https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5E14M_UCYJg
the need and the desire for control just grows and grows and grows. And yet at the same time, as you say, you have this kind of, on the one hand, extreme coercion, and on the other hand, kind of extreme liberalism or individualism in which, on the one hand, yeah, we can be anything we want, literally anything we can imagine, we can redefine our own bodies if we feel like we’ve just done that. But at the same time, if you cross any of the kind of red lines that are drawn by the culture, then you’re dead meat. And you can literally be you can have your bank account taken away. This is happening to people. And so you’ve got this sort of strange combination of extreme liberalism and extreme illiberalism at the same time. And it messes with the head, actually. I mean, you talk about different people writing to me, but maybe the common, I mean, I have people from right across the spectrum writing to me all the time. And a lot of the common, maybe the common factor that people will often come out with is I just have no idea what the hell is going on. And people tell me at least sometimes that they value what I’m writing because I’m trying to work that out and they find it useful to sort of come along with me. But it is just so immensely confusing because so many of the things which, as you say, maybe in a more customary society, people will just live with family, community, local level institutions, roots in a place, all of these things that would define most traditional societies around the world, they’ve all been demolished. And so we’re left with on the one hand, the individual and on the other hand, the increasingly powerful state, which has a kind of corporate arm and a media arm. And that’s almost become one blob of power, corporations, the state and the mass media. And then there’s us little people. And depending on where we live in the world, we’ve got more or less of a kind of rooted community around us. But fundamentally, the whole thing is reduced to a binary of, you know, powerful state up here and the little person down here. And so that’s how you get this weird thing in which you can define your own reality, but at the same time, you’re more controlled than you’ve ever been. And it’s extremely confusing. And it’s kind of rushing in that direction all the time. And the other thing to think about is just the huge wave of imagery that we’re battered with all the time, the possibility now through social media and the web to just give us endless images. I mean, the war in Ukraine is a great example of this. Has any war ever been kind of so relentlessly covered and live streamed? You know, you can get this diet of horrible images and news and conflicting ideas and opinions all the time. And it’s almost impossible to, you know, I long for the old days where you turn the BBC on and the man would tell you what was going on. And that was the news. And there’d be a war reporter and there he was and he would say, this is what’s happened here. And it’s yeah, so you’ve got all of these kind of these forces coming at your consciousness from so many different directions. And I think increasingly a lot of people just find it almost impossible to manage it actually, just to navigate the whole system. Yeah. I mean, I think the way you presented as the two extremes, I think that that’s the key is that a normal kind of traditional, what I call this kind of symbolic world is a constant negotiation between levels of existence. So, you exist in these embedded communities. So you have your friends and your family and that creates a kind of cohesion. And then that’s embedded in churches or embedded in community groups, embedded in villages and towns. And ultimately it does reach up, it can reach up very high in terms of empire, in terms of nation. But because you have these buffered realities, then at the point where sometimes the king might become tyrannical, you can find some solace and some protection in your family or in these more embedded communities. But because of the way that the system is getting set up, because of the fact that the state in many of our countries, the state has become the sole arbiter of all your existence. It decides pretty much everything about how you’re going to live your life. Then you have these two extremes where the state becomes more and more powerful, the human beings become more and more disconnected from each other. And then the power becomes absolute, but people don’t feel it so much. I mean, until they do. They don’t feel it until they do. Like you said, if they’re inside, then they’re okay and they feel like they can do whatever they want. They can watch whatever Netflix show they want. They can consume as much in any manner they like, but as soon as sometimes the face of the system shows itself. And I think that that’s something that during COVID, it has, something happened for, it was funny, like when Justin Trudeau basically shut down people’s bank accounts, I think that, I don’t know exactly what happened. We don’t know what happened in the background of that, but it seems like he let the mask slip a little too much for some people, because all of a sudden in a week later, they pulled back or a week and a half later. But I think they realized that this is telling people we can do this. Not only we can do this, we’re going to do it. We’re going to do it increasingly. And the Russia situation is the same. Like watching people in Russia get there, going to the store and then using Apple Pay, and it doesn’t work. Do you think that that’s only going to be used outside, that it’s not going to be used inside? It happened just a month ago in Canada. So of course it’s going to be used on you. And the short sightedness is astonishing. I mean, I have, say friends on the liberal left, my old activist buddies, and I see some of them out there cheering on what Trudeau did, because they’ve brought into the line that this is just a bunch of fascists who’ve turned up to wave swastikas, and so it’s great that he can shut them down. Now, even if that was true, which as far as I can see, it wasn’t true at all, but even if it had been true, even if it had been a fascist rally or whatever, are you still really comfortable with the government doing that? Do you think that that won’t be used elsewhere? Do you trust any authority at all to have that degree of power over anyone? You’ve got to be very short sighted to do that. I mean, it’s interesting looking at Trudeau from where I am, because I’m no expert on Canada, but he’s almost a poster boy for how to be a liberal, isn’t he, in the global sense. He says all the right things. And yet, at the same time, he’s just used the most authoritarian powers in any modern democracy that I can see. Yeah, but people don’t realize, I think it’s also there’s a sense in which people just don’t know history or don’t actually totally understand, seem to not understand how democracy works or how systems work. And so I always use an extreme example, and I tell people, if I rape a child, they won’t take away my bank account. If I go out in the street and I start slashing people’s throats, they’re not going to take away my bank account. You understand that. So why do you think that it’s normal to take away bank accounts? That’s insane to think that you will actually cut people out of the capacity to pay for it. And people just thought it was a normal thing to do and to do it against your political enemies. That’s insane. It’s like we’re reaching levels that are hard to describe. Well, that’s the thing that’s new. And it’s like this stuff has been normalized. Something has happened over the last two years where this kind of, firstly, society has become incredibly tribal in the West. I mean, we already had this culture war brewing in America, which has come roaring over into Europe as well, especially into Britain. Less so where I live in Ireland, thank the Lord. But I’m hoping that will last. But you already had this culture war after Trump was elected in Brexit happened in Britain. There were all these divisions opening up and people weren’t listening to each other at all. But it’s gone into hyperdrive over Covid because the war against the unvaccinated and the so-called anti-vaxxers was astonishing. I’m not vaccinated myself, so I had to sit here and be excluded from the life of my society for six months for no obvious scientific reason at all. But even if there had been, even if the arguments for that had been legitimate, which in my view they weren’t, it was still done without question, with no discussion and with a complete media blackout on any dissenting views, no conversation. In some countries, obviously, it was worse. They had mandatory vaccination in other places. And it was so normalized that it seems to me now that wherever you are on that, whichever kind of side of this fake battle that you’ve decided to put yourself on, it’s increasingly possible for you to justify extreme measures against the guys that you’ve decided are the bad ones. And it’s this kind of extreme moralism on the one hand, where your enemies are not just wrong, but they’re evil. And then as we were saying, that’s coupled with the ability to use power, technological power especially, in a way that hasn’t been possible before. And then at the same time, you have this kind of development of the sort of the moral state in which the state is taking very clear lines on what is acceptable to say, what is not acceptable to say, what are moral positions, how you should behave at work, how you should relate to each other in a way that states have never really done before, at least to this degree. You combine all of that and we’re going into a situation where nobody’s listening to each other. Everybody wants a war, or at least a lot of people do, especially the ones on Twitter apparently. Social media sites have so much power and influence just for basically a bunch of people sounding off on the internet, which is what they were, what they are. The ability of those sites to effectively destroy people’s lives and reputation sometimes. It’s astonishing. So you’ve got all this stuff kind of converging at hyper speed. And it’s quite frightening. I don’t know where it ends because you ask yourself, how could you defuse this? And I don’t know how you can defuse it in the context of a culture that’s disintegrating, I think, and an economy that’s starting to fall apart with a kind of ecological background of disintegration as well. It’s difficult to know. There’s certainly no returning to whatever period you thought was normal, to put it that way. No, it doesn’t seem like that’s for sure. At this point, we’re not going back to anything and people have to stop thinking it’s going to return. Two years after the beginning of COVID, most of the countries still have emergency powers and they keep pushing back when they’re going to let that go. And why would they let that go? We let them have it for two years. So maybe they will for a little moment just to make people feel like they’re doing something. But the track is set, the pattern has been accepted. And so by now, it seems like only a very, very large crisis will be able to pull us back from what is happening. And so I don’t necessarily anticipate that with great joy, but it seems like it’s not going to return without some massive crisis, a very big one. It will sadly have to be very big for it to pull back.