https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6IHNRlrMC9E
We have to live with each other. The left wingers have to live with the Trump voters and the Trump voters have to live with the identity politics types. And we have good solid institutions. And I think we need in the next coming months to put out our hands to those who oppose us, knowing full well that we might be burnt in the attempt, but to do it nonetheless and to keep doing it because all the alternatives are much worse unless you want to see things burned. And most people are moderate and reasonable. Yes, and we’ll feel deep embarrassment at some point if they allow their own political side to run to its extremes. They will, I think this about, I’m gonna get stuck on him again, but I’ll be very quick here. I think this about what has happened in recent weeks on the Republican right. There will be and should be some embarrassment that a president, a Republican president was able to stand in front of a very large crowd, mainly comprising patriots, and to say words that were not incitement, direct incitement, but were real fighting talk and raise the question of exactly what it is he thought the crowd should do. You know, and I think everyone- No, he didn’t ever wanna make that too clear even to himself, I think. I read the speech carefully. Yes, same here. It’s here’s what I think, this is what I would suggest you do if you were true patriots. Right, and I think this is a reckless, reckless speech. And I think that people should have the decency on any and all political sides to say that recklessness, you don’t have to go all the way to incitement, that reckless speech you’ve gotta be careful with, and you’ve gotta try to limit it, and you’ve gotta try to call it out where you can and not just enjoy it, because at some point it will lead to something which will humiliate you and humiliate your side and much, much more. It will make you feel shame, and you wanna try to avoid that. So in the man’s of crowds, one of the things, as you say, I refer to is, is this, and I write a chapter on, is the importance of forgiveness. And it’s quite easy when you’re caught up, as you well know, and you’re caught up in the sort of day-to-day fights that are going on and the endless information and new examples and new lows that are always being hit. It’s quite easy to lose sight of the deep underlying answers to some of our present formers. But I’m absolutely persuaded that one of them lies in forgiveness. And one of the reasons I go there is obviously, we live in this society and the social media has exacerbated it beyond all previous human belief. We live in societies which are very eager to demonstrate us and them instincts without having to leave your bed. You know, you can shame somebody, you can try to destroy them, you can do your bit to pick up on something somebody said or once said and go for them and pummel them and destroy them and everything. Every future they’ve got, you can do that. But you should also know how dangerous it is. And my hope has always been that the more people saw this, the more they would step back from this manner of living. But the thing that struck me and made me write about the forgiveness thing in particular actually was something that Hannah Arendt, perhaps it isn’t a thing I think over highly of actually, all sorts of criticisms of her like a lot of people have, but there’s a lecture that Hannah Arendt delivered in the 50s, I happened to read a few years ago and just made an enormous impression on it. Because Arendt says in this lecture something I think will be highly pertinent to a lot of people listening which is that we’ve always as human beings had a one worry in particular, which is how do we act in the world? How do we act in the world? How do we put one’s foot in front of the other? How do we put one word in front of another? And say the next one and decide what our actions should be day to day, nevermind year to year. And we all have the terror of action and beyond people in particular have it because they haven’t tried it out enough. They haven’t yet made their mistakes and you’ve got to make your mistakes in order to find anything else to lose some of the terror of the question of action in the world. But Hannah Arendt says something so interesting in this lecture, she says, she says as human beings, we only ever really found one mechanism to make the horror of acting in the world less horrific. And that was the mechanism that we know as forgiveness, which in religious terms you can add to is also the possibility of redemption, which perhaps in a highly secularized society we ought to also think about more, not just forgiveness, but redemption. And I say that this is therefore something that we should all be trying to exercise in our lives because we sure as hell know that we as individuals do not want to ourselves be treated without ever having forgiveness demonstrated to us by other people towards us. We don’t want to live in a situation where when we want slip, if we once wear the wrong thing or make the wrong move or make the wrong move on someone else or say the wrong thing, we don’t want to live in the world where we at any moment can destroy ourselves catastrophically and unmendably. We don’t want to live in that world ourselves. So why would we expect other people to live in that world or to want to live in that world? And the mechanism therefore that we all have to in our political and non-political lives, because politics isn’t, that well isn’t everything, but in our political and non-political lives, we have to work at finding ways to forgive. And there’s a lot to say about this, but this seems to me to be one of the absolute keys in our time that we all need to work on. How can I forgive a person who has done a wrong to me? How can I allow somebody else who may have made a mistake to make up for it? To live again. To live again. It’s not the same thing as you well know. I mean, it’s not the same thing as being willfully naive. It’s not about just giving people a second time. The nature of the apology matters deeply as well, of course. The nature of the seeking for redemption or the seeking for forgiveness matters. We know that you can’t just sort of say, oh, well, yeah, sorry about that and move on, that it has to be deep and deeply meant. But when a feeling of that is deeply meant and is deeply offered, it should not be retributively and deliberately, willfully smashed away in order to win a short-term political or other point.