https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hYflkaHs4gM
Welcome everybody to Voices vs. Raviky. I’m very excited for this dialogue and I’m sure it will get into genuine dialogos. I’m going to be speaking with Lord Bird from the British House of Lords. I met him when I was in the UK in February. I met him at a talk I gave at Cambridge and then he came to a demonstration of dialectic and dialogos I did with Johannes Niederhäuser and then he kindly invited myself and my partner to a tour of the House of Lords and he said at some point he would very much like to talk again and then his wife reached out and I immediately said yes, of course, I would very much like to talk with him again and I won’t preface it anymore. I’m going to let him introduce himself and why he’s here and then we’ll get into sort of a core argument in the philosophical sense of argument that he has been making. So welcome Lord Bird, it’s a great pleasure to have you here. Well, welcome, thank you very much. Great to be here or there. And I know it’s a kind of auspicious day over here because of the passing of the Queen and for all of us, I mean, I was a child when she became the Queen and I have a kind of interest, I’d like to launch, just to explain me, I was born into a kind of London Irish slum in just after the Second World War, 1946 and actually the slum I was born into was about, was a bus ride from where the Queen lived. So you get on a bus, the 36 bus outside my slum and you could travel for 20 minutes and you would be at the back of Buckingham Palace and then you walk around the back. So I was born in this kind of really weird world, which I think has greatly influenced my thinking and my philosophy. And it’s a world of enormous plenty surrounded by these pockets, these gessos of terrible poverty, deprivation and the mind forged manacles that go with poverty. So I was brought up as a child in a London Irish Catholic family, not to like black people or Indians or English people or Jewish people or anybody like that. So that was my kind of education. I didn’t go to school much. I left school at 15 with no ability to read and write properly. I learned to read and write in the boys’ prison when I was 16. And it was, I was saved from prison and various other things by Marxism. When I was hiding from the police in Paris at the age of 21, I met some haute bourgeois Marxists who wouldn’t let me be a racist anymore. And as one of them was my girlfriend, I had to kind of keep in with her in a kind of sexual opportunist sort of way. It doesn’t matter where change comes from. You might fall in love with chocolates and it might lead you to become a great philosopher. So it doesn’t really matter where you start. So I am self-educated. I went through all sorts of prison, homelessness, rough sleeping, heavy drinking, drug use, being beaten up and all sorts of stuff like that and being a pain in the ass to the state and costing the state an awful lot of money. And all this went on for, you know, probably 30 years until I kind of got myself straightened. And then I started to think to myself, I’ve got to be useful. I’ve done, I’ve been through this thing and there must be a rhyme in this, you know, you know, a rhyme in this unreasonable, unreasonableness. So I then started to think, how could I utilise the fact that I was a person who had been so low and so dejected and so hungry and, you know, self-harming and harming other people? How could I turn that into an object? So what I did was I started to work with people who had drink and drug problems like I had and who had problems around violence, which I had, and problems around reliability. And I, so that, I spent my 30s doing that kind of thing. I trained myself as a printer and I started a printing company and then a publishing company. And then I re-met a guy who I met when I was hiding from the police in Edinburgh. I re-met him in about 1990 when I was 30, I was 40, I was 43 or something like that. Anyway, I was 43, I re-met him and we became great friends again. And he turned from being kind of ordinary person into a multimillionaire and him and his wife had started a business called The Body Shop. And they, in 1991, gave me the money to start a street paper. And the street paper was based on a very, very simple principle of stolen. The idea was stolen from America where there was something called Street News being sold on the streets of New York. And Gordon Roddick, the guy, had seen this and he had decided that he wanted somebody to do it in the UK and he got me eventually to do it. And I did it as a really rather kind of crazy, unhoused trained sort of geezer. I didn’t like charities, I didn’t like to do good as I was not going to do this. I was going to do this to give people who were doing harm to themselves and robbing other people, I was going to give them the means of making money so that if they were drinking or putting stuff in their arms, they didn’t have to rob your grandmother to do it. They could be like anybody else who uses narcotics or drink and was paying for it out of the money that they earned. So I was decriminalizing them. Anyway, I did this for kind of 10 years. I am getting near to why I’m interested in doing this thing today. I did this for about 10 years and I was asked on the 10th anniversary of the big issue, which was the paper I started, I was asked by the Times newspaper, well, you’ve done this for 10 years, what are you going to do for the next 10 or 20 years? And I said, you know, I’ve spent the last 10 years mending broken clocks and I’m going to spend the next 10 or 20 years preventing clocks breaking. So I’m going to move into prevention and I’m going to move into cure. Anyway, so that was really my big intention. Unfortunately, 9-11 came along, which really almost destroyed my business. And then we got over that and then the 2008 crisis came along when the banks and that almost destroyed my business. But we kind of got there. And in fact, we’ve expanded the business. So we work in the emergency of homelessness and crime and poverty, but we also work in prevention. So we work with schools and we work with trying to prevent people falling into poverty. And then we work with cure. So all of this led me to create a methodology called PEC. And this was a very, very simple thing, PEC, meaning prevention, emergency, coping and cure. So it’s an acronym. And the idea is that you identify your activity on the face of God’s earth. So what do you do if you’re working in social intervention? What are you doing? Are you preventing people falling into poverty or are you responding to the emergency of poverty? Or are you helping people cope, you know, stabilize them? Or are you helping people with the cure? And virtually all of the money and all of the time and all of the thinking that I could find in the parliament, outside parliament throughout the world was nearly all to do with emergency and coping. So there was very little big money on prevention. There was very little money on cure. So 80% of social intervention money that I could measure and find was all about it. Anyway, I then decided that I wanted to make some major changes. And it was really because I was almost like I’ve been I’m very good at keeping my enemies and my friends together. You know, I’m not I’m kind of diplomat. Four lines between left, right and center. And because of this, what happened was I kept being described as, oh, the thing about John Byrd, he’s brilliant. He’s absolutely brilliant. And he really knows how to think outside the box. And I really, after a while, I got kind of cheesed up for this. And I thought, why they keep saying, I am so good at thinking outside the box. And then of course, I realized that the reason for that was because the box wasn’t working. In government, oh, John Byrd, let’s bring John Byrd in and do a promotion in the House of Commons or or at number 10 Downing Street. And he can tell us all these wonderful thinking and they’re all sitting there and all, you know, pat themselves on the back, because the box is not working. The box, right, which is society is not working. And it is a clogged up, unsustainable system. So then that was when I decided that I would apply as a people’s peer, which is a system that we have over here, which is a life. You’re a life here, which means when you go, you can’t leave it to your family. It’s not inheritable. And I decided that I would apply to be a people’s peer. And after two or three years of applications and, you know, meetings and interviews, they chose me. They choose about two people a year. Some years they don’t choose anybody. And I joined what became a cross-bencher. And I moved in and very theatrically, as I told the BBC, who were making the programme about me going into Parliament, I very theatrically drew a knife, an imaginary knife. And I said, I’ve come here to slit the throat of poverty, just because I am a theatrical sort of geezer. Very loud and overbearing and bombastic because I have a message and I don’t think the system works. So anyway, let me just end. So that’s the kind of preparation. I’ll just end on the last thing was that I decided that what I would do when the March period came along, we had what’s called the March Statement made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And, you know, they were going on about everybody was lambasting the government because they’ve done all their figures based on a 3% increase in inflation. And it was 8% then and it was like, as it goes to 12%. And they’re all these people lambasting the government and telling them we’ve got to, we need more for the poor, more for the poor, more for the poor. And I thought, you know, they don’t realise how expensive it is to keep people poor. That is where I then decided to write this paper called It’s Expensive Keeping People Poor. And why I’m dialoguing is because my belief is this is a very, very, very simple thing that I want to do, which is to help people clear up their minds and actually help reinvent thinking. So that is social intervention thinking. And that is where I am. And that is why I’m very interested in kind of talking about my argument, my intellectual argument, which is, you can almost call it the simplest intellectual argument ever. So I agree with Bertrand Russell and he says, when the greatest philosophy is some very, very simple, often dumb thing, which you have to present and you have to wrap up in complexity. Otherwise, people don’t take it seriously. So anyway, that’s something. Well, first of all, thank you for that. That was an excellent background. So I take it that you’re trying to figure out why people’s thinking is, in some important sense, stuck on around this, why they, right, they’re framing things. You use the box, think outside the box, why they are framing things in a way that is actually preventing solution. And one of the things you emphasise is we have been, you claim, I think, plausibly so, that we have been inculturated to be fixated on emergency. And that seems to line up with a lot of other research, that human beings only respond to things that are directly present and imminently threatening. And they give very little regard to more long-term thinking. This is known as hyperbolic discounting. This is why people procrastinate. This is why they don’t save for the retirement, all kinds of things. Long-term thinking is very hard for people. And our culture, especially with social media, is making this worse. We’re getting more and more short-term in our thinking. And the social media also exacerbates this, I would argue, by making everything sort of really urgent and salient, but only in a superficial fashion. So I’m wondering, have you, have you any, have you have any thoughts about exactly the problem you posed? I mean, I’ve given you a couple of cognitive science sort of answers as to why people are in some, and I don’t mean conspiracy, and you make it clear you’re not talking about any grand conspiracy, but people are in some way complicit with keeping this system the way it is. And they’re complicit in a kind of self-deceptive fashion. What do you think is driving that? What’s your initial impression from the inside? I’ve given you a couple points from sort of a scientific perspective, but what, like, what from the inside? Why are people complicit with this? Why is it so hard to step back and pursue the long-term, but plausibly much better goals of prevention and cure? I mean, we’ve already, we’ve slowly come around to understand that about our physical health. It’s much better to do all these, you know, preventative things rather than wait till you’re, you know, overwhelmingly sick and go to the hospital, etc. And, you know, it’s much less inexpensive in the long run if we, if we, if we act preventatively rather than reactively. We know this. In some sense, we know this. So what is your sense? Why are people, why do people not want to give up on that framing that is keeping them locked inside the box, fixated on emergency and fixated on coping and not paying attention to prevention and cure? Like, what’s your sense? Let’s start there. What’s your sense for this? Well, it is, it’s interesting for me. And I mean, I think in a way it’s, it’s not a very short-term thing. I think it’s, it’s something that’s, you know, quite a few thousand years old. I think it goes back. I mean, if we look at the Judeo-Christian methodology, when Christ says, you know, we’ll always have the poor or, you know, give to the poor, I think what he was doing consciously or unconsciously, and Islam does it as well, is they were dividing the world between two species. No. The giver. Ah, this is interesting. So you get the giver and you get the taker. And that is the way that we have constructed the world ever since. In the days of Henry VIII, for instance, which is like four, five hundred years ago, the, we had a national health service and the national health service was called the Catholic Church. And if you were ill, you went to the local monastery or the nunnery and they would look after you. And then that was completely destroyed. And then what you had, you had hundreds of thousands of displaced people wandering around the England. And they, if you were a sturdy beggar, that meant if you were strong enough to work, but didn’t work, but begged, then you would be murdered. And in the reign of Henry VIII, we had, he executed along the highways, 50,000 sturdy beggars. So if you go back even, you know, you don’t have to go back to the beginning of the game. But you go back to that idea of the fact that you had this division between the deserving and the undeserving poor. So if you were a sturdy beggar and then, you know, you could be hung. But at the same time, if you were prepared to work and be poor, then you would be given arms. And for me, the whole system is based on the idea that you and I are givers. And I used to be a taker. So this is why my interest has been sharpened by the fact, well, once upon a time I was a terrible taker. And then I became a bigger and I thought, but I thought you had the givers and you had the takers. So this kind of class divide. So what I’m saying is, it’s built into the very nature of society. So for instance, if you have children, how do you develop your children’s humanity? Well, one of the ways you do is you get them to go and give food to old people, or you get them to collect food for poor people. And that’s how you instill in them the idea that they are a part of the worthy world of givers. And they’re going to score their, get their brownie points by engaging with the takers. So what they do is they give money to the taker. So this is, to me, this is what they teach you at school, they teach you at the university. There are so many silly, silly, drunken students in Oxford and Cambridge, I live in Cambridge, who every year go around the streets and get drunk and stupid collecting money for charity. And so they do all this. And then the money, so they are givers. And they are demonstrating their skills and abilities and their humanity by going around and giving money to people. And they say, here’s the money, get on with being poor. That is one of the big problems. When I worked in Los Angeles, I went to Los Angeles to take my street paper movement there. And I was astonished that this was in the time, this was in the mid 90s. And I was astonished that, you know, when you looked at the research that America, you know, this bombastic capitalist country, that doesn’t give you, that believes strongly, absolutely strongly in the idea that if you make your way in the world, through your own effort, they’re always selling that idea. Anybody can become the president or whatever. But at the same time, it was buttressed by the dumpsters or skips that they had outside of the lucky supermarket that I would go to, where you put all every week, you gave stuff. So you’d buy stuff for yourself, and then you get tinged in there. And that was how you demonstrated and developed and honed your humanity. And you got your children to do it. And really, so you had this kind of hard nose capitalist sitting at his office desk trying to make as many much money as possible throughout the day. And then at night, he becomes stupid and gives money away or raises money for charity and away. So it was the it’s the charitable. It’s the charitable thing that process that gets in the way of transforming the lives of the poorest, right? Because they are another species. Same species as us. Now, how do we and but this is all contradicted by the fact that you will meet somebody I know, I have I have a friend who supports the work that I do in parliament. And I made a friend with him. And it’s very fortunate because he’s a billionaire. And and what he started off doing was his father was a miner. He comes from the north of England. His father was a miner, you know, they talk like that, you know, and he still talks like that, you know, it’s you almost need a translation. And he thought he got a job, he left school, he’d gone to the grammar school, but didn’t do very well. He got a job as a as a trainee draftsman. So he got an office job, and then he moved into accountancy and selling insurance. And then he made and then he got into a business that created a lot of other businesses in the 80s. And he became a what they call FinTech, which was financial technology. And he got into that. And he grew a business into a business that is turning over hundreds of billions of pounds in this in hundreds of billions of pounds. And he is a man who’s got hotels, and he’s got all sorts of things, and he’s socially very, very committed. But he came from absolute nothing. Now, therefore, it proves that actually, there is no bar. If you remove the the the obstacles, there is no bar in a taker becoming a giver. So in my opinion, and I’m exactly the same, I went on my maiden speech in the Lords, I said, when people ask me, how did I end up in the House of Lords, I said by lying, cheating and stealing. And what I meant by that was every time I got arrested by the police and put into another institution or a prison, they taught me something, they taught me a bit of bricklaying. I learned scaffolding, I learned printing, I learned all sorts of things, I learned a bit of plastering, I learned about trees and doing all sorts of stuff. So and they taught me to read and write in a boy’s prison when I was 16. All these sorts of things all helped me to become socially transformable, and therefore, socially mobile. So what I’m saying is it is an artificial system. And until we can break this system, where we divide. And I was with a bunch of architects last night, and people also who were building, we’ve got this big thing over here called HS2, which is a 30-year planning job. Now this is where capitalism is very clever, you know, when I say capitalism, I mean society and parliaments, they’re really, really clever at planning stuff in a really long term sort of way. They do that to superstructure, but they don’t do it socially. And the government does is short term in and around poverty. And I was with all these architects, and all they love me, because they want to sit with me and tell me that their latest social program for building houses for the poor. And I said to them, you know, I don’t want to hear about your building houses for the poor, because by you building houses for the poor, what you’re really doing is enshrining them as poor. What I want you to do is help me solve the problem. How do I convince the world that we have to move from emergency and coping to cure or to prevention? And that is why I developed the methodology, which is called PEG, prevention emergency, coping and cure, because I developed it so that I could say to government and anybody, are you preventing poverty? Are you curing people of poverty? Or are you just allowing people to stand, to mark time, to tread water? And in my opinion, 95% of the world is like that. Okay, so excellent answer, excellent answer to my question. So, right, you’re proposing there’s a deeper issue. And the issue is, as you said, we’ve got this sort of two species. We divide the world into the givers and the takers, the rich and the poor, or something like that. And then charity has been our primary response to the plight of the poor. But I understand you to be saying that that charity actually helps keep that distinction alive. It helps keep the two species. I know, because you said it in your writings, you’re not saying we should stop helping people in emergency. You’re not saying that at all. But you’re saying, look, there’s a deeper issue in how we’re framing the world. And charity actually contributes to that framing, and it’s preventing us from curing poverty. I think that’s a very powerful point. So then I want to ask you a question again. Why are we so invested in that distinction? Why is it important to us? What function is it performing such that people are highly motivated to keep it going? I think, as I said earlier, I think it’s where your children and you make your social brownie points. I think that’s where you get your feeling of goodness, your feeling of humanity. I mean, what is so beautiful is that the spur to help people is one of the most encouraging and most beautiful things that we’ve got. I’m one of those persons who is always getting involved in other people and in their lives. So I see somebody going down the stairs, and they’re stumbling, and there’s a lot of other people in the underground. And I will go and help them. And I know, largely, I’m also working on the fact that I used to be an exact opposite, a person who was a terrible person. So I get my brownie points. That’s how I, at the end of the day, I know there were two or three occasions yesterday when I was in London, when I did things that made me feel really human, helping an old woman into a cab, helping a disabled person downstairs. So that is, that is, we cannot, we can’t urinate on that. I mean, sorry, we can’t. Ruta, we can’t say that that is a bad thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s the thing that brings us together. But the problem is, it brings us together, and it ties our minds. It stops our minds. Right, right. So this is a very challenging problem, that this is a beautiful and profound and very human impulse. And yet the way we practice expressing that impulse is actually exacerbating the problem of poverty. So like, what, which, so you’re not trying to throttle the impulse, but you’re saying that we have a long-standing tradition in many religions of that, the way you express this impulse is through charity. And you’re saying that that is actually maintaining the difference between the two groups, keeping that solid. What would you propose as an alternative? Like what, how would, how would we start to, I mean, because you’re doing something really profound here, Lord Bird, you’re trying to challenge literally thousands of years of enculturation across multiple religions, across many different political ideologies and parties. You’re trying to say, right, we need a different way of thinking about how we express the impulse of wanting to help other people. What is that other way? Well, the other way is, and I got this from my, I fell in love with philosophy, and I fell in love with, well, because I’m a kind of self-appointed Marxist, ex-Marxist, or a self-appointed historian, because I’m always writing about this. You know, I’m writing at the moment about the creation of the Americas, and I’m writing really about why, what, if you were doing it again, you wouldn’t do it the way you’ve done it, if you see what I mean. You know, if you’d really, if it was time for reinvention, you certainly wouldn’t have a Pissarro and a Cortez, you wouldn’t have the Mason-Dixon line and all sorts of stuff like that, and you certainly wouldn’t have the middle passage. So I’m a kind of self-appointed, so I am clumsy, so I don’t necessarily have all the answers, but what I’m saying is that I, my instinct is that what we need is a scientific method, and I know that that’s the kind of concept I’ve stolen from Marxism, which I did. I actually left the Marxist movement because I found it very unscientific, found it very, very difficult. It was another religion, and I’d been a Catholic, and I’d left Catholicism, and then I’d become another kind of Catholic, you know, I moved, as I said, I moved from one bearded Jewish gentleman to another bearded Jewish gentleman, and they were both roughly the same in some sort of ways, but I, you know, they use these things like the scientific method. So what I wanted to do was to make conscious people much, much more conscious of actually what do you do? What is the power of the dollar? What is the power of your wallet? What is it? Why is it? I mean, I had this argument with George, no, with that famous Joseph Stiglitz, you know, the guy who got a Nobel Prize for, and he’s always going round talking about, you know, capitalism and all sorts of things. I had an argument with him at one of his public meetings because the way he was describing the billionaires and, you know, the people who started Amazon and all those sorts of things, he was describing them almost as though you were laying in your bed in your hotel room or somewhere, and they snuck in at night and they stole your wallet. And I said, don’t do that. The way it is, is you have a pound or a dollar and you invest it in someone like Amazon, you don’t make an investment in cents, you ask them to deliver something to you that they can get their hands on. So actually, modern capitalism is not these billionaires, modern capitalism is you and me who go to the garage where Steve Jobs works, making one computer and you buy it, and then somebody else buys another one, and somebody else buys another, and before you know it, they’re selling millions and millions and millions. So the major force in society is consumers and consumerism, and that is where all the big money is. So the point, what I’m trying to make is this, that I want to get people conscious about poverty, I want them to get conscious about the environment, I want them to get conscious that it is us that is destroying the world because the world is being destroyed by consumerism, and until we become conscious, and if we can wrap the fight against poverty, if we can wrap it up in the fight to save the planet without telling anybody off, because I don’t want to tell anybody off, because I have to tell myself off because I’m a part of this process, you know, I use Amazon and I drive my car, so I’m doing, you know, so what I’m saying is I want, I think if we could have almost a philosophical correction which would be, look, we are not thinking, so from now on, because we’re not thinking, we have to recognise that we’re not thinking. So if we’re not thinking, we have to start thinking. Now I compare this to the fact that you and I or somebody is ill, and you’re ill, and what happens is that you say, oh, I better go to the doctor. You’re at zero until the day that you ring up the doctor and say to the doctor, can I come in with my complaint? Now what I mean by you’re at zero, every day you get up and say, I’m going to do something about it, I’m going to do something about it, I’m going to do it, and you don’t, and then the day you ring the doctor, you then move from zero to 90% because you move nearer to the solution because you’ve done something about it, and in my opinion, what is actually happening in the world is that we are not saying where are the solutions because we’re not saying our thinking has not this far produced the solutions. So when you do go to the doctor, you possibly can be cured, but you can’t if you keep going along saying, or you can’t cure poverty if you keep saying, there’s more poor people and we can’t do anything about it, there’s too many of them. It’s only by us stopping and saying, whatever we’re doing at the moment is not working. I don’t think I explained that as clearer as I have done on other occasions, but what I’m saying is we need to reinvent thinking and we need to reinvent thinking at such a profoundly simple level, which is to ask, what are the solutions to stopping a repetition of poverty? And I’ll give you an example of what I mean by that. My parents who, as I said, were, you know, they were laborers. My mother was a barmaid, my father worked on a building site, and they spent most of their spare money in the pub, so they weren’t the greatest husbanders of their resources. When I went to school at the age of five to St Mary’s School in Notting Hill, in the slums of Notting Hill, my mum and dad didn’t prepare me for school. They didn’t say, Sonny, you’re going off to school and this could take you anywhere. This could take you virtually to the moon. They said, go in there and stay there for 10 years, because it was five to 15 in those days, and come out and we’ll give you a shovel and you can go work on a building site. So they were preparing me for a replication or a duplication of their own poverty, where education was not a means was offered. So you had what I call the school gate syndrome, where if the parents have not prepared or activated the beauty of education for their beautiful children, because all of our children are beautiful when they’re standing nervously on that first day, and if you can inspire them, then they can go into the school and you can support them, then they’ll do better. They won’t become divisive, they won’t become the troubled children, the 35% children that we fail at in our schools in the UK. They will not become that because the parents will encourage and nurture them and they will grow and they will become strong and they will move away from the poverty that they inherited from their parents. And that to me is where we need to make the major, major change, but we don’t do it. If you look at the money that is spent in the UK, and this is why I’ve called my paper, it’s expensive keeping people poor, because about 35% of the money that the government collects, which is nearly a trillion pounds a year from taxpayers and some borrowings, they spend in the region of 350 billion a year on poverty. So they spend this money that doesn’t get anybody out of poverty, but it maintains them in poverty. So the money is there to be used, but it’s wrongly utilised. So what I’m saying is that until we, every one of us, we can’t do this simply through political parties and through MPs, unless we have, we move from what you call a representational democracy to a participatory democracy, we will never arrive at where we would have what you might call a cognitive democracy, a democracy where everybody knows the difference between things. And you therefore, when you’re voting to leave Europe or stay in Europe, you’re voting because you know. So I’m talking about how do we get people involved in their schools and in their social support things. If you really want to be charitable, help our parents who come from poverty, help their children pass through that wonderful world of school so that they’re not disruptive, so they’re not listless because they don’t understand, because they’re not doing their homework or they’re not being inspired. If you really want to be charitable, that is where we as human beings should be putting our energy. That is the solution, one of the solutions I’ve come to. So what I’m saying is we are not thinking, we are not a thinking species. I think what we are is a processing species. I think we spend much more of our time processing stuff, but not thinking. It’s not quality, it is not about taxing ourselves and saying, why is it that we accept the poor quality of the delivery of our masters and the people around the world, the political people and all sorts of things? Why is it that we’re accepting the fact that 35% of our children fail at school? These figures are replicated and duplicated all over the world. You look at it, it might be 20%. You look at the United States, it’s 45%. All these sorts of things. Failure of creating a new generation of people who will have health problems, who will suffer from food poverty, food poverty costs the National Health Service in Great Britain. 50% of this budget is spent on keeping the poorest people as healthy as they can. I’m carrying on too long. No, no, no, you’re not. I asked you a very challenging question and you do something I like. You first present the idea and then you give an actual concrete example of how that concept can be applied. So I want to make sure I’m getting it, because I think this is a place where your work and my work converge. Part of what you’re saying, you’re proposing, you said it’s not a political, we’re not going to solve this just through sort of political means. This is something that’s got to take place at the cultural cognitive level in our thinking and the way we’re understanding ourselves, the way we’re understanding how we are with each other. And then you point to the fact that, and this is a point made by Zach Stein in his education in a time between worlds, we’ve basically lost an important way of understanding education. And what he argues is we used to understand education as how one generation connected to the next generation and passed the culture on. And education has largely been separated from that. Like you said, we don’t care about how the parents are preparing their children so that they will make the most of the educational opportunity. So we think, right, so that’s his point. If you look at other cultures, education is something that is understood to be happening between the generations. It’s not something that just the state does, but generations do with each other. And to my mind, that says something very, very important, because what I could hear in my head people saying when you say, well, we all need to do something. Well, a lot of people just default and say, well, I give this much money. And your point is that’s not the doing that you’re talking about. You’re talking about, no, no, we need to put time and effort and yes, money into reconfiguring fundamental cognitive framing of things like education, such that we don’t think of education as happening, for example, when the child enters the building we call the school. And we don’t think of it as ending when a person comes out. So I’ve been talking to people in the Scandinavian system, and they do the folk high school system, where the kids come out of high school and before going into the marketplace, they spend a year or two, financed by the state, where they actually explore who they are. It’s part of the building movement. It’s very philosophical who they are, how they should interact with other people, how they can cultivate virtue, what their primary interests are. And this, by the way, this is proof of concept. The building movement took the Scandinavian countries, which were impoverished, authoritarian, agrarian, and changed them, changed them into the countries they are now. And what they did was they created all these almost like secular monasteries where these kids go and they work on this level of education, and they built and they said we have to change the culture first at this fundamental level, and then we can put a democracy on top of it and a social network system on top of it. So this is actually happening. We have proof of concept. I’ve talked to Lenny Anderson, I’ve talked to Thomas D’Arcman. The building movement shows that if we do this fundamental reorientation and think about education as, I would put it to you, almost as a religious project, that kind of comprehensiveness and commitment to transformation, that people can, and not just one country, it started to Sweden and Norway. It really worked. It really happened. And so for me, I think the idea that we have bound ourselves into an inappropriate model of education and what education is and what it does and who it’s responsible to and how we should be responsible for it, is that we have to be responsible for the way we think about education. And so I think that’s a very important point. I think that is one of the core places in which we are facing a problem. And we have seen, we have proof, historical proof, that when people reorient, I think the way you’re proposing at that fundamental level, you can lift entire countries out of significant poverty, reorient them, make them much more truly democratic, etc. That has happened in the past. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I didn’t know about the bulldozer movement. But I do know that there are examples of enormous changes in the lives of poor people who move from feral poverty, like in India, they move from feral poverty, which is where you wake up in the morning and you don’t know how you’re going to feed your family or your children. So a feral person with feral poverty would get up and they have to say, well, am I going to put my child into a sweatshop? Am I going to prostitute myself? Am I going to go around picking up cans, you know, so that I can do that. So and then when jobs come along and you can move from feral poverty to exploitative poverty, where you earn three or four dollars a day, and you get people in the West saying, oh, it’s terrible, absolutely terrible, and castigating people who employ people for three or four dollars a day. Now, I know from the work that we’ve done in India, and people that we know, that when somebody moves from feral poverty to exploitative poverty, their lives change. They can then start planning for their child to go to school. They can and an enormous amount, millions and millions of people have been able to move out of poverty, out of feral poverty into exploitative poverty. They may themselves never get beyond exploitative poverty, but their children are being potentially the new doctors and the nurses of tomorrow. When in Karela, for instance, was a very run-down state in 1969 when the Marxists came in, and I’m certainly not promoting the Marxists, but the Marxists did to what Castro did, which was take, you know, 3% literacy and within 10 years make it 90% literacy. So in India for now, and I’m going on what I’ve been told by Indians, is they moved from, you know, 5% literacy to 95% literacy. So now you’ve got a problem in Karela where you’ve got these incredibly educated people who are effectively building the doctors and the nurses and the dentists. Wherever you go in India, you will get people from Karela who have used their education. So what they’ve done is they thought their way out. They put their energy into literacy. Literacy was what turned me from being a tater. Right, right. So literacy was the key and if you give literacy, so that’s one example of this enormous power of the generosity, the generosity of spirit that goes with that. That’s what I’m interested in, but I don’t want generosity if it is ill-founded. If it’s, I’m being generous because I see a person sitting in the street and I’m going to give them money and then I’m going to walk home and I’m going to say I’ve done my bit for the day. All your dollars, they’re going to come back the next day because that little top-up you give them doesn’t go there. Now if you look at Brazil for instance, there is a very, very conflicted experiment that they did in Brazil under Silva, the guy who’s trying to get back in again at the moment, the president, I forget his name, Luba or something like that. Anyway, what he did was he created something called family allowance and what happened was he gave money to people who were largely in the barrios, you know, in the slums. He gave them a hundred, I think it was a hundred and fourteen dollars a month to these people on the basis that two things happened. One of them was that mummy had to go and see the doctor maybe once a month because if mummy becomes ill then what happens is she becomes ill and she might die and then the children become feral and they start breaking into the stores and all sorts of stuff like that. So you’ve got to keep the family together. So that’s one thing. So mum had to go to the hospital, go to the doctor and keep healthy. The other one was you wouldn’t get the money if your children didn’t go to school. Millions of people were lifted into the middle classes in the same way as in India because they got education. Now I know that this was a contradictory thing because I was at a conference when I talked about this in Scotland maybe 10 years ago when a whole group of Brazilian women sat upon me and said this was an absolute corruption because there were thousands of gangster type people who were going into school and putting a gun to the teacher’s head and said you will fill in my children’s, to say that my child comes to school and if you don’t I’ll blow your head away. Now that was used even though it lifted millions of people. These activists, these Brazilian women were saying to me oh but you know some people are going into school and so they couldn’t separate the enormous impact to the relative impact because relative impact was taken up by the newspapers and the newspapers were the ones who destroyed this thing. So what I’m saying is they’re often doing it for good, they’re trying to get rid of corruption but they’re going you know 50,000 parents are doing this every year but five million of them or 10 million of them are being lifted out of poverty. So what I’m talking about is actually a real consciousness, a real scientific let’s check the evidence, let’s look at poverty and not look at it as something that as I say is a division as it’s continued to be between the giver and the taker. I’m interested that that strikes me as a very important point you just made especially the case about right. Why did those people move towards and the newspapers follow them crushing this program? I mean that question really honestly, why did they do that? I mean if you’re right and millions of people are being lifted and then a small percentage is corrupt right and the exploitative capitalism is called exploitative capitalism for a reason but if we were to destroy exploitative capitalism we would actually you know prevent people being lifted from out of feral poverty and moving out of poverty. I know I’m asking a really hard question but why do we do that? Why do we fixate on that? Is it a simple narrative? Is it a sort of I can find the villain or is it an ideological orientation? Why go that small picture rather than the big picture which is where the poverty is actually being alleviated? What do you think? Why does that happen? Well I think it’s largely because people cannot hold fast the opposites when using them. I’m sorry they’re the only terms I’ve got. That’s fine keep going please. Holding part you know the contradiction and interpenetration of opposites they can’t you know that. For instance I will tell you some interesting stories. I mean the Queen has just died right and I was on the I was on the radio commiserating with her being ill not being we didn’t know she was dead at the time and I was asked by the team you know the the radio interview he said he said but John Byrd you know Lord Byrd you know you work in poverty you know you you must be kind of upset with all the money that they’ve got and you’ve got all of the you know you’ve got all of the rich and powerful you know it should be an offence to you and I said well it could be an offence but I live in a world which is made up of many many contradictions and many many things and the biggest contradiction for me is because I have self-selected elected myself to be an advocate with people in poverty I must at the same time talk and and kind of sit down and eat and socialize with people who have got vast amounts of money vast amounts of power because if they give me something then I can use it to get people out of poverty so I have to hold fast the opposites I have to you know sup with the devil using a very long spoon and a lot of people they they can’t take that they can’t they can’t take the fact that because we live in a world which is run by very very powerful people with a lot of money that actually if you want to make a number of changes if you want to make major changes then you have for the lives of people that you’re working with because you’re duty-bound because that’s the area that you’ve chosen to work then I have to do it we have Prince William selling the big issue uh uh at the street paper working with another street it got us enormous amounts of press and we sold more and more papers because so we helped hundreds of helpless people people homeless people we helped lift them a bit higher because they could sell more papers that could make more money and people often don’t like those opposites but the but the other thing I think is is is one of the major problems is the fact that we we build a world of uh you know what investigative journalism for instance I have a real problem with investigative journalism I am a visiting professor for a university in England in their journalism school and they won’t ask me back and the reason they won’t ask me back is because when I did my inaugural when they made me a visiting professor I said to them that if I was caught on an island with a hundred other people of of uh and they all were all of the same profession I’d rather it was a hundred accountants than a hundred journalists because journalists are not necessarily interested in the truth they’re interested in the story so I was being made an honorary director a professor and I was telling them I said look you you you’re being taught to go around the world almost as though you imagine you’ve got kind of 24 little windows little doors and you open the door and you say look at that look at that look at that big problem there then you close look at that problem and then you go to the next door and you go to the next look at that look at that look at that and I said you know you’re destroying the world by creating a whole slew of investigative journalists because none of them are stopping and saying okay so what can we do about it but to me journalism at its finest is as much about answers as it is about problems right and it it unfortunately it’s it’s the liberalism of our universities it’s the but basically all under to me the whole thing is the fact that we divide the world between the the the the givers and the taters the whole basis of our universities the whole base because they are all givers the universities are always giving a little bit tokenistically to prove that they’re charity but largely their businesses etc so so as far as I’m concerned until we take dispassion I was asked by someone said to me when Liz Trust they were saying if you were prime minister what would you do I said the first thing I would do is I would stop and I would sit back and I would take a social order of the inputs and the outcomes of government and I would tell I would look at what works and what doesn’t work and I would do it dispassionately and I would take a hundred days before I did anything because I would want to know what does work what why is it that social security can help people and I’ve seen it on an individual basis it can help people to get out of poverty social security can be turned into social opportunity but why is it that mostly it is a hand holding it is a it is a warehousing of the poor because you don’t give them enough money to ever get out and and a big issue vendor we nurtured a big issue vendor and we got her into the university and we got her on to social security and when the social security found out she was going to university they stopped giving her social security and the reason for that was social security is you stay there you don’t go so so they were not using social security of social opportunity and security to me is the first basis on life you don’t have security you’re not going to have education you’re not going to have social mobility you’re not you know you need social you need social security in your life to bring transformation so they even use these terms and they debase them so what I’m saying is that you you’ve got all of these but they’re all about dare I say a philosophical cultural intellectual gap between reality and and and the needs that that uh that present themselves and I I use poverty as an example uh because that’s where I work but you could move in you know the climate change I mean why why why is it that we don’t accept the fact that I mean if if the if the world if the 100 of the world damage if you look at the 100 of the world’s damage from 19 from the beginning of time to the 1970 50 of the damage that was done to the world was done in that period including the industrial revolution the next 50 percent of damage done to the world between 1970 and now sorry was done the next 50 percent was done in the last 60 years that is because of the way that that uh individualism as it as an expression as expressed through through consumerism really took off and you will remember that you’re not as old as me but I remember the beginnings of mass you know in the days of Reagan and the days in the days of Margaret Thatcher whether where where credit you know in England you you you had um uh you know most people in 1980 owed the equivalent of about one and a half times their annual wages by the by the 1990s it was seven times yeah but but that was that boom was all crazy so so we we we have to I’m sorry I’m going with my subject a bit but it’s all it’s all germane now sorry just about the um you know education is really important the other thing if you look at Great Britain the problem it has is that it’s always been a low wage economy always had a very a vast amount of people who are low wage it’s also a low investment economy so therefore most of the investments that are made in Great Britain are made in and around the buying and selling of property 80 percent of the transactions made by British banks are made around the buying and selling of property only 20 percent is about creating new businesses if you look at Germany it’s the exact opposite 80 percent of the money that the banks lend is for the developing of business and only 20 percent is spent on uh the buying and selling of property so we are really arcy-versy country so we are always creating jobs for poor people but we’re creating jobs for the working poor so there are all these other sedimentary levels that keep people in poverty that was a lot I’ll try to as there’s a bunch of threads I want to respond to uh you so I asked you about the what was happening around Brazil uh you said something I found very powerful which is you know people’s incapacity to hold the opposites um which is a sign by the way you know speaking as a cognitive scientist and cognitive psychologist that requires a lot of education to get to people to the place where they can hold the opposites that way that kind of dialectical thinking then you also said you know that we’ve got this impulse the journalistic impulse right to uncover right the the story uh the great story so we are too much attracted by the narrative and not enough by coming up with the response to the narrative um are you still there so sorry everyone for that slight glitch that we had a technological problem um I was just reviewing what I had gotten from Lord Bird’s uh last thing he said I was reviewing we’ve been right he talked about um one of the reasons why people can’t get the big picture is the inability to hold opposites and I was saying that is wrapped up with the education problem uh because it takes a lot you got to get people out of scarcity mentality and get them quite a bit of education where they can get that cognitive flexibility to do that but those two problems are interwoven and then he pointed out uh the way journalism especially investigative journalism is oriented towards the story and not the response to reality and it helps disconnect us uh because of a kind of narrative bias and then you you killed that out again with you know all these ways in which um not just poverty but climate change and other things we seem to have fallen into practices of thought and culture in which we are disconnected um in important ways uh from reality and I would put it to you that again all of those things are interwoven uh the needed education getting people out of scarcity mentality getting them into dialectical thinking getting them into self-correction so that they can question right the thing about the investigative journalists to your point is they don’t actually question their own orientation they question everybody else but they don’t step back and say but what are we doing and what’s the big picture about this and so I think all of these to my mind are coming together and kind of a like there’s at least a through line with them that there’s this nest of uh issues about how we think and how we are relating to reality that we have to prioritize if we’re going to address issues like poverty and climate change and other things do I understand you correctly yeah uh that’s that’s a very beautiful way you know building a structure to me is is is is the most important thing um uh because it needs to be built I mean the reason I’m writing it’s expensive keeping people poor is because I do want to prevent present all those levels and all those things I do also want to question you know the the western methodology the western thinking you know why this kind of uh this kind of dispossess this this um uh just you know this difference between the world that we live in and uh the way that we teach our children are the way we run our universities I mean I I maybe it’s because I’m not really a part of the academic world but I’m always appalled at how partial the the university life is and the way I think this is another thing you don’t have unity in in your thinking you don’t because you’re not in the world you’re taught to have a unity you know when you when you talk about Christianity or Judaism or Islam or or whatever whatever they are they are unities they are they position you in the world as a part of something which is much much bigger than your own personal experience exactly one of the I mean I call myself Catholic Marxist because I don’t ever want anybody to look upon me and think I am just a person who’s going to spend a lot of energy on finding out whether there’s a god or I I if if there isn’t a god we need one and the only way we need a god in the same way as sometimes we need a king or a queen is because we need to feel that there is something bigger and we are attached to something which is much more enormous which is society and as I I personally believe in the goodness of most people that I meet but it’s a goodness that is that is never really allowed to become manifest because it’s all that you know they’re all making partisan arguments you know they’re dividing the world between the goodies and the baddies and they define themselves by the failures of others right the thing so many people and I’ve done it myself so I would never accuse anybody of doing something wrong if I hadn’t done it myself because that’s how I’ve learned to defining yourself by the failures of others so the so the point I’m saying is because we don’t train people in in this unity this this we call a universe a university a universe a university is a universe but it’s not because most of the people who participate participate partially yes yes with the world and it’s often it’s often that that way so I’m always meeting partial people in the Lords and and in the common it’s already in the House of Lords and the House of Commons I’m always meeting people who have an absolute passion for something something in particular whether it’s dogs cats whether it’s gay issues or whether it’s like and as far as they’re concerned that is the whole of their unity and I said it’s that’s that’s that’s one brick in the wall even I when I am contemplating poverty I am not contemplating poverty simply in order to get rid of poverty I’m contemplating poverty to get rid of the kind of thinking yes that are of the teeth are part of the system for you know since the days of Mebrek and Ezra or you know the days of Gilgamesh you know there are the poor and why is it that so many every generation has accepted the fact that there’s always the poor and never saying hang on how can we break that and one of the reasons is because every now and then somebody will escape from poverty you know there’s a guy who lives very very poorly in Bristol he comes from a very very poor family he’s built he’s born in the early 20th century but he’s very good at juggling so he gets a job in a circus and then somebody puts him on a boat and he goes to America and he ends up at Hollywood and this guy called Archie Leach is absolutely nothing but he’s a good looking guy he’s got a nice chin he’s got nice hair and he becomes Cary Grant he becomes the biggest movie star in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and and and people love that story but they don’t realize that somebody being able to do it Charlie Chaplin being a homeless guy in London can become a multi-millionaire in the United States they all they say that is the system and because they don’t realize that actually we could destroy the whole system if we didn’t just say well poverty will always be with us but the best will escape and that’s what they do with me they’re always I’m always being asked on some program or something they say oh come along and tell us your story because I love it it’s a nice yeah because it doesn’t bring my story doesn’t bring us anywhere nearer to understanding why so as a conditional part of life for you know thousands of years that’s really powerful I mean again the you know that we get entrenched by the narrative and we don’t actually orient to the reality and then the point you said about the partiality again that meshes the fact that people want to be connected to something greater than themselves that’s that’s one of the most powerful things for giving people a sense of meaning so people do want that connection but as you said they they fail to see that that that means trying repeatedly to fit whatever their partial frame is into a more encompassing framework and again that’s part of I mean we that’s also something that we’re deeply educated in because we have we’ve developed a culture in which we increasingly ask people to specialize and do this and do that and we don’t we do not we do not incentivize integrators I’ll give you a concrete example in my case so I’m in psychology and because we do we because we place such an emphasis on people specializing and innovating right we have a lot of problems in psychology now it’s called the replication crisis a lot of our experience that this is experiments done in this lab don’t replicate in this lab and etc and etc precisely because we’re putting so much emphasis on that specialization and we do not incentivize people who integrate if you take a bunch of existing empirical work and say but how does it all fit together and you try and get that published and I know this from my personal experience that’s 10 times harder than I ran this experiment over here and I found this new piece of data that nobody’s found before we have a culture that also incentivizes people to take a partial view and rewards them for them and then and part of it is because we get enormous power out of that because we can get individuals who can do extraordinary things but again this goes back to your point about holding the opposites yes we need people who can specialize but we also need people who can systematize we need innovators and we need integrators we need to hold the big picture and we need to hold it at a much more profound cultural level than we currently do that’s what I’m hearing from you as well right now yeah I mean that is so interesting the the specializers uh only really work when you do systematize things yes yeah yeah and uh you know going back to uh to to this idea that uh we have to learn to handle contradictions we’re always handling contradictions uh I I got married for the third time at the age of 58 and the big contradiction for me was I married a woman a lot you know 24 years younger than me well she asked to marry me so it was a her mistake not mine but the point is I then had the biggest contradiction because I became very very jealous and very very very unhappy because I was possessive because I was weak I was made weak because love all out I’d been a board game bachelor for 10 year 12 years so all of that so the contradiction I had to hold that contradiction we are always holding that contradiction we are always in relationships or in jobs or in parts of the world or in in whatever that are not quite filling what we want uh and and uh and and therefore contradiction is is the lifeblood of of and we have to have to learn to to to do that I mean taking coming all the way back I mean if you if you look at um um if you actually look at look at uh the development for instance of Steve Jobs’s apple empire uh which I talked about earlier you know he makes one computer and somebody buys it and he makes he ends up making a million and that is the power of us that is the power of society that is not his power his power does that we empower him but when they launched the ipad I remember writing an article and saying the problem with the ipad uh is that it was very beautiful but it was expensive uh but the thing is that if it didn’t have a hidden ingredient which no one ever talks about which is poverty then it it wouldn’t have existed because if Steve Jobs wanted to make it in Seattle it would have been maybe ten thousand dollars or he wanted to make it in Mexico it would have been three thousand dollars so we have to go as far away from the marketplace so he went to Foxconn the Taiwanese business working in China so we have to go as far away in order to get it down to eight hundred dollars so we’ve got all these elements that we make up and what I’m saying and I might not be saying it very well is we have to become conscious yes we we are such a profoundly wonderful invention whether it’s God or its nature we are and we are sitting we are hiding our light under a bushel and that’s why I proselytize and evangelize about poverty because as well as my commitment to the poor to get them out of poverty uh is I’m is is using a mechanism that enables people to enrich their thinking and all that so my passion is is is changing the pedagogy and changing the uh changing the way that we engage in the world that’s you know so no no this is what I find fascinating about you know you want to change the pedagogy and the philosophy and how the philosophy and the pedagogy interweave and and that is something that is very much in concert uh with my work um I’m afraid we’ll have to draw it to a close uh but I always like to give my guests um the last word um it doesn’t have to be summative it doesn’t have to be um you know uh you know a review or anything but what would you pick what you know a few minutes what’s the final thing you want to say um I want to say really dumb simple things that we’re a lot cleverer than we think we are uh or we’re a lot cleverer than we demonstrate we don’t think cleverly and as a person and I don’t mean this in a rude sort of way but it might be interpreted I spent a long time getting into the British middle class I got in I realized they were as ignorant as the people I came from but they were in different ways you know they knew what knife and fork to use and they knew you know the difference between a Beaujolais and a and a Riesling or something like that but when I analyzed the quality of their lives and the quality of their thinking and the quality of their table talk I was astonished at how they hid their true cleverness their ability to learn their ability to actually communicate uh their their supreme ability with small talk I mean it’s all you can almost small talk your way to the top table in the UK uh and so I I in a way uh I I if I’ve got something to sum up I would say we are a much cleverer than we pretend or operate in and that cleverness I want to release that cleverness into the ether I want to release it in to the education system and I want to release it into the lives of our children as a father of five children and a permanent father because I’ve been a father to many many people and I’m I’m a bit pastoral uh I believe deeply in the dignity of human beings I believe in the beauty of human beings but they’re but they’re always stubbing their toe on reality and they’re always making mistakes and they are always enshrining the poor to remain the poor forever and in my opinion we could do this a lot cleverer and we could address the problems of climate and any of the other problems that come our way thank you so much lord bird this has been a wonderful conversation thank you very much for asking me thank you