Jack Donovan joins Richard to discuss feminism, shaming, and the politics of outrage. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
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| So, Jack, how many people do you think died last weekend because they were run over by women texting all women while driving? | |
| Well, we may never know. | |
| But there's a strong possibility that while women were texting their woes about men checking them out and trying to buy them drinks and trying to hold doors for them, That possibly they ran over pedestrians in their Porsche Cayennes. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Poor men who are out running errands for their wives and girlfriends. | |
| Yes. | |
| Yes. | |
| Poor slaves out there doing hard work that goes unrecognized because, yes, all women. | |
| So what was all women? | |
| You actually took part a little bit in this hashtag war, I hear. | |
| Yes! | |
| That was... | |
| Hashtag war. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, I just... | |
| What did you do during the hashtag wars? | |
| Well, I can tell you. | |
| I fought in the Battle of Joyce Carol Oates. | |
| Well, I was on Facebook, but I really wanted to go. | |
| I had too many commitments at home. | |
| I had to go to college. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| No, I just – I was sitting there. | |
| I had other stuff to do and I could just play along with it for a while and so I sat there and Joyce Carol Oates was tweeting a bunch of yes-all-women things about, oh, well, why do men get so upset when women just want respect? | |
| I was tweeting her back like, respect is earned. | |
| What do you mean? | |
| What kind of respect do you want? | |
| Do you want control or do you want respect? | |
| Just to mess with her. | |
| I was hoping that she would say something terrible to me so that I could use it to promote my book, but no such luck. | |
| I followed it all day. | |
| One guy nailed it, and he said it was a massive, humble brag. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Where women got to get on there and say how oppressed they were. | |
| And kind of in a way say how desired they were. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And it was kind of – this one guy just went off on them all day. | |
| I can actually like – let's see if I can – I retweeted almost everything that he posted because it was hilarious. | |
| But it was pretty funny to troll that. | |
| And I was also trolled some of the – of course you have – Anytime you have women saying, oh, we're oppressed, you'll have some white knights sweep in and say, yes, women are so oppressed, even though they're less oppressed than they've ever been in the history of the world. | |
| And those white knights are just trying to get laid. | |
| Yeah, either trying to get laid or their gay best friends trying to support the girls. | |
| They're all sitting there. | |
| I just imagine them all sitting there in high chairs at some cocktail lounge. | |
| And they're just saying, yes, all women, while they're, you know, drinking cosmopolitans together. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's very strange. | |
| It is, I mean, obviously not everyone is on Twitter. | |
| Right. | |
| But nevertheless, it is a broad... | |
| Booth of the population, really the world population. | |
| Yes. | |
| And it's a hive mind. | |
| I mean, it really is remarkable. | |
| I mean, we can joke about the hashtag doctrine or someone like Sui Park who seems kind of like a cute little girl who has... | |
| Mental problems. | |
| It's hard for me not to feel sorry for her, actually, despite the fact that she is completely obnoxious. | |
| I won't say the word. | |
| But, you know, in a way, we can make fun of them properly, but in a way, they are getting at something. | |
| I mean, it's almost like there's a hive mind quality to things like Twitter, where everyone really is on the same page and all of this phony outrage. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, actually, the tweet that I made that was retweeted the most was hashtag, yes, all women will be passionate about whatever hashtag the media tells them to care about next week. | |
| Good slaves. | |
| Yes. | |
| And people like that one because that's – I observe with glee that I don't think today it is trending anymore. | |
| And so no one cares about all women anymore. | |
| Yes, correct. | |
| Right now it is Jay Carney, T-Cott, White House, some unpronounceable name, Tito's, Starbucks, Taco Bell, and Josh Earnest, whoever those people are. | |
| Yes. | |
| So that's what is on the minds of America today. | |
| Well, it would be funny just to get a screenshot of like all women and then cancel Colbert and then Taco Bell. | |
| Like, bullshit feminist causes followed by, like, disgusting fast food. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and that's... | |
| Welcome to America! | |
| Yes. | |
| USA! | |
| USA! | |
| What do you think, I mean, don't you think they're... | |
| I guess I would say, what do you think is behind... | |
| These feminist things. | |
| I mean, it's a very weird thing. | |
| I mean, I guess you could say, like, what wave are we in? | |
| Because as you were saying, it's not... | |
| It's a kind of... | |
| It's all women are oppressed in the sense that all of these guys are eyeing me and asking me out and rubbing up against my breast or something on the subway, which are all this kind of indirect manner of self-aggrandizement, of I am desired and I am beautiful. | |
| So, I mean, is that kind of where we've ended up with feminism? | |
| Well, no, it's just, you know, women want to feel special. | |
| Everyone wants to feel special to begin with. | |
| I think we all can agree that everybody wants to feel special and women want to feel special and in our culture being victimized makes you special and also being desired makes you special. | |
| So that's a twofer right there. | |
| So they get to be desired and special at the same time. | |
| But as far as any kind of movement goes, I mean, these things – I mean, I don't know. | |
| I can't put the finger on who started this particular one. | |
| I'm sure someone knows somewhere. | |
| I can't be bothered to even Google that. | |
| But the people who get behind it and push it are a lot of times these feminists with a lot of followers who really write clickbait articles almost every week. | |
| About how women are oppressed because that's their shtick. | |
| I mean that's what – it's – I don't know. | |
| Like Michael Moore tweeting about the 1% or something. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Whatever he tweets about that he cares about. | |
| Another person I don't give a shit about. | |
| But yeah, no. | |
| That's their job, is to write about this. | |
| In many ways, it's our job to write about things that disgust us about modernity and the current state of affairs in the world. | |
| And so that's what they're doing. | |
| So I don't think sometimes it's any more than that, is these people riling, tapping into women and everybody's need to feel special and desired and whatever. | |
| I think people love to jump on these bandwagons and then forget about them. | |
| Do you think there's been a kind of collapse of the left? | |
| I've had this article brewing in my head alongside the other 20 articles that I've promised myself that I'm going to write. | |
| But one of them seems to be like the left has... | |
| We always think that we live in this leftist society and blah blah blah. | |
| But in a way, the left has collapsed into the politics of outrage and just nonsense like this. | |
| Basically. | |
| The left is no longer a revolutionary force. | |
| It's going to fundamentally change society. | |
| It's also not a force that threatens the establishment in any way or form. | |
| It's a conservative force. | |
| Progressivism and conservatism are the same thing right now. | |
| Anyone who still calls himself a conservative and is not a progressive hasn't caught on yet. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so people like Sui Park are the future. | |
| Like, it's all bullshit outrage politics that we see now. | |
| Because there's, in a way, nothing left. | |
| Like, outside, you know, transgender marriage, or I don't know what's next. | |
| But there's nothing really left. | |
| I mean, we live, it's just... | |
| I mean, I guess you could say that in terms – there clearly is inequality of the human race in the sense that if you look at who's making a lot of money, who's doing entrepreneurship, who's – so on and so forth. | |
| There is clear gender inequality that will probably never go away outside of some kind of totalitarian society. | |
| So granted, that is there. | |
| But, you know, in the sense of rights or in the sense of just being recognized, I mean, I think a lot of, I can even understand a lot of early feminism of just wanting to be recognized. | |
| And that's also a human emotion. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, but it seems like that has kind of been done with. | |
| And so we're just left with Sui Park. | |
| I mean, Sui Park, we shouldn't make fun of her because she is in a way gotten, like, she. | |
| She has mastered the zeitgeist in a way that few have. | |
| Like, she, in a way, really gets it. | |
| That it's all about bullshit outrage. | |
| And that's what it's... | |
| I mean, if you think of even, like, the neocons... | |
| I'm sorry to go off on a tangent here, but I think this is getting at something... | |
| I mean, I was thinking, like... | |
| The neocons of an earlier generation, like the grandparent neocons, were arguing about Trotsky and Stalin and the dialectic of history and blah, blah, blah. | |
| And then their children were, oh, let's go work in the Pentagon and create the Iraq War or something. | |
| And then the grandchildren are like, let's get a... | |
| I'm thinking about Jamie Kerchick and these types of people. | |
| Let's get a Russia Today reporter to resign on air. | |
| You know, it's just... | |
| It's just... | |
| Everyone is trolling. | |
| Yeah, it's the troll. | |
| Trolling is the new politics. | |
| Yeah, it seems like that way. | |
| Well, actually, I mean, Jim Goad... | |
| I've actually said the phrase before myself, but Jim Goad wrote a great piece. | |
| Called the New Church Ladies. | |
| And, you know, basically saying that the people of the left are really the – they're carrying on this kind of Protestant church lady tradition of like, how dare you say that? | |
| Oh my goodness. | |
| You know, like this outrage over words. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| You know, like that comic character. | |
| And he used that for his article. | |
| It was on Thought Catalog, I think, It's a great – it really describes what's happening because these are prudes in a way. | |
| They're prudes. | |
| What they can't believe, they can't believe that everyone doesn't agree with them. | |
| Someone has said something that is socially inappropriate. | |
| Is really what – that's what they're responding to. | |
| Like this is socially inappropriate. | |
| This is a breach of etiquette. | |
| And that's what the – I mean that's what it all is. | |
| It's all this game and I've thought about it and I was going to write an article about the difference between being offended and being insulted. | |
| And it actually became very complex. | |
| But one of the things I talked about as I was writing it, I was thinking about the idea that – In many ways, this is kind of a woman thing that – this proving purity because women have always – as I wrote in the article for Radix, women have always been put in a position where they had to prove purity. | |
| That was their value. | |
| This constant kind of chastity contest that women have like, I am more morally upright than you are and you see that. | |
| That's the church lady thing like, oh no, I am far. | |
| We're more morally pure. | |
| And that's what they're doing. | |
| They're having a purity contest. | |
| And by voicing their opinion, all these people who are doing yes all women and all these hashtags and all these moral hashtags, they're saying, I am more pure than you. | |
| Therefore, I'm morally superior to you. | |
| And I've now increased my value. | |
| And it's all evolutionary psychology. | |
| They don't know what they're doing. | |
| They're just being emotional and doing their thing. | |
| But I really feel strongly that that's what's happening. | |
| This kind of etiquette purity contest that people are having now. | |
| And now the new purity is on the left or even whatever it is, the corporate progressive mainstream. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Because I don't even think it's a genuine left anymore. | |
| I mean it's just these kind of social leftist causes that have been sucked into the mainstream as a way of kind of making everybody interchangeable. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, I agree. | |
| That's what I was saying. | |
| I think the left has collapsed maybe much more than the right. | |
| Because what we're seeing really, I think it's in a way better understood as some kind of weird new morality than thinking of it as like, this is what Stalin wanted or something. | |
| I mean, Stalin wanted it. | |
| Yeah, they don't know about him. | |
| They didn't even know about him. | |
| Or Marx or Trotsky or any of them. | |
| This is not part of that. | |
| This is something very different. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I've actually had a progressive say that to me. | |
| I've had a progressive, a school teacher, say that he thought I was wrong because I was – I thought that people were losing values and he's like, no, we're making new ones. | |
| And I'm like, yeah, not values but morals. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like, no, we're making new morals. | |
| And I'm like, yeah, that's actually what's happening. | |
| Yeah, that's clearly what's happening. | |
| And it's both. | |
| I mean, it's one thing. | |
| It's to speak a certain language. | |
| It's a shibboleth, which I believe the origin of the word shibboleth is from the Old Testament, and if you pronounce that word differently, that meant that you were of this other ethnic group, and they'd kill you on the spot. | |
| But now the new shibboleth is I speak this certain language, and I... | |
| Check off a couple little boxes. | |
| And that means that I am employable, for one thing, as a man. | |
| Like, oh, all women. | |
| Oh, yeah, that's great. | |
| That means that I could work at a corporation. | |
| I can earn more money and so on and so forth. | |
| So it has a social kind of competitive nature. | |
| But then also I think it would be wrong to totally discount the fact that it's just a moral thing. | |
| People almost would want to think it's a good in itself. | |
| And also just that weird... | |
| I mean, this notion that a word, like the letters N-I-G-G-E-R, have... | |
| You spelled it. | |
| That was so brave. | |
| I'm going to say it, but those words have such... | |
| All of language is context. | |
| I mean, remember, we're just, we're throwing around little sounds and within a certain society and within a certain context and even within a certain tone voice, they have meaning. | |
| But there's no meaning to nigger. | |
| You know, it's just some thing. | |
| It has a certain history. | |
| It has certain connotations. | |
| Some of them are contradictory or cunt. | |
| You know, I mean He's a great rapper. | |
| Right, right. | |
| Niggers with an attitude. | |
| He's now, oh, right. | |
| He's a billionaire now. | |
| He's the new Apple CEO. | |
| I'm sorry, I was just calling you a good rapper. | |
| But, you know, I mean, Cunt has a history. | |
| And actually, you know, interesting. | |
| I was watching this funny video by this shrill professional atheist named Thunderfoot. | |
| But, you know, Cunt has a certain etymology. | |
| It has a history. | |
| And it actually has very different meanings in different contexts. | |
| In Australia, I had actually never known this, but Australia, it's a term of endearment. | |
| So it really... | |
| Yeah, it's not real, but I think these people put all this magic to it, and it really is like an incantation or a spell. | |
| And it keeps going. | |
| So now no one in... | |
| And I would not. | |
| Even I. I'm not going to go start using nigger and cunt around people because obviously they're like, wow, this guy's a real jerk. | |
| So, I mean, it's obvious everything's in context. | |
| But, you know, there was a recent attempt to ban the word bossy. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| So it's like bossy has a spell. | |
| Even though this is a perfectly fine word that can be used in all different contexts, including patriarchal oppression, but also a myriad of other contexts. | |
| That was beautiful. | |
| A friend of mine said that it's a magic word. | |
| Well, ban bossy was fantastic because it was bossy women telling you not to be bossy. | |
| Telling you not to say bossy. | |
| I mean, it was fantastic. | |
| You know? | |
| It was a joke that wrote itself. | |
| A friend of mine pointed that out and I'm like, that is beautiful. | |
| It's so true. | |
| Exactly. | |
| The other thing, I love the fact that Condoleezza Rice, like, so we're banning a perfectly fine word, yet we're supposed to admire this horrible woman who was directly involved in the deaths of millions. | |
| Oh, well, yeah. | |
| Like, the wasting of trillions of dollars, the violent, brutal death of more than a million people, and yet we're supposed to be, like, offended by Bossy. | |
| It's like, God. | |
| Ban Condoleezza Rice. | |
| America is ridiculous. | |
| That's why people want Putin to take us over. | |
| America has become ridiculous. | |
| That's the way it is. | |
| One of the tweets I sent out when I was wasting time was Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton are embarrassed by yes-all women because they can't... | |
| Yes. | |
| Something like the effect of like – because obviously they had a hard time getting to be some of the most powerful women in the world because men were checking them out and trying to rape them all the time. | |
| It's like somehow they've managed to overcome all this stuff to become these amazingly powerful women. | |
| But all these women are complaining that men are trying to hold doors open for them. | |
| I remember when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, it was about 2002 or 2003, and I actually held a door open for Martha Nussbaum. | |
| I don't know if you know who she is. | |
| I didn't know who she was. | |
| I only realized that she used to be married to Cass Sudstein. | |
| Who's this big Obama figure. | |
| And he seems to actually be this kind of alpha male who trades out various leftist icons and then dumps them once their ovaries shrivel or something. | |
| So he was marrying this philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, and then he dumped her for Samantha Power, the horrible... | |
| Like, humanitarian interventionist who works in the UN. | |
| Anyway, I remember opening a door for Martha Nussbaum, and then she was like, and she opened the door for me. | |
| I was like, oh, God. | |
| It was a standoff. | |
| Yeah, it was a Mexican, a feminist standoff of door opening. | |
| Of glaring and kissing. | |
| Now, I was really close to power then, yeah. | |
| Oh, gosh. | |
| Well, what else is going on? | |
| So do you think Elliot Rodgers is kind of the Anders Breivik of the men's movement? | |
| What I can assure you is that no one will remember him two weeks from now. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that's the thing with these shooters. | |
| I mean, I know that there were a bunch of people online. | |
| It was actually... | |
| Fairly grotesque and whorish in the way that a bunch of feminists kind of jumped on that and wanted to make his murdering of more women than men. | |
| I mean, sorry, more men than women into something that was about misogyny. | |
| I mean, obviously, he was just a poor kid. | |
| Well, he was a rich kid, actually, but they couldn't get laid. | |
| And it had to be about white privilege, even though he was half Asian. | |
| It was so nakedly grotesque in the way that they tried to fit this into their narrative. | |
| And it just makes them look trashy in my point of view. | |
| But at the same time, I mean, these shooters, I mean, I think we're just – we have whatever, 300 – is it 300 or 350 million people in America? | |
| Something like that. | |
| Something like that. | |
| It's in the threes. | |
| More of us don't kill each other on a regular basis. | |
| It's actually pretty amazing. | |
| A lot of people have thought about shooting or strangling or whatever their co-workers or the people who screwed them over or whatever. | |
| This is a constant human drama throughout all. | |
| This is what Shakespearean drama, this is what the epics, this is what everything is about. | |
| This person screwed me over, therefore I want to kill them. | |
| That's a normal human thing. | |
| Most of us don't do it. | |
| The fact that some – every once in a while with millions and millions and millions of people, somebody does, it's just amazing to me that more people don't do it. | |
| I agree. | |
| As our society grows, I mean like how many people do it in China? | |
| We'll never know. | |
| They won't tell us. | |
| But I mean every so often they go on sword killing and knife killing sprees or whatever. | |
| But we – It's going to keep happening. | |
| It's going to happen once every three months, it seems like. | |
| That's the deal. | |
| And for me to care about it or get outraged or get upset or even find it notable, as we started this thing, how many people died while texting while that happened? | |
| Literally, that's not an insignificant number. | |
| Not at all. | |
| I was joking, but literally people died because of that. | |
| Yeah, people died texting. | |
| More people died texting that day. | |
| Possibly all is texting the hashtag, yes, all women, but absolutely died while texting in America. | |
| That actually happened. | |
| More people died while texting than were shot by this guy. | |
| And the level of outrage is completely disproportionate to what's happening. | |
| It's like, do we change society so that – let's change the way that all men think everywhere so that – Maybe one less shooter happens a year. | |
| What are you going to stop? | |
| We have to change everything because these statistically insignificant shooters are sad. | |
| It would be sad if your family got caught in the crossfire of one of these shooters. | |
| It happens. | |
| They could also get in a car accident. | |
| People want to blame somebody and that's human nature. | |
| I just feel like the media needs something to talk about, and so they talk about that. | |
| Because it's exciting and dramatic. | |
| Well, I think it was the Joker in... | |
| In The Dark Knight, who said that when 30,000 people die a year in a car accident or soldiers die in war, it makes the back page. | |
| But if the Joker does one of his stunts and he introduces chaos to the system, it makes the front page. | |
| In some ways, what we actually accept in daily life is so much more... | |
| Appalling and crazy than the fact that one person clearly has a mental illness. | |
| These guys are the jokers. | |
| That's a good way to put it. | |
| They're just these kind of random things that pop up. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so theatrical people. | |
| This kind of self... | |
| I don't know how to, if it's the right word, like self-theatricalizing a person. | |
| I mean, if you listen to Elliot Rodgers' video or looked at his manifesto of sorts, it's this person who took his life very seriously. | |
| And he was, I mean, this is why I kind of, I was reading like, I still call him Rossi, but... | |
| I guess he now goes by... | |
| Artiste or whatever. | |
| Yeah, he used to be... | |
| What was his name before that? | |
| Vigilant Citizen? | |
| Not Vigilant Citizen. | |
| That's another guy. | |
| Citizen Renegade or some... | |
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That was a bad name. | |
| But, yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to disagree with anything he says in the sense of this is a failure as a human being and so on and so forth. | |
| There might have been a kind of homoerotic content to the fact that he stabbed men and shot women. | |
| You know, I kind of saw that peripherally, and I thought maybe he was a little reaching a little bit there. | |
| But, I mean, it's possible. | |
| Who knows? | |
| I mean, I try to not get too Freudian with, you know, that kind of stuff. | |
| Let's not make everything about a weird sexual perversion. | |
| Sometimes a violent stabbing is just a violent stabbing. | |
| Yes, exactly. | |
| As Freud said. | |
| Sometimes you just really hate that guy. | |
| I mean, possibly. | |
| Possibly. | |
| I mean, the thing is, everybody was like, oh, he was probably gay or whatever. | |
| I mean, he was half Asian, so he's got a more gender-neutral face. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't know if he was actually, you know, if in that world or by those standards that would be true or not. | |
| But it's easy for us to look at him and be like, oh, well, he has a slender jaw. | |
| Right. | |
| He did, at least from my eyes, have a kind of feminine persona. | |
| But anyway, I don't think that's, in a way, overly meaningful. | |
| I mean, again, I have this... | |
| God, I don't want to say I sympathize with him because not only have I just used the N and C words, but I'm saying this, but I kind of... | |
| Well, pray that the SPLC isn't listening. | |
| But, yeah, in some ways I have a certain bit of sympathy. | |
| I mean, needless to say, you know... | |
| Random killing is something that I reject totally. | |
| It's very bad. | |
| Yes. | |
| I've got it. | |
| But, you know, and in some ways, these people that take themselves so seriously, he probably did have a kind of Asperger's type, you know, on the autism spectrum of some way. | |
| But it's these types of people who, if they're able to sublimate a lot of these horrible desires they have, they make crazy movies or write novels or become hedge fund managers. | |
| It really is these types who I think are almost... | |
| They can, including if they can channel that resentment that they have, they can actually do great things for society. | |
| And I don't think they're actually, I mean, I think in a way mental illness, you know, mental illness probably had a positive evolutionary aspect to it in the sense that... | |
| You know, you almost need some crazy psychopath if you're at war. | |
| Or you need, in order to create great art or to kind of think outside the box, you almost need someone who is quote-unquote mentally ill. | |
| Because they serve a purpose in society. | |
| And, you know, I mean, at some level, Beethoven was totally crazy. | |
| I mean, he was, you know, living in filth. | |
| Had a bedpan underneath the piano. | |
| These types of people can sometimes be the great people. | |
| I mean, certainly not all of them. | |
| Some people are just crazy. | |
| But I don't know. | |
| I think it's also... | |
| To kind of just see this as some acting out of male patriarchy is... | |
| Totally ridiculous. | |
| But I think it's also in a way demeaning these types of people who we should try to understand and try to actually have sympathy for. | |
| You could be the type that thinks outside the box and does something special. | |
| Or you could be the type who shoots a bunch of people. | |
| Well, if I may make a bad pun. | |
| The only difference... | |
| Between this guy and Yukio Mishima is in the execution. | |
| Yeah, so to speak. | |
| You know, I mean, it's are you making a great artistic impact? | |
| Are you doing this amazing thing when you kill people? | |
| I mean, there's so many ways you can go with that. | |
| And yeah, I mean, like, the things that make people weird are all the things that make them great. | |
| You can think outside the box, like you were saying. | |
| When you talk about mental illness, everyone wants to say, oh, well, he was mentally ill. | |
| He was failed by the system. | |
| Oh, he shouldn't have been allowed to get this or that. | |
| And they do this every time that this happens. | |
| And that's such a danger in that as well because then you're talking about what is the definition of crazy? | |
| And what makes someone mentally ill? | |
| And that's so politicized. | |
| And it's so controlled by a very specific group of people that you really don't want to give more power. | |
| At least we don't really want to give more power. | |
| I mean we're talking about basically democratic women. | |
| Reliably democrat women are the bulk of the psychology profession. | |
| Statistically, it's a fact. | |
| Most of those people who are involved in that are progressively minded women. | |
| So if you're going to let them decide who is crazy, It's going to be everyone who doesn't think like a progressively minded woman. | |
| Oh, I'm sure. | |
| And that's what's happened over time. | |
| I mean that's why we can send people – oh, yeah. | |
| I mean obviously you're insane. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean I'm insane. | |
| You're insane. | |
| By their definitions, they can come up with a label for each of us that is clinically – that has some kind of clinical context. | |
| And that's the danger of everyone wants to be like, oh, well, we should put the focus on mental illness. | |
| Well, the people who are making the decisions about what mental illness is and what isn't are people who are not our friends. | |
| No, absolutely not. | |
| What is that list of – it's a big book where they list essentially psychological disorders. | |
| I want to say DSM. | |
| Yeah, that's what it is. | |
| DSM or something. | |
| I can't remember what it stands for at all. | |
| I'll Google it. | |
| Yes, I would not be surprised if racism is not already in there. | |
| It will be. | |
| It is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. | |
| Right. | |
| But, yeah, no, I wouldn't be surprised. | |
| I mean, as you can see, they... | |
| And what we think is mentally ill is actually – it says so much about culture. | |
| You could write a fascinating history about what is mental illness. | |
| I mean the one that jumps out just because this is what has become the political cause celeb of the past five years is homosexuality in the sense that that once was a mental illness. | |
| We have to figure this out. | |
| What's gone wrong here? | |
| Let's – You know, let's free them or save them or something. | |
| And then, you know, you can't conceivably say that now. | |
| But you almost need a... | |
| Someone has to be mentally ill. | |
| So at one point, racism was like, oh, yeah, well, that's a sign of sanity. | |
| Yeah, it's normal. | |
| You know, race mixing. | |
| Oh, my gosh. | |
| Lock this person up. | |
| But, you know, things have flipped. | |
| And, you know, I guess this gets back to, I think, what's probably the theme of this conversation. | |
| Is this morality, that this moral... | |
| This moral imperative, which is really deeply human and which we need. | |
| And it's wrong to say that we're no longer moralist or morality doesn't play a part in our lives just because a certain Christian morality has waned. | |
| And clearly it has. | |
| But we've become hyper-puritanical in other ways. | |
| And maybe we can't ever get away from that. | |
| I mean maybe humans – that's just a real deep human need. | |
| That's why I never finished that piece that I was writing on being offended because it comes down to social shaming. | |
| And social shaming is how groups of people control each other. | |
| And I mean that's – it happens in every society whether you like the idea of the society or not. | |
| It happens in a group of men. | |
| Every group of men has social shaming. | |
| Masculinity is a product to a certain extent. | |
| I mean I couldn't make social shaming bad because I – It's | |
| good for a certain kind of society. | |
| The only reason we're responding to it is because we think what they're shaming people about is ridiculous. | |
| But that's their values. | |
| And that's why in many ways it's important for us to think of ourselves as part of something else and not part of their world. | |
| I think we might also be getting at He's mentioned this at a couple of conferences that I've been to. | |
| People usually don't understand him. | |
| But I think he actually is right about this. | |
| One of our chief tasks is to create a new morality. | |
| Or many. | |
| Yeah, or many. | |
| We shall shame people. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that's what people do. | |
| I mean, that's part of being human. | |
| It's just what we're shaming them for is the question. | |
| And it just comes back to it. | |
| It's all philosophy at that point. | |
| It's what do we think is good? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And we shame them. | |
| To the opposite of that. | |
| And it's the philosopher's role in a way to come up with justifications for social shaming. | |
| Yes. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| We hate this guy. | |
| Let me figure out why. | |
| Let's come up with good reasons why we hate this person. | |
| Look, here's a sacred text. | |
| It was revealed to me upon stones in the desert by whatever. | |
| Something, something, something. | |
| Holy. | |
| Well, Jack, on that note, let's put a bookmark in it. | |
| On something, something, something. | |
| Holy. | |
| I think that's a good place for a bookmark. | |
| This podcast itself will become a sacred text in time. | |
| Yes, in many years people will speak of it in hushed tones. |