.
Then there was disparate impact.
Well, you know, if you have a test like the SAT and certain racial groups are not represented,
then that's a kind of indirect discrimination.
So what we can see is this kind of evolutionary ratcheting.
Now that's quite different from a Neo Marxist takeover of institutions, a kind of vanguard
march through the institutions argument, which I think is, I'm not as persuaded, but I think
there's some of that happening. But I think it's really this sort of evolving, ratcheting
left liberalism because it has no boundaries. As you say, when is there too much diversity?
We know from the studies, Robert Putnam, for example, or Easterly, that too much diversity
actually has negative impacts on, for example, economic development, on various kinds of,
for example, trust in your neighbors.
Right.
And this is now a, this is a finding I would call a consensus finding.
Well, how can you have trust without cohesiveness?
Right, right.
How the hell can you manage that?
Yeah, but there's no limits and there's no willingness to recognize, we don't want to
maximize these things, we want to optimize them. That is not the way the liberal left thinks. They just think more
equality, more diversity, more inclusivity. Now, of course, inclusivity means we got to
have speech codes, we got to clamp down on speech, which might be offensive so people
don't feel included, might damage their self-esteem. So this is getting at free speech to get inclusion.
And I just don't know what...
You know, self-esteem...
Yeah.
Self-esteem.
Well, I've been watching these pathologies grow in psychology for 30 years.
And the social psychologists in particular, they've irritated the hell out of me for like
three generations.
And so, self-esteem, people still use that word.
So, here's what self-esteem people still use that word. So here's what self-esteem is
Self-esteem is trait neuroticism
Minus extroversion. There's no such thing as self-esteem. It's a complete bloody lie. It has no construct validity whatsoever
it's an index of your
temperamental proclivity to negative emotion and women have lower levels of
temperamental proclivity to negative emotion. And women have lower levels of self-esteem
because they have higher levels of neuroticism
and that kicks in at puberty.
And so this is a good example
of how the educational psychologists
and the social psychologists
have actually perverted the whole culture
because we actually believe in things
that don't exist so deeply
that people use them in their speech
as if they're actual facts,
maximizing self-esteem.
It's trait neuroticism.
It's extremely difficult.
It's very much set temperamentally.
It has a very powerful genetic, what would you say, foundation.
Neuroticism doesn't differ between boys and girls.
It doesn't kick into puberty.
It's different between men and women all around the world.
And, you know, so we can't lower people's self-esteem.
It means we're aiming at a target that doesn't even exist.
And we're using ideological means
because we've got our measurements wrong.
So, all right, so one of the things
that was striking about your book,
and I don't know how to rectify this apparent paradox.
You make the case that we've raised a cohort of kids
who've been thoroughly propagandized in high school,
let's say, because that looks like about the place
where it's occurring.
And your belief is that that's pretty sticky,
although there'll be some movement
in a conservative direction.
People get more conscientious as they get older,
they get more agreeable,
they do tilt a bit more towards conservatism,
but you believe that a lot of those ideas will be sticky.
And that means that that's going to dominate,
let's say in positions of power 10 years down the road.
But by the same token,
you also believe that there's time to turn the ship around.
So let's talk about that. You have 12 ideas, and I'm really curious to see you go through
them. So, well, you lectured for us at Peterson Academy, right?
That's right. That's right. Yeah.
Right. Right. So that's one of our answers to the problem. And that's launching, by the
way, at the end of the month.
Fantastic. Yeah. And it was a very enjoyable experience.
I didn't teach anything particularly controversial, but still.
What I would say is there's really two different approaches to dealing with the issue.
One is what I might call libertarian, and that's using market-based solutions, and
the other is interventionists using government-led solutions.
Now, I actually lean more towards the second than the first,
which may jar against some of the libertarians
in the audience.
So for example, I think when it comes to the battle
of ideas in the media, there I think it is,
the barriers to entry are quite low.
You can set up a podcast, you can have the impact
that you're having, that Joe Rogan is having.
But when we're talking about universities or tech firms,
particularly search engines, there are natural monopolies
and there are sort of market failures.
So there are first mover advantages to being Harvard.
It's gonna be very hard for Harvard's reputation.
I know it's dropped a little, but it's gonna be hard
for that rank ordering to change a lot.
And similarly with school.
So the view that we should simply
have school choice and that's going to fix the problem. I think school choice is great,
but I don't think it's going to make much difference. Surveys that I've looked at, for
example, show the kids who go through the private school to parochial school, who are even homeschooled, actually don't differ
very much in their views.
And in addition, the amount of critical race and gender theory that they are being exposed
to is relatively similar.
If you think about universities-
Even in homeschools?
Very, very, it's a little bit lower, but in the data that I've seen, which is the, at
the FIRE, Foundation Individual
Rights and Expression, and also we also asked the school questions on our 18 to 20 survey.
Now we didn't get a ton of variation.
Now it could be that the homeschool kids, we got a selection of those homeschool kids
which wasn't representative.
I don't know.
Maybe that's the case, but...
Well, is it a curriculum issue?
Well, how do you account for that?
Because on the face of it, that seems...
I believe it with the private schools, because my experience with private schools is that
they tend to be as woke as the public schools.
Maybe not quite as much, but pretty much.
The home school one, that's more complex, but it's not that easy for parents, for example,
to set up a curriculum.
And the curricula are well dominated by the ideology, let's say. complex, but it's not that easy for parents, for example, to set up a curriculum.
And the curricula are well dominated by the ideology, let's say.
But how do you make sense of that?
Right.
Well, I think there are some differences.
So on the gender ideology, there's a bit less amongst the home school.
Now we don't have a massive sample, but there looks to be some effect, but it's not massive.
And my point is, if you are a really switched on parent, you could send your kid to a classical school. If you have that option
nearby, that may make a difference for you. But the number of parents who are like that
is quite small. Most of them will just say, what school is going to get my kid ahead into
a top university gets the best results, even if they have a choice. And so most kids are
just going to be put through the sort of indoctrination machine. And that's my concern.
It's not the freedom of a very, you know, switched on parent to actually avoid these
things, which is important.
But it's most of these kids are being put through the same system.
So we've got to, I think, get at the public school system.
So for example, I think something like what Ron DeSantis is doing, essentially banning DEI, getting indoctrination out of
the schools, monitoring that.
Okay, let me ask you about that.
I really have mixed feelings about this.
And I'll tell you why.
I like Chris Rufall.
I've enjoyed talking to him.
I think him and DeSantis have done very interesting work in Florida.
But I have a concern.
And the concern is that once you establish the precedent that the universities can be
directly, can be directed from the top down by the politicians particularly, to set their
curricula straight, you set a vicious precedent.
And I believe that the work that Rufo is doing in Florida,
setting up the new university, for example,
and pushing back against DEI is laudable,
partly because all the universities to speak of are woke,
with the possible exception of like Hillsdale.
And so even if there is a risk of overshooting on the conservative side,
they're at such a disadvantage that practically speaking at the moment that might be necessary.
If the universities are incapable of governing themselves, and that would go along with the
faculties of education, and we turn that, we move that responsibility up the political hierarchy
to the elected officials.
We open the door for mass intervention
in the education system for ideological reasons.
And that's like, so I just can't see that as,
I see that as a solution with a lot of attendant danger.
So I'm wondering, like I said,
I understand what Rufo is doing and why, and DeSantis as well, and I think
they're both sensible people, but that doesn't mean that it'll always be sensible people
doing such things.
No.
So I would draw a very stark distinction between K-12, between the school system, where you've
got minors who are captive.
They have to be there.
They have to parrot back what the teacher says in order to get a good mark.
With the universities where academics have academic freedom, for example, so at university
level, I would be opposed to critical race theory bans. I've taught critical race theory.
I think you've got adults, they're choosing which courses to take. Now, I do think, however,
that state governments or the government has the right to defund, not ban,
but to defund, say, well, we're not going to fund
this kind of course.
Now that's a political decision,
but it's not to say it's banned.
You can cross-subsidize that
from your more profitable faculties.
And I think that will just,
it will allow it to be taught
if people really want to take it.
But so I don't think this is practical for universities.
Universities, I think there's a different set of solutions.
But I think for the school system,
it is perfectly legitimate to say
we're going to have a politically neutral space.
More important than that, sorry,
I just want to say one thing, which is
you have to teach about the past
and the war, slavery, genocide, conquest,
but I don't think you should be allowed
to teach about American slavery
without teaching about, say, indigenous slavery
or Ottoman slavery. You shouldn't be able to teach about-
Or Roman slavery or Greek slavery or-
Right. Yeah, or stolen land, you know, the Americans stealing land from the indigenous
without talking about the Iroquois stealing land from the Huron and the Comanche committing,
you know, atrocities against the Apache. So what I mean is we need to have a fully contextualized discussion that all land is
stolen land in a way.
Because I think part of what the problem is, 70% of 18 to 24s in the United States believe
that the Native peoples, quote unquote, the Native Americans lived in peace and harmony prior
to the arrival of the Europeans.
Right? So, this is exactly the problems we have.
I know. They were all wise stewards of nature and everything was peaceful and harmonious.
Yeah. Right.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 101. It's so pathetic.
Yeah. So, I think that kind of really, that sort of attempt to forge the curriculum. And now, if you look historically, Canada, the US, Australia, Britain, conservative parties have
tried and failed. They've essentially been out-distanced by the education establishment
time and time again on this stuff. That's going to have to change. They're going to have to get
hold of the curriculum and insist on a balanced curriculum and political neutrality. Britain has a law on the books
that schools cannot politically indoctrinate.
But what they do is they say,
well, critical race theory is not political.
They get around that.
Yeah, right.
So then, okay, so that begs the next,
well, that begs the next question.
It's like, once the institutions that we're discussing,
the faculties of education, let's say, once they're universally corrupted,
who the hell has the wisdom or the time in order to manage something like curricular analysis?
You know, like I went to the Republican Governors Association meeting, which was an interesting
thing to do. I did that last year. And one of the things that really struck me and kind of strikes
me in general about the Republicans, it was a rather dull meeting. They were trying to appeal
to their donors, so I expected a bit more spice, but it was dull in a kind of competent administrative
manner. So the governors would get up and they would talk about what were essentially local micro initiatives that were sensible and practical,
but they weren't the sort of cultural transformation vision that's necessary for people to sit
down and say, okay, well, the faculties of education are propagandizing.
What do we want our children to learn?
Like who in the...
Rufo is an exception to this maybe, but he's
a singular sort of person. I don't see widely, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to
political people all across North America, and it isn't obvious to me that I see anywhere
the kind of expertise or even the time that's available to manage such a thing. So how do
you, how do you envision that happening?
Well, I think there are groups. So the National Association of Scholars has model curriculum,
civics curriculum that they're developing, some of the think tanks, Manhattan Institute
as well. So there are now model curricula. And Britain History Reclaimed is working on
this. So we actually have got model curricula that, say,
conservative governments could adopt. They have to have the fight with the educational
establishment, which by the way, they have had and lost. Now, you look at, for example,
DeSantis, the African American, the AP, for example, I don't know if you recall where
DeSantis rejected the AP for African-American studies, was filled with
critical race theory, forced the critical race theory to come out of that.
That's an example of what I'm talking about is you actually have to get into the weeds
of this and you have to insist and you have to do inspection, you have to mainstream it
into the inspection regime.
All this very boring technocratic bureaucratic stuff. I just think so it's a bit I use the
analogy of Elon Musk taking over Twitter had so much more of an effect than Gab Parler.
Those are important to have these alternatives are important, but I just think we're going
to have to get our hands dirty, get into the weeds of the details of the curriculum and
insist on a balanced curriculum and actually have
that fight.
Okay, okay.
Well, let's, fair enough.
I'm going to point out a couple of problems again.
It's not because I don't agree with you.
It's just like you said, or implied at least, the devil's in the details.
I mean, the person who took over Twitter, that was Elon Musk, and he's a complete bloody
monster and he's a complete bloody monster.
And he's run many difficult corporations and done impossible things.
And so he's like, there's one guy like that.
And he fired, what, 80% of the Twitter staff, and nothing happened except the place got
bitter.
Now, the Pareto distribution for large corporations or large enterprises kicks in very viciously. And so the Pareto distribution, what would you say,
mathematical equations indicate that the square root
of the number of people in a given organization
do half the work.
And so if there's 10,000 educational bureaucrats,
then a hundred of them do half the work.
And that basically means you can fire 80% of them.
And if the whole place is corrupt, you probably have to. And like, I you can fire 80% of them and if the whole place is corrupt you probably have to.
And like I just can't see how the hell the conservatives are going to manage that because
it could easily be that 80% of teachers need to go.
Now I know there are places like the Acton Academy and so forth that are setting up educational
institutions where teachers for example are much less necessary because the students take a lot of the work on their own.
And I understand, as you pointed out,
that there are places that are producing model curricula.
But I've talked to Republican governors, for example,
who've tried to take on the teachers' unions
in their own states and failed because they have 50%
of the state budgets and they're insanely powerful. They're much more powerful, generally speaking, than the governors are.
Right.
Well, so you talk about Florida and Florida is a good model, but that's one state.
So lay out some more of your ideas for how these things might change.
Well, I do think so.
It's already having an effect in Florida.
I mean, the chilling effect on the CRT bands.
And those are being now, I think there are many red states, and I've lost track of the
number.
It might be approaching 25 that are rolling this out.
And actually, there is compliance.
It's not perfect.
But I think if the Republican Party in these states is serious, it will
invest political capital and it will demand accountability.
It will ask people to sort of, you know, what are the inspections saying?
You have to report to the legislature on progress.
And I actually think that process, first, because I also think most teachers are, I
think a lot of teachers are flexible and actually teachers are not quite as left-wing, believe it or not, as academics. So there is actually, I think,
more receptivity. Now you also need to open up new avenues into the profession so you don't have to
require an education degree. There's all the things that you need to do. So there's a whole
set of things we can do as liberal democracies. Likewise with the government, getting CRT
and DEI out of government is something I think we can do. I think you can, so through political
appointments, you have to, you're probably going to have to fire some people. You might
have to set up new agencies. So on the UK, we have the Higher Education Freedom of Speech
Act where there is a new 10 person academic freedom directorate.
That's a new institution.
Now I actually think that's a good thing.
Now it could be that labor comes in and defangs it.
Fine.
I mean, perhaps to some degree this becomes a matter of political contestation.
Because really what all of this gets down to is the only institution that the sensible
majority on the cultural side can control is the elected
government. That is the only institution that we have. We haven't got the schools, the universities,
we haven't got the civil service, the quangas. What we actually need to do is to use elected
government to reform all of these devolved bodies and also institutions relying on public money.
We're not trying to indoctrinate them. Our goal is political neutrality and balance. That's it. I think that has to be
the goal. And that's maybe where I disagree a bit with Rufo and some others who want to
put in a different ethos based on Christianity or Yoram Hazony. I don't believe that. I believe
we can have political neutrality and actually you can chill activists within the academic sector.
Okay, so let me ask you about that because the postmodern rejoinder to your claim is that,
well, you claim that your anti-DEI stance, let's say, is politically neutral or that there's even
such a thing as political neutrality, but really all you're trying to do is, what would you call it, sneak in an alternative
ethos of power to replace the one that is highlighting the victimized and the marginalized
and pushing things back 50 years into the hands of white Christian conservatives.
Because for the postmodernists, there's no neutrality.
There's only a battleground of power.
That's it.
And they believe that.
And they believe it technically.
And certainly the radical leftists not only believe that, but revel in it because it allows
them to use power with no guilt.
And so, on what grounds are you convinced that the claim that institutional neutrality,
for example, could be instituted and that it actually constitutes neutrality?
What's your philosophical justification for that claim?
Well, philosophically, what I approach the whole book with is this idea of human flourishing,
a kind of utilitarian argument that says we want to have a certain amount of equality,
a certain amount of diversity, a certain amount of inclusion, but only the amount that is
optimal to maximize human flourishing
in the system.
I think we've overshot on those three and we have to sort of move it back, not back
to where it was in 1950, but back a little bit further.
And so the idea there is institutional neutrality is critical for people to have trust in the
system.
Now, we already have, for example, the civil service in Britain is supposed to be
neutral. We already have this aspiration. And I think a lot of people, even left liberals,
will actually be convinced by it. They're not postmodern in being radically cynical,
the way that, I mean, some of them are, but I think many people will be won over if you say,
look, what we want is neutrality. You know, you've talked about, you know, American slavery. We want to talk about Ottoman slavery.
I think that making that argument can win over some people.
And I think a neutrality argument is more winnable
than to say, we're going to replace your ethos of woke
with our ethos of public religion,
to use Hasoni's argument.
Right, okay, so you still think that there's enough
of a centrist consensus around what neutrality
constitutes for that to still be a compelling argument to people.
Even the more liberal progressive types, well, you'd think at least they'd be self-interested
enough to understand that neutrality throughout sequential elections might be held a lot better than domination
by the radical conservative right,
which is certainly a possibility.
And that's certainly something that's emerging in Europe
and could easily, well, who knows how things will play out,
but it's popping up its head in many, many places in Europe.
The last country to go was the Netherlands.
So that's what Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy,
most of Eastern Europe, like this is starting to happen
very, very widely and could certainly continue.
So neutrality, you'd think across sequential elections
would be the best policy for everybody
if we had enough of a consensus to define it.
Well, I'd also say too, that right now the public,
if you take a look and I've done surveys
in the US, Britain and Canada, the public in all three societies leans about two to one against
what I would call the woke position. And that could be teaching kids that Canada is a racist
country or that there are many genders or whatever. So it's roughly two to one against
across 50 questions, let's say. In a democracy, the democracy gets to set the curriculum.
I think the majority of the population would be on board the idea of political neutrality
and balance as they see it.
And I think we have the numbers to institute that now.
And one of my pleas in terms of the 12-point plan is that the conservative politicians
really need to upgrade the focus on culture because you have a a two to one majority, these are clear wedge issues, they divide the left
and they unite the right.
A question like, should Winston Churchill's statue be removed from Parliament Square?
If you take conservative voters, they are overwhelmingly strongly opposed to that. If you take labor and green voters and liberal
Democrats, they're kind of splintered. Some are strongly in favor, but many are not. So
these are obvious issues to go after. Why haven't conservatives gone after them? Because
they're scared of being accused of being a racist. I'll give you another example, which
is affirmative action. Red states, only four red states have got bans on affirmative action, 13 have bans on abortion.
Now, bans on abortion are relatively unpopular.
They may have a one-third support across the US population.
Bans on affirmative action might have a two-thirds support, and yet there's very little of it
in red states. How do we
explain that? Well, we explain it, first of all, by the fact that this issue has not been
important enough for conservative politicians. Hananiya does a good job of talking about that.
And also that the abortion lobby, the gun lobby, they're very organized. They put pressure on
Republican politicians between elections. The anti-Affirmative Action Lobby is totally disorganized
and cannot hold conservative politicians feet to the fire
if they do nothing about it.
That has to change that organization between elections.
We have to be putting much more pressure on our politicians
to raise the importance of this issue
and to deliver on that issue.
Now that may be changing.
Well, I've seen in Canada, well, I
talked to a lot of conservative politicians in Canada
and a fair number in the US.
Although I think the proclivity for this
is much more market in Canada because it's more left leaning.
10 years ago, the typical conservative
was terrified in Canada of saying anything that
smacked of social conservatism.
And there was a very specific reason for that.
And the reason was, if any one of them came out publicly and said anything socially conservative,
then the woke psychopathic mob would take them out on social media, like as an individual.
Right.
They'd be targeted and destroyed.
And that was very effective.
And the conservatives who are also very guilt-prone
like that's the other thing too is that the left has this radicals have this tremendous advantage because
especially they're really psychopathic ones because
conservatives feel guilt
but radical leftist psychopaths feel none and
They can use guilt as a weapon and conservatives are very sensitive to that so you get that combination of
Clear threat because it is no fun to be mobbed. It's really really hard on people
It drives them to not only to distraction, but often to suicide you lose your job. You lose your friends. You lose your reputation
No one has enough courage
to stand up beside you the
No one has enough courage to stand up beside you. The radicals had the conservatives cowed completely.
And so, and affirmative action is a real touchstone for that because to even question it,
well, it's changed to some degree now, not that much, but to even question it meant
you're the probability that you could be accused of being a racist was like super high.
It's going to happen instantly.
Right.
Right. But I think this is where you have what political scientists would call an
Overton window of acceptable debate, right? And if you're outside that window, you can be canceled,
but you can be attacked by the press. But what we've actually seen in Europe and in the US is,
you take an issue like immigration, that was a taboo. In many European societies, that's no longer a taboo. So Sweden, for example, you could not, the sort of establishment conservative party tried
to, one of the ministers tried to raise levels of immigration as an issue in Sweden in 2014.
He was attacked in the media as a racist.
Okay, he's shut down.
But then what that means is the next year, the Sweden Democrats swoop in on 12 and a half and of course they've reached 25%.
US, Trump was the only candidate of 17 primary candidates in 2015-16 to make the border a
signature issue.
He was willing to go there.
Now, once you break the taboo, all of a sudden, as in Sweden, now all the parties are talking
about immigration and the taboo is, it's not gone entirely, but the Everton window has opened quite a
bit.
And so in Canada, likewise, we're going to need that.
Now we've seen it a bit on the gender issue, Premier Higgs in New Brunswick, we've seen
Scott Moe in Saskatchewan.
That's the beginning of an opening up of a Congress.
You need a brave politician like Higgs to break the ice.
The next thing that we need to see from a Canadian politicianiggs to break the ice. The next thing that we need to see
from a Canadian politician is to break the ice on this hoax of the mass graves. Somebody
has to sort of say, the emperor's new clothes on this thing, because there is no evidence
of this. And it underpins an entire garment-rending attack on national history, on the founders
of Canada, et cetera. Now, who is going to
take, who's going to throw the first stone in that? I don't know, but it has to happen.
And I think I would argue that, in fact, the population will follow you. Because, for example,
in the surveys I've done, by two to one, Canadians do not want Sir John A. MacDonald statues removed.
They support the idea, yes, he was a creature of his time, no, this idea that the residential
schools are genocide, etc.
I just think somebody needs to go after that.
Have you had a chance to talk to Pierre Pauliev, the new leader of the Conservative Party in
Canada?
I haven't.
I'm a little concerned.
I certainly think, obviously, that Trudeau was a disaster for all the issues we're talking
about.
So, but I'm worried that Poliev has only largely talked about economics and only reluctantly
about any cultural issues.
Now I get it.
He's well ahead of the polls.
Why endanger that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Priorities to get Trudeau out.
There is some of that.
Yeah.
My sense is though, you know, my sense is in Canada that the conservatives are a lot
different lot than they were 15 years ago.
Like Daniel Smith has a spine, Scott Moe has a spine, Higgs has a spine, so does Poliev.
Poliev isn't pushing the cultural issues at the moment, and I think it's partly because,
and I think this is actually wisdom to some degree if
your opponent is busy slaughtering himself you might as well just stand and watch well seriously
there's not you know there's no sense causing a tremendous amount of trouble while that's occurring
but the conservatives are much less intimidated in Canada than they were 15 years ago like a lot
and they'll certainly make an issue of the sorts of things that we've been discussing
in a way that wouldn't have been conceivable in say 2010.
I think that's right.
I think that it's also, but I do think it's important for the grassroots to some degree
hold Poliev to account when he's in office.
If for example, he backtracks on defunding the CBC, if he doesn't do anything,
say anything on immigration, on culture wars.
I think that, you know, and my worry, having seen it in Britain, where the conservative
government came in with the support of Brexit voters and essentially did not deliver, hoping
that the voters wouldn't notice.
So that's my worry, but I don't know is the honest answer.
I don't know him or his cabinet.
So let me ask you a more personal question maybe,
and then I'll see if there's anything else
you want to talk about on the YouTube side of this discussion.
Does it, like, would you characterize yourself politically?
Where do you characterize yourself politically?
First of all, that's the first question.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I don't think I'm down the... yourself politically, where do you characterize yourself politically? First of all, that's the first question.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I don't think I'm down though. So I think economically,
I'm sort of centrist, you know, I have many centrist views, I believe in the welfare state.
I actually think tackling climate change is actually worthwhile thing to a degree and
using nuclear and using a whole bunch of other on. However, on the cultural side, I think
I'm very much a conservative and I think think we are in danger of losing free speech and truth.
We're in danger of losing national cohesion.
And so in a whole series of issues,
I'd say I'd probably lean conservative for that reason.
Okay, is that a surprise to you?
I mean, you're a rare academic, right?
I mean, it's not like there's no people like you,
and there are a lot more of them than
there used to be.
You know, I'm in touch regularly with a group that we communicate by email that's got like
100 people on it.
And there's more people who've been, well, many of them kind of slipped surprisingly
into the conservative camp over years.
But it's rare.
It's still comparatively rare.
And it's particularly rare in your field, I would say, although that's also
the case in mine.
So why is that the case with you,
and how did you come to these conclusions?
Well, yeah, I think-
And how did you manage any degree of success
while having them?
Yeah, it's a tough one, as you probably know yourself.
I mean, were anyone right of center is 5% perhaps
in the soft social sciences, and that's what the surveys seem to show. Now, I haven't changed my
views really. Not really. I can't think of any major change that I've had in my views
since I was in my 20s. But yeah, you keep your head down, you write, you sort of write things
that are not controversial, that are in fields that are not political.
And that's what I did for many years, until about 2018 or thereabouts.
I was a full professor, I was head of department.
I felt that I did what I wanted to do in terms of publishing.
I published in the major university presses and journals.
And so I just thought, now's the time
to actually, you know, with the populist moment and the rise of Brexit and Trump, I sort of,
you know, I was talking about why I think these things happened in a different way. And I was
also more openly critical of the social justice movement. And that is really what got me under
attack from Twitter mobs, open letters, internal investigations, which are prompted by people inside the university
and outside who simply have to bombard your Twitter feed
and put in a complaint against you and then you have to...
Okay, well, I think what we'll do,
and I'll let everybody watching and listening know this too,
I want to talk to you for another half an hour
on the daily wire side.
Unless, let's not step into what happened to you personally.
Let's do that on the Daily Wire side.
And I guess what I would like to do, is there, are there other issues that you're working
on now or that are germane to this new book that you would like to close with, let's say?
Are there some other things we haven't talked about that you'd really like to bring to the attention of people on the YouTube side?
Well, I just say a couple of things. I mean, first is that I think that woke and cancel
culture are connected to many different issues that are very pressing to a lot of voters.
And one of them is, you know, you look, the populist right is going to do very well in
Europe in the European elections coming up in a couple of weeks or thereabouts.
This is really a...
So it's not just about free speech and truth when we talk about cancel culture.
It has downstream effects.
If you can't talk about immigration, you're not going to get control of your border.
You're not going to be able to deport people.
And then you're going to have populists rising up because the mainstream won't touch it.
I use the example of Soviet department store.
You can only sell black pants.
Well, then you're going to have somebody popping up and selling blue jeans.
So if the mainstream parties are only selling one immigration policy, then the political
entrepreneur, which is going to be you, Kip, or the Sweden Democrats, or Donald Trump,
is going to pop up.
So if you care about polarization and populism, you have to have free speech, which means we have to deal with woke.
And I should just say one other thing, which is I'm trying to both with this book and which with a
new course that I've run this year on, it's an open online course on woke, trying to get people
to understand what's, what's led to this problem and why so many of the things that we argue about
and talk about, crime, healthcare, education, they're downstream of this.
One of the things that I fear is that the culture wars get siloed into this narrow campus
bubble and people think it's a minor thing and they forget that it has many, many effects
on a lot of issues that a lot of voters care a lot about.
So I just think it's a much bigger thing. In a way, it's the future of our civilization.
It's not just a little culture war.
Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, that's the thing is you've got to see what the source is. And
it's, well, it certainly seems that the source is the source of much of the trouble is, well,
I think it's the higher education system.
And then it's the more specifically the ideologies that have gripped the higher education system
that people have allowed to grip it, I suppose, and also enabled.
And so yes, you're absolutely right, is in my opinion that it isn't about economics with
the culture war being a distraction.
It's partly to, you know, one of the things I've come to deeply understand that wealth
is a consequence of an ethos.
It's not a consequence of natural resources.
In fact, the natural resource curse is one of the economic facts that seems to disprove
that entirely.
Countries that are rich in natural resources are often, in fact, statistically more often,
not likely to be rich because they become corrupt, for example.
You need an ethos, and an ethos makes you wealthy, and that's what happened in Japan,
for example, and the default interaction between Japanese citizens is one of trust and honesty.
And so Japan can be filthy rich in the absence of any natural resources at all.
And so there's no culture war independent of economics.
That's foolish, is if we get the culture war wrong, we're going to destroy the economic
system.
And that's actually the stated goal of many of the real deep radicals.
And so that actually should come as no surprise to anyone who's listening.
And so this, and I think you're right in, in, in consequence about the libertarians.
You need a certain kind of cultural consensus so that less government is even an issue.
And it's not going to be less government, it's going to be better distributed responsibility.
And that's not the same thing at all. Like, right? Because the libertarian
ethos only works when you have a citizenry that's capable of picking up governance on
their own to take that responsibility. Then libertarianism is fine. But if the culture
war has destroyed that responsible ethos, less government is not a solution. It just
lets the ideologues win. Well, exactly. I mean, this is sort of a point Tuckville made as well, is that that sort of layer
of civic trust is vital for the functioning of freedom. If we have more polarization,
polarization means you can't enact the right economic policies because each party is sort of
wrapping that policy into its ideology. People can't be rational and detached,
right? And this is one of the things I think that the left loses sight of is that if you try and
infiltrate institutions and politicize them, civil service, schools, corporations, you are actually
going to cause half the citizenry to lose trust in those institutions. And therefore, without trust,
I mean, as Putnam's work, a
lot of people have done work on the salutary effect of trust on entrepreneurship and innovation.
Without that basis of trust, if that's being torn apart, as you say, by culture wars and
polarization. And so I just, I'm trying to appeal to the same left to say, look, you
cannot just conduct your politics by infiltrating
institutions. If you want to win that battle in the court of public opinion, that's fine.
But to try and do it surreptitiously by infiltration is actually eroding the trust in society.
And by the way, you can see it on the right too. The right has kind of won over more positions
on the Supreme Court. So what do we see? The left's trust in the Supreme Court as an institution
falls.
And that's what happens when you politicize. And so I just think we've got to solve. And when people say it's just a little culture war, no, these are critical issues that we have got to
come to a solution on if we want to overcome this polarization. Yeah. Yeah. All right, sir.
For everyone watching and listening, I'm going to continue this
conversation on the daily wire side. I'm going to talk to Eric more about what happened to
him personally with regard to his experience with cancel culture, because while these things
are made much more realistic when they're nailed down to actual experience. And so if
you'd be willing to join us there, please feel welcome and invited to do so.
Thank you very much, sir. Be nice to talk to you again at some point. I'd like to delve into the
the
the issue of fundamentals. Like your take is
something like, as far as I can tell, that there's still enough centrist
consensus so that we can adopt this stance of neutrality
and use that as a, what would you say,
as a conceptual structure to push back
against the woke nonsense.
And that seems plausible to me, possibly.
There might be enough trust left for that.
I'd like to have a conversation with you at some point
about what the sacred fundamentals
perhaps actually have to be.
What are the ones that are lurking underneath that residual consensus?
Because I think you can be utilitarian when the implicit consensus still exists.
But the question is, are we so fractionated that that's not the case anymore?
Hopefully not. Yeah, I think that we do have to sort of try and, just as we fought the Cold War, it was economic
utilitarianism and well-being against economic socialism. What we have now is we've got cultural
socialism and we need that sort of cultural wealth perspective. It's a bit like the economists always talk about the pie.
The more equally you cut it up, the more it shrinks or the less it grows. So you need an
optimal balance between equality, redistribution, and growth. I think likewise with the culture,
we have to have a conversation about the more we push equal outcomes by race and gender and other
things, the more that cultural pie isn't going to grow. So you may, maybe a white man can't write about a black woman and that impoverishes literature.
You can't borrow, that's cultural appropriate. I mean, so essentially we get a poorer culture
the more we push cultural socialism. And so again, I think we need this sort of new vision,
which is really about human flourishing and overcoming cultural socialism.
We'll have some concern with equality,
as we did with economic equality,
but it's not gonna dominate the whole thing.
Right now, I feel we've got cultural socialism
unbounded with no guardrails.
And that's something that we're gonna have to address.
All right, sir.
Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening.
As I mentioned a few minutes ago,
I'm going to continue talking to Dr. Kaufman
on the Daily Wire side.
Please feel free to join us there.
To the film crew here in Northern Alberta,
thank you very much for your help.
Where are you, Eric, at the moment?
I'm in London, actually.
You're in London.
Yeah, and you're in...
Okay, well...
Whereabouts in Northern Alberta? A little bit. I'm in a. Yeah. Okay, well. You're in northern, whereabouts in northern Alberta?
A little bit, I'm in a town called Fairview, which is near Grand Prairie.
It's about 400 miles north of Edmonton.
Right.
I lived in Peace River for a year.
I think I mentioned that once.
Oh, okay.
So you know exactly where it is.
All right.
All right, sir.
Well, thank you very much.
And yeah, and good luck with your book and with your continued efforts.
And thank you to everyone watching and listening.
Thanks Jordan.