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April 8, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
55:18
Delingpod 67: Carbon Mike
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And I know I always say this, but I totally love this week's special guest and you're going to love him too.
He's my brother from another mother.
His name is Carbon Mike and he lives in Brooklyn.
And I don't understand, nor will you, how a black American can be totally like me, a white Englishman.
And we've got so much in common.
It's like we are brothers under the skin and we love each other very much.
So I'm really looking forward to your sharing my joy with Carbon Mike.
Can I just say, before you listen to the podcast, thank you very much for all those of you who've been supporting the podcast, either by buying special friend badges or by contributing to my Patreon account.
Thank you very, very much.
I'm going to mention you by name, I think, in the next podcast.
Thank you, thank you.
It's really, really good to have your support.
If anyone else wants to support me, please do.
You can go to my website, which is delingpoleworld.com and you'll find details of the addresses of my Patreon page and how to buy a special friend badge and all sorts of things like that.
And you'll also get all my old podcasts.
Well, without further ado, here is my good friend, my brother from another mother, Carbon Mike.
I love Danny Paul.
Come and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Danny Paul.
Unless another time subscribe with me.
I love Danny Paul.
This is Carbon Mike and I'm speaking once again with James Dellingpole from Across the Pond.
James, thanks again for coming to talk to me.
Carbon Mike, I am always happy to do your show.
This is going to be a joint show, isn't it?
Because I'm going to put it out on the Dellingpod as well.
And I love you because, you know, in a manly way.
Um, because you are my black American brother from another mother, and I find it fascinating.
You've just got so many interesting things to say.
I mean, you're like me.
It's weird.
Oh, thank you, man.
It's like I, um...
I'm very pleased to be kind of making these connections and to get a lot of this stuff off my chest with someone who gets it.
So yeah, man, it's great.
It's fantastic.
So you're in Brooklyn.
Yes, sir.
And I... I know that New York has been one of the areas hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, or at least the kind of the hysteria anyway.
Yes.
So how is it like for you?
Are you under lockdown at the moment?
No.
I'm not sure what the official line from the city is at the moment, but I know that there's certainly no enforced lockdown.
Certainly in my part of Brooklyn, I don't think when I talk to my other friends in New York, they don't tell me that there's anything like that going on.
People have, and also, you know, in Brooklyn, especially in my part of Brooklyn, people are taking this in their stride.
This is kind of a working class, black and Latino area with a sprinkling of hipsters.
You walk around the street, some people are wearing masks, most people aren't.
People are just doing common sense things.
People aren't rushing out in large numbers to go and do unnecessary things.
They're taking what I think are reasonable precautions, but they're not going crazy.
I have a pet theory that this is driven by...
Mostly media hysteria, specifically because the class of people running the mainstream media, that is populating the mainstream media and actually reading aloud in front of cameras and what have you, are mostly sissies.
In other words, there are people who...
And by the way, by sissy, I do not mean homosexual.
I mean sissy.
And the fact is that these are people who've internalized the kind of culture-wide denigration of virtue, of classic...
governance of one's passions.
We've kind of denigrated that in our cultures across the West over the last few decades.
These people have internalized that.
They've gone to all the wrong schools, okay?
And so they have no problem displaying abject cowardice for everyone to see.
And that's what's pushing governments to go for a disproportionate response.
You know, it's like people are capable of using common sense.
People are capable of saying, okay, this thing sounds like it's dangerous, and so we should take precautions and what have you.
But my problem with this whole thing is not that it's fake, not that the virus doesn't exist, not that it doesn't make people sick, not that there aren't people suffering, but that it is merely dangerous.
Do you see what I'm saying?
It's dangerous.
It is not infinitely dangerous.
And I have a real problem with that.
I totally agree with you, by the way.
You and I sing from the same hymn sheet, basically.
I think that this is...
A perfect storm of stupid.
And I think that when we look back on this era and when we start trying to analyze the madness of the government's overreaction and we lament the damage that has been done to the global economy and done to the livelihoods, not just of current generations, but maybe the next two generations, it's going to be awful.
When we look at this, I think we're going to start asking questions like, how could we have handled it differently?
And these counterfactuals are all very well, but I think that all this bad stuff that's happening now was inevitable.
And it's inevitable because it's a product of all the stupid thinking That you and I used to lament in the days before coronavirus.
The way that universities, for example, no longer inculcate intellectual rigor.
The way that the universities have become essentially training grounds for social justice warrior.
Well, sisses, I think, your word, sisses, is a very good one.
The way, for example, that the police...
what the purpose of the police is they're more interesting in in in in monitoring people's dodgy tweets or offensive tweets than they are in dealing with real crime and now they're seizing the moment in in the uk and the us to pettily enforce these very dubious regulations which have been imposed by the government I mean, the most absurd for me is the mayor of Los Angeles' closure of 25 miles of beaches.
How can that happen?
How can that happen in the land of the free, the country which is supposed to be an example to the rest of the world?
So I think there are so many currents which are meeting to create this world.
This craziness.
And I'm very sorry that people like you and me have been vindicated.
You know, we saw that our world was going to hell in a handcart, and lo, it has gone to hell in a handcart.
Yeah, that's correct.
What's interesting is that you talk about the mayor of Los Angeles.
The mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, has been dead to me for a long time.
We can get into that later.
But it is...
It's very interesting.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned, de Blasio is kind of a sissy and a mama's boy of the first order.
And from our previous talk, you already know that I have no problem reigning on either conservatives or liberals, depending on where they're standing.
But one thing that I'm always complaining to any conservative who will listen is that Too often they forget, they get caught up in the idea that the tyranny, the great tyranny, is something that will come from the federal government.
And sometimes that's true.
But tyranny can very often be a local thing.
In fact, my buddy James LaFond, who's a fight trainer down in Maryland, and he's a pretty prolific author.
I've got a bunch of interviews with him in the archives that I'm working through.
But he's the one who pointed out to me that in times of antiquity, tyrants...
We're very often kind of local rulers that kind of treated their local population as their own personal fiefdom and what have you.
And we see this.
And I think that the things I'm complaining about, the inconsistency of...
Conservatives on the American political scene, I think has allowed a lot of these small-time people, these minor men who are running cities, okay, to run amok.
It's like, why do we have a mayor like Bill de Blasio?
Partially because, you know, New York City, you know, conservatives in New York City and in other big cities have not made a compelling case for themselves.
And as a result, we've got someone like this, you know, running New York City.
I'm really fed up with, again, the hysteria and also the kind of...
There's a very undignified kind of way that people display their nervousness and display their panic and allow it to turn into this kind of peevish, resentful, attacking, spiteful tone.
This is definitely on display with Peter Hitchens, who is a favorite of mine.
You just talked to him recently.
He was on Good Morning Britain with that woman.
He directed Piers Morgan.
He was, yes, he is a woman.
Yes, he certainly, yes.
That's the woman I was thinking of, right?
And, you know, just the kind of, I mean, all, and I've been looking at his Twitter feed as well.
Here's the thing about Peter Hitchens, okay?
It's not that I agree with him about everything, of course.
If two people agree on everything, then at least one of them isn't thinking for himself.
But the fact is, whenever I disagree with Peter Hitchens vehemently about something, I like to kind of take a drink and, you know, sit down and wait for it to pass.
Because what I found is that he has been very rigorous and very methodical in his fact-finding.
And that he's not just voicing an opinion for the sake of voicing it.
He's thought about the thing.
He's looked at the facts and he's speaking on it.
And on the facts, he is correct.
He's not telling people they shouldn't wear masks.
He's not telling people coronavirus can't kill you.
He's asking about trade-offs.
And an intelligent society, a society of grown men and women, but a society of men, not of sissies, is okay with facing dangerous things and thinking about trade-offs.
And that's all I ask from my fellow citizens.
Not that you act in an irresponsible way, not that you expose the immunocompromised to unacceptable risk, but that you look at the thing immediately.
And you face it, this is dangerous.
It is merely dangerous.
Goddammit, stand up, straighten your back, grit your teeth, and face it.
You know, and stop saying you're terrified and this is terrifying and this is terrifying.
I'm tired of grown-ass men, you know, being okay with being cowards on camera, you know, and in front of their fellow citizens.
What kind of, I mean, you should be ashamed of yourself.
But again, a society that has dispensed with the concept of shame has, without realizing, also dispensed with the concept of nobility, because you can't have one without the other.
No, I totally agree with you.
The analogy I always use is war, because I'm obsessed with military history.
And what I always like to ask is, who would I like next to me in my foxhole at Bastogne?
you know, when you're holding out during the Battle of the Bulge.
And I've been very disappointed to discover that even quite a few of my fellow supposedly conservative columnists have been found wanting in this.
Also, by the way, there have been some surprising people who've come out good.
I mean, for example, I'm really impressed that my friend Sarah Vine, who writes for the Daily Mail, has come out on the right side.
Yeah.
It's quite difficult for her because she's married to a cabinet minister, Michael Gove, and yet she has ploughed her own furrow.
She doesn't care what the government's doing.
She says what she thinks.
She's been good.
I don't know whether you heard the podcast I did yesterday with an American professor, a public affairs professor at Arizona University called Don Siegel.
And he said the problem with when you defer these decisions to public health commissars, these people have a single objective function, which is to say they only think about one thing.
So as far as they're concerned, you cannot do enough to protect the health of the nation, no matter how much damage you do to the economy.
It needs grown-up politicians to say, well, hang on, there are other issues at stake here.
There are all sorts of costs involved in diverting your entire economy towards beating this alleged mega plague.
And I worry that we are going to pay a terrible price, far greater than any of the deaths that might be caused by people dying with, let's make the distinction, with coronavirus, not of coronavirus.
That's correct.
Well, so a couple of things.
Again, I go back to Peter Hitchens because I was struck by something he said about how the monarchy in the political life of the country, it plays the role of the king on a chessboard.
It prevents something else from occupying that space.
And then I'm also thinking of my friend, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown.
I've talked with her a few times on Dangerous Space.
One of our interviews is up on the Foundationist website and another.
I just finished editing another.
That'll go up soon.
But what she posits, and I agree with her, is that religion is what you get in any case.
And so the decline of religion over the last few decades in the West hasn't meant that people are not religious.
What it has meant is that people will worship other gods.
Some, you know, they may worship dead gods.
They may worship synthetic gods.
And I have noticed that one god that we tend to worship quite a lot in the U.S., especially in our big secular urban centers, is science.
And so you hear this thing of like, believe the science.
When I hear people from the UK, from the birthplace of Joseph Lister, the guy who bucked the prevailing trend at the time, who didn't believe the science at the time, and as a result, pioneered antiseptic surgery.
You know, it's like when I hear people act as if the consensus means correctness, you know, I kind of lose it a little bit.
So that's one.
So we have elevated science.
Beyond what science itself can bear, beyond what science was designed to do.
Science is not a set of answers.
It is a family of techniques for getting at certain kinds of questions.
And the principle among those techniques is the pattern of getting the investigator out of the investigation.
That's what that means.
So that if I'm a scientist, I run an experiment, you should be able to I should be able to show you my notes.
You can run that experiment in your lab, and I'm out of the picture.
Now, the moment we start talking about decisions to be made in common, that is, the moment we talk about what should we do, we are no longer in the realm of science.
Automatically.
Like, science cannot tell you what you should do.
So I'm not even saying that one should disbelieve public health officials on the merits.
I'm not saying that one should disbelieve Anthony Fauci when he makes a claim about the reality of what this pathogen is and what it is doing.
But he is simply not qualified, speaking in his capacity as a scientist, to tell us what we should do.
Because should is not part of the lexicon of science.
And it never can be.
Because the moment you say should, the investigator is back in the investigation.
Now you're in the realm of what?
Morals and politics.
And these are political decisions.
These are political questions.
We have to argue about them.
We have to weigh things up.
We have to figure it out.
You know, it's like, you know already, I have made no secret that I don't much care for Donald Trump.
But you know something?
When you're right, you're right.
And he said, we can't crash the economy behind this.
And he's right.
Is that how, like, what are you going to, how are you, so, you know, so you've crashed the economy to deal with this, then how are you going to pay for healthcare?
You know, a lot of this, I have to say that, I know I've gone on for a bit, but a lot of this, I've noticed that the usual suspects kind of show up saying the same things anytime there's a crisis, anytime there's a dispute.
You know, I got, I soured on this a while ago when I found that every time there was some environmental issue, the environment would show up and say, that's why we have to dismantle capitalism.
And then, you know, we had a couple of big disputes about police brutality and big scandals in the U.S., and a bunch of people stood up and said, yeah, that's why we have to dismantle capitalism.
And, you know, I've just noticed these people seem to crop up again and again, and every time their formula is suspiciously similar.
It's like, oh, yeah, see, this is a real problem.
This is why we have to dismantle it.
This is why we have to do what I wanted us to do anyway before the crisis began.
Yeah.
So anyway, go on.
I've been railing for a bit.
We are in a Rahm Emanuel situation, aren't we?
Don't let a good crisis go away.
Exactly.
The left wants to turn this crisis into an opportunity.
And look, before coronavirus, they were using global warming, climate change as their excuse for dismantling the entire Western industrial civilization.
Now they've got a better thing.
And I've noticed this.
I mean, the left is too reductive a term.
It's inadequate to the task.
All the people that you and I know to be wrong in the way they think have been emboldened and empowered by this crisis.
And I think that for many of them, they don't really want it to end anytime soon because ultimately they're thinking of the world they want to exist when this is all over.
And it's going to be a world of bigger government.
And I see this not just coming from the leftists, by the way.
I see it from the kind of the centrist or centre-right people they normally describe themselves as.
I'm reading columns on...
We've got these online publications called Unheard.
Unheard is supposedly conservative.
But it's running pieces...
Saying that actually, after this, the business of business should not be doing business, that businesses should somehow become part of the social justice machine.
I don't believe that.
I believe that free markets more than ever should emerge from this.
Free markets are the best way to allocate resources.
Everything that's wrong with our response to this crisis is the opposite.
It's, for example, public government-led, well, we call them quangos over here, quasi-autonomous non-government organisations.
So we've got Public Health England, which has spent the last 20 or 30 years, well, I mean, actually...
I've had different names before, but basically it's been saying, don't eat sugar, don't smoke, don't do this, don't do that.
It has been utterly useless at preparing the country for a pandemic.
Now the pandemic's come round.
What it's doing is it's centralised the testing laboratories.
The report's just come out of this today.
Rather than throwing it open to the private sector.
Correct.
If the private sector moves in, Private sector responds much more quickly to these situations.
So we've got that same sclerotic, morally corrupt, intellectually corrupt, lazy, incompetent, civil service deep state, which was completely inadequate and ripe for change before coronavirus.
And now this deep state is actually in charge of responding rapidly and efficiently.
And it can't do it.
It's hopeless.
That's correct.
Ideologically, it's hopeless.
In every way.
So a couple of things you've said.
Very interesting.
We're talking about free markets.
And, you know, I... Being conservative, right?
I think...
Well, going back to Peter Hitchens again, something that he has also said is that markets are what you get in any case, right?
In other words, there were certainly markets in the Soviet Union, right, under communism...
But they weren't transparent.
They didn't operate effectively.
But there was certainly a market.
You'd go to a restaurant, and you'd say, do they have X on the menu?
No, we're out of such and such a food.
You go around the back, you hand the guy a few rubles, and all of a sudden, he ushers you in, and there's food for you and your party.
In other words, markets are what you get in any case.
And the question is, should we have markets or not have markets?
The question is, how do we want them to operate?
Now, to me, so much of what you said Makes its way back to the importance of courage because—so it strikes me that authoritarianism and,
to some extent, totalitarianism is really the—it is— It is almost by definition the ideology of cowards and sissies.
Why?
Because...
And pussies.
And pussies.
That's correct.
Why?
Because you have to...
And look, the framers of the Constitution understood this, is that self-government It implies a society of virtuous people.
That's the first thing.
It implies a society of people who are able to govern themselves.
That's the only kind of society that can be properly governed by a limited government with enumerated powers.
Chesterton has said much the same thing, right?
If you don't have the ironclad laws in yourself, you'll get the big ironclad laws in society, right?
So it strikes me that So much of what we're talking about with letting markets figure things out, with having a bottom-up grassroots response to emergencies and crises, this requires courage because you have to trust that your fellow citizens in the aggregate will do the right thing, will figure things out, but you have to also accept the fact that That you may not be as quick off the mark as a totalitarian government.
I mean, this is true.
It's like, I've been in the store stocking up on things, and people have struck up conversations with me.
I was in a store the other day and a woman, she was a mom and she was getting supplies or what have you and she struck a conversation and she seemed, just by her rhetoric and her talk and her demeanor, I could tell that she was kind of a liberal, right?
But she was speaking, she was kind of praising China and its response to the crisis.
And I had to stop her and I said, well, hang on a second.
Yes, authoritarian governments can move very quickly because the person or the people at the top say, jump, and everyone says, how high?
Okay, wonderful.
Now, that's great if the person at the top is correct.
But if the person at the top is wrong, then everyone's screwed.
So we have to decide.
We have to really think about this now.
You have to decide, okay, how much risk do we want to accept?
If we say that we're going to allow people to decide for themselves and we're going to limit the degree to which central powers can instruct us, then that does mean that people are going to try things and some of those things are not going to work.
So we're going to be slower off the mark, and we may have a higher error rate.
But the thing is, that error rate is more distributed, and the system degrades gracefully.
You can't decapitate a system like that and throw it into chaos.
But again, that requires courage and it requires us to have a kind of a masculine outlook where we can look at something dangerous.
We can face it and grit our teeth and say, OK, yeah, I'm ready.
You know, and I go back to my buddy James LaFond.
He talks about the importance of this masculine tribes.
You know, the idea that you have to take this kind of protective attitude toward your family, toward your neighborhood, toward your toward whatever element of your society you feel you can line up with.
And all of those little platoons in the Burkean sense together kind of make up a civilization.
But if you kind of allow that to be kind of washed away by the petty, small-minded, cowardly universalists who want to pretend that there's nothing particular and everything is universal, then...
You get a society that's run by cowards and you get the current situation.
Yes, I was thinking of an example.
I could have got my facts completely wrong because this is all from the top of my head, but I seem to remember reading that one of the sticks often used to beat Winston Churchill with is the Bengal famine.
I think I've got this right.
And I think that this was exacerbated by By the response of the British colonial authority, which I think I'm right in saying, that they imposed price controls because of this obsession with so-called profiteering.
So they forbade people selling grain and so on above a certain price.
But actually, when officials interfere in that way, what they do actually is they interfere with the efficient running of the market.
I dispute whether totalitarian regimes can ever really respond to crises as well and quickly and intelligently as the markets, because the markets have price signals.
So what a price signal would have done is send a signal to producers in areas beyond the Bengal area to To rush loads of grain and other food into the area because, hey, there's loads of money to be made.
If you take away those price signals, then you are removing the efficient functioning of the market with potentially disastrous consequences.
I think the markets are a glorious thing and I don't buy this...
I haven't heard the term profiteering used to describe in a modern economy.
One often hears about it having been used during the Second World War and lots of opprobrium was poured on people who were seen to be Profiteering, i.e.
take advantage of the war to make money.
But it seems to me that making money is...
I mean, Adam Smith made this point, didn't he, with the whole notion of the invisible hand and the wealth of nations, that greed is good.
Greed is what actually drives people unconsciously to do the right thing, to provide things that people want.
I am reminded hearing you say that.
Of a quote, and I can't remember who said this, but it was a really fine saying.
He said that the spirit of business is a fine spirit.
It's an ennobling spirit.
And I think that is true.
I've been complaining for a while about this tendency that I've noticed with progressives to act as if someone is getting away with something by making a profit.
I remember I was arguing with this one guy.
It's funny because this guy turned out to be as dishonest as they come.
The argument was about affordable housing, right?
And it was about the idea that, you know, one of the reasons you don't have affordable housing in a lot of these big urban centers is because it is illegal to build enough housing.
Because the government makes it very expensive to bring you housing online.
And I was kind of walking with him through the ways in which government imposes burdens on people who are bringing housing online.
And then he said something like, well, yeah, but if they did such and such and such, then they'd profit from this.
And he said it in this way that I was taken aback because he really thought that you're not supposed to make money for it.
And it's extraordinary because you talk about price signals, and I think we talked a little bit about this last time.
I definitely see the markets and the pricing system as a communications channel.
And I'm with you.
I think that totalitarian governments, or even just short of that, governments that skew toward I want to distinguish between top-down intelligence and bottom-up intelligence.
Because, look, both kinds of intelligence are needed.
But we've fallen into this unfortunate habit of thinking that the bigger and more complex the problem is, the more top-down intelligence you need.
And that's why you hear people saying it's a global problem.
It's a global problem.
It's a global solution.
And exactly the opposite is true.
I mean, after 25 years plus in the software industry, I can tell you that the opposite is true.
It's that the bigger and more complex the problem is, okay, the less opinionated you need to be to solve the problem.
Many of the architects of the Internet itself had many of the same ideas about how you solve these very complex problems.
I think it was Vinton Cerf, C-E-R-F, not to say the road to surfdom.
But Vinton Cerf said that one very important design pattern when designing large communications networks is to push important decisions to the edge of the network, right?
In other words, not to embed your opinions about traffic, about communications modes, not to embed those opinions in the core of the network, but to push them to the edge.
And that's very important because that philosophy Having been adopted by the architects of the internet has meant that we could essentially use the internet to solve all kinds of problems that would have been very much harder to solve if we'd had to work through a very tightly held set of opinions in the core of the network.
You can hang a mobile phone off the internet, right?
You can hang a web browser off it.
You can hang file servers off it.
And it's just a conduit.
And so bottom-up, you know, Top-down intelligence is great if you're solving a specific, a well-defined problem.
And my general rule of thumb in terms of how I work through my conservative philosophy is that governments can solve difficult problems.
They can.
But governments are very bad at solving wicked problems.
For example, going to the moon, putting a man on the moon is, at its core, merely a hard problem.
You have to stand on a rock and throw a rock at another rock.
And so what that means is if you spend enough money, if you pay scientists who are bright enough, if you get the orbital dynamics right, if you get your physics right, then you can do it.
Now, of course, that's a highly ramified problem, okay, because you first have to throw the rock at about, you know, seven miles a second, roughly, okay, to escape the gravity well, right?
Your metallurgy has to be right because otherwise your rockets blow up.
You have to figure out, well, how do I compensate from the fact that a rocket nozzle that works well at sea level doesn't work so well in the stratosphere?
But at the end of the day, you are standing on a rock and throwing a rock at another rock.
So that's a merely hard problem.
Now, how do we solve the problem of poverty?
Now, that's a wicked problem, because what do you mean by poverty?
Well, it depends.
Is it poverty of information?
Is it poverty of calories?
Is it poverty of spirit?
Yeah.
Right?
And what are the underlying causes?
You know, is my friend always broke because of racism?
Because of systemic racism?
Is he working?
Well, if he's working, does he have a drug habit?
Does he have a gambling habit?
You see what I'm saying?
So, it's not even that...
Because, of course, conservatives get beat up by progressives who say, well, you're just anti-expertise.
That's the big thing now.
It's like, well, all you anti-experts.
I hear people even taunting Brexiteers.
What do you Brexiteers think about experts now?
It's like, well, no.
It's like, I think we properly doubt the ability of experts to solve wicked problems.
Because in a wicked problem, the problem hasn't been defined well enough for an expert to get a handle on it.
What they can get a handle on is they're like the blind men with the elephant.
They can get a handle on this aspect of the problem.
Now, that may be a very valuable thing.
But as a society, we can't afford to just look at one aspect of any problem that confronts us all.
We cannot.
And if we do, we're done.
And I wish that people were at least able to hear that, that no one is saying that markets are good at everything.
No one is saying that the market is God's.
What we're saying is that you need a supple, bottom-up mechanism.
You need a genetic algorithm to handle these kind of problems.
And if you push decisions to the edge of the network, it can be scary because you look at the core of the network and what it seems like there's no quote-unquote leadership.
That's another thing you hear.
Like, oh, well, Donald Trump isn't showing leadership.
Well, I'm sorry.
I look at my newsfeed and I see people, you know, makers using 3D printers to try to print protective equipment for healthcare workers.
I see people, I see women with sewing machines at home sewing surgical masks out of fabric trying to get them out the door.
I see people figuring out, okay, how can I make an emergency ventilator?
You know, there's a guy in England who I think he won an engineering prize for this ventilator that he built that could fit into a little Pelican case, you know?
So it's like we don't necessarily need ideas, you know, the leadership of ideas to come from the core.
You know, from the core, from the government, from the authorities, what we need is operational heavy lift.
The government can sail a thousand doctors into New York Harbor.
Wonderful.
But when the government starts saying, okay, we're going to supplant your individual judgment about when to go out and what to buy when you go out and whatever, we're going to put down and say, then they are destroying the very suppleness and the very agility that they need to actually solve the problem.
It's interesting you say all that because people of a leftist mindset always...
They cherry-pick examples from history to show that government top-down directives are what changes culture and makes it better.
So, for example, anything to do with race, you know, the integration of black people in the workplace, or the integration of women in the workplace, is used as an example of government legislation.
Yes.
And when you look at the underlying figures, what you find is that society was moving in that direction anyway, in the same way that car manufacturers didn't need to be told by government to make cars more safe.
Drivers were choosing anyway to go for cars that didn't kill them.
It's reasonable and logical.
And in the same way, before in my country, before Boris Johnson's government imposed the official lockdown, people were moving in that direction anyway.
I'd already made up my mind in the previous week, this is my last trip up to London because it's a plague pit.
Although, frankly, actually, I'm fine anyway because I've already had it, so I've got the antibodies, and so I'm all right, Jack.
But nevertheless, people were making these mature decisions.
I was telling my parents...
But notwithstanding what the government was saying, I was already saying to them, look, look, Ma, look, Pa, you need to look after yourselves.
You need to isolate, self-isolate, because if you don't, you could be in trouble.
So I think you're right.
Trust people's common sense.
And if you don't trust people's common sense, what you get is an infantilized country.
What you get is the kind of pussiness, this sort of mass hysteria we're seeing.
Yes, that's correct.
Especially among people, low-information people, who haven't really had a very good education.
Thanks, Tony Blair.
I mean, Tony Blair effectively dumbed down the education system, and now we are paying a terrible price, because people do not have the rudimentary understanding of things like the economy.
You often hear people say, well, I'd rather choose people's lives over the economy.
The economy sustains people's lives.
Exactly.
That's correct.
How do they think healthcare gets paid for if not by the economy?
It just goes back to my theme of the perfect storm of stupid.
We created this monster because we created a weak society which was ready for the next pandemic to roll over it and destroy it.
It's like the last days of the Roman Empire.
It has become corrupt, effete, unmanly, and we are reaping the consequences.
Well, here's the only place I disagree with you.
I think we have we have done that to our society at the level of the elites, because what I found is that, look, looking at UK politics, what it seems to me is that working class people up and down the country in the regions kind of have their stuff together.
Like they've kind of got a handle on it.
I mean, they voted they voted mostly to to leave the EU, which was right.
You know, so, OK, clearly that they've got they know what's going on.
It's it's the people.
It's the elite classes, the chattering classes.
Again, the journalists, right?
The the the academics, the the quangos, the people in these are the these are the.
Because, you see, I think a country is always going to have elites.
But what you want is, one, you want there to be some fluidity so that people, as it is in the U.S., people can enter the class of the elites.
We have a class system as well as you do, but our class system tends to be fluid.
And I think, compared to continental Europe, I think even one could argue that the U.K.'s class system is much more fluid.
That is...
I have learned from Martin Durkin, who I think is amazing, that that became much more true after Margaret Thatcher, that she was kind of a radical reformer in that way.
But going back to the thing of creating a weak population, I think that they've created a weak population.
Elite population.
And the problem with that is that your elites really do need to embody the national mythos.
They do need to embody the tribal mythos of the nation.
They need to embody the virtues that the nation organically thinks are important.
And if they fail to do that, that's the problem because the ordinary, the working class people are too busy making society work.
They're too busy actually, you know, fixing the streets and, and, and, uh, digging coal and building houses and, and, and what have you.
And they, they've hired these elites.
Okay.
As a convenience.
You know, I hired you guys, and you guys work for this thing we'll call the BBC, and you have a charter, and you're supposed to, one, tell me what's going on in the world, and two, show the country an image of itself that is honest, but that is also ennobling and also kind of loving as opposed to disdainful and scornful and look at how terrible our own country is.
You see what I'm saying?
And with the scolding tone that's very common to the BBC and why they're in so much trouble now.
People want to get rid of the license fee.
But you get my point is that it's the elites.
I don't I don't I don't claim that because, again, when I look at working class folks here in New York City, like working class people taking this thing in their stride.
They're applying common sense.
They're doing what needs to be done, what have you.
Again, it's it's it's the journalist.
Now, I want to go back to what you said, because you mentioned common sense.
Claire Fox, who is amazing and amazing.
Yeah, we love Claire.
Every time I hear Claire Fox speak, I get this really anxious feeling because I know she's going to stop at some point.
I just wanted to keep going.
But she mentioned this.
She said that this...
This response runs the risk of infantilizing the population and putting them in a situation where they're just saying, okay, well, let the government tell us what to do next.
And she has a problem with that, and rightly so.
You talked about common sense, and I've been thinking a lot about this, because common sense isn't sensible merely because it's common, right?
Common sense has come to be common because it is sensible.
Because it's the evolved response of a society to the actual problems that it has been solving over its lifetime.
And one of the problems, the reason a flag went up when you said common sense is because one thing I have realized is that we're looking at a class of people, talking about the media elites and the woke brigades and what have you, we're looking at a class of people who, for whatever reason, you could say at the Gramsci and March through the institutions or what have you, have set about trying to destroy common sense.
And have been largely successful in some quarters, right?
And that's a problem because if you destroy common sense, I think that's a quote from Gramsci, actually.
If I can destroy common sense, I can destroy society.
So, if you destroy common sense, well then, yes, people don't have a reservoir of common sense with which to respond rationally to problems.
Common sense is the bottom-up intelligence of a society.
That's what that is.
It's that very grassroots thing that enables society to kind of flow around a problem like an amoeba and solve it from a million different directions.
Okay?
And so, if you destroy that, you're in trouble.
And what it means, conversely, is that you need a central authority.
But a central authority is always going to...
Again, a central authority is only better in terms of speed.
That's all.
It can do things very quickly.
But it can fuck up very quickly as well.
And that's...
So that's the thing.
I've been thinking about that for a while.
I agree with you.
I totally agree with you.
What you've just described is essentially what has happened to the Academy since the war.
You think about the French philosophers, Derrida, Foucault, De Saussure, all these kind of...
Philosophers whose trade is bullshit and their job is designed to persuade the supposedly intelligent middle classes that everything they think is wrong, that common sense, that their instincts are wrong and actually there's another way of thinking which is a better way of thinking because it's the way of thinking that unlocks the door to your world of elite privilege if you can only master this dialectic.
Which I think is one of the reasons why you've got this divergence between the working classes and the supposedly educated classes.
That's correct.
The educated classes have been educated into stupidity because they've been taught to deny reality and to think in this alternate leftist sort of pseudo universe.
I mean, the cultural Marxist universe.
Correct.
So no, I think your analysis is absolutely spot on.
People who've done apprenticeships and stuff.
I mean, I was lucky.
I am technically part of the elite.
I went to an elite school and stuff.
And yet somehow I developed immunity, I think, just because I'm a difficult bastard.
I just don't like being told what to do.
I like following my own judgments.
And you're the same.
But yeah, you're absolutely right.
If only, I was thinking about this as you were saying it, and this is a naughty thought, You've presumably come across the theory that maybe this virus was kind of engineered in the lab and it was sort of released by mistake.
And there clearly are characteristics of this virus which are quite curious.
For example, it prefers to kill men rather than women.
Which, of course, is what you would do if you were China, say, just to pluck an example from the air, and you wanted to develop this bioweapon which wiped out the defensive, let alone offensive, capabilities of your enemies.
Well, you'd obviously want to kill the men Yes.
And I was thinking, wouldn't it, isn't it sad that when this strain was being developed in the lab, it didn't kind of find a way of wiping out these kind of...
I mean, imagine how good the world would be if this plague rid us of the kind of people who've been to Yale and Harvard and believe in social justice and stuff.
And people like you and me were left to inherit the earth.
You were truly a horrible man.
Can we say that on a podcast?
I don't...
You know, it's...
No.
I mean, this is...
Well, here's what's funny.
So, I've been thinking a similar thing about just...
What's ironic about this is that social justice itself is a viral infection, which, if it is allowed to propagate to its natural crisis point, will kill off all the social justice people first anyway.
People need to know, like, you know, I was talking to someone the other day, it's like, listen, do you think, and this woman is a friend of mine, but I said, listen, do you think you and your lesbian lover are going to live in peace and harmony in a little house down there in South Brooklyn or wherever and grow vegetables in your garden and what have you if you really smash society as you talk about doing?
That's not what's going to happen at all.
What's going to happen is that you and all of the women in your neighborhood will be owned by the best armed psychopath to come down the road.
That's what's going to happen.
I mean, in other words...
Have you read...
Sorry, go on.
Have you read The Road?
I have not.
I have not.
But yeah, I mean...
It's basically what happens.
The strong...
Yeah.
Exactly.
And so it's very interesting.
It's like the...
Who was I? Who else was I listening to that you, you lucky bastard, get to talk to all the time?
Douglas Murray.
Douglas Murray.
And Douglas Murray, this really, you know, lights went on inside my head when he said this because, you know, I started the foundationist movement and I'm always thinking about the foundations and the roots.
And what he said, he basically said that people have mistaken...
The fruits for the roots, that is the fruits of a liberal society, okay, from the roots, the thing on which you build a liberal, tolerant, just society, okay, you know, the rights of women, the rights of sexual dissidents, you know, all these things, these are wonderful things, but they come out of something.
You can't build anything on top of them.
You know what I'm saying?
They're what you get having solved a whole lot of other problems first.
You know what I'm saying?
And I'm always talking about this.
I'm always talking about the idea that merely the fact that some deplorable white guy in the American Midwest can wake up at 5 a.m.
every morning for a year and work his ass off, and then I can go into a climate-controlled building in Brooklyn And buy a pound of flour is a goddamn miracle.
And that means that we've solved a whole lot of problems first.
But if we try to now upend that structure and we say, no, we have to, the basis of everything is the ability of people to deny biological reality, is our right to mutilate children who have psychological problems.
We have to center the idea that men and women should be at each other's throats and they're naturally enemies.
We have to center the idea that you and I cannot come to terms on anything because of our respective skin colors.
If that's what we do, then all of that stuff goes away.
And again, the people who will die first...
Are the very people who are advocating for it.
It's astounding.
It's like, you know, I never see these kind of protests happening outside of trade school.
I've never heard, I've never, ever heard a diesel engine mechanic spout this bullshit.
Ever.
You know what I'm saying?
I've never heard any welders, steam fitters, whatever.
It's always the people who are most useless.
How is it possible?
This really struck home with me when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became this big thing in the Democratic Party.
And it's like, you know, it's...
How is it that someone...
Because she and her people talked about this Green New Deal.
Remember they said that we're going to reprogram the economy.
Now, I write software for a living.
I have a track record of building and maintaining and managing complex systems.
And I'm not smart enough to reprogram the economy.
How is it that someone who cannot fix a car thinks that they're qualified to do this?
And what does she think is going to happen when the trucks stop rolling?
So maybe stop and think before you do this.
So yeah, I just...
But no, I wanted to touch on one more thing because you mentioned the universities.
And again, this thing of the universities having...
Because we're talking about the roots of things, right?
And the foundations of things.
And the foundations of things are all in your history.
They're all in history.
And I think it was Chesterton who said that only lovers of history and honest students of history can really be radicals.
Modernists have no choice but to be superficial because they're all in the present.
Okay, and it's only, you know, the roots of everything are in history.
And so if you've destroyed people's understanding of history...
You've destroyed the foundation on which they can come to terms as well.
Because if you know history well enough, as I started to do once I stopped being a dumb, angry, young progressive, I started to realize that, for example, it was no good setting myself apart from my white brothers because black people were chattel slaves.
Because the fact is, most of us were chattel slaves at some point in our history.
That's just how it is.
You know, slavery and oppression and marginalization were the default lot of humankind for basically ever.
You know what I'm saying?
And it's only when we dig deep enough in the history that we find the things on which our different tribes can come to terms.
You know, we can say, okay, what can we agree on?
What can we, you know, and that's, so I wanted to get that off my chest as well.
I'm sorry, I've gone on for a long time.
Go ahead.
No, I love it when you go for one.
But I'm thinking, I'm thinking for where I'm sitting, it's now my lunchtime is approaching.
And I'm thinking, there are so many more conversations that you and I are going to have.
And I think that, do you know what, I reckon that some of our listeners might want to crowdfund the meeting, the inevitable meeting between James and Cub and Mike.
Oh, yeah.
Where's it going to happen?
It's...
Where's the amazing restaurant that you and I are going to go to when I come over to Brooklyn?
What's the place that people can crowdfund our glorious meeting in?
That's a good question.
Anything come to mind?
Nothing comes to mind right now, but let me give it some thought.
Here's another good idea.
You could actually come to my house And I can make dinner.
And we can actually break bread and have a conversation.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
And presumably, we will be eating fried chicken, won't we?
Don't...
See, you're a weak one.
You know?
Is that wrong?
You're a horrible little man.
Do you think...
You're going to call me a racist.
I know you are.
I had a whole list of pejoratives, you know.
Let's see, deplorable.
Hang on a second.
Deplorable.
I'm typing shh.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Oh man, no, listen.
It's going to be fun.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
As you know, living and working in New York City, I don't get to get this stuff off my chest very often.
I don't get to say this out loud with other people in the same room.
It is really a blessing, man.
That we can talk.
Just being able to say this stuff is good.
And I'm glad you enjoyed it as well.
I feel totally the same way about you.
I think this is a bromance.
And I'm sorry if it's too sickening for any of our listeners.
But that's just the way it is.
That Cub and Mike and I love each other.
And screw you if you don't like it.
So until another time.
I'm going to have my lunch now.
It's been great talking to you.
Same here.
So, yeah, keep well and, you know, keep throwing those grenades into the leftist hordes.
And we'll talk again soon.
Yeah, yeah.
And Dragonfire as well.
I think I throw that at them because, you know, it's what they deserve.
Oh, that's good stuff.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
Take care.
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