Konstantin Kisin | How Technology Changes Culture And How We Should Respond | OAP #43
Chase Geiser is joined by Konstantin Kisin.
Konstantin Kisin is a host of TRIGGERnometry, a free speech YouTube show and podcast.
"We believe in open, fact-based discussion of important and controversial issues.
Konstantin and Francis create fun-but-serious conversations with fascinating guests, including former Presidential advisors and political experts, leading economists, psychologists, journalists, social and cultural commentators, YouTubers and others. We give our guests a chance to say what they think and explain why.
OUR MISSION
Society moves forward through the open discussion of ideas. Name-calling, gotcha-journalism and phoney politicians drive us apart. Our mission is to bring people together by facilitating free speech, understanding and encouraging all sides to listen to each other."
EPISODE LINKS:
Chase's Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/realchasegeiser
Konstantin's Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/KonstantinKisin
TRIGGERnometry's Twitter: https://twitter.com/triggerpod
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard, Mr. Gorbachev teared down this war.
A date which will live in infamy.
I still have a dream.
Good night and good luck.
Good night and good luck.
Hey, hey, hey, thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me.
I love your countdown, man.
It takes me back to the good old days of my people against your people in the world for survival.
I know.
Yeah.
so I, I wanted to ask you actually, um, I listened to a little bit of your podcast just to kind of get, get prepared and get a little bit familiarized with what you've, you've been working on.
And I wanted to ask you, Is there anyone in the United Kingdom that is still really bitter about the revolutionary war?
I don't think so.
I think you you guys make a much bigger deal about it than we do.
And when I said my people, by the way, I was talking about the Soviet Union, of course, which is where I'm originally from.
So really I didn't realize you grew up in the Soviet Union.
Yeah, that's why I'm from.
But I moved to the UK when I was about 11.
Um, so yeah, I actually it's funny.
In Britain, no one seems to care about uh the loss of America.
You guys are very keen to talk about it, though.
Well, we uh it the thing is though, I I don't know if you if if you're familiar with this, but uh nobody in the United States uh holds holds anything against Britain at all.
But it's it there's just a tremendous amount of pride.
It's like, look what we did, you know, so it was the strongest empire in the world, and there were only a little or only a few of us, you know.
It's very accurate, very accurate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So um uh what year would it have been when you were 11 then that you uh moved from the Soviet Union?
Well, I don't I don't know if I I was 11.
I think the first time when I came to the UK was 11.
I probably moved over when I was about 13 in 1995.
Uh so after the war.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was it was once Russia was already independent, which is uh, you know, my dad for a very short period of time was quite wealthy because it was that period of time when the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and if you were smart and creative, um you could make quite a lot of money very quickly.
So my parents could afford to send me to uh a private school here in the UK, which is how I ended up here.
So basically he just sold a lot of AK-47 ammo on on the black market.
Yeah, I think if he was selling AK-47 ammo, we'd still be rich, which unfortunately isn't the case.
So was it what was it like growing up in the Soviet Union?
Uh I mean, that's a big question, isn't it?
Uh I suppose it kind of depends what what angle you want to cover it from.
Uh it was a very interesting experience in terms of not only my own experience growing up in the Soviet Union, but also talking to my family, my parents, my grandparents about the stuff that they'd experienced over the previous decades.
And I think that has informed a lot of my thinking about the importance of freedom, the importance of uh, you know, freedom of speech, all of these things which we didn't really have.
Um and uh that was a big kind of formative uh part of my education and my growing up, the the realization that societies very often uh become tyrannical, that revolutions aren't necessarily a good idea.
We talked about your revolution, which was obviously quite a success, uh, but not always.
Sometimes they end up uh causing more more damage than and more problems than they solve.
Uh so yeah, that was a that was a big part of my my uh childhood experience.
Yeah, I was talking to a friend uh about the revolutionary war, and uh, because that's all that Americans do is talk about the revolution.
And uh and um uh we were trying to figure out why it is that ours worked out, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that when we started the revolution, we already sort of had like government in place.
There was already Continental Congress, and there was already like a fairly clear vision of what we wanted the United States to look like, you know, in in the event that we won the war.
Uh but it seems like a lot of these revolutions that we saw in the 20th century were sort of spontaneous, and then when it was over and the revolutionaries won, it was like, okay, now what?
It was a disaster, you know.
Well, the the real the real reason I think is that the the American uh the war of independence, it was a war of independence, it wasn't actually a revolution.
You were not overthrowing right the government, you were separating physically from a government that was governing you from very very far away if you'd overthrown the British government and tried to replace it with another system you'd probably have the same clusterfuck that we had in in in Europe uh so it was more the fact that you guys had your own territory which you decided you wanted to self-govern uh and you chose to govern it by a set of rules that you you democratically imposed on the country so uh I think that was probably the main reason more than anything else.
That makes sense.
Why is it that there's still so much uh like reverence and fascination with the royal family in the UK I have no idea man I it's something I've been trying to understand in the 20 plus years I've lived in this country I have absolutely no idea I'm I'm someone who's very happy for the monarchy to exist I just I refuse to care about it.
It's funny happy for it to exist but totally like neutral that's yeah that's that's interesting.
So does the does the royal family actually have any power because whenever I ask Americans about this I can't figure it out.
They don't have any power but they but doesn't the queen have a tremendous amount of land the queen has the royal family has land and wealth etc but uh I I suppose it depends what you mean by power.
I mean she's obviously someone who contacts comes into contact with the prime minister of this country uh who's equivalent of your president right so that there's uh by having access to him or her she she obviously has the ability to have a conversation but uh the the the the monarch is is by law required not to interfere in that sort of thing so uh I I don't believe that they have much power in terms of actually shaping the political decisions that are made or anything like that.
So what do you think would happen?
What if there was a king that were to come to power in the UK and he just decided to claim power?
Would there be a certain number of citizens that would support that?
No.
No?
I mean, look, there might be three.
You know, it's like the Pope though, right?
Like the Pope doesn't have any real power, but there's a tremendous amount of influence there, right?
Well, the Pope has a lot more power than the Queen uh yeah but I I don't look we have a constitutional monarchy the the the sovereign the monarch is by law excluded from any political decision so yeah uh I I think that's uh that's an unlikely scenario and they certainly wouldn't go under much support.
So when you interact with family and friends that were in the Soviet Union throughout the 80s and late 20th century, does the conversation ever steer toward comparing what was going on there to what's happening now?
Or is it just so radically worse that it's sort of not even mentioned that similar things are happening?
Because I'm concerned about things like censorship that are happening, especially with social media platforms and the conglomeration of big business and government merging.
And it seems to me that there's a lot of anti-freedom things that are happening.
Obviously, it hasn't gotten to the point where there's just absolute tyranny, but it does seem like there's an erosion going on.
Does that conversation ever come up in circles of people who have actually experienced what the end of these paths look like?
Well, you know how they say history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
I think that's kind of where we are, where no one, I think, would credibly suggest that we've got, you know, 1930s Germany or 1930s Soviet Union going on.
But, you know, the reality is that the authorities, the government will always tend towards accumulating power and wielding it for what they see as the greater good.
And if you allow that to happen, if you don't stand up against it, it will happen.
So I think one of the things you're seeing now is with COVID, with lockdowns, et cetera, the governments of our countries have had an excuse to meddle and interfere in our lives more.
In the UK, I don't know to the extent to which this is true in your country, but in the UK, it seems like a large percentage of the citizenry have embraced this interference in their lives.
They've happily surrendered their civil liberties and are demanding that other civil liberties are surrendered, are demanding that other people are made to do things that they want to, don't want to do in order to keep them safe.
quote unquote uh and and so yeah of course the the there are some resonance with people who've experienced uh the restriction of their freedoms in the past to go, well, we don't want to slide into this authoritarianism now.
And by the way, if you look at things like opposition to vaccine passports, opposition to mandatory vaccination, et cetera, it's not the stroke, it's strongest in countries which have experienced totalitarianism.
You know, in Russia, in Ukraine, parts of the world where I have family, uh, people are not in favor, to put it very mildly, of the government telling them what they must put in their body or uh forcing them to prove that they've been vaccinated in order to go to a restaurant, whatever.
So yeah, I think this is one of the things that I, someone who comes from a uh a communist country that always boggled my mind.
I've got these 18-year-olds in America now telling me that you know real communism hasn't been tried and uh and all of this sort of stuff.
Uh uh and uh, you know, is someone who comes from that sort of place.
I have an outsider's perspective, I think.
Um, I talk to a lot of people who are like, well, I you know, I don't understand why you're concerned about the government potentially taking away your freedoms.
And I'm like, well, yeah, you wouldn't, because it's never happened to you before.
But but you have a responsibility, I think, to broaden your mind beyond your own experience and to go, what's actually happened in history in the past, what can we learn from?
Uh, what are some of the critical signs of a government that is becoming authoritarian beyond what a citizen should should allow?
Uh, and to me, you know, the line we're at now, which is uh essentially moving towards forcing you to put things into your body that you may or may not want to put into it, that is that is a point where I'm like, hold on a second, I'm not sure this is a good idea.
And you know, I'm I'm very pro-vaccine for people who uh who are vulnerable because of their age or because of their clinical situation, but uh it's the mandatory nature of it and and the forced element of it and the coerced element of it that troubles me a lot.
And I think it should trouble a lot of people.
Yeah, you know, and there's always sort of this comparison or or dichotomy between safety and freedom, right?
So you how much freedom are you willing to give up or sacrifice to increase your safety?
And it was always obviously that in the event of tremendous danger, you know, people would be more willing or susceptible to exchanging uh civil liberties rights for some sort of government protection.
But what's alarming to me is how uh eager people are to do it in in the face of um very little danger.
So I'm not underplaying, I'm not downplaying uh the danger of COVID per se, but if you look specifically at um the debate in America about whether or not we should be forcing children to wear masks or get vaccinated, it's really interesting to me because I have a close friend who's on the opposite side of the political spectrum and very involved in politics here in the United States, and we were having this debate uh via text last night.
And you know, I looked at the data uh from the CDC, and only 349 Americans under the age of 18 have died of COVID since 2020.
And if you look at those numbers for under 18-year-old, then you're more likely to die from the flu or pneumonia, right?
And so it's like if you're gonna force kids to wear masks in school because of COVID, then you should have been forcing them to wear masks the whole time because there are several things that are more dangerous and more common outside of that.
So, like, why is it that this perceived danger is so great psychologically that you're willing to you know force a kid to wear something on their face all day, like uh it just makes me so uncomfortable.
Yeah, and look, uh there are many, many different answers to that.
I think one of them is the relationship we have with death in the Western world, it's something that we put out of sight and out of mind.
Uh, if you if you take all the people who are dying and you put them in institutions that are designed for that, to which normal people almost never go and don't experience, then the fact that death is inevitable and is normal and is part of life uh doesn't feel the same way.
And therefore anything that comes along, uh no matter how, as you rightly say, how dangerous or not dangerous it is, becomes terrifying.
And I also think, you know, this is something that Jonathan Hyde has written about.
And if we talk more broadly about some of the political shifts that have occurred in the last 10, 20 years, the the increasing culture of safetyism, the fact that younger and younger people are now being taught that safety is everything, that even if someone says the wrong words in your presence, you are unsafe, uh, conflation of language with physical violence, all of this stuff creates the idea that you must be safe all the time.
When the reality is that human beings have never been safe all the time.
All life involves risk.
Every time you go out of your front door, uh you are unsafe.
Yeah, you could be run over by a bus.
You could you could have a car accident, uh, you could get shot by your neighbor.
Like all sorts of stuff could happen.
And those are risks that you take on every day voluntarily because they're they're factored into your life.
Um and then, of course, is you know, you talk about how many how few Americans under 18 have died of this virus.
This is the part of it that really bothers me.
Uh this is the first time, as far as I'm aware in in the history of humanity that we have attempted to restrict the behavior of some people on this mass scale or force people to take a vaccine, let's say, uh, for the for the benefit solely of others, right?
The vaccine is not there to protect people under 18, because as you rightly say, almost none of them experience serious illness, let alone die from it.
Uh, yet forcing these people to inject a vaccine into their body or to wear masks or to do all these other things, it's just completely unethical and it's morally wrong.
And I always ask people who are advocating for this.
Well, why aren't you for forcing people to donate blood?
Why aren't you forcing for why are you for forcing that or coercing people to do that?
Because donating blood saves lives, right?
Protects the healthcare system.
Uh, it's less risky than taking the vaccine.
Um right?
What why aren't why are you for that?
And and where does that end?
If you go from blood, what about donating kidney?
You've got to.
If you've got a spare, why aren't you saving someone's life for that?
I mean, this way of thinking can be taken pretty far down the line.
And I think that you have to stop right here when you start violating other people's bodily autonomy.
And it's amazing to me as someone who's I'm not obviously not pro-abortion, but I'm against banning it outright.
Uh, you know, for for years, people have screamed about my body, my choice.
That seems to have gone out of the window now.
And now we're very much in the territory of uh your body, my choice, which I I find very strange.
Yeah.
Man, the my body, my choice thing always bothered me about uh with the with the uh abortion debate, because the the argument isn't isn't whether or not a woman can do what she wants with her own body.
The argument is whether or not the fetus is its own body, has its own rights.
Like, you know, so it's just like I I people always take sh cheap shots with with ideas and headlines, and it's just so frustrating to me how there's there's such resistance or reluctance or unawareness around getting to getting down to the crux of what a debate is really about.
And it just it just it's just like two different sort of sides of the same propaganda coin often that are just you lobbing um uh attacks at one another that aren't really right the correct attack.
Right.
Well, it's because people on both sides are not interested in having an honest conversation.
What they really want is to win the fight.
And once once we go from having a discussion to having a fight, then the idea that you should be constructive goes out of the window.
The only thing you want to do in the fight is win.
Uh, in a discussion, you might want to see the other person's point of view uh or the the side of the the story that they want you to hear.
And abortion is a very good example of this because it's an unresolvable issue, right?
And it can be simultaneously true that the take the the abortion is the termination of life, but from a practical reality perspective, it's life that is encased in someone else's body.
And for that reason, you might not want to treat it as murder as you would any other taking of life.
Do you know what I mean?
Uh so it's a very complicated and unresolvable issue.
And I think extremists on both sides want to make it into a conversation that's not really a conversation, it's just a fight.
And that that is symptomatic of many of the other so-called conversations that we're having, when they're not really a conversation anymore, it's just become a political football uh that people fight over.
And and it's very damaging to to to the fabric of our society, I think.
Yeah, and I I I tend to have sort of a Lockean perspective on on liberty and private property rights.
Um, I'm a big fan of second trees and government.
I think that it explains the the need for a state in a very eloquent way, but simultaneously the need for a small state.
And um I don't know, it's just um it's it's interesting to me when we can when considering liberty, because when you sort of make a libertarian argument that people say, Oh, well, should should we legalize all heroin then if you're a libertarian, that people should just be allowed to to do heroin.
And uh as I've gotten older, I've sort of developed a little bit more of a nuanced, though not sophisticated uh perspective on that, because if if you would have asked me when I was 17, I would have had like a really hard-line libertarian answer and been like, yes, it should absolutely be illegal.
I don't care if everybody's a heroin out, it's none of my business.
You know, that would have been kind of my impulsive teenage response.
And now, you know, I I I sort of think that, yeah, we should live in a society where it's legal, but only once our society has gotten to the point where no one would choose to do it.
You know, so like we're not there.
Like you can't just like you can't just legalize it overnight, but like maybe there's like a path where there could be gradual change and cultural change, you know, over the course of many decades or a century or whatever, where you know, we have a society in which the liberty is just maximum, but everybody's sort of mature and responsible enough to make the right choice.
Well, I I would say uh that as you grow older, you might you might find yourself growing out of that position as well.
Uh because good, that's fine.
Yeah, well, right, we all do.
Uh and uh I'm not someone who's ever, I don't think I've ever described myself as a libertarian.
I might have done at one point, but it's certainly a uh a very naive way of thinking, uh as someone who has had elements of that thought in my in my experience.
Um so I'm not a libertarian.
I think there's plenty of areas where uh freedom is not a good thing.
Uh and we we've seen it, you know, particularly whether they think something like the breakdown of the family over the last 60 or 70 years, uh, this extreme pursuit of freedom at the cost of everything else has not been a productive thing.
Uh, I think there's a lot of areas where communitarian action is important.
I think uh things like uh rap rampant inequality like we have in our societies at the moment is damaging to the fabric of our society.
Now, what you do about it, it's different conversation.
But um, I think there's there's good elements to almost every ideology.
Uh it's just about finding the right mix.
Uh so uh I just think all ideology is bad, and you have to come up with a with a custom fit for what you believe and and base that on practicality rather than ideology.
Have you experienced, and pardon my ignorance, have you experienced the same sort of cultural shifts in the United Kingdom that we've experienced here in the United States in terms of the breakdown of the family?
Uh I I think it's probably I don't know the stats exactly.
Sure.
Uh, but but uh we have experienced a massive uh a massive increase in the number of single parents uh in children growing up without uh two parents, particularly without a father, uh and it's having exactly the same impacts as it's had in America in terms of crime,
in terms of uh you know, social disorder, in terms of all sorts of other mental health, you know, all of that, uh all of those things are largely a product of that process, and and we have it on a similar scale, I think to you.
So I want to run, I I have a recent theory that I want to run by you just to see what you think about this, because I've struggled with this for a long time.
Because if you look at like the African American community in the United States and you look at them during the civil rights movement and before, they were sort of like model nuclear families in terms of you know strong Christian values, divorce rates were very low.
And I I was talking to my buddy and I couldn't figure out we were trying to like what happened really, like how do you have such a drastic shift in culture within a short period of time?
And it occurred to me that maybe it correlates with the massive amount of inflation that we had in the 1970s, particularly with going off the gold standard.
Um because if you have a if you have an entire community uh or large swath of a population that is making ends meet, but barely, like paycheck to paycheck, and then suddenly their currency or their the their money is devalued by 10% over the course of maybe three years, 36 months.
That could put them over a threshold where okay, now mom has to work, right?
Or now dad has to work two jobs, so dad's never home.
And it seems to me that what may have caused all these problems that we're having now in terms of racially uh economic uh equality may have spurned from hyperinflation, and then nobody's ever nobody's really putting that together.
Yeah, I don't know enough about uh to comment.
My my take on it is much more uh that it's much more to do with it depends who you talk to.
Different people have different theory.
Some people say what you've just said, other people will talk about the creation of the welfare state in America, certainly.
But given that it's a global trend, uh, I'm less convinced by that argument.
Well, I would argue it's the product of the sexual revolution.
Uh essentially, if women can uh can the sexual revolution has freed men to pursue their biological nature to a large extent.
And a man's biological nature is not to commit to one woman uh and and to have kids with her and to to be there for them to from a purely biological evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for a man to have as many children as he can with as many women as he can.
And I think the sexual revolution has created the ability for men to do that.
Uh, and that I think is probably the largest factor in uh in driving that breakdown of the family, which is happening everywhere.
Uh it's not just it's not just in America, it's not just in the UK, it's not just in the West, actually, it's happening all over the world.
In Russia, where I come from, it's the same.
So I think that and there's a guest we've had on trigonometry called uh Mary Eberstad, who's written the book about the the how the sexual revolution is created identity politics, basically, and all the other stuff that comes with it and why the breakdown of the family is largely a product uh of it.
That's interesting.
What do you think caused a sexual revolution?
Because it's not like people suddenly got way hornier in 1960.
No, no, no.
The sexual revolution is about technology, it's about the invention of contraceptive uh effect of contraception.
Uh just mitigated all the risks drastically, so people started behaving more recklessly.
Exactly.
I mean, recklessly is a judgment call, but uh I would say it has allowed men and women to behave differently.
Uh uh and um and then of course, yeah, if you combine that with a welfare state that uh that essentially ensures that the decision to have a child without a a second parent in the house means you don't starve as you once would have done, pretty much.
Uh it then creates a self-fulfilling uh vicious cycle, which where uh you you you technologically can have as much sex as you want without committing to another person and without having those bonds in place first, right?
Because if you think about the institution of marriage, it I mean you can talk about whether it's patriarchal or not, but partly it's about protecting the woman from the consequences of sex, right?
Right.
It's about saying you're gonna have sex in this way, but the consequences of that, which will inevitably be children, you are protected from the negatives of having children because there's a person there who has committed to undertake that process with you, right?
The moment you take that away and you say, well, that those consequences aren't there for you or for him, it explains why the marriage breaks down because you no longer need to do that, uh, right?
Uh and the product of that seems to be that there are a lot of children who now grow up in in single parent homes, and we know all the statistics about what that causes in terms of likelihood of going to prison, committing crime, for dropping out of school or whatever the numbers are there and they're massively magnified.
So, you know, it's interesting that you mentioned that because uh I hadn't put it together in really a conscious way, but it does it, it makes a lot of sense that technology, particularly in recent cultural history has been perhaps the number one catalyst for cultural change, right?
I mean, if you look at what's happening in the 21st century with with the internet and technology and social media, I mean, it's completely uh morph the way that um human beings are perceiving the human condition.
And I wonder if like you know yet there's sort of a lot of like fist-waving people that are like, we go back to the nuclear family, and it seems to me that it's you know a much more difficult issue than simply whether or not we can convince people that the nuclear family is right.
It seems to me that in order to actually have cultural change, you have to you you have to almost create something with so much momentum that it's an it's an unavoidable.
You can't just sort of will it to happen without uh external factors.
Yeah, technology has always played a huge part in if you think about the invention of the printing press.
I mean, the printing press completely changed the entire history of humanity.
Uh it caused centuries of religious war.
Uh uh, and and if you go back further, many, many, many technological breakthroughs that have happened in human history have generated cultural uh and other consequences of magnitudes that were very difficult to predict at the time that they were being created and social media, big example of some uh of of the technological development and the internet more broadly that is having an impact on the world that nobody could have really predicted.
Uh and yeah, you're right.
I don't think um moralistic uh judgments and telling people that you know they're wrong and bad and evil for for not sticking around or whatever is really going to change that.
But um I mean, who knows?
Who knows what the next technological development will be and what it will cause.
Uh I also think you know, a lot of technology that we now have does allow us to um to make certain breakthroughs culturally, because if you think about the conversation you and I having now, uh there are people who might listen to or a Jordan Peterson interview, for example, about the importance of men taking responsibility or all people taking responsibility for their actions, and the product of that will be that when they have children, they stick around, right?
And to raise those children.
So that is a feedback loop that could be positive rather than negative as well.
So you know, I think it remains to be seen what what what what will happen as a as a product of this.
But but also you know, a lot of people forget that we seem to live in this world where we think society always moves forward, things always getting better.
I I don't necessarily know that that's always true, right?
And if you look at the statistics on mental health and depression and and all sorts of things, I'm not sure that we've necessarily made progress on everything.
Certainly, certain things are better, and our quality of life in many ways is a lot better, but I also think in many ways it's a lot worse.
You know, the the fact that you know, if you look at particularly young people, if you look at the the number of friends they have, or how many of them have no friends at all, the familial bonds, the connections they have with family, uh, all of these things are uh making people more miserable, you know.
So um we'll have to wait and see to see what the impact of these latest technological changes is, and we'll also have to wait and see what the next technological changes are gonna be and what the impact of them is going to be too.
Yeah, and I think that one of the one of the challenges that we face in the United States, particularly, and I don't know what it's like in the United Kingdom, but the United States, we this the conservative faction is is so which which I I lean toward um just for a slew of reasons, not not so much the dogmatism, but other reasons, fiscal particularly.
Um but the there's a tendency to try to hang on to the past and resist change.
And I struggle with that because change is inevitable.
And it seems to me that our problem isn't the fact that things change, is that we don't have the wisdom to respond to change when it happens.
And rather than running away from the coming storm, I think that we need to learn how to run straight through it, you know, uh so that we can come out the other end because these these tech technological advancements are gonna happen, and we we we we have to somehow have the maturity and the wisdom to respond to them in a prudent way.
And I don't I don't know what I don't know what the answer is to it, but we we can't resist change and we shouldn't just blindly embrace it either.
We should just respond appropriately.
Right.
Well, very few people are capable of doing that on either side.
Right now, the political battle lines that seem to be between the two extremes, uh, and the the left extreme is about tearing down the very foundations of our societies uh and replacing them with well, they they have no fucking idea what they want to replace it, where they just want anarchy because they're really unhappy with the status quo.
Uh and as you say, people on the other side of the conversation don't want any change uh and want to go back to the 1960s.
But uh they're actually the they're both minorities of their own wings of the political spectrum.
Uh the rest of us, I think uh are much closer to the middle.
Um and and we we've got big problems to address.
I mean, the the social media, the consequences of the existence of social media on our political landscape are so profound and so damaging in many ways, while also being hugely beneficial, uh, that we're all gonna have to find a way to make peace with them and to move forward.
Uh and that's why the way the conversation is currently being had is not particularly helpful because you just have extremists shouting across everyone and everybody else is just somewhat concerned and afraid about speaking their mind and having a real conversation about the the challenges we face.
Yeah, and it seems to me, and I could be way off base on this, but it seems to me that these sort of radical sentiments that we're seeing are are disingenuous.
Because when I think just historically speaking about when radicalism has really taken hold, it's been during much more desperate times.
So if you look at late 1920s, early 1930s Germany, for example, you're talking about an unemployment rate of you know 30%.
Right.
And when unemployment rate, when an unemployment's at 5%, you know, a significant portion of those unemployed actually have a real problem that can explain why they're unemployed, whether it's mental health or disability or just lack of skills, whatever.
There's there's reasonable reasons those people aren't working, but when it reaches 30%, that means that you have a significant portion of your population that is waking up every morning and going out and trying to find an opportunity and there just isn't one, right?
And so then it makes sense that radicalism would take hold of that.
And like people start pointing fingers when, you know, when you can't feed your family and you're trying to, right?
And it seems to me that things just aren't bad enough now to explain the level of radicalism that we're seeing.
Bad enough for whom?
For the people who are radicalized, right?
So like the leftists who are who are complaining, like want to burn it down, and I agree with you.
That that's definitely the message that I get when I when I see it.
And I don't mean to say leftist as as if as if the right side is like this pure angel.
Because I'm I'm also not like a I don't consider myself Republican either.
But it doesn't, it doesn't seem to me that the level of struggle being faced by uh our most vulnerable communities in the United States in particular, justifies the burning of police precincts all over the country or the burning of cities all over the country.
It's like things aren't bad enough for you to be acting like this yet.
Like maybe they will be, and maybe there is a real problem here, but I I don't understand why you're reacting this severely.
I mean, like with George Floyd, for example, like terrible what happened to that guy.
No evidence it was race-based.
Like, you know, he never used a racial slur.
Like I've the guy was a dick.
Don't get me wrong.
I don't like Chauvin, the cop.
I have a problem with what happened there.
But there was just automatically this reaction as if is if the opposition was like totally convinced of what happened and how evil it was and how this was a systemic issue.
And then the city started burning.
I'm like, whoa, the things really that bad.
And maybe I'm just ignorant and like sort of in like my own privilege, but I don't know.
It just seems bizarre to me that we're seeing this sort of behavior.
I mean, there's a lot to unpack in there in all of this thing.
The first thing I think if you go back to first principles, you know, you talk about well, unemployment causes you know, this sort of radicalism, and but we don't seem to have the same problem.
Well, if you think about uh unemployment, what does it cause the person to experience?
It causes them to experience depression, it causes them to experience hopelessness, it causes them most of all to feel like they are a loser in the society in which the they exist shame, etc.
Right.
So in other words, you've got an animal essentially that feels bad, right?
Yeah.
Now, there are a lot of people in our society right now who feel bad as well, and their reasons may be less obviously uh rational or less obviously visible for us.
But um this is where we come back to the break.
Well, right, if we come back to to the breakdown of the family, there's a lot of people now growing up in in uh in a situation where they have this sort of existential angst, as most people do, about what's happening, but they also they've not really had the loving care of two parents, and that that is something that's difficult to deal with.
Uh they live in a world in which the gap between rich and poor is ever widening, and they see more and more images of billionaires who are out there on yachts and doing whatever else and making more and more money as they get uh either poorer or stay the same.
I don't know whether this is as acute in the in the US, but in the UK, young people are essentially completely locked out of the housing market, which is historically the one form of capital poor people have ever been able to purchase and accumulate and pass down through the generations.
So it's it's not uh lacking in credibility to say that young people growing up now are for the first time in a very long time, uh suddenly in living memory, I would argue, are going to have a worse life in terms of their prospects uh than their parents, right?
Uh and and the promise of America in particular is that you know you can come to the US and there's a first generation immigrant and open a taco stand or or work your ass off as a clean and whatever, but your children will do better and their children will do better.
And by the third or fourth generation, you know, you your your grandson or great grandson could be a senator, right?
That isn't available to many people, or at least it doesn't feel like it's available to many people now.
So I think it's about rampant inequality.
I think it's about the failing education system in the inner cities where you talk about, you know, there's a lot of people growing up who are just completely locked out of normal society.
The they're going to a school where 3% of kids graduate being able to read properly, right?
You're not going to fulfill on your wishes of the American dream if that is the situation you find yourself on.
So while, yes, in terms of the objective statistic statistics, life may be better than it was in the 1930s, and it definitely is.
In terms of people's subjective experience, their feelings about the future may well be very pessimistic.
And of course, we forget as well that people aren't rational.
So people need something to people always need young people in particular, something to fight back against.
And if you run out of real problems, then you will start to generate artificial ones.
And I think there's a combination of those two.
People have a lot of real problems that they can legitimately point to as the source of their anger and frustration and disappointment.
But there are other problems that are underpinning all of their frustrations.
And in addition to that, a lot of people just need something to be angry about.
We always do.
And I think, you know, uh the society we live in has plenty of opportunity for both at the moment.
Do you think the internet has made it easier or more difficult for people to discover the truth about what's going on just generally speaking?
Yes, it has.
It's made it a lot easier and a lot more difficult, I think.
I think I think it's made it easier to discover the truth.
It's also made it a lot easier to discover what you want the truth to be and to believe that.
And it's also made it a lot easier to be misled.
Uh it's one of those things that has a lot of positives and a lot of negatives.
Uh and that's the conundrum that I think we all are struggling with.
Yeah, I I'm often afraid for myself, because you know, when I look at things like the flat earth phenomena that we that we witnessed in recent years where, you know, a tremendous number of people started believing the earth was flat again because that you know they got kind of caught in an echo loop on YouTube watching videos of people making fairly convincing arguments, the earth was flat, and then you know, those arguments were not counterbalanced with the correct argument, right?
And so when you get caught in these echo chambers, you can you can believe ridiculous things for you can have better reasons to believe the wrong thing, you know, uh if you if you're only consuming a certain perspective.
And I wonder, I'm often concerned about trying to identify my own flat earths.
Like, what is it that I believe that I'm just dead wrong about because I'm caught in the and we we almost have them, but and and I I cognitive consciously want to like truth is my priority consciously, but emotionally I don't know that it is.
And so emotionally I I wonder if if I'm just leaning into two ideas and things that make me more comfortable, and I'm I'm becoming a damn flat earther in my own way.
Well, it's almost inevitable.
I mean, the point I would make about the flat earth thing is uh I I would bet you there were far more people in percentage terms in the past who believed wacky and crazy ideas uh than there are now.
Uh the existence of mass communication has amplified the spreading of truth and accurate information.
It's also amplified the spread of wrong and inaccurate information.
Uh, but really what's happened is the visibility of the people who have bought into inaccurate information is far greater.
So it seems like uh there are more of those people, just like uh, you know uh the death of George Floyd, which you mentioned, the killing of George Floyd, a lot of people saw that as representing a system that's in, you know, breaking down and getting worse.
Actually, in the year that it happened, 2020, that was a 30-year low for police uh police shootings or police murder uh killings of of unarmed citizens.
So things are getting better.
The visibility of bad things is getting higher, and therefore that there's the discrepancy there.
And then, of course, yeah, we we we all want to believe the things that make us feel better uh and validate our existing points of view.
Um and it's a challenge.
There's no question about it, it's a challenge.
Uh, and how we deal with it, we don't know.
Uh I certainly don't think the the ideological crackdowns on social media, which we've seen lately are the answer to that.
Um but we we were we we wait and see how the powers that be are gonna resolve that issue.
Well, it's interesting that the the way that you you framed that response sort of made me just consider the inherent evolutionary evolutionary and psychological um features or bugs of of what it is to be human.
And you know, one of the things that's unique about being a human being is for the first time uh on earth that we've seen, we are a species who is capable of changing the environment at a much faster pace than natural selection or adaptation, right?
So we live in a completely different society than we lived in 5,000 years ago uh from an external factor, but biologically we're exactly the same.
So we still have these sort of bugs about how we perceive things, how we stereotype and group and categorize and group things because they were you know useful to our survival some time ago, right?
But they they kind of get in the way, like what you said.
It's like an emotional, it's almost like an emotional or psychological perception issue that we have.
You're you're right, like with the George Floyd thing, or just with police brutality in general.
I mean, you're seeing countless videos of police brutality.
If you just go on the right Facebook group or YouTube channel, you can watch that all day, and then you walk you walk away feeling like police brutality is the biggest problem in the world.
And when the fact of the matter is, if you look at the numbers, it's it's it's getting way better and improving.
But the problem is psychologically, we are designed to respond in an emotional way to these issues and not in in really a logical way.
Or uh just we we just don't happen to be exposed to the actual data at the same time that we're exposed to the emotional catalyst, right?
And so I I wonder how as human beings moving forward as our as our environment continues to change is at an exponentially increased rate, how we can um just kind of exercise the muscle of our will to overcome our biological tendencies that can't keep up with the with the changes in the real world.
And whether we're even capable of that is uh is a whole other question, isn't it?
I I think the there's another piece that I think could be added to your analysis as well, which is that there's a big social contagion element of all of this.
And there's a as a groupthink element of this.
For example, if you cast your mind back to a year ago, uh having the conversation we're having now, even the very mild conversation we're having now about police brutality and George Floyd was very, very difficult for the vast majority of people.
Many lost their job, many were attacked, etc.
For simply stating some obvious facts.
Uh and so a lot of people don't necessarily believe the things that that they're required to believe.
They just say them or uh keep quiet when they are said in their presence because they know the social cost and uh and the social punishment that comes with it.
So it's not just a problem of um knowing what the truth is, it's also a problem of the fact that many people, and this has always been true, don't want you to know what the truth is.
And instead they want you to keep quiet and they don't want you to say what the truth is because it's inconvenient to their agenda, whether political or cultural or otherwise.
Uh so that that's another thing that I think we're dealing with.
The the power of uh groupthink has never been greater than it is now in many ways.
Uh for the same reasons, the existence of mass communication.
So uh we've got a lot of challenges and and how we're gonna work them out remains to be seen.
I don't claim to have any answers on that.
So where can people find you?
Uh I'm at Constantine Kitchen on Twitter, and uh I uh co-host a show with my colleague, another comedian uh called Francis Foster on tri it's called trigonometry.
It's on YouTube and everywhere else online.
Uh check it out.
Thank you so much for uh coming on today.
I really appreciate you taking the time and I really enjoyed our conversation.
