TRIGGERnometry - Can Democracy Survive Identity Politics? With Yascha Mounk

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

Is multiculturalism good for society? What effect is social media having on our democracy? How do we stop society from crumbling? Yascha Mounk is a writer and academic known for his work on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism. See Triggernometry LIVE at the Edinburgh Fringe for 2 nights only on the 6th and 7th of August! We’ll be joined by very special guests Andrew Doyle and Leo Kearse. Get TICKETS here 👇 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/triggernometry-live Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What becomes dangerous is if, you know, the person who I agree with police, politically, also has the same ethnicity as me, also goes to the same church as me, also as part of the same Little League team as me. And the outside of the person who I distrust is just a stranger in all realms of life. Because then it becomes easy to actually vilify them to such an extent that they're capable of doing terrible things to go. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham.

And this is a show for you. if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a political scientist whose latest book is called The Great Experiment, Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart, and How They Can Enjoy. Yashemunk, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks so much for having me on. It's a real pleasure to have you on.

You and I have been messaging back and forth for years now trying to get you on the show. I'm pleased that we can do this now with your book coming out, which Francis and I both really enjoyed. Before we talk about it and the case you make in the book, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Great, yeah. I think we have probably, we haven't talked about this, a somewhat similar background.

My grandparents originally are from, we were born in Leviv, in Colomere in what's now the western part of Ukraine. They ended up, the Jewish, they ended up surviving the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, actually, went to Poland in hopes of, you know, building up a better political regime. They were un-communists. They realized that the hopes were misplaced and were in fact thrown out of the communist regime in 1968. And so I ended up growing up a little strangely in Germany. And then went to university in England, spent a few very, very... very nice years there before coming to the United States for grad school. And so now I've been living

in America for, you know, about 12, 15 years. And my intellectual journey is that, you know, I thought I would do various things, but I'd do theater and a bunch of different things. But in the end, I sort of got stuck on writing in academia. And when I was a grad student in political science, I was surprised to hear the consensus in the field being that certain countries in the world just have these very stable democratic institutions, these very stable democratic systems, so we don't have to worry at all about how democracy will play out in countries like Britain, like the United States, like Germany. And perhaps in part informed by the history of my family, I thought, hey, I've seen a couple of big historical surprises. And I'm not so sure that's true. And so I started to warn

about some of the threats to our democracy. And that's sort of how I made my name. And so my last book was called The People v. Democritus. democracy and it was about the threat of authoritarianism and populists on the right and also on the left. And this book is really trying to think about, you know, I think one of the things that is making this political moment so fraud, which is how do we build these deeply ethnically and religiously diverse democracies that treat the members fairly without falling apart, without fragmenting, without making everything about group identity, without oppressing some people in terrible ways. So that's what I meant. Well, it's a really interesting book, and I want to delve into it.

But before that, can we talk a little bit about history? Because it seems to me, and I'm welcome being corrected on this, that the experiment that we are conducting in the West is an experiment, and it is unique in terms of human history. Historically speaking, my understanding is generally even multi-ethnic empires, whether that was the Ottomans or the Russian Empire, or the various Chinese empires, They tended to be a primary ethnic group that was considered superior, and all the others would be some form of second-class citizens.

They wouldn't necessarily be persecuted, but they would have reduced rights or they would have to pay special kind of tax or something. How unique is the sort of multi-ethnic, quote-unquote, multicultural societies that we are now experimenting with in the West? Yeah, so this is one of the things that I had a sense of before writing a book, but research much more deeply, as I was also, preparing to write it and, you know, the historical precedents are not good. You see that a lot of the worst conflicts in human history pit these different ethnic, religious, cultural, sometimes national groups against each other.

Not every big crime in history is along those lines, but most of the big crimes in history, most of the wars and civil wars and genocides and forms of ethnic cleansing do pit one group against another in that kind of way. And the history of democracy is not great either, because actually most democracies in the history of the world have either prided themselves in their ethnic purity, or at least in the ethnic purity of those who really had something to say. That's true in ancient Athens, in the Roman Republic, in the city-states of medieval Italy. Or like the United States, they were founded at the moment when they were diverse, but they excluded and oppressed some groups in terrible ways, as was the case.

case, obviously, with slavery. And so, actually, the kind of multi-ethnic empire, as you're talking about, are some of the better examples. Some of the places where people were relatively free to go about the religion, the places where, for a few centuries at least, these different groups managed to coexist as somewhat peacefully. But as you're saying, obviously, there was still one dominant group, and it did have privileges. It did have a lot more standing. There was real restrictions on minority groups. And obviously, we want to live in a democracy.

And, you know, paradoxically, the empire has made it a little bit easier in one key respect, which is that in an empire, you don't have power and I don't have power. And so if your group has more kids or has more immigrants that look like you rather than me, doesn't really change anything because, you know, we didn't have power to start off with. We sort of had to rely on the monarch. In a democracy, you're always looking for a majority. And so if you feel like, hey, I'm in the majority group, and now suddenly there's these other people coming in

and they're having more kids and they're growing more quickly than I am, then perhaps they will lose power. So in certain ways, you know, it's not a coincidence that despite their flaws, some of the countries where the coexistence of these different groups has worked the best, precisely where these big multi-ethnic empires, because in certain respects, absolute rule makes it easier than democracy to sustain that kind of difference.

It's a very, very good point. And looking at an empire which has got many diverse people, many diverse cultures into one melting pot, as it were, perfect example is the United States of America. But I would say to you, Yashah, and maybe this is me looking at it from an outside eye, the US seems more divided than ever. Well, it certainly does. and sometimes looking at it, you know, I sort of have two hats, right? I've been living in the United States long enough, but I feel like I'm really in this political discourse.

I've become United States citizen. I've been a citizen now for about five years. But looking at it sometimes from Europe, you do think, wow, I mean, for all of the problems we have in various European countries, just the sheer rancor, the division, the thing that really strikes me, the disdain that people have for each other in this country. The disdain that many of my friends have for average America, and just goes so much, and is so much more extreme than what I know from Europe. So I think that's right. But my book is actually quite optimistic.

So here's something that I've noticed about the way that people talk about this topic, which is that, look, the fundamental starting point is really tough, right? A lot of the biggest crimes in history are pit one group against another, as I said. Democracy makes it harder in some ways. There's a third point, which is that humans tend to form groups.

groups and in favor the members of the inner group over everybody else. And we tend to think about that as other people doing it, but we all have this instinct. So I'm really struck by the fact that I teach a bunch of kids. I'm a college professor and I have a very diverse student body and they think of themselves as some of the most tolerant people in the world. In some ways, they are quite tolerant and otherwise they're quite intolerant. But, you know, they don't think that they're groupish, right? they don't think that they would ever treat somebody better because they're a member of the same

group over somebody else. And I haven't played the simple game where I asked them is a hot talk a sandwich. And they debate that for a little while and they think what on earth is that have to do with political science, but they also clearly enjoyed. And when I haven't played a little group where they have to give people points that they can redeem for a little bit of money. And it turns out if the kids who think what a hot talk is a sandwich start to discriminate against the kids who think that a hot talk is not a sandwich. So a question like that is actually enough to motivate this in-group favoritism mechanism, right? And so you take those three points of difficulties together and you realize that it's really hard to build diverse democracies.

And it's not a surprise that we sometimes are divided. It's not a surprise that we have real injustices. But that actually allows you to be a little bit optimistic because then you say, hey, the task what we're trying to accomplish here is really hard. But you know what? When you look, even at a divided country like the United States, we don't. a lot better at it than a lot of other countries around the world. We're doing a lot better at it than so many societies that have failed in history. We're doing a lot better at it than America did 100 to 50 years ago. And a lot of people come to this topic and be the other way around, right? They're like, this should be easy. How hard is it to tolerate your neighbor? How hard is it not to be a

bigot? And then they look at the injustices in our society that are real. And they say, oh my God, there's something uniquely wrong with us. How can we have any hope for the future? So I think when you start with a realistic appreciation of the difficulty of what we're doing, you can actually come to an optimistic point of view, whereas what a lot of people do is they start with a really naive assumption that this shouldn't be hard, and then they end up being really fatalistic because of the problems that we do see in the real world. Yesha, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, my attitude has always been, and I think this is something my parents have inculcated in me when they sent me as someone from Russia over to the UK

was the idea of what you might call the civic patriotism, which is the solution to our inherent evolutionary developed tribalism is to build this thing called the nation state, to which you can subscribe no matter what your skin color, what your religion is, whatever, as long as you buy into the idea that we're all American or we're all British or we're all whatever. Is that the answer here?

Because in your book, you look at that as one of the potential solutions, and that is not without its challenges either. Yeah, so I think it's an important part of the answer, right? So let me take another step back, perhaps, to start off with. I mean, when I was growing up, my parents, it's interesting that your parents, you know, sort of taught you civic patriotism as part of the answer. I think my mom in particular taught me something slightly different

when I was growing up, which is to be skeptical of any form of group, right? So she thought about her history of being thrown out of a kind of, country she grew up in when she was 20 and her parents' history of, you know, having to flee for war and losing most of the family in the Holocaust. And she blamed quite reasonably in a way this groupish mechanism of humans, right? This we are the in-group and you're the out-group and we're going to be really altruistic towards a member of the in-groups, actually, sometimes capable of huge courage and altruism. But, you know, if you're not part of the group, we can do whatever we want to you. And so she, I think, hoped that we would all identify as individuals,

or perhaps as cosmopolitans, right, that we would all think of ourselves in our own individual terms and care about everybody in the world equally. And that was very appealing to me as a moral vision. I think there's something of it, but we should preserve. But it's just not a realistic prescription for how most people in the world are going to act. And it's not realistic for me, for myself either, right? If I hear of an earthquake or a terror attack somewhere in the world that I've never been, but I don't know very well,

I'm saddened by it and I want to help and I want to think about how to avoid that. But if I see a terror attack in London, which is a city I know well where I've lived for a while, or in New York City on the subway that I take myself, I've affected in a different way.

And that's just part of human nature, right? We might want to push against it a little bit, say, hey, we should also care about people far away. Let's not make it too easy for ourselves, but we're always going to care a little bit more when it's places we know that we can picture, you know, countries that we have a real deep connection to. And the same is true about, you know, religious and other groups, right? People will always have strong religious beliefs. They will always identify in part by the kind of cultural origins they have. And to some extent, perhaps, they'll always define by the ethnicity too.

And I don't think that we can ever quite get rid of that, right? So we need to think about how do we build a society in which people have individual freedoms, in which they can determine themselves how they want to lead their lives, in which they can be true to the kind of groups in which they're in, in which they have religious freedom, obviously, in which they can say, hey, I just want to be with people who have a similar kind of cultural background with me and mostly hang out of those people and so on, and that's perfectly fine too. But that comes naturally.

What is harder and what we really need to sustain our countries, to stop them from falling apart, to stop the risk of the, civil war, to stop deeply fragmented societies, is that we also build a level of identity where we have something in common. And that to me is the importance of having an inclusive national identity, having the kind of civic patriotism that you're talking about, or actually in my account, also a kind of everyday cultural patriotism. And yes, you've touched on this about the need and the deep-seated need for people to form tribes. But there's also a physiological aspect to that in that the hormone oxytocin that quite literally binds us together also gives us a

suspicion of the outside because that's how we survived on the on the african savannas so that's another layer of challenge isn't it trying to get people to override and get over that particular instinct yeah jonathan hyde and the righteous mind is is is really great on this and showing how satisfying it can be to be a member of groups, how it can bring out

the best in us. And that is to do probably with this hormone that gets triggered when we're doing, when we're dancing together, or we're singing a song together, you're at the football stadium

and you're singing the song of your home team together with thousands of people. There's something that experience triggers in us, which is a kind of high. And it can make us feel loving towards other people. It can make us risk our lives.

It is in part what's happening in Ukraine today, where millions of people are volunteering to risk their lives to stop this terrible invasion from Vladimir Putin's troops. So these forms of collective being together, sometimes in the form of at the national level of patriotism, sometimes in a form of your football team or whatever other, you know, your friends being out singing karaoke together.

It can be different forms of group is really positive. But as you're saying, it then also pushes very quickly to say, well, hang on a second, but if a member of our group is threatened, we're going to go and beat you up, right? If there's something that threatens this group from the outside, true or imagined,

I'm also going to be capable of this sort of deep velocity against others. Now, one of the solutions to this is, But you don't want a society in which groups are really monolithic. So one of the things I research from my book is sort of modes of failure, right? How do diverse societies go wrong? There's all kinds of ways they go wrong. They can be so many different groups that they never agree on building a state in the first place. So you never get public services.

You never get an effective state like in Afghanistan and parts of Somalia, right? You can have these extreme forms of domination where one group dominates and just oppresses the others like we've had in large parts of the history of the United States. But you can also have what's happening in Lebanon. So it's such a deep fragmentation that, you know, there's barely any Lebanese identity. What there is is Sunni and Shia and Maranah Christian identity. And those groups are really monolithic.

And the system wants them to be monolithic because it works in this compromise between elites. But the elites can only represent the groups if the groups are really stable and don't interact with each other there. much, right? And then it becomes dangerous because the moment the vet's triggered, it's like, you know, I'm a Shia 100% and I have nothing that connects me of somebody who's a Sunni. I have nothing that connects me with somebody's a minor Christian. And that then raises the very real risk of civil war. In a healthy society, you might say, hey, I'm in church and that gives me seroton and gives me a sense of being along my fellow worshipers. But you know, some of the

people who don't go to my church are in my son's Little League game. And, you know, we're supporting the same team there. And so I have a sort of sense of connection with them in that context, right? And then, you know, some of the people who are neither of that, perhaps are part of the same political party that I support. And so even as we're divided in some spheres of life, we also have connections in other spheres of life. That's something that sort of helps to control that instinct to say it's the out-group. Where it becomes dangerous is if, you know, the person who I agree politically also has the same ethnicity as me, also goes to the same church as me, also as part of the same Little League team as me, and the outside of a person who I distrust

is just a stranger in all realms of life, because then it becomes easy to actually vilify them to such an extent that they're capable of doing terrible things to them. Hey, Constantine, do you love trigonometry? I'm from Russia. I cannot love anything, apart from vodka, miserable literature and a horrendous downfall of my people. But yes, I find trigonometry satisfactory. And do you like live shows? Of course, but only if it's check of play about collapse of Russian aristocracy as they face death and obscurity before the glorious might of the proletariat and the beautiful revolution.

Okay, mate, well if you like trigonometry live shows, then get your credit card out for the lads, because we're coming to the Edinburgh Festival this August. We have only booked two shows August 6th and 7th because if we do more, the comedy industry will treat us like the Tsars and executes. That's right, we're going to be in Edinburgh for two days only. Saturday's guest is Andrew Doyle, which is sure to sell out.

Our other guest is Leo Curse, which means when Nicholas Sturgeon hears about it, she'll ban us from Scotland herself. Tickets are sure to sell out, and when they're gone, They're gone. Click on the link below and we'll see you in Edinburgh on the 6th and 7th of August at the Gilded Balloon Teviot. Come and see us before hordes of left-wing comedians try to put us in Gullag. What do we do then with identity politics, which encourages people to see themselves in this way, which encourages people to tribalize, which encourages people to think that they're oppressed, that the society that they live in is biased against them,

they're never going to have the same opportunities as X group. What do we do with that? Yeah. So look, one of the weird things about this topic is that no damn term you can use actually describes well and neutrally what we're talking about, right? And these terms that seem equivalent have slightly different connotations, so identity politics or woke or whatever. They all mean slightly different things and they're all kind of embattled weird concept. So let's be precise about what we're talking about. Because I believe in this group of that people have because I think that people are always going to form those groups and sort of fight for the interests. There's certain forms of identity politics that I'm fine with, right? The fact that there is

to name a silly example, the American Association of Retired people, right, that fights for the interest of elderly people. We want to make sure that we preserve social security and they have a bunch of other kinds of it. That's perfectly fine, right? And there's other forms of interest group politics that will always exist in a free society that I'm not to not to concern about, not to worry about. So if all we mean by identity politics is people have those group identities and they're going to have associations that fight for the interest in certain ways. Sorry to interrupt. Let's just make this simple, though.

We're not talking about people who are retired because we're all going to be retired one day if we live that long. What we're talking about identity, when we mean identity, we use the term identity politics, is exclusionary ways of looking at different groups, particularly through the lens of race, sex, sexuality, whether you're trans or not, et cetera, this kind of thing, where these are not things

that will ever bring people together. Like Francis and I, we have different ethnic backgrounds, but we'll both eventually get to a point where we're retired. Do you know what I mean? Hopefully. Whereas, I know what he's saying.

I was working up to it. So I'm an academic, you know, I do a lot of public stuff, but sometimes my professorial thing comes through, you know, that sometimes I have to take a long run after something. You'll have to forgive me. Yeah, go for it. So look, the same is true for the American Armenian Association, right,

that's pushing for Congress to recognize the Armenian genocide, right? Or for the American, or for the World Jewish Congress, which looks out for the interest of Jews in various kinds of ways. And for the NAACP, which looks out for the interest of Black Americans. That's fine. I'm not worried about that because that, you know, not everybody's going to be Jewish, not everybody's going to be Armenian. so that's different from the sort of association of parties.

But that's okay, right? It's perfectly fine for people to say, hey, choose have particular kinds of interests and particular kinds of concerns and worries, and we need an organization that is capable of representing that politically. So if all you were talking about of identity politics was bad, I wouldn't be so concerned. Now, as you're saying, identity politics today is a lot more than that.

And there I start to get concerned very quickly. So let me give you one concrete example. One of the things I talk about in the book is a deep research program in psychology for 75 years. It's one of the most well-established findings, which is intergroup contact theory. And it shows that when we spend time with people from different groups against whom we might have prejudices in the right kind of context, then we reduce those prejudices. So in one famous study in 1950, white Westonians who had black neighbors ended up having more positive views of them than white Westonians who were randomly assigned to similar housing units that were segregated. But there's important conditions around that. You need to be in a situation which you equal within the situation, even if you might not be equal in other parts of society.

You have a common set of goals and you're being encouraged to get along by authorities. right now let's talk about what a lot of indeed private schools have started to do in the united states places like horace man and uh dalton in new york city places like civil friends in dc where presidents tend to send their kids really influential schools that show you a lot about what's going on the american lead today right there you have teachers coming in when the kids are 10 or eight or six and saying you're african american you're going to that group over there you're Asian American you're going to that group over there you're latino you're going to go to that group over there And you're white, we don't really know what to do with you, but I guess you're going to go on back group over there.

And the goal, which is understandable, is to make people aware of some of the discrimination they might suffer and to make them more capable to fight for the interest and so on. But when you're taking kids that young and you're telling them from on high, the most important thing about you is the color of your skin or your origin. That just hardens these groups in extreme ways. And by the way, the hope is to take these white kids and turn them into DeAngelo-style anti-racist. If you know anything about Sartotan, if you know anything about the way that groups tend to work, you're much more likely to create races. You're much more likely to create people who say, well, my identity is as being white.

I'm going to fight for the interests of white people like these other groups are fighting for their interests. And so when identity politics becomes the celebration of and the encouragement of group identities to the exclusion of everything else, it can start to go really, really wrong. And what would be a better kind of pedagogical mechanism? Put them in a sports team, right? Where they might start to hate the sports team or the other high school. That's okay. That's not going to tear our society apart.

But within the sports team, we're going to feel inequality. We're going to feel a kinship. We're going to be working together for a common goal. And then they might also have valuable conversations where they're like, hey, you know what? I don't feel a scene in this school as I might. Or I, you know, I come from, you know, a difficult situation. at home and I face these disadvantages and so on. They're going to be much more sympathetic to each other, much more open to each other

because their teammates, they're working on a common goal and they start to like each other, they start to spend time with each other. So that's one of the many examples in American society at the moment and British and so in society too, where the wrong form of identity politics becomes really dangerous. Yeah, I agree. And yes, I want to come back to... I promise you I'd get that. It took me a while, but I got it.

You did, and maybe I shouldn't have interrupted you. I thought we could cut some corners and get straight. into it, but I'll make sure that you probably could have. Yeah, there we go. So I want to come back to something you use in the book and something you mentioned earlier where I kind of want to perhaps disagree with you or at least to push and see what comes back, which is you talk about this metaphor of the melting pot and then some people talk about the salad bowl, right? And the melting pot basically means everybody comes to America, becomes American and no one cares what the ethnicity is. The salad bowl is sort of like all the people are in the salad

but they're kind of like the tomatoes are separate from the cucumbers, right? And you talk about what actually... Which was puzzled to me because that sounds like a terrible salad. Yeah. Like a good salad, actually, everybody is mixed up. So, you know, perhaps I like the metaphor of a salad bowl if it's like, you know, a sweet green salad. Right. And then, of course, you talk about the way that it ought to be, I think, is a park where everybody can come

and everybody can sit next to each other and have a picnic and mix as they wish or not, right? And this is where I might disagree with you because I know that having lived in the UK you've seen that we have had problems with integrating certain communities into the family of British people, if you like. That there are some people who've integrated very well after coming to the UK and others that are struggling. They're not doing very well. They're not doing well in education. They're not doing well in terms of embracing certain aspects of British traditions and values. They're not serving in the British military in anything like the numbers of every other group, for example.

They are excluded. they live in separate areas and so on. Is that not a problem that has to be overcome for our diverse societies to triumph and succeed in the future? Look, yeah, so let me talk through his metaphors for a sec, right? You put it very well. The problem with the melting pot is that it asks people to give up, at least in one reading of it. I mean, it's a slightly unfair reading of a metaphor, but that is how people often talk about it. It asks people to give up too much of a particularity, right?

So it imagines that once everybody comes to Britain or once everybody comes to the States, the culture will bear some of the marks of their influence, right? Like the curry becomes the typical British dish in a certain kind of way. And, you know, Americans love spaghetti with meatballs and, you know, Kung power chicken or whatever. But everybody within the society is kind of indistinguishable, right? And I think that that we've asked people too much. I think it's perfectly fine for people to say,

I want to be 100% British, but I also am going to continue to be 100% Indian or 100% Chinese or whatever. I'm also going to continue to want to be true to the cultural heritage of my ancestors. There's no problem with that. And in fact, it's one of the great things about these countries today. One of the reasons why I love London and why I love New York is that you continue to see the influence of those different cultures and that one neighborhood of London feels a little different from the other neighborhood, but everything isn't the same, that every person is not the same.

So that's why that's wrong. Now, the salad bowl is really dangerous, right? Because it creates the kind of separateness that I think you're worried about, right? It pushes us to the point where we say we just live in these completely different communities. And, you know, perhaps we somehow managed to sustain the peace. Perhaps, you know, we're able to pay tax and sustain a welfare state together. But really, we have no points of connective tissue. We have no points of overlap at all.

And I do think that at a time. when that form of multiculturalism was very politically fashionable, there were some real mistakes in terms of policies people adopted. So in Britain, for example, the new labor government introduced state-based faith schools. Now, it's one thing in a free society for parents who say, we want to send our kids to a private school, and that's a faith-based school, that's the right to do that. But for the state to come in and encourage people and say, hey, you're Hindu, go to the Hindu school, your Jewish, go to the Jewish school,

your Muslim, go to the Muslim school. That I think is really raising the risk of having these completely separate communities that don't speak to each other, mistrust each other, and then also become much more likely to harm each other. So the salad pool for that reason, I think, is a real mistake.

And so my image is that of a public park because of two things. In a free society, you have the right to decide who you hang out with, right? And if we have a fun conversation as we're having, we can go to a park together after this conversation and say, we just want to be among ourselves and keep this conversation going. We don't want to talk to anybody else. Or we might say, hey, this is a fun conversation. And now we're kind of feeling loose.

And perhaps there's some fun people sitting next to us and we get into a conversation with them and we make more friends. In a free society, you have a right to do either of those things. You can be Amish and stay among the Amish community all of your life. And that's your right to do. If all of society becomes like that, right? where there are some groups that completely cut themselves off from the rest of society in a way that undermines any ability to sustain common values, that becomes an economic problem, that becomes a problem of potentially deep mutual mistrust, then I really start to worry.

So it's fine for some people to say, hey, the most important thing about me is my group, and I'm going to remain a member of it, but looking at it from above, as it were, looking at it from the outside, you need enough people to have enough of those connections, but you don't end up in the salad bowl, but you don't end up having these really separate communities. Now, I don't know enough about the situation describing to know whether or not that's a fair description of some communities in Britain, but certainly if the description is, as you say it is, I would agree that that's a problem. I would put that under the salad bowl rather than the public puck.

Right. But I suppose what I'm saying is if we accept, as I completely accept, your idea that human beings are always prone to tribalism, then unless people are encouraged by the state to shed some of their past identity, right? Some, not all, but some. What possible reason would we have to go to a park and communicate? Instead of going to a park and going,

this is my part of the park and you're not coming in because this is where, you know, the pointy hat people sit and this is where the flat hat people sit. And we're going to keep apart because that is our instinct, as you say. What is going to encourage us to do that if it's not the state saying, look, we're all British and you can cook the food you want and whatever. But we all speak a certain language. We all buy into certain values. We all develop a sense of patriotism about our country, et cetera.

How is that going to happen unless the society encourages people to buy into a single identity? Well, I think – so you said state ones and said society. society ones and I'm much more comfortable for society to do this than for the state to do that. It depends a little bit on the context. And it depends a little bit on the kind of commonality you're talking about. But yes, absolutely we should, in countries where that's historically being the case, Switzerland or whatever is a different case. But in Britain, the United States, we should all end up speaking the same language.

And we should have real shared values with each other. We should agree on the fundamentals of how our political society is governed and the kind of mutual tolerance that that entails. And we absolutely need social institutions, including especially schools and universities as well as media, that encourage that. Now I'm actually quite optimistic about that. So language is a great case, right? You have fears on the right that immigrants who are coming in aren't really learning the language

of whether it's English and Britain and States or German and Germany and so on. And you have some people on the left saying they shouldn't. So there's a fashion book in the States at the moment which basically says, don't integrate at all. If you're always going to speak Spanish and always going to speak Chinese, that's perfectly fine. I think that just misses the sociological reality because sociologists have a really fascinating model about how language acquisition works for immigrants. And it's striking how true it is in many, many different contexts.

So here's what happens, right? The first generation comes in, and especially if they come from somewhat less educated backgrounds, they had less educational opportunity, especially if they come as adults, they often don't learn the language very well. Some do, but many people might live in a country for decades and never fully learn the language, right? Their children are going to speak both languages well, because they go to school in English or German or whatever the language may be.

But at home, they at least need to understand the language of origin. Often what happens at home actually is that the parents speak to the language. of the language of origin, they often respond in English, right? But the majority of these kids prefers to speak English with their siblings, with their cousins, with other people from a similar background of migration. So they speak the language of origin pretty well, but they prefer English. By the third generation, by the generation of the grandparents of the immigrants, English or German or the language of the new society wins a complete victory.

So only about 1% of the grandchildren of immigrants still speak any of the language of origin. Now, that, by the way, is a little bit sad. It would be nice if they spoke it a little bit, right? But that just shows that actually the power of integration in our societies remains very strong. Now, there's reason to worry about that in the future. There's reasons to think about,

and what circumstances would that change. But for now, I'm just actually quite confident about the ability of Britain to turn the children, the grandchildren of people who come to the country into people who feel British and who are seen as British and certainly who speak English. Hey, Constantine, do you like trigonometry? Of course, what's not to love? Incredible interviews.

Hilarious raw shows. Plus, we're going to start doing weekly satirical comedy like the ones that we used to put out. I'm Constantine Kishin, and you may remember me from Myston hosting a kids TV show on Al Jazeera. And I'm Francis Foster, a man who looks like a cross between Louisville. through and Abiva. We are going to start doing them, but we need your help. As the show grows, Francis and I are finding it increasingly difficult to stay on top of everything we've got to do.

With two interviews and three raw shows every single week, plus loads of admin on top of that, we've got more work on than Justin Trudeau's makeup artist. Do you miss comedy that's actually funny? Comedy that pulls no punches. And isn't all about how we must fight the structures of patriarchal oppression by toxic, straight white men. If you want real comedy, you can make that happen. If we can get an extra 250 local supporters by March 15th, we'll be able to outsource a few

of the day-to-day things that we do and free up more time to make incredible content for you. It'll be funny, biting satirical and not some worthy gimp telling you what to think. It's $7 a month, which is £5 if you live in the civilised world. Join our locals community using the link in the description and help us make comedy great again. Yashya, at the very start of the interview, you gave the example of the sandwich and whether people see a hot dog as a sandwich and if they don't. And you found that people, you know, were disagreeing and there was discrimination going on.

But there's one important thing that you miss, Yasha, social media. People going on social media on Twitter and you're going, you're a fucking. I'm a fucking idiot because you think hot dog is, do you know what I mean? There's a whole other element to this conversation now, which didn't exist 20 years ago. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things I worry about is the way in which social media can split us into these very tiny tribes, right? So for a lot of the history of these diverse societies, the tribes are kind of relatively big, right? I mean, perhaps there's two tribes in a society, perhaps there was 10, perhaps there was 50.

But there were these longstanding religious, cultural, ethno-linguistic groups. Social media can in a certain circumstance deepened the attachment to them and deep in mistrust against outsiders. But a lot of the time what happens is actually a slightly different problem, which is, you know, here's a good story from Twitter, right? like this vegan activist who has a lot of followers and posts about how anybody who's not vegan is kind of bad and all that stuff. And then she lives in a suburb in the state and she, you know, comes home and she sees the little girl who's crying. And she walks up to look, Lord, say, are you okay?

What's going on? Why are you crying? I said, oh, all my friends bought ice cream and I didn't have money to buy ice cream. And she said, oh, the truck's still there. Come, I'll buy you an ice cream. And she posted, you know, a nice little story about this on Twitter, right? What do you think happens next? Well, obviously, all of her hardcore fans turn on her and say, you know, how can you sell out like this?

You've become a shill for the dairy industry, you know, how dare you buy this ice cream that contains dairy for those kids. And that's a political problem for us. It's a little bit different, I think, in nature, right? Because suddenly we have not five or ten or fifty, but a thousand groups that are just fanatical in their advocacy of some particular. issue. And then we have a political system where you have two political parties or perhaps five or six political parties in some countries. And they just can't bundle these thousand groups in any meaningful way anymore. And that's a real political problem. But perhaps one way of that goes with a larger point that I want to make, which is that look, when I look at

the thing that so many people are worrying about right now, the state of these countries with with these different ethnic and religious and cultural groups, I'm pretty optimistic. I think integration is working pretty well in Britain and the United States, and I think these societies, for we still have problems, for we still have injustices, are much more tolerant,

are much more integrated than they were 50 or even 25 years ago. So I'm relatively optimistic by that. When I look at the political level, I'm really worried, right? I'm worried about the 2024 elections of the United States. I'm worried about the fragmentation of our politics. I'm worried about just the assumption that anybody who doesn't agree 100% with your party line within that tiny group, whether it's vegans or some other thing. It's just an evil person, right? And social media has a lot to do with that piece of it.

Yeah, and that's the thing, yes, I see it as being such a divisive influence that you've mentioned about a thousand groups. I can see those thousand groups in two years' time splitting into 10,000 groups. And like you said, these political parties They're not going to be able to hold all these groups together The prime example of that is a Labour Party In the UK Where they simply can't hold, you know The old style, you know, left-wing socialist

With the new left wing or the new left progressives And everything else in between and the centrist It simply doesn't work So what does that mean for our political systems? Well, you know, one of what I am struck by is that politicians that try to sustain a unifying message actually do relatively well. And so the problem is that, you know, the people who are active in politics often are the most strident advocates for one of those different kinds of groups.

And they often think of the near enemy as much worse than a fire enemy, right? the person within the political party who has slight disagreements, you know, deserves to die. You know, who cares about the Tories? You know, we can forget about them, right? The important thing is that the person and the other faction is sort of subjugated, right? And that's a very old mechanism, by the way. In the first treatises on freedom of religion, people were saying, well, you know, we really should have some tolerance towards Jews and Muslims because they're misguided and, you know, we can sort of put up with them. But Christian apostates, they deserve death, right?

Like, that's unacceptable. So this mechanism is a really, really old one, actually. But when you have politicians that manage to transcend that a little bit, that are not captive to these activist groups, that speak a language of unity, that actually try to address the country as a whole, that tend to do pretty well. So, you know, in the primaries for the Democratic Party in 2020, you know, of the 16 candidates, basically 15 of them, were running after Twitter and we're running after the most extreme voices of it.

And that really represents what voters wanted. And the reason why Joe Biden is the president of the United States is that he's too old to follow Twitter. And so despite some personal weaknesses, which are also evident with him, he actually was speaking. to the middle of a party in the middle of the country in a completely different way than his competitors in the prime weeks. Now, he's not always kept that up as much as he should, but I think that shows something, but a candidate who's not full of charisma and youthful stride,

was able to win out against all these other candidates precisely because he wasn't caught by that. And, you know, you mentioned the Labour Party. You know, I'm certainly not a super fan of Kirstama. I think he too has some weaknesses, but there's not a surprise that he's doing a lot better in the political. polls than Jeremy Corbyn was. And that is because he is trying to speak to the middle of a country rather than to the activist base of parts of the Labour Party much more than his predecessor.

Yes, it's a very interesting point you make, particularly given that I think one of the things that's starting to happen is Twitter is bleeding through into politics. And so you're seeing the wedge issues of the culture war coming through and becoming real. for politicians that are maybe not quite able to deal with them or uncertain of the right approach. So, you know, we have these endless debates about defining what a woman is, something that about three years ago everybody had the answer to now. Everybody's worried about saying the right thing. So how do you think politicians will tackle the need to, on the one hand, as you say,

reach to speak to a broad coalition, while on the other hand, constantly being asked these sort of Twitter-based questions, you know, what is a woman, where should a treat? trans woman be kept, you know, if that trans woman commits a crime, should trans women be in spoor? I mean, I can go on and on in every area of this sort of cultural discussion. How are they going to be dealing with that in order to solve some of the problems that you address in the book? Look, the first good point is simply to remember that Twitter does not represent public opinion, right? So I see this in journalism. 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I mean, I wasn't around, but from what people tell me, you know, people had a

healthy sense that a letter to the editor does not represent the average view of your readers, right? Because most people read an article and they say, oh, interesting, I agree with it. Oh, well, I don't agree with it. But they're not going to go and write to you about it. And so who writes to you about it? The person who's triggered, right? The person was like, this is terrible. This is wrong.

And so when there was a little bit of a transaction cost, people realized, oh, if we get a bunch of letters about this article, saying, you know, it's a little bit of letters about this article, saying that, you know, it's terrible and offensive, whatever, you know, perhaps that we represent something that our readers think, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it means that, like, 0.1% of our readers feel very strong about this in some direction. And so, you know, people would print leaders to be editor and, you know, there was a whole culture around it, but people knew that they couldn't just assume this actually represents what people think in the world. With Twitter, we've somehow lost that lesson. And it's because it's public, right? Like, with Letters

to the editor, you know how many came in, but your readers, don't, everybody else doesn't. So someone feels less humiliating or it feels less worrying, right? Whereas in Twitter, if you say something and everybody pounces on you for it, it feels like you've been like publicly shamed. And so then you're like, oh my God, how do I avoid being publicly shamed in that kind of way? And so in a double down, you double down. You double down. You doubt. That's the answer. And never apologize for bullshit. Like if you've done something wrong, say it, but never apologize when in fact you haven't. But that makes the real difference because suddenly we know that on the left and on the right,

the people who use Twitter actively are very extreme relative to the average of a population because most people have better things to do than to argue on Twitter all day long. I say with a lot of Twitter followers who spends way too much time on Twitter, but I'm political scientists that care about politics. I think about overtime. Most people don't, right? And most people have pretty moderate opinions, actually. And so the first thing to do is simply,

spend less time on Twitter if you're an important decision maker. Look much more to Ponyin polls, look much more at focus groups in which you hear ordinary people actually talking out issues than you do at what you see on Twitter because you're going to miscalculate

about where people are. That's the first lesson for political candidates. In particular. The second is when there's a firestorm on social media, right, when one of your employees is being targeted if you lead an institution, just waded out

couple days, right? Nearly all the time, people get bored of these campaigns. They just need somebody to shout at that day because they woke up on the wrong side of the bed. And by the next day, they're going to be shouting at somebody else. So rather than firing somebody, rather of them jumping to some huge conclusion about how you're going to change your organization, just assess it in a calm way. If there's accusations that somebody in your organization did something heinously wrong, investigate. If it's true that if it did do something, substantively wrong. There should be consequences

if it's the sort of thing for which there should be consequences. But don't just fire them the moment that 200 people on Twitter are calling for their heads. That's a huge mistake. So I think, you know, social media is always going to be

a little bit crazy, and that's actually fine. I don't worry about what happens on social media. I worry about what happens of social media. I worry about the inability of our institutions

to actually put that in context and act on it in appropriate ways. That is a very, very, very good point. Yesha, what do we do with what you're talking about and the need to have these melting pot societies, as it were, things to be more homogenous in the era of globalization, where people are becoming more fluid about where they live, if you take the European Union, freedom of movement.

doesn't that mean that that sort of state that you want to work towards in that state of living is becoming ever more difficult and dare I say it old-fashioned you know my impression is always that's not the case and like I'm as close to the damn cosmopolitan as they come

I mean not only am I Jewish but you know I grew up in Germany and I've lived in Italy in France and I went to college in Britain and I you know I'm living in the states now I have two passports you know But like, I wouldn't up and leave and live anywhere in the world. And I have a pretty strong sense of belonging, actually. And perhaps it's a bit more complicated than others, but it certainly doesn't extend to every place in the world.

And most people are way less mobile, have way less experience living in other countries, have way more family and friends in one particular place than I do. So I think some of those descriptions, I know David Goodhart in England likes to go on about with sort of, you know, the cosmopolitan elite that really, you know, are people of nowhere. I just don't know many of them. You know, most people, yeah, if you're pretty educated and perhaps have some money,

you're very comfortable flying to X, Y, or Z that place tomorrow for two weeks. But after two weeks, most people want to go home. You know, and perhaps if you're in your 20s and you have a professional opportunity to go live in a country for a few years, there's a bunch of people who love the idea of that. but after that most of them want to go home or they decide hey I've fallen in love here I've stayed here and I'm going to make my home here but I'm going to build roots here and stay in this new country

and actually really be rooted there you know the number of people who really are sort of let me live in Hong Kong for two years and then in London for three years and you know then in Rio de Janeiro for five years and you know Venon in Seoul for one year there is an extremely extremely extremely small number of people

I would say we've had David on the show and just so to defend him a little bit. I think his argument is a little more complex than that because his argument isn't that, say, someone like you, and you were definitely anywhere in his conception. You might have a feeling of attachment to New York or London or wherever you live, but what his point was that most people who are of that persuasion, they're never going to go back to the small town from which they come, or indeed they've probably never lived there since they went to university. And so that formation of long-term community bonds, the deep attachment to a sense of place,

perhaps some of their anxieties about rapid change that come with having that sort of community attachment are not as strong. And that, I think, is probably the difference between you and someone who grew up in, I don't know, Wigan and lived in Wigan their whole life and had a job that is very much tied into the city and their friends and family all live there and their identity is that and they go to the rugby games and on and goes. I think that's the difference. So that's fair, but I think Ben's terminology doesn't work very well.

We're getting a little bit in detail on this particular theory here, but I think it actually says something about where the problem lies and where it doesn't lie. What I see around me is people who have a very strong sense of belonging to particular places and particularly to communities that they're a part of. They're not these individualists who lack social ties. they are people who are part of an affluent neighborhood somewhere, who are part of perhaps a university town with a campus in a strong community, who are part of a very strong professional circle,

with fearing the judgment of the peers in a very, very strong way. They have very strong attachments. The problem is that we have an educational and a socioeconomic elite that often has become dissociated from a lot of the rest of the country socioeconomically, right? And so, you know, they look down on the, on the middle of the country. They look down on people who are educated. They look down on people who don't speak the same fancy languages.

They look down on people who use, quote, quote, the wrong term, which is one that's been invented in the last two years. But that's not because there are people of any way who can up and leave or who can, you know, it's because actually they're really afraid what people are going to say to them within the community at the next dinner party, right? And they actually have this extremely strong form of peer pressure. which helps to explain why you can go from one view to the next in a year and anybody who deviates from it in a slight way is sort of subject to these pretty extreme forms of

social punishment. And so to me, this is groupism, right? To me, this is actually, yes, I'm a member of this particular group and part of the identity of this group is to look down on other groups within our society. But it's not, hey, it's individualists who are people from anywhere and they don't have affiliations. It is an extremely strong group affiliation, but one that's developed among, you know, an educational and to some extent socioeconomic elite that has become disjointed from less educated people. So, I don't know, perhaps David and I are saying the same thing, perhaps you're saying different things. You are. I think you'd actually agree. Yeah. Yeah. So that being the case, and this elite group of people, they don't only have a disdain. And I use

and I use that word accurately, I think, for people that they deem from a lower class than them, or however you want to describe it. But there is also a disdain amongst that group of people for the nation state, particularly in America and the United Kingdom, where they feel a sense of shame that they come from the United Kingdom or America. And as a result, doesn't that also mean we're losing harmony in that instance? Because once you start to want to detach from the nation state, then what you're really doing is saying that, you know, we no longer have a collective identity. Well, we saw that in Britain with a Labour Party

and its debate over the British flag recently, right, where the idea of a major political party embracing the flag of its country becomes somehow controversial, which is a huge mistake because the nation continues to have this strong symbolism and the strong emotional power, and if you're leaving it to, you know,

especially the far-right fringes, that becomes really dangerous, right? I think that's a lot of what went wrong, what allowed some really dangerous people to win political power. So I agree, but I actually think that the biggest problem is just, it's people

no longer believing the basic thing you have to believe to actually be a small D-democrat. So you can despair of your fellow citizens. You can say, my God, they vote for this person who I dislike, or they, you know, made a big mistake morally on this issue. A majority of my fellow citizens think something that I think is really bad and wrong. That's fine, right?

Democracy doesn't mean that you always have to agree with a majority, and it doesn't mean that you always have to love your fellow citizens. But to believe in democracy, you do have to think that most people are capable of doing the right thing most of the time. That most people are decent human beings who are responsive to urgent moral reasons. And you might lose some debates. You might lose some important debates. But you still have to retain the hope that you can convince them the next time around. And what I see a little bit in my intellectual circles is that that's been lost over the last years. But a lot of people have started to think, you know, the average citizen is just a bigot.

You know, the average citizen is just a bad human being. And that really worry. me even more. Yeah. Well, I suspect there's a version of it that comes in other circles that you don't swim in on perhaps the other side of the discussion too, where there's, you know, I think it's almost like the stakes have been raised so much now that we can no longer accept losing because losing is existential now. If we lose, then, you know, the left-wing argument would be, well, then Roby Wade gets overturned and this happens and that happens.

And on the right, likewise, it's like, we're losing our country, and we're losing to these people who hate our country. And by the way, the most loud people on Twitter do hate this country. You know, so if you look at that, you're kind of going, well, that sort of makes sense. So, you know, we got a few minutes left before we ask you our questions for locals, Yasha. You seem positive. You seem optimistic. In a few minutes, how are we going to get to the sunny uplands where we're all living peacefully

ever after. Well, look, let me start because we haven't talked that much about it with some of the things that make me positive about the current situation. Right. So look, we have problems of some amount of fragmentation in our society. And we have problems with injustice and racism in our society. And both of those are real. But just the current state of our society is a lot better than people think.

And it's a lot better than it was a few decades ago. Look, I'm in San Francisco right now as we're having this conversation. 30 years ago in the United States, a majority of Americans thought that interracial marriage was immoral, that it was immoral for a white and a black American to marriage. Today, that figures down to the single digits. It's plummeted in the course of a few decades. And we know that this is a change in reality, not just in what people are comfortable telling pollsters, because of real change in who they're marrying and who they're having kids with.

a few decades ago, about one in 33 Americans were newborn. Now it's about one in seven. That's a very rapid and very significant change in the nature of society. Well, let's take immigration. Right. On the far right, you have people who say, look, immigrants 100 years ago from Italy and Ireland in the United States, for example, they succeeded because they're the right kind of immigrants, right?

Was immigrants coming in today from El Salvador and Vietnam and Kenya? They're not succeeding. because there's something somehow inferior about them. Now, people on the left and in the mainstream of society rightly reject that attribution of blame, but I'm struck by how often they echo the pessimism. They say, yeah, it's true that these immigrants today, they're really not succeeding, you know.

They're not doing well. But the reason is that our country is so racist and so discriminatory, which don't stand a chance. No, there is discrimination, there is racism. But actually, the best studies show that this pessimism is simply misplaced, that, yes, the first generation often struggles. Yes, it's a slow process of socioeconomic progress of educational mobility.

But actually, immigrants from all these countries are mentioned are rising the socioeconomic ranks, arising the educational ranks, at about the same speed as immigrants from Italy and Ireland did 100 years ago. Now, what that proves is that there's nothing inferior about them, but the far right is obviously wrong about that. But what it also proves is that our society

is not so unjust and so discriminatory where they don't stand a chance. They have a chance and they're seizing it. And that's something we should celebrate. So what I see is a political level that's really, really screwed up, a really dangerous kind of cultural civil war of the elites, which is trying to be imposed on the rest of society. But actually a lot of very reasonable people in the middle of society,

going about their lives, making connections with each other, integrating with each other. And the question is, well, we're going to be able to sustain that progress in the coming decades. Now, you know, I talk in the book a whole lot about a bunch of policies that we can pursue. You know, it's easier to tolerate your neighbor and to be open to newcomers when you have economic growth and you feel like, you know, if you lose your job, you're not going to be impoverished and when you feel your political institutions are inclusive and there's all kinds of little

policies and reforms we can pass in order to sustain those background conditions. But my real optimism comes from the actual changes we already are making in society. Perhaps one last point. Americans have completely accepted, and I'm starting to see a similar kind of rhetoric creep in in the United Kingdom, that the country is going to be a majority minority by 2045 or something like that, and that this is giving Democrats this sort of rising political majority. This is the one thing that Democrats and Republicans in this country agree on. And it's wrong and it's dangerous.

It is wrong because actually voting behavior is way more complicated than that. In the 1960s, Irish Americans were one of the most reliable voter groups for Democrats. now they're one of the most reliable voter groups for Republicans. Donald Trump was competitive in the 2020 elections because he increased his share of a vote among every non-white voter groups compared to 2016 among African Americans, among Asian Americans, particularly among Latinos. And Joe Biden is the 46th president of the United States because he significantly improved his share of a vote among white voters

relative to Hillary Clinton. So we've actually seen a racial depolarization of the electorate in the last years. And that's a good thing. I don't want to live in a country where I can look at the color of your skin and know who you're voting for. That sounds terrible and dangerous.

But I'd go even one step further. I no longer believe that America is ever going to be a majority minority. Now, if you accept the definition of the United States Census Bureau, if you accept the one-drop rule, generalized to every demographic group, if you accept that anybody who has, you know, seven white and one Asian grandparent is a person of color.

Right. If you accept that anybody who has any kind of connection to a Spanish or Portuguese-speaking country, like my Brazilian Uber driver yesterday who dropped, who took who dropped who picked me up from the airport who had a Bolsonaro, 22, uh, had in his car and told me about how much he loves Donald Trump, you know, if you think that that those people all finest people of color and that they're naturally on the left politically, then perhaps all of this view of the future of America might be right. But that's just a really strange way of looking at the world. And so I think what's actually happening is what the social with Richard Alba has

described as sort of broadening of the American mainstream. By the time at which in some technical level of America is going to be majority minority, it just won't make sense. And it already doesn't make much sense to describe the country somehow naturally split into this monolithic group of white people and this monolithic group of people of color. So if you're a racist who just cares about the purity of white people and the things that, you know, any non-white ancestor that any American has somehow makes them impure and makes them non-white, then it makes sense to say that America is going to be majority minority by 2045. If you're somebody who's actually thinking about sociological reality and people's self-conception, how they think

about themselves, how they interact, whose friends with whom, who's married with whom, how people are voting. This whole concept doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Yesha, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. If people want to find you online, if they want to buy your book, how do they do that? Well, by the Great Experiment, it's called, in the United States, called The Great Experiment, My Diversitymoxies fall apart in how they can endure in the UK. It's called The Great Experiments, How to Make Diverse Democracies Work. You can buy it in your bookstore. You can buy it on terrible online retailers like Amazon.

You can buy it anywhere. Three more plaques. Follow me on Twitter. Yasha underscore M-O-U-N-K. Listen to my podcast, The Good Fight. And subscribe to my online publication called Persuasion, which tries to stand up for philosophically liberal values against its many attackers from Willel. after Android. Fantastic, Kasha. Well, before we let you go, we've got a couple of questions

from our local supporters that only they will see. But before that, our final question is always the same. What is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be? I'm going to go to a completely different topic. Look, I don't know whether aliens exist. You know, they probably don't. We're probably not going to make contact with them. But if you'd know anything about human history and what it means to be colonized, you should know that it is a very bad idea to be sending signals out into outer space saying, hey, aliens, if you're around, here we are, we're sitting ducks, come and get us. And that's what humanity is doing. I think we shouldn't. And by the point, by the way, the point has been made on that is any civilization

that's not from the earth that was capable of coming here would probably be a lot more powerful than we were. So maybe you're right. Perhaps the wonderful, altruistic, beings that just want to share their fancy food with us, or perhaps they want to do terrible things to us as most human societies did when they had the guns with technologies to go and subjugate other human societies. There's a nice positive note to have the interview on. Fantastic stuff. Well, thanks for joining us, Shasha.

We're going to ask you our questions from our locals in a second. But for now, thank you so much for joining us, watching the show, listening to it. We will see you very soon. Another brilliant episode like this one, Oral Show, all of the. which go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

What would be the effects of a democracy falling apart? Would it be like the old Yugoslavia? For example, would England collapse into a disparate nation state?