Former C.I.A analyst and author of ‘The Revolt of The Public’, Martin Gurri chats to Russell about disrupting politics & media, and how the age of the internet has shaped our future.You can find out more about Martin Gurri, here https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/ Join our Stay Free AF Community for an exclusive weekly show, and meditations, here https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to COMMUNITY 2023 - a 3 day festival in Hay-on-Wye this July https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand, an in-depth conversation with free thinkers who awaken us to the glorious world around us.
Previously, I've spoken to Tim Robbins, Vandana Shiva, Maya, Graham Hancock.
These are all available right now on Rumble or by downloading the podcast.
Joining me for this episode is Martin Goury, a former CIA analyst and author.
He's done a great deal of research into power and the transformation of the media environment and how that's shaped the entire discourse of the modern world.
He's the author of The Revolt of the Public and The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.
I'm very excited about this interview.
I think Martin Guru from his unique position as a former CIA insider has understood the dynamics of contemporary power better than almost anyone else.
Maybe someone like Adam Curtis is close to understanding how fundamental the changes we're currently experiencing are.
The reason that previous terminology is redundant, the most obvious example being left versus right.
Why don't these terms make sense anymore?
Why is it that there feels like an attempt to assert power in unprecedented ways?
Why are we experiencing more censorship, more calls for people to carry digital ID?
Why is authoritarianism being masked Particularly in liberal clothing around social justice issues.
Martin Gurry, I think, has a unique take on this.
And I think that from his work in this book, and presumably elsewhere in his writing, we can get a different understanding on why our world is the way it is today.
I'm extremely excited about this interview.
Martin, thank you so much for joining me on Stay Free.
I'm really excited to speak with you.
Good to be here.
This is a pretty unique interview for me in that I've actually read the book, which is a rare achievement.
That's pretty unique for me too, that people have read the book when they interview me.
Yes.
I make a point of going into my interviews based purely on trust, blind faith, ignorance, but today I'm actually prepared and the reason I'm prepared is because we were speaking to Michael Schellenberger and he mentioned your name in your book.
Rick Rubin, the legendary hip-hop producer, came on the show a little while ago and he sent me like a diagnostic tool a breakdown of why the relationship between centralized
authority and the public has shifted in the post-internet age
and it offered a series of suggestions of how this would likely play out.
I was astonished that something that sounded so avant-garde and anti-establishment
had been written by a man who had worked at the establishment's heart,
and so that our audience knows this, you are a former CIA operative.
Can you tell me how you have come to this position?
Please tell us a little bit about your experience with the CIA.
Please, can you even touch upon the way that it seems that the deep state is embedded within social media now?
One of the revelations of the Twitter files, and we'll get into the sort of broader ideas discussed in your book and your work elsewhere about how even our terminology around left and right and our understanding of power dynamics is breaking down.
First, I'd love to get a little biographical understanding of how you've come from being a CIA operative to being a, what appears to me, to be an anti-establishment author, even though I know there are things about the establishment that you revere and respect.
Yeah, first of all, to clarify, I was not a CIA operative.
I was a, which I'm not sure what that means, honestly, but it sounds like I'm going around with a gun in my hand and sexy ladies on my arm.
Sadly, none of that happened.
I probably had the least sexy job in the organization, which was, I was an analyst of global media.
All right.
And if you want to know how I came by the job, it was in the most prosaic way you can imagine.
I answered what was in a newspaper ad. So that's how romantic and
glamorous my my ascent to CIA was.
Sadly, sadly, the beautiful ladies never fell in love with me, except my wife, so I mean,
I can't complain. But as it turns out, I happened to be in the one perch where I could see
I and those with me, I don't want to pretend like this was just me,
could we were in the high place where we could see what was coming from pretty far off.
And what was coming was, as a young analyst of open media, I can tell you the world of open media in the 20th century was absolutely thin.
It was a trickle.
If the President wants to know, for example, okay, what are the French saying about my policies?
You went to one of two newspapers.
One of two newspapers.
We consider those authoritative.
Those are the good things.
Then?
Sometimes, sometime around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake, epicenter, let's say, Palo Alto, I don't know, generated this tsunami of information that just literally swept us away.
It was in volumes that were utterly unprecedented in the history of the human race, and if you read the book, you saw the chart.
The year 2001 produced double the amount of information, double the amount of information to all the previous history of the human race, going back to the cave paintings and the dawn of culture, okay?
And in 2002, Double 2001.
And we sort of have been writing that chart ever since.
And if you do chart it, it looks like this stupendous wave.
It looks like a tsunami.
So, here I was, looking at this, along with my compadres in CIA, and the first thought we had was, okay, what's authoritative in this massive stuff?
Who are these people?
How do we now answer a question from the policymakers?
You know, what are they thinking about our policy?
Who knows, right?
But secondly, far more important than that, we noticed that there were effects.
Information has effects.
The information structure sets the stage and arranges the props for the human drama.
So you have to play the way it is, right?
You're an actor.
You know that if you go into a, you know, Mark's Brother comedy, you can't play Hamlet in that set, all right?
It just doesn't work that way.
So The information that was flooding the system, you could see behind that tidal wave, as different countries digitized at different rates, ever increasing levels of socio-political turbulence.
And, you know, we raised the flag where we were.
You know, we were one corner of CIA.
We were the open corner of CIA.
CIA places a very high value on secrets.
We didn't deal in secrets.
We dealt in open information.
And we jumped up and down, and I'm not sure we were listened to as properly as we should have been.
So when I left the government, my little mission to myself was, well, what would you have done if you had been in there and you were to do the analysis of this phenomenon and explain why these changes are happening in terms of the information environment?
And by then, You know, because we were told always was, you know, the joke was, OK, you have these bloggers.
So secret police comes knocking on their door.
What are they going to do?
Hit them with their laptops?
I mean, I must have heard that joke 10 times.
So, OK, no, they didn't couldn't hit them with their laptops.
And the fact was, if you look at a country like Egypt, the bloggers had like a little protest there,
and it was a charade.
These were all educated people.
They didn't know what they're doing.
About 20 people, there were like 20 cops for every blogger.
After I left government, we got the Arab Spring.
And the Arab Spring was like the initial detonation of this massive global explosion
that continued for at least 10 years, and it's still going on in many ways,
of the public just kind of spilling out on the streets and changing the environment in ways
that country after country after country is very characteristic.
In other words, they are very similar traits of how the public behaves in Egypt.
how it behaves in Spain with the indignados, how it behaves here in the United States with
the occupiers and the Black Lives Matter people and the January 6th people—all those have
very similar characteristics.
Or Hong Kong, the pro-democracy protesters there, you can see these very clear characteristics.
And the book is essentially an attempt to reconcile the fact that this new actor in
the political stage, the public, is now possibly the protagonist, possibly a protagonist.
Certainly it is one of the strongest forces that all political alignments have to deal with, and that there is a conflict from the people who have been established in the old 20th century institutions.
I call them elites.
That word has become so worn down, right?
But so my interpretation of what an elite is, and there are clear definitions of who the public is and who the elites are in the book, We can go over those if you want to.
But the elites, to be brief, are people who manage the great institutions that make modern life possible.
And that's not just government, it's business, it's media, it's the university, it's the scientific establishment, it's people from entertainment, all the way along.
All these institutions, much like the public has a characteristic way of being, all these institutions have a very characteristic 20th century way of being.
They're hierarchical.
They are credentialed.
You win your way there by going to school, knowing people, a great deal of status is invested.
So you have these elites who have this set of very hierarchical values colliding with this public that is networked on the internet.
And it's very asymmetrical, very asymmetrical.
And if you want a quick rundown of, for the first 10 years of 2011, when Arab Spring broke out till the pandemic, the public was in the ascendant.
Let me tell you, if you follow the sales of my book, the elites never picked up that it was even a situation until Brexit, first of all, but then Trump.
Trump was the gigantic detonation that woke up the elites.
So between 2016 and 2020, the elites Embarked on what you might consider a reaction, kind of like the reactionary movement that was imposed on Europe after the fall of the French Revolution and Napoleon.
They want to go back to the 20th century.
They want to go back to, you know, when we say things, you have to listen to us.
And if you say things that are different, it's disinformation.
And I think with the pandemic, the elites gained the upper hand.
They gained the upper hand.
I think the public was very scared.
They were very scared, and they wanted the elites to know.
The elite modality is, we are the experts, we know, you should listen to us, you should never listen to anybody else.
That made sense in the 20th century because there was nobody else talking.
We couldn't even talk back to them, right?
So the worst you could do was yell at your television set, which I sometimes did.
There was no way to communicate or to put out in public your opinion of these elite players.
Now, of course, that world is over, but the elites want to clamp down and say, no, no, we are the people who know.
A pandemic I think even the public wanted the elites to know, please, we're scared, help us.
And that began a process that spread, if you look at Twitter files, that spread from health to politics.
Because now it's the Russians that are interfering, and you don't want people to vote on false information.
But what's false information?
Hunter Biden's laptop is false information and suddenly becomes very one-sided.
The Democratic Party, the elites are not, it's not a partisan thing, right?
There are Republican elites, you talk to Mitt Romney, he is probably as elite as they come.
But the establishment of the United States of America, its political home is the Democratic Party, so question about that.
And it was remarkable for me to see how the entire bureaucracy of the United States, I mean I was in CIA, and I'll tell you when I was in it, One of the things that was almost like a religion with us was you did not have a political life inside.
You just did not have a political life.
You didn't even have a policy life, all right?
You weren't even supposed to say, this policy of the president is a great thing.
You dealt in platonic truth.
You basically told the policymaker, this is the world as it is happening.
These are the effects of your policy.
But you didn't say it's good or bad, right?
So the idea of all these people from intelligence getting together and putting together a manifesto saying that the idea that there's this laptop from Hunter Biden, this is a Russian manipulation, this is a Russian hack.
That has never happened before.
Many things are happening now that have never happened before.
I think it's an attempt that the elites are trying to do.
Every political action triggers a reaction.
We're in a reactionary moment across the world, but very powerfully in America, I think, right now.
The term public, as you use it, as I understand from your book, is taken from Walter Lippmann's definition as a group that coalesce around a particular issue.
So the public could be talking about a hockey game or they could be talking about anti-establishment policy.
It's fascinating to learn that during your time in the CIA, words like therefore and so were extracted from the discourse and you were encouraged simply to deal in data, not its connotations, implications or potential solutions that could be derived from it.
as you're talking. That was actually the CIA mandate by law or at least by regulation. CIA
is not supposed to be dealing in policy, it deals in facts.
Well perhaps one of the many metastasizations that has occurred as a result of this
radically shifting dynamic that you beautifully articulated as a kind of information tsunami and the
evidence seismic connotations of that is that these agencies have lost perhaps their apolitical
status and have become instruments of power in a more conventional manner.
What interests me a great deal, Martin, is the dissolution and evaporation of what seemed to be quite reliable taxonomies even 20 years ago, although there has always been a strand of public discourse that has been the centralised establishment are ultimately one entity, the distinction between left and right is meaningless.
But now we are seeing a kind of mobilisation at and a kind of interconnection between those two apparently,
formally polarised worlds that demonstrates that there is no real difference.
Just examples, recent examples, Bernie Sanders right in on Fox News yesterday, Chomsky saying
that Trump is one of the only anti-war advocates.
And if what we're seeing, as you describe, is the redundancy of those terms, and you call for the introduction of the idea of the centre versus the boundary or periphery, that we are seeing that the establishment is able to assert control in an environment of fear.
Even under all of these neologisms, there is still a kind of primal and archetypal resource that we can return to, i.e.
the palette of emotions that human beings feel.
And it seems like the pandemic was a great opportunity to utilise fear to assert control.
When we look at the results of the pandemic, lockdown, introduction of digital ID, crushing of dissent, introduction of government control via the agencies we've discussed into presumed private spaces and the cooperation between spaces that we would never have assumed cooperation would be likely.
So, in your book, whilst you continually recognise that you ain't claiming to be Nosferatu, it seems that in terms of just information, there are trends that are emerging.
Do you imagine, Martin, that we are going to see attempts to assert centralised control and ways to advance globalism?
What will be the likely resistance and what Given that much of what you said was, I wish I could have written down and said, you know, what I was starting to recognise when I was at the CIA, what is it that you're saying now, given that even in the post-Trump, post-Brexit era, we are beginning to see new movements from centralised authority?
Yeah, I'll give you the sort of slightly negative view and then I'll transition, because I think, for example, I'm looking at something very positively right now, which is what you do.
What concerns me, Despite my youthful good looks, I am not a young man, alright?
I have grandchildren, young grandchildren, and I grew up in an America that was an adventure, alright?
It was an adventure.
I'm Cuban, I'm an immigrant, alright?
Many, many weeks and months where I forget that, okay?
It was never to me, if it was anything, it was an advantage.
The girls liked it, right?
For some mysterious reason.
So, um, I, my entire history, personal history in the United States, and I was not a particularly ambitious person.
I mean, This country gave me so many opportunities, and I have had so much fun just being alive as an American.
And fear was never a part of this.
Conformism, well, you know, we all conform a little bit.
But it was never this pressure.
And I fear that when you look at the generation right above my grandchildren, the Zoomers, you know, they are terrified.
They're terrified.
They have high levels of stress.
They have high levels of suicide.
They are the most conformist group that you can ever imagine.
They need safe spaces.
Words harm them.
I'm a 60s guy.
The words harm them.
I mean, the idea that I'm a 60s guy, the idea that words can harm you.
I mean, what are you talking about?
You know?
So I would like to make sure that my grandchildren grew up in an America like mine, where being
young is an adventure.
And you can sort of say, what are you people doing?
And why are you messing up?
And the old people yell at you, and you yell back.
And in the end, you become a little bit like your parents, because that's the way of the world.
But you change a few things here and there, all right?
So that, and I think the elites today would Would want to keep those Zoomers scared.
I mean, I think there are forces at work today, you can see them in the Twitter files, that basically everything is a harm.
Everything is a fear that they have.
That's a big thing with, for example, the social media companies.
You can't use this, you can't talk about this, because that's a harm, right?
Words are harm.
But a lot of those are, of course, politically latent and favor one side over the other.
Can they do it?
Can they centralize?
Well, I'm looking at Russell Brand, all right?
You, and I'll tell you what, I'm looking at Russell Brand, and since this is this weird Zoom thing, I'm looking at me too on the screen, all right?
And I'm looking at two people who have gotten to where they are by not following the pattern of the 20th century, all right?
You would never be doing what you're doing right now in the 20th century.
You just don't, you don't look like Walter Cronkite.
You don't sound remotely like Walter Cronkite.
You don't have the background that is necessary.
Where are your degrees, all right?
You're just somebody who came from some other field and happen to be good at what you're doing right now, all right?
And how do we know you're good?
Because you have lots of people who want to hear what you're doing, right?
The internet, or whatever you want to call it, the digital dispensation, gives us the possibility of doing those things.
My book was an e-book to begin with, right, before it was published by Stripe Press.
And that's very hard to centralize, very hard to centralize.
And you know, There are people with millions upon millions of followers who don't agree with this, and I think it took us a while to recognize what was going on with this weird post-pandemic shutdown of the information sphere.
You know, they locked us down at home, and then they locked down the information sphere in a very similar way, strangely.
And I think we We may have been a little laggard in figuring it out, but we're pushing back.
We're pushing back.
And I don't particularly care whether you believe in these things or not.
If you're a big believer in progressive ideas like identity, that's fine.
It's just, that's your little church.
Don't drag me in, right?
You can't use state power or corporate wealth or your control of the mainstream media to drag me in by saying, if you use these words or have these opinions, somehow bad things are going to happen to you.
That, I don't want my grandchildren to grow up in that America.
And I think we're fighting back.
And I don't think centralizing is, to me, I'm not the most brilliant person around, but I can't imagine how that can be done in what is virtually an infinite information sphere.
I mean, for human purposes, it's infinite.
It's so big that you can't occupy it.
You can't put, you know, fact checkers in every little corner of it and make sure everybody says the right thing.
In the absence of the potential for controlling it or regulating it meaningfully, it's likely, I would say, that we will see the assertion of unreasonable power and an increase in censorship, an increase in the smearing of dissenting voices.
And I think that what you're referring to with the utilization of progressivism is an attempt at asserting control with a moral aesthetic rather than a kind of blunt boot-in-the-face Orwellian feel.
a new way of creating censorship, a new way of shutting down dissent.
And it seems that the only, well not the only, a way of neutralising this threat of ongoing
control and censorship is to accept now that there are indeed, curiously given the nature
of much of the rhetoric emerging from those circles, there is true diversity of opinion.
There is a requirement for real democracy that is decentralised.
Now I know that you have a lot of respect for many of the institutions that benefit from the ability to implement control, generate Generate and extract profit.
I'm talking about the corporate and governmental institutions that appear to have aligned during the pandemic period in conjunction with conventional media and indeed, evidently, social media.
It seems that they have a convergence of interests that is sufficient to negate the necessity for conspiracy, although there may yet be conspiracy.
In order to oppose that, it seems that a new vision needs to be put forward.
One of the things you talk about a lot in the book is that the periphery doesn't have an alternative vision.
When I've talked around these subjects, particularly with Adam Curtis, he said that the Arab Spring was a demonstration for the potential of change and an even revolution.
But when it came to the crunch, they didn't have an alternative idea to implement
at the level of government.
A similar thing could perhaps be said of Podemos and Syriza, although they were, broadly speaking, socialist ideals.
When it came to their encounter with centralized bureaucracy
in the form of the EU, both melted into the kind of centralized and establishment powers
that had preceded them.
What, therefore, do you imagine based on the information that you have access to-- and I understand it's quite a lot
and it's growing-- do you think needs to be the kind of vision
And what can we refer to?
Can we refer to ideas like anarcho-syndicalism?
Can we refer to plain old democracy?
Can we look at confederacy?
What kind of ideas, Martin, do we have recourse to?
Wow, if I had the answer to that, I wouldn't be talking to you, I'd be talking to my banker who would be counting my billions, right?
I mean, I would hesitate to put myself as somebody who can answer a question that gigantic.
I will tell you this, there are structural reasons why the public cannot generate, we're in a pathetic a sickly ideological moment. There are no ideologies. Identity
is the orthodoxy of the elites of the establishment, but if you really analyze
identity, it's not an ideology. It's kind of like a conflict generation machine, a perpetual
conflict machine. And the public can't oppose its ideology the way, say, the working class would
have opposed a very clear Marxist ideology in the 19th or 20th century for structural reasons.
The crowd in Tahrir Square - Cheers.
that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, was composed of many, many, many different strands
of political opinion, all the way from very agnostic,
socialistic types, to the Muslim Brotherhood youth.
The older guys in Muslim Brotherhood stood aloof, but the youth showed up, and in between every other kind of person.
They were unified, as is the public unified, every time by what they were against.
And they were against Hosni Mubarak, right?
But if you had gone into Tahrir Square and said, what should follow Hosni Mubarak, they would start fighting among themselves.
Yeah, and the same was true of the, you know, I mentioned Podemos.
Podemos was a tiny little, you know, subset of the indignados, and the initial indignados manifesto said we are apolitical.
We are not this and we are not that, all right?
And that's basically where the public has stood, like sort of beyond politics.
But beyond politics unfortunately means that all you can be is against, and if you are Forever against and never present an alternative, you fall into the pitfall of what I call nihilism, which is the belief that destruction is a form of progress.
Now, if you were to say, what are we to oppose to this?
I mean, we have to assume, coming from Cuba, I can tell you this, it's very easy for me to say democracy is better than anything else.
And in fact, in the world, almost every human being, even the people who don't actually
act on it, will use those words.
They say democracy.
I mean, if you read the North Korean constitution, tears will come to your eyes that it's such
a democratic constitution, right?
Of course, not much happens along those lines, but you have to at least pretend to be democratic.
That may seem hypocritical or fraudulent, but in fact it's not.
It means that the only game in town is democracy.
It's actually an important point.
So we are hobbling along with a democracy in the 21st century, when the public moves at the speed of light on the internet, that is moving... basically it's immobile.
A democracy that is in case of these immobile pyramids,
these hierarchies for the 21st century.
So what we obviously need to do is start thinking in terms of how can we move these 20th century hierarchies
into something that more resembles Amazon, right?
A 21st century institution.
Amazon is a great big bureaucracy, right?
Amazon is a hierarchy, but you don't encounter that.
What you encounter, number one is, oh, geez, I gotta go to my laptop and poof, you know,
I want this thing and I trust it, has a high trust factor.
I put my credit card there and I assume.
No, nothing bad is going to happen.
And then, oh look, I want this thing, I want this thing.
Two days later, a day later, it's on my doorstep, all right?
So what we encounter is service.
What it actually is, is a bureaucracy, like the government.
So the government is the opposite.
The government delivers more services than Any other institution in the universe.
But what we encounter is arrogance, bureaucracy, you have to stand on one foot, you have to sing the Marseillaise, you have to, you know, the Woody Allen comedy, which is, you know, put your underwear on the outside and start speaking Swedish, you know?
I mean, all these things that government demands of you just because they have power, and these are people who are not really meeting an end, but just exercising their power.
But the more that that institution can resemble Amazon and just be focused on service in a digital way, the flatter the government is going to be.
You always need institutions.
You will always need elites.
I am not a massive egalitarian in that sense, but the institutions of the 20th century just are Well adapted.
They are like the dinosaurs with that comet streaking down.
They cannot survive in the digital era with legitimacy.
The only way they could survive is through control, which is what they're trying to do now.
So we need to reform them.
We need to reform them.
In a sense, it feels like our government agencies are still being fuelled by the anti-democratic movements of the last century, state communism, fascism, in ways that are Opaque, this kind of corporatist and undemocratic version of democracy that most of us live within are in a sense, it seems to me at least, in attempts to manage outcomes.
Regardless of who you vote for, regardless of what happens, these elite interests will be able to continue unperturbed.
When you talk about the fact that public power is now networked, it seems that there are clues in the idea that that word encompasses, that networked power is part of the solution.
It's interesting that you say that the Successes in big tech these unprecedented power systems are perhaps somehow examples for how state power could evolve when it seems at least it's not something I've considered enough that they are
You know, monopolistic, profiteering.
But I really take your point that they elicit a lot of trust for all of the complaining that we do on this channel about Amazon.
Amazon do have my credit card details.
Amazon do deliver my packages on time.
They do make a fairly decent amount of TV and certainly they curate a lot of great Entertainment.
The fact is, in terms of utility, they're succeeding, and there must be something in that.
But just yesterday we spoke to Christian Smalls, the leader of the first Amazon union, and you only have to listen to him for a while to see what the invisible cost of that expertise is.
And similarly with Apple, with their friction-free, beautifully designed product, we know that elsewhere people toil to capture those resources. Part of, I believe, what's
happening is beyond even the advances of the industrial age and down to the project
of secularism itself. That we're pretending that we are not spiritual beings, that we're
pretending that we are not beings that require purpose, meaning, connection, ideas
that are difficult to articulate and certainly difficult to bring to the area of policy.
Good.
This is why I think it's very interesting and important that you say that democracy is the only game in town, that ultimately we have to abdicate from the idea that we know what's best and the idea that there is one universal best for everybody and perhaps look at What type of reform these giant central organisations are going to be required to make?
Sometimes it seems like such a behemoth of a task that we're afraid to undertake it.
But regularly with the subjects we report on, it's pretty clear That if you were to end lobbying, it's pretty clear that if you were to break down the military-industrial complex, if you were to demonopolise the big tech space in particular, if you were to end people in congressional and political positions owning stocks and shares in the industries that they're supposed to regulate,
There are changes that could be made pretty quickly that would restore public trust and would create the opportunity for real democracy, even at the seemingly unmanageable scale of great nations, that change could be instantiated.
But I wonder if, you know, it seems that when you were talking about the ability to interact with Amazon through a credit card, that we could be interacting with democratic institutions in a similarly direct way.
Yeah, I mean, think about it.
The political parties here in the States, as they are throughout the democratic world, they're dying.
They're just dying.
They don't have a reason for being.
They haven't for quite a while.
I mean, long before even the internet, they were falling apart.
But what if you basically set up a political party as kind of like a Reddit,
a subreddit, right? Okay, and I'm the Republican subreddit. What is the public interested in? So
the things that people are interested in, the issues that people are interested in versus what the
political players are interested in, are going to rise to the top as they do in Reddit, you know,
where everybody, the things that people want to talk about the most become the most talked about,
you know, versus now.
Part of what happens to the public is they're saying, you know, please help me with inflation.
Please.
You know, I think immigration is out of hand.
And when they look up, the person says, well, you're probably a racist.
And by the way, global warming.
Right.
So they don't want to talk.
They don't want to talk the issues that the public is interested in.
But you could change that, and it doesn't even mean necessarily, of course, that if
you're a Republican hearing this upswell of opinions, you'd have to accept it necessarily.
But you would know, you would have a data point of, okay, our people are saying these are the most important issues.
The people who are engaged, that's what they're saying.
Right now, there's this gigantic air gap between what the elites say is important and what the public wants to talk about.
And much of the anger of the public comes from the sense of distance.
You know, we are We are very immediate.
The internet age is a very immediate age.
President Trump can tweet something and I am right below Trump saying you're an idiot, blah blah blah, whatever.
So he and I are chickened out there, right?
Most of the elites, they're in some unfathomable distance at the top of the pyramid, and they're not listening to us.
They're talking their issues, their issues, they're all talking, you can see, they're all looking at each other.
That's the 20th century modality.
You know, if you ever want to know what a newspaper was, a newspaper in the 20th century, as I said, in my venerable old age, I can tell you, I was there, okay?
So, newspapers were elites talking to elites.
That's all it was.
I mean, everything that was printed in a newspaper was something an elite was interested in, whether it was reporting or opinion.
But that doesn't translate anymore.
Because the public is out there.
The public is saying, this is what I'm interested in, and this gigantic air gap has developed, and the public is very angry.
And I will say, you actually put your finger on something that I note, but don't I don't know how you would, number one, and I'm certainly the last one to be able to do it, which is the spiritual dimension.
I think part of the anger is because much of the people, the public that actually pours into the street, obviously there's always a disproportionate number of young people who do this, right?
And when you look at that late millennial and Zoomer generation, these are people who have stopped going to church, come from families that are not in good shape, I mean statistically, and their communities, you know, these are people who may be moving around, they're not necessarily embedded in a single community, they're everywheres, they're not somewheres, and And they want meaning.
They want whatever a human being wants.
They want meaning in their lives.
And they have decided that the place to find meaning is politics.
And politics is just transactional.
Politics is not a place where you find meaning.
So they all these when you look at the people in the streets in the indignados or you know the autonomous zones in Seattle you know this is all over YouTube right and they They just beam with this joy of transfiguration.
Well, everybody here has changed everything.
We don't use money.
People bring us food for nothing.
There's a brief moment of moral perfection and meaningfulness.
Then, of course, it dissolves into chaos, and then the police come, and everybody scrambles away.
But you cannot put the burden of meaning on politics, and therefore The anger multiplies.
It's like, well, we tried and we failed.
That is systemic.
You're never going to be able to get a kind of a, you know, meaning of life from any kind of political process.
So I think bringing up the spiritual aspect of it, the things that used to give us meaning, church, religion, a family, settled families, settled communities, Um, that's, that's a trick.
That's a trick.
Meaning is a root out of the self.
The reason I mention secularism is because, of course, in its most rudimentary form, it is the extraction of church, you know, the separation of church and state.
But like, perhaps more philosophically, it's the idea that something neutral is taking place that doesn't access the transcendent or the hysteria That the religious and spiritual, you know, ecstasy, hysteria, transcendence, all of the things that we can associate with spirituality, as well as duty, service, connection, meaning, purpose.
You're right that politics can't be a vessel for that.
They have to be grafted on artificially.
That true politics, who gets what where when, is about The administration of resources, an organization, but in a sense one can't underwrite these systems of pragmatism without an ideology, and the ideology ultimately has to, and has done in sort of Western humanitarianism, has borrowed from Christianity, even something as avowedly
atheistic as communism in the notion of solidarity has to borrow from fraternity, has to borrow from
a unitive idea, a potentially a unitary consciousness. So I feel that something
interesting happened at the advent of the union movement in your country, America, that
that there was a sort of a moment where populism appeared like it was going to be a kind of a
democratic movement. Someone came on here once and talked to us about that and like that now
populism has become a kind of...
Dirty word affiliated with, you know, extremism and a kind of a byword for all forms of prejudice.
But I'm beginning to feel that what has to be understood and appreciated, demonstrated and brought about is precisely what you've said, Martin, that instead of saying, you know, this is what you need.
I mean, then it can be a discourse and persuasion is always going to be part of leadership.
But we can't anymore have a politics that is, as you say, this is what you should care about, particularly when there is so little trust, particularly when ultimately we know that the policies in the particular areas that you cited aren't likely to meaningfully alter even the conditions that they claim to pertain to.
So what I feel is that You know, throughout your book you're talking about this tension between centralised authority and the peripheral voices that we assume to be the public, which are of course amorphous and of course numerous.
It seems to me that what is required is the opportunity to say, you in your community may want to run it this way, very traditional, very orthodox.
You should be allowed to, if that's what you democratically want to do.
Good luck.
You're entitled, by virtue of the land and population, to this amount of resource.
You, I mean, it's difficult to not do it geographically in terms of, you know, practically.
And as you say, we're dealing now with everywhere people.
We're dealing with constant migration.
I don't mean international migration, I simply mean movement.
It's bloody hard, but I guess as well, Martin, isn't it important when you talk about this spirit of adventure that you enjoyed as a young man, that we are intrepid, that we are bold, that we move forward with a vision, even if that vision is, we're going to try to provide you with what you want, and we have to accept that what you want is diverse, is sometimes conflicting.
If you in this area want to live this way, we're going to have to allow it.
If you in this area want to live this way, We're going to have to allow it.
This idea of trying to create a unipolar world, you know, and I believe even the current war is to some degree motivated by that desire.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
It seems to me like unwinnable and likely to bring about a true dystopia.
Yeah, I mean, I have said oftentimes that We, one effect of the internet has been to fracture the public.
By the way, that's the way the public really was.
The mass audience that I, when I was a young person, I was part of that mass audience, we all seemed to have the same tastes.
And it was just wonderful because, you know, the entertainment industry and mass production could all pitch to our tastes, which was remarkably similar.
Of course, we had no voice in the matter.
We chose between the products and the shows or whatever that were given to us, which were very few.
And suddenly, when the Internet came and we got a voice, it turns out, no, actually, we're very fractured.
And we're becoming increasingly fractured.
And I think I have been an advocate of the idea that government policy, national policy, should not be one size fits all.
Because when you do that, you're inviting a revolt. You're basically at least 50% of the people,
probably more, are going to say, "That doesn't suit me." All right? And you should tailor
your policies so that they can be implemented much more locally, because you're right. Our
localities tend to be far more civil and far more homogeneous. And maybe over here we're
conservative and we're not going to interfere a lot. Maybe over here we're very liberal and we're going to
have all kinds of programs to save the the world. I mean, that's fine. That's fine. The problem,
of course, is...
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that proximity. You know, the internet means we're all on the same stage jostling one another.
And we're watching the other side, watching the people, you know, if you are conservative,
you're watching California. And if you're a Californian liberal, you're watching
DeSantis in Florida. And it looks like he's in the room with you talking to you. And so
everybody's yelling and screaming. And that, I think, required that. I mean, there are many of
the issues we have to deal with are issues that in an older era in Victorian England would have
been called moral. All right.
Would have been called issues of self-control, self-assessment, self-presentation, right?
Issues that Number one, do you want to scream when you can just talk?
Are you going to be afraid of the consequences of your words, even though they are the words that really express your opinion?
There are all kinds of decisions that one makes along questions like that, that are in some sense social, that's a word we love to use, rather than moral, and in some sense political.
But they really boil down to, who am I as a human being?
What kind of value do I have as a human being?
And I think You know, if you are tailoring your words because you're afraid, and if you are backing off from the struggle or opposite, you become some kind of member of a war band that seeks out enemies and virtually attacks them and destroys them, and there's lots of people who do that.
You're being destructive and you're being cowardly.
And we just need to teach the manners of the internet, right?
I mean, people like Shaw, the old Victorian and post-Victorian Brits were great about this.
Everybody makes fun of the Victorians.
Go back and read them.
There was never a more self-critical crowd than them.
Gladstone's diaries.
The guy who had risen in this career, one of the great Prime Ministers of Britain, one of the great towering figures in the world.
His diaries are one gigantic anxiety question about, am I good enough?
Am I good enough?
He was religious.
Am I good enough, you know?
So that's what we need.
We don't need people to applaud us, all our anger, all our questioning,
don't aim it out, which is what the internet suggests you do. Aim it in. Am I good enough,
right? Am I good enough? So, I mean, there is that to this, and I'm a little uncomfortable
because I'm not a moral preacher, I'm not particularly religious, you know, so, but
unfortunately all these questions lead back to what I consider to be a very, very moral posture.
And the last word on that I would say is, if you're an elite, it is morally incumbent on you to convey the fact That you are not an oracle, that you can't see the future, that there are questions that are too complex for the human race to understand fully, all right?
And to pretend that you know what's going to happen 50 years from now, to pretend that you know that this is the only policy that's going to fix some, you know, solve some problem that then doesn't happen.
You're going to be sowing distrust, and your institution is going to be hemorrhaging that much more authority.
So you have to be able to convey the will to move forward by understanding a scientific way, which means we're not certain.
We think this is the way.
We're going to try this way.
The human race has only ever advanced by trial and error.
Nobody ever predicted, well, 100 years from now, this is my 100-year plan, and we're going to get there.
That never has happened in history, ever.
You try this, you try that, and something works, alright?
And our elites need to change their 20th century rhetoric, which is very utopian, very, we can fix everything if you give me enough power, enough science, and enough money, to a much more humble.
And that's a moral question, too.
Yeah, it is, and it's interesting, Martin, how often you return to ideas that, in my lexicon at least, are spiritual.
And I just want to allude to two ideas that are, given that your book, in a sense, offers a transcendent lens to view what's regarded often as a sort of a quite narrow polemic between old, atrophying ideas, what we once regarded as left and right, So individualism and materialism as derived from post-enlightenment
rationalism, the idea that the rights of the individual, which I do
obviously believe are sacred, the rights of the individual have somehow become this desiccated
and isolated idea that is serviced through consumerism,
that your function is to fulfil yourself through your screen,
and that even your emotional requirements are conducted in a virtual way.
I've come to understand, whilst I'm sure I err frequently, that morality is about what I do, not what I believe you
should do.
My morality is how do I treat people, and as much as possible it oughtn't be abstract.
It oughtn't be, "Well, when we've got this utopia, how am I driving today?
How am I speaking to the people I work with?
How am I treating my wife and my children?"
The reality of my moral and ethical conduct, which often in my fanciful allusions
to great change and utopia, I personally forget.
This is also recognised that the necessity for continuing acknowledgement of personal fallibility, that there is no end point, that there is, that, you know, as Christ indicated, the Messiah has to be found within you, that there is no external source of salvation that's going to become available, that it's not going to be resolved externally.
And also this idea of, part of the problem I believe that we're encountering is because, excuse me, beyond the you know sort of limited dynamic of parliamentary or congressional politics, there is a unchallenged idea that underwrites much of what we're doing, progressivism.
But whether we're on the left or the right, we kind of, in the same way that you believe that, you know, the ideal, the ideologies of the last century were going to, oh, we're going to solve all your problems through this ideal or that ideal.
Many of us believe that technology, you know, like there are sort of technological utopianists, if that's a term, that still say, no, no, we can solve this.
We'll just go to Mars.
This will happen.
AI will solve this problem.
But I also, like, you know, Gandhi said, like, You know, like, obviously it can't have been later than the early 1940s.
Look, we are too obsessed with trinkets.
We are too obsessed with comfort.
India is a country of 70,000 villages.
We should be, each of the villages should be independent where possible.
That we must not lose craft and trade.
You know, and like, how vehemently he opposed the separation that took place after British occupation.
Believing that there was a way for Muslims and Hindus And other Indian religions that are obviously of less significance when it comes to scale and size must find a way to cooperate.
And that India oughtn't just replace the power structures that the British had implemented with new elites.
And it seemed that that happened.
So it seems to me that what's required is a kind of a reckoning, an inventory, about where we're going and what our vision is.
An acceptance of our shortcomings and a kind of understanding that, as you say repeatedly in your book, the old idea, that's gone now.
To assert centralised control in the way that you could a century ago is going to have a high cost in blood.
And the dissolution, just the nihilistic Destruction of these institutions also leaves us with a landscape that's difficult to contemplate.
Somehow, from the thesis and antithesis, some kind of synthesis must be born, and that can only be born through conversation.
So it seems to me that one of the subjects we've talked about and talked around a lot, the kind of cultural conflict and the inability to accept differences, whether that's wokeism or anti-wokeism, That must be benefiting the elites.
That must be benefiting them.
Because in order for their stasis to be maintained, their supremacy to be maintained, you cannot have mobilisation of ideas through these currently opposing cultural forces.
Well, I mean, I think the elites, if you looked at what it was like to be an elite in the 20th century, it was a good life.
It was a good life.
You basically were protected, right?
I look at somebody like Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is a protected animal.
I mean, it's an amazing thing.
If you look at his personal history, You know, he has said things that are so weird and false, and he was guilty of borrowing other people's speeches a couple of times at once, has been guilty of inventing his own path and being caught at it several times.
This would have destroyed me, would have destroyed probably you.
But he's a protected creature, and this man just kind of, from his 30s on, he just kind of rode this wagon that got him to the Senate for 30 years and to the vice presidency.
God, how did he get—and now he's president, all right?
This man, who should never have been in the Senate in the first place, when you look at who he is, he was protected.
That was the 20th century, all right?
It's hard for them to give it up.
I suspect that people who have had any taste of it or who have a nostalgic streak in their
hearts will never give it up.
We need a new elite class.
That's the way I see it.
We need a new elite class.
And that's a hard process, but it's not impossible.
There is a dialectic, sort of a tension between the public and the elites.
They are chosen by us.
Democracy to a large extent, they are chosen by us.
Who do you give your money to when you go to the movies?
What TV show do you watch?
What products do you buy?
What books do you read?
Who do you vote for?
What party do you give money for?
All of this is the public asserting itself.
If we say, well, let's, this crowd doesn't cut it.
Let's look for new faces.
Unfortunately, they're such a close ranks that the public is always afraid of being duped.
You know, I'll vote for this guy.
I thought he was going to be it.
And then he turns out to be, you know, Emmanuel Macron, another guy, just like the other guys, you know?
So what you, the only way you are sure that this is not one of them is these weird political mutants that say outrageous things.
Like if you are, Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro or people like that.
So we have to now, somehow or another, the public has to assert itself to elect an elite or to select an elite class that is not necessarily chosen for its bizarreness because that's kind of like a token that, you know, the way Trump talked No elite ever talks like that.
I mean, Trump was an elite.
He was a billionaire.
But he just was a different animal.
He was a mutant, right?
And Bolsonaro was the same thing.
And I can name many others.
But, I mean, is that what you want?
All you have is a sense that he is not them.
So at least he's more like us.
But it's not even true.
It isn't.
You need to You need to aspire higher than that, I think.
In the absence of real legitimate change, people will accept novelty and peculiarity, these chimeras, these odd emergent things that ultimately have the same sets of interests and aren't meaningfully going to change the lives of ordinary people.
It's interesting what you say about new elites. I know you talk in the book about how the
current elites aren't able to handle the new dynamic and I suppose then that is why you know the magnates
of this century where it was once the Carnegie's and the Rockefeller's is now it's Facebook,
Google.
I love the bit where you talk about even the clues in their monikers that there would never have been a moment where they have easy names like Yahoo and Google and Facebook and Google would never have called itself the International Search Engine Corporation.
Even that linguistic change is an indication of something.
I've got a lot from this conversation, Martin.
I'd like to talk to you a lot more.
Still, I guess when I talk to you, I realise that I still must have some crazy ambition, because I feel like I'm trying to pull something out of you, that you know something that I need.
You know something that I need.
And there's things I want to ask you about.
I really want to know about how you feel media reporting on the current war is a demonstration of what we're experiencing.
Do you have time to answer that question?
Yes, I do.
Well, I mean, I think at a certain moment, and I kind of halfway have studied this but not in depth enough to give you some very definite answers, but I think a certain moment The media became, just like we're talking about the young generation being conformistic, the media became kind of like monolithic.
And don't question where the trigger was.
The trigger was, again, Donald Trump.
If you look at, if you make the habit of saying, okay, what are the subjects that are playing out in the media?
They always seem to have, well, this is higher, this is lower, this seems to be attracting attention.
Trump was like, I mean, a phenomenon. Nothing like it, I can tell you, had happened
in my lifetime. He was so far above in attention. Then came the pandemic. The pandemic was as far
above Trump as Trump was above the rest of us. That's probably what killed him, by the way,
because he didn't have that monopoly of attention anymore. When the war broke, that isn't true
anymore, when the war broke in Ukraine, it took that place.
And two things always seem to happen with this phenomenon.
Number one, it's monolithic attention.
Number two, monolithic opinion.
All right?
Everybody must have the same opinion.
So somehow, if you were in the slightest bit pro-Russian, you got kicked out of your job or something, because it was kind of like, if you didn't want to vaccinate, you got kicked out.
Suddenly this became an identity issue, and I think the media was responsible for that.
I think it was, there's this phenomenon that's going on with the media
where it suddenly becomes monolithic around the subject.
It doesn't particularly, it's discourse narrowing is a technical term for that,
where there used to be 100 subjects that were discussed.
Now there's like three and one of them is way up here.
And if you look at it, everything is really about the same thing.
That has not continued with the war, but in the background, in terms of attention, but in terms of opinion, yeah, I think it still is.
The momentum has continued.
The inertia has continued.
You rarely hear any other than one point of view.
Since we've been having this conversation, and we stream it live to our membership community, so the public, or at least our community, have been present during this.
And I sometimes feel like I should be incorporating their questions, but they are communicating with each other.
Hello, those of you that are there.
It's lovely to see you.
And, you know, in a sense, the dynamic that you're describing is taking place even now.
Now, admittedly, this is an elective community that is created primarily around the content That we make but it seems to me that there is going to be more of this that if there are a set of ideals around which people can cut it like I guess like what you're talking about is there is now opportunity to canvas you know the fact is is that the elite establishment are not interested in serving the public you could not have that
That interest, and being the elite, it's an anathema, it's antithetical to that position.
So your counsel that an emergent class, at the very least, needs to emerge is a good one, that you have to come from somewhere else.
This is some comments.
Look at this.
Oh yeah, this is Blessed Old Bird says, Animal Farm, we're all equal, but some are more equal than others.
Bree One says, if we all begin sharing all our information, we will start a conversation that can't stop.
It may be revolutionary.
Change is possible if we take action.
Some optimism there.
Audrey says, COVID was always a tool to get the ball rolling for Agenda 2030.
Then there's just people saying that they love you, Martin.
Simple love being conveyed.
Perhaps that's most important of all.
That's from Claude, at least here.
What exactly is democracy?
The word democracy isn't mentioned a single time in the Declaration of Independence.
Have you got anything to say to that particular inquiry?
Do you think that's just a semantic thing?
No, I don't think democracy was in the mind of the founders.
I don't think it was mentioned in the Constitution either.
The system that was set up by the founders and the framers of the United States of America, and by the way, how fortunate is this country to have had such a A lot of geniuses.
To number one, break us apart from the mother country, sorry about that.
But number two, frame us a constitution that has served us so well for 250 years, whatever it's been.
So democracy we evolved into, and this is why I'm actually halfway optimistic, because The original system that was set up was a gentleman's republic, all right?
These were people who had property and were of course male and were white and so forth.
Somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century, that system was deeply reformed.
Between the 19th and 20th century, affluence was a new thing.
Education became very powerful.
Literacy exploded.
Newspapers exploded.
And there was this need for a system that incorporated all these tens of millions of people who had just literally just entered history, all right?
And they created this mass system.
We had mass political parties, mass movements, you had mass production, and people were stovepiped
into these mass systems.
It seems very undemocratic today, and it was very undemocratic, but they were incorporated
into the system.
That hierarchical system of the 20th century was actually, in its day, a reform, because
it included more people than just a whole bunch of white gentlemen.
The white male gentlemen.
So, it's just, as with evolution, you know, the environment changes, and then you have to adapt.
And that is what has happened today.
But democracy happened.
Democracy was not planned upon.
Democracy does not forget, through most of the history of the West, was considered a bad thing.
It was considered the rule of the mob.
It's precisely what we must aim for.
Finally, BeHereMeow said, Martin, thank you so much for joining me for this incredible conversation.
You're every bit as wonderful as I imagined you might be.
Having read your material, I know that it's something that I will continue to study and learn from.
I really appreciate you giving us your time and I hope we have the opportunity to communicate again.
Well, I would love to do that, and if I ever get back to Britain, which I love to be in and haven't been in way too long, I think 2019 was the last time, I'll look you up.
We do this event called Community where we bring together people like Vandana Shiva and Wim Hof up here.
If you're in the UK in July, we could certainly help to facilitate that if it's something that you would like.
Hay-on-Wye, the border between Wales and England.
We do this event where people come and share ideas and we create community and try to create symposia for discussion.
It would be wonderful if you were available to join us there.
Yeah, I'll look into that.
July is a good time to be in Britain.
Yeah, it's the only time that it is not punishing.
Thanks, man.
Martin, thank you.
Thanks for joining us.
-Lobby, that was great.
-Thanks, man.
Thank you.
That was, of course, Martin Goury, writer of The Revolt of the Public.
There's a link in the description to any information you might need about him and how you can follow
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Join me next week when I'll be speaking to Silky Carlo from Big Brother Watch, sharing
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