All Episodes
Previous Next
April 10, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:02:04
What Happened to Meritocracy? With Douglas Murray | The TRUTH Podcast #9
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
We're on the road for this edition of the podcast, but I just finished a speech this morning and then a fireside discussion.
There wasn't really a fire there, but we call it a fireside discussion with Douglas Murray.
And the topic of the morning was merit.
An idea we've feels like forgotten in America.
As I often say, we need to put the merit back into America.
But what does merit actually mean?
What does it mean to be meritocratic?
It's almost like the right or the right is challenged by the left often these days to define woke.
I rise to that challenge as best I can.
I define wokeness as a worldview that calls upon us to wake up to the invisible societal injustices created by the invisible power structures rooted in genetic identity, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and to act upon it to correct that.
It's a neutral definition.
Left or right, that's what the woke left calls upon us to do.
We should see it before we criticize it.
So be it.
The challenge that I give to my friends on the left is define merit, actually, because they've turned merit into effectively the same word on the left.
Functionally, in the concept that wokeness has become on the right, it's an assault on merit.
But what is it?
What does it mean to have a system that administers excellence in a given domain?
It's a pretty deep, philosophically rich discussion that my guest today, Douglas, who I spoke with on stage earlier today, began, I think, a deep conversation on it.
And, you know, in some ways, there is no beginning or end to this conversation, Douglas.
And so, you know, we're in Washington, D.C. today.
Normally, we do this in Columbus, but I wanted to take advantage of this to have you here.
Let's just pick up where we left off and start right in the middle.
The definition you gave on stage, right?
It was...
It's pretty good.
I thought it was a very useful starting point.
It made me think, you know, since, you know, we're doing this on the podcast again, we'll pick up where we left off, but can we just start with that definition of merit that you gave and we'll take it from there?
Yeah, I said the opposite of a straw man, a steel man.
If you steel man the question of merit, what we might agree on across political and other divides in America, I suggest maybe we could agree that most of us, the vast majority, let's say 98%, there's always a percentage who don't want something,
but most people in this society, most people in most Western democracies would agree to the following proposition, that nobody should be held back from achieving something in their life that they can achieve by dint of some characteristic over which they have no say.
So if you have the competency to do something and the desire to do it, you shouldn't be held back.
I think most people agree with that.
People on the left agree with that.
People on the right agree with that.
There's a difference of opinion on how you arrive at that situation.
We've got closer to it in the last couple of generations.
I mean, unbelievably closer.
When you think about the societal actual progress we've had in these regards in recent decades, it's extraordinary.
However, there is a disagreement today, clearly, where the left, broadly speaking, believes that you must get this sort of equality by getting equity.
You've got to get the equality of the outcome.
Now, the right has its own answer, and the right's answer has criticisms that can be made of it.
That is basically the gradualist approach.
Set up the conditions and, you know, like...
At the moment, there might not be enough representation of certain people in certain places, but if you give it time, you'll get there.
The critique of that is that it's sort of complacent.
Okay, well, how many years do you think we have?
And so on.
But I would suggest that the left's view has its own problems, which is simply that equity, equality of outcome, is not possible in this life.
I don't think it's desirable either, by the way.
I'm very fond of a quote of the late Irving Kristol who once said, I don't like equality in sports.
I don't like it in economics.
I just don't like it in this world.
I would say equity where he said equality there.
I'm not for it.
I'm not for equity in baseball, cricket.
I don't think...
Any of us can have everything the same just because we want it to be so.
But this is something that is tearing underneath our societies at the moment because many people have been persuaded that, as it were, no one will be free until every company board precisely replicates the makeup of the society.
And as I mentioned when we were talking earlier today, it's very striking that this is only the case with high-status jobs.
It's Hollywood.
It's boards.
Most people in America...
are not lucky enough to sit on company boards.
Most people do not have high status jobs.
And there's something very telling about the fact that we sort of have this obsessive discussion about, you know, Harvard admissions, like absolutely the elite of the elite institutions.
And that's right in many ways.
But we don't think the same thing should be applied in lower status jobs.
You You know, nobody's actually concerned about whether or not we have absolutely representative workers in the postal service or in garbage pickup or coal mining or road laying or anything.
Nobody says we need more women to apply to be laying roads and highways across America.
So there's something off about the whole discussion.
But as I say, the question in a way is this thing of how would you as a society, how would we unleash talent in an optimal way?
I think that's a much more useful place to have the discussion than why does everything not absolutely replicate the makeup of society.
I'd like the discussion to be shifted from that to how can we just make sure that all the talent we have in society is as widely utilized as possible.
As I'm hearing you talk about it, maybe we didn't get to this and we didn't go in this direction this morning.
But on the philosophy of this, you could… Imagine that our goal in fostering meritocracy, which I sort of define as the system that administers excellence in any sphere of life, okay?
That's meritocracy.
I like the way you define it.
It's a little bit more applicable, but you could come at it in different ways.
The case for it could be, one, that it increases the size of the pie for all, roughly speaking, an economic justification.
And I think that that's one account for why we want to protect meritocracy in America.
The other though, maybe more interesting direction to go is the case that this is actually the just system.
Regardless of whether or not it results in a bigger pie for everyone to eat from.
Even if the size of the pie is the same, it's just the right way to split the pie.
Right.
Because any other system would be necessarily unjust, that equity is inherently unjust if it is requiring us to take actions that Past determinations on people that's constrained them from achieving their truest potential, that there's something fundamentally just about letting a free bird roam free and fly wherever it may.
Which of those moves you more?
Well, the first thing is that it's unwise economically and morally to, for instance, demoralize anyone in the population by saying you can't achieve something because of who you are.
I mean, one of the most striking things about how any economy thrives is women being allowed into the workplace.
Why?
Well, you know, 50% of the population, you're going to get an awful lot of benefits from that.
And societies that don't allow women to work historically and in the current day suffer as a result.
But there's also just this question, yes, of what I regard as demoralization.
We have had periods in the past in America, as in all countries, we've had periods where certain groups have been demoralized from the idea of, for instance, going to higher education.
My own parents' generation, it was still thought by many people to be a waste to send a daughter to university.
You know, that somehow, well, she's just going to marry and have children and, you know, what's the point?
That's quite recent.
You know, it's living memory.
So if we could regard the fact that that was the case with education and with certain jobs with women, It was certainly the case in certain walks of life with ethnic minorities, who were expected more, where I'm from perhaps, than in America, were expected to stay in certain professions, you know.
It was certainly the case of sexual minorities, you know, until the 1990s or so, you know, if you're openly gay, you're expected to either go onto Broadway or be an interior designer, you know.
And you're how old now?
I'm 43. Very rude to ask.
That's okay.
We're in America here.
It's not long ago.
It's personal for you as well.
Yeah, of course.
I think it's an important part of your background that I think builds empathy with your audience.
Well, when I was growing up and I was gay, I mean, there was no out gay politician.
Right.
And you weren't allowed to be gay in the military.
So there were certain things that you just didn't or thought you wouldn't be able to do in your life.
Yep.
So these things, which are hopefully in the past, were demoralizing to minority groups, and in the case of women, to half the population.
But there's something now happening, which is, I think, even worse than that, which is the attempt to demoralize majority populations.
And that we enter very strange terrain in our own time.
I mean, for instance, why is there such an emphasis in our culture on toxic masculinity?
On the bad things about men.
Why is there so much discussion about that?
It demoralizes men hugely, as it would demoralize women if we talked endlessly about toxic femininity.
So the attacks on masculinity, being a man and much more, is very demoralizing to men, who make up half the population.
And then you have this new thing, in that it's happened in our own lifetimes and in recent memory, Where you also tell the majority population who are white, or you've got special problems of your own.
And you should, for instance, hold back.
You should not speak up.
You should- Step aside.
Step aside.
Stay in your lane.
All of these sorts of things.
Now, if you said to a racial, sexual, or any other minority, stay in your lane, I mean, I think we would wince at that.
Of course.
But we're saying it to a majority population.
Like, who made these lanes exactly?
And who are you to tell us which lane, where we should be?
In other words, in the name of sort of fighting past unfairness, which is a word I'm kind of keener on, unfairness.
I think equality, inequality, equity, all these things are sort of a bit abstract compared to just fairness.
Mm-hmm.
But if you were to try to make up for past unfairness, you don't do it by exercising unfairness in the present day against people who look like the people who you think were the unfair people in the past.
So one of the things I'm worried about in America today is we have this endless absorbing discussion about representation, about equity, and all of these sorts of things.
And my question at the end is, are you sure that in the process of doing this, You're actually going to make our society better, more successful, more thriving.
I don't think the evidence is there yet.
In fact, I think quite the opposite.
I think that this expectation that playing these games would inevitably improve matters hasn't been demonstrated even in one company.
So why try to roll it out across the whole of society, every government department, and so on?
I mean, isn't it strange to be carrying out a nationwide experiment when you haven't even done one successful control test?
So I think the case for – the easy case for us to make, and of course, you and I I agree on this, but nonetheless, the easy case for us to make is that not only does it not make society overall better off,
but even if you apply a sort of John Rawlsian difference principle or whatever, roughly speaking, that we should organize a society's affairs based on what helps those who are worst off.
Mm-hmm.
It would fail on even that standard today.
You come up to the topic that's – one of the topics that's near and dear to my heart to address and dismantle is race-based affirmative action in America, an experiment that began as part of that great society in the mid-1960s.
Black Americans are palpably worse off economically and on other metrics, family formation, two-parent households that children are born into, drastically worse off today than they were in the 1960s directly as a consequence of sort of becoming addicted to this form of and being sort of duped and shackled, dare I say, by these modalities that were designed to help them.
So it fails that even more stringent test But because we agree with each other, I feel some sense of obligation to air what someone who disagreed with us might say if they were here.
Okay, so that's not the right way to correct for that historical injustice.
What is?
And that was what you also posed as the question that we're asked of the right, but I think if we're getting to the meat of the matter, let's get real here about what our actual preferences are.
Suppose we live in a world where we never can actually correct for that injustice.
What if the answer to that question – part of the reason the right hasn't come up, the conservative movement or whatever, have come up with an answer to that question is that there is no such thing as an answer to that question.
There are many injustices depending on how long you look or through what prism.
And that the question of correcting for injustice itself on a false premise, I think it's not – It's not intellectual laziness or dullness or coldness that causes many conservatives to lack an answer to that question.
It may be the fact that that is an unanswerable question itself and somehow in some philosophical sense, forward is the only way to go.
And there is no beyond a reasonable look-back period, a period behind which you ought to look.
What's your reaction to that?
Well, first of all, I mean, the idea of making up for historic injustice is a very ropey bit of moral terrain.
I wrote about this a couple of books ago in The Madness of Crowds.
Madness of Crowds is already a couple books ago?
Yeah.
What came in between?
What came after?
The war in the West.
War in the West was after.
Oh, okay, okay.
But the man of the crowds, I addressed this question of historic restitution, because at this stage, for instance, in a country like America, we're not in the position where somebody who has done a wrong Can ask forgiveness even, let alone make up for things to a person who was wronged.
We're in a situation of somebody who looks like a person who did a wrong historically, making restitution to somebody who looks like a person to whom a wrong was done.
Who's not, I like the way friends, because they're not even the descendant of.
They're not even necessarily the descendant of.
You may have seen, it was quite amusing to me the other day, the former Black Panther, Angela Davis, discovering on television, genealogy show, discovering that she was descended from one of the...
People who came over on the Mayflower.
She was absolutely horrified.
I mean, you couldn't have upset her more if you'd tried.
Because here is a woman who has made...
Her hustle of demanding reparations and much more turns out she's, I don't know, maybe she should take money out of her left pocket and put it in her right pocket.
I don't know.
She's got to give and take in this situation.
It just highlights the absurdity of what we've actually been caught up in talking about.
And remember, it's not abstract.
You know, San Francisco is discussing this in real terms at the moment.
Oh, really?
Actual distribution of money to people who look like people to whom a wrong was done.
I have quite a lot of views on that.
But anyway, the point is that that whole terrain of who gets the right to apologize and who gets the right to accept the apology is in moral philosophy pretty much agreed you cannot do it on anyone else's behalf.
You can't ask for the forgiveness.
you can't give the forgiveness.
And there's a great book by Simon Wiesenthal on that, which I recommend to anyone interested, called The Sunflower.
But so that's the sort of the problem with that.
In a way, of course, it's the wrong question to be asking because you don't want to blithely pass by historic injustice, but nor do you want to get caught up on it, particularly if, as I say, it's effectively unsolvable.
Mm-hmm.
And I say unsolvable because everybody could play the game.
And it is a kind of game at this stage.
I mean, you know, I was saying recently somewhere that if you want to get into the slavery thing, you've got to address the fact that one million white Europeans were taken from Britain and Southern Europe by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Africa.
Is that true?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
What are you going to do about it?
These people might have been my ancestors who were stolen.
Can I get any money from...
That's a high number, actually.
It's a lot.
One million?
Yeah.
How many slaves came from Africa to the U.S.? I think the transatlantic slave trade is thought to be up to 11 million, maybe 12. And a much larger number, perhaps 18 million, were taken east from Africa in the Arab slave trade, which ran much longer.
And the interesting thing about that is… The Arab slave trade had more traffic.
Yes.
From Africa.
From Africa, sold by Africans to Arabs.
Interesting.
And you know why we don't hear anything about it?
I haven't heard anything about it.
Because it was actually genocidal.
They castrated all of the men.
Yes.
So there are no descendants.
What was their objective in doing that?
To get the men, use them as labor, and make sure they didn't have children.
Oh, because they didn't want to.
They didn't want them to have children.
And they thought they were inferior anyway.
In fact, it's one of the reasons why in the Middle East today, the word in Arabic for black is the same as the word for slave, abid or abid in the plural.
Oh, it is.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know that word.
I didn't know that it was the word for slave.
It means slave.
So in current modern day Saudi Arabia, they will still refer to a black person using the word that means slave.
It's like using the N-word here in the United States as a regular moniker.
It's insane.
But my point is that whenever you go back in history, there's this presumption today that for certain types of people of certain skin colors, history was great.
And actually, history was pretty awful for everybody.
You know, in the country I'm from the UK, if you worked in the mill towns in the north of England, your average life expectancy in the 19th century was 37%.
So it wasn't a great life.
It wasn't great for slaves either.
It wasn't great for anyone.
And there are degrees of not greatness, for sure.
But do you want to spend your time raking that over, reopening wounds, and crying about your hurt?
Or do you want to try to solve something in the current day?
I would, and it's not because I want to cover anything over or anything like that, I just would rather that we focus on this question of how can we try to make it work better today?
And this is a bit of a long-winded answer, but let me just very quickly answer the second part of that, which is this issue of the situation not improving in the way we hoped it might have done in American recent decades for certain minority groups.
Heather MacDonald has a very interesting observation on this.
She says that she thinks that much of the Current angst on the left in America comes from a recognition that The situation for American blacks since the 1960s has not improved to the extent they expected it to.
Well, it's actually gotten much worse.
And so there's a whole hell of questions underneath that.
And again, I mean, it's not obvious to me that in order to try to make up for that, you should be prejudiced against Asian students, for instance.
Well, I make the strong case.
It's much worse because of the very policies that undergird.
Penalizing Asian students today.
I think that's not been good for anybody including even the – including the black community.
But yeah, I think – but the question I think we have to – I think you and I are both, you know, quote unquote admitting.
I think it's worth airing, right?
I'm all about suppressing – you know, smoking out suppressed premises on the left.
Let's smoke out our own is that – It's not just that we think that, well, the right way to correct for historical inequity is not certainly by replicating the patterns of discrimination or demoralization, as you put it.
I think demoralization is a better word because discrimination is too narrow to describe what's actually happening.
So that's a better word you've, I think, found.
It's closer to the target.
But it is that the project itself can't be done.
And it's almost a stoic view or something like this applied societally that The path is through.
And we kind of go forward together because that's just what we can do, right?
There's not much else we can do, but we can move forward.
And I think that that will be a deeply unsatisfying answer to, you know, it's not all of the left, but those on the left who subscribe to this restorative equity agenda.
But I wonder, just as a matter of persuasion or galvanization, national unity on the project of moving forward, I suppose it's the seat I sit in right now, whether that isn't just the right way to do it, to go through the reckoning, to not offer this false carrot of a promise that we sort of falsely promise that there's to not offer this false carrot of a promise that we sort of falsely promise that there's some other way we can go about addressing that historical inequity, but more just the open admission of the fact that we recognize Yeah.
So that we, in ways, don't make the same mistakes in the present.
Absolutely.
But that we're just not – we're not even attempting to actually take on that historical project and to sort of be honest about it.
That'll make people mad in the short run, but might actually galvanize some sense of Of honesty, of how we agree we're moving forward.
Well, it's definitely not a healthy thing for any group or individual in society to feel that at some point they'll get a great payday for doing nothing.
I mean, that seems to me to be very sort of laziness-inducing, among other things.
I mean, there are so many other things we could and I think should be addressing instead.
I mean, you know, in our own lifetimes, we've seen the whole way in which people accrue capital has madly changed.
When I was young, if you had savings in the bank, you know, you could sort of sit on them and you would earn money from them.
Yep.
Today?
That sounds mad.
I joked to a friend some time ago that being Scottish, I said my investment strategy was if I had any cash to put it in a pillow.
And then when the markets all went down recently, this friend said, actually, your idea wasn't such a bad one.
It was a good idea not to put it in stocks.
But think of the way in which...
Accruing capital, for instance.
I mean, I've said to you before, but it's not inevitable that you create a generation of capitalists if you have a generation who cannot accrue capital.
What do you do with the inability of young people to get onto the housing ladder in many democracies at the moment?
These are real-world issues which will have the biggest effects on people's lives.
Because if you can't accrue capital and you can't get a house, you're not going to start a family.
All sorts of other things are in the air.
Why don't we spend as much time talking about that as we do on the other things?
I would argue because we've effectively been distracted by this unwinnable game.
You know, Marie Antoinette was famously alleged to have said, let them eat cake of the crowd.
I think many of our politicians in the current age of left and right have effectively said, let them eat identity politics.
Because it's something that will keep them preoccupied.
We know it can't be won.
We know it's unsolvable.
Let's give them a totally unsolvable game to play so that they don't notice all of these other things that are going on.
I mean, think of the airtime that has been taken up in recent years by arguments which frankly show our society as becoming stupider and stupider.
If you'd have said 20 years ago to me, What do you think, Douglas, we're going to be discussing in America in 2023?
If I had said, well, one of them is we're not going to know what a woman is.
And another will be that we don't know when America was founded.
You'd say, I thought that...
Did you have other problems to solve?
Didn't you have the internet that was meant to be a great opportunity to solve problems and swap learning?
And we've actually unlearned the first things we knew as a species.
Boys and girls.
What sex?
What's your new baby?
No way to tell.
That's a new madness.
The person who disagrees with us...
I really enjoy – I quite enjoy the way you describe these things and you sort of back into them.
I like it.
The response would be, you know, it's a tired refrain, but let's air it, which is that, well, yes, exactly.
You conservatives are just making this stuff up, right?
It's a distraction from solving the real problems.
And why are you guys so obsessed with gender identity, with race, with wokeism?
Why is that something that every Republican politician – I mean, you hear this stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
And so I think, you know, respond to that.
Well, it comes from people who start a culture war and then object when you...
Engage in it.
Engage in it.
Yeah.
I mean, one of my favorite awakening moments was my friend Joe Rogan some years ago realized the gender thing was a problem because there was a trans...
He does MMA fighting.
There was a trans MMA fighter who was just beating the hell out of women and winning.
Yeah.
Oh my god.
That's a particularly, that's more crass than the swimming.
Right.
The swimming is quite an easy one.
Was this a hypothetical?
No, this happened.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Oh my god.
Like, is that okay with you?
Yeah.
What have you got?
What's the problem you have with this big guy beating the hell out of women?
Bigot.
I mean, you know, it is...
I don't know why I'm laughing because it's not funny.
It's crazy.
But it's nutty, yeah.
And, you know, and so people, you know, again, I mean, even on the less harmful ones comparatively, you know, some young woman spends her life training to be a swimmer and then a big dude with shoulders jumps into the pool and says he feels kind of feminine whenever he gets into a pool.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I didn't start that.
I didn't make that up.
It's just...
And I'm not...
No, but I think the basic request is...
The basic request is...
Is ignore it.
Is ignore it.
Just let it happen.
Allow the female athletes to be knocked off the field.
Allow the end of women's sports.
And if you're even interested in it, we'll kind of cast aspersions on you and suggest that there's something bigoted going on.
So no, I mean, people who start culture wars, in order to completely destroy our collective mind, which is what they're doing, as I say, 20 years ago, it was not hard to say what a woman is.
Today, you can't even get a nominee for the Supreme Court to say what a woman is.
Everyone has their thing to say about somebody being non-binary or transgender.
What's a transgender person?
Oh, that's easy to answer.
What's a woman?
Impossible, impossible conundrum.
So these are primarily not actually things that the right started.
But of course, people are going to respond to them.
But again, what if this is all coming about in part because there are much bigger and deeper problems in our society that we don't have an answer to?
And I include myself on some of those.
I mean, we have runaway inflation.
I've got some view of how you solve it.
But For all of us, it's kind of easier to get distracted by the other stuff, because underneath us are these big problems.
You know, I have an economist friend who said to me years ago that the only job of politicians is to make sure the economy doesn't go wrong.
And I remember saying to him, well, you would say that because you're an economist, you know.
In the years since, I thought, actually, that's- It's a big job.
It's a big job, for sure.
Because if the economy goes wrong, everything else can go wrong, you know?
I mean, you've written about this as well.
Think of all the things that have gone mad since 2008. So much of it is to do with the fact that we never really reckoned with that.
We didn't really know what to do with it.
That was the essence of Woke Inc, actually.
And I think that that's why I partially find your deflection account appealing, right?
As a way to, you know, woke smoke or whatever it is, right?
It's a deflection tactic.
And it can definitely help both sides, as it were.
I'm totally open to that, that conservatives can be as guilty of that as the left.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I want to go back to this intuition, though, that you're supposed to stand by and watch.
Because I think that's the base expectation.
You just sort of put your finger of what's going on in the ether.
It's that – forget – we got the deflection theory, but let's just go to the essence of what's going on anyway, even if that's a big part of the cynical force behind it.
I think the base expectations – so I sort of feel this sometimes when I'll get friends who agree with me.
I think I post on Twitter or whatever the other day, if it's about race or somebody else, especially someone like Ibram Kendi making a particular comment.
If I'm quoting him, I get some criticism for that.
Not because somebody...
And quoting him in a critical way.
Not because...
From a particular strain of friends at least.
Okay.
Not because they agree with him and have an objection to the content of my critique.
But it's sort of like...
Why are you bothering with this when you yourself, speaking to me, could be engaged with the more important problems themselves?
And I'm not criticizing the people who are offering this criticism.
I'm actually airing it in a fair way, which is to say that, kind of to pick up where you left off, why should a guy like me, and maybe your answer will be, maybe I shouldn't be, but why should a guy like me even be paying heed to To engaging in that debate when I could just be focusing on solving inflation and addressing economic growth, which, by the way, I am in a sphere of my agenda.
But there's a part of me that says it's wrong to just...
Ignore this without engaging on the merits of the debate about meritocracy itself.
And yes, I could be just focused on an economic agenda to deliver GDP growth and embrace nuclear energy and, you know, let's put people back to work in a way that fights, you know, the unemployment crisis that creates inflation actually in the supply chain issues.
Maybe we could just focus only on that and just turn our eyes away.
But I feel like that wouldn't fully be what being a leader in our time actually means, though there are some Republicans who I don't criticize them are drawn to take that approach.
Why should we engage?
Why shouldn't we just take that approach of solving the problems that you say need to be solved without, well, pretty much pretending this debate doesn't exist?
Well, because if somebody sets up a whole pile of booby traps in your path, you do have to remove them, get around them.
If somebody minds the path in front of you, You can't just say, well, I'm still going to get to the end of this minefield.
You've got to take out the mines.
You've got to demine the terrain.
And our era has produced quite a lot of people who have done nothing constructive, but have put a whole pile of mines in front of us.
Of the kind that mean that certain of your friends will say...
I can't believe you're interested in this mine, and why don't you find a way around it?
I'd love to.
That's what they say, find your way around it.
Yeah, I'd love to.
It's just that, you know, it's in my path.
And I'm afraid that, you know, all of us have to make our own decisions on the way in which we use our energies.
My own belief is that you just have to clear some of this stuff out of the way for other people or for yourself.
But the end of the path has to be remembered as well and kept in sight.
And the end of the path has to be, and something I brought up toward the end of our discussion this morning, but the end of the path to my mind is to pose the following question.
If all of these minds were taken away, and you didn't have to concentrate on all of the booby traps set down by Kendi and others, if they were all taken away, what would you be doing with your life?
How would you be using your time best?
What would be the dream you would be pursuing?
Now those are the good questions.
Yes.
And those are the questions which we need to keep in mind and we definitely need to address more.
But we have to somehow find a way of doing it that says, that frees people of this terrible set of traps we've put in their way.
As I say, there have been times in the past, most of the past, in most places, and in many places in the current day, where the situation you're born in would be the single defining factor in your life.
Yes.
You know?
And you just, there was no way out.
You know, I often think that there's a great line in the fifth season of The Wire when one of the boys says to the boxing coach, you know, how do you get, he says, there's a whole world out there.
And the boy says to the coach, how do you get there?
And the coach says, I don't know.
And it's a heartbreaking scene.
It's a heartbreaking scene.
But you want people not to be limited by whatever it is they've been born into if they have the aptitude to pursue whatever the thing is that they're good at.
You know, people often say you should pursue your dreams.
But another way of doing it is you should pursue what you've discovered you're good at.
And you should work really hard at that.
Now, that's good life advice for people.
But say to them, there's no point because the whole system's rigged and you won't get anywhere.
Well, that's the view of a very bitter cynic or somebody living in a society which is genuinely unpleasant to live in.
And we don't live in such a society.
I mean, God knows there are enough critiques we can make of America as it is.
But it remains the best society on earth that I know of that allows people to get on that bus and get out of town.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, I spend a lot of my life traveling all over the world and I can't think of a society where that opportunity is more.
That's not to say, as I said, it's there for everyone in America or that we couldn't do better.
Or a time in history where that was more true either.
Or a time in history.
I mean, take another one from that which always strikes me.
Wherever you go in the world now, If you meet a really smart young person, it doesn't matter which country they're in, they can be at the forefront of the discoveries of their time.
I mean, it's an amazing thing.
I mean, I've seen it myself.
You speak to someone and you realize, oh my gosh, that's exactly what we're talking about in New York.
That's exactly what we're talking about in London.
And I'm here in this far-flung place.
But yeah, you've got the opportunity to do that.
This is amazing.
We could solve so many problems if we put our collective talents and minds together.
To solving specific problems.
And we have a lot of problems to solve.
You know, that account you just gave It does put some pressure on your earlier diagnosis that – and maybe there's not one diagnosis, right?
There's no such thing as a single source for a complex cultural phenomenon.
But it suggests to me that there's more than just the deflection game going on.
Because on this version of it, it's a different paradox where – It is precisely at a moment in human history, certainly in American history, when we have made so much progress, when we have solved the problems that allowed us to change life expectancy from 37 to 73, that we discover these booby traps, as you call them.
And it suggests to me that it's not so much in this view of the world, That we're deflecting against all of these great problems that we face.
I mean, inflation in America, as bad as it is, let's be honest, is different than the bubonic plague or whatever, right?
We've been through World War II. We've been through wars.
It's that actually it makes me think about the root cause and this is closer to where some of my descriptions have been but it's closer to the root cause being not in spite of the fact that we achieved close to the pinnacle of what we had but precisely because we almost achieved the pinnacle of what we could have ever wanted that makes us want to apologize for that in some way that it's some more native instinct in our In our psyche that makes us have the
need almost to have something to apologize for.
Might that be closer to the flame than even the deflection?
Well, that's...
I mean, it's possible.
Some people think that historically speaking, the point we're at is...
Is particular because we're at that point where instead of focusing on making, creating wealth, we're talking about distributing it.
And that is a very big shift in a society's priorities.
I mean, there are all sorts of, we've talked about some of the opportunities of the world, and there's also the flip side of that.
There's also the cruelties of the world.
For instance, and this is one that in politics is very difficult to address, but nevertheless, it's there, is that some people fail and some people don't want to bother.
And some people just have terrible suboptimal situations and some people fall into just terrible situations and make bad choice after bad choice.
And that happens.
And whilst being compassionate towards those people, You can't pretend that the well-being of all of society has to be predicated on that not happening.
That's going to happen.
And as I say, you have to have compassion as a society.
But some people, for instance, are going to be lazy.
Okay.
I'm sorry for them.
They'll not get as much as they could have done if they were a bit more thrusting and ambitious, maybe.
But maybe they didn't want all that much.
Who knows?
As long as they know that that's the result of their choices.
Part of the whole problem we've had in recent decades, perhaps since the war, has been that there's always this option that you can say, well, you know yourself, you didn't really work that hard and you weren't really that motivated, but you can always blame someone else.
So there's a lot of...
You know, there's a lot of awkwardness about the whole issue of success because it's likely, I mean, you know about the Pareto distribution and all that, it's likely that a certain number of people in society are going to be more driving and thrusting and more of the success of the world will accrue to them.
My question would be how could you make sure that the people who want to achieve stuff get to achieve it?
And what should those things be?
What should we prioritize?
What should we admire?
Years ago, I had a very moving conversation with a sociologist friend who I said, what's the biggest change that's happened in your lifetime?
He's now in his 80s.
What's the biggest thing that's happened in your lifetime that's changed in relation to jobs in America?
And he said, it's this, that he said, when I was growing up, a man who provided, who did a job, whatever the job was, it could be refuse collecting, it could be street sweeping, it could be whatever.
But a man who did a job and provided for his dependents was a man of great worth and value and was admired.
And that's not the case today.
In fact, many people would think that guy was a schmuck.
That's changed.
And if it's changed, it means it can change back as well.
And one way to change that back, I'm pretty passionate about this one, is we should rely on people actually achieving things before we admire them.
I mean, we have a very strange popular culture in America where You know, there are people who are massively rich, who are massively admired, who have done massively nothing.
Oh yeah.
And that's going to have an effect.
I mean, I said to you earlier, isn't it interesting in our own lifetimes, again, that America has turned from a society that admired heroism to one that admires victimhood?
I mean, again, you've written about this, but that's a massive shift.
Think of the moral change that occurs in a society between And small, sometimes large acts of valor for which you do not expect to be congratulated versus doing nothing and auditioning for pity.
And being celebrated.
And being celebrated.
Yeah.
That's a big shift.
And I think that part of our way out – I mean, I'm interested in solutions to this cultural quagmire we're in.
It feels to me less like a terrain with a bunch of booby traps and mines, but just a quagmire is really – visually the way I see it is – anyway, our way through this quagmire is – Mm-hmm.
a little bit.
So I actually think this is, it's sort of coming at this from a completely different angle here.
But if we're allowed to, if we create a society where people can achieve as much as they're going to achieve and accept that some people aren't going to achieve as much, recognize that achievement ought not be the sole form of respect.
Yes.
It could be the axis for admiration.
Yeah, well...
But if we restore some sense of civic equality, let's say that, okay, you know, you're born with one set of talents.
Someone else was born with a different set of talents.
You both...
Live in a society where you can both use your talents to the maximum extent, but the reality is money or other currencies or fame or whatever do get certain people more that everyone would wish to have if they could have it, but certain people are only going to get so far that that becomes okay against the backdrop of a society where we know with a rock-solid foundation that you're still co-equal citizens in some way that matters.
Well, that's been something which actually has been...
Ever since the founding of America, this has been a very live question because effectively what you see in the Declaration of Independence and the extraordinary men who wrote it is an attempt to incarnate a religious idea in a non-religious framework.
Civic religion.
So, the biblical thing is, of course, equality in the eyes of God.
Yes.
That's incredibly important as a virtue of Western civilization.
Yes.
Equality in the eyes of God.
That doesn't mean we're equal in our accomplishments, in our talents, in our looks, in our singing voices.
But it means that in the most fundamental way, we are absolutely equal.
And it's an extraordinary gift, really, of the biblical tradition.
But the founders and others, the sort of enlightenment project in a way, was how can we do this without the religious pretext?
And in America, it came up with all men being created equal.
By their creator, yeah.
I mean, you effectively rely on the creator, but then you incarnated in founding documents.
If we agree on that, a lot of the pressure comes off other things.
It does.
We don't need to be the same in everything else.
It's almost a fetishization of the everything else, fetishization of green pieces of paper, actually.
Right.
Because the real action is with the equality in the eyes of God, which we can translate into civic equality as citizens.
Right.
If that's the stuff that matters, then why are you worshiping...
The number of green piece of paper or whatever other metric, units of fame, number of followers, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
It's not fully artificial, but it's almost superficial in importance.
It's superficial.
But I think that one of the things which people have not realized has gone on underneath our feet in more recent times has been the loss of that foundational or the fear that that foundational virtue is being lost.
That somehow inequality affects that sanctity of the individual.
It's hard to do it without religious language, but something like that.
You don't have to be allergic to the religious language, that's okay.
No, I know, but- You're trying to be true to the founding framers project, which is why they didn't abandon it totally.
They didn't abandon it totally.
Endowed by their creator shows up in that same Declaration of Independence, right?
But it was in the backdrop.
It was in the backdrop.
It was in front and center.
It was in the backdrop.
But the central insight, of course, was simply something which...
Again, as you know, that's not a common belief everywhere in the world.
There are so many wonderful things about traveling in India, but one of the things that is disturbing to many Western people is people not being equal in the eyes of God.
Actually, some people being...
Less than, and by accident of birth.
And it's sort of quite often horrifying to the West, simply because we assumed it was in the water everywhere.
And it wasn't.
It's a specific set of inheritances.
But I think there's a nervousness about this that's going on.
And it's because, it's undoubtedly because, and again, I mean, I make it as an observation, either decrying it nor praising it, but it's a result of coming apart from part of our roots.
Or not even being humble enough to admit that these are our roots.
Yeah.
You know?
That's what Ratzinger and Marcelo Pera wrote about 20 years ago in a book called Without Roots.
That the secular modern mind didn't even want to admit where these foundational principles had come from.
But equality, you have to start from there.
You have to start from there.
But in one sense, of course, we're all equal.
And in another sense, we should not expect to be the same.
Yeah.
Makes you think that...
Here's an idea.
Here's just as a thought experiment for you.
It's one I've played with – you've seen my books and I play with them a little bit.
It's certainly not a part of the presidential platform.
Not yet.
I don't think it will be either.
Do you think that if there was real teeth, if we gave real teeth to that civic equality here, not monetary equality, not the equity agenda through the materialist redistribution or through the allocation of rewards on the axis of genetically inherited characteristics, none of that stuff, none of that stuff, but actually say required military service of every American?
Billionaire or not, black or white, descendant of slave or descendant of aristocrat or unknown, which is actually what most – the category most people are in despite the fact they won't admit it.
Whether you look like the descendant of a slave or look like the descendant of an aristocrat, it doesn't matter.
That your kids, if they want to have full citizenship – maybe we won't put them in jail if they don't, but if they want to say vote, voting is not a – It's not a fundamental...
There's no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.
It doesn't show up in the constitution.
For the longest time, actually, we imperfectly in this country said you had to be a landowner to do it, but to say something else.
Not a landowner, not that stuff.
That's for the Department of Achievement, right?
But in the Department of Citizenship, that we're replicating this equal in the eyes of God, we're equal in the eyes of the country.
That if you're going to be part of the class who determines who runs the country...
That you have to have, say, served the country in some way, military or otherwise.
I've always been a fan of that idea.
I don't know if it has to be military service, but yeah, I've always thought that, I mean, well, we actually have, by the way, a very good test case of how you can do this well, which is Israel.
Yes.
In the 1970s, even, the big discussion in Israel was the divide between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Israel, whether or not they would always be apart.
That's right.
This brought them together.
You don't hear that discussion these days in Israel.
One of the reasons is military service.
And in fact, when people sometimes make Aliyah move to Israel, it's very hard to integrate into the country, really, unless you have been in the army, like everyone else.
Because that's where the bond of the nation is actually formed.
That's where you learn Some of the selflessness, some of the heroism, the virtues, and the recognition that first of all, this all relies on you.
And secondly, that you are responsible for the other men, the other women in your battalion.
But you can't muck up.
Because if anyone mucks up, everyone's in trouble.
A whole set of sort of – and then there's just a simple camaraderie and, oh, which unit were you in and all this sort of thing.
It melds the nation together.
I've always thought that in – certainly in my own country of birth, Great Britain, I always thought some form of service after school – Didn't matter whether you were pushing around hospital trolleys or, you know, training for the military.
You should do something because a society needs to have people in it who know that it all relies on them and that it is not the other guy who's going to pick it up for you.
And even further, Douglas, I love that's the real meat of it, but even further, a nice side benefit is it satisfies that native impulse that's about Equity, right?
It's not about equity of result, but equality, the sense that we have discharged our duty of giving real substance, real stuff to the otherwise ethereal idea, especially in a non-religious society, then when God is even gone in the – I can't say equal in the eyes of God, made in the image of God, where it then becomes this abstract secular notion that you think exists in some founding documents somewhere – It's too ethereal.
It's not real enough versus giving that real teeth.
I got to think that, you know, for a certain percentage of people in this country, you're always going to be lost.
But for most of us even, us even including those on the left that otherwise, you know, bend the knee to wokeism or whatever, but mostly because they're unsure, that this sort of goes a good part of the distance to say that the civic equality – Is foundational and then the rest is the details in the scheme of things.
And then you can unapologetically sort of unshackle yourself from the psychological insecurities that stop you from Pursuing merit unabashedly.
Well, so much comes down to that foundational thing of respect.
One of the reasons why what I just described and what you just described certainly is appealing to me is because young people, and young men in particular, very often the insecurities are about respect.
Yeah.
I have a friend who works with gang members in London, and she always says, very striking that these are people willing to stab other people or be stabbed themselves over ridiculous infringements of tiny bits of terrain that don't belong to them.
And all of the infringements are always about respect.
He didn't respect me.
And none of it recognizes the fact that you haven't earned any respect.
You've done nothing to earn any respect.
Well, that's why they're so fragile.
That's why they're willing to do terrible things, because they have no self-respect.
The very thing that they demand is the thing they don't feel.
So inculcating a sense of self-respect In a society is also incredibly important if you're going to be dynamic.
And I think there's a deep relationship in both directions between actually having a foundational respect for the other and respecting yourself.
Your self-respect, you can actually do that more easily.
Earned, deserved self-respect.
Yeah, of course.
You can't just make it up.
Yeah.
To accomplish something.
But I mean, it's an important distinction that the sort of you've got to respect me versus I'm somebody who has earned respect.
That's why I go back to that thing.
Because I served my country or whatever.
Exactly.
And by the way, I mean, that's one that worries me very much in America now is how few places there actually are in our society which are recognized as places where you earn respect.
I mean, think of the field of politics itself.
No longer.
It's, you know, I mean, the sort of they're all in it for themselves, you know, that's sort of a very commonplace among the public to think that of politicians.
The actual military still has the respect that it deserves.
Top rank, not so much.
That's changed in recent years, and it's the right as well as the left that that's changed for.
Things like the intelligence agencies don't have the respect they had.
The police certainly don't have the respect that they once had.
So where is the respect earned?
And one of the answers is in shallow and frivolous places.
And we should be able to call that out and say, you know, you can do this if you want, but there might be better ways to spend your life.
I mean...
There's a joke that Norm Macdonald made in one of his last appearances.
He said, I can't remember if it was, I think the fifth guy who went to the moon, or the fifth guy who walked on the moon.
He looked it up on some list online, and he says, like, I never even heard of this guy.
He says, this guy went to the whole moon and back.
He walked around the moon.
Nobody knows who he is.
And there's this girl who's got a fat ass, and everyone knows her name.
She's a billionaire.
Ha ha ha!
That must be really annoying to the moon guy.
Yeah, that's true.
I went all the way up there.
I risked my life.
Kind of captures the moment we're in.
But I think this idea of we started with merit, we ended with respect.
Hmm.
I mean, next time we sit down, we'll start with respect.
And see if it takes us back to merit.
It's a great subject.
And as I say, you can learn almost everything about a society, about looking at who they actually respect.
And there is some hope still in America.
It's always worth having an optimistic note.
There is some hope in America, because But most Americans I sense still do actually respect somebody who's worked hard and made a success of their life.
I think that's still alive.
Yeah.
I think that's still alive.
It's not the case in Europe.
It's not?
No, no, no.
But we will set the example, not use them as an example, but we'll end on that hopeful note.
It'll give us something to work with.
I appreciate it, Douglas.
It was good, dude.
This is the longest time we've actually spent together, not just the ships at bay here, so this was good.
Great pleasure.
I look forward to it.
I love that.
Thank you.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
▲
Export Selection