Jan. 5, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
59:46
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Prudence means being sensible, thinking carefully through what will this mean for the community, what will it mean for the next generation. | ||
| See, what the West has really done is rob its children and its grandchildren of the things that we've taken for granted. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| As long as you're here, don't forget to click that little subscribe button and tap that bell over there so that you actually see our videos. | ||
| Crazy, I know, all right. | ||
| Joining me today is the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, a relentless fighter for freedom, and the host of Conversations with John. | ||
| John Anderson, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Glad to be with you, Dave, it really is. | ||
| I am very happy to have you here because I'll start by saying that something that I'd never have told you in person even though we've met a couple times you reached out to me about three years ago right when we built this studio and the show was taken off there was a nice little bump in what we were doing and you reached out to me or your people reached out to me and said John Anderson former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia would like to chat with you he's coming to LA And it was really the first time that I thought, whoa, this thing is seriously international, that the conversations that I'm having are seriously important. | ||
| And we had a great breakfast where we talked about freedom and conversation and all of those things. | ||
| And since we've done a couple of events together. | ||
| So I guess my first question is, You've been in this fight for a long time. | ||
| When did you start becoming aware that there was something worldwide around having decent conversations that was sort of becoming the new way of going about discourse? | ||
| Well, I think my initial sort of concerns around freedom were largely economic. | ||
| So, I was part of a coalition government in Australia from 1996 to 2007, and we were a reforming government. | ||
| Our emphasis on freedom was economic freedom so that we would not pass on debt burdens and lack of opportunities to young people and that was my focus. | ||
| I think for me it was after the great financial crisis and you saw the blame game started to really play out. | ||
| And I started to see that we needed to make major adjustments to the way we ran our economies in the West. | ||
| They're all hopelessly indebted, with the exception of a few places like Australia. | ||
| But we wouldn't do it. | ||
| We wouldn't own what we'd done. | ||
| And you started to see the shouting become very shrill. | ||
| Now it hadn't started then, but you asked when I started to realise this is a real problem. | ||
| It was about that point because I started to see that actually Understood properly in democracies governments downstream of culture. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And so is economics and the whole Lehman Brothers collapse was about a collapsing standards But again, you didn't have a grappling with what had gone on in terms of the ethics of it bankers instead of saying What should I do now? | ||
| Should I behave rather? | ||
| What can I get away with how can I build a bigger bundle for me? | ||
| and for those around me and hang and You know, the people who bank with us and who trust in us and rely on us. | ||
| And I started to think, this is getting really serious. | ||
| But then it was the nature of the debate. | ||
| Because it wasn't a debate anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now you can't get good public policy without a good debate. | ||
| And you can't have a good debate without a reasonable degree of respect for the other person's dignity and standing. | ||
| So it's interesting because I was a struggling stand-up when Lehman Brothers crashed. | ||
| I used to work in a comedy club handing out tickets in Times Square right on the corner. | ||
| I think it was either 50th or 51st and Broadway. | ||
| That's where the Lehman Brothers building was. | ||
| It was this huge, lit up, massive digital display building. | ||
| And I remember when it went down. | ||
| It seems like another lifetime ago. | ||
| But what's it like to be one of the guys going, Hey, everybody, we're about to go off a cliff here. | ||
| I mean, that's not what politicians want to do. | ||
| They want to always give everybody all the things that they want. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There is no doubt, we need to understand, that a lot of this rot started in the 1960s. | ||
| We gave up talking about the big sort of meta-narratives. | ||
| Who am I? | ||
| What am I? | ||
| Where do I fit? | ||
| How does the world work? | ||
| It's all too hard. | ||
| And you can understand that in a way. | ||
| We've seen horrific wars. | ||
| We've seen the Great Depression. | ||
| Let's live for us now. | ||
| And in an age of cheap credit, we started to rack up debt right across the Western world. | ||
| You know, it's not as if I'm singling out one country, your country or my country. | ||
| We're all into it. | ||
| We've all done it. | ||
| We've all done it. | ||
| And here's the rub. | ||
| In a democracy, so you can say to Mr. Congressman, now listen, I'll give you my vote if you promise me X, Y or Z. And Mr. Congressman might know instinctively, if he knows his stuff, you wonder how many of them, well I shouldn't single out American Congress, but a lot of politicians don't know as much as they should. | ||
| They might, if they were honest, say look that is not a good way to do it. | ||
| We can't afford it. | ||
| It'll come against your children and your grandchildren. | ||
| Unfunded liabilities. | ||
| It turned out to be a nightmare. | ||
| But we've said, no, no, you don't get out of that. | ||
| All right, I'll give it to you, because it's on the never-never. | ||
| And kings from of old have known that until the credit runs out, you can live pretty well. | ||
| But when the credit does run out, it's a very different story. | ||
| So it really, I think it has this genesis in the 60s and this idea that it's all about me. | ||
| I will do what I like with my life, etc, etc, etc. | ||
| We abandoned the golden rule. | ||
| Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. | ||
| It's all about me. | ||
| Now, of course, most people don't live like that. | ||
| But that became a sort of prevailing ethos. | ||
| Right, we would never live like that in our own lives, right? | ||
| I mean, sometimes you do. | ||
| Most of us have been in debt at some point or racked up too much credit card stuff or whatever it is, but you would never just, well, you can't. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| As an individual, you can't keep just getting more credit as you keep not paying things. | ||
| But somehow in governments, we seem to be able to do that. | ||
| Well, I think that, you know, it takes two to tango. | ||
| I think the electorate, the voters, if you like, have demanded too much. | ||
| But politicians who should have known better, right across the West, have not been prudent enough either. | ||
| And there's an old-fashioned word called prudence. | ||
| It was a classic virtue. | ||
| It went along with integrity and courage and all of those other ones. | ||
| And prudence disappeared. | ||
| And the story of Lehman Brothers, in many ways, is a disappearance of prudence. | ||
| Prudence means Being sensible, thinking carefully through what will this mean for the community, what will it mean for the next generation. | ||
| See, what the West has really done is rob its children and its grandchildren of the things that we've taken for granted. | ||
| And look, I don't know what privilege is, because you can adjust it a thousand ways, but as I understand it, I think you and I would both say we're very, very fortunate people. | ||
| We've grown up in free societies, we've never really wanted, and so forth, but those things should never be taken for granted. | ||
| Do you see a direct connection then between a stop, no longer asking the big questions in the 60s, to then directly to, well, politicians then just say, here's more, here's more, here's more, here's more, because the people no longer have the tools to understand why that's actually not good. | ||
| That actually really explains what's happening here in America, I think. | ||
| Well, I do think that. | ||
| I really do think that. | ||
| I think we are paying a terrible price, is my personal view, for washing out. | ||
| You see, I think for a long time, I don't think, particularly in my country, it was ever particularly religious, but there was an idea that, broadly speaking, the Christian view of the world, love your neighbour, You're accountable to a higher authority. | ||
| You may dislike your neighbour, but they still have value and worth and dignity, and I have to respect that. | ||
| Broadly seen as true. | ||
| Then it just became seen as one of many truths. | ||
| Now, of course, we know there's open hostility to traditional underlying beliefs in the West on the part of I don't know what you call them. | ||
| You call them a lot of the intelligentsia, or the politically correct, or the people who have the microphones, or the elites, whatever word you want to use. | ||
| There's enormous hostility there that says, this stuff's dangerous and you shouldn't expose your children to it. | ||
| But what's the substitute? | ||
| What are we putting up instead? | ||
| The idea of radical autonomy? | ||
| I will hazard a guess that you would understand exactly what I mean if I said to you, I don't think you ever find yourself in yourself. | ||
| You actually find yourself by relating to and serving others and being considerate and looking to see where you can make a difference. | ||
| Not just for yourself all the time. | ||
| Self-centeredness just destroys. | ||
| Well, that's the, I guess, real irony of the situation. | ||
| As we've removed some of these traditional beliefs, we've replaced them with authoritarian movements. | ||
| They don't seem to be replaced by freer movements. | ||
| If there was something so wrong with them, you would think, all right, well, then freedom will replace them. | ||
| But no, it seems to always go the other way. | ||
| Well, very much so. | ||
| I mean, I'm a great believer in the freedoms. | ||
| I don't think you can ever unbundle them. | ||
| We've had a debate in Australia, what's the first freedom? | ||
| And people say, well, obviously it's freedom of speech, I say, because that's the one by which you defend all the other freedoms. | ||
| But I think I want to join with Frank Farudi. | ||
| Now, and that's an interesting story in itself. | ||
| I would be seen as, broadly speaking, classic liberal stroke conservative. | ||
| He would not, you know, he was a student radical in the 60s. | ||
| Wonderful and delightful man, if you've not had him on. | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| You should get him, Frank Ferutti, Kent University. | ||
| But he would say, if I said to him, I did, I said to him, do you think freedom of speech is the first freedom? | ||
| He said, no, no, no, no. | ||
| He said, you should understand with your Christian convictions that actually it was freedom of conscience. | ||
| Our forebears were burning one another at the stake. | ||
| A dreadful, cruel, appalling thing to do to another human being because they had a minority view. | ||
| And after a while, people sort of said, well, this isn't very consistent with Christian charity. | ||
| And it's pretty barbaric. | ||
| And it's stupid. | ||
| Because a person with a minority view today, that we burn at the stake, may in fact be part of a movement that tomorrow is in the majority. | ||
| Do you sense that sort of where we're heading right now? | ||
| That's where I'm going. | ||
| It really worries me. | ||
| There's an aura of triumphalism. | ||
| I think Douglas Murray's thesis is right. | ||
| You've had a whole series of movements to correct things that have needed correcting in the West. | ||
| And by the way, what system delivers the ability to peacefully correct things that are wrong better than liberal participatory democracy? | ||
| And you think of the civil rights movement. | ||
| incredible speech. I look forward to the day when my children are judged by the | ||
| content of their character not the color of their skin. So all of these movements | ||
| you know I mean I have three daughters it's incredibly important to me that | ||
| they're paid properly for their work or whatever it happens to be. As Douglas | ||
| Murray says you know that train has moved with a lot of cabooses in its | ||
| carriage onto the platform. | ||
| It's starting to slow down. | ||
| We've made tremendous progress. | ||
| If you like, in Martin Luther's language, those who have been marginalised and sidelined have been allowed to join the citizenry. | ||
| And all of a sudden, the train, the governors let go. | ||
| And just when you're getting close to the station, it's taken off. | ||
| So how do you untether people from that then, right? | ||
| So I've heard Douglas talk about this, I've discussed it with him, but how do you then untether people from the idea that they're still oppressed when they're no longer oppressed, if oppression can be used to control people? | ||
| That's a pretty addicting feeling right there. | ||
| Well, this is the great problem, I think, of victimhood politics. | ||
| Now, a good friend of mine from the left in Australia, a very noble, old, classic sort of Australian socialist, and I've always regarded him as a man of noble intent, and he said, you know, look, we were about, in the labour movement, universalism. | ||
| So if someone was oppressed or sidelined or not being looked after properly, the idea was to Elevate their status so they were part of the citizenry. | ||
| That's what Martin Luther King was trying to do in this country. | ||
| But now we've created a new caste system, a new aristocracy. | ||
| So a victim, often self-proclaimed, will say, I've got all these grievances and I'm owed. | ||
| And I need those addressed. | ||
| And society's left saying, well, if we say sorry and try and meet them, I hope you'll appreciate it. | ||
| But no, they'll say, we were owed. | ||
| If you don't, then you confirm their victimhood and you're a hater or a racist or whatever. | ||
| But here's the rub. | ||
| If your power comes from being a victim, you have every interest in ensuring that your victimhood is never addressed, that you remain a victim. | ||
| And that's why you can't untether it from that train. | ||
| Well, I actually, can I say to you, I think this is proving to be such an unsatisfactory philosophy for people who find themselves, you know, the rush for a university student. | ||
| Oh, I'm a victim. | ||
| I'm owed. | ||
| But as I think it through, I think, and you and I have seen this, I think there's a lot of people realising that's not very sustaining. | ||
| And in the end, I don't want to be a victim. | ||
| I want to be a full member of the community and I want to pull my weight. | ||
| And we've got to play to the better angels. | ||
| Isn't it funny that we know in real life, when you're around friends or family, people that you socialize with, nobody wants to be around a victim. | ||
| Nobody wants to be around someone endlessly complaining all the time. | ||
| You want to be around people that impress you, that inspire you, that make you laugh, that have joy in the world, that can share something good with you, and yet somehow a movement has been created that somehow seems sexy based on something that is so anti how any of us, if we really thought about our lives, would ever really want to be. | ||
| Let's be clear, and I think you and I would agree on this, there are people who have very legitimate grievances. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The people Martin Luther King was talking about, if I can say this in your country as somebody who's not American, I mean, those grievances were deep and real and raw and horrible. | ||
| For anybody who's studied Jimmy Crow and what happened, it's extraordinary. | ||
| I hope you don't mind me saying that. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| You're saying the truth. | ||
| Do you stay there? | ||
| I mean the whole point is to lift yourself out of it and join the rest of the community. | ||
| Again, the hackneyed to death, I know, everybody talks about it, but Kennedy asked not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. | ||
| We've reversed it. | ||
| We've reversed the idea of citizenship. | ||
| So now we say, I demand my country meet my needs. | ||
| But as you say, you know where to stay there. | ||
| One of the most remarkable men in Australia, he's just retired, he's a very old man now, was the man Frank Lowy behind Westfield's, I see them even here in America, shopping centres. | ||
| Yeah, we've got one right here. | ||
| Now his whole family, he escaped the Holocaust, but his family was wiped out. | ||
| He was a little boy one day, watched his father go off to work and he never came back. | ||
| And he talks about how he sat in the window day after day after day, sat by the window waiting for Dad to come home. | ||
| Dad never did. | ||
| And the whole Holocaust thing. | ||
| And that was appalling. | ||
| I mean, how any human being could do what the Nazis did to other human beings is beyond my comprehension. | ||
| But if a man like that had spent the rest of his life saying, I'm a victim, I'm owed, fix up my victimhood. | ||
| Now, I feel deeply for what he went through, but I respect him hugely for saying, I'm not going to play the victim card. | ||
| And he's gone out and created jobs for goodness only knows how many Australians. | ||
| I see shopping centres here in America. | ||
| It's been a success story. | ||
| And we can sympathise with what he went through, but we can delight in the fact that he has chosen to be a positive, forward-looking person. | ||
| And, if you like, has confronted those demons by rising above them and denying them oxygen, if I can put it that way. | ||
| Yeah, so that's, before we go too far down the political rabbit hole, because I can sense where the richness of this conversation is, I just want to talk about your story a little bit. | ||
| You come from a sixth generation farming family, and somehow went into politics. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit of that? | ||
| Yeah, Scottish ancestry, which is very common in rural Australia. | ||
| And in rural Australia, farming and grazing was the way to go. | ||
| uh... | ||
| it's a rough country to find because of the unreliable climate scots were very | ||
| good at because they it's got this poor land in a rough time | ||
| uh... and so if you know if anything i've a gun if it if i've done one brilliant thing i chose | ||
|
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my parents will not have a good move good move and uh... | |
| you know that the thing is that uh... | ||
| uh... so i i've been very fortunate I've seen them go through terrible ups and downs. | ||
| My family was decimated by both the First and Second World War because Australia was deeply integrated in both. | ||
| Double the number of Australians died in the First World Wars did Americans. | ||
| It's extraordinary the level of engagement in international affairs that Australia's taken up even when it was very young. | ||
| But yeah, I went to school and university in Sydney and I had never contemplated a political career, although I was always fascinated by the great debates. | ||
| I've always seen our society as a result of fierce debates that are not personalised at their best. | ||
| We're the result of a clash of great ideas. | ||
| Look at the debates that went into the independence of America. | ||
| The thinking, the depth of understanding, The belief in the worth and dignity of all, which is where your freedom motif comes from in this country. | ||
| But I was literally headhunted by a retiring federal member at the precocious age of 27. | ||
| He said, I'm going to retire and I think you should have a go in my place. | ||
| And I said, what at, sir? | ||
| What did he see in you if you were coming from a farming family? | ||
| What did he know about you that he thought this guy could do it? | ||
| Well it's an interesting question in a way that I can answer it honestly. | ||
| I'd been at a public meeting where he'd said something about, he was from the conservative side of politics, he'd said something about the left side of politics and I thought he'd completely missed the point. | ||
| So I stood up and remonstrated firmly but not personally and he actually said to me, I think you should have a go, because you said something, I said something that you disagreed with, and you took it up in a good, humored, but effective way, without attacking me. | ||
| That's what he actually said to me. | ||
| So... And that's basically what your guiding principle has been throughout politics, and now even out of politics. | ||
| I mean, you're having conversations. | ||
| Jordan and I sat down with you for your show, which was in front of a live group of people, and it was exactly this. | ||
| It was exactly, let's work through this stuff instead of, you know, breaking each other's backs. | ||
| Well, I just always deeply, deeply believed, and it stems from my Christian belief, that it's not for me to judge others. | ||
| It is for me to engage in the contest of ideas, and I ought to believe passionately in a vigorous debate. | ||
| Our parliament in Australia is very adversarial, and people often complain about it. | ||
| And I say, look, let's split this into its two components. | ||
| You actually want your parliamentarians to believe in things deeply. | ||
| And there ought to be a great clash over people's versions of how best to take the place forward. | ||
| What you're really objecting to, I hope, is not that clash of ideas, but when it's personalised. | ||
| When people give or take offence. | ||
| I've just never seen the point of it. | ||
| I've never seen that it's taken anybody anywhere. | ||
| Do you sense that one side of the aisle is better at that than another? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Do you think there's a reason for that? | ||
| Like a deep reason for that? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| I think Douglas Murray may have tapped it again as well. | ||
| And I think it's getting worse, not better. | ||
| A very clear-thinking person from the left He said to me quite recently, he said, I was quite deep into my life before I realised conservatives could be nice people. | ||
| He said, I'm from the left. | ||
| And he just looked me straight in the eye and he said, John, understand there's a fair bit of truth in the old saying that the right thinks the left is misguided, but the left thinks the right is evil. | ||
| Dennis Prager. | ||
| I quote it constantly. | ||
| Actually, it wasn't him who said that to me. | ||
| It wasn't? | ||
| No, it wasn't. | ||
| I've been quoting his quote forever. | ||
| Who? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, someone else that said it to you. | ||
| And he may have been reflecting what Dennis said. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I hadn't heard that connection. | ||
| No, it was another person. | ||
| And he said it to me. | ||
| And then I think, you look at David Goodhart's work on Brexit. | ||
| He brings that out again. | ||
| He says that families from the left will do almost anything to stop their children relating to | ||
| and marrying somebody from the other side of politics, whereas someone from the | ||
| conservative end tends to be quite relaxed in accepting of somebody of different views. | ||
| And here's where I think, and I don't want to misrepresent him, but I think Douglas Murray | ||
| makes the point that in the current context, the lack of logic and intellectual sort of | ||
| underpinning for the positioning that much of the left now adopts on issues means that | ||
| They have to demonise others rather than get into a debate about them. | ||
| Well, it's pretty easy if you can just say they're a Nazi. | ||
| It's a lot easier than going into the philosophical underpinnings of what you think. | ||
| Isn't it fascinating the way people bandy the word fascism around? | ||
| I studied enough at university. | ||
| I'm not a bright bear. | ||
| I don't pretend to be. | ||
| As I said, the only really smart thing I did was choose Australian parents. | ||
| But I do know what a fascist is. | ||
| And I do know its origins and its underpinnings. | ||
| And so the left pin this label of fascism on people in a way that reflects that they're not interested at all in any exactitude in language. | ||
| In fact, I would say Ambivalence in language has emerged as the postmodernist's best friend. | ||
| It's becoming very hard to have a debate, not only because of the labels that have bandied around, but the way in which words no longer mean what they should mean. | ||
| So our national broadcaster never stops talking about the importance of diversity. | ||
| The trouble is they don't believe in it. | ||
| So they'll make sure that, yes, if you go there, they've got every gender imaginable. | ||
| How many are there? | ||
| Well, it depends what time it is. | ||
| I'll check. | ||
| And if they haven't found one to fit, and I don't want to be flippant about it, and I shouldn't be flippant, but in all honesty, what you will find is that diversity means anything except difference in perspectives, in political perspectives. | ||
| So diversity, what does it really mean now? | ||
| And this is a great problem, very hard to debate, when not only is language used to demonize others, it's used to confuse the argument and to make sure you're not able to talk on a level platform. | ||
| So I know we could probably spend all day, you know, talking about the frustrations that say classical liberals or conservatives have with leftism. | ||
|
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We're falling into the trap of great fun of reinforcing one another's I know, so exactly. | |
| So I'm gonna move us out of that. | ||
| Watch what I'm gonna do here. | ||
| Watch the move. | ||
| The move is, well then, what can conservatives, say Christian conservatives or classical liberals, people that are more liberty-minded in general, what can they do right now to make sure that they don't lose those ideals? | ||
| Because we are aggrieved that we are facing something that is pretty bad, and it's not really rooted in reality or a consistent philosophical outlook. | ||
| So I think there's a tendency sometimes to go to our worst side too, to fight that. | ||
| Oh, there is. | ||
| And what do you think we can do, maybe from a religious perspective, you could give me an answer on that? | ||
| Look, I think the first thing I'd say is that we need to practice what we preach in the sense that we shouldn't demonize others. | ||
| Demonize the ideas? | ||
| That's different. | ||
| I think we should probably try and see civility As not just meaning, you know, Dave and John talk politely and I don't criticise the way you hold your knife and fork when you order. | ||
| At least not publicly. | ||
| Not publicly. | ||
| But it means much more than that. | ||
| That's not a knife! | ||
| It was going to get in here somehow, one way or another. | ||
| Yeah, I should tell you one about that. | ||
|
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Come back later. | |
| We'll get to that. | ||
| I've got several Crocodile Dundee questions here, don't worry. | ||
| I think we need to see civility actually as a tough-minded virtue. | ||
| That says, picking up on the old Evelyn Beatrice Hall idea, that I may disagree with you, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. | ||
| It implies two things. | ||
| I'll respect you enough to say you have a right to put your ideas on the table, and then the ideas are the issue, because that's where we'll get the best way forward. | ||
| It's not for me to demonise you. | ||
| I don't like your ideas, but absolutely you've got the right to put them on the table. | ||
| Let's thrash those out. | ||
| Now, it's an unequal playing ground, because that's not the way the game's being played at the moment, but I don't see any option. | ||
| And even people like Gandhi sort of kind of got that, didn't he? | ||
| I mean, it's about forgiveness. | ||
| That's something that's washing out of our culture. | ||
| I don't know how relationships ever work if we can't forgive, and I think we have to be prepared to practice that, and say, look, it's okay, I'm sorry, I was offended, but it doesn't matter, let's move on, rather than this perpetual, I will carry the offence to the grave. | ||
| And that's the other great problem we've got in our culture, because even if you can try and forgive now, you can't forget because social media has stored up absolutely everything. | ||
| So that's also the interesting part is that the asymmetry of the rules, I think, is what's becoming harder and harder for conservatives. | ||
| So for example, Justin Trudeau can show up in blackface. | ||
| I don't think most people think he's a true racist by any stretch. | ||
| He did something stupid. | ||
| It was, you know, times change, all of those things. | ||
| You know, we've had the governor here, Ralph Northam, also, you know, blackface 30 years ago, but he's a Democrat. | ||
| And the point is that they're both still in power. | ||
| While we know if these were conservatives or Republicans or whatever, they would be destroyed. | ||
| Well because of that then we see the conservatives going, no we have to destroy them too. | ||
| And I think that's the impulse that you're saying, no we have to fight that impulse. | ||
| I believe that's right. | ||
| I mean I think there the other point would be to go to the frankly the hypocrisy of it and highlight that but to try and avoid doing You know, the triumphalism. | ||
| Remember the lessons when we stopped burning one another at the stake. | ||
| At the heart of this unique model of Western harmony where we learnt to live with one another's deepest differences was a willingness to respect another person's conscience and let them live truly to that conscience as long as they are not damaging other people. | ||
| And I don't mean by that occasionally offending people. | ||
| This idea that you can't give offence, that is a way to shut down debate if ever there was. | ||
| If I'm honest about my life, the times in which I've grown up have been the times when I've been grossly offended because somebody else has told me something about me I haven't wanted to hear, and I've had to grow out of it. | ||
| Jonathan Haidt makes that point. | ||
| We tell our kids, we bring them up to believe that what doesn't kill you will make you weaker. | ||
| He says, actually, we need to build resilience, and when we get the setbacks, we've got to learn from them, and not just be like a plastic cup that you drop on the floor and recovers its shape. | ||
| We actually need to be people, when we've had a setback, who grow. | ||
| He calls it anti-fragility. | ||
| And our parents and grandparents believed that. | ||
| And look at what the great generation, as you call them in this country, went through. | ||
| So is that just all then a function of our success? | ||
| That our parents, you're right, our parents and grandparents went through it. | ||
| Grandparents particularly, at least in an American context. | ||
| And because of that, because of that grit and fight, Then they sort of got us to unprecedented wealth, a growing middle class in the United States, and what happened? | ||
| Well, we got participation trophies. | ||
| Yeah, I think you may be right. | ||
| And maybe it took, I mean, I grew up with a father who had a horrendous Second World War, and I was born quite late in his life. | ||
| And so I always lived with a man who'd seen war, he'd volunteered, hated it, you know, could never talk of it, was almost killed in the campaign against Rommel in the Western Desert. | ||
| And that shaped me. | ||
| But then I'm conscious that I had a desire with my four children to want a snowplough for them. | ||
| The tendency was there. | ||
| I wanted to remove every obstacle in a way that my father didn't try for me. | ||
| He knew instinctively that a few challenges were a good thing for me. | ||
| And I knew that too, but I had to pull myself back because the instinct all the time was to make it soft and easy. | ||
| And I think Jonathan Haidt's right. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| And he goes on to say that we then encourage our children to trust their feelings. | ||
| Your feelings are always right. | ||
| We know that's not right. | ||
| You have to think things through. | ||
| Your feelings must accord with reality. | ||
| It's just dangerous to feel something's wrong. | ||
| I feel that water would be nice and that the sign saying that there are sharks in there shouldn't get in the way of me having a good swim. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And then the other one, this problem that goes to the heart of what we're talking about. | ||
| We teach our children that The dividing line between good and bad is between people, or that life is a battle between good and bad people. | ||
| That's a disaster. | ||
| It's a disaster. | ||
| Yeah, most people on the other side believe that they're good too. | ||
| They may be wrong. | ||
| Well, not only that, we're all a mixture. | ||
| And why can't we go on a journey? | ||
| You write quite a bit about how you've been on a journey politically. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, isn't that a good thing? | |
| You know, to think things through and to learn from your mistakes. | ||
| Forgive me, it's not for me to say that you've made mistakes or whatever, but I know I have. | ||
| I have absolutely made mistakes, I promise you. | ||
| Yeah, but you're not allowed to now in the lexicon of those who hold the microphones in our society. | ||
| And you see that with social media. | ||
| The thing we were talking about earlier, you make a mistake and it's brought up against you 30 years later to keep you out of public office, when you might have grown enormously as a human being. | ||
| And you might have asked those that you hurt, or that you misjudged, or whatever mistakes you made, for forgiveness. | ||
| You've grown enormously, you've come to a different place. | ||
| Why should we not respect that? | ||
| Do you think, oddly, though, that the end of secularism leads us to that place of unforgiveness? | ||
| Do you think that is sort of what you were talking about earlier, that if you remove all of whatever traditional belief there is, that you will end up in a place that will be so subjective that how would forgiveness even make sense in that world? | ||
| That sort of seems to me where we're sort of at at the moment, yeah. | ||
| I mean, this is a great thing now. | ||
| It's all about power. | ||
| Everyone talks about power. | ||
| It's very inadequate. | ||
| Douglas Murray says it. | ||
| If you walk up to most people in the street and say, what matters to you most, they won't say power. | ||
| They'll talk about love, they'll talk about relationship. | ||
| But I think relationship in the Western model draws an enormous amount from our understanding of that thing called the cross. | ||
| And the central message there was a death, a life surrendered. | ||
| For enemies. | ||
| Out of love. | ||
| Loving your enemies. | ||
| We can't even love our friends! | ||
| Half the time. | ||
| We need to learn to love our enemies again. | ||
| Which is why I think I'm all for vigour in debate. | ||
| I love what you do. | ||
| I love what Jordan Peterson does. | ||
| I love what... I mean, this is a big part of the picture. | ||
| You've got enormous intellectual vigour coming back into Western life. | ||
| And that's tremendously encouraging. | ||
| And it's an enormous privilege just to play a tiny little bit, you know, I hope, in facilitating that with my own website, for example, and so forth. | ||
| I see this as tremendously encouraging, but we've got to break the very model that's brought us to that place in the first place, which is the rejection of the idea of respect and recognition of the worth and dignity of others. | ||
| Are you amazed how this is a truly worldwide phenomenon right now? | ||
| So that's why I started the interview by saying that, you know, you sent me this email three years ago, and then, you know, flash forward basically two and a half years, and I'm in Australia, and I'm doing this event with you, and everyone in that room knew who I was, and now most of them were there for Jordan, I can see that point, but the basic idea that What we're talking about in America is the same thing you're talking about in Australia. | ||
| It's the same thing they're talking about France. | ||
| They're talking about it in Mexico. | ||
| It's not purely a Western society idea anymore. | ||
| It's everywhere now. | ||
| It is, it is indeed. | ||
| And a couple of observations. | ||
| The wealthiest countries in particular, where it's been very easy for a long time, have lost sight, I think, of the idea of suffering. | ||
| And suffering can be very instrumental in determining character. | ||
| and resilience and compassion for others because you understand. | ||
| We've got rid of the idea that suffering is part of life. | ||
| We try to pretend we can build perfect society, which is why people make unreal demands on government. | ||
| We don't need God anymore. | ||
| None of that stuff. | ||
| We don't need suffering anymore. | ||
| So, Mr. Congressman, I expect you to solve every ill. | ||
| Give me everything. | ||
| Give me everything. | ||
| And Mr. Congressman has been unwise enough too often. | ||
| If there's a Congressman listening, please say, I could say exactly the same about what I was under the House of Representatives. | ||
| Or a Senator in Australia. | ||
| We have Senators just like you do. | ||
| We have a Washminster. | ||
| Our House of Representatives is based on the British House of Commons. | ||
| Our Senate is modelled exactly on your Senate, so we call it a Washington system. | ||
| And we've just got to break that cycle again and rediscover some roots. | ||
| You know, a conservative doesn't believe that the people who have gone before them were lesser. | ||
| But our culture now seems to think that those who went before us have nothing to teach us. | ||
| That is a fatal flaw. | ||
| I've just been reading a remarkable story about Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers who doesn't get a lot of recognition because he died early and a jewel. | ||
| And he was a mixed grill of a man. | ||
| He was a noble, highly intelligent, imbued with what might be called Christian principles, who, because of his cleverness, I think, became vain. | ||
| and got into silly disputes because of his vanity and he died in a duel. | ||
| But you read his writings and what have you as he played his part, the Federalist Papers and so forth, in establishing the land of the free. | ||
| It's brilliant stuff. | ||
| And to dismiss the wisdom of the ages because somehow we're cleverer and they were lesser No conservative should ever adopt that line. | ||
| The wisdom we can learn from Moses, we're mad to reject it. | ||
| It also strikes me as deeply personally flawed. | ||
| You asked me this when we were in Australia, but in the last year I'd say I'm having a bit of a religious awakening or at least a spiritual awakening. | ||
| An awakening, let's say, about belief in general, the importance of belief, because the idea that somehow I know something so much better or more wittingly than my parents or my grandparents or my great-grandparents, all these people who lived through so much more than I've lived through, but somehow I figured it out and it has something to do with all of our technology and everything else, it's actually absurd. | ||
| It's an erasure of the people before you. | ||
| And it feels very weak and thin to me. | ||
| Well, terrific. | ||
| I guess that wasn't a question you're happy with. | ||
| You're happy with my own answer there. | ||
| We'll discuss that on your podcast. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| All right, how about let's shift a little bit altogether. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about what an American watching this should know about Australia? | ||
| That we have no idea. | ||
| You know, there's sort of this idea, there's like, okay, we know Crocodile Dundee, we know boomerangs and kangaroos and koalas, okay, blah blah blah. | ||
| I absolutely, for the ten or so days that I was there, I loved every second, every moment I was there. | ||
| I thought the people, We're absolutely joyful and fun and interesting. | ||
| Now, I know I'm traveling in certain circles where I'm gonna meet a certain type of person, but people that were coming up to me everywhere, and the weather was great, and just the events we did were fantastic. | ||
| But what do we not know about Australia? | ||
| Besides, you're a big landlocked country, and there's kangaroos running down the highways. | ||
| Well, depends which highway. | ||
| Well, when we were going from Canberra to Sydney. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You would. | ||
| It's an interesting question, isn't it? | ||
| Because sometimes Americans, I think, probably don't know a lot about Australia. | ||
| No, I truly don't think we do. | ||
| I got lost in the middle of your country once. | ||
| You were talking about knives. | ||
| This is a true story. | ||
| And I had a little rented cart, which had Missouri plates on it, but I was in Kansas. | ||
| I was looking for a good friend of mine who lives right in the middle of Kansas. | ||
| I got lost on Sunday afternoon. | ||
| Pulled up outside a little weatherboard house, timber house, and there's a lady there with a pet raccoon on her shoulder. | ||
| Standing outside. | ||
| Welcome to America. | ||
| And three children. | ||
| So a girl about 15, and a boy about 12, and a younger lad. | ||
| And I pulled up, and I was frustrated. | ||
| I don't know about you, but when I get lost, and it's pre-mobile phone days, this is the mid-90s, I wind down the window of this little car, and I say, excuse me, ma'am, I've got myself lost. | ||
| Can you show me where I am on this map? | ||
| Well, the boy, he's about 12, he looks straight up at his mother, and he says, hey, mama, this dude talks just like Crocodile Gumby. | ||
| Well, she grabbed those kids like a hen gathering her chicks and pulled them back out of danger's way. | ||
| As if to say, you know, he might have a knife. | ||
| He was the good guy in the movie. | ||
| And she pulls him around the front of the car. | ||
| You say, what are they? | ||
| The other one, I think, she's going to look at the license plates. | ||
| Well, she sees them. | ||
| And all the tension goes out of her body. | ||
| She says to the kids, it's all right, you can relax. | ||
| He's not from Australia, he's from Missouri. | ||
| That's a strict Missouri accent, this guy. | ||
| And then she said, I said, actually, you boys are right, I am from Australia. | ||
| And she said, did you drive here? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, it's a true story. | ||
| I got to tell George Bush that, and he laughed his head off. | ||
| Anyway, that's a hell of a drive because that flight ain't easy. | ||
| So, you know, the drive's really gonna be... It took a while. | ||
| But what should we know about Australia? | ||
| Well, Australia was settled after America became independent. | ||
| The traditional wisdom is that the Brits were looking for a new place to dump their prisoners. | ||
| In fact, it was nowhere near as simple as that. | ||
| They knew there was a big land down there. | ||
| They wanted to put their flag on it before the French or the Spanish or the Russians, etc, etc, etc. | ||
| etc. etc. etc. | ||
| And it's the same size as Continental USA. | ||
| It was a prison settlement. | ||
| Interestingly, the convicts were, of course, were pretty wild. | ||
| And all sorts of enlightenment and Christian thinking went into, how can we turn these people around? | ||
| How can we rehabilitate them? | ||
| There were those who didn't want to. | ||
| They wanted to treat them like slaves. | ||
| Interestingly enough, the saving order said no slaves in the new colony. | ||
| One of the first places in the world, when slaving was still legal right throughout the British Empire. | ||
| And in America, it was banned in the new colony from day one. | ||
| Was there a big fight about that? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, I don't think so. | |
| It was very quiet. | ||
| And then there were those who wanted to see it as a place of rehabilitation, a very sensitive issue, but arguments too about could we bring enlightenment and education and salvation to the Aboriginal people. | ||
| And of course that became very vexed because we have our own great difficulties in that area. | ||
| Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. | ||
| And the amazing thing was that an incredible effort was put into encouraging those convicts to marry. | ||
| Many of them had illegitimate children, regularised their arrangements. | ||
| And one of those was known as the currency lads and lasses. | ||
| The first generation of Australians born on Australian soil turned out to be model citizens. | ||
| And in some ways, with some parallels with your country, they built a nation. | ||
| Now, only 6 or 7% of Australian agricultural land is high quality, for example. | ||
| A lot of it's desert. | ||
| So although it's the same size as continental USA, it's nowhere near as productive, although we're very resource rich, on the other hand. | ||
| So still only 26 million people, much smaller than America. | ||
| That's smaller than California, for heaven's sake. | ||
| But it's one of the so-called Five Eyes countries, America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. | ||
| They share everything. | ||
| There's enormous trust. | ||
| They're democracies. | ||
| Traditionally, we'd look to Britain until 1941, Pearl Harbor. | ||
| Australia was in, you know, the direct line of fire, so to speak. | ||
| And an unashamed pivot was made to seeing America as the sort of senior friend to whom we would relate. | ||
| And funnily enough, my mother married during the war an American serviceman and lived in America for a while. | ||
| It was one of those marriages born of war that didn't work out. | ||
| She went back and married my father, who had been her real childhood sweetheart apparently. | ||
| So I do have some connections with the place. | ||
| Our own home was modelled on a house that she lived in and loved in America. | ||
| Wow! | ||
|
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Yeah, a little bit of a linkage there. | |
| I think the bonds are quite close. | ||
| The left in Australia demonises The Republican movement in America and I think misunderstands the nature of the alliance. | ||
| But I think in the current context Australians look on with concern with the way the world is going and recognise the importance of America's strength. | ||
| I certainly do. | ||
| We are very committed to the alliance. | ||
| Do you sense that there's something different in terms of, you know, we've been talking about the left a lot here. | ||
| I spoke to several classical liberal organizations in Australia. | ||
| I sense that liberalism in and of itself was still kinda strong in Australia. | ||
| Now, it's a self-selected group of people, I guess, that I spoke to. | ||
| No, no, no, I know. | ||
| So, right, you probably come here and feel the same thing and go, whoa, it's not nearly as bad, but it depends who's inviting you. | ||
| Am I completely off in that? | ||
| No, not completely, I don't think, but I think it's a bit like your country. | ||
| When I look at America, and I love this country and I love its can-do attitude, and funnily enough, when I was a constituent, I had about 60 expat Americans who lived right in the middle of my area and they'd bought the cotton industry from the west coast of America to Australia. | ||
| And they were terrific citizens. | ||
| I love their can-do attitude. | ||
| They'd have a go. | ||
| Whereas Australians can have a little bit of the old British, you know, the world is miserable. | ||
| We're out of living and the government should sort it out. | ||
| These Americans, I learnt a lot from them, just about a positive attitude and having a go. | ||
| Because they were, I suppose, they were greatest generation products, really. | ||
|
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It's very important to understand that Australia didn't fight for freedom. | |
| It was given to us. | ||
| Now, a lot of Australians would say, what the heck are you talking about, John? | ||
| Think about our past, you know, we had to forge a life in a difficult... All of that is true, and Australians have fought hard to defend freedom. | ||
| But our democratic traditions and the institutions of freedom were really bequeathed to us by the British, with a fair bit of input from America. | ||
| So when the Australian Constitution was being written, we had the best received wisdom from what I would say was a great Protestant stream of thinking, filtering through the best of the Enlightenment. | ||
| The Australian Constitution had proven to be a very robust document that secured our freedoms. | ||
| We don't have that same Strength of commitment that's still in this country, in certain strands of your public life, that's richly endowed with the deep commitment to freedom that came out of the independence struggles. | ||
| As I say, we largely inherited it. | ||
| We're very fortunate in that regard. | ||
| We've been prepared to defend it. | ||
| We didn't have to fight to get it in the first place. | ||
| This is particularly evident in our universities, where there's a remarkable lack of commitment to the Western canon, to understanding of our culture. | ||
| Here you still have great liberal arts schools. | ||
| It's starting to teeter here too, for sure. | ||
| So it's there in Australia, but it's not as strong. | ||
| However, the public debate has become much more engaged and vigorous in recent times, and the recent election in Australia was a very Very, very clear cut. | ||
| The coalition, which is a sort of centre right grouping, was not expected to win. | ||
| They'd been in a bit of chaos. | ||
| They'd chosen a new leader. | ||
| The Australians were sick of the revolving door leadership stuff. | ||
| But they decided this leader actually represents the Australia that we still have a great attachment to. | ||
| And I think in a way, that last election two or three months ago was a giant hit the pause button. | ||
| It wasn't just about the two parties' economic policies, important as they were. | ||
| It was also Australians saying, we're getting a bit sick of being told what we can say and therefore what we can think. | ||
| This stuff's getting out of hand. | ||
| And the other side's too keen on it for our liking. | ||
| So are you enthused then that obviously the election basically went in the direction that you wanted to, but that's seemingly also happening in other parts of Europe now. | ||
| There's been a couple surprise elections lately, and even if you were to look at the Canadian election, which is obviously not Europe, although Trudeau won, it's gonna be a minority government. | ||
| So there is something when people are looking for hope. | ||
| That's one of the questions I get the most. | ||
| It's like I have all these conversations and people go, all right, Dave, we can start understanding the ideas now, we can have these conversations a little bit better, but where's the hope? | ||
| But the hope is that There have been, in the last two or three years, a couple of elections that have been sort of centre-right, sort of sensible government. | ||
| Well, I think that's right, and the other thing, I think the great danger there though, is particularly in Europe, I think, and I don't want to sound anti-environmentalism, but I think what's happened with the environment movement is it's moved from the scientists and from academia and from solid policy thinking into the era of emotion and populism itself. | ||
| And so you'll see knee-jerk reactions which may, instead of helpfully decarbonizing the economy in Europe, will de-industrialize it with their levels of indebtedness and so forth. | ||
| I'm not sure that's going to be very helpful. | ||
| I mean, the issue, if you're worried about climate, remains, frankly, India and China. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, when you look at the cleanup here... Right, no matter what we do to clean up here. | |
| It's never enough. | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| And you've made enormous progress. | ||
| You're on missions per head. | ||
| Really, it's quite a remarkable story. | ||
| It doesn't get much credit. | ||
| But as I understand it, it's quite a story. | ||
| To turn it back and ask you a question of this, you've been to Australia. | ||
| You were with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| You must, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but there are a lot of young people turning up. | ||
| They seem to be saying the empathy culture doesn't really offer us what it promised. | ||
| There has to be a better way. | ||
| Was that your My main take was that people were desperate, and this was worldwide, I definitely saw this in Australia, but everywhere that we went, in Europe, in the States, in Canada, I saw the same thing, which was people desperately wanted to think about their lives seriously. | ||
| That was the overriding theme. | ||
| So even the way, I mean, I always reference this, but I was amazed, it took me a couple shows to realize it, but suddenly I started going, The amount of people, the way they dress at these shows, they're kind of dressed like us, most of them, young guys. | ||
| And I've told the story about how when I was in Sweden, I was at H&M, and I was buying just a baseball cap, and I'm standing on line, and the guy in front of me is telling the cashier he's buying his first suit because he's going to see Jordan Peterson tonight, and then the cashier says, I'm going to see Jordan Peterson tonight, and then he looked at me, and he goes, you're Dave, and it was like, This is crazy, I'm on the street in Stockholm, you know, I'm just at a store in Stockholm, and here are young people, these guys were 22, 23, that all they wanted was to just, I mean, to quote the book right there, they just wanted to get out of the chaos. | ||
| So that was the overriding theme that I felt. | ||
| I think there's an element too, a lot of young people feel rightly, I have to say, insulted by the modern debate. | ||
| That divides them into victims and oppressors. | ||
| Victims and victim-makers. | ||
| It's such a simplistic way of looking at the world. | ||
| Look, both you and I could invent a narrative that says we're victims. | ||
| You've got a cough. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| That's what I got in England. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's terrible. | |
| I've got a bum knee. | ||
| That happened in Australia. | ||
| I was running from a kangaroo. | ||
| Actually, I was running from a syphilitic koala. | ||
| I did not know that the koalas all have syphilis. | ||
| Yeah, it's very tragic. | ||
| It really is a sad story. | ||
| Chlamydia. | ||
| Oh, it was a chlamydia, not syphilis. | ||
| Same sort of thing. | ||
| Both of us could be painted as oppressors. | ||
| I've done things that are wrong. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| But to divide us in that way, and to set us at enmity, this incredible desire in the West, it seems now, to set women against men, Race against race and generation against generation. | ||
| Now we've got this sort of despising of adulthood. | ||
| We've got to listen to the children. | ||
| Some academic in Britain the other day proffered that children from six on should have the vote because they have wisdom that adults don't. | ||
| Have we taken leave of our senses? | ||
| But you see we're all at war with one another and I actually think a lot of people are saying I don't want to be at war with everybody. | ||
| And I know I'm not always perfect and I've done the wrong thing, but basically I want to be a decent person. | ||
| And I saw Jordan talk to an audience of a thousand in Chatswood. | ||
| It's changed my outlook on things a lot. | ||
| It was enormously encouraging in some ways, because there were a heap of young men there. | ||
| And he walks onto the stage, I give him a standing ovation. | ||
| No, he's not a celluloid hero. | ||
| He's not a global celebrity in a sporting sense or anything. | ||
| He's there to say, you're not the people you ought to be. | ||
| Life can be tough and terrible. | ||
| Go back to your bedroom, sort yourself out, then go out and be noble. | ||
| And an empathy culture or a victimhood culture is not going to solve your problems. | ||
| And they responded. | ||
| In other words, he's calling out their better angels at the very time as he's telling them they're not as good. | ||
| We all need to hear we are not as good as we think we are, nor are we as bad as we think we are. | ||
| That's the great irony, isn't it? | ||
| We're lost in a lack of self-esteem. | ||
| We're over bloated with pride. | ||
| We're such complex beings. | ||
| We've got it all wrong. | ||
| But here are people looking to say this isn't good enough and I want to rebuild relationships. | ||
| I want to be a responsible citizen. | ||
| I'm enormously encouraged by that. | ||
| Do you think some of this is just the nature of the fact that the internet exists? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can put this video out and someone in Australia can watch it the same moment someone in America can. | ||
| And because of that, that's great, obviously, at some level, but the negative of that is that we're constantly exporting ideas, good and bad, all the time. | ||
| We're commenting on everything. | ||
| Everything's going faster than we can possibly imagine. | ||
| We have no idea how this is all affecting us. | ||
| And so perhaps, for the first 20 years, let's say, of the internet, It was good, it was bad, it was causing tumult, it was fixing things, it started revolutions, it sort of ended revolutions, I mean all of that, and now maybe... | ||
| We're sort of, I mean this would be the hopeful part, is that we're sort of maturing to the point that some of the things you're talking about, it's like, okay, we can have that battle of ideas forever, but now maybe the global conversation has to be, how do you fix all that? | ||
| I think there's a lot of truth in that. | ||
| And Neil Ferguson talks about how the greatest parallel for the internet age is probably the printing press. | ||
| And it resulted in a lot of chaos initially. | ||
| But in the end, of course, it was responsible for the spreading of wisdom and of learning and of ability to, if you like, share. | ||
| That transformed the way that we live. | ||
| And so this thing called social media, that in some ways has been so disastrous, And I think it's unquestionably helped spread the victimhood culture, by the way. | ||
| Not just to wealthy countries, but even to a lot of developing countries. | ||
| And frankly, you know, here we are on the west coast of America. | ||
| I think Hollywood's had a bit to do with this. | ||
| A friend of mine pointed out, look at the two supermans. | ||
| The first Superman was your simple, pure childhood dream of the perfect, all-capable, powerful person. | ||
| The second one, still pretty effective and pretty impressive, but he had issues. | ||
| You know? | ||
| He was a victim. | ||
|
unidentified
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And that spreads, you see. | |
| It goes everywhere. | ||
| Everybody watches Superman. | ||
|
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And so now, to be a Superman, you've got to have issues too. | |
| And we all have issues, but it's how you deal with them. | ||
| And so I do think that, yeah, that this turbocharging of our ability to take forward our best thinking and highest ideals at the same time as we can take forward the worst is very lumpy. | ||
| Maybe it's encouraging that Mark Zuckerberg has now come out and said that he will ensure that his platform does allow for political debate. | ||
| And I see the Democrats are very upset because they think it gives Trump an advantage. | ||
| But the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has now seen that free speech is really important for minorities and for the oppressed, he's said that as I understand it, and he's right. | ||
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That surely is a pointer that's encouraging, do you think? | |
| I think it's basically encouraging, and you know my feelings on this, I would prefer that the government have nothing to do with tech companies. | ||
| We know that there's high-level conversations and we know that there's ways that they're tied together that maybe aren't as pure as I would like, that they just are. | ||
| But where do you fall on that, actually? | ||
| Because when I was watching the congressional hearings where they've been grilling Zuckerberg over and over, I've basically always been against intervening, and I would hope that competition and human ingenuity can solve some of these things, and I'm working on some of that myself. | ||
| But I thought, as I was watching AOC and some of the more far-left Democrats grill him, I thought, the people that are calling for intervention are saying, those are the people you wanna hand the power to. | ||
| Are you nuts? | ||
| So in a way, they're just outsourcing their tyranny to him. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you exactly what I think. | ||
| I hope America displays the common sense and the leadership on this that Europe hasn't. | ||
| Because all of their emphasis has been on, all you terrible platform providers, you clean up your act or we will do it for you. | ||
| And of course, they don't have the protections around speech that we have here. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| A very important point. | ||
| Everyone forgets that about America. | ||
| Your defense of free speech is robust, second to none. | ||
| It's the American Motley. | ||
| So you guys, as great as the Australian Constitution is, there's nothing in the Constitution that directly enshrines absolute free speech, right? | ||
| Not in the way that the rules does. | ||
| It assumes it more than states it, I think would be the way to put it. | ||
| And there haven't been the amendments in there. | ||
| The Australian people have been very reluctant to amend the Constitution. | ||
| Incredibly reluctant. | ||
| And the mechanism's set up to set the high bar quite high as well. | ||
| So when you see these laws, the hate speech laws, and then you see social media crackdowns that happen in Europe, and then sometimes people's Twitter accounts, American people's Twitter accounts get deleted because they're violating a Pakistani blasphemy law or something, how worried are you that some of that could, you know, get over the ocean and get to you guys? | ||
| Well, there's always a concern. | ||
| But to come back to the essential point, my great hope is that America calls this right, The problem when you get caught, of course, is that we do expect them to pull down stuff that might be facilitating child pedophilia or instructing kids on how to make bombs. | ||
| So you've got to draw a line somehow between Protecting free speech and open debate and getting over this issue of hate speech, I mean, it's just used to club everything. | ||
| So how do you actually draw that line though? | ||
| Because of course, those two examples, nobody wants child porn online, nobody wants ISIS propaganda or how to build a bomb, something like that. | ||
| That's why I'm so encouraged by what I understand Zuckerberg said. | ||
| Surely in this country, If we can just get above the personal and the acrimony and appeal to the better angels, with America's tradition of commitment to freedom, you get people to do what Mark Zuckerberg's done and said, let's sit down and talk about this properly and maturely, so that we can protect robust free debate at the same time as we deny oxygen to things that are truly dangerous. | ||
| Because the free exchange of ideas, even if many of them are offensive, Builds freedom. | ||
| There's a sharp difference. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| Let the sun shine in on bad ideas. | ||
| Don't push them underground. | ||
| Different matter altogether when you're talking about facilitating evil people who are intentionally going out to blow people up or to subject them to sexual harassment. | ||
| Damage. | ||
| Are you hopeful? | ||
| How would you describe your general outlook on life? | ||
| It's a race against time. | ||
| And as I would say, as I would say, see the world has changed dramatically in strategic terms as well. | ||
| We're very conscious of that where we live. | ||
| And so the idea that somehow or other democracy's won out, the Francis Fukuyama idea, end of history, that we'll all be free, open, democratic, capitalist societies led by America, is really over already, and it happened very quickly. | ||
| The world is now a centre of competing power constellations. | ||
| I remain hopeful that America, because of its pivotal role... It was an interesting comment made in the Australian Parliament by Tony Blair. | ||
| He said, sometimes we like to criticise our American cousins, but the reality is that no great global challenge can be managed without their full involvement. | ||
| So I remain hopeful that America will rediscover a higher degree of unity and purpose for the sake of humanity, if I can make that appeal to Americans, and put aside Some of this terrible polarization. | ||
| I think Arthur Brooks now talks about it's not just anger. | ||
| It's anger plus disgust equaling contempt. | ||
| And that destroys relationships. | ||
| We've got to end this business where we're tearing ourselves apart and not focusing on our common citizenship. | ||
| And we need to do that globally as well. | ||
| The leadership role is really important because as I say I think it is a race Anything could go wrong strategically, globally. | ||
| And in that case, people who love freedom, led by the Americans, will be critical in whether the world breaks the current stalling of the opening up of democratic freedoms that followed the falling of the Berlin Wall, or whether it retreats and more and more countries see further restrictions on freedom and the winding back of the progress that was being made democratically. | ||
| And then the other side, the foundational issue is, We've got to avoid eating ourselves out from within, at the same time as it's a race against making sure that we're ready to defend freedom globally. | ||
| I don't think it's a lay down Mazaire at all, but there are good people everywhere, I think, who see the dangers and are stepping up. | ||
| Let's hope they're in time. | ||
| That's a solid closing statement, my friend. | ||
| And you've been doing this for a long time from the political side, and now you're doing it with all the conversations that you're having. | ||
| And as you mentioned, you've had many of the people that their books are right here have been on your show. | ||
| It's been a pleasure. | ||
| And now we're going to flip the script. | ||
| Are you going to sit in this chair? | ||
| Well, that would be good fun. | ||
| That would give me a position, a feeling of great power and influence. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| All right, we're gonna flip the script in a moment and I'll be doing conversations with John. | ||
| And for more on John, you can go to johnanderson.net.au. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlists all right over here. |
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