Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Sargon of Akkad BBC Radio 4 Interview

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Oct. 23, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

15:20

The Sargon of Akkad BBC Radio 4 Interview

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	The BBC documentary has now come out and I think it what did you make of it when it when it came out this BBC Radio 4 piece?
	I was genuinely quite pleased with it.
	I mean I thought it could have been a lot worse in my opinion So to prepare for it what happened I sat down with Gavin and we did a three hour interview They took some like five minutes of that interview but I actually I got permission from Gavin to release it afterwards if I wanted which I probably will do because it's not you know they weren't being mendacious or anything like that.
	They were being straightforward and upfront but they operate in an ecosystem where there are certain pressures.
	And I think that's most clearly revealed by their use of Ash Sarkar, the literal communist who revealed herself on Piers Morgan and she was called to give a counterpoint to our perspective.
	So the centrist liberal opinions that we were giving were the offset to.
	That was possibly the most radical leftist you can imagine, and she was making an appeal to the law as morality as well, which was very amusing, as if.
	As if the laws are how we decide what's right and wrong and the laws aren't a product of what we decide is right and wrong which again, it's.
	It's fascinating.
	I'll probably I'll probably do a video of my own to go into that in more depth, but but yeah no, the whole thing, I think, was quite interesting.
	I think it was very.
	It was fascinating how they were talking about our legitimacy and that I found that amazing, as if we need their permission and their, their acceptance of our audiences or our opinions, as if we are not already out competing them on the sheer number of views which again, something they pointed out in the the BBC piece, and the conclusion they came to clearly, very reluctantly, was that yes, these people are legitimate and yes, we are going to have to start speaking to them.
	And I think that they need to ask themselves, why would we need to speak to you?
	Because the numbers are going in our favour and their numbers are not.
	So you know the, the paradigm is changing and I think they need to be aware of that.
	This is something that has struck me since being out of.
	I was in the Channel 4 newsroom for many years and when you're in that kind of environment, it feels like you've got this kind of institutional backing to you, it feels like a very secure place to be.
	But since being outside, I've kind of got a sense of how fragile that ecosystem actually is, because your success I mean you've now got what 800,000 plus YouTube subscribers your success is on on your particular voice, and I think a lot of these new media can we still call it new media maybe kind of it's you let's, let's say, YouTube stars that the success is built on an individual voice, and this is something that mainstream media kind of militates against.
	You you're, you're not judged on your on your individual voice.
	That's why we're out competing them, because we we are.
	We are doing the job they're doing at a much smaller budget and we're reaching more people now and we have more dedicated viewers.
	I would say one of the one of the the great benefits that was this was something that was highlighted in the Alternative influencer Network report that the youtubers have a more personal connection to their audience, Audience, their audience, because every video has a comment section, they like, dislike, bar, this, you know, you know, they can easily contact us, they can message us on any social media platform.
	So your audience is very keen to give you feedback.
	And if they feel that you're going off the rails and they're doing something awry, they'll be the first to tell you.
	And it's one of the reasons that I don't do any kind of corporate sponsorships, in fact.
	I like to know that I'm beholden only to the people who are paying me.
	And the people who are paying me are my audience.
	I have a Patreon account, they donate however much money they want.
	If they like what I'm doing, they want to keep it going.
	And so they're the people I have to serve.
	I don't have anyone I can't say a thing about.
	So I'm free to say exactly what I want, presuming it's legal.
	And the audience that I think each YouTuber finds is the audience that expects them to do that.
	To defend the kind of the media platforms that I was part of for quite a while, there is a sense of like real journalism is something that's slightly different from the commentary side of things.
	But I think what's really striking is the idea that there's a kind of belief within the organs of the mainstream media that they are there, they have no biases.
	I think this is what it's shown up more than anything: is that actually there is a kind of group think, there is a kind of perspective that a lot of the people in the mainstream media are denying.
	And that's what the success of these new media platforms is really showing.
	Like there are ways of thinking that are probably socially enforced as much as forced via any other medium.
	Undoubtedly.
	I mean, so social enforcement of these ways of thinking is the primary method by which they proliferate.
	And it's the public shaming, it's the personal attacks, it's the fact that they'll try and get you fired from your job if you happen to have a dissenting opinion.
	I mean, there really should, in a healthy media environment, there would be no room for someone like me or Paul Jesse Watson, you know, because anything we were going to say would already be being said by whatever legacy media platform that we're talking about.
	They should have a space for these things.
	But instead, they've decided to partition off parts of the dialogue and say, right, this is the concept of the open window.
	This is the acceptable bound of conversation.
	You can say anything within this thing.
	This is very much what Noam Chomsky talks about as well.
	But the problem with doing that is as soon as you say, right, this is the acceptable bound of conversation, you become the gatekeeper.
	And now you have to be aware of everything that's outside of that.
	But you also have to be able to guarantee to everyone watching and the people who are requiring you to be the voice that holds power to account, you've got to be able to guarantee to those people that the things that you leave out of your dialogue deliberately will never become a political issue.
	And if they do become a political issue, what can you do?
	You've already said, I've predetermined this is not something we will talk about.
	And so you leave the field open to people who don't do that and who are prepared to discuss anything, no matter how uncomfortable that is.
	And I'm one of those people.
	Yeah, I think Radio 4 did as good a job as probably anyone within the mainstream media could have done to kind of pull apart these ideas.
	And it was really interesting.
	Sorry, yeah, just to jump in, yeah.
	I think one of the things I think a lot of people watching that won't consider.
	Sorry, listening to that, sorry.
	I'm used to YouTube.
	Won't consider that is the while it seems like an unfriendly piece towards us, it actually wasn't.
	It didn't misrepresent us.
	Excuse me.
	It actually wasn't an unfriendly piece.
	It didn't misrepresent us, but it was couched in the sort of cultural norms of the far left, which is why they had Ash Sarkar representing the dissident narrative to what we were saying.
	But I noticed that they confirmed almost everything we said next.
	I mean, for example, I said, well, you know, if you want to talk about victim classes, if you want to talk about people who are marginalized, who are pushed out of the mainstream, then you're talking about us.
	You know, I mean, you can find any kind of progressive group, any kind of marginalized group is well represented as long as it falls within the progressive purview of reality.
	As soon as you're outside of that, then they'll do everything they can to actively marginalise you.
	And it's only because of the years of the grinding work we've done, doing the solid work, putting out solid videos, giving good ideas for it, putting good ideas forward, that we've managed to essentially force them to acknowledge we even exist.
	And then it's like, oh, God, how are we going to approach these people?
	Because they would love it if we came from within the paradigm with which they work.
	They want to be able to say, well, we have a plan for society and therefore.
	And they want us to say, well, we have a plan for society and therefore.
	Where in fact, we actually come from a completely radically different paradigm where we're essentially coming from society and saying, we're not interested in your plans.
	We want to be left alone.
	We don't want you to play social engineer and sit there and try and make the people you see on TV proportionally representative of anything.
	We want these people to be chosen on merit and be chosen on hard work to show that they're actually worth listening to and worth watching.
	But that's not what you're doing.
	And so we're very difficult for them to kind of respond to.
	That's why they would love for us to be part of the alt-right.
	They would love that because the alt-right are just the mirror image of the progressive left.
	They think that race, gender, sexuality, these are all legitimate vectors by which the state and society should command the people within it to do things.
	Just when you say we, who are you referring to?
	the classical liberals, you know, we're the people who want autonomy, effectively, compared to, I mean, for example, I did an interview recently.
	In the interview, I said, well, what do you think that women's role in society should be?
	Well, whatever they want it to be.
	It depends on each individual woman, what she wants to do with her life and how she wants to interact with other people.
	That's a negotiation that individuals have across all of society.
	I mean, that's what we call society.
	And so, yeah, I'm not for some kind of effectively social planning.
	I'm not for telling people how to live their lives.
	I'm more interested in making sure people are free to live the life that they want to live as long as they're not hurting other people and it's not causing something detrimental to society as a whole.
	It felt like a rearguard action.
	The Radio 4 piece.
	It felt like a rearguard action.
	They were realizing that something was coming and it may have already passed them by and they realized that the ground has shifted underneath them.
	And I think it's this kind of institutional insularity that's caused this.
	The idea that they think they could gatekeep between what people want and what the public receives.
	And they see themselves, I think, as a key link in that chain.
	The fact that we can just go straight to the public.
	It's the same with Donald Trump's Twitter account.
	In fact, they were calling for so long to have Donald Trump banned from Twitter.
	Twitter knew they couldn't do it.
	They knew they couldn't do it.
	No matter what Donald Trump tweets, he's on there for as long as he wants to be.
	And this is a problem for the media gatekeepers.
	And they are very much aware that they are gatekeepers.
	I mean, there's academic literature that goes through all these ideas.
	They openly refer to themselves as gatekeepers.
	They understand that that's their role.
	And the internet is acting like the Gutenberg printing press.
	It's destroying that.
	We're moving into a new paradigm where it's not just going to be the priests in the church who have the sole access to the interpretation of the Bible.
	And they're seeing the results of that.
	It's exactly the same phenomenon, where now new information is coming out that has been essentially kept invisible from people.
	And now the paradigm is changing and they don't like it.
	And I don't blame them.
	I wouldn't like it.
	I'm sure when it happens to me, I won't like it either.
	But that's life.
	The thing that I find quite difficult to understand is that this kind of worldview was decisively rejected twice by Brexit and by the election of Trump.
	This kind of assumption, which I've called the liberal shadow, this idea that we're completely inclusive to everybody apart from those people who we judge as bigoted.
	And even if you don't bring sort of morality into it, whether it's right or wrong, it's clearly not working.
	And it's clearly like this idea of kind of constant progression to sunlit liberal uplands was interrupted by these two events that just didn't compute for the mainstream media, didn't compute for the liberal consensus.
	So at least I would hope for some kind of self-reflection of what is it that we're doing wrong?
	What is it that, and I don't really see very much of that at the moment.
	One thing I think is worth paying attention to is their focus on language.
	I mean, they're very interested in policing people's language because they're well aware that language is thought.
	All thought is within the confine of language and you can't escape that.
	And so they are very quick to go after certain phrases, certain words.
	They are the ones who are pro-hate speech laws.
	And they're very concerned about the things you say to one another and they want to police that.
	And so I think that we shouldn't do them the service of calling them liberal because they're not.
	They're illiberal in many different ways.
	They're very progressive, but that's not the same thing.
	And the reason I think this is important is because it allows people like Ash Sarkar to be considered part of the liberal elite.
	She's not a liberal.
	She would never accept that label.
	She would reject it categorically.
	And a liberal would never look at a communist, a literal communist, and say, well, that's a liberal.
	That's an anti-liberal.
	That's someone who's against what liberals actually want.
	So I think that we should definitely avoid even deigning to give them the term.
	And I think this is the case because after the 20th century, liberalism was the only ideology left standing with any moral credibility.
	Communism and fascism have both failed catastrophically.
	And the worst human disasters in all of history were because of continental collective ideologies like fascism and communism.
	So the idea that a communist, a literal communist, can be called a liberal is, I don't want to say offensive, but it is offensive to me.
	And I think that we should be careful of that.
	And I know I've dodged your question.
	Do you want to repeat it?
	It was more about, I guess I was using the words the liberal consensus as a kind of shorthand.
	And I guess what I meant by that is the kind of the ideology that we talked before about David Goodhart, his work where he talks about the somewheres and the anywheres.
	And that's a really good way of kind of looking at it.
	This anywhere idea of an achieved identity.
	You can move between any kind of European capital city and you get your identity from your qualifications, from your work.
	And the somewheres are people who are much more rooted in their place, they're much more tied to, they're much more relational in terms of, yeah, they get their identity from often their trade and their location and they have family, they have deeper roots.
	And what we are seeing is a real conflict and a split between the anywheres and the somewheres.
	Well, that's a fantastic way of phrasing it.
	And it's very interesting how the identities are formed, isn't it?
	Because you'll notice the anywheres, their identity is entirely within themselves.
	And it's entirely a part of the characteristics they have.
	I mean, when someone says, you're a white male, to me, that's not an identity, that's a description.
	I don't identify as a white male.
	That's just a physical reality that I have to live with.
	I identify as myself as the person.
	And that can be all kinds of things.
	My personal achievements, my personal relations, again, the place that I live.
	All of these things.
	The somewheres have an identity that's made up of things outside themselves.
	And they all come to as a sort of confluence into the individual that they are and their relations with other people.
	But the Anywheres don't do that.
	They say, you know, I'm, you know, they list all of their identities and their bios.
	And you think, well, why did you list those things?
	Why didn't you list other things about you?
	You know, you're five foot seven.
	You know, you're 200 pounds.
	You know, why didn't you list these?
	These are inherent integral parts of you, just like being brown or whatever it is that they're using.
	But again, it's all ideological.
	Thank you.

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