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Nov. 13, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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WINNING FORMULA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep706
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This podcast is brought to you by Coming up, I'll illustrate the principle that when the left is screaming, we must be doing something right.
Political scientist Carol Swain joins me.
We're going to talk about affirmative action in her new book, The Adversity of Diversity.
And I'll examine an important article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who became an atheist in resistance to radical Islam and has now converted to Christianity.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
How do we know when we are successfully pushing back on the police state, in fact, rolling it back, even if marginally, even if in certain areas?
Well, one way we know is when the left starts to scream about it, when the left claims unfair, when the left distorts what is happening but declares that Republicans are doing something awful.
So here's a classic article.
This is actually from NBC News.
How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda.
What are they talking about?
They're talking about the censorship industry, the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda.
As if to say that the job of the censorship industry is merely to block propaganda coming from Russia or China or some other country.
No, the primary function of the censorship industry is to block you and to block me and to control the narrative and to shut down dissenting voices on a whole set of issues.
In fact, to shut down truthful voices.
That's why they came up with the phrase called malinformation.
Malinformation is accurate information that nevertheless is damaging to the left.
So let's say, for example, I say, even if you take the vaccine, you can still get COVID. True.
Even if you take the vaccine, you can still give somebody COVID. True.
but it's malinformation because after all if a lot of people come to believe that they may be unwilling to take the vaccine. In other words my comment may introduce vaccine hesitancy and that's what makes it quote dangerous and that's what makes it malinformation and susceptible to censorship. So now you read this article And the article itself is disinformation.
I mean, it's actually so twisted that the premise of it, the headline of it, is all deceitful.
A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials, and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation as fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks.
Now, this raises an interesting question.
If you've got this coalition and their focus has been on stopping foreign disinformation, why would Republicans want to stop it?
Why would they try to block it?
They wouldn't. But the truth of it is, that's not what this censorship industrial complex is all about.
It's about shutting down conservatives.
So no surprise, conservatives have been speaking out, have been objecting, have been doing what we should do here, suing.
And here the article references the Missouri v.
Biden case, which resulted both in a district, a federal judge, but also an appellate court.
Putting restrictions on the Biden administration.
Now, those restrictions are on hold pending a Supreme Court review.
But the point here is that these government agencies are seeing the writing on the wall.
They're seeing if we couldn't win on the federal court level and we couldn't win on the appellate court level...
Good luck to us, i.e.
we're not likely to win on the Supreme Court level.
So they've already started pulling back.
So here's the article.
The most recent setback, and see again, we have to decode these articles.
When they say setback, it's actually progress.
So the most recent setback came when the FBI put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies.
Beautiful. That's very good that they're doing that.
Then they talk about how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, called CISA, has, quote, halted its outreach to Silicon Valley.
And they quote somebody from CISA saying, it's not really worth it.
We're really not doing much of that anymore.
We've kind of shut it down.
Again, great news, but presented in the article as regrettable news as if Republicans are mucking up a very healthy effort to block foreign disinformation.
And then finally, the Department of Homeland Security, and I mentioned before that's bigger than the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security is also shutting down some of its censorship operations.
So all of this is excellent news.
It's excellent news because essentially the censors...
We better get out of this even before the Supreme Court comes in, because the Supreme Court could come in with a very big hammer, and the Supreme Court could not only shut us down, but shut us down in a very decisive way.
So maybe we scale back our operations, and then we go to the Supreme Court and say, we're no longer doing this, we're no longer doing that.
So basically, you don't need to bring the hammer down that hard.
So all of this really is progress.
It's excellent news.
It shows that that censorship is at least on the defensive.
It hasn't been ended. And frankly, even if we win the Supreme Court case, Google can still censor.
YouTube can censor.
Facebook can censor.
They just can't censor with the help of the government.
The government's kind of grubby fingers will be withdrawn from the censorship enterprise.
That alone would be progress.
And then look forward to more articles from NBC News bemoaning the end of censorship.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast our friend Carol Swain.
She's got quite a story.
She was born into poverty in rural Virginia.
She earned five degrees.
She got tenure at Princeton.
She became a full professor at Vanderbilt, where she was a professor of political science and law.
And she's the founder and CEO of Carol Swain Enterprises.
We also want to talk about her new book, The Adversity of Diversity, How the Supreme Court's Decision to Remove Race from College Admissions Criteria Will Doom Diversity Programs.
Carol, welcome. Great to have you.
You know, you and I kind of go pretty far back.
I remember first coming across your work on voting rights.
And this was in the 1990s, I believe.
I was at the American Enterprise Institute at the time.
And so we go back really a few decades now.
And you have been...
A close observer and student and scholar of the way in which this whole affirmative action diversity thing started out maybe in a benign way, but quickly spun out of control.
Let's... Let's talk about the story as it developed from the beginning.
Would you say the starting point was the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
And it's apparently clear affirmation that race should not play a factor in decision making.
Wasn't that the starting point?
Well, we could go back further, you know, to go back to efforts to desegregate the military.
And then the civil rights movement itself started in the 1950s.
So I was born in 1954.
That was the year of the Brown v.
Board of Education school desegregation case.
And so civil rights, you know, the movement was taking place, but it always pressed for non-discrimination.
Equal opportunity.
Affirmative action, the first affirmative action executive order was Kennedy, I think in the 1960s, and then Johnson had his executive order, Nixon had his, and it was Richard Nixon, the Republican, that put in place racial quotas.
But I can tell you that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when I think about my life and many other black Americans, that was the high point.
Because at that time we passed legislation that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, and religion.
And there was a consensus around civil rights.
In fact, in the 1960s, we passed three major civil rights bills.
One was the 1964 Civil Rights Act that opened up opportunities for many racial and ethnic minorities as well as women.
And then 1965, the Voting Rights Act.
1968, the Open Housing Act.
And so we had the right idea In the 1960s, but the turning point, I would say, was Johnson's 1965 Howard University commencement speech when he said that we were going to, you know, you don't take a shaffled runner,
put them at the head of a race and say you've been fair, that we would go to the next stage, and that was the preferential treatment and the discrimination really that Led to cries of reverse discrimination from white people.
And initially we laughed at white people when they talked about reverse discrimination.
People are not laughing now because it's so real.
Yeah, it seems like there was a moment early on when affirmative action was defined as outreach.
The idea, I guess, was that a lot of people who grew up in poor neighborhoods, maybe even white ethnic neighborhoods, didn't know about how do you get into Swarthmore or Oberlin or Princeton or Vanderbilt.
And so colleges need to do a lot more work to widen the pool of applicants to I think the idea was not that there would be standards that would be adjusted, but rather you would try to get more qualified applicants so that the best guy really would get the job or would get the slot at the selective university.
How do you think that affirmative action became such a deeply entrenched system of racial preferences, which seemed to have lasted now, well, I mean 40 years before the recent Supreme Court decision that we want to talk about?
Yeah, there's even more to it because the 1964 Civil Rights Act itself led to the advertising of jobs.
It ended the old boys and old girls network where someone picked up the phone, they called someone they knew, and they asked them who they knew.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended that, and so outreach came from it.
And the initial efforts at diversity, that was where you sent out recruiters to neighborhoods to try to get people to apply for jobs, making them aware of opportunities.
And that was how it was initially conceived.
That's how it was operating.
But I would argue that the riots of the 1960s put pressure on elites.
And you may know this sociologist, John D. Spreadney.
You see San Diego, he wrote a book, The Ironies of Affirmative Action.
He said it was white male elites in the Nixon administration that pushed for faster results.
And that faster results ended up with eventually the really dramatic lowering of standards.
And it led us towards where we are today.
And where we are today, I would argue, is that affirmative action, critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion, they are intertwined in a way that you can't disentangle them.
And affirmative action, it's good intentions.
The people it may have helped, right now, it's not helping people.
It's lowering standards in a way that's very harmful to racial and ethnic minorities.
Let's take a pause. We'll be right back with Dr.
Carol Swain, author of The Adversity of Diversity.
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I'm back with Dr. Carol Swain, author of The Adversity of Diversity.
Carol, you said something really interesting at the end of the last segment.
said that affirmative action has now become twisted in with, mixed in with, something that seems related but is also kind of different, which is the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Now, the way that I understand these to be different is that the DEI business goes beyond affirmative action. In fact, it makes claims like, if you have, let's just say, blacks,
Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and whites all on, let's say, a business team, that they would somehow come up with more creative ideas than if you just had a bunch of whites or just had a bunch of Asians. The assumption is that diversity automatically leads to kind of higher thinking, more innovation, more creativity.
This is all part of the ideology, as I understand it, of DEI. Talk about how these two things became connected together, and then talk about the merit or lack of merit of some of the dogmatic assumptions of DEI. You know,
Dinesh, if I wasn't such a lady, I would say bullshit for what they say, because it's how they sell DEI. But the diversity that came out of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and early forms of affirmative action, it was about the outreach, the recruitment, equal opportunity.
People like me that came from poverty, we had an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.
Many of us failed when the doors opened up, but it was not handed to us.
Diversity, equity, inclusion is something else because diversity is not about integration.
It's about bringing people in and they keeping their group identity.
They're not trying to assimilate.
They're not trying to integrate.
And equity is not the same as equal opportunity.
Equity is about equal outcomes.
They want everyone to get the same outcome by showing up.
I can tell you as someone, and you have had the same experience as a minority, you have to prove yourself.
I mean, we had to prove ourselves.
With equity, you just show up.
Look at the Biden administration.
They hand out awards for group membership.
It's been divorced from qualifications.
And inclusion, that's not the same as integration.
I would say in my day, there was an assumption that you'd bring in diverse persons, they would be integrated into these environments.
And so if you were going to college, you got to meet people from different races and ethnicities, you learned together, you didn't self-segregate.
Even though that had started to happen by the time I got to college, but initially it was about integration.
Inclusion is about you keeping your distinct identity and really having a chip on your shoulder in many cases.
And I think it's taken us backwards.
And it is undergirded by critical race theory.
No matter how they try to sell it, it's all part and partial of the same thing.
And it's rooted in cultural Marxism.
And I know the left says there's no such thing as cultural Marxism.
We can call it neo-Marxism.
I don't care what we call it.
It's rooted in Marxism.
Carol, the Supreme Court had a landmark decision focused on the Harvard case and the UNC, University of North Carolina case, and seemingly struck down at a single blow the practice of racial preferences.
Now, there's been some discussion about whether colleges can try to cunningly navigate around the Supreme Court's guardrails or the Supreme Court's criteria.
Do you think that the Supreme Court decision is clear enough, decisive enough, important enough that it will produce a, you know, just as earlier Supreme Court decisions produced a lasting shift, not only in policy, but also by and large in attitudes and cultural practices?
How important was the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action?
It was so important that I anticipated the result, and that's why the Adversity of Diversity was published so quickly after the Supreme Court decision.
My plan had been to get it out in a couple of weeks after that decision, and I had to wait for the decision to actually complete the book.
I felt that the reverse racism against whites and Asians, and even worse than that, even though the case didn't address this, but even against Christians and certain groups, now we know Jews, I felt like the court had to act.
And if the Supreme Court didn't act, they would have missed an opportunity to maybe sort of reset America, get us back on course.
Now, do I think it's going to be adhered to?
There are institutions and people very vocally announcing that they're going to resist it, that they're going to continue doing what they're doing because they have to do it.
And it's so demeaning to racial and ethnic minorities.
And it's also something very similar to what happened when I was a child.
I was born in 1954.
It was 1968 before they integrated schools in Bedford County, Virginia, where I grew up, because of the massive resistance.
Just like with the Supreme Court decision, a lot of people have said, we're going to resist.
We're going to find another way.
And their argument comes from the fact that they are lazy.
They don't wanna work on K through 12 education.
They don't wanna expand the pool of qualified students.
And they don't wanna move away from that quotas.
Their belief that a perfect class is one where, let's say you have 15% blacks and you have 10% Hispanics and you have 8% Asians, and then you throw in some whites.
They have decided what a perfect class should look like.
And so they have lowered the standards to the point that an Ivy League degree doesn't mean the same thing for a racial and ethnic minority.
And it's hurting everyone's education.
So the degrees from the elite schools, everything has been dumbed down to the point.
Critical thinking and divergent ideas, they have removed everything that made an education an education to the point that we are not, a college degree, I would argue, is not worth the money that parents have spent on it and grandparents.
We'll be right back with Dr.
Carol Swain, the book, The Adversity of Diversity.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with Dr.
Carol Swain.
You even have a company, Unity Training Solutions, that is aimed at being part of the solution.
So talk about how we fix this.
It seems like there's been a lot of critiques.
There's now been an important court decision.
What should happen next?
The American people should realize that by civil rights laws and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment protects all persons, and that includes whites and Asians, that includes heterosexuals as well as homosexuals, Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims and Buddhists and other groups.
So... That's the first thing I want people to realize.
And in the book, I have a chapter on the corporate conundrum and also how George Floyd's death was used to push DEI. It's been on steroids.
And what is better is for us to go back to the founding principles, go back to e pluribus unum out of many one.
And I believe that it's critical for all people, employees, to know the civil rights laws, to know the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.
But at the end of the day, a company should be about the business of the founder's vision.
Every organization has a mission.
It has a purpose.
We've gotten away from the original mission and purpose and we've gotten into social engineering and it has divided workplaces because DEI, CRT, it comes out of a conflict model rooted in Marxism.
And so Unity Training Solutions is about Really, they are educating the CEOs, the owners of companies, so that they can change the culture of their institutions.
Initially, the vision was to train employees and to have an alternative to DEI. That was focused on harmony and building healthy teams.
But now I critically believe or I strongly believe that only the owner or the CEO can set the vision for his or her organization.
They're the only one who can change the culture.
And so Unity Training Solutions now is more about training leaders so that they can change the culture of their organizations.
Guys, you've got to check out Carol's book, The Adversity of Diversity.
The subtitle is How the Supreme Court's Decision to Remove Race from College Admissions Criteria Will Doom Diversity Programs.
Carol, let's widen our conversation.
We've been talking about civil rights, and of course, with civil rights, you also have civil liberties.
We have in our Bill of Rights these basic liberties that are embedded there and are not really supposed to be susceptible even to majorities to be overrided.
A majority shouldn't be able to override your right to free speech, my right to conscience, and so on.
And yet what we've seen is under various pretexts.
Some of it goes back to 9-11.
Some of it was COVID. Some of it was January 6th.
We've seen censorship.
We've seen political targeting.
We've seen suppressions of basic civil liberties.
And my question is, did you think that you would see this kind of police state stuff in America and happen also so quickly?
It appears that it has all escalated so rapidly just in the last couple of years.
Well, it has escalated.
Excuse me. It has escalated rapidly in the last couple of years, but I trace the changes back to the Obama administration.
I am no longer in academia.
I took early retirement in 2017.
I would argue that I was on the cutting edge of the cancel culture that I got canceled before we knew what it was.
And so I saw America change back then when Christian groups were ousted from some university campuses.
That was something I never thought I would see happen in America.
But today I can tell you that the loss of our civil liberties, it really frightens me.
And I was fortunate enough to see police state a couple of weeks ago And I can tell you that for a long time, and I posted this on social media like months ago, that I feel that even though I've been a law-abiding person all of my life and I've loved America, I don't recognize this nation And I believe that the FBI could come against me or anyone for something that we don't even know what we're doing.
So I'm one of those persons, because I'm outspoken, I tend to be transparent, I tend to challenge the status quo.
I don't know when I would get that knock on the door and it would be the FBI there to kick down my doors.
Because being black and being conservative and being Christian puts a target on your back.
Carol, this is really interesting.
And talk a little bit about your experience at Vanderbilt.
I think you said to me once that, you know, they thought they were getting, quote, a black professor.
And instead they got a Christian and they weren't really expecting that.
And then everything for you sort of turned.
So talk about that experience just briefly.
How... You went from being sort of somebody that the university actively courted.
They wanted you to come. You were in demand for all kinds of reasons.
You had a spectacular career.
You were a big acquisition for them.
And yet when they got you, they didn't want you.
Well, I mean, it happened gradually because I came to Vanderbilt as a new believer.
And I can tell you and everyone else that I never proselytized in the classroom.
And so that was never the issue, but I was always transparent.
And after Obama got elected...
I became more vocal in the political arena and I became a Republican.
And before that, I accepted two political appointments from George W. Bush.
And so all of a sudden, I had shifted in a way.
I was no longer a Democrat.
I was a Republican.
And it didn't take long for the total environment to change.
When I left academia, It was me who initiated the separation, but I did it because it was like I needed at my age to be my best self, and I felt that I could not be my best self in an environment that I felt was toxic.
So the separation was voluntary.
But I experienced, and this is all documented, situations where whenever I would do media, and if I criticized Black Lives Matter, or if I stated or criticized Islam, that was what initiated really what led to my taking the early retirement.
I would have these emails sent out that I didn't represent the institution.
The institution stood for free speech and all of these things.
But I had a right to my opinion.
And at some point I decided again that I could not be my best self in that environment.
And walking away from academia, It was one of the best things that I've ever done in my life.
And I've gotten so many opportunities since then.
I'm reaching millions of people that I would not have reached before.
But I also have to tell you that I long to be back in the classroom.
And without going into a lot of details, I may have an opportunity to do so soon.
And I'm very excited about a possibility of teaching again at a university because at the end of the day, You know, that's what I have been trained to do.
I joke about the world being my classroom, but I want those intimate relationships you form with students in the classroom.
I certainly hope that pans out, Carol.
You've been doing great work.
Thank you for joining me, Carol Swain.
You can follow it on X, at Carol M. Swain, the book, The Adversity of Diversity.
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I've been talking a good deal about police state on the podcast these days.
I want to pivot to a quite different topic because there is an important article that appears in unheard.com.
It's written by a prominent atheist.
I don't know if you've heard that name.
She's Somalian. She was raised as a Muslim.
She experienced all kinds of Muslim atrocities in Somalia and learned about even more around the world.
In reaction to that, she decided if Islam is such a theocracy or is so theocratically minded, is doing these tyrannical things, not just to women but to whole societies, in the name of Islam, she's like, I don't want any part of it.
And so she went to the other extreme and became a prominent atheist.
And all of this is described in this article.
The article, by the way, is titled, Why I Am Now a Christian.
So, the important news in the article, and it's actually making some of the new atheists, the Richard Dawkins types, kind of nervous because Ayaan Hirsi Ali was part of their gang.
She kind of joined in with their group.
And so, she was hanging out with Dawkins and Dennett and, of course, Christopher Hitchens when he was alive.
But now she's decided that really doesn't work.
That's no solution either.
It's almost like she's saying, I was on the rebound from Islam.
I went to the other extreme of atheism.
And now I've discovered that Christianity is, in fact, the true way.
And let's look to see how she tells her story.
Because she says that...
She says that she found it liberating when she got out of Islam.
And it's not that when she was in Islam, she was a believer in God.
And of course, she was conventionally a Muslim woman.
But she saw what the Muslims were doing in the name of Islam.
The key thing is in the name of Islam.
Sometimes people of all faiths do bad things.
You have robberies. You have all kinds of stuff.
But the difference here is this was done in the name of God.
So in the name of Allah.
And so she said that she found a new circle of friends.
She said that, and she was confident that she had made the right choice because these friends were urbane.
They were university people.
They were smart. By the way, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is married to a prominent Harvard historian.
And so they live in Cambridge.
I wouldn't call myself a close friend, but I've had the privilege of having dinner with her and her husband in their house.
And she says, why do I call myself a Christian now?
She says, well, part of the answer is global.
She says there's a global fight, and you've got the tyrants, the totalitarians on the one side, and that includes places like China, but it also includes radical Islam.
And she says, who are they fighting against?
They're not really fighting against atheism.
And not only that, but the atheists have no real defense against this kind of attack.
The atheists really stand on the sidelines.
The atheists basically start talking about what the implications are of Darwinian evolution for human selfishness or for human altruism.
And she goes, what the heck does that have to do with the fight that we're in?
Answer, nothing. She's also seen that people like Sam Harris, who are atheists, have ultimately proved weak-kneed in fighting against some of the assaults, internal and external, against our society.
So she goes, well, what unites our society?
What are we fighting for?
What are we defending? Answer, we're defending the Judeo-Christian tradition.
And she says a lot of our liberties, including liberties that we think of as secular, let's say the liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights, those come from Christianity.
Christianity, in a sense, created the universities.
Christianity even created a certain form of separation of church and state.
Remember Jesus, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's.
So all these things from learned inquiry...
To a separation of domains between church and government, limited government, the idea that we have a basic human dignity and our human dignity cannot be trampled without proper reason or certainly without due process.
So all of this is the Judeo-Christian tradition.
So one reason, she says, for becoming a Christian is a recognition that if you're on this side, you're defending our way of life.
At its core, you're defending the Judeo-Christian roots of our civilization.
And now you can obviously say, well, why didn't you become a Jew?
Well, what she's really, I think, saying is that the tradition of Judaism...
As it then developed through Christianity, through the most famous Jew of all time, namely Jesus Christ, that's really the tradition she wants to defend.
So she has a, let's call it a sociological reason to be a Christian.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I'm continuing my discussion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her conversion to Christianity.
Her essay is called, Why I Am Now a Christian.
And it's an interesting title because, in a sense, it's a play on a famous essay and actually a book.
That was written by Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russell was the great mathematician and philosopher of the early part of the 20th century.
He wrote a book called Why I Am Not a Christian.
And so look at how Ayaan Hirsi Ali plays on that, Why I Am Now a Christian.
And as I mentioned in the last segment, she talks about Christianity as the kind of undergirding pillar of Western civilization, right?
But she also says that there's a personal reason.
She's not just joining Christianity because of the larger cause.
She's joining it because she says, when I was an atheist, I found that life has no meaning.
It has no spiritual solace.
She says, I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable, indeed very nearly self-destructive.
Atheism failed to answer a simple question.
What is the meaning and purpose of life?
Now, interestingly, as someone who's done apologetics and done debates with atheists, if you ask them this question, what is the meaning and purpose of life?
They answer, there is none.
And what they mean by there is none is that there is no externally given meaning.
There is no moral order in the cosmos.
There is no recipe for life being provided from outside ourselves.
So to the question, you say, well, is your life meaningless?
I go, well, no, it's not, Dinesh.
Well, why not? They go, well, because I create meaning.
I create significance for my life.
The meaning comes from me.
It doesn't come from the Ten Commandments.
It doesn't come from some providential plan for my life.
It is a meaning, you may say, inwardly generated.
Now, I think that this is probably too vast a topic for me to dive into, but I don't think that it makes any sense for someone to generate inward meaning that is somehow separate from the external coordinates of meaning.
Here's what I'm getting at.
Let's say someone says, I found great meaning in my life because every day when I wake up, I... Make a serious attempt to count the number of hairs on my head And then you say, well, let's see, how many do you have?
He goes, well, I don't know. I've never really finished the count.
Every day I do a count and then I kind of stop because I'm up to a certain number.
And then I start again the next day.
And that's the meaning I found in life.
That's what gives me a sense of, that's when I wake up in the morning, I'm like, I got to get through my breakfast because I got to start counting.
Now, what would you say to such a person?
You'd have to say to such a person, well, That's not what we mean by meaning.
And so it can't be that it is a purely subjective matter for each person to say, I find meaning any which way.
The meaning that people find in life has got to conform to some recognizable exterior.
Someone goes, well, I get meaning out of doing creative work.
I get meaning out of the family that I have.
I get meaning out of helping other people.
And notice that the moment you say that, You are now doing nothing more than plugging into the very external sources of meaning that have been supplied by moral systems, have been supplied by religion.
So this idea that you're sort of coming up with it on your own is complete nonsense.
You're not coming up with it on your own.
In fact, you're looking at the experience of other people.
You're looking at the codes and commandments that other people live by in interaction with you.
So this is really what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is getting at.
What she's saying is that ultimately, meaning has to come from somewhere.
People may or may not find it, but the meaning to be found is not something entirely inwardly generated.
Now... There have been some very interesting responses, and I might even save a segment tomorrow, to people reacting to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
In fact, I think I'll do that because they criticize her.
In fact, some of her fellow atheists, they don't want to bash her because she's actually been a friend of theirs over really a decade or more.
Remember, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a book called Infidel.
So she very much was associating not just with rebellion against Islam, that was the immediate meaning of that title, but I think she also meant it in the broader sense.
I am an infidel from any system of religious belief, including Christianity.
And so certainly her conversion to Christianity, as described in this article, must come for many of her fellow atheists as something of a blow.
Solzhenitsyn is talking about what it means to be part of the blue caps.
This is the people who run the prison camps of the gulag.
And I think he wants to show that these start out as ordinary people, but they become, in Solzhenitsyn's words, intoxicated.
intoxicated with what?
Intoxicated with power, power over other people.
And Solzhenitsyn is going into a discussion, I think quite deep and profound, about what power of this kind.
And by this, I mean power virtually unchecked.
It's not totally unchecked.
You're still subordinate to your bosses.
You're subordinate to Stalin in the end.
But the power is delegated in such a way that while you're in your own domain, you can do whatever you want.
And so here's Solzhenitsyn.
He goes, he's talking about a typical guy who works in these camps, a typical blue cap.
And he says, you're still young.
Shall we say a sniveling youth?
Very Solzhenitsyn-like.
He envisions a guy who's just this little puny character.
He says, only a little while ago your parents were deeply concerned about you and didn't know where to turn to launch you in life.
So your parents are like, oh, we got kind of a loser on hand.
You know, this Yuri, this, you know, Pavel, this Alexei.
Where is he going to go? He's a bum.
He's not going to do anything with his life.
And then says Solzhenitsyn, you were such a fool, you didn't even want to study.
But then you were admitted to this school.
What's this school? The school of training to be a blue cap, to be part of this prison camp industry.
How your situation changed, how your gestures changed, your glance, the turn of your head.
So look how observant Solzhenitsyn is.
He's like, once you become...
It's kind of like becoming a cop, but you're under no rules.
So the cop is like, I'm now lord of my territory.
I'm going to walk in such a way as if I own the place.
I'm going to cock my head as if to say, don't question me because I have ultimate authority over you.
So this is... This is a cop in a lawless society.
That's the meaning of a police state.
If you have a law about speeding, no one can speed.
If you have a law against corruption, no one can take bribes.
But in police states, the law is never like that.
It's like the guys who run it, they take bribes all the time.
They speed. They do whatever they want.
And they are above the law.
So, now Solzhenitsyn describes a scene.
The learned council of the Scientific Institute is in session.
It's like an academic conference is going on.
You enter and everyone notices you and trembles.
So in other words, everyone knows, hey, there's a member of the secret police who's coming.
Maybe you have some kind of badge or insignia or even just some kind of a cap that you wear.
So you immediately inspire fear in other people.
And think of it, this is what Solzhenitsyn is saying is part of the pleasure of the job.
Because it's like, normally, if you walk into the room, nobody cares.
There's that guy, he's a big loser, he's so-and-so's son, he amounted to nothing.
But now it's like, he comes in, everyone notices, oh, we better be on our guard.
And so, even though you're not inspiring positive reaction, you're inspiring fear, that is still a kind of power.
You can sit there for five minutes and leave.
You have that advantage.
You can be called away by more important business, but later on, when you're considering their decision you will raise your eyebrows and you will say to the rector, you can't do that, there are special considerations involved.
So, you can leave the conference, come back later and go, listen, you know what you guys I said in that session.
You can't do that. That's not allowed.
And they have to take seriously what you say.
Why? Because you're the enforcement authority.
You can have them arrested.
So, it says, you walk into a room and even people who are senior to you, decorated veterans, people who are military commanders, he goes, the portly old colonel, the commander of the unit, stands up when you enter the room and tries to flatter you, to play up to you. He doesn't even have a drink with his chief of staff without inviting you to join them.
You have a power over all the people in that military unit or factory or district incomparably greater than that of the military commander or factory director or even the secretary of the district communist party.
Those men control people's military or official duties, wages, reputations.
But you control people's freedom.
So Solzhenitsyn here shows that he fully understands that the key to the police state is the ability to lock people up.
He goes, other people may have power over whether or not you get a raise, whether you get a pension, whether you're favorably looked at in the company.
He goes, but what does that matter?
Compared to somebody else's ability to say, come with me and you will not be returning to your family tonight or tomorrow night or perhaps even any night after this.
So the ability to grab a guy and change his life overnight and put him into confinement where his destiny is essentially altered, his life is completely wrecked.
Only you have that kind of power.
And you might be low down on the totem pole.
You're not the director of the secret police.
You're not Berea, Stalin's chief of police.
You're just an ordinary cop.
But you're an ordinary cop who is part of a corrupt police state.
And so they delegate down, even to the ordinary guy, almost an absolute power over other people's happiness and over their very lives.
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