TRIGGERnometry - Niall Ferguson on COVID, Lockdowns and Authoritarianism

Episode Date: May 16, 2021

Niall Ferguson is a Scottish historian and the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... 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. SHOW LESS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode sponsored by Maximus Tribe. You train, you track, you eat right. But if you're over 40, you've felt it. The results don't match the effort anymore. That's not willpower. It's biology. Hormones drop. Metabolism slows.

Your body stops responding the way it used to. Maximus is the online clinic that reverses your decline with prescription performance medicines, GLP-1s, testosterone, and peptides that reduce belly fat, restore energy, and boost recovery. Over 50,000 high performers have already broken through their plateaus. If you're ready to turn your hard work into measurable results, go to maximus tribe.com. That's maximus tribe.com. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Does not get any more fascinating than the guest we have for you today. He's an accomplished historian

and a prolific author, Neil Ferguson. Welcome to Trigonometry. It's great to be here, but of course you had my much more interesting wife the other day. So I'm, you know, I know when to bask in reflected glory. Well, we had the better half now we've gone for the other half. So we've got you as well. Thank you very much. It's more like a third, actually.

It's good to have the other third on the show, Neil. Of course, you're very gracious to your brilliant wife, but you are, as I said, a very interesting man, very accomplished author. Your latest book is called Doom, the Politics. of catastrophe. We've had a couple of those in the last year, I feel. What made you want to write the book? Well, I'd been thinking of writing something about the history of disaster and dystopia before COVID-19 came along. And I was trying to persuade my publisher that I could write a book that would use science fiction as well as history to describe our strange relationship with disaster.

And he was kind of giving me funny looks. And then a disaster. happened and I think I was quite quick to see back in January last year that this was going to be a big pandemic and I thought well this is surely the way to frame the book if we can if we can locate this disaster in a broader historical perspective comparing with all the disasters in history that will help readers understand what they are going through so that was the reason for writing it and publishing before the disaster is over clearly COVID-19 is not over but I I felt like a lot of people were just disorientated. And there was a tendency in the media last year, particularly,

to think that this was going to be comparable in its scale to the great influenza pandemic of 1918, or even to the Black Death. Some people mentioned that. But it was obvious a year ago that it wasn't going to be that bad. It was going to be bad, but not really, really bad. So there's a need, I think, to put these kinds of event in historical perspective. and that's really what the book tries to do. And the opening sentence to your entire book, I found so powerful, Neil.

And I'm going to paraphrase it and butcher it, and I apologize in advance. But the sentence was something along the lines of, we've never been more fearful of the future whilst knowing so little about the past. Why did you write that sentence and why did you open your book with it? Well, I think there is a great sense of fearfulness and uncertainty. in our world today. And often that leads to great overreactions and extreme responses to challenges that previous generations would not have been so thrown by. And part of the reason I think for that is that we are historically extraordinarily ignorant. Now, of course, you could say we've always

been historically ignorant. Nobody studies history. But I do think something has happened to our relationship to history. and it's particularly obvious when you look at young people because of the way history is taught. And history has been decoupled from traditional ideas of what we should learn about the past. And increasingly, it embraces a sort of activist agenda. So people are not, in fact, taught to think about the past as anything other than a series of terrible lapses from political correctness, which we should always approve of. This is not a great way of thinking about human history. just going back in time and going, terrible, terrible racist. I mean, that's not how you should think about the human past,

but it's how, I'm afraid, more kids and indeed now young adults are taught. So the idea I had was let's try to locate what's happening in a proper historical perspective, not condescending to past generations. And when you do that, you realize that it's not the end of the world. Now, the media, especially the internet-driven media, have tremendous incentives. to represent every crisis as the end of the world. So not only is COVID-19 the Black Death, but if a bunch of lunatics storm the US Capitol

on January the 6th, it's the Civil War. And this kind of inflation of historical significance is what I'm trying to push back against because it allows a kind of hysteria to build about each breaking news event, which is clearly not helpful to rational responses. by voters and by politicians. It's an interesting point you make, Neil,

particularly about the media, because this is something I've been thinking about quite a lot. We have research here in the UK, which shows that when polled British people, on average, think that about 10% of the public have been killed by COVID-19, which would make about 6 million people. The actual figure is 0.1%.

And in America, there's been some polling across different media platforms of CNN and MSNBC. I think people who regularly watch those. I think that you're 50% of people who get COVID are likely to be hospitalized when, again, the figures are nothing like that. So you talk about the overreaction. Do you think that Western governments in particular overreacted to the pandemic?

Well, they first underreacted and then overreacted. I think that would be the right way to put it. But there was a way to get this right that averted mass death and also averted lockdowns. It was what they did in Taiwan. The Taiwanese, who have every reason to be suspicious of their neighbors, the People's Republic of China, very quickly realized that something wicked was coming their way from Wuhan, restricted travel, but more importantly, actually, ramped up testing, because it was quite easy to test for this virus early on, sequencing the virus had proved to be very, very easy.

They also had a system of integrated contact tracing using phones, and so they were able to quickly identify who had it and who might have spread it, and then to isolate people who were infected. And as a result of this very rapid response, 12 people, a dozen, have died of COVID in Taiwan, which is right next door to where this thing began. So we know there was a right way of doing this. The South Koreans also did very well. There are a bunch of countries that were quick off the mark and were therefore able to avert lockdowns.

Taiwan had the least stringent government measures of any country. at the Oxford Blavatnik School stringency index. So that tells us that what happened in the UK and the US was clearly suboptimal. What happened was that the public health officials dithered around and so did the politicians, but I think we should recognize that ultimately, sounding the alarm about a pandemic is not the job of the prime minister.

It's the job of the people whose job it is to worry about public health. The public health officials dithered around at both sides of the Atlantic, January, February, first half of April, and then another Neil Ferguson, I want to make it clear that I'm not here. Before the hate mail begins, the N.E.I.L. Ferguson at Imperial College, London, the epidemiologist, published a paper mid-March saying, if we don't lock down, and he could have said, like the Chinese, who by that time had completely shut everything down, if we don't log down, we're going to have half a million dead people in Britain and we're going to have two point. two million dead in the US. And politicians read this and thought, oh God, we better do this. We better shut everything down. So there were extraordinary measures taken from mid-March onwards, like shelter and place orders here in California, locking people in their homes, because the initial opportunity to shut the virus down had been missed. And then I think you can

have a debate about whether the lockdowns were overkill, and I think many respects they were. But what you can't, I think, say is that we should have done nothing at that point, because by that point, we really had got ourselves into a serious mess with the virus spreading rapidly all across the US and all across Europe. We had to do something. I think we did more things than we needed to because those lockdowns were a very, very blunt instrument. And we also, of course, couldn't really follow Neil Ferguson's advice because he said, you have to do this until there are vaccines. Now, nobody in their right mind could have locked down the US or UK economy for the entire period that it took to get the vaccines available. And so what we did was we locked down and

then we realized we'd completely created the economy and we had to start lifting restrictions and then playing whack-a-mole with reinfections. So looking back on it, this was a pretty big public policy failure, to say that it was going to be a failure at the time was hard, but I was writing a weekly column back in those days for the Sunday Times. And I do remember thinking that ultimately we'd gone from too little to too much. And that ensured we had lots of mortality, but also huge economic and social disruption. Definitely the worst of both worlds. And you say it's a worse of both worlds.

And when I was reading your book, you were talking about, the relationship that we have as a society with death. Do you think part of the problem with COVID-19 was we had a moral crisis surrounding this virus? I think part of the reason for writing the book is to get people to think a little bit more realistically about death. There were moments in the discussion last year when you'd have thought that the job of politicians was to prevent anybody from dying. Now, single death is too many. Hang on a second, people die every day. That's the nature of our species. Only 13% of deaths since the pandemic began in the United States, being caused by COVID. I mean, most people actually die of other things once they get up above age around 70.

even in a pandemic, excess mortality was certainly significant, probably 18% in the US and UK, if you just look at the whole period since this thing began, and that's a bad outcome. I mean, clearly it's a bad outcome for over half a million Americans to die and what, 120, 130,000 Brits to die, but relative to the population, in not talking about the black death, just to be clear, in the black death, something around 40% of the population of most European countries died. The global shock of COVID so far that the percentage of the world's population killed by this disease is about 0.04%. So the black death were three orders of magnitude bigger than this.

And if you take the 1980-19 influenza, it was a huge calamity, something in the region of 40 million people died. I mean, for that number today, just adjusting for population. you'd be looking 160 million deaths as opposed to what we're looking at at the moment, which is three and we might well get to five or maybe more by the time it's all over, but it's still not one of history's really big pandemics. So one of the things that's striking, I think, is that in the face of excess mortality, we don't have a good way of calibrating. And that's because we haven't got a good sense of what a bad year looks like.

Now, in Britain, there have been years as bad as 2020 for excess mortality, and then I'll tell you what they've been in the recent past. 1918, 1940, and 1951. Now, your listeners will immediately get 1918, World War I plus the big Spanish influenza. 1940s are no-brainer. obviously it's it's world war two and the catastrophic first phase of the war but what happened in 1951 1951 was as bad a year as 2020 for excess mortality in the UK and that's because there was a really bad outbreak of influenza it wasn't global but it was very severe in england especially

around liverpool for any scousouss listening we've forgotten it it's completely forgotten because people in the 1950s kind of expected there to be bad years. It'd been through World War II. There was a lot more still to come. There were many infectious diseases that we hadn't got under control, polio, for example. And so people accepted that there was, in the nature of things, going to be the odd, very bad winter. And by the way, if you just look at months of excess mortality, yeah, April 2020 was a very bad month in Britain. But actually, it's not even a top 10 bad month since 1970. And we got the

data going back that far. So actually, in my lifetime, there have been significantly worse months for excess mortality than the worst month of COVID last year. Part of the point of doom is just to kind of get that sense of perspective. Because you have to know whether it's worth shutting everything down in relation to the likely excess mortality that you face, because you don't want to impose huge unintended costs in society for the sake of a bad winter. And in effect, I think we may well have done that. We will never know quite what the death toll would have been if we hadn't done lockdowns. And so Neil Ferguson's always going to say that he saved, I don't know how many lives,

maybe a quarter of a million or something like that. But my sense is that that's probably not right. And that in truth, we could have got through this with significantly less restriction on people's social and working lives. And I'll never be able to prove that, nor will he be able to prove that he saved England. This episode sponsored by Maximus Tribe. You train, you track, you eat right. But if you're over 40, you've felt it. The results don't match the effort anymore. That's not willpower, it's biology. Hormones drop, metabolism slows, your body stops responding the way it used to. Maximus is the online clinic that reverses your decline with prescription performance medicines, GLP1s, testosterone, and peptides that reduce belly fat, restore energy, and boost recovery.

Over 50,000 high performers have already broken through their plateaus. If you're ready to turn your hard work into measurable results, go to maximus tribe.com. That's maximus tribe.com. Well, the one thing that we do know, though, Neil, don't we, is that a lot of the consequences of lockdown, which no one wants to talk about, have actually been resulted in deaths as well. That's suicides, that's cancer, that's missed heart, people not going to accident and emergency, to get treatment for what then turns out to be a heart attack. So, yes, maybe we'll never know. But what troubles me is not necessarily what the numbers end up being, but rather the fact that we seem to have made a decision on lockdown without any regard for the unintended consequences whatsoever. People are pretending that that side of the formula just didn't exist. And obviously it did.

Yeah. I mean, it's clear that a lot of the excess mortality last year was not people dying of COVID. There were a lot of other things that happened that would not otherwise have happened. We know, for example, in the US that there's been a big increase in deaths from overdose. And then there are all the kind of not so obvious costs. I mean, a year of education has been taken away from people in California public schools. That is to say, broadly speaking, the poorer kids in California society. That will cost them for the rest of their lives. So I do think you can fairly say that the Imperial College epidemiologist said,

here's what's going to happen if we don't lock down. And by the way, we're epidemiologists. So don't bother us with the unintended consequences, especially not the economic ones, because that's not what we do. But here's a kind of way of saving lives. I think those calculations were very, very crudely done. And they were based on a couple of assumptions that were wrong, one, the infection fatality rate, which I think they got wrong because they said it's going to be 0.9% of the people who get it who die. But that actually was a bit misleading because of the enormous variance in the infection mortality rate by age. 80% of people who died of COVID in the US were 65 and older. And the older you get, the higher the rate. So it's essentially very unusual history to have a pandemic that is aged. Most pandemics kill the very young and the very old about the same amount. And some actually go after people in the prime of life. interestingly, 1980-19 that, and 1957-58 increased mortality amongst teenagers in the United

States by something like a third. So we had this kind of benign pandemic that was generous enough to leave young people alone, mostly, and concentrate on killing people who were nearing the end of their lives. So under those circumstances, and we knew that, by the way, in March, because the Chinese data were already there, and you can see very clearly that this was the agist virus, knowing that we probably could have come up with something smarter than shutting everybody in their homes and stopping them going to work. And I do remember long discussions with people in different fields,

trying to figure out what a smart plan would look like, because obviously a smart plan would have protected the elderly. And that was one of the things we didn't do, because we let huge numbers of people die in Lerner, elderly care homes by not worrying about their vulnerability and actually shipping people with the virus to elderly care homes, making sure that very large numbers of people there were affected. So these are the little mistakes that end up having really, really large costs. Now, remember, my key point is that we should have been Taiwan.

By the time we got to mid-March, we'd already kind of blown it. But I think having blown it, we could still have been smarter than we were in the way that we tried to deal with the pandemic. And I sense that the costs, when we finally do a proper cost benefit analysis, the costs of lockdown will turn out to be much higher than people thought at the beginning. And you say that, and I'm in an agreement with you. Has it surprised you, Neil, how we seem to have politicised this virus? You know, both sides have done it. It's been really shocking to me. And by the way, just to add, it didn't happen straight away. There was a bad, a month, somewhere around February, March, when it hadn't quite broken either way and people

on both sides of the normal political divide were not, sort of, there wasn't the same alignment, whereas now it's very clear if you're on the left, you're pro-lockdown on your right, you're probably not. Yeah, so talk to us about the politicization of this. It's one of the striking differences between our time and the 1950s, especially in the US, because if you think it's politicized in Britain, you, You ain't seen nothing. Here, every aspect of this public health crisis became politicized. Mask wearing, potential remedies for the disease, and then, of course, the vaccine.

And vaccine resistance is much more stubborn in the US than it is in the UK, i.e. resistance to getting the vaccine. So what went wrong? Back in the 1950s, it really wasn't controversial that getting a vaccine for a contagious virus would be good. So when the Asian flu as it was then cold struck, the federal government in the US prioritized getting a vaccine. And that was really all they did, because they recognized that they couldn't shut everything down. So schools stayed open, workplaces stayed open. Yeah, there was excess mortality. But they got the vaccine done really quickly within a matter of a few months from developing

a vaccine to get into people's arms faster, in other words, than we've done. And it wasn't controversial. Nobody was saying that it was a Republican vaccine because Eisenhower was president. Here, I think you can see he illustrated a theme of my last book. The last book, The Square in the past said, the way that the internet has evolved as our new public sphere has exacerbated polarization because on the internet, you're incentivized to have extreme views and to disseminate fake news because the internet platforms, the Facebook, and the Googles are incentivized by their business model to basically promote clickbait. That's how you get eyeballs to stay on the screen long enough to see ads. It wasn't like that in the 1950s. There's a finite amount of terrestrial television.

There's radio. There's local papers. The window, the spectrum of information in news is much more limited. And the crazy stuff really doesn't get much beyond men with green ink writing letters. The internet's created this entirely different news system where news and entertainment have kind of fused, and the incentive is always to go out on the extreme to try to get those eyeballs to linger just a bit longer on the screen. So you're right. At the beginning, Constantine, it's very true. At the beginning, it was actually liberal media who condemned Trump for wanting to restrict travel from China. It was in the New York Times and the Washington Post that they ran articles saying it's just the seasonal flu. The presidents are terrible racist for wanting to do this.

And it took a while for that all to flip. It really took until March for the position to become liberals like lockdowns and conservatives like herd immunity. So this was absurd. It led to absurd debates. And the public health officials made matters worse by changing their story on masks for reasons that were. transparently mendacious. Oh, you don't need a mask because we actually don't have enough and we need them for the doctors. And then actually change a plan. You need to wear two. Make it three. Can you blame people for becoming skeptical about the utterances of people like

Anthony Fauci? So we've ended up in a terribly, I think, a suboptimal situation in which the public is skeptical about official guidance. It goes to the internet. in search of better guidance, and it ends up down conspiracy theory wormholes that tell you the vaccine is Bill Gates' plan for total mind control. I mean, the number of people who believe that stuff is truly shocking. I knew that Americans had a weakness for conspiracy theories already. I wrote about it in the square and the tower. Well, the pandemic was just a glorious opportunity for the conspiracy theory networks to go crazy. And sure enough, that's why there's so much reluctance to get the vaccine, especially amongst conservatives. Do you have a website or do you plan to

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Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is head over to easydns.com forward slash triggered and use our promo code, which is of course triggered as well, and you will get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, access of easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. Neil, do you think part of the problem is, and it's going to sound flipping, is that we've all been driven insane. You know, we've been locked in our houses. We've, you know, our movements have been curtailed and the ability to see family hooked up to social media for 24 hours a day. it's driven us all mad, hasn't it?

Well, it's not a frivolous point, Francis, because actually mental health has become its own pandemic. You are doing things to people that are calculated to put them under psychological strain and that the data on mental illness are really shocking. It's become far, far more of a problem than it was before. Not surprisingly, as you rightly say, if you lock people up in their homes,

they are unfortunately deprived of things that are good for sanity. We are a social species. We're not really designed to just be stuck in cells with a very small number of people. That's why prison is punishment. But if you place the entire population under house arrest, unless you're somebody with a large and spacious home with a decent garden, it's really rather stressful.

And I do think that this is one of those costs that will only gradually become obvious. But I mean, we already have pretty good evidence that this has been a huge psychological strain on societies. And I, you know, I've spent much of the pandemic in a pretty relaxed place, Montana, listening to my kids and my mother talked about life in England, which I had to do over a Zoom, made me realize that things really were much. much more restricted in the UK. So, yeah, I think this is a very important point. And it means that we have to acknowledge that there were at least two pandemics going on simultaneously.

One was the virus. The other was, let me call it, the sort of pandemic of the mind. And this pandemic of the mind range from people who are pretty well adjusted in relatively comfortable circumstances, feeling miserable to people in much more difficult circumstances with perhaps already some mental strain feeling really mentally ill. And that second pandemic will have all kinds of lasting consequences. Of course, it made people susceptible to crazy ideas. If you're already under some stress and somebody tells you here, did you know that this is actually a pandemic

devised to put microchips into your bloodstream? Under the circumstances of 2020, a surprisingly large number of people will believe that. Now, rewind to the 1340s. Biggest, probably the biggest pandemic in all of history of the back death, sure enough, what we find in the 1340s is not only that there's mass death, but there are also crazy ideas that spread amazingly fast. For example, the flagellant orders are founded and people wander around men exclusively wander around whipping themselves to try to ward off the NIC's contagion. I was fascinated when I read about the flagellants many years ago in Norman Cohn's great book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, because there was a certain amount of that kind of mood in the United States in 2020.

The Black Lives Matter protests ostensibly were about police brutality. But if you looked at it with the detachment of the historian, it looked a lot like the flagellant orders processing through European cities in the 1340s in an act of expiation. You know, if we can only punish ourselves for the racism of the past, somehow will ward off divine wrath. There was something of that about 2020. So there was a pandemic of the mind in our time, just as had been in the Middle Ages. I did tweet recently that the only thing that surprises me about this pandemic

is no one has decided to blame the Jews yet. Give it time, because you're quite right that in the 1340s, there were terrible outbreaks of anti-symetic violence in multiple European cities. And these events are very shocking Jewish communities in some German cities were kind of burnt to death or there was mass murder in some other form. Now, what's interesting is that one manifestation

of the plague of the mind, what we call wokenism for short, all that complex of radical left ideas that seems to flourish in American academia these days, I mean, that has its anti-Semitic side to it. There's no question. So I think the connection that you just suggested, jokingly, is kind of already being made, I'm afraid. Great news. But, Neil, let's move on a little bit. I want to talk about China. And the reason I want to talk about it is, can you, as a historian, first of all, just very briefly, I'll lock down something

that we've inherited from the past. In other words, this is something that people have done prior? or is it the Chinese came up with it and now everyone's doing it? There's never been anything like this. In the great influenza pandemics of the 20th century, nobody thought about shutting everybody up in their homes. It wasn't an option because you couldn't work from home in 1957, nor in 1918. That just wasn't an option for most people,

whereas now something like a third of jobs in the US can be done at home. That's because the internet has made it possible. Basically, sorry to interrupt. So what we've done, and just I'm a layman in this, but what we've done is we've taken the response of an authoritarian communist dictatorship halfway around the world and imported it into Western liberal democracy

entirely. Yeah, we didn't weld people into their apartments, but we might as well have done, with no precedent for this whatsoever. Yeah, but they've got good food, so. Well, the only thing. Ferguson, the other Neil Ferguson, admitted this in an interview in the time the other day. I mean, he said the Chinese kind of gave us permission to do this, and we weren't sure that we could do it, not being a communist regime, and it turned out that we could. That's the

really remarkable thing about what happened last year. I think it's right to say that we copied the Chinese model, because if you look back at the debates of March 2020, there weren't really many examples of lockdowns to go on. All you could see was that things were going horribly wrong in North Italy. There was a terror that the same thing was going to happen in England. And there was a Chinese model for repressing the virus that was getting a lot of publicity because the Chinese were rather proud of the fact that they'd been able to impose such draconian restrictions on their people. Now, it's actually impossible for us to replicate what the Chinese did, because the Chinese Communist Party has an active member in every apartment block in

every Chinese city, whose job it is to report on his or her neighbours. And that we don't yet have. We certainly have lots of nosy parkers. That's part of English life since I'm a memorial, but they're not members of the Communist Party, and they don't report to Big Brother. What about COVID-martials? Well, of course, we have a certain tradition in British life of restricting freedom in an emergency, which goes back to World War II. And so we can all remember, even if it's only from watching Dad's Army, that there was a certain kind of personally quite enjoyed enforcing the blackout regulations. And those same people or their grandchildren suddenly had a wonderful opportunity to be

busy bodies about COVID. But I think you're right to identify that we basically copied the Chinese lockdown model. But that was the wrong China to copy. The right China was the Republic of China, Taiwan, which had done the winning combination of mass testing very early on, contact tracing, and isolation of the infected. But the Taiwanese were basically ignored by the World Health Organization because it's so much enthralled to Beijing. And so nobody paid much attention to what the Taiwanese were doing.

It was actually brilliant, and it worked really, really well. So we copied the wrong China, unfortunately. Let me just follow up on this, Francis. So if this is what we've done, and I care passionately about civil liberties, I come from the Soviet Union where we had very few of them. I know how precious they are and what happens when they're not protected by society. As a historian, what is the impact of adopting wholesale an authoritarian methodology into a liberal society? because it strikes me that in the context of China,

this may not have even been seen particularly by the people as something vastly different from their day-to-day lives. But in the West, this is unprecedented, and it worries me that we may have broken something. The contract that the public have with government may be affected for a very long time by this. What do you think about that? A hugely important question.

At the end of the book, I say the biggest danger that we face is not actually climate change. I take that seriously, but it's not the biggest danger. The biggest danger that we face is totalitarianism, because totalitarianism was responsible for more avoidable death in the 20th century than anything else. The totalitarian regimes killed their own people, and they killed other people, and they did it on a massive scale.

Whether you're talking about Stalin, Hitler, or Mao, those regimes were responsible for an insane amount of avoidable death. Unfortunately, we did not kill off totalitarianism at the end of the first Cold War because it survived to fight another day in China. And not only did it survive, but it then flourished, has gone from strength to strength by exploiting the benefits of the market economy without sacrificing dominance of the one-party state. And unfortunately, copying China is a way of important. into free societies the kind of software of the unfree society. I dread to see any more articles of the form. We should learn from China. It's going to be the Chinese century. Look how smart they are because that's just an invitation to import totalitarian ways of doing things. Yes, in the past,

in time of emergency, we have restricted civil liberties. We did it in both world wars, quite drastically actually. But everybody understood in the World Wars that it was a temporary state of emergency that would be ended as soon as the war was over. The problem with doing it in a pandemic is that it's quite easy to argue that, in fact, it's never going to be over because the virus will always be out there. And this is one of the typically totalitarian sounding slogans you hear. There's no safety. It's not over until there's until there are no cases. at all anywhere in the world. Now, if you make that argument, you will be able to justify COVID restrictions forever. And I do think this has been an opportunity for a power grab by state bureaucracies.

Even in countries that are nominally under conservative leadership, in the US, it's very obvious. In the US, the Democratic Party at the state level, sees the opportunity to expand its control over citizens. California is a strange place. It's a one-party state, oddly enough. here. And the Californian Democrats really do quite like blocking people up in their homes. They seem to enjoy it, rather as I think the Scottish National Party do. And this is a very disturbing tendency to me, because it suggests that it's possible to have totalitarian behavior without a big brother-like dictatorship, because there are people who actually enjoy it. If that's the case, there are two ways in which were threatened by totalitarianism. One, if China becomes the world power, if China,

it becomes dominant, we're threatened by it. But we're also threatened by totalitarianism from within, because it do seem to be people who quite enjoy informing on their neighbors or their colleagues. And there do seem to be bureaucrats for whom there's no greater pleasure than to impose new restrictions on individual liberty. And is that surprise you, Neil, that there's some people who grew up in the tolerant, you know, the tolerant liberal West who've got a real thirst for authoritarianism? I wish I could say that I'd seen this coming and that it doesn't surprise me because obviously we love to be pre-sent. But I did not anticipate, particularly when I went into academic life back in the 1980s, the universities would become the places where free speech was most limited in our societies.

That I did not see coming. And I didn't see it coming even 10 years ago. So I think one of the things I've learned in the last few years. years. Really, I think it began to dawn on me in about 2016, is that you can have totalitarianism from the grassroots up. It's not necessary to have a Stalin for people to start to engage in the behavior we associate with Stalin's Soviet Union, that culture where you inform on people and officials then use a non-due process to cancel people. Cancellation is a little like being purged in the Soviet Union. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me there are

totalitarian behaviors, which kind of originated in academic life, that are spreading outwards into the rest of society. You know, there are aspects of university life that one sees, which are very reminiscent of the cultural revolution in China, where professors are sort of accused by their students and have to humiliate themselves with apologies and then struggled with and then purged, cancelled from the internet. All of this is going on without there being Big Brother. And that I don't think I would have predicted, even as recently as the 2015. And Neil, since you bring it up, it's slightly aside from the subject of your book,

but we'd be remiss not to ask you about this. Depending on who you talk to, we've recently had Mary Eberstadt on the show who talked about identity politics stemming from the sexual revolution, the breakdown of the family, the breakdown of community, you get atomized individuals. As a result, people look for belonging and they look to their identity. Other people would argue it's the long march

through the institutions. The neo-Marxist invade and infiltrate the university and education system and indoctrinate young people with that. Where does this woke culture come from, in your opinion, as a historian? I think there's some truth in both those. hypotheses, but I'm strongly attracted to a phrase that a left wing, but left liberal writer came up with this, Mattie Iglesias, is great awokening. A wokeism as a religious quality to it, and in some ways it's part of a long American tradition of periodic religious revivals when the

country's Puritan roots manifest themselves, and there is a sort of part of American culture that does yearn to ostracize people, if not to actually burn witches. And I think one of the ironies of all of this is that what Margaret Atwood envisaged in the Handmaid's Tale, which was a kind of right-wing dystopia, has actually happened or begun to happen on the left instead. And I think that's really the crux of the matter, this has a quasi-religious quality to it. And one of the signs of this is that the belief system that involves various strange uses of language and strange rituals that are designed really to separate the elect, the true believers in wokeism, from everybody else. Now, you said this was a little bit of a sideline, but it's not actually, if you're talking about the history of disaster as doom does, it's clear that one of the most disastrous periods in modern history was in fact in the 17th century when the 30 years war happened.

And the 30 years war was a kind of culmination of about 130 years of deep religious division, beginning with Martin Luther's reference. And there's a sense in which we're kind of in that world today, even if it's not religion, so much as the secular religions of politics that are really being fought over. But we've left behind that period that I feel I belong to, the period in which you could have free speech and you debated and you debated pretty aggressively. But there was a sort of argument plus evidence approach to resolving differences. When you go back to the 17th century, that's not possible because you just say that the other side are heretics. And what do you do with heretics? You burn them. So we are in a kind of much more religious moment than we perhaps realize because we assume that we're talking about politics. Actually, the way people talk about politics in an American university is much more like the way they talks about religion in the 17th century. And doesn't it also give voice to the lie that we tell ourselves that,

we live in a post-religious society. We don't need religion. We have science. But this embrace of wokeism shows us that we actually do. We need a belief system in order to adhere to it, to give us meaning. It is not the case, sadly, that G.K. Chesterton said, the trouble with atheism is not that men believe in nothing. It's that they believe in anything. He didn't actually say that. That's one of these quotes attributed to him that nobody can quite claim to have authored. But it's a very good insight. And Chesterton thought something along these lines. Post-Christian Europe and increasingly post-Christian America,

sadly for Richard Dawkins and other militant atheists, is not a place where the principles of the Enlightenment are universally embraced, quite the opposite. In fact, these post-Christian societies seem to be amenable to all kinds of wild superstitious belief. We talked a little bit about conspiracy theories before, but it's sort of broader than that. And people who think that they're invoking the science, and this is a dreadful term, actually, because there is no such thing as the science, are very very. very often, in fact, enthralled to some legacy religious belief, of which the best example is

clearly the millinarianism, the belief in the imminent end of the world, which has found a new home in radical environmentalism. So it's impossible not to see as an historian that the religious undertone of much that someone like Greta Toonberg says. And indeed at times, she seems like some child saint from the Middle Ages sent to warn of the impending apocalypse. So, yeah, I think one of the other things that the pandemic revealed was that the people who talk most about the science are in fact anything but scientific in their approach, are in fact, I think, enthralled to some version of religion without even being aware of it. Where do we go from here, Neil?

because you invoke the example of the 30-year war, as you say, the culmination of a longer religious struggle. You make the parallel with our modern society now. Where are we going? One of the conclusions of the book is that we nearly always are well-prepared for the wrong disaster. And one can sense that enormous efforts are going to go in over the next 10 years to discussing climate change, again, which was what we were doing back in January 2020. when a pandemic was actually beginning. I think we've decided that that's going to be our disaster, and we're going to spend a lot of time and energy preparing for it.

And history warns us that you don't get the disaster that you prepare for. So where do we go from here? I think the biggest, nearest, most likely danger is some kind of major conflict. And it can take a number of different forms, but I'd put my money on a U.S.-China conflict, because all the ingredients are there now for a superpower showdown, which nobody will quite intend to escalate, but which will nevertheless do so. I think that that's a disaster we're not giving nearly enough thought to, partly because we've got used to wars being small things that don't really affect us directly. We've forgotten what a really big war looks like.

But I worry about what would happen if there were an escalation over, let's say, Taiwan. And we had full-blown cyber warfare. Now, what we don't know is just how much the other side could disrupt our own critical infrastructure. But my guess is way more than we assume. And the worry is that in the case of a US-China conflict, there would be really significant disruption of our internet capabilities. There would also be a massive dissemination.

of disinformation and misinformation, because the Russians already know how to do that well, and the Chinese are getting better at. I think in the short one, while we're having our conferences about climate change, which is a relatively slow-moving problem, there is a near-term and very disruptive scenario of conflict with China. And that's why I said earlier that totalitarianism is really the big worry, because this is a very, very well-armed totalitarian regime now, and it's much richer than the Soviet Union ever was, much closer to us in terms of gross domestic product. So you ask what's next? I think that's the kind of crisis that is pretty imminent. Of course, it might not escalate. The Biden administration might just fold if the choices between fighting for Taiwan or not fighting, and they may just decide that the midterms are more important. But that would be a major seismic shift in the geopolitical order. And China would really, at that point, have become the dominant global power. surely as the US was after the sewers crisis. So I worry a bit about an American sewer crisis over

Taiwan. That wouldn't necessarily lead to enormous numbers of deaths. But I think the loss of American dominance would have all kinds of unforeseeable consequences if the winner was China. And, Neil, understandably, this interview has been, I wouldn't say doom and gloom, but let's, let's say, a pessimistic appraisal of what's been happening. But look, they have, when they have, when there's pandemics, there's always things that happen afterwards, positives that happen. Are there any particular positives that you could look to see, looking back at history that could come out of this pandemic? I'd love if you just said no. It's a bit like a joke, isn't it? A Russian and Englishman and a Scotsman went into a chat room.

And of course, the Scotsman's going to be like Private Fraser from Dad's Army, oh, I were doomed. And part of the point of calling the book doom was to make a bit of fun of myself and of world history because really the major point of the book is we're not doomed. The end of the world has been predicted countless times and it has not happened. And even the worst disasters, don't kill everyone. Even the black death couldn't even get to half of humanity. It probably managed about a third at most. So we survive.

We're remarkably resilient, even despite our own stupidity. And when we come out of a disaster, we will come out of this disaster. We're coming out of it now. I mean, look at the UK. Deaths are in the low double digits. Pretty soon we'll be in the single digits. And as you come out of a disaster,

you do have the right to have a most terrific party. This is something that I think has already kind of begun. You can feel it happening. It's going to be the most tremendously enjoyable summer. It's almost it doesn't rain the whole time in England. And that will extend, I think, until really the autumn. And if we're lucky and there isn't some kind of recurrence of the pandemic in the winter,

we're going to feel really quite cheerful because we're going to get back all that was taken away from us, including above all else, the opportunity to be gregarious. Won't it feel great when we can actually go to the foote and sing again? Because singing and hurling abuse at the other team's fans are great sources of pleasure in British life, that we've been deprived of. I hate football without fans. It is a deeply unmoving spectacle, even although I dutifully watch.

So there's a lot that's going to feel great, just in the same way as when you stop beating your head against a brick wall. It's really quite a relief. The question is, how long will it last? I mean, my friend Nicholas Christarkas talked about the roaring 20s coming back, and I think that's wishful thinking, because I think the economy will roar for the second half of 2021, and then we'll start realizing that it's actually a little pricier than it looks to come back from a pandemic.

But yeah, I'm definitely going to have a very, very fun summer, see my kids and my mum, and my friends whom I haven't seen for a year and a half. And I think this is the thing to, this is the note to end on. I mean, the great thing about doom is you worry about it a lot. Sometimes you kind of read about it almost for pleasure. But then you survive and there's a kind of spring in your step thinking, I was one of the lucky ones. Well, there you go. Most of you are going to die, but some of you will be fine, and that is the message of this interview.

Neil. All of us are going to die, not maybe from Peter Thiel. But it's just a question of when, and ideally not today. Not today. Neil, thank you so much. We're going to ask you a couple of questions for locals, but before we do, we have our usual last question for you. Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? I learned in writing Doom that there have been periods in history in which volcanic activity

has had a huge impact on human life. The late 1,100s to the late 1,200s, there was a time of extraordinary global cooling because of huge numbers of volcanoes going off. And we haven't had a big volcanic eruption since 1815, so, you know, 200 plus years ago, which was Mount Tambora. So I'm kind of, every time I see a volcano story in the papers, I sort of see. it up, wondering if it's going to be a real big one. But yeah, that's something we don't think nearly enough about.

But I spent the pandemic right next to the Yellowstone Supervolcano location. If that thing went off, which it hasn't done for a very, very long time, then, I mean, you'd have to cancel the conferences on global warming because that would no longer be the problem. Excellent. You can look forward to the earth exploding as well. Fantastic stuff. Well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on.

The book is called Doom. Thoroughly recommend it. And thank you all for watching. We will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or a show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.