Russell chats to Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer, known for his groundbreaking work on the human brain and its relationship to culture and society. He is the author of the 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World'. In this conversation, Iain explains how the division within our brains affects our thinking and behavior in society - and how the left hemisphere of the brain tends to dominate our thinking and decision-making, leading to a reductionist approach that can overlook the broader context and human values.Find out more about Iain McGilchrist's work: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/ Watch the FULL INTERVIEW: https://bit.ly/428RiCYFor a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here:https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to my festival COMMUNITY - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
It's Friday and what an incredible week it's been.
Joe Biden has announced he will run again with an extraordinary video.
Tucker Carlson has been ousted from the mainstream.
Don Lemon has left.
It's left us all in disarray.
We've got some news analysis coming up as well as a fantastic conversation with one of my favourite guests that I've ever had.
Dr. Ian McGilchrist will be talking to you about psychology, neurology and the way that the state is using your own mental illness as a kind of mind dagger against you.
How you are being controlled, nudged, behaviourally manipulated by systems and forces way, way, way beyond your control.
We're going to talk a little bit, first of all, about Sama Davos had me a blast.
Is that what we're talking about?
That's happening.
Davos is back!
Sometimes on a week like this, it can seem like the world is being coordinated by centralised globalist force, where technocrats get together to manipulate our consciousness.
And that's because, to a degree, that is exactly what's happening.
If you thought winter Davos in Davos was fun, wait till you get a load of summer Davos in... China.
China, that's right.
Once a year isn't enough, is it, for Davos?
Let's be honest.
Get through the year, Gareth, with just one look at Klaus Schwab in an ethnically inappropriate outfit.
I want to see Klaus Schwab with Xi Jinping.
Oh yeah, Xi Jinping.
I thought that was a type of clothing or something for a minute.
This is a type of clothing.
It certainly is.
Klaus Schwab, that's how we estimate.
We should say we've editorialised that.
That's not a factual image.
No, that's not an actual image.
We think that's what Klaus Schwab would wear.
And will.
And will wear at Summer Davos.
Let us know in the chat and the comments.
In fact, why don't you make your own artwork of Klaus Schwab?
Be as adventurous and as bold as you want, unless you're watching on YouTube, in which case you should stay within the WHO guidelines, which includes, I think... Which he certainly does.
He stays well within those guidelines.
Oh, I stay within the guidelines.
I don't like to stray.
Van der Waals is just intruder.
Authoritarianism with the face made up with the hair perfect.
I wouldn't like to pry.
That's right.
That's what's going on.
Summer Davos.
Who wouldn't want to participate in that?
Well, I wonder what's going to be going on because obviously it's in China rather than Davos.
They can't call it... I don't think they should be allowed to call it Davos if it ain't in Davos.
I don't think so.
It's confusing.
What will they call it?
You'd be able to go in that top.
With this?
I think so.
I think you'd be welcomed.
Some shorts?
Maybe some sandals?
They'd love you, mate.
Who knows?
What if you and Lee Fang, guest from earlier in the week, go together?
I'd love that.
I'd love that.
Hand in hand.
I've already asked him, actually.
Fang and Roy Buller.
I've actually been texting Lee Fang myself.
No, no.
It's me and Lee.
We've got the connection.
You're hurting me.
The Biden administration has invested 1.9 million in disinformation education.
So the actual presidential administration is trying to censor and control and legitimize the further manipulation of the media.
Let me just get into the facts of this.
I'm going to read this this out under the assumption that reading it is going to
improve my understanding of the story. The Biden administration is set to spend almost
two million of taxpayer dollars on a media education program to train educators, media
professionals, librarians, government employees and information specialists in foreign countries
on how to combat disinformation according to a grant document seen by Washington Examiner.
I don't remember we needed that, that could have gone. Let's have a look at the next still.
Meanwhile, META's oversight board recommends continuing censorship until the WHO calls
an end to the pandemic.
So according to the WHO, are we still in the middle of the pandemic?
This is still it.
Certainly is.
Do you feel like you're in the middle of a pandemic?
Let me know right now if you are locked within your house, masked up to the hilt, vaccinated to within an inch of your life.
And remember, I have no opinion on what you should do.
I mean, Just stay healthy, eat well, look after yourself, those kind of things.
A bit of exercise.
Vitamin D, a bit of exercise.
Some of that.
Probably do get out of the house, actually.
Yeah, I think so.
Probably the mask.
Probably always should have done.
Should have done that in the first place, as a matter of fact.
Probably should have done that in the first place.
Is there not anything else?
We're not going to be talking about... Well, we can discuss this.
I mean, obviously... Four minutes.
The way in which this is going to impact us is continued censorship because we know those guidelines because we're on YouTube literally now as we speak and having to adhere to those guidelines and those guidelines will continue to inform the way Facebook or Meta approaches censorship so it's like the kind of continued sweeping I don't know whatever you call it of censorship that will continue and I guess it also highlights the kind of power that the WHO have.
Dr Ian McGilchrist is a brilliant and groundbreaking author and intellectual who I've had the great privilege of meeting because I'm stifling a burp.
Can you tell that?
Are these the nerves kicking in?
I'm not nervous about Dr Ian McGilchrist.
I've met him before.
I've spoke to him.
He's one of them Ians that's got too many I's in his name.
I know the ones.
You know some people, Ian, will just have the one I. Some Ians, I have another eye!
Get rid of the eye.
Thought you were through with the eyes?
There's no eye in Ian.
Actually, there's two.
So I've got you there.
Confused you.
His groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, is often misquoted and misused because people talk about, like, you know, people might say to you, Gareth, oh, you're very right-brained.
That sort of thing, Ian McGilchrist, you don't want to hear that.
No.
Because there's complex networks in neurology.
It's not that the left brain's doing this and the right brain's doing that.
Although it's not even as simple as that because there are certain traits that are characteristic of the hemispheres.
And it's these misunderstandings that we're going to be clearing up.
It's reductive.
I hate all reductivism.
Yeah, which is in itself a redacted.
That's the kind of thing I just came up with.
Do you want me to leave now?
Don't you dare leave me because there's a lot of actual, I would say, erotic tension.
I'm not going to start saying there's erotic tension between Dr Ian McGilchrist and myself because I'm about to have a very serious conversation which we're going to talk about a variety of topics.
Including Tucker's departure and how a figurehead like Tucker Carlson rose up.
We're going to be talking about Joe Biden, what it means when you have an atrophy and cadaverous figure running for president for four more years, presenting himself as radical when he couldn't be more corporatized and more of an establishment figure.
And how was the pandemic used to induce mass compliance as well as the ensuing and demonstrable mental health crisis that was exacerbated and potentially even, well not caused because the mental health crisis has been going on for a little while, but it certainly got worse during the pandemic.
Lots and lots of things to talk about.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
Joining me now is Dr Ian McGilchrist.
Thank you very much for joining me, Doctor.
Are you happy with your introduction?
It is a very good one, a fine one.
You said that I was incorrectly anticipating the conclusions to our conversation.
Any particular instance where I've been misapprehending what's likely to take place?
Oh, I wouldn't like to prejudice our subsequent conversation.
God, you're brilliant at this, aren't you?
I think that what our viewers will be most interested in initially is understanding the nature of your work.
We've of course had a conversation before, enjoyed very much your conversation with Jordan Peterson, and I wonder if we can start by talking about how the principles of psychiatry and psychology more broadly, even though I understand that much of your work has a neurological basis rather than just analytical psychiatry, How these tools are applied in sociology and in particular in the kind of messaging that we might receive from, for example, government authority.
Yes, I thought the things that you said were right, that there are many things in the social sphere to which my hemisphere hypothesis is very relevant.
But I just didn't think that the conclusions were necessarily as straightforward as the ones you might have outlined, that's all.
I'm afraid I have been accused of reductivism before, Doctor.
I think one of my main messages is that one of the problems with our era is the lack of ability to see both sides of a question.
The inability to have nuance or to finesse an answer.
Everything has to be, if you'll pardon the expression, black and white.
And that's not a good world in which to live.
We've been discussing this week in particular how the rise of polemicism is underwritten by the collapse of the previous economic models of mainstream media outlets that could previously confidently appeal to a broad mainstream base, knowing that they would be talking to both, in the case of the United States of America, Yes.
liberal and conservative voters.
Now that a plain fissure has appeared as a result of social media's ability
to use targeted and bespoke advertising, mainstream media outlets benefit from polemicism.
They know who their audience are and they know who their audience are not.
This has increased, as you correctly identified, as you say, black and white arguments.
And it's getting worse.
These kind of silos are, I think, leading to any number of problems, including a sort of a cry for more centralised authority, perhaps even a return to outmoded ideas like ethno-nationalism, which I would I'm not saying I'm sympathetic to you, but I appreciate and understand how that might happen in a bifurcated media and sociological space.
But before we get into some of the particularities of our current affairs-oriented conversation, can you please tell me some of the common misunderstandings that are applied to your work so that I can stop making them?
Thank you.
No, the first thing I have to say to anyone who hasn't read either The Master and His Emissary or The Matter at Things, my two works on this area of difference between brain hemispheres, is forget everything you think you know, because it'll be wrong.
And what that's about is that back in the 60s and 70s there was a new operation pioneered to help people with epilepsy that was making their life unlivable.
And basically epilepsy is an electrical storm and if it goes right across the brain the person loses consciousness.
And so these people were losing consciousness very, very often.
And the idea was that if they could just divide the two hemispheres one from the other, which you can do by cutting a band of fibers at the base of the two hemispheres called the corpus callosum, then you would stop it spreading and they would have at least one hemisphere working.
And for those individuals, this was a life-saving procedure.
But then what happened was that psychologists quite rightly thought, we can find out more about the differences between each hemisphere by interviewing it on its own.
There are techniques in the lab whereby you could engage, if you like, one hemisphere at a time in a split-brain patient.
And see what the differences were and out of that arose a sort of quick and dirty consensus that the left hemisphere was logical and linguistic whereas the right hemisphere was, I don't know, given to painting pictures and a bit of fantasy and rather emotional.
And all this is completely wrong.
I mean, completely wrong.
Both hemispheres take part in language and reason.
And both are involved in pictures and emotion.
In fact, the most lateralized emotion is anger.
And guess what?
It lateralizes to the left hemisphere.
And I can talk more about the differences between those two hemispheres and why that changes the world if you like, but one of the things I suggest in The Master and His Hemisphere is that we have slipped more and more into a world in which the kind of things that we know via the left hemisphere dominate to the expense of knowing really or understanding or receiving.
Any of the rich stuff that the left hemisphere could tell us.
And the right hemisphere is the one we should be listening to.
Not just because of my prejudice, but because I've demonstrated at great length in The Matter With Things, it's deluded, it's false, it's wrong, it's non-veridical.
The left hemisphere on its own, it needs the right hemisphere to guide it.
One way of thinking about this is that the left hemisphere has a targeted attention to a detail, and this is to enable us to grab stuff.
Very important for survival.
But if the only kind of attention you pay is this very narrowly targeted attention, very precisely to a detail that you want to get, You won't last because, at the same time, you've got to have a completely different kind of attention which is broad, open, vigilant, looking out for predators, looking out for your mate, looking out for your offspring that you also need to be feeding and looking after.
So, in nature, going back at least 700 million years, all neural networks are asymmetrical because, I think, of this need to do two completely different kinds of things at the same time.
Are you then suggesting that our cultural institutions and our systems of government are unduly biased by this meticulous focus that is attributed to the left brain at the expense Of the more visionary aspect of the right brain, even though I'm sort of tiptoeing down this imaginary and real equator in order to avoid toppling into misinterpretation.
No, that's right.
I mean, broadly speaking, the answer is yes, but I think I ought to do a little more unpacking first, otherwise people won't see what I'm getting at.
Yeah, I'm sick and tired of people's ignorance.
Unpack everything, if you would, please, Ian.
Okay.
I don't mind if I do.
No, the thing is this.
Effectively, I've described two kinds of attention, and that may not electrify people.
In fact, when I first realized that the fundamental difference between the two brain hemispheres was the way they pay attention to the world, the penny didn't immediately drop.
Because I've been brought up in this very machine-like system of psychology that, you know, it's a function of a machine, the brain.
But it isn't actually.
Attention is something a machine can't give.
It can be made to, you can turn the camera where you like, but it's not attending.
Only a conscious person like you or I can attend.
And when we attend, we bring about a different kind of world.
I mean, if you think about it, the same body on the mortuary slab in a model's artistic setting, the body of your lover, the body of your aunt, they all evoke different things and are seen differently, but they're still bodies.
And so the way in which we look at something Matters a lot.
If we look at something in a very detached way in which we're fragmenting it and not allowing ourselves to interact with it, we see it as a thing that we can use.
Whereas I think the importance cannot be overstated of relationship.
That really everything is made of relations, not of things.
We have an idea that the world is full of things and then how are they related?
And how am I related to them?
But I have this view that actually the primary thing is relations.
And that things are the bits of this picture that stand out for us.
But in any case.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
So there's this tendency to look at things due to utility, which would have an obvious evolutionary function.
Exactly.
But there's Deleuze's ideas that we should look at things in the model of machines, that they are interrelated systems that are ultimately relational, that a bicycle isn't a bicycle until you use it as a bicycle.
Yes, that's true.
And that takes one to the business of context.
In the left hemisphere there just appear to be these isolated things that it targets and then moves to another target and so on.
So it sees the world as built up from fragments and they don't have any meaning until it's put them together in some kind of a way.
And it sees them as static so that it can grab them easily, familiar because it's what it's looking for, food or a twig to build a nest or whatever it is.
Decontextualized, disembodied, deanimated, in other words inanimate, and effectively something that is only of use.
Whereas in the right hemisphere, you see that nothing is actually completely separate from anything else.
That everything is connected in a sort of flowing web.
So it's not static, it's changing.
And that context matters.
When you take something out of context, you change it.
That the world is embodied, that it has emotional and moral value, and that it is a living world, a complex and beautiful world.
So we have these two quite different visions, if you like.
It seems that based on what you were just saying Ian, that the right hemisphere has a capacity
for a temporal and a spatial thought, not governed by the presumption of context
that perhaps could be regarded as animalistic, i.e. even concepts such as space and time
are quite sort of almost spatially subjective.
It's only when you live in an environment that needs to function in a particular way
that ideas like time as experienced through entropy and space as it appears through the relationships
one might achieve in space even become relevant.
I was wondering while you were talking also about what type of relationship might an ape
such as our species have with a tree pre-linguistically.
How do we distinguish ourselves from our environment prior to language?
Before we sort of delve into that subject, can you give me a conclusive answer please?
Beaten around the bush, metaphorical or otherwise.
Before we get to that, I want to let our YouTube audience know that we're going to move exclusively to being on Rumble now, because I'm going to ask Ian McGilchrist about how, during the pandemic era, Lockdowns and government control induced a degree of compliance and whether or not there's an advantage to locating our behavior and our decisions in this more empirical left brain.
You know, like a minute ago, you talked about like how the ability to focus on detail and utility.
Same as empiricism.
Empiricism is derivation from experience.
You're going to have to get off YouTube now.
Derivation from experience is going to be explained to me and everyone who clicks over to Rumble.
If you're watching this on YouTube, join us on Rumble.
There's a link in the description.
Please explain my error.
One of the ways you can think of it is that the left hemisphere's view, this mechanical one, is entirely theoretical.
It ignores most of experience.
The right hemisphere is the one that says, well, that theory may be right, but let's have a look and let's test it in the real world.
That's empiricism.
That's empiricism.
And the right hemisphere is a very good guide to what really is going on, whereas the left hemisphere has a theory.
A map.
A mechanism.
A model.
But it's not the reality.
And there's nothing wrong with a map, you know.
A map is useful.
But a map is useful because it leaves almost everything out.
I mean, a map wouldn't get more useful if you put in all the names of the children that live in the houses along the road.
No.
That's there in the real world, but the map is highly selective.
If the map was for paedophiles, they would probably... Thank you, Russell.
If you were at a map... Thank you for elevating the level of this conversation.
You can't imagine the jokes I discarded when you said if it was a lover or an aunt when you used the cadaver on the slab example.
As I was saying it I was thinking, is this wise with Russell?
I thought it was interesting that even in the example you wouldn't use a mother.
I thought that showed incredible sensitivity that even in a rhetorical For example, you used a detached family member that you could survive the grieving of.
Well, maybe.
Yes, yes.
Depends what relationship you have, I suppose, with your aunt.
My aunt was also my lover.
Sorry, sorry.
I'll just get that out of my system and then I'm going to ask serious questions.
Well don't worry, I'm a psychiatrist, I've heard it all.
There might be a point in this conversation where it turns into treatment.
Yeah, I don't know where to go because you've raised a number of things.
Life without language, atemporality and aspatiality.
Yes.
And more recently, what about the Covid?
Where do you want me to go?
Shall we start with COVID because it's more sensational and it will be helpful for our audience and then we'll move into atemporality, aspatiality and pre-linguistic models of cognizance.
Okay, good.
Well, I mean, the first thing I'd like to say about Covid is that I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon of saying that either those who were pro taking strict measures or those who were against it were right.
I mean, I think it's all very well being clever after the event.
But when you're suddenly presented with something where people were projecting that there would be deaths so numerous that basically society would break down, the hospitals wouldn't be able to cope and so on.
If people didn't take fairly drastic measures afterwards, they would have been criticised as having destroyed the nation.
So there's that.
And then on the other hand, you have to be flexible as different bits of science come in.
And so you may change your mind and swither about.
And it's, again, easy to be retrospectively clever.
But at the time, you haven't got the advantage of knowing what's coming down the line.
What I think I can say is that whatever happened in the initial phase, you can't really blame anyone, but it went on far too long.
And the introduction of this business of trying to keep everybody safe was a huge mistake.
But you see, this is not just about COVID.
This is about how we now think about us and our relationship to society.
I was brought up at the tail end of a culture in which it was thought good to be self-reliant, to be resilient, not to fall apart if you were opposed or criticised, and to take responsibility for yourself.
Those were the general ideas in the culture I was brought up in.
And I know I'm anti-Diluvian compared with you, Russell, but there we are.
And what has happened during my lifetime is that I think we've got lazy.
I think we've got used to having everything easy, which is extraordinarily unusual in the history of the world.
And we've also, because it's comfortable, outsourced looking after ourselves to the state.
So the state will do everything for us, protect us and make us safe.
Well, if you were made ultimately safe, you would be cocooned in a bubble and you might as well die now and order your coffin, you know, because life is a risky business, starting from the fact that in the moment you're born, you're going to die at some point.
And I'm not saying that a society has no role in keeping Peace, it clearly does, but not by extreme authoritarianism, infantilization of the people and so on.
So we should have been in a position very soon where we were able to make our own decisions about that and not certainly tracked in the way that this technology of the mobile phone does.
I mean, I'm very concerned about that.
We can come on to all that later.
We must.
I'm anti-authoritarian myself, you'll be astonished to learn.
I'd never have guessed Russell!
What's happened to you lately?
But when you say that there's been an almost generational shift, and I can understand that argument to a degree, between a kind of attitude of self-reliance, autonomy, self-responsibility, etc, to one where we outsource responsibility to the state.
I wonder how an epochal shift like that might have occurred on the basis of individual decisions.
Isn't it likely that such a significant shift has been somehow culturally brought about and is to some degree the responsibility of the state that has now assumed this responsibility?
And I would say in this context another word for responsibility might be power and authority.
And that it isn't inadvertent or accidental, but it's quite deliberate, and that this very technology is being used to present the idea of individuality, but individuality that's usually expressed through consumer choice, while in important matters, the state, who ultimately, I would argue, acting as brokers on behalf of globalist and corporate interests, continue to subdue the population and induce compliance through a number of measures.
And one of the, perhaps, inadvertent side effects of the Covid pandemic has been increased authoritarianism and increased obedience, something that you alluded to and touched upon whilst I acknowledge also that in the initial phase it would have been negligent to have done anything other than be cautious in a relatively unique situation.
Subsequently it's quite clear that surveillance was increased, monitoring was increased, censorship was increased, very powerful interests all profited from this crisis.
And I'm not the first person to observe that we seem to be living in a time where one crisis begets another.
9-11, economic crisis, the sort of crises around Donald Trump, the pandemic, the endless wars.
It seems to become a kind of sort of a living or literally Orwellian dynamic where the legitimization for increasing authority occurs and then that authority is imposed.
So I just would like to query your assumption that it's sort of somehow the What do I want to say?
The individual's negligence that has led to this infantilisation.
No Russell, that's not what I said.
I won't accept that, no.
But one aspect, there are many many aspects to this and if you want I can talk about them.
Of course I do.
But one is that We have got further and further from real community which is local and involves things like extended family and embeddedness in a place which perhaps where your parents also were brought up and died.
The locale, the sense of a place and a group and a rooting, a belonging, a place of belonging.
And because of mobilization and industrialization that has shifted over 150 years towards people who are uprooted, may come from almost anywhere and they're put together in urban settings and that basis of trust which is there in a palpable, intuitively felt society has been lost.
And in that vacuum, various things come up to take control.
And people feel slightly afraid.
And when people are afraid, it's very well known, they look for a strong man who will give definite black and white answers.
This is always bad news, actually, but...
So you mentioned Orwell.
1984 was written in 1948.
So that was before the breakdown of the kind of way of thinking I'm talking about.
People have been through the war and they still thought more or less in that way.
But I think there were a number of things that happened.
One was this virtualisation in which we were no longer sort of living in a place and a time that was connected and embedded in a society with whom we knew we were safe.
That was one.
Another is that civilisations get lazy.
If you look at the downfalls of other civilisations, what happens is that the first generation that establish it are enormously courageous, very self-sacrificing, rather authoritarian.
They kind of create the state.
And then the next generation comes up and they can afford things like philosophy and science and art.
And then eventually another generation comes who just takes all that for granted and thinks, well, I'll cruise on it.
And I think what happened was that after the war, people were fed up with, you know, the sacrifices of the war.
And they wanted to have fun, basically.
And I think the 60s and 70s were great, and they were a push against lots of the things that are so terrible that we're seeing around us now.
But they were also somewhat irresponsible.
I mean, the idea that we could learn things from the past, from our culture, was somehow lost.
And I think once you lose that connection with your own tradition, with your own culture, A people is destroyed.
And tyrants know that.
They set about destroying it.
And before we go any further, just let me say about a tradition or a culture, this does not mean fossilisation.
It means the opposite.
Because a tradition is flowing and changing.
If you look at the history of the West, there's been a tradition for 2,000 years, but it's been a very different world at different times.
So it doesn't rule out change.
But what it is, it's like a river in which you don't cut slices out of a river and shove another one in.
The river is a river.
A plant is a plant.
If you want the plant to grow up a wall, the good gardener chains it gradually up the wall.
He doesn't cut it off at the roots and stick it on the wall because he doesn't have a plant anymore.
And that's the same way that a society, a cultural civilization is.
It's like that plant, it's like that river.
And if you don't know what the past held, you are very much at sea and very vulnerable to anything that comes along.
That's where we are now.
I'm inclined to agree with you.
Ian, but I also feel that some of those arguments are used to mobilize a kind of exclusivity and othering of potential outside groups.
I also would like to offer potentially That this did not take place because of the absence of ideology, but because of the presence of an insidious and invisible ideology predicated on individualism, materialism, post-enlightenment rationalism, deracinated from any sort of sense of, as you say, tradition.
I'm interested very much in what you say that somehow there are anthropological cues that we might regard in the same way as we would understand diet as being informed by our evolution in the obvious example of excess sugar inducing diabetes.
Perhaps there are subtler cultural forces that play a part in our evolution that if extracted or needlessly amplified become detrimental that an advanced civilization ought bear in
mind precisely as you say not only traditions which can be sometimes oppressive, exclusive and
potentially tyrannical but traditions that are in place to carry our relationship to
the soil, our relationship to one another, our relationship to our values and our
principles and I feel that those things have been kind of annihilated in order that
As I say, insidious and difficult to determine economic models so that they can be transplanted and transposed.
For example, take once more the pandemic, just because it provides such a convenient lens.
During this time where sort of safety was brought to the forefront, during this time of crisis, just because I believe it is an economic ideology ultimately, so by observing the economics, one can or at least it plays out economically and those are observable symptoms.
Um, you know, if there was a wealth transfer, there demonstrably was, there was, that if like big tech platforms benefited, government benefited from the ability to regulate, the pharmaceutical industry saw record profits, the media benefited, there are sort of institutional forces that benefit from ongoing crisis, and we have in fact, look, some facts here.
For 2022, the total global pharmaceutical revenue was estimated at 1.48 trillion U.S.
dollars, and antidepressant drugs market revenue across the U.S.
is predicted to be at 22 billion dollars by the year 2027.
Some of these statistics relate to mental health, some of them obviously relate to particular medications.
But I suppose what I'm bringing to bear is this, if people do not have an awareness of individual traditions
and do not revere their own heritage while respecting other people's heritage,
that it's very easy for our ideologies to be usurped.
And I think that this culture of consumerism and commodification of everything is--
Well, you're right that a capitalist society is benefited by destroying human bonds, traditions,
because it will get in the way of the mechanical manipulation
of people as units that will consume.
And of course, that's such a terrifically impoverished vision of what a society is.
I mean, one can hardly begin expressing how negative that is.
But I just want to comment, before I say anything else, about your point that perhaps if we pay too much attention to tradition, outsider groups will be not welcomed.
And there's something in that, because a tradition can become sclerosed.
It is true.
But to throw away a tradition on the basis that if you don't look after it, it can become sclerosed is not a good one.
And in fact, in my lifetime, what I have noticed is that relations between the races have frankly got worse.
During my lifetime, relations between the sexes have got worse.
In my lifetime, the gap between the super-rich and the poor has got greater, not smaller.
In my lifetime, freedom has become curtailed in very obvious ways, disastrous ways, that make this look like On the way to being a totalitarian state.
So at the time, in the 60s, we wanted freedom.
We wanted men and women to get on well, the races to get on well, and for, you know, the gap between rich and poor to be closed.
And exactly the opposite has happened.
And this is partly because of the inability to think in more than one One thread.
This is good.
This is my slogan.
I can express it in a word or two words.
That's what we go for.
But there is always another side to every question.
And it's the neglect of the downside of what one is doing that is leading us into ruin.
Our eyes are being drawn away.
And perhaps, if I wanted to be a bit paranoid, as you might prefer, I would think this was deliberately schematised.
But I think that we're being asked not to look at the downside of what's going on, because it's so terrifying.
Through pursuing what look like good ends, we have reached the exact opposite.
And this is to do with the coincidence of opposites.
Which would take us into another philosophical realm altogether.
But I argue that, you know, we have this linear view of life.
That this is over here and that is over there.
And the further you go that way, the better.
Or the further you go that way, depending on what you want.
But actually what happens is they curve round and come together.
You know, since I was young, since you were young, you probably noticed what I did.
That the extreme left and the extreme right have more in common than anybody in the middle.
Yes, I think you're right.
In some ways I completely agree.
The utopianism of the Cultural Revolution I felt was earnest and I feel that the journey from the kind of collective goodwill that the counter-cultural, anti-war, civil rights movement, I feel that that too was Devoured and repurposed by the machine.
I think it's very easy for things to become commodified, for identity to become commodified.
For example, if we look at just one current media furore, the Budweiser light scandal in case it has escaped you.
What happened was is that Budweiser Light used a trans woman to promote their beers.
This called provoked blue-collar Americans, the traditional one might argue, consumers of Budweiser Light to sort of protest and sort of vocally and publicly reject this new advertising model and a kind of cultural war in miniature ensued all around the product of Budweiser
Light.
But of course, in my view, Budweiser Light doesn't care whether people are trans and
progressive around identity issues or traditional, it doesn't care what class you are from, it
cares only about markets.
That was a cynical marketing move.
Yes, yes, because that's the only metric by which it survives and succeeds.
It's the only necessary or relevant metric.
And I think that this perhaps can be mapped onto many of the conflicts of our time that people are... It was the gay rights activist Peter Tatchell that told me a long time ago that in his experience around civil rights issues, whilst they are obviously significant, he dedicated his life to gay rights, for example.
He said that whilst he had discovered in his personal experience that people would cede on civil rights issues ultimately and eventually when it came to matters of finance he had noticed that there was a sort of a hard and impermeable edifice that could not be breached and I feel that what's happening is the cultural conversation is being directed into areas that cause more conflagration and infighting among ordinary people rather than and allowing people to come together
to confront the centralized authority that is better centralized authority,
authoritative institutions, be they governmental or corporate,
that are benefiting from these ongoing conflicts.
I wonder if, please.
No, no, I was just gonna say, I mean, my view based on my life's experience
is that generally speaking, when things go wrong, it's more cock up than conspiracy.
And one can see these things being engineered, and in some cases, I'm sure they are, and you're right.
But generally this is a drift that I would have predicted from enslavement by being hypnotized by this left hemispheric way of thinking.
Tell me what you mean, please.
Well, it's not aware of the complexities, the different strands, the fact that opposites tend to coincide.
It has a very simple map and it doesn't deal with the uniqueness of an individual.
It talks only about categories.
So everybody is just a category and a representative of that category.
This is how the left hemisphere works.
It abstracts, takes things out of context, Gets rid of their individuality, fits them into a mechanical model.
Now if you start doing that in society, what you will get is a great deal of opposition from people who resent this feeling that they're no longer allowed to speak for themselves but have to be part of a group and so forth.
And the more it's promoted the more resentment it will build up and eventually you will get populist people who will not be doing good but will be voted for because they alone seem to have any Possibility of moving things away from a world which I think has been generated by patronizing liberal middle class intellectuals who basically don't...
They secretly think that people are stupid.
Yes.
And anyone who doesn't belong to their clique is stupid.
And they have made this so obvious now that they're destroying universities, they're destroying the law, they're destroying politics.
Of course technology must, not ultimately, but perhaps is currently a reflection of the human intelligence that designs it.
And the way that these models function, in particular currently, affords a great deal of data analysis.
And perhaps this data analysis is an interesting reflection of what you are saying about the hemispheric biases.
That may be informing our current cultural trajectory.
Perhaps this is bolstered by the ability of technology to accrue data, but only on the basis of observable data points, leading to conclusions that, while deductive, are also reductive.
Is it possible that the tools that are being used are incapable of incorporating the aspatial, atemporal qualities that you referred to earlier in our conversation?
Well, I'd have to talk about that separately if we have time, but because I don't think... We do have time!
All right.
OK.
I mean, first of all, let's talk about economics, because there are two points in economics that really demonstrate what I think we're both getting at here.
One is the old saying, well, we've shown that it works in practice, but we can't prove that it's right in theory.
That's the wonderful left hemisphere inversion, you know.
This economic thing works, but it's not our theory.
And the other observation is that, and made by economists, that over, you know, the last 20 years, events that were palpable, aspects of the picture that were very obvious, were deliberately ignored because they didn't fit into the theory.
Or maybe not even deliberately ignored.
I mean, there's something like this, that if you have a theory that says it's got to be like that... You're observing some of the messaging that comes through.
I do, yes.
That's the left brain.
It's another problem with AI, yes.
Very demanding.
Yes, yes.
Dictatorial.
But basically, you know...
What is the information that's not included in the analysis?
Can you give us an example of that?
Well, I'm not an economist, unfortunately, but I can see in the world around me that people deny things that seem to me pretty obvious, you know, and they I want to go referring to a brilliant philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who was a German-Jewish philosopher, as you know.
Yeah, the banality of evil.
Yes, exactly.
And the first-hand experience of Nazism.
But she said a couple of things that really strike me.
One is, when there are things that you cannot say, you live in a tyranny.
So right now in 2023 in Britain, we live in a tyranny.
One we have brought upon ourselves by just not...
Opposing these kind of moves that I think are the sort of Wokarati's moves which will eventually destroy our institutions and destroy the culture that is very important to us.
Of course it has its weaknesses but it's got an awful lot also that it's achieved and is, you know, used to be admired all around the world for that.
So there's that.
And the other thing she said is The best person for a totalitarian regime is not the prototypical Nazi or the prototypical communist, but the person who no longer knows the difference between true and false.
And I think that's the world we're coming into now, and it's a big issue.
There are all sorts of ways in which it's harder to know what to trust, who to trust.
And a third century Chinese emperor said, in a society you need three things, guns, food and trust.
If you have to give away one of them, it's guns.
If you have to get rid of another, it's food.
But you should hang on to trust because no society can flourish without trust.
The bewilderment of not having a strong foundation, and I suppose the connection between foundations and traditions is one that needn't be overly emphasised, is I suppose what we're experiencing is there is not a consensus anymore.
There is not a consensus around how we ought to organize.
No, I think there is a consensus.
I think it's very clear what the consensus is.
It's what a group of far-left leaning intellectuals decided was the only moral way, or the only right way, and they're already being proved drastically wrong by the things it's now leading to.
In other words, all the opposites of the good aims that it was supposed to be achieving.
That's extraordinary.
But that consensus is kind of cloistered.
It's not a broad consensus while it might be... I suppose you're saying it's important policy.
They may be a very small number, but they have enormous influence over media, including social media and so on.
May I just mention something?
In the 16th century, the English ambassador to the Lowlands, you know, Holland basically... I still call them the Lowlands.
I will not refer to them as the Netherlands.
Lowlands.
The Netherlands.
Whatever it was.
The ambassador wrote home about the Puritans going around in the Reformation.
And what he said was, a rather disciplined band, a small band, went from church to church, taking sledgehammers to these wonderful statues, breaking the stone glass, burning the old manuscripts.
And these were probably a handful, 20, 30 people, and the population was 10,000, and they all stood at the doors and just looked, and watched these people going about their business, and did nothing to intervene.
That is where we are now.
I think we're living in a time of undue and untethered iconoclasm.
What I feel potentially might emerge as a result of the technology that is currently
being used to inculcate the kind of compliance that we've been discussing is that it may
be differently utilized to create, once again, localized democracy.
I suppose what I feel, Ian, is that we ought be emulating, where possible, the conditions
of our evolution.
And I don't mean in a Luddite way, let's retreat to the caves.
I think we should observe how—but there were some ideas in there that are quite radical,
and I mean literally anarchic, because it would seem to me that with the type of technology
and capacity for communication that we currently have, that even ideas like centralized state
authority, the nation itself might be exposed as temporal.
And that is a challenge to some of the traditions and institutions that you plainly revere or hold at least in some regard and believe have a great deal to offer us, as I do.
But what I personally am led by is the belief that at a time of ongoing cultural conflict, a way that it might be diffused is to acknowledge that there are many different ways of being a human being.
There's nothing in our evolution to suggest suggest that we all be corralled together in groups of 300
million and simultaneously governed by one set of ideologies and that and when I've
been having conversations with people that are described as being sort
of right-wing the thing that I've bought to the conversation continually
is would you be willing to stand on a platform with people that you're ideologically
opposite to although I reckon you would refute the idea of opposition from the
basis of your own study and expertise if it meant that you were able to have
autonomy in your own community.
For example, like Ben Shapiro and people that are sort of openly libertarian or conservative, they said of course they would stand on a platform that people had different views on the pro-life, pro-choice, pro-gun, anti-gun, in order to In a sense, it would seem to me that we all be emulating the conditions of our origin and our evolution where possible, whether that's diet or the governance of a system or a group.
Yes.
I mean, there's a very civil society and in a different sense, we've become a very uncivil one in which people are not willing to listen to someone else with whom they disagree and then say, that's interesting.
I would completely disagree.
My point of view would be this.
What do you say to that?
And you can do that without getting angry and vicious.
But, you know, the general timbre is one of anger, self-righteousness, disgust.
And this, let me say, in terms of hemisphere lateralisation, this kind of emotional timbre is typical of the left hemisphere.
The right is more willing to say, hang on, there may be something else going on here, and let me form a bond with this person.
So that compassion is better than anger.
Yes.
Well, would the attributes or at least traits that you just listed there in conventional psychiatry, am I right in saying, would be regarded as potentially unconscious responses?
And I'm not sure how much you value that kind of terminology.
But sometimes what I feel is that we are governing from a place of unconsciousness, from unawareness.
You talked extensively about attention, and it feels like that, you know,
when righteousness, anger, these are sort of, I would say, motivated by lower levels of awareness.
That's using a more sort of, I guess, a sort of spiritual dialectic to analyze it
as opposed to a psychiatric one, but you must acknowledge that spirituality
and psychiatry overlap almost continually.
A lot of my work is under the aegis of exactly that kind of a script that religion and science don't have at all.
It's a myth that they have to be at war with one another.
They're entirely compatible.
And I've written about that.
Well, so have I. Well, there we are.
Just now.
What I'm saying is that we ought to be able to talk about these things and it should be absolutely wrong for anyone to be denied the right to say something.
And I think one practical thing would be that government funding for universities would be depleted by 10% every time there's an event at which somebody is barred from speaking.
And, you know, that's perfectly practical.
It could be done.
And it would encourage openness.
And if our opposite point of view is obviously wrong, then please demonstrate it.
But allow the other person to, you know, have their say.
The way I was educated was to argue a point of view and then stop and argue the opposite point of view.
And I think that's really rather important.
Everybody should leave school having had that in their head.
There isn't one right answer to anything.
Shall we do that now?
You be an edgy online provocateur and I'm respected neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for presenting these arguments in fact so succinctly and beautifully for our audience.
It's fantastic to speak with you.
You're such a wonderful communicator and educator.
Thank you Ian McGilchrist for joining us.
The Matter with Things, Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World is available now.
There's a link posted in the chat and I would recommend you read the work of Ian McGilchrist, that you become better equipped to have conversations in a confusing world.
If, throughout this conversation, you were thinking, I wish that bearded man would shut up and let Russell Brand just flow freely, then you're in luck, because it's time now for...
You've been slowing me down throughout this conversation, impeding me intellectually, my flights of fancy tethered.
Let me fly like Icarus, who I believe flew towards the sun triumphantly without consequences.
Happened to him, yeah.
He was fine, I believe.
That myth ends with Icarus circumnavigating the sun, successfully returning to Earth with his wings still bonded, I believe.
Time now for a deep... Still ablaze.
Still a blaze, yeah.
You've got to burn to shine, baby, as it says in the opening titles of The Sopranos.
Thanks very much for joining me today, Ian McGill.
Chris, who is even now riding on the crest of my needless hysteria.
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