https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=d5938BeDBpc
One of the things I felt when reading a book was that, you know, like I, I, because I think you’re coming from a perspective of psychoanalysis and it rings very, the language rings true and the analysis rings true. The, what I, where I feel, one question I was keen to bring to you is when you talked about skateboarders in the, so I think it’s the last but one chapter and that spirit of a young people. Yeah. Courage and a willingness to try dangerous things and to push forward. I wonder how that sits with the idea of a, an earlier passage in the book where you talk about the gratitude that we should feel for, you know, having time to read a book and the ability to read a book and sort of respect for the establishments and systems that have been set up from which we all benefit. You know, because when I, you know, I, I could find it difficult to dispute your opinion about sort of a churlish, what would have been in the lexicon of the day, socialist, social justice warriors and that kind of somewhat rootless, unresearched rage. You know, I identify what you’re saying there. People that can’t keep their bedrooms tidy, you would be careful before you let them organise an economic system. But like, but similarly, like, you know, where is change going to come from? Who are, who is going to challenge tyranny? Yeah. Is it going to be? Those are the sorts of twin forces that we have to contend with across the political spectrum. So I could run through something quickly to put the things that you just, that you just brought up in, in perspective, let’s say. Okay, so the first thing is, is that hierarchies, if you’re going to value some things more than others, then hierarchies are inevitable. And you have to value some things more than others, or you don’t have anything valuable. Beauty or strength or something. Well, or confidence or sure, whatever, whatever it happens to be, the ability to play the flute, right? It doesn’t matter what it is. Tie on my list. Well, what, what, you know, obviously, if you value music, then you’re going to value some musicians more than others, because some are better. So as and so you have to value things in order to move forward in life, and you have to value things in order to have something valuable to produce. But if you play out the value in a social landscape, you’re going to produce a hierarchy. And the problem with producing a hierarchy is that a small number of people are going to be more successful than the majority, and a very large number of people aren’t going to be successful at all at that particular thing. It’s inevitable. So, okay, now, so so you say, well, we have to put up with that, because we need to pursue things of value. Okay, fine. So that’s the right wing perspective is that the hierarchies are justifiable and necessary. Now, the left wing perspective is Yeah, but wait a minute. The problem with hierarchies is that people stack up at the bottom and that they tilt towards tyranny across time. And that’s also true. And so you need that dialectic in society between the right wing that says, you know, we need the hierarchies and they’re useful and you should be grateful for them. And they structure you and give you form and provide value. And the left that says Yeah, but they exclude people and people stack up at the bottom. And that’s dangerous to the hierarchy itself. And it means that people might not have opportunity. And you have to say yes to that. The problem comes and this is the situation we’re in right now, where the radical leftists and this is mostly a problem that really permeates the universities. The radical leftists say, Yeah, but all hierarchies are just tyrannical power. It’s like, oh, no, they’re not. Hierarchies are based on competence in a functioning society and mostly our society functions. So you need you can’t go that far. Now, that doesn’t mean that that hierarchies don’t tilt towards self-interest and tyranny across time. But that’s a bad thing. It’s even a bad thing from the conservative perspective. So well, so there’s room for the left. There’s room for the left because the poor will always be with us. That’s the reason that there’s room for the left and that the dispossessed need a voice, not least because there are talented people among the dispossessed. And if they’re stuck at zero, everyone suffers because we don’t have access to their talents. It’s bad use of resources. But on the right, it’s like, no, we need the damn value hierarchies. We need to be grateful for our traditions and our structures because they they stop us from degenerating into chaos. Also, across our society, numerous hierarchies emerge. And at some point, decisions are being made about which thing, you know, is it being a brilliant flautist or brilliant at tennis or brilliant at owning land or controlling energy resources or dominating financial systems? Which are the hierarchies that are most important? And also, the way that resources are designated and challenging those hierarchies seems to become, well, almost impossible. When I was leaving the hospital, the brilliant hospital that’s been taking care of my mother recently, I sort of like, you know, when at the level of crisis and trauma and tragedy, they are excellent. They’ve got the sort of the best doctors, the guy Martin Griffith that operated on her bowel. He’s like a fantastic surgeon. It’s in fact him that Trump was quoting when he talks about European hospitals with blood spattered floors from knife crime. It was a sort of a mangling of a quote that this Martin Griffith had given. And then sort of like I step outside, like I’m driving along Whitechapel Road and there are electronic advertising boards and it that, you know, that require energy to tell me to eat, you know, sort of McDonald’s or Kit Kats or whatever. And there’s so much poverty on that street. There always has been in that part of East London, terrible poverty. And I feel moments, there are moments when I helicopter out to the macro, a perspective that no individual can long hold, a weight that can’t be long born. But in that moment, I think, why is this hospital struggling for resources when we can afford to run electronic adverts for McDonald’s? Who gets to decide how collectively and individually do we determine where resources and where power, both in terms of energy, but also in terms of human power, end up? How are these decisions made? And as you say, among the dispossessed, there are great resources, great talent. One would imagine if the research were possible to the exact same degree as there is power and talent among the possessed, because it’s normally an accident of birth that decrees. And reading about your early life in Canada, in a blue collar community and the sort of the mental health issues and the anger and agitation that grows there. So much of that is about resources, the dispossession of the native people of that area, the mental health issues of your friend, Chris. Like for me, we that are rising through these hierarchies, we that have experiences of both sides of that line, well, we are now challenging this evolutionary force. We are now in a position to talk about these hierarchies, how they’re ordered and how they’re organized and whether there is room for negotiation. Well, it’s up to us to do that. We must, mustn’t we? Well, don’t you think there’s a risk in conservatism of saying, well, this is how the cards have fallen? And of course there is. That is the risk in conservatism. So how do we confront that? Well, the risk is that the hierarchies ossify and turn to stone and then there’s no mobility. And the idea that things can turn to stone and they become tyrannical is an extraordinarily old idea. For example, in the story of Exodus, the story of Moses, so the Egyptians are portrayed in that story as tyrannical conservatives, essentially. Right. And they’re masters of stone. And Moses is a master of water and water is the thing that dissolves. And so that drama is being played out in these stories that are thousands of years old. And in the Egyptian story, the ancient Egyptian story of Osiris and Horus, Osiris is the old king who becomes too rigid. And what happens to him is that he’s dismembered by evil. That’s the consequence. And so even the Egyptians long ago knew that the danger of hierarchies is they become static and corrupt and tyrannical. And so part of what we do in our ongoing political dialogue and when it’s genuine dialogue is to say, well, look, are these do these systems have it? We need them. They’re not avoidable. But do they are they functioning properly? Are they loose enough so that people can move? Are they are they serving the broader good or have they degenerated into something that’s too tyrannical? Now, you know, you you kind of pointed to both of those in the way you formulated that question, because you said, look, well, my mom was in the hospital and she needed care. And so and I found a surgeon who was an excellent surgeon. And so so what you did there basically was take a bow to the you bowed before the functional hierarchy of the hospital and said, look, the greatest surgeon actually rose to the throne. And thank God for that, because otherwise my mother would be dead. It’s like, yes, that’s a competency hierarchy. And it could be contaminated by tyranny, in which case it would be the brother of some powerful person who ended up with a surgical position. Right. And then everyone dies. And that does happen in many, many cultures where nepotism or connections define your position on every axis. But then you said, well, but I went out of the hospital and I was driving down the road and I saw what appeared to be a misallocation of resources. And what we have to do about that is have have a discussion about it constantly. It’s like, are we allocating resources to the appropriate place?