DarkHorse Podcast with Douglas Murray & Bret Weinstein: View from an Outpost of the American Empire
Douglas Murray is an author of Multiple books including his most recent one; The Madness of Crowds, and associate editor at The Spectator. He discusses with Bret the collapse of American cities such as Portland, how we end up here, and what will come next. Find Douglas’s new book: The Madness of Crowds (https://www.amazon.com/Madness-Crowds-Gender-Race-Identity/dp/1635579988) Find Douglas on Twitter: @DouglasKMurray Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for prov...
I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting with Douglas Murray right here in the studio.
He happens to be live.
Douglas is Associate Editor at The Spectator, author for many publications, author of many books you may know, which we will certainly talk about.
Upcoming here, and he is traveling in the U.S.
Now, I know your cover story is something like you're here for espionage, but I have deduced what you're actually traveling for.
Your most recent book is The Madness of Crowds, which many in our audience will know, and because you wrote The Madness of Crowds, you've come to Portland, where we have taken crowd madness to the level of high art.
You have.
You're the epicenter.
I thought that before coming here, but now, having been here, I'm confirmed in my initial prejudices, as so often.
It's a thrill to be back in the United States, touring around the country, writing about what's going on here at the moment, and obviously this.
Enough news every 24 hours in America for an average six months.
So I've been in a number of states so far, I've got a number more still to go.
One mutual friend said to me the other day, I think it's disaster tourism, isn't it Douglas?
It's not, but I could see how it could seem like that with the state of your country at the moment.
Yes, although, I mean, you do have the perfect cover story being a journalist.
You know, astrotourism is actually you letting the world see through your eyes.
Exactly.
But, you know, I just came here, as you know, from California.
I feel somewhat that I shot my bolt.
I said in a piece the weekend that I thought that California appeared to be a failed state.
But then I came to Portland and I feel like I stole my own thunder.
Well, thank you, yes!
The state of Oregon.
It's really the whole West Coast, I think.
Right.
It all suffers from the same disease.
Why the West Coast, by the way?
I mean, I'm still... Well, this is a very interesting question, and I've been involved in some private discussions along the same lines, and I would say, at least what I'm hearing, is that nobody has a proper bead on what happened.
However, I do think there's something missing from the conversation, which I keep trying to introduce, but I confess I don't have the precise description of it.
There's something about if you take the tragedy of the commons as a just sort of general game theoretic problem and you try to map it onto our political landscape I think what it predicts is that you will have essentially ruthless capitalists in some of the most vibrant and dynamic industries of our moment
Who will espouse a set of beliefs and values in public that result in effectively the collapse of the system, the killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs.
And basically...
You know it is a tragedy of the commons in the sense that in a classic tragedy of the commons an Individual has effectively no power to protect the commons and has a huge amount of power over their own well-being and so they end up making a decision that when everybody makes it causes the commons to collapse and And in this case, what it's causing is political movement in a dangerous direction based on everybody signaling to each other and frankly convincing themselves that they believe this stuff, when in fact they are profiting from this other side of it.
And wow, are they going to be shocked.
Yeah.
Yeah, I am.
That seems right to me.
I mean, San Francisco being another base for this.
I've never been much committed to the inequality discussion because I think it's never taken on some of the complexities it needed to and was oversimplified at an early stage by certain people in the latest iteration.
But, my goodness, the extent to which the actual inequality problem exists on this coast is extraordinary, where you have the richest people in the world cohabiting with the world's destitute.
in such proximity and they seem to have just got used to it.
That's what I can't quite get over.
Everyone seems to have got used to the idea that you can have some of the world's most expensive real estate facing a parking lot of people who've got a trolley.
Well, so there are a couple interesting phenomena.
One is that I'm sure you are hearing the same things I am about a huge number of people who do have that nicest real estate fleeing from the circumstance that they have created.
Which I think raises very interesting questions because to my mind I will be very shocked if in the end the most powerful people do not end up with the best real estate.
It seems to me that that is an automatic outcome at equilibrium and that raises the question if they are currently fleeing that real estate.
I wonder if it's not in some sense a cryptic and maybe even unconscious renegotiation strategy.
In other words, the political regime that they have ushered in is now generating perfectly incoherent tax policy, for example, that's going to penalize business out of these places, which is going to cause the economies to collapse.
And the question is, will the wealthy who fled these pieces of real estate be able to demand effectively much more hospitable terms in order to bring them back in and make the economies of these states vibrant again?
I don't know.
So much of this in the US is just varying state by state in a way we obviously don't have in the UK or indeed in Europe.
You can't flee across a boundary and find an entirely different tax structure or whatever.
I wonder, I mean, New York, it seems to me, is going to take a long time to come back, but has the impetus to do so.
Like London, it's hard to see New York not coming back.
I'm curious to hear why you think that's the case.
Well, before I say that, I mean, I think that California, it's very hard, and Portland here, I just, I think I said to you last night, Why anyone would open a business in this area?
I mean, why anyone would open a business almost anywhere at the moment is a pregnant question, but why they would open anything here is... I mean, well, it's a question that's answering itself, the nod.
Right, they're not, and there's no plan B, right?
It was the sort of, you know, vibrant libertarian West that fueled the place.
And if you drive the businesses out by effectively allowing a small number of people to demonize business owners and to inflict arbitrary damage on them, then what even is, you know, what are these states?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was on my mind, the first night I got here I went to a rally, protest, march, I don't know what you call it, Antifa, BLM.
Which was opposed to gentrification, was one of its justifications.
Where the marchers marched through residential areas, screaming at householders, telling them that they were living on stolen land.
And that black people used to live in this area and they've been pushed out.
Something that wasn't that evident.
There were plenty of black homeowners in the area in question.
Not quite sure how happy I'd be if I were them, that I'd been woken up in the evening by people with bullhorns telling me Things that weren't true or accurate, but that seemed to be a fairly ordinary evening in this city.
But, you know, it seems that you have activists who are opposed to all forms of human betterment, all forms of improvement.
And actually don't mind the state they've created.
The sites in downtown Portland seem to me redolent of nothing so much as a third-world city, where people who haven't been here may be interested to know.
I mean, it's much worse than you expect.
It's not just the empty plinths.
I think there's one statue left standing, which is a World War II statue.
I'm hesitant about saying that because They might find it.
Yeah, it's a little high up for their gaze, but the World War II statue seems to be the only thing that they haven't brought down.
One is tempted to say, oh... One is tempted to say that You know, it's primarily, I think outsiders might think it's primarily about statues, but isn't it?
It's so many things that have come together at once.
It's the fact that these sort of history-robbed areas also just, you know, are inhabited by homeless people, people living in tents, with sort of food stalls hanging around outside.
I mean, it really, it's post-apocalyptic, it seems to me.
It's something that people should know about.
In order to see what happens when you make this number of mistakes in this order.
Well, it seems to me that you're pointing something out that I think in some sense only you can point out.
Maybe you don't even realize you're doing it.
But because of the way COVID has intersected with the George Floyd protests and riots, and what has happened to Portland,
The point is in general those who are reporting on what took place here are from here and we are held to a particular absurd standard where you know I have been absolutely diligent about not portraying Portland as on fire because it isn't but that we have nightly riots is
A reliable fact and it has a very distinct implication and the so in some sense you coming here as a visitor and seeing it and saying it's actually worse than you expect when we are constantly told if we mention the riots that we are portraying something false, which is obviously not the case No, I mean, this is a maddening hostage situation for a population to be in.
To be told, you know, it's not literally burning down all the time, so how dare you say Portland is burning?
I've seen this as you have in areas before, as in this rhetorical move.
Why are you saying things are so bad?
Bad things continuously happening does not equal a bad situation.
Just because you have X problem every day doesn't mean you have X problem.
I don't think there's... I mean, like you, I've managed to travel very widely around the world in my life.
It's a great honor and privilege of my life.
But it means that I do have some reference points.
What people in Portland are living through is not normal.
It's certainly not normal in a first world city.
There are places in the world where I've seen similar destitution.
It's less by choice than it appears to be here, and a certain element of it does appear to be by choice.
But you have to go to parts of South Africa, bits of India and elsewhere to find the normalisation and acceptance of homelessness at the level it is.
And then you have these extra layers on top.
As you say, the COVID layer is one that seems to strip everything back.
Obviously, my own country is suffering very deeply from this, and the economic consequences in all our countries are just unfathomable at the moment.
But you have this extra virus layer of people who think that it is perfectly normal to engage as a full-time occupation.
In assailing the state and any front face of the state as if it is a fascist entity which needs to be pulled down entirely.
And the people who say that that's some minority or something.
It clearly is a minority.
It's quite a large minority on occasions.
Clearly in July and August in the city it was a significant minority.
It's dwindled a bit now.
But it is not normal for drivers to be prevented from going down streets because they're blocked off by pseudo-paramilitary groups, as is happening in this city.
It's not normal that the police would not be visible
For hours in center of the city at night and that instead militias that are self-appointed Barricade those areas off and the police don't go none of this is normal let alone as I saw the other night Crowds of Antifa activists Trying to Basically storm or something similar a federal building and
In order that, well, what do they want to do?
Burn it down, obviously.
And they get into this running battle with the federal police, which I saw myself.
And they set fires to things and then tried to provoke the police to attack them.
And that, again, I mean, I've seen running battles before.
I just haven't seen them in a first world city that's said to be at peace.
No, this is... I gotta tell you, it's actually quite reifying to have you visit and say this, because we have had, you know, Nancy Rommelman, for example, who used to live here and came back to report on the situation, but you are the person farthest afield to come in and look at it, and to the reality check of just hearing you describe what it is that we see and what it is that we are in some sense stalemated in our ability to even describe it to the world is very...
By the way, one other thing on that if I may.
Clearly those politicians who are in charge of the Portland area feel no shame and feel no responsibility for the immiseration of the people over whom they're meant to govern.
Ordinarily one would try to shame them, but clearly we're in a mechanism where that wouldn't work.
Nevertheless, I think it has to be stated.
Again, I have never been to a place where it is commonplace and acceptable for people to graffiti and put up signs everywhere saying that a journalist should be murdered.
Absolutely.
Nowhere.
Nowhere, right.
I have been to totalitarian countries where journalists are at this kind of risk.
I have been to closed societies where journalists fear that they are at such a risk.
But I have never been again to a first world free democratic society where the local authorities allow paramilitary organizations
To demand the killing of a journalist for the crime of reporting and to have such calls everywhere in the center of the city and I am not as people see in the coming days I post some of this we'll see I'm not exaggerating this that I mean we can do we can name Robert but the journalist I'm obviously thinking of his name is scrawled over walls and And over monuments in the city.
Sure.
I mean, he's been a guest of this podcast.
Okay.
So yeah, so Andy, no, Andy, no, who's done more than anyone to report on what these groups are doing.
I knew how much of a risky take and I knew how brave he'd been the extent to which he Has been braver than almost all the journalists from this state put together in bothering to report what so many journalists just think is not worth reporting.
To walk through the center of the city and to see, say, on the World War II monument, on the massive walls downtown, calls to kill Andy Ngo, in big letters, stated as such.
It's not free speech.
That is incitement to murder.
And the authorities here don't care about it at all.
They clearly don't care about it or they'd have done something about it.
But again, as I say, ordinarily one would make that point and hope to shame authorities into doing something to, for instance, take down calls to murder a journalist in the city.
But the authorities here have let so much go that merely encouraging the murder of journalists for the crime of reporting is a comparatively minor issue for them to address.
Well, I want to adjust one thing in what you said.
I, of course, resonate with it across the board with one exception, which is I don't think these politicians are insensitive to shame.
I think some of them are.
In other words, we have a mayoral candidate who I believe may be insensitive to shame.
But our current mayor, I don't believe is insensitive to shame.
In fact, I believe he is being puppeted using his shame.
It is his compassion that has been weaponized against him.
And so in effect, again, I think this comes down to the game theory, which is You have a tiny number of people some of whom are shameless who are using shame as a weapon and they are arguing They've been set up by a political Narrative in which one side is understood to be evil literally evil and the other side is understood to be the force that holds back evil and so therefore anything that maps
Onto the side that is evil is not deserving of protection.
This is exactly the dynamic that unfolds when one population goes to war against another.
It dehumanizes them.
And so Andy Ngo falls outside the zone of protection of the authority.
And this is frightening.
And I fear that the comparison you're saying, you've seen these things but you haven't seen them in a first world city.
I think many of us who are paying attention fear that we are going to square that circle by ending up Effectively a third world country.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and You're very close to it in this city very close to it.
I mean, I went to a restaurant the other day cafe much recommended Which just the day before, two days before, had the people at Antifa, activists, BLM activists, whatever these ones are now calling themselves, fired shots through the windows because the cafe in question has first responder photos on the walls.
That is, you know, photos of firemen coming out of flames.
And a female cadet in army uniform.
It's a cafe run by a black man who is obviously proud of the fact that people in this country have historically and today put themselves on the front line to protect the population of the United States.
And this is seen as so reprehensible by the local Well, as I say, I would say fascist militia groups, that he has to have the situation where he's got boarded up windows because people have fired rounds of live ammunition through the windows of his cafe.
Again, I mean, I've seen that in the Middle East.
I've seen people in the Middle East intimidate business owners by firing live ammunition at their properties.
I've never heard of it happening in a first world city with the follow-on that the authorities aren't interested.
The authorities which are perfectly capable of shutting this down any day of any week.
- This is effectively being sanctioned by allowing it to happen.
- Yes. - So, I'm always with you caught in the following bind, and I think we, I'm hoping we can address it productively, but I confess I don't know where this goes.
You are nominally a conservative, right?
I am very much a liberal, and I know precisely what I mean by that.
I find you I don't even want to say paradoxical because I don't think there's any paradox in it.
But as I accused you of the first time you were on the Dark Horse podcast, there are things you say that strike me as more usually heard from what used to be called a bleeding heart liberal.
No, but I think this is marvelous.
And I must say, my audience is apparently very confused about me at the moment.
And I think actually I've threaded the needle, I'm told by the person who mans the email account that goes with this podcast.
That there are many irate people who appear to be perfectly divided over the question of whether I am cryptically in favor of Trump and supporting him or have the worst case of Trump derangement syndrome they've ever seen.
So anyway, somehow, somehow nobody can figure out where anyone belongs and I think you speak to something that is not
Is not commonly seen which is I hear in what you say and frankly Douglas I see it on your face when you say it you are You actually feel the pain of what is being lost and those who are being Run over roughshod
And, you know, you're trying to do something about it by spelling it out, by describing it in ways that other people haven't seen it.
But here's the question.
I'm living in Portland with my family.
I am watching the political scenario descend from bad to worse, right?
We have a completely ineffectual mayor who has allowed the situation to develop, and he is actually, if the polls are to be believed, behind in a race with an Antifa sympathizer.
So there is no good option on our ballot with respect to escaping this dynamic and this has been a long-winded way of getting to the real question which is
There is something to be said about the interaction of liberalism and conservatism and I have said Many times that there is an important tension between these that each side keeps the other side honest that they are both necessary I'm sure you resonate with that, but I think there's another level we have to go structurally speaking You stop me where I go wrong The magic of the West
Is the product of liberal ambitions restrained by conservative discipline.
Yes.
You take either of those away.
If you take the liberals away, you don't get there, right?
If you take the conservatives away, you go off into crazy town.
I would add a thing to that, which is quite often people find it hard to work out why something like the dichotomy that used to exist in America, exists in my country, does exist in almost exactly equal portions.
Why isn't it the case that the left wins every election?
Or the right wins every election?
Why do we have this back and forth?
And one of the things I think people don't say often enough is that it's because the line goes through all of us.
We all have a liberal, in the American sense, leftist and conservative instincts on a range of issues and quite often on the same issues.
And that this very fine balancing act is one that we know in our lives on so many issues.
I mean, day to day, you know, I want this thing and yet I know I need to buy things that I can afford and you weigh it up in your... Should I borrow money to get this thing that I want?
The left bit of the brain says, I'd like the thing, and the right wing bit of the brain says, but you can't afford a thing, you certainly shouldn't get into debt in order to do so.
We know that.
Another obvious one is, I like this thing, whether it's Alcohol, food, drugs, whatever.
You might want this thing and another bit of your brain says, yes, but is it going to be good for you?
We know the restraining impulse because we all have it every hour of the day.
Particularly after 6pm in my own experience.
And yet politically we don't think in these terms often enough, that yes, you may want these things, which may include hard to oppose things, you may want all of these rights, you may want all of these liberties, but another thing has to come in that is a restraining impulse on those things, because we know what happens, and again this city knows what happens, with an unrestrained impulse in politics as in our personal lives, which is that you enter the realm of complete chaos.
And this seems to me, has always seemed to me, the dichotomy that exists in politics, and it's why there's a roughly, you know, 49-51 situation, or in my country a 48-52 divide that exists, and that there's nothing that wrong with it.
It's a perfectly fine contest.
Unless, as you say, one side completely disappears.
And, you know, I wouldn't want to live in a society where all of the restraining impulses that can exist on the right existed.
Because, among other things, it would mean your society was closed to new proposals that may well necessarily correct things you should have corrected before and haven't got around to.
So I wouldn't want to live in a society where only the right existed.
And I wouldn't want to live in a society where only the left existed, where the restraining impulse didn't exist, and that seems to be one of the things that you have here.
And it ends in this urine-stenched, history-less, pathetic people wasteland, where, you know, Look at the arrest photos every night in Portland.
The photos of the people in those mug shots show the consequence of an unrestrained life.
That is a life where you think you are free and you are living in total chaos.
Where you live a disordered life, with a disordered brain, with disordered ideas of your society and disordered ideas of yourself.
Totally agree.
Now, so anyway, I do, this is great so far.
I think, I think we are getting to the heart of the matter, right?
So I will take a certain amount of flack for having a congenial conversation with you because you being a conservative are taken to be some sort of a stain on my liberalism.
By the way, may I make a quick interjection there on this?
Please.
I hope people notice that it never happens the other way around.
So interesting.
It used to.
In the US.
Right.
It has not in some time.
Yes.
When did you think it did last?
80s.
Okay.
I make the reference because I think that people should deduce a number of things from this.
If somebody said to me, Douglas, I can't believe you sat down with I mean, he is a leftist.
Nobody would say it.
I wouldn't say, oh my god, I had no idea he was a leftist.
I'm so sorry.
I mean, I had no idea he had all these views.
And he votes for candidates I might not vote for.
And I'm so sorry.
And if they said, Douglas, you are going to be excommunicated from the right, I would say, who the hell are you?
It's such an unfathomable thing to me.
The only explanation I've ever had for why this happens the other way around is that the right has stopped being a club of affiliation and the left is a lifestyle choice.
I mean everything in your, I'm not saying in your case, but in leftists, many leftists find everything to do with their identity is tied up.
with their left-wing views and left-wing activism.
And therefore, being excommunicated from the club actually does matter.
I can see, I mean, my leftist friends who do get excommunicated, and a lot of them do, feel it very deeply because they think, I've spent my life on the left.
How could I not be wanted by my tribe?
I personally, as I say, there's not a tribe I would want to be a part of that pulled that move.
Absolutely, absolutely agree with you.
And there is, you know, there's some tiny group of us on the left who are neither fish nor fowl at this point, because the fact that we are left in our belief structure does not mean that we are left with respect to who will speak to us, right?
So it's become this very bizarre paradox.
But I will say, just in passing, I find nothing odd at all about being a very liberal person who has no trouble talking to you.
I find what you say is sensible, interesting, frequently raises points that I need to think about.
In fact, I think this is almost the expectation, right?
It's not a paradox.
In fact, there are no paradoxes.
I've said, you know, all true stories must reconcile.
The resolution that makes it not a paradox is all systems that work, work based on dynamic tension, all complex systems, including the body.
The body is absolutely riddled with these things that manage your temperature, your pH, every single system, even, you know, the motion of a limb is tension between two systems that pull in opposite directions.
To the extent that I see the possibility and in fact the necessity of fixing the problems with society and making it better, I know that the tension on the other side is what makes that plausible, right?
So, you know, I think the problem is we're confused over the center.
Right?
Centrism has a very nasty connotation.
I admit to feeling this personally.
I don't like centrists, right?
Because they're tepid.
But I do think we need to meet in the center.
And that two people who are, you know, in effect what I'm saying is, I think you are a kind of specialist, that you see the aspect of the system that requires a conservative bent to see it well, and you see it with a great deal of precision, right?
By virtue of that, you may have, you know, just as eyes that are tuned to day aren't so great at night, right?
That specialty may make it harder for you to see things of the opposite type.
Oh yeah, yeah, sure.
And therefore, there's obviously value to be had in that discussion, and that discussion takes place in the center.
Yes.
Not necessarily with centrists.
An obvious example is things to do with compassion.
Compassion is a, it can be a noble instinct.
It isn't always because it has to be balanced out with, well, what would you balance compassion out with?
A sense of having to pay sometimes.
So this is, this is one of the things that I see very clearly about you is that, um, People mistake sort of unbridled niceness for compassion.
Yes.
That's not what compassion is, right?
A parent that does a good job with children is a parent that knows how to mete out discipline, how to set goals that are difficult to attain but achievable, right?
It's not like whatever you want, honey, right?
It's something much more complex than that.
And empathy.
The overriding urge in our age to be empathetic is, again, I mean, it's one that requires serious balancing.
In some sense, one has endless empathy with people, except it can't be endless, because we have to do other things with our day.
And if I just had empathy all the time, I'd melt in a puddle.
Right, you'd be paralyzed by it.
And again, it comes back to this thing of, do you pay for when you screw up?
And the answer has to be yes.
Now, the balance is clearly, to what extent do we forgive mistakes?
And how far can the mistakes go before actually something else kicks in, another mechanism?
Now, again, coming back to this city, mingling in the Antifa protests the other night against the ICE facility in Portland,
These reprehensible, mainly young, mainly white people assailing a government facility were desperately trying to provoke the police to be violent against them in order that then they could say they had been treated badly.
By the way, I might take some flak for this, but the extraordinary restraint of the federal police who I saw in action was remarkable to me.
And because everybody has understandably spent part of this year fixating on American policing.
Maybe this needs to be said in terms of balance as well.
That seeing men of every race, racial background, in federal police uniforms being taunted and threatened in the American street
By people screaming at them through bullhorns, that they were not just fascists and Nazis, but one young woman was screaming repeatedly, you know, your family hates you, your children will hate you, you never see your family, you're destroying this country, and all this.
And these agents, they happened to clear me out of a bit of the protest I was in, And they did so with extraordinary politeness.
Considering that it was nearly the middle of the night, we were all wearing black face coverings, they couldn't have seen who had arms and who didn't.
Um, and, uh, they very politely, albeit with heavy weaponry, um, got us away and cleared people out.
And I thought, as I've thought and I've seen videos of certain American, particularly black American policemen, being taunted and insulted and provoked by anti-fagtivists and others.
I think the restraint that these men are actually having to exercise is nothing less than remarkable.
But these people on the streets of this city are clearly people who need a restraint.
And they need to be stopped from hurling projectiles From smashing up business after business to the extent that large portions of the city have more shuttered businesses with boarding over them than open businesses by a very long way.
That this has come about because nobody stopped them throwing the damn rocks.
Nobody told them you can't start to set fires in buildings and in the streets and get away with it This doesn't seem to have happened the restraining mechanism has totally broken down and by the way the fear of that and this is a legitimate fear of the Decent part of the left is what if the over react?
What if the reaction is an overreaction which I must say I haven't seen it yet, but that is inevitable Oh, yes.
I mean I I thought it myself This week each time I saw these I thought, you know, the ignoble instinct kicks in.
I wish somebody would beat the crap out of you.
Just beat the crap out of you.
You know, uh...
Appointing yourself to just destroy private property, running around hoping that somebody lays a finger on you in order that you can pretend that you are now oppressed when you have been rampaging through a town and immiserating its inhabitants.
Terrorizing citizens in their own homes.
People you don't know, you have no idea what they think or want or anything.
But as I say, I mean it's an ignoble instinct and I would hope that it would settle somewhere, again it comes to meeting in the middle, it would settle somewhere in terms of just ordinary damn policing and the exercise of justice that means that people who do this sort of thing get arrested and go to prison.
Right, which is... So, okay, this has unfolded.
We have a mayor who, for reasons I cannot quite fathom, has misunderstood that there is nothing he could do to find favor with these people.
He has effectively let them do what they do.
And they think he's a sort of alt-right, whatever his opponents said.
They see him as just another version of fascist.
Right.
So the right reaction, from his perspective, if he saw with any clarity at all, would be, well, there's no... Yeah, I'm not going to be able to woo over that percentage of the lunatics.
Right, nor should I want to.
Therefore, you know, doing right by the majority of the population of Portland is the obvious thing to do.
But, you know, What is he being threatened by in this election?
It's not something from the right where people are calling for law and order.
They're so busy virtue signaling to each other that they're actually in danger of electing somebody even crazier.
Yes, that's why I say that I have less hope for this place than other places.
It would seem to me obvious that New York, although it's a bit beleaguered at the moment, like London, and there's a lot of shuttered businesses and a lot of things are not gonna come back fast.
Nevertheless, in terms of law and order and things, it seems clear to me maybe it's because of the accumulation of capital, well-off people, businesses, they can't allow to go down.
The market and much more.
Whatever the reason, I think that New Yorkers will be voting in a right-wing law and order mayor very soon.
They will get a Giuliani-like figure because New York's been through this cycle several times in our lifetime.
Yes, it has.
And I would expect New Yorkers to do that because they're not going to put up with, you know, Rapes on the subway and killings in the streets on a regular basis without voting for somebody who knows how to sort some of that stuff out.
And they will deserve the return of their city.
But if this comes back to the crux, at some point the people of Portland have decided not to do that.
Or it hasn't thrown up people willing to do it.
At that stage, the people of the city bear responsibility for what has happened.
Well, as I keep saying, and nobody seems to respond to it the way I expect, they're going to get what they deserve.
Unfortunately, we are also going to get what they deserve.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Which I can't believe this is being allowed to happen.
But, you know, it also The way the left and in particular the Democratic Party under the corrupt rule of the DNC is playing this, they have created a legitimate argument in favor of Trump.
Yes.
Right?
There wasn't one.
And what they've done is they've created one by leaving the federal government as the only potential restraining force against this insanity.
And, you know, I sure don't want to see that happen.
On the other hand, what happens if the Democrats, you know, take the White House and who knows what in Congress?
And, you know, what does protect Portland from this nonsense?
The thing that's been on my mind in recent days has been that so much just seems to come down to a fundamental misapprehension about the nature of the society that you're in.
As I see it, I don't see that there's no white supremacists in America.
There must be some, but my gosh, are they pushed to the margins.
And I think that a white supremacist group doing what so-called Antifa are doing on a regular basis to an American city would have been not tolerated from day two.
Right.
And rightly so.
What seems to have occurred, the image I can't get out of my mind, is that it's like a magic lantern trick that's occurred in this society, in this area, that there's this tiny, residual, reprehensible, neo-Nazi, white supremacist people, and somehow the society has put a light behind that.
And it's blown up onto a wall into this huge monster against which these people in Portland and the surrounding area are fighting.
And the politicians, unfortunately, have encouraged this perception.
They haven't said, you're totally wrong.
Right.
The American police may have all sorts of things that need to be done to improve them, but they are not the Nazis.
And, you know, there may be injustices in society, but we are not a reprehensibly unjust society that requires burning down in order to get through the furnace to some better state.
They haven't done that.
They've been willing.
Nancy Pelosi did it.
Well, that's the thing.
They've been willing to make people believe this thing because they think they're going to be advantaged by it.
Yes, individually they are advantaged by it and what they are doing is upending the structure on which we all depend, right?
Each person is serving their own individual interests at cost to the structure that undergirds everything.
Yes.
So, there's so many things ready to go here, but one, let's just say the sine qua non of white supremacy, right?
If you were to define that term in any reasonable way.
It can't be that you are allowing something that advantages white people to continue.
A white supremacist would have to be rooting for that.
Yes.
And so if we take that, that a white supremacist must be rooting for white people above others, right?
Then the answer is exactly what you said.
Those people are vanishingly rare.
They weren't always vanishingly rare.
Sure.
They're not non-existent.
But you're right, Magic Lantern, they've been projected onto a wall at huge size and then everybody has said, okay, you know who is in league with that thing?
It's everybody who isn't on our side.
Yeah.
Right?
Which creates basically a race to the bottom that we are now seeing the product of.
But I have the sense Well, one other thing I want to say.
The thing about the graffiti on the wall calling for Andy Ngo to be killed, the shots fired into the cafe owned by a black man who would dare have first responders on his wall.
This is a matter of policing narrative.
Why is Andy Ngo the target of their ire?
Because Andy Ngo makes it impossible to sell the story that you have people protesting racial injustice on the streets of Portland and facing a fascist crackdown from the federal government.
You cannot believe that if you just simply pay attention to the video that Andy Ngo puts out on his channel, right?
You know, you could say all sorts of things about it, it's not a complete picture, whatever you want, but the fact is, you can see what it is, right?
Those things are taking place.
Likewise, a black man who is running a successful business, doesn't hold truck with any of this, you know, white supremacy is everywhere nonsense, is very inconvenient to the narrative.
And the result is, you know, we've said it before, but Yeah, you've got the police are standing back and allowing this to happen, you know, having been restrained by the municipal authorities.
You've got, you know, basically paramilitaries enforcing their own laws.
This, you know, this is Evergreen blown up to a major American city size.
Yeah.
I guess the question is, A, is there an example of a society that has gone this far in the direction of one of these nominally justice-oriented utopian is there an example of a society that has gone this far in the direction of one of these nominally
That's a very hard question to answer.
Maybe people can answer in the comments underneath this video.
The problem is the combination of factors here.
That's what disturbs me.
You have the imminent decline in living standards of everybody in society.
Overlaid on top of a number of existing problems, including a misperception about the nature of the state they're in, a belief that they are engaged in a life and death struggle against a, if not non-existent, then very minorly existent enemy.
The lack of purpose and meaning in individuals as well as the wider society that means that any cause is worth getting on board with if it'll give you purpose in your day and in your life.
I mean, I could go on.
The problem is all of these things, it seems to me.
And it's perfectly easy to see how, and it's happened many times, an immiserated city can be brought back from the brink of poverty.
And made into a vibrant and dynamic financial proposition again.
And that's happened in all of our countries repeatedly.
That's a city, though.
Right.
The number of things that need to be corrected here seem to be so significant in number that I don't at all blame, as in California, my friends who say, right, that's it, I'm off.
And the more that happens, the more all you have left behind are the people who either can't move, which is, apart from everything else, those who are less financially, you know, fluid, flexible.
That means the poor just can't move.
And those who really do think that the wasteland is what they want to inhabit.
But there is... Yeah, it's hard to... I can't think of anything that comes around from all of these factors simultaneously, no.
Yeah, that's worrying me quite a bit.
So, let's just... I think this should be obvious.
I'm sure it will be to you.
But I think it needs to be said because I never hear it said and it seems the core.
You have a society that generates a huge amount of well-being.
That well-being is not well distributed.
I do not mean to say it should be evenly distributed, but it is not well distributed.
It's not efficiently distributed with respect to producing the kind of incentive that you would want, you know, a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian ought to want opportunity better distributed because it results in more people discovering more things that serve us collectively, right?
So we've got a society that creates a hell of a lot of wealth.
It's not fairly distributed.
It's not well distributed.
The revolution that we are watching begin has misunderstood the difference between the
Noise in the way and you know, there's a lot of signal in how it's distributed But I would argue there's even more noise and how it's distributed They've misunderstood the basic fact that their lives will get much much worse If the engine that creates the well-being that is unfairly distributed is turned off.
Yes, right?
Yes and so the point is if you just wanted to talk about absolute well-being And you are compassionate for all sorts of people who have less than they ought to, or who were given tools that are less useful than they might be, right?
You want those people to be well off.
You are about to hurt them egregiously by turning off the engine on which we are all survivors.
Yes, this is a misunderstanding that Immanuel Kant describes, the famous dove analogy, you know?
Kant's dove is that the dove flying in free air may make the mistake of thinking that the air under its wings is the thing that's holding it back.
Yeah, that's it.
And may imagine that in free air it could fly further, faster.
Yeah, right in a vacuum.
Yeah, and that's what these activists and a significant portion of the American public now make the mistake of thinking.
They think, and we have this in my own country as well, although thankfully at the ballot box it keeps being seen off.
But there are significant numbers of people in our societies who think, if I could only stop capitalism, Not a form of capitalism, or some extreme versions of capitalism, or capitalism gone wrong, or bad capitalism, or anything more.
But capitalism.
The exchange of services, financial incentive, products, all this.
If I could just stop that, we would be fairer.
It's incumbent upon anybody who knows history, as well as anyone with eyes, to say the situation you are dreaming of that you think will allow you to fly further and faster will make you plummet.
Yeah.
Plummet.
And the people with the most capital from the capitalist system will be able to leave your benighted Results.
Right.
But most people will not.
It will collapse on all of those who don't have the means to leave.
I mean, this is obviously the case with property in all of our countries at the moment.
I mean, once you see the differential between average wages and average property price go to, you know, five times or something, you know, and much more in places like San Francisco, I mentioned earlier, far more of the average salary to average property price.
You end up in this system where you think all the corrections you can see are catastrophic I mean what happens in a society where the average cost of a home is a million dollars or 1.5 million dollars and the average wage certainly isn't that but you have the asset and There's no one to buy it from you at some stage we get into this we get into this realm of you know, all of the all of the words that For what happens after that are terrible.
Right.
Collapse.
Yeah.
Gulag killing people.
Right.
So, a friend, I didn't clear it with him so I can't use his name, but a friend posed a question the other night in a clubhouse discussion.
Whether there were any new ideological Movements or whether we were just simply rehashing all of the familiar ones and it struck me as a very good question a good question I do think I do think I have something I would describe as roughly new but let's put that to the side For the second for the most part back to it.
Okay, but for the most part we are rehashing Prior ideas and dressing them up in new ways and you know tinkering around the edges But here's here's the reason that I think that is likely to be true The fact is, what we have is a description of a roughly optimal system.
Liberalism, in its sort of theoretical form, is the right answer, right?
A system that provides liberty, that distributes opportunity evenly, right?
That is the ideal form.
Now, we're nowhere near it.
But the point is, the reason that we are not looking at new ideologies is that we're really talking about the corrective for the degree to which we fall short of an ideal that we have already discovered.
Right?
Yeah.
And I think this is really important because I think we're just fighting over the wrong thing, right?
I think even, you know, the idea really ought to be, you know, we have to find our way to fixing the remaining obstacles to our actually living by our liberal principles on which almost all of us agree, right?
And As we get there, the conservative force that prevents us from having utopian ideas beyond a functional liberal society that is very fair, right?
That force has to prevent us from seeking some place that doesn't exist beyond that state.
I would add one thing to that.
I agree with most of that.
I think we never did take enough account of the problem of people who didn't find the state you're describing is actually as optimal as we regard it as being.
So I don't think we're as far off.
But I think in some sense that's like talking about people who've never traveled to a nation and their opinion.
In other words, you know, and this goes back to those mugshots that you were talking about.
I do have the sense that one of the patterns of history that we see is there's something very valuable about a meritocratic system.
Meritocracy is a magic ingredient.
It's not sufficient on its own, but it is a magic ingredient to the achievement of things.
And that thing, to the extent that Feedbacks are bad, that unfairness is badly distributed.
Certain people end up poorly placed to function in a meritocracy.
Yes, yes.
And eventually, if those people are large enough in number, they rebel against the idea of meritocracy.
Yes, that's right.
Yeah, if you end up putting an unwieldy emphasis on that aspect of the society, then yes, a large number of people will be disadvantaged and will notice it.
Right.
So my sense is if everybody had the tools to function in a meritocracy, then there'd be jockeying for Well, also, if you regarded, in order to do that, you would need to widen the array of things that we regarded as being worth having.
Sure, and actually, frankly, you would want also to forbid, in some way, I don't mean necessarily legally forbid, but maybe disincentivize the production of all kinds of things that are profitable that are destructive.
We get into the PRETA distribution issue, don't we?
Exactly.
Which I understand, I'm not going to try this on you because you've got to tell me, but I understand in nature is the most recognized force and the things in the forest that grow up, grow up tall and the things that can't grow in their shade don't.
Well, I mean, I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at.
The only reason trees are tall is they're in a competition for light.
There are obviously lots of things that are built not to need canopy levels of light and compete and play some of those same games down near the ground.
You're drawing a connection I don't yet see.
I understand in a range of, certainly some aspects of your area of specialism, that The problem of the curve that just goes up.
Well, but, so, alright, so this is exactly what I think, you know, as a liberal this is sort of our job is to figure out what actually could be achieved.
And one thing I would say is we have a system in which truly bad luck, right, that is to say misfortune that does not arise from bad decision-making can ruin you.
That's very bad from the point of meritocracy.
You want to protect people from bad luck.
You want...
To push it out, you want to make sure that the bottom part of the curve is softened.
I want to make sure that A, you are safe to gamble in ways that are smart.
In other words, if your gambling on an idea stands a chance of greatly improving human well-being and it doesn't work out, but there was no way to know that ahead of time, I don't want you ruined over it.
I want you protected.
It doesn't mean I want you to profit from it, but the point is If bad decision-making results in misfortune, and good decision-making results in profit, then we evolve very quickly to a state in which we generate more well-being.
So, protecting people from bad luck is essential, right?
And making sure that people don't freeze each other out of opportunity.
So, you know, this never-ending battle over education in the U.S.
really comes down to people preventing other people's children from getting well-educated.
I have to say with one caveat, which is so few people in this country are well-educated.
I mean, it's astonishing.
It's because they go to school.
Yeah.
I mean, it's another version of the burrito issue, which is the well-educated here are really terrifically educated, albeit sometimes with appalling ideas at the margins.
But the majority seem to me, I mean the schooling system here, the university system seems to have so woefully let down the public.
So that's the connection I want to draw.
I actually don't have the sense of wanting to see Antifa or Taunting the Cops beaten, right?
Maybe I just don't allow myself to even have the thought.
I actually feel like, you know what?
We really did fuck up and we harmed a huge number of people so that they do not have the tools to function in the system that we leave open and That that is actually that's a a problem that you cannot solve in less than a generation Yeah, there's two things of course.
I'm too specific.
There are two things that need to Opening out there.
Please.
One is what fuck up is.
And the second is who we are.
Right.
And when people say we did this or we didn't do that, the question is, Is the first-person plural actually the right one here?
Because a lot of people didn't do that and were not sorry it happened in spite of them and In often against their wishes so the we didn't do this in the case of America obviously we America the nation does have to bear some responsibility as any nation does but In many cases in this country, as in all countries, what has gone wrong has gone wrong because specific actors decided to go the wrong route.
I agree with this.
And, you know, I believe in the tension you are describing, but I also know that at some there's a higher level truth of what we are biologically.
And then there is some reality that we have not yet gotten good at integrating with it, right?
So, you know, I'm a Jew.
My ancestors came from Europe in the 20th century.
Somehow I am an American tied back to George Washington, right?
Yes.
My ancestors were somewhere else when George Washington was doing his thing.
And yet, by virtue of the fact that I am a citizen of this country and a believer in it, Right?
I actually have picked up, you know, the George Washington, and, you know, the Martin Luther King, and all of these things.
They actually become part of what I am, and maybe even the more important part.
And so, the question is, you know, am I responsible for the miseducation of these people?
No.
You know, I've actually dedicated a large fraction of my life to educating people well, and I did it well.
On the other hand, is there a we, and did we fuck up?
We fucked up.
We, we allowed, and you know, I don't think there's more I could have done, but I still feel the responsibility for a society that has allowed, I mean, you know, I feel it not just with respect to the, you know, the people who were given cruddy tools that now don't arm them for the meritocracy that we insist they should be competing in, but I also, you know, I'm watching the homelessness population, the homeless population
Grow and I know that a lot of these people for a very homeless population to grow at the rate that it is growing Those people weren't homeless some of them were but it's many of these people have gone from having the ability to house themselves to not having it and What you know we have allowed that to happen well again, I mean not to want to play the conservative card too much back at you, but I
One thing that has to be on everyone's mind is, is there a scenario that you can imagine in which the person does actually deserve to be on the streets?
No.
No.
This is a problem, isn't it?
It's the same thing as the portions of the left, I'm not saying you, find it very hard to see what scenario leads anyone to be in prison.
Well, and it's something on the same trajectory of thought, which is that I don't think that homelessness per se can ever be stopped because I think that, for instance, there will be some people who actually, I mean, again, it's impossible to tell exactly what proportion, but there'll be a portion of people who want that.
I've noticed that in San Francisco and elsewhere, by the way.
I mean, there are some people who seem to want to live on the streets.
There's a very small proportion, perhaps, but a voluntary street-dwelling population might be something you can't eradicate.
What you want to eradicate is the people who fell through layer after layer after layer of the society and absolutely do not want to be there.
But as with prison, as with other things in our society where an individual ends up in a catastrophic situation, there does have to be some understanding of Not always assuming that it was society that caused the thing to happen.
Let me give you another example.
It's obvious in American society that there's a debate over incarceration.
There has been going on for a long time in incarceration rates, particularly in breaking it down by racial origin.
And one of the answers that people have come to on this, I think actually it's a pretty good place to contest, is over incarceration rates of black, particularly male Americans, over Relatively low level drug issues Dealing in small amounts of marijuana.
Do you do any large amounts of marijuana and all of the comparisons?
I mean this is this is what we were going back to earlier about the distribution of opportunity and much more in society, which is that that This is a good place to contest this It does seem unfair to people and I think I know I would share this that
That somebody, whatever their racial origin, has their entire life affected, disenfranchised, future job opportunities forever taken from them for what could be seen as a relatively minor offence.
And people leaning on this seem to me to be leaning on something which is It is reasonable.
It's a reasonable concern.
The problem is that those same people will not allow themselves to say, what is the thing that means, yes, you should be banged up, you should have future opportunities taken away from you because what you've done is deeply harmful to everyone else in society.
And the problem is that these people, they say, mainly a leftist problem, cannot do that bit.
Yeah.
And that's the same thing with it.
The right can be heartless at times, but there are times where a form of heartlessness is necessary.
If somebody is determined to do a thing and does it again and again, you cannot then say that we as a society let them down.
No, that person's responsible.
They have to pay.
Yeah, oh, I totally agree.
The question you asked me was whether anybody deserves to be homeless, right?
Do people deserve to be in prison?
Many do.
I'm not sure, by the way, I'm not sure that I think anyone deserves to be homeless.
But I'm saying the situation that emerges, that means that some people will screw up again and again and again, and some people...
We present it only in terms of they haven't got the help they need.
That is a very reasonable way to present it.
But, as we all know, there are people who every single opportunity you give them, they fall through.
Well, okay, you've got two categories.
I'd say there are three categories, right?
You've got a category of people who, given enough functional structure, would be productive and decent and have fallen through the cracks because there's no safety net, right?
Then you have people who meet your description, who, given every opportunity, can't pull it together, but not necessarily because they want it that way.
They may be badly damaged and just incapable of doing the kinds of things that would solve the problem.
And then you've got undoubtedly a category of people, and I don't know how big it is, but a category of people who just suck and aren't interested in participating in society.
And I would argue homelessness is not a right answer in any of those three categories.
In part, not just because of the people involved.
The first two categories, I would argue, deserve our compassion, right?
The third category, I don't know that they deserve our compassion, but is it good for society to have homeless people?
Of course not.
It is not, and so you have to provide some Reasonable alternative.
But you also have to make sure that that third category, whatever number they are, do not end up confusing and confounding the rest of society.
Oh, a hundred percent.
This is, you know, it's a parent's dilemma again.
It's that at some point It cannot be extrapolated out onto everybody else when one person has behaved in a certain way for which they have to pay.
Total.
And with respect to the prison side of the equation, I would say I think it is insane that we do not distinguish between, at the very least, sociopaths, and maybe I mean psychopaths in this case, and other criminals.
Right?
And sorry, because the criminal one is in some ways easier.
But I mean, going back to this thing, there was protests in Portland the other night because of, I gather, sparked by the fact that a family who happen to be black, stopped paying their rent some time ago, the landlord wants to evict them because they haven't been paying their rent, and they say racism, and now people are campaigning for this family to stay in the home.
The family itself says that?
When you say they, they say racism?
Yes, as I understand it, the people who live in the house say it's because of racism.
I would venture, as an outsider, I'd venture it's highly unlikely that racism is the cause of the landlord wanting to evict them and that it's more likely that the landlord wants to be paid for leasing his house to anybody, whatever their skin colour.
I don't know.
Maybe we found a white supremacist landlord in Portland.
Strange place for white supremacists to try to earn their keep, but in this situation every mechanism of the society, and this isn't just important, every mechanism of the society is in favor of the family Who is not paying the rent.
Right.
Very, very little.
And I'm not going to say that porn is an extreme example.
But in general, very little of society looks to the landlord who is losing money and thinks that we should pity them.
And that's because Our societal ethic, again, it starts in a good place, it just doesn't know where the hell to stop, favors the person who appears to be the underdog over the person who is perceived to have privilege.
And we have become wildly intolerant of and unsympathetic with anybody perceived to have privilege, and wildly over-sympathetic with anybody who can be claimed to be in any way an oppressed group.
Even if They are allegedly oppressed because there's something they haven't been doing, which they should have done.
That was the deal.
Right.
Well, so in this case, I would just say, um, A.
If you extrapolate, and this is the thing I think in some sense Americans are worst at at the moment, is extrapolating.
But if you extrapolate from, well we can't very well evict these people for not paying because, it doesn't matter what follows the because, once you set that in motion the point is what you've done is invalidated a system that houses people without suggesting a replacement for it.
So it's insane, right?
It's just simply unstable.
Now, I will say, as a biologist who has spent a great deal of time working on and thinking about human beings, I actually believe that there is something deep to the idea that the differences in well-being that we see distributed in a non-random way between races
Is a consequence of Structural features of history right echoing into the present now again.
I don't know this to be true for sure I don't you know, it's something that remains to be demonstrated, but I do think Societally speaking we have to leave that possibility open until it has been disproved.
Yes, and so If it is the case that a well-functioning liberal society that protected people from bad luck provided people with tools that allowed them to avail themselves of the opportunities in the meritocracy and incentivized them to do so, right, if that's sort of the minimal criteria,
That we would actually find that many of the problems that are motivating a lot of this insanity would evaporate.
Now they wouldn't go, you know, you wouldn't get total equality.
You'd get a distribution of well-being based on how hard different people work and various other things.
But the unfairness in the system would be randomized.
And so in a sense, I think we have, and you know, let's go back to your example about we know, or we at least have excellent reason to think that there is an important racial inequality that has caused a large number of black men to be incarcerated for something that most of us don't think is even worthy of being criminalized, right?
The distribution of pot.
Okay.
You and I have no disagreement about that.
Well, I'm not for decriminalization.
Oh, you're not?
I mean, I don't, I believe in, I mean, it's actually something I haven't studied an enormous amount, but I actually don't think that...
I think it's another layer of the catastrophe of the society that on top of everything else you decide this is a great time to legalize pot-pot.
I mean, I don't think that people should be punished for its possession.
I mean, I think this is roughly my view.
It's not a totally evolved view.
I certainly don't think people should be punished for the possession of marijuana.
Yeah.
I don't think a society should encourage, by legalizing, its use because I think that it does a lot of Damage once he gets going interesting.
So here's here's what I would say as somebody who used to smoke a lot of pot I haven't smoked it in a long time.
I gave myself an allergy actually, but Yeah, I damaged my lungs and gave myself an allergy.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's a lot.
It was a lot Wow, I really didn't but here's the thing this was this was quite a long time ago and pot wasn't Yeah, it wasn't Nearly so strong a drug.
It was a pretty minor phenomenon.
People weren't smoking the varieties that give them psychosis and much more.
Right, exactly.
And so what happened to POT was that it actually, the THC got concentrated because the criminal penalties tracked the weight that you were trafficking in.
So the stronger that the individual quantity was, the less the penalty for trafficking a certain amount of effect, right?
So anyway, we've created a very powerful drug out of something that wasn't very powerful.
And, you know... Again, I question what we is there, but yes, okay.
Our collective societal action created a very powerful drug out of marijuana, which wasn't very powerful to begin with.
And so, in the case of the ancestral, the pot we used to smoke, ditchweed, whatever it was, right?
It I think actually on balance might be a lot less dangerous from the point of view of societal harms than for example alcohol and that in effect criminalizing it meant people spent a lot more time drunk.
I mean, yeah, I know the argument for that.
All the problems that alcohol can cause and all the pleasures it can bring.
It's suboptimal for society to have many things like that in the circulation system.
And I don't find it persuasive when people say that legalizing marijuana in California or anywhere else is desirable because some people drink beer.
And I just had one other thing which is again the state of somewhere like San Francisco It's visible to an outsider that marijuana legalization layered on top of everything else has not improved the society I Don't know how you would know.
Oh, I mean things like every time I visited I mean the last time I was there there were huge adverts everywhere For a new company which would deliver marijuana to your door.
And I remember just thinking, yeah, that's clearly the thing this needs most is easier access.
So you don't even have to leave your house to get your stash.
Yeah.
Um, I actually, I do feel sort of strongly instinctively about this one.
Again, some people smoke pot.
I don't have a particular problem with it.
I don't want people to go to prison for it, but my God, on a social level, do I not want them to do it around me?
- Okay. - Because they all become boring and I think it's selfish.
I don't think it makes them funnier or more interesting or more insightful.
I think it dulls their brain.
There's some process of almost like retardation that it seems to have on a lot of people that goes on when they're not on it. - Yep. - And I'd rather have a society of sort of alert and thinking people who, who weren't first of all weren't you know retarded from things they could do and think and feel and And contribute through.
Again, I mean, if people want to do it, and it's available, then sure, I just wouldn't encourage it.
All right.
So I take your point.
And again, I think we're talking about a whole different beast than we used to be talking about.
So, you know, Let's leave it aside.
If we agree that there's some problem in which society has not only penalized people for the relatively trivial offense of having pot, but done so in a wildly unequal way that has... Then that would be wrong and it would be needing to be corrected.
Right, but here would be my point.
Okay, so you take a lot of black men for a relatively trivial offense and you lock them up.
This has an automatic consequence that creates a much larger problem, right?
As bad a problem as that is, right?
Removing people's freedom is a very serious thing and doing it over something trivial is obviously an illiberal thing to do.
But If you take a large number of men out of a population then you Undermine the bargaining position of women in child rearing which results in women raising children alone Yes, can I cut in there?
Sure.
Sorry, but there's another thing We are quite good at going over the the effect that incarceration rates have on Causing fatherless children in America.
Yep.
My fear is that this is a conversation.
I think that conversation should be had.
I'm not, I'm not by any means against it.
This is, I sometimes worry that some things like that come up because it's the easiest conversation to have.
I never hear it.
Oh, it's written about pretty widely here, isn't it?
It's possible I've just missed it, but I keep raising it, and I get all kinds of... The Atlantic, among other magazines, has run a lot of pieces about this.
Maybe we're not talking about the same thing, or maybe I'm unaware of what they've written.
What do you think the argument is that you see regularly portrayed?
I mean, I'm not not a big fan of his, but Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have written a length on the way in which incarceration has affected the American black family.
Oh, no, no.
Okay.
That is a very common conversation.
I'm talking about something Basically a biological argument about mating systems and the predictable effect of creating an imbalance between the numbers of males and females.
And so, you know, situation like China, portions of China where there aren't China's a very interesting paradoxical violation of a biological principle which says... For different reasons.
Right, for very different reasons.
But anyway, my point is just simply, we know that black men have been incarcerated at a high rate.
We can argue about why that is, but part of it seems to be unfair and on the basis of marijuana offenses, for example.
Part of it, yeah.
Part of it.
The consequence of that is to create single-parent homes, and single-parent homes are almost certain to produce offspring who are less well-positioned because they just have a lot less parent effort available.
The problem is, again, this is a part of a conversation that's relatively easy to have.
Whether it's had often or not, I don't know.
It's relatively easy to have it.
The harder conversation, again this comes back to something like the left-right tussle, is what about all the people who do that and it has no relation to incarceration rates, marijuana possession or anything else, i.e.
people who choose or just happen to father children with people they have no intention of staying with and leave and leave another family being brought up with a fatherless Situation but my point there is repeatedly a risk in our societies that we address the allegedly most difficult to address thing whilst actually leaving The really hard to address things completely unaddressed and that's unaddressed because we come back to this thing.
It's easier to address whatever percentage of whatever percent I would say that I'd have to remind myself of stats on this that fatherless households are not primarily in America caused because the father is in in jail for marijuana possession.
Okay.
Right?
So I want to clear this up.
A, I totally agree with what you're saying and You may or may not realize that this is something Heather and I have talked about extensively.
I didn't realize that.
Yes, so there is something very troubling going on and I think it comes out of, frankly, sexual liberalism, which resulted in a crisis of people producing offspring that they didn't intend to care for.
So that is a part of the discussion.
None of which is answered by sexual illiberalism, may we add.
Right.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
So there's some new conversation that has to happen, that basically the fact of birth control sets something in motion, the consequences of which were not well anticipated.
So, such a short way into it.
Right.
So it's about time we had a good conversation about that.
But I want to make the point, I am not arguing that somebody's father needs to be in jail in order for a single parent household to have been created.
What I'm arguing is the following thing.
Men are programmed for two reproductive strategies, okay?
One of them involves investment in offspring and in that mode men are very much like women in the sense that they are very choosy and very careful with whom they reproduce because anyway it's a lifetime of investment.
The other reproductive mode involves no investment.
The children are still needy and the mother's raised them.
So my point is Given men programmed for both of these possibilities, men find the idea of sex without commitment nearly irresistible.
And so what that means is if you have a community in which there are not enough men, men are in demand, there are lots of women willing The point is it's very hard to nail any of them down, right?
And so the point is how much fatherlessness in the black community is the result of a simple demographic lack of men available for marriage, right?
By the way, do you see any of this?
I mean, it's obviously must be replicated in other communities as well.
Well, you would see it in various places, anything that eliminates men would be likely to produce this, unless you had cultural provisions that prevented it.
Yes.
Right?
Shame mechanisms, for instance.
Exactly.
Shame mechanisms that could be, you know, religious in nature, for example.
All this is to say, we have consequences.
We have a complex system.
We have inequalities of various kinds.
We have an uncertain assertion that maybe actually people given the same tools are roughly equally capable and that what we're seeing is the echo of the fact that there was never a moment when everybody was at the starting line at the same time, right?
People start from different places with different baggage based on how they arrive in the population.
And that in effect we are, I would argue, I believe we are dealing with the downstream consequences of the fact that we never equalized things, nor could we have, but that in some sense that's the puzzle to be solved.
Now if you did that...
And you found that there was residual inequality left over, that would tell you you had a different problem.
But until you've done that, imagining that the inequality, and I don't mean inequality in wealth, I mean inequality of capacity to compete, right?
Until you've equalized things enough that we've run that experiment then we're in this very cruel predicament of Society blaming people for their failures when we actually don't know to what extent they are Responding to the tools they've been given.
Yeah, we don't know and it's very hard to see a scenario in which we could know that's one of the Problems I have with this.
I mean One of the reasons why the right is not so keen on the whole equality argument is the unmeasurability of the factors we're talking about Totally.
I mean By the way, I think there's lots of things in our society at the moment which fall in with where we have the same unknowability problem One that is very much on my mind at the moment is mental illness, which is on everybody's minds, and which seems to me suffers from some problem in this area, where we have compassion for anybody with mental illness, quite rightly.
It exists.
We know.
But we also don't know where the boundaries are, for instance, of people who simply claim an element of it in order to gain something else.
There is no knowing mechanism in society.
There are doctors I speak to who say we can tell when there are people who are after a diagnosis of something that will help them.
I mean this, of course, in a cynical, helping them moment.
Doctors tell me, you know, there are certain things people would quite like to be diagnosed with that are actually, if you did have them, you would not want to have them.
For example?
Bipolar.
Bipolar.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the number of people who appear to be almost proud of or seeking of a diagnosis of being bipolar because They see there as being certain gains to be made from it.
Nobody with bipolar problems would want it.
Yeah.
But you can tell something is up.
And again, Dr. Friends I speak to says because there are things that clearly people don't want to... Nobody wants to go out on a date with somebody and boasts that they're a schizophrenic.
Right.
Actually, I've noticed the same thing, that there are certain conditions that people that apparently carry no stigma and... In fact, the opposite, in a way.
Right.
Not always, but in certain situations.
And by the way, I want to stress again, none of this is by any means to...
Condemn or criticize people who actually do have, you know, serious conditions which seriously affect their lives.
But we all know that there are people who do want that we see them and we experience it particularly when people are growing up.
Yeah.
That they want to have certain things in order to single them out and make them special and give them better treatment.
They're better to be given certain leeway by society.
We don't have mechanisms in place to deal with this.
And for something which for instance, I mean the British government a couple years ago said they wanted to treat physical mental illness in with the same Dedication as physical illness if you haven't worked out what the boundaries are of mental illness in your society You've just allowed a massive problem to erupt Because there's no delineation of right you create a certain amount of
Ambiguity between people who are genuinely suffering and people who would like to suffer because they'd like the things that they believe accrue to people who've suffered.
Yeah, it's psychological munchausens or something.
Right.
And I mean, all of these things do come together.
I think I joked to you when we were having dinner with Heather last night that I had wondered on arriving in Portland whether or not the water was safe to drink.
There does appear to be something in it that causes the growing of pink hair.
Yeah.
The masculinization of women and the feminization of men.
Yes.
It's causing me to go gray.
You got the best imaginable fate from that.
But I mean, you do wonder when a society has as many deranged people in it and as many people who believe they're involved in some weird gender boundary, malefluous Transgression and much more.
I mean, again, to an outsider, this stuff is obvious here.
You have an awful lot of people who, I mean, again, roaming the streets who clearly should be in places where they're being looked after for mental problems.
Clearly you've got a problem with that.
And you have a lot of people who are clearly operating in society.
Who have a range of less severe, but low-level mental disorders.
Yep.
Who believe that they are... And again, this isn't to say that trans doesn't exist, as I say in Manners of Crowds, clearly something is going on here, we just know almost nothing about it, but we also have people who are pretending that they're trans in order to gain attention and win the hierarchy game of the era, because weirdly, They think that in the Intersectional Olympics, to be gender fluid is something that will make you win, or give you the megaphone that evening.
And all of these things are going on simultaneously, and again, A conservative critique of that would be because you didn't set up any boundaries.
Oh.
You didn't chart any of this.
It was not in your interests to be rigorous.
It was not in your interests to pinpoint to people when they had personally screwed up.
Nobody in the social system was willing to say, shut up, go and do your work.
Nobody was willing to say, you failed because you deserve to fail because you're a reprehensible and selfish figure.
Nobody was willing to do any of these things and so you just have this like literally a girl the other night in a pink jumpsuit Screaming at the police and hurling things hoping to be arrested.
She's like We're there so I think we are We're in a position to converge here, because first of all, let's just say, I don't think it's in the water in any literal sense.
I know you're speaking metaphorically.
I am speaking metaphorically.
That's a good thing to clear up, just in case.
Well, let's put it this way.
From my perspective, I think we've got the same puzzle across all of civilization, which is You have a huge number of people who are sick psychologically, physically, socially, right?
And you don't know why.
And you're busy telling me that all of these things are safe.
You don't know if they're safe.
You know that they don't kill you outright if you ingest them.
But you don't know that they're not long-term harmful and so the point is we've got a lot of things causing pathology and we don't know what they are and that's a very dangerous situation and it should start a very serious adult conversation about how you deal with things that cause pathology that you can't identify in a complex society where we keep inventing new stuff and releasing it assuming it's fine.
But what I want to get at is this.
The situation you're describing I don't agree, I don't disagree with you, right?
We didn't set limits, we are, we got exactly what we ordered, in effect, right?
We set up a system that was guaranteed to cause this kind of dysfunction, and then we got this kind of dysfunction, we scratch our heads over it, and that's absurd.
What we should have The way you do deal with the problems that we've been talking about without being able to run the test about what causes what is you set up a mechanism that protects people.
We don't want people falling off the bottom of the ladder.
We don't want people rewarded for hanging out at the bottom of the ladder, right?
We want people incentivized to solve their own problems.
We want them to seek competence rather than incompetence, but we want to protect Everyone, I would assume, from falling off the bottom and becoming a burden to society on the street, right?
And then you want to arm people with high quality tools for making the most of life.
If you had a system in which you protect people from falling off the bottom, you arm everybody with high quality tools for making something Of your life, and then you allow inequality to drive people to strive, right?
That, I believe, solves the problem by virtue of the fact that people have a very good reason then to achieve, right?
And that good reason to achieve is what drives people away from the kind of incompetence that you're describing.
Yes.
Do you think that's achievable?
Again, I think the big problem is that we are talking about a problem, we have an immediate problem.
Like a, it's October of 2020 and the clock is ticking and we're talking about what to do next week.
We have that time scale of problem.
And the solution we are talking about is, if we started tomorrow, it's still going to be a generation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So... Let me add where we offer alternative, which is...
That thing of people falling off the bottom.
When I said earlier, you know, should anyone, does anyone deserve to be homeless?
What I'm trying to get at is the society cannot rack itself endlessly over the tiny number of people who actually fall through their own volition.
Right.
Okay, we cannot be endlessly empathetic with those who have been given every opportunity and still fall and One of the reasons is and I mean this is a very again It's a very ugly very unpleasant thing to say perhaps is that knowing that that is possible is one of the things that keeps everyone else running mmm, well, so seat citing that I mean, I have this instinct always with the homeless.
I'm by no means heartless on this issue, but you know, it depends what your state in life is, but I've certainly had times in my life where I see somebody who's begging and I think, could be me.
Could be me.
And that's a good instinct to have for lots of reasons.
One is it gives you sympathy with the person in question.
The other thing is it reminds you to work and run yes now the reason I say this is because and you're not going to like and your local visitors are not gonna like this but Portland may be that example that the rest of the world needs to run mm-hmm and work and do a lot of other things to stop this being replicated and
And to that extent, those who would like to play the left, right, and indeed media reporting cards on this, are doing it, I think, for that reason.
To give them a most plausible steel man analysis of it, I suspect that some left wingers, including the far leftists in this region, don't like accurate reporting of the extremes to which their people are going, because they intuit that what is happening is that the rest of the country is saying, We would like that lesson to become even clearer.
They might not be wrong on that.
I don't doubt at all that there are a lot of people on the American right who would like to see Portland burn to the ground in order for it to be a lesson for everybody else.
I don't doubt that.
I don't know how commonplace that is.
I don't think one could measure it.
But equally, there are people of the left who don't want any of what's going on here to get out, precisely because they realise that the lesson that people will take from here might be the opposite lesson to the one that they hoped this place would be speaking to the nation at this point in its history.
And that is a very reasonable explanation for why this place has become such an epicenter of a much bigger debate.
Because one group of people thought this was going to be Nirvana, and Nirvana stinks.
And they intuit that, perhaps.
And another side wants Portland to fail because it wants the rest of us to see how and why it's failed and make sure we don't replay the lessons.
So, I agree that this is part of the dynamic and I think, you know, this is unavoidably for my family a personal tragedy because, you know, we moved to Portland because in many ways it is an amazing city with great promise and to watch it fail in this way... It's a beautiful city and beautiful nature around you.
It has the potential to be marvelous.
If only it had, you know, I like its idealism, right?
I don't mean the Antifa insanity in the streets.
I mean the idealism of your average Portland homeowner or business owner, right?
I like what they're striving for.
I like what they want.
But I want the restraining force that causes it to be, you know, deployed in some reasonable way.
And that is not happening here.
I do want to... I accept the pushback that you've just delivered about Portland as cautionary tale for liberals, and I think it is that.
I want to deliver the other side of that argument though.
There is part of what is taking place nationally, and in fact internationally, that is the result of too much stinginess on the part of the right.
In other words, I think that we had a kind of post-Cold War dividend that we spent very, very stupidly, and that we allowed rent-seeking to hoard opportunity that, if it had been broadly distributed, would have resulted in a much better, much fairer, much nicer society.
And that in effect, it's not that I want either side to be held responsible for what happened, because I think it is actually, you know, it's a Shakespearean failure here, that what we've got is each side had its blind spot, and the two engaged in a kind of
Dance of death that brought us to this place and The you know, so there's a question about what we can do about it immediately and the answer is I don't know that anybody knows the answer to that.
No an individual level, you know for you and your family as for many other reasonable people in this place the the calculus that has to happen by now is Is it worth hitting my head against a wall or is it worth getting out?
And this is a conversation I had with lots of people in California, again, from across the political spectrum, was, is this able to be improved?
Or is it not worth, you know, I quote in Madness of Crowdsummery the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, who at one point, in an essay from the 80s or so, said something, he said, you know, we all have to spend ourselves on something.
And that's an interesting tipping point in any society is I will spend my time, I will spend myself on the attempt to turn around the city I am in and from and that I love and that has great potential.
And then the moment when it's perfectly clear that this is not a useful way to spend the limited energies we all do have in our life and that time to go.
Well, that's a calibration.
It is unavoidable.
And, you know, I must say, having seen this in microcosm at Evergreen and now seeing it in Portland, it's the same damn calculation, which was, you know, Heather and I tried everything we could think of.
You know, we were two of the most popular professors Evergreen had.
Heather was actually number one.
Right?
And you would have thought that we could have brought reason to that system and prevented it from going over the edge.
There came a point at which it became utterly clear that spend everything we had on the puzzle wouldn't be nearly enough to prevent the place from imploding and that the only thing to do was to get out.
Right?
That became clear.
That same, I mean, it's almost the identical calculation is now unfolding in Portland.
And we didn't, you know, sometimes our friends give us a hard time.
Why did you move to Portland?
And the answer was, actually, the quality of life here was spectacular and much more affordable than it was in many places.
So, you know, we actually looked at 10 different cities that we might have moved to, and we moved here because it was the best.
But, um, Watching what it's doing now, I have to tell you, my upbringing, I was born in 1969, which felt like, as I was growing up, it felt like it was a long time after the Holocaust and World War II.
I now, as an adult, realize it was much closer to those events than I had realized.
And I cannot escape the question, you know, we always, when I was growing up, talked about people who had been living in Eastern Europe, Jews who didn't react fast enough and told themselves that it would be okay and, you know, that it would pass.
And then it didn't.
And, you know, I can't, I don't know how to convey to people who are busy attacking The foundations of logic, of mathematics, science, the enlightenment, the idea of equality amongst the races.
I don't know how to say to these people.
You are scaring the shit out of those of us who know anything about history because you sound an awful lot like things that we have seen and this doesn't end well, right?
But I also, you know, the question I asked you earlier, where are the examples where people who were headed this direction turned around because they realized what they were up to or some properly moderate restraining force?
Well, the ordinary thing that happens at this stage in a society is a war, in which very large numbers of people die, and people are reminded of one of the forces of nature.
Saying that sounds catastrophic, but there's no way around it.
Late empires and societies which have this number of things, they say that's what happened and it requires that.
And the problem about that, of course, is that it's both the mechanism that sets things back on some other trajectory and also the thing that kills vast numbers of people.
You can't ever wish for it.
Nobody sane would.
Occasionally you meet insane people who would.
This is why the misunderstanding, what I described at the beginning, the wrong projection on the wall of things, which you then war against, is so important to correct.
And it has to be done at that micro level.
And maybe a lot of people didn't realize, I mean, you realized, Heather realized, but that if you allow people to get away with the subtle, Tiny misrepresentations around the margins of the thing that is being created.
If you allow that to happen, when it's projected on the National Wall, you'll know that you should have got it right earlier.
That's brilliant, by the way.
This is exactly how it works.
There are those of us who are sticklers for getting the fine detail right.
And I think we often look absurd to others because their point is just generally.
Yeah, why didn't you just let it go?
Right.
Absolutely.
And the answer is because sooner or later you're going to hit an amplifier.
And when you amplify the little incorrect aspects of this, you're going to cause the whole I've had this throughout my life and noticed it among many friends and colleagues and that in different sectors this is this is perhaps unknowingly often the reason why we are sticklers for detail.
We will not.
I mean the most obvious one in America today is like, why would you argue about the details?
I was in New York the other week and we were talking about the Breonna Taylor case and I came away from that thinking, everyone had different views and different claims, but I came away from that just thinking, you know, why are we sticking to this?
It's because that matters.
Because one narrative of it, like the George Floyd case, one narrative of it, if you don't get all the facts right, will allow the projection on the wall to be the American police are allowed to kill black people with impunity.
And some of the people doing that will have done it for short-term political gain.
Some will, you know, that will be their estimation of events, including people whose estimation of events is thus because they have themselves suffered at the hands of the law unfairly themselves.
The problem is that you will create this next generation, which is clearly one of the things you had at Evergreen and clearly one of the things that's going on in Portland, that actually believes the picture that has been played onto the wall in front of them, and at this stage cannot be shifted from that unless it is through some monumental reboot of the whole system.
Which is only imaginable through a catastrophic event.
Yes, although, so A, I will say I was, as a younger man, I was a believer in the idea that a catastrophic destruction of an American city could wake the population to what it wasn't paying attention to.
I no longer believe this.
I mean, you know, Katrina, among other things, revealed that No, that just wasn't the case anymore.
I also think that there's something about the spectacularness of what we see on our screens that has caused us not to be able to detect when something is so spectacular in the outside world that it should immediately grab our attention and we should Think very soberly about it.
So we're sort of caught where people are dealing as if their beliefs and what they say don't have consequence because of the narrative environment we're in.
But I did want to add one thing to your portrayal.
I agree.
One possible interpretation is This is what people do.
War is the thing that puts the brakes on it.
You can descend into madness.
Disaster, catastrophe.
It doesn't have to be war.
It could be genocide.
It could be lots of things.
But the point is societies go crazy, they hit bottom, and then they come back.
I don't think that happens here.
And the reason I don't think that happens here is because the U.S.
isn't just any country.
Yes, yes.
This is 2020.
Yes.
The U.S.
plays a special role in the West.
Well, I know.
I mean, I live in one of the outposts of the Empire.
Exactly.
So the thing is things go wrong in Rome right they affect us in Galicia They do and the thing so that may be an ancient pattern But the new pattern is the technological context that we live in and the fact that you know this will be the first time you've had a major reorientation like that on a Planet armed with nuclear weapons, for example
Yes, and all able to see everything in real time and not agree on what we've seen and much more.
Right.
And yes, then you layer on to it the industrial strength, scientifically tuned propaganda generators.
And we're talking, we have to stop ourselves.
And without a precedent for how that happens without hitting rock bottom, Well, that's why the details are going to continue to matter.
And the individuals, however small in number they are, who care about the details must continue to be seen to do well.
You know, this is why people admire you and Heather.
It's why people admire the figures who are willing to get the details right.
And I think if I have any hope in all this and I always do have some hope It's that people relearn why some people were compelled to be sticklers in this era and that they were not They were not being boringly pedantic They were not
narrow in their vision, but saw that when the madness of the era trod on their areas and they said, no, you don't get to do that.
They were making the most important fight that they could in the areas they knew about.
And in case after case in recent years, that's what's gone on.
Yes.
I must say at the moment, um, It's possible that it's at the wrong scale to even know whether that's possible, but the overwhelming sense for Heather and me was that We were surprised that people actually correctly registered that what happened at Evergreen was this thing we are seeing more widely and that we did say we got it exactly right.
We were told at the time we were overreacting or maybe it was an extreme case or something.
There's been wide acknowledgement that, uh, we were seeing accurately and that the warning was if anything tamer than it might've been rather than, uh, an overreaction.
However, It seems to amount to nothing with respect to, it's, we're just going to repeat the disaster.
And it's like, you get some kind of a prize for having spotted the last one and correctly diagnosed it, but there's no like, okay, well then what do you think is happening now?
And what do we do about it?
It's like, it's treated as a completely separate phenomenon, um, at the level of,
What's going to happen here when I think the answer is what's going to happen here is what happened there, except that when it happens at the scale of major American cities, it's going to result in the loss of life and limb and well-being, and it is going to place the nation in terrible jeopardy relative to its big bad antagonists in the world.
Yes, I think that's right.
One way in which all of this corrects itself is by America failing, being seen to have failed, and those who believed in other systems to be able to portray themselves as having been vindicated.
My own belief is that that's the worst case scenario imaginable.
Because people who didn't like the American empire or the American era of hegemony and dominance are going to love the Chinese one.
This is exactly it.
And here's the thing.
People don't understand that they are, that humans are themselves the latest iteration in an ancient evolutionary battle, right?
That until humans nobody can name or understand is even taking place, right?
And the point is, the Chinese might even be More fit.
Their system might be more fit.
But it is pointless.
It is pointless because it does not liberate the individuals to do the things that humans are uniquely capable of doing.
And so the point is, we have to win, even if their system is more robust and fitter, because it has no purpose.
Absolutely.
No, no, no.
A life dedicated to growth in China.
Right.
It's not alive.
Right.
You know, I mean, a yeast is a very successful entity, but we don't want to become yeast, right?
Not my aspiration!
No, right, we don't want to do it.
And, you know, frankly, if, you know, the West were to catch on in such a way that the Chinese were liberated to be freer and less efficient, you know, it would be good for them.
It might not be good for them.
Sense of their, you know, long term growth, as you put it, but it would be good for them from the point of the human part, the part that makes us different.
That part is really the part struggling to survive in this era.
And I think it's on the ropes.
It is on the ropes, but it always is.
It always is.
It's not been on the ropes to this extent in this place for a long, long time.
And that's why it matters.
That's why the city we're sitting in's name is known.
It's why it matters.
It's why Evergreen mattered.
It's why America matters.
One can't be too adamant about this, that screwing this up, or claiming that if you bring it down, better things will emerge, are things that have to be stopped.
Not just willed, but stopped by people who know what the stakes are.
And that's why whatever way through there is, it involves people of left and right, centrists, boring though they may be, and much else, agreeing that the optimal conditions may not be these, but all of the rest are infinitely worse, including the ones that are being propagated
By people in the name, especially of social justice and equality and much more.
And we have to not be derailed by these people.
We have to stand up to them.
The American public have to stand up to them.
The American authorities have to stand up to them.
And, you know, the world only walks in one direction in relation to America, which is towards it.
There is no mass movement to Sudan.
There is no mass movement to Saudi Arabia.
China does not have a massive immigration problem of people wishing to flee to it.
The footfall speaks for itself.
It's a very good point.
It speaks for itself.
And the American public and politicians should realize, whatever direction they come from, this is too big a thing to screw up.
And it's too big a thing to get the details wrong for the short term.
Because America's short term is the world's long term.
That's very, very well said.
And I must say, if I can just simply paraphrase the implication here, this is something I have felt very strongly for a very long time.
It is not our right to screw this up.
We Americans, There is an irony in the belief in democracy, which is that democracy is about the consent of the governed.
And because the U.S.
plays a role in governing the world, many of those who are governed by it, whether they like it or not, have no vote here.
And so in a sense, we have to vote with the responsibility to the rest of the world in mind, and we are doing a terrible job of it.
Yeah, well, you vote in, what, two weeks.
So we'll see.
Well, let me ask you one thing before we go.
You have traveled in the U.S.
now.
You came west from the East Coast and then you traveled up the West Coast, landing here in Portland.
I don't know how to ask you this exactly.
I'm tuned into a bunch of conversations amongst some powerful and influential people.
I know what I hear.
You've now physically passed through places where you will have participated in many of these conversations in person.
The elite How well do they understand what's going on?
How coherent do you think their response to it is?
I can't really say.
I mean, I can say only a few tiny parts of it.
I mean, America is such a complex country, as you know.
It's so wide and it's so hard to... It's so infinitely interesting because it's so hard to gauge it because of the difference from state to state, place to place, city to city, and much more.
So if somebody says you know, do you have your ear to the ground in America?
You have to say but where sure there's an awful lot of places to put your ear to It's it's I can't really answer that I I'm struck by the number of people who are now thinking catastrophic thoughts and coming to emergency scenario planning very struck on In all the places I've been to so far.
with the fact that that people for instance are planning to vote and then get out of the area they live in.
It's just a terrible fate for a country the one you're in.
It's just a terrible, horrible fate.
Because nobody Nobody is wild about anyone other than people who you wouldn't trust to be wild.
I mean, I feel embarrassed for this country in some ways.
I'm embarrassed by those who are going to vote for Joe Biden As if in his fifth decade in politics he's going to do something he didn't do in the first four.
Well said, of course.
I mean, it's so preposterous.
All these things you say you're going to do, but why didn't you do them in 47 years of this?
I'm embarrassed for them because I know their heart isn't in it.
And that they're doing something which is transparent to everybody.
And I'm embarrassed for Republicans and others who have to pretend that Donald Trump is lots of things he isn't, including somebody you can totally trust.
I'm embarrassed for them because it seems to me, I've avoided writing about Trump pretty much for the last four years, partly because everybody's got a view, partly because you can't change anyone's mind, and partly because it's so damn obvious.
I mean, I can riff on him like everybody else.
You want me to list his flaws?
I can do it lying down.
But we all can.
And the embarrassment to my mind for Republicans, and certainly for Trump voters, is that their man has been in for four years.
And although he is to some extent capable of pulling big levers, he has no capacity to effectively do things.
He can do big things quite well on occasion.
The trade war with China doesn't seem to me to be something anyone else would be able to do.
And I think it's necessary.
I think that, oh I mean things like the critical race theory stuff is something probably almost, well actually probably no other leader would do.
It's just that repeatedly with him you have this thing, but why don't you follow through with things?
Why don't you do things?
Why aren't you interested in detail?
Why can't you get anyone to work with you?
And much more.
And I'm embarrassed for my friends and contacts and others who have to pretend that Trump is something he isn't.
I'm embarrassed for those with the same problem on the other side.
I'm personally rather relieved I don't have a vote in this election.
I'm pleased to be one of the disenfranchised on the remnants of the empire.
So, all right, do you have a sense of what's going to happen?
I don't.
I mean, like everyone, I've got different scenarios.
The polls seem to show that Biden's going to win.
Yes, they seem to.
And of course, then everyone says, aha, but they seem to show that Hillary was going to win last time.
I've just got all the thoughts in my head simultaneously.
I have no special way of seeing through the fog and I see odd things.
I've spoken to surprising people who are going to vote Trump, who I would never expect it to do so.
I've seen rallies and gatherings in which there seem to be support for Trump on a level that is not replicated in the polls.
But I also think that America, as Peggy Noonan brilliantly wrote the other week in the Wall Street Journal, might want a return to normality.
And they think that voting, rightly or wrongly, they think that voting Biden would be some return to normality from a reality TV show that they've been forced to watch for four years and they can't change the channel on.
My own views are always beyond the individual, the ballot, and onto the fate of the nation.
What I find difficult to comprehend is what is the best and worst long case scenario in each outcome.
Only knowing that the worst case scenario is a contestation in multiple jurisdictions.
Oh, which is highly likely.
Highly likely.
And that, I mean, I spoke to somebody the other day and I said that the absolute worst case scenario, as I'm sure you know, is the reverse of the Moonlight Oscars scenario.
You know, the other year, the Oscars, I mean obviously nobody watches it anymore, but at the Oscars they gave the best picture to La La Land.
Oh yeah.
And then it turned out that they'd got it wrong and it actually went to Moonlight, this black gay movie that wasn't seen by anyone other than the cast.
And Moonlight, fortunately, was given the Oscar.
And I remember at the time watching and thinking, oh thank God it happened that way round!
Because if they'd have taken the Oscar from the black gay movie and handed it over to the boring, whitey, la-la, singing, dancing, tedious movie, There would have been rioting in downtown within a few hours.
So you'd have news in brief the next day and the English papers would have been shots were heard overnight.
And obviously the worst case scenario for America in terms of security is that the Democrats are thought to have won and then it turns out that Trump won.
Would you agree that's the absolute worst case scenario?
Well, let's put it this way.
The worst case scenario starts there.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Of course, all of this is only the day after.
Yes, only this is the day after.
I'm sorry if I say any of this with a sort of glee and laughter because, of course, this is your country and your life.
I think, well, first of all, I think, in some sense, Anybody who's paying attention to you knows that you have an extraordinary capacity for gallows humor.
They know where your heart is, and they know you're not rooting against us or delighting in our torment.
So anyway, yes, I think there's no danger of you being misinterpreted that way.
All right, well, I will make a prediction about the election.
We're going to lose.
Oh, yeah.
And by we, I mean the American people.
Yes, yes.
Yeah.
All right.
This has been a great discussion.
It has been a real pleasure to see you in person.
You were the first guest of the podcast remotely.
And now, in this era where everything is remote, here you are.
And we should stress, in a chilly and windowed-open... Right, we have increased the volume of this room to fight COVID to an incredible degree by plugging this room into the outside world and turning on the fans.
So, I don't think either of us is sick with COVID, but we've taken precautions.
And, in any case, very stimulating discussion.
I really appreciate it.
Where should people look for you?
They should look for your most recent book, which you've just updated.
Yes, The Madness of Crowds, out on an updated edition at the moment, just out this month, and they can find that if you can find any bookshops.
The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity is available there on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, on all of these.
Things and I'm also on Twitter Douglas K Murray.
I actually do post and Otherwise on various places and YouTube various maniacs upload interviews with me that they've conducted against all the better Better judgment.
Yes, exactly and I will say as I think I said in the first podcast I did with you That I found the audio version of your book particularly delightful because you yourself read it, and you read it like no one else could.
It's great fun.
I much recommend the audible version.
I had a whale of a time laughing almost every page, and I have to say to the sound technicians, not because of my own jokes, but because of the madness of what I'm talking about and the crazy crap that I have to recite from a range of madmen and women.
Yep.
And now you've been to the epicenter.
And now I've been to the epicenter and I, yep, can't wait to leave.
Well, that's a terrible thing to say, Douglas, but we don't call it leaving anymore.
We call it fleeing.
All right.
Well, thanks everyone for tuning in and hopefully we will see you again soon.
