TRIGGERnometry - Douglas Murray: "We Are Standing on the Precipice"

Episode Date: September 6, 2020

Douglas Murray joins us for the first episode at the new TRIGGERnometry studio. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod 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

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. From our brand new studio in the heart of London, I'm Francis Boster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. And a fascinating first guest of the new season we have for you. He's an author, journalist. Most importantly, he's here for the fourth time, Douglas Murray. Welcome back to Trigonometry.

It's very good to be it. I can't believe four times. Four times. And helping to break in your new set. You are indeed. It is an absolute honor to have you back. You've just written an afterword for The Madness of Crowds, the book that is now a bestseller pretty much overnight. It's been a tremendous pleasure to read it, to talk with you about it in the past. But I want to go back to the last conversation we had via Zoom, not quite as good as this. When we were talking probably, I would think it would have been April, perhaps early May. Very beginning of lockdown. Yes. And we were talking about, is China going to need to pay for some of what's happened? And I remember you sort of dismissively going, if only we could stop talking about this woke shit.

I think those are your exact words, believe it or not. It was a sort of like minor thing in the background that if only we could just ignore these silly people on university campuses who were going off the deep end and get on with the adult business of discussing the things that adults should. should discuss, the world would be a much better place. Well, I put it to you, Douglas, that in the months that have passed between then and now, we have seen that this woke shit is actually existentially threatening to everything that we hold dear, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I've always spoken in the spirit of optimism more than anything else. I mean, everything we know about COVID has changed in the months since we last spoke. And I think when we were speaking then at the very heart of the feeling that actually we were undergoing a generational

pandemic that was going to see each of us lose a swath of our friends and family. And at that point, it did seem like a lot of the crap receded for a time. There were examples I give in the updated version of the madness of crowds. You know, the obvious one is Sam Smith sitting in his mansion, crying and posting that on social media so that people feel sorry for him, they, then. and of course various people said well at least they have themselves a company but but Sam Smith didn't get much sympathy because everybody was in the shit you know we were all not even if even if the mortality figures weren't going to be as high as at first predicted you know massive numbers of people were out of work isolated in their houses not able to see their

loved ones, not able to go to funerals or weddings. So everyone had a lot of reasons to complain. And it was my assumption that in a time when we all had lots of reasons to complain, we wouldn't have much time for people with fake complaints, you know. At a time when, at the very least, significant unemployment starts to rocket, you know, somebody says you've misgendered them or used the wrong pronouns, desire to say, F off. Finally, finally kicks. in. And that was my feeling at the beginning. It was real complaints that we all now had. We didn't have much time for people with imaginary complaints. And I thought that was going to hold, and it did hold right up until events in Minnesota. And I think the historians will say

that all of this was a sort of perfect storm. You know, you have a lockdown where for the first time in modern history, everybody is told to stay in their hands. houses. A Tory government tells everybody in Britain to stay at home and we do. That's an interesting corner. We might not have predicted it. And what's more a Tory government says that everyone who is young and not in the committed relationship must be forced into celibacy for months. Again, I'd be surprised if any of us had expected that. But then when the killing of George Floyd happens, it was almost like a combination of things happened. The first was clearly people were fed out of lockdown.

And to a great extent, obviously there were sincere protesters, but there were also people who were just delighted to have a reason to get out of the house and start mingling again. And then there was this particular sort of concatenation that it was an anti-racist cause that was able to explode and come out at that point. And I think, yes, that in the period since all, of the things that we had hoped might go away have just burst out. And I think we've said before that, as Andrew Sullivan said a little while ago, we all live on campus now, but this is now

all of us living on a violent campus. It's like everyone's living on Evergreen in 2017. And this is a moment where all of the theories and the intellectual theories and the intellectual thinking about stuff starts to be it starts to become clear what we were worrying about you know that it's not it's not just play acting and by the way

I do think that that is to an extent what we were engaged in right up until recent months you could even see it with some the test as important they were they were playing at being like you know

they had these weird black block things they'd advance behind umbrellas, like a sort of post-apocalyptic Roman legion. And these sort of desiccated pseudo-warriors were confusing real life and computer games and much more. They call it lopping in it. LARPing, exactly. LARPing, it's a very useful term. And then we see that thing where the game starts. And people start firing guns. People actually start to get their heads and skulls smashed in. And then everything changes. This isn't laughing anymore. This isn't, this isn't computer game stuff. This is the real world. And I think we all, but America in particular, is standing on a precipice.

Do you think, Douglas, a lot of people have said this, that COVID actually acted as a catalyst for all of these particular issues. That this was inevitable, this path that we were going to tread. But with everybody locked down, with everybody being exposed to social media 24-7, it's just sped the whole process up. It is interesting, isn't it? We've all had, the first time in our lives, an inability to be able to judge what our fellow human beings, friends, family are thinking and doing. As you know this better than anyone as comedians. You know, you develop extrasensory perceptions in your finger, you can judge whether something's going to land right if you have people in front of you. What is it when people talk about public mood? But a sense, because

some people really have it, and some people think they have it, a sense of what the public are actually thinking or feeling. That's because we interact and we meet people and we sense what happens understanding beside somebody in a shop or speaking to a friend or hearing from an audience. strip all of that away, isolate people in their homes, for many people in a very solitary situation, and we all lose that. And so online becomes the only way we can imbibe ideas. And that's why it's so complex with BLM, because for a chunk of people, they actually think that this is what it says it is.

I mean, as you know, you took some heat for this. But you said early on, this is itself about. Marxist organization. Well, lots of people just didn't believe that because they only had the screen. And by the way, this has been happening in American cities where I've had this experience, I'm sure you have, where some American friends say, my neighborhood's just been burnt down, or all shops in my neighborhood just got looted. And then other people say, oh, no, it's just peaceful protests.

And then you notice that the people who say it's peaceful protests haven't moved back to their own neighborhoods, things like that. It's an evolving story. You mentioned the peaceful protests. And again, last time when we had you on the show, we sort of moaned a little bit, didn't we, about how of the media were asking Boris Johnson's stupid questions about the COVID response. And I feel like in the last three months, I mean, what has been happening in the United

States particularly, but also with the BBC here reporting on riots. and calling them largely peaceful. CNN reporters repeatedly standing in front of burning cities. Yeah. And saying that the idea that the violence is happening is a myth. That's the elite. They're standing in front of a burning city. He was particularly good, wasn't?

He was a sort of comical alley or Frank Drevin in police forces. There's nothing to see here when the firework factory is going off behind. I love that thing. Please move on. There is nothing to see here. And as much as we can laugh about it and laugh, we should. Of course we should. the derailment of the media, the derailing of the media from reporters of information with a slant, perhaps, as well, we had that until a year ago, to now just full-blown, unabashed propaganda.

Didn't you think one of the most extraordinary things? Everyone's forgotten about it now, the attack on CNN headquarters in Atlanta? So the crowd gathers very early in BLM start smashing through the glass front of the sea. CNN headquarters. These are not Trumpies, you know, these are not like MAGA hatwears. This is the BLM protesters. They start smashing in that one of the reporters is reporting from the lobby of his own workplace and his, the people he's broadcasting to upstairs are telling him to get away for his own safety. And nobody at CNN says, don't do this, get away. They report it as if it's a sort of normal thing to have an invasion of a network by hooligans. And they're not even on their own side, these so-called journalists. Nobody called it out. None of the other networks

seem to be bothered. Nobody seemed to mind. Nobody said this was an attack on the free press. But why have we got to this point where you can't criticize them? And if you do criticize them, I found out it doesn't end well. You have to find a new studio. And a new home. Here's the best steel man explanation. They think that it's a disagreement about the proximity of fascism. If you believe that the fascists are about to take over or have taken over,

almost anything goes. everyone's been taught this all their lives what we're living in is a problem of people who think the proximity of fascism to their front door is wildly close and they have completely misinterpreted their universe because by any fair estimation

there is no support for fascists in a country like Britain one man at some anti-COVID protests the other day appeared to have like waved the the strike sort of symbol that was a Mosleyite British Union a fascist sort of symbol and never said oh my God the fascists

are only openly protesting again in London as far as I could see from that from one guy some old lunatic who may well be a fascist himself he has no support He has no support. Now, unfortunately, there are a lot of people who think, for instance, and have got away with thinking that fascism is right in front of them and around them all the time. They think that Donald Trump is a fascist.

God knows none of us have a paucity of complaints to make about Donald Trump. A fascist? I don't think so. I don't think so. Not by any definition of fascism, I know. the Tory government? No. Not by any reasonable estimation.

I think it's absurd that we even talk about. I know, but we have to accept that there are people who have been taught and told and whipped, perhaps some honest people, into the belief or imagination, that that is the situation. And that they live in a state which is going to be fascist at any moment. By the way, that is not a totally... new thing. This has gone on for two generations at least. In 1968 in the student protests, this was a common theme as well, in America and Britain and other Western countries. The idea was that the state was essentially proto-fascist, that the police were the most visible wing of that. And that if you pushed the police sufficiently, they would reveal the true fascist nature of the state. My late friend, Pive James and I often talked about this.

He was in Cambridge in 68 when the garden hotel in Cambridge, famously the crowd outside started to smash the hotel. And I remember Clive described how he and others said, whatever you think of this, the moment you throw the first brick, everything changes. But these students at that point who were prosecuted, that's what they thought, they thought that you could reveal that the state was truly fascist. And of course, one of the things that the 68ers then learned, even the most

vociferous ones, people like Danny Cohen-Bendit from Germany and so. What they started to learn was that, of course, they ended up as the establishment. You know, they ended up, all the Blairites were all of them, you know, people within that sort of radical left, former radical leftist milieu, who made a fundamental misunderstanding about the establishment. You know, they ended up. You know, state, not all of them, but some of them. And then they were the state, clearly the state wasn't fascists, and people just pretended that they hadn't had their embarrassing youth or whatever they could do to sort of gloss it over. But we never really confronted those fundamental lies. And in recent years, they've clearly grown and grown. And yes, you know,

James Lynde in Helen Pluckrose in their excellent new book, talk about this. The way in which these theories on campus about the nature of the state, the nature of society. And if you're told by everybody in authority that you live in an oppressive, patriarchal, quasi-fascistic state, you're going to have a misunderstanding about the nature of the society you're in. And if on top of it you haven't traveled very far, you don't know any damn history or anything else. I'm giving you my most generous interpretation of what I think is going on. Because that is a problem, isn't it? We throw these labels about it.

We say that Boris Johnson is a fascist, but the reality is these people don't know the meanings of the terms that they use. Look at one, look at one of the even worse ones, the way the left, the Labour Party members and Labour Party MPs have thrown around the accusation that Ian Duncan Smith killed hundreds of thousands of people in the early part of this decade during the coalition government. That's a completely normal claim made on the left. It's outrageous, it's defamatory. I don't say that because I'm a member of the Conservative Party because I'm not. I don't say it because I agree with everything. It's outrageous as a claim. And yet it's made all over the place.

All the major left-wing, you know, Corbynista journalists all made it for years. They went around telling people, Ian Duncan Smith murdered thousands of people in Britain. And that wasn't a problem. And I think the point you're really making that, Douglas, is that this debasement of language over time where people who have nothing to do with fascism are being labeled in this way and ordinary people, some of them,

are being convinced that this actually is true. Well, if I put myself in that position and the Third Reich is rising again, I suppose it would be the Fourth Reich now, if the Fourth Reich is upon us, well, why wouldn't you be on the street with batons burn it? down.

And in fact, it's one of the few things, societally, that we all agreed on. You know, it's one of the few things we all agreed on. We're not doing that again. In the conversation, Jordan Peterson and I had a couple of years ago, you know, we agreed that basically, I think we came to the formulation in the end

that we all almost learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century. But they almost learned the lesson on fascism was pretty near. But certainly we have a, this is why I say, an almost total, societal revulsion of fascism.

And I'd add something more on that. We have an almost total societal revulsion of racism. And so again, if you think we live in a racist society and you've had pumped around for years the allegation that we have a racist Prime Minister running a racist Tory party. And you know, they all found these little nasty lies, didn't they?

That, you know, the extraordinarily ethnically diverse British cabinet that we have was only a cover or their only Uncle Tom's, all these nasty little tricks that the left and the far left played all these years. This is the fruit of their labour. You can see the beautiful fruit of their labour in the mobs that ran rampant in this country for a short period and that are running far more rampant in America to the this day. And Douglas, what's happened to common sense? Because you've got terrible ideas and you get, you know, you get fed terrible ideas. But surely you have your common sense where you analyze the idea,

and you go, well, this is palpable nonsense. Or you do the reading. Or you analyze it. Well, it all makes you worry, doesn't it about the fundamental, the most disconcerting idea for anyone who cares about ideas is that reason isn't enough. You know, No. Miguel de Unimuno, the Spanish philosopher, pre-revolutionary, Spanish philosopher, described being at a meeting once in Spain where the crowd starts chanting, what was it? My Spanish name is it. Viva la Muerte. Viva la Muerta, yeah. Long live death. Long live death. And Inumino said, what is this? necrophilic chant.

I mean, how could anyone and that's what always worries people who think. What if everything we put all of our attention into isn't enough?

It's a terrifying thought. And time and again, I remember when the Rwandan genocide occurred, there was one news report of a man being murdered by the rival tribe of massacring everyone and somebody he was a doctor shot in the head and the man who shoots and says he's a doctor what good are these brands

this is this is the you know what happened a couple nights ago in america a man is is shot and immediately you have a crowd on the streets with a woman shouting through a megaphone I do not care that a fascist was killed tonight. Of course, because you've labeled the victim of the murder you incited a fascist and everyone's been taught not to mind if fascists are dead. You've just moved the goalposts to make fascists majorities of populations. That's why we're in this mess. And then you don't mind about the killing. And then you're back into Viva Lamuerte territory again. And this is why, you know, I can never understand why the blame never gets to the right doors on this. It never gets to the right doors.

You know, the people who make false allegations about the nature of the state, frivolously erroneous accusations against individual citizens or politicians. that they never have to pay a price for that. Douglas, I haven't seen you this animated before, and we've spoken to you several times. Are you concerned that things are getting worse? Sure, I'm deeply concerned. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world,

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and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. I think we're standing on a genuine precedent. And it's getting worse all the time because of this misunderstanding, misinterpretation of our societies.

And what I mind is that this is the best chance we have. There isn't another option. we don't have for instance if we're going to go back to this line of racial segregation this time enforced by so-called anti-racists we go back to hell absolute hell and you can feel it daily what's eroding is the settlement that we had on that you know sam harris and i have said before we know we had hoped to arrive at a stage where skin-carrying was as unimportant as hair color. And now these people come along. It's like having a ginger separatist movement.

You know, I mean, to decide we should only speak about hair color for the rest of our lives then creates countervailing forces and much more. But it's like the settlements that we were hoping to head towards are being pulled apart by people who seem gleeful at pulling away the threads of our society. They seem positively gleeful of. about it. And that goes back to your point about reason. That's because there is an instinct that drives people to destroy. It's there throughout human nature. The instinct to destroy is very strong. The high octane of enjoyment of destruction. Isn't it also because it's easy,

Douglas? As far easier to destroy than it is to create. That's right. That's one of the central Burkean insights. Yes, you can pull a thing down in a second and it takes a long time to build it up. You can destroy a building or a statue in no time at all. It might take somebody an entire lifetime to create it. And so we find ourselves in a very suboptimal condition because the desire to pull down is clearly rife. But maybe this is an evidence that people have to endlessly relearn the same lessons. There's a line in Elliot in murdering in the cathedral. He said, men do not very, men do not learn very much, except that from generation to generation, the same things happen again and again. Men learn little from other experiences. You're sounding very

apocalyptic, Douglas, and I don't blame you because I don't disagree with you. And the question of Francis and I really both want to ask is, do you think we are past the point of no return now? No, I don't. I'll tell you why. These are the circumstances outside. But the circumstances outside are always bad. They're always bad. Now, there's particular peaks to the mania.

I've been reading quite a lot about revolutions recently for obvious reasons. And it's just so striking the extent to which this is just what happened in 1789. It's just what happened in 1917. I was reading the other day an account of the days after the revolution in 1917, Vincent Petersburg, when, you know, law and order, of course, is all fallen apart. But people are sort of starting to police themselves and sort of quasi. No one quite knows because, of course, the revolution was meant to bring the peace, but no one actually focused on any of the details, just like in 1789.

So nobody knows what to do when things go wrong, like crime. And there's a description, an incredibly haunting description I read on a tram in St. Petersburg in 1917, a rather well-dressed woman. And there's a rather well-dressed man standing near her. And she starts screaming. She thinks he's stolen her purse. And everyone gets interested, and they start finding out what's happening. And the man insists he hasn't stolen her purse.

And a couple of men who was a sort of self-appointed police at this point decide that he must have done clearly. And they take him off the tram and shoot him in the head. And they get back on the tram and the woman finds that the purse has fallen down the lining of her coat. And then they have a problem, of course. So they take her off the tram and shoot her in the head as well. It's a Russian way, mate. What can I say? That's how we do this.

you know, and that's what happens in revolutions. That's what happens when everything starts to break down. That's what's happened in Kenosha briefly. That's what happens when, you know, one person thinks he's going to go and protect a shot and then gets the peers, one particular case of them thinking about obviously, appears to have been separated from other people and then the people who are the protesters and recognize who he is. And then before you know it, he ends up shooting three people dead.

You know, that's what happens. What's happening in Portland? People being dragged out of their cars and smashed in the head or shot. That's what happens when everything else breaks down. So we might be in one of these periods, and it might get a lot worse yet. Or it could get better. But the reason for optimism on it, as it were, is that this is what history is always like. And we've had a very blessed time in our...

life so far. And I don't need to tell you to. All of us here know something a lot of people outside this room don't, which is we're the luckiest damn people in history and luckier than any of our forebears and luckier than we have any right to expect. But it was always like this in history. And the thing that's most important, the thing in a way I think is most important for us all to be thinking about and the people watching, particularly young people watching to be thinking about, is this. It's always like this to some extent and don't wait for more optimal conditions before you do what you're meant to be doing in your life because the optimal conditions will not be arriving. And it's a great point you make. And do you think part of the reason we've come to this point is because

of cowardice and I use that word in its true sense of a lot of the mainstream media. in particular the left, the centre left, who seem unwilling to stand up and say to these people, you may be on our side, you may be on our side politically, but what you are doing is fundamentally wrong and destructive. Yes. And they, or they want power more than they want true. But sorry to interrupt, Douglas. I mean, I don't think you can lay the blame for that only with the left.

I mean, look at Boris Johnson on BLM. He did very little, said almost nothing. Yeah. To tackle it. There are two excuses for that, which I don't like at all. One is that he was still ill. Yeah. Possibly.

But in that case, somebody else in the government had to make a stand. The second is that some people say this is a typical Boris Johnson tactic that his desire tends to be to wait till there's massive overreach by his opponents and then say something. If it's not overreach when the cenotaph is being attacked, I don't know what it is, you know, or when the winner. the St. Churchill's statue is being attacked. But your point still stands, which is cowardice. Yeah. Is that it? Cowardists, a desire for a quiet life.

But as I say, also, prioritizing the search for power over truth. You know, the New York Times, which is just a lost publication now, clearly, you know, has deliberately inverted the nature of these riots. As pro-Trump supporters become more of all. Island, protesters have to work out how they should react was one of the headlines, something like that, one of the headlines they did the other day, as if the sort of black block protesters just sitting around a rather contemplative body, these are protesters. So yes, those people want to be in power more than they seek truth, which is a calculation

that will come back and bite them at some point. I hope it bites them fast, but probably not. But to come back to this point, it's really crucial, I think, we start to bear this in mind. We've spoken before about the over-emphasis of politics in all of our lives, the way in which it's become almost a full-time occupation for too many people. And I mean, I think that when politics gets as bad as particularly in America now is, people start to wonder what they can do. And other than voting, there's not very much that most people can do, other than influencing the people around them. What I'm worried about is this endless opportunity cost. You know, Pluck Rose and Lindsay say in their book, at one point, what would have happened if the academics doing all this complete whank about, you know, intersectionalism and, you know,

comparative feminist theory and the intersections with disability and fat studies? What if they'd have done something meaningful with their time? What if they'd studied something that was of importance? What if all of that brain power, and it must by now be a considerable amount of brain power, had been expended on a worthwhile problem? Well, maybe we'd be a bit further forward. What have those people brought us? I thought nothing, but now it turns out it's worse than nothing. It's an actually malevolent, malignant thing that they have been injecting into the thought of our society. So again, just to come back to this point, what do we do as individuals about this? We all have a limited amount we can do in our personal lives in terms of trying to correct untruths, correct false narratives.

But other than that, I think it's a very important message that we remember you shouldn't put off what it is you should be doing. with your life nevertheless. I was reading the other day, it was an extraordinary sermon by, given by C.S. Lewis in 1939 when the war has started. It's a very, very brilliant piece of prose. And Lewis says there, he says, you know, these are, says something paraphrase, these are suboptimal conditions. And he says, but anyone who puts off what, they're meant to do to wait for the optimal cases, you know, so you'll realize that they will never come. And there is something highly unusual about our species, that we're not like other species. You know, the ants found their own accommodation and look after their, you know, physical

well-being and the well-being of the colony. But human beings are different. And I think, what's it Lewis says? He says, you know, we are We are beings who, he says, discuss mathematical theorems in belie good cities. We make jokes on scaffolds. We talk about poetry when advancing at the walls of Quebec. Com our hair at the gates of Thermopylae. It says this is not panache. It's our nature.

It's our nature as human beings. We do extraordinary things in the face of tenorough, terrible beleagueredness and confoundedness and confusion. But it was always like that. It's not an excuse. And do you think part of the problem is as well, especially in America more than it is here in that people are disenfranchised by the democratic system. You look at the Democrats with Biden in charge.

You look at Republicans with Trump. And you know, whatever happens, if you're amongst a very poor, whoever you vote for, nothing's really going to change. Well, it could do. I mean, by the way, actually, I'm not a supporter of Trump, but the job figures until the COVID crisis suggested there was something he could do. And if you're a poor working class person in a relatively poor state in America, having a job or not having a job is important,

much more important than all of the abstract things that we could talk about. you know, I mean, Obama, for instance, you know, who had many virtues, but I mean, there was an awful lot of just lovely rhetoric. And, you know, for most people, it's very basic things that more like to change their life, having an income, being able to provide for their family. That's the most important things. And so there are things that can be done. And you can always moan about your present political class. Again, I mean, everyone all my life has moaned about it. our political class, that's part of the joy of being in a free society. They're never good enough.

I mean, as we were in a famous example, everyone gives it. Churchill in retrospect is universally, was, to everyone, decided that he was the worst racist and a totally unforgivable figure, used to agree that he was a good thing. But, you know, the British public famously rejected the election in 45. We always moan about our political class. Do you think that's it? You said something that, Douglas, about.

not knowing how good you have it, which is really what you're saying. Do you think we have had minor aberrations aside since 1945 this tremendous period of perpetual growth, endless stability, every generation that came after was wealthier, was freer, was safer, lived longer, wherever you look, any metric you measure by. We have just had this extraordinary life in the West. Did we forget the other side of the coin? Did we forget that the moon can be light and dark, that life is pain as well as pleasure?

Did we forget that? That's the philosopher I cited earlier, Spanish philosopher, the famous book, The Tragic Sense of Life. Something I suggested in my last book, but one strange death of Europe was the Western Europeans and Americans had forgotten the tragic sense of life. I mean, to a great extent, we suffer from lack of willingness to face up to the most basic facts. I've always been interested in the way in which the spillage of Christianity and post-Christianity

means that you have certain things still in your society which are not willing to confront. So, for instance, this is a bit of bleak one, but when people die, there's still a little tendency to sort of they were with the angels now and you get i mean i know metaphysical systems in which you can believe that but what's yours that allows you to believe that or say that you know um rest in peace those sorts of things like yes there are systems of belief where you can say that but if you don't believe in any of that it's like well yeah i mean there's no other option and we have live for a while in a weird metaphysical system where we have a bit of the hangover of that belief. But it means that we're totally unwilling to confront that. So we're unwilling to

confront the reality of death. Famously in the society like us have been for a long time. Many people have pointed out. Death is something that occurs elsewhere in retirement homes and in hospitals and, you know, graveyards are way out of the center of town. you know, everything, everything we can do to keep the realities of life away from us, we do. And there are answers that are non-religious to that, but we don't bother with them either. I mean, in my view, we could do, for instance, with a dose of stoicism. That would be much, much more useful than, for instance, the medicalization of everyone in society to help avoiding truths we don't want to face up to.

much better that everyone got a dose of Marcus Aurelius or somebody who says these are the facts of life that are unalterable. And this is how we can cope with that terrible knowledge. This is one means of training ourselves to do so. That would be quite a useful thing to teach in schools, for instance. But we haven't done any of that. We've run off this sort of diluted content-free post-Christianity. We've run off, as Jonathan Haidt and others have pointed out, the fumes that we've got that are positive from our success in 1945.

And they've been running lower and lower and lower. And at the same time, people have been told the life will give you. the following things, and of course you'll get that, and you deserve this, you deserve that. And what if that's not the case? I mean, I would have thought in an era we're going into, the living standards that are going to decline for all of us. I can't see how they can't. And people said that after the 2008 financial crisis, which we still haven't got over. So I would have thought, if that's the case, we should prepare ourselves for that. And that's not a totally hopeless exercise. You know, things have gone down before. It's just, I'm sure like me,

you have that feeling that if the party's over for a time, at least, people ought to be prepared for what that feels like, rather than standing over demanding that the party continues to be laid on for their personal enjoyment. But isn't also part of the problem that, you know, for these people who come and graduate to university after 08, the party's over. And in a way, we've discussed this before. How can you expect them to believe in capitalism when capitalism is doing very little or nothing for them? No, I agree. I think there are big questions that shouldn't remain unanswered or so little answered this long. I think that wanting to get onto the housing ladder, feeling like you never can, these are very...

That problem is about to be solved, Douglas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Could be. be. But it's very demoralizing for people. That's something. And I notice that, you know, people who are sort of big defenders of the state of Crohn have not been doing a great job in shoring it up. I don't think, by the way, capitalism per se is responsible for that. I know it's a longer debate, but I think there's a form of capitalism which can go wrong, which everybody knows about. It's a sort of corrupt crony capitalism. Yeah, but I don't even think we particularly live in an era of cronial.

capitalism. We certainly don't in the UK. So what is it then? How has capitalism become distorted? Well, I mean, for instance, zero interest rates. I mean, it's an obvious one for this long because you do that in order to help get yourself out of the last financial crisis, but it means that nobody's rewarded for saving. And in fact, the inflation ends up meaning that what you're saving is worth less and less.

Oh, look, I mean, the response to the 2008, essentially, had a medical problem, we emptied the medicine cupboard without dealing with the problem and it's just waiting to come back, but the cupboard is empty. That's what's coming. Yeah. And I mean, there are people who say, I mean, I'm not an economist. There are people who say to me who are economists that you don't need to worry that the perpetual growth keeps going anyway or that I was only arguing with somebody the other day or that the debt

can continue to be accumulated. Yeah, MMT, the idea that you can print and borrow money in debt. And I just, neither that worries me because I don't see that. I think they're an obvious consequence. All the time. Yeah, it's weird. You can just spend money endlessly. But historically, what always happens, by the way, I actually have a great friend who is an economist and was born in India, who,

will Deepak Lowe, who some time ago described to me going to a university somewhere in America, I think it was, asking to see their library, they showed in the library, he said, where's the economics section? They said, oh, it's all online. He said, but what about all the books about economics? He said, they're all moribund, I mean, because we've learned now what, and he said, he realized this was increasingly a study that believed it had no history. And that's why the history of economy is so interesting is because people, some people in it think it's like medicine. A book on economics from the 19th century has no more to teach you than the book of medicine from the 19th century because we know more. And the problem with economics is actually there's lots of stuff you do know, but there's

also history recycling itself in certain ways. And in the case of economics of the kind we're going through at the moment, it's one of the reasons why one feels very, very worried about the moment we're in is because ordinarily, just financially take away these other bad signs, what normally happens at this point is that it all gets corrected by a war. Yes, absolutely. And this has been something that I've been thinking about this whole time, which is obviously our reading of history is perverted by that dogma that it's written by the winners. And so...

It's such a weird claim that, isn't it? Because it's not true at all. I mean, lots of time the losers write the history. Sure. What I mean more accurately, I think, is that our reading of history is, based on things that happened as opposed to things that were avoided. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah.

Let me elaborate. So, for example, if a plane crashes, that's a huge event. If a mechanic tightens a bolt that prevents a plane from crashing, that never gets covered in any way. Nassan Talib writes about this in the Blacks one. So the question that has been borrowing away into my head this whole three months or four answer is, has there ever been in time and history where we have been on the trajectory on which we are now so far down that trajectory? And there is no question that the trajectory leads to

what you've just said, which is war. And we decided, you know what, let's step back from the precipice. Let's stop this madness of crowds. Let's remember that as individuals we have the capacity to think and reason? Well, I mean, you can hope that that can happen. Because I go back to the experience of the individual, because there is something very instinctively in us when we know we get suddenly a glimpse of what it is that's about to happen. I was reading a lot of Tolstoy in lockdown.

Why, he's so depressed? You Russian writer. There's that magnificent description in what? and peace of the two sides of the army coming together, and they have the gap between them, and they know as they're facing each other, but just as sent a meter forward, and you are into this other terrain. And the other terrain is where everything happens, every limbs hacked, everyone. But as long as you're standing there and you haven't taken that small step into that terrain, that small step is everything. And all of us sense that,

the people engaging in violence in America in particular, the protesters in the UK, you could see it. They were testing whether to dare to take that step into that terrain. And actually, in this country, partly because eventually the policing became okay, realized you can't step there all changes. In America, it seems that some people have started to step into that terrain. Now, some of them might immediately see that it ends up with people being shot through the skull and they might see an exit wound of a bullet for the first time of their life in a human being

and think, you know what? Maybe we get back to the formation we were in before. Maybe that was more fun. And there will be others who will enjoy being in that train. But I have some confidence that once people see what they're about to step into, they will step back. So I hope. Is that how crowds work though, Douglas?

Well, the other option, of course, is you do get in, again, I go back to these events in Kenosha the other day. You get that and then you never know where you are because suddenly the melee. I mean, you know, I wrote some years ago a book about the events of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. And I have a particular interest in this thing of what happens when the first.

shot fires, because when the first shot fires, the perception of everybody outside is, well, then you knew that, for instance, that person fired from there and that person fired from it. You don't have a damn clue what's happening. Once it kicks off, once violence kicks off, you don't know. You don't know where the sound is a recall of a bullet. You don't know where it is at a rebound of a bullet. You don't know who shot where it's a free fall, the whole thing. So yes, that's the other option.

And this is why it seems to me that the aim of the era is not to join the crowd. You must have seen, as I did, that amazing footage of the restaurants in Washington, D.C., of these totally reprehensible, spoiled, mainly white as far as I could see, college-age kids going around and doing around and, demanding that restaurant goers put their fist in the air. There's a black power salute. Some people say the salute for something related as ever. They pretend the whole thing is a mystery, even whilst they're enforcing it on the population. But like taking the knee, it's all this sort of modern, crass iconography.

They just want to force, it doesn't matter in a way, just so long as you've demoralized people enough that they do the thing you tell them to do. take the knee, raise your fist, jump. And they go around all these restaurants and do this. You can see the clientele. Some of them, they go downstairs in the restaurant. And you can see these, like, some of them just start doing it anyway.

And then it's like, you know, and then they also say, fuck the police. And then you can see one of the guys like, oh, I'm not sure about that. But in that situation, there were some people. There was one woman in one of those videos who done. doesn't do it and the whole damn mob is around her screaming to her to do it and she won't. Be that woman. Be that person. Do not join the crowd.

Do not do what the mob demands. Be that woman. Doesn't matter what the mob demands. It matters less what the mob demands and that you do not do what the mob says. So there are people. And examples like that throw up these people. that woman may not have known that she was that sort of person. She may not have known that she had the heroic quality needed.

And it is heroic to say, no, I will not join the madness of the crowd. I will remain a human being with my own sense of dignity and my own sense of self-worth. And you will not demoralize me because I know that if I do this, you will demand that I do something next. And it seems that these crowds have a narrative. They adhere to a particular narrative. Whatever it may be, it may be the Black Lives Matter narrative of, you know, racism is everywhere. We live in a racist structure of oppression, all the rest of it. Why has it come to this point now where if you don't adhere to this narrative, if you don't go along with it, it can't just be that we're two people who have a difference politically?

Why has it got to this point that you must be cancelled, destroyed, defenestrated and ultimately ruined? Because the crowds are good. They're really good. They really know what they're doing. I mean, I'm in this position where I can say whatever the hell I want. Why? Because I don't owe anything to anyone, really. I mean, my editors, papers I write for could be persuaded not to publish me.

I suppose my publishers could be persuaded not to publish me. But other than that, I don't have anyone I sort of need to have on side. Maybe I shouldn't have given that list of people. I come to think about it. No, but most people aren't in that situation. Most people are beholden to someone. They have an employer. They teach somewhere and there is a boss or there's a board at their company and so on.

And those people are in a very vulnerable position. and they are being well picked off by the current mob. And the mob is not just physical. It's obviously online. And they come for people. And they make them essentially unemployable, and that's the aim. So, as I've probably said to you before, those of us who aren't in that vulnerable position,

I think have a disproportionate duty to say the truth as we see it, even if we're wrong. And I have no doubt, like everyone, I can be wrong. But the thing that alarms me is that things we could all say until yesterday have become impossible to say. You know, I have this example I give in the madness of crowds about relations between the sexes in the chapter on women. We all know in our society the motif of the predatory male. We all know that one. Almost all news about relations between the sexes is about the dreaded alpha male.

The predatory alpha male. Well, left-wing comedians. I was wondering why you were sorry. I was just getting ready to make the same point I've made on every live stream for last two months, just enjoying the fact that, you know, all these wonderful people who are very kind and compassionate, turns out. Right. Well, the first thing is, of course, as we discussed before, within that, is the people who are actually predatory males who would tend to be little, little, little,

harmless little men who say, oh, I'm a feminist, and I'm for black class matter, and I do all these things, and then turn out to be rapists and rapacious perverts of every kind. But that's not the point. The point is that we knew that, and we've always known that, and there's also always been another thing in history, which is the rapacious predatory female. Totally familiar type. Literature is filled with it. Shakespeare revels in it. Chaucer revels in it. Every single civilization and country has a version of this literature, and we pretend now that there's no such thing. There's only the predatory mess. Samson and Delilah. Samson and Delilah. Every single tradition has predatory females,

but our age has decided since yesterday there is only the predatory male. So most people pointing this out get into a whole world of trouble. Say to most bosses in an office, is there such a thing as a woman who'll do a certain amount of stuff just to get to somewhere? to see whether he wants to have that conversation. You know, you were right. You know the first time we interviewed Francis looked at you and went, you know what, Douglas, he's a bit of a trouble maker. Possibly.

But not, you know, it's mischievous, I think. Missed sometimes. But the point is that there's a lot of stuff we all knew till yesterday on this. Yes. Yes. And I'm, and I think we should all be worried that this stuff, which is true, is not able to be acknowledged. And that's the case now overwhelmingly. It's becoming clear that that is that in the racial thing, this is becoming a particular issue because what we've done

is, among other things, subvert a whole load of discussion. And as I say, my own hope in all of that has always been that, well, my own belief in it is you have only two ways to go on the race one. You either, you either do what people. people like me had put our store in, which is, you say, well, it should, we should seek to get to a society where it's as unimportant as hair color. And I grew up in London in which that was, to my mind, and some people say, well, you would say that because you're white, wouldn't you? But to my mind and to my mind of my contemporaries and my friends, I thought that had basically happened, or was in the process of happening. That's one option. We are united by certain civil and other

unifying factors. And race is an unimportant element of that. Now, in the name of anti-racism, a group of people have come along who said, no, no, no, race is the only thing that matters. And if you say that it doesn't matter, you're a racist. And if you say that it does matter, you're racist. And everywhere you go, you're racist. And then you get people into the great double-blind moves

that everyone's been getting caught in by total crocs and fraudsters like Robin DiAngelo, money-making monsters who goes around American College campuses and to firms and charges and tens of thousands of dollars to tell them that if they say they're racist, they're racist, and if they say they're not racist,

they're racist. And the only best correct answer is to always say you're a racist. We should have got into that, right? Should have got into the ground floor. Mate, you're definitely racist, what can I say? And these people have come, therefore, with the only other option to the one I had put my story, which is, okay, it's about race.

Well, here's a warning on that one, even if you don't want to go down all of the other warnings you can do on it. Even if you were of the group pushing that, step back because it's not going to work. What is the black population in America? 13%. 13%, you think that a population that is still a majority is going to forever suck up the claim that they're evil. But this is where the war part comes in. Right.

And it's the same in this country, to a lesser extent. You think that white people are still a majority in this country. I hate talking about that. I hate the idea that we have to talk about white people and black people. But fine, if they force us to do that, let's just do the maths on that. White people remain the majority in this country. You think they are going to be happy to be told your past was disgusting and reprehensible and not just ordinarily reprehensible, but uniquely reprehensible.

None of your forebears are of any worth. Your society didn't get anything that was good other than by stealing it. What you have now you do not deserve. You should give it to other people. You should give it to other people who look like people to whom think. were done in history because you look like people who did some of the things that were done. We will ignore anything bad done by any other group of people other than you. You've got to do this for all the rest of time.

Are you happy with that? You think you're going to win? You think that the British public's going to suck that up forever. You think that they're going to be willing to sit there and take it as they're told that our forebears all had the best imaginable time? you think that's going to work? Oh, it might work this year. It's not going to work for very much longer. And I can see exactly what the play is that comes back, which is, that's a shame. We had put an awful lot of faith in this pluralistic multicultural ideal. Turns out it wasn't wanted. How do you unknit that without going to hell? these people are playing with the most dangerous elements of our society

and they're like they are it's like seeing a child playing with a nuclear device and we've got to stop them but don't you think the problem is so for instance in Venezuela in 99

when Chavez came to power and he had a lot of the same ideas a lot of the same rhetoric that Black Lows Matter espoused. I saw what happened in Venezuela. A lot of people don't understand what it is to live in a communist society. They don't know what it means.

You know, I have people coming up to me and going, you know, Cuba's not all bad. It's always meant to be the schooling system. Good weather, mate. It's good weather. Nice cigars as well. Yeah. It's always meant to be the schooling system

isn't it, the health care? Yes. It's always some crock. There always was doing cold. war as well. There was obviously always a certain type of fool who could tell you how great something was. Maybe one of the most important tasks of our time is for everybody of your age, younger, older, to tell more about this. I am going back to that thing I said about almost learning one of the two lessons of the 20th century. Why don't we work harder at teaching

telling people, explaining whatever voice we have, how we do it, what that second lesson ought to have been. And again, the formula that Jordan and I came to some time ago was, how about trying to work out where the left goes too far? Like, we all know where the right goes too far, the right goes too far and gets into the worst possible territory when it starts playing games of racial superiority or racial superiority. Not that the left can't do racial superiority claims, but it's more, historically, it's more being a factor on the right, the far right, and could be again.

On the far left, where does the left go to the far left? Nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to know. The obvious place is to put it at equity, the search to make everybody equal. By the way, I think, my gut, I think it's a disgusting idea. I don't want everyone to be equal. I don't like equality. sports. I don't like it in any other realm of life. I like human difference. I don't want everything to be this flat, monochrome, monotone, boring society. But some people do seek, at least a greater, or put a greater emphasis on equality than, for instance, than I do, and then to equity. Well, that would be where the left goes wrong, has always gone wrong. why don't we start to name names, put blame, why do we start to put the blame at the doors of the people who make this happen again and again

and make sure we learn nothing from others' experience in Venezuela, in Russia, in Cuba, everywhere else? Why don't we start to trace this? Because we still, all of us must be able to agree that the amazing thing that the left got away with in the 20th century was that it got away basically Scott three and the right didn't and for good reason and the left somehow did. That's because we needed the left to defeat the right. That's why. Yeah, and that made sense at times. You know, I mean, I have a great degree of sympathy for people

who actually did think that communism was the only way to cancel. out fascism at a certain point. Yeah, until Solzhenitsyn, right? Well, once Solzhenitsyn, after Hungary, after Czechoslovakia, after Solzhen, how the hell do you still think that's? Well, also after 1945 in general, you know, I mean, but I have some sympathy for people. Do I have sympathy for people who became fascist because they thought it was the only way to deal with communists? No, that's an example of the inequity of the calculation I've just describing. For some reason, I mean, I have that too. Why? Because we

focus more and are more, maybe it's also because in Western Europe, a communist threat didn't come as completely close as the fascist threat did. There's something in that simple geographical issue. But why is it that we are still in this situation in 2020 where they fly the Marxist banners, they fly the Soviet flags, or play a Soviet, play a Soviet, anthem. They'll play games. They'll wear t-shirts of Che Guevara and they'll admire Venezuela and they'll they'll they have this horrible roster of first and second-class sadists and they still think that they can make it work. And why aren't they more shamed about it all after this amount of time? It's not like it's a damn secret anymore. Well, it's been a great opening that

fresh season of trigonometry with an uplifting episode. Yeah, there was a massive amount of time for gags, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, Douglas, I do think it's important that we talk about this in this way, too, because I think people need to understand that the time for half measures and for wishing it all would just go away and we can stop talking about the woke shit. That time's over now. Sure.

That time is over. Sure. This is the time for. the opposite of the cowardice that Francis talk about. This is the time for people who can. We're privileged, you're privileged in that position to have that freedom. But it's also now time for other people, too, to in their small ways not to raise the fist, not to bow to the mob, not to join the mob.

And I think the message that you have carried and your book presents to people is exactly that. It's an important message right now. and you talk about it in the afterward that you wrote to the madness of crown just now. Every time you publish a book now, you expect that it will be the last book you publish. It's true. It's true. But this is why it's so important that you do. And it's why it's important that we have these conversations.

And it's important that other people who can do the same. And I hope that watching this, listening to this gives them some measure of inspiration. to do that because in my opinion that is the only way we get out of us. Completely agree. So with that in mind, we've got one final question for you as always. Which is what's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? I think we just talked about it actually. I think it's that thing.

I think it's finding and agreeing on the place where the left goes wrong. And I think it is people, it should be incumbent on people. to know their own ignorance on this. If somebody said to you, what's Auschwitz, that person is ignorant, wickedly ignorant. They should not say that.

Nobody should say that. If somebody said to you, who was Pol Pot, that person is also ignorant in an evil way. if they don't know by now they should know and we should make sure they know thank you for coming back it's been a pleasure

thank you so much for watching guys if you want to follow us please do and also remember that we go out our episodes are Wednesday and Sunday 7 p.m. We also have live streams don't we constant? Every other day except Monday so we will see it 7pm I love the way we ended on a very dark note And now we're just brazenly plugging ourselves for the capitalist returns that we deserve.

We'll see you very soon with another. Take care. Thank you. And see you soon.