https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Xmyud5O54Ds
I’m a high school teacher here in Christchurch. What are the best ways in which I can stand up against woke ideology without being cancelled? Only 35 people voted for that, but I think it was pretty popular by the sounds of it. Yeah, it does. It does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you know, by the time you find yourself in a situation like that, where that question becomes particularly germane, you probably already made a thousand mistakes. So you know, one of the things I observed at the University of Toronto when I worked there is I could see this woke nonsense emerging over decades. I really started to see it when I was at McGill University in the 90s with the encroachment of ethics committees on the research enterprise. And I could just see it just doing this like this year after year. And you see when I was a graduate student and I went to Harvard after I was at McGill and it was pretty under control there in the 90s when I was there. The psychology department there was the people there were pretty damn tough and they were in charge like the adults and a lot of them really were adults and they were smart people. We met some remarkable people there. And then I went to the University of Toronto and it wasn’t the same caliber as Harvard and unsurprisingly because Harvard’s a very high caliber university. And then I would observe my faculty colleagues retreating. The administration which has ballooned out of control over the last 30 years in universities just incrementally moved forward with increasingly intrusive demands. Each demand being rather small demand but the sum total of all the demands was not small. And I had many minor altercations with my colleagues at faculty meetings pointing out that this was happening and saying well are we going to say no. So the university would say well you have these fourth year seminars they only have 15 people in them. We have a staff shortage faculty shortage. Can you like double the size of the seminar. And my response to that was how about you hire some more faculty members and a few fewer people on the administrative side. How would that be for a solution. And then I tried to get data and the data question was how many administrators have you hired in the last 10 years compared to faculty members as the student population has grown. And I never did get that data from the University of Toronto but we know it broadly speaking for universities and the answer is there’s more students there’s no more faculty members like there’s more students than there were 20 years ago. There are no more faculty members and there’s way more people on the administrative front. And so but the answer to my colleagues was that my colleagues always delivered was well you know does it really make that much difference if we double the size of our seminars. And the answer is well yes if the seminars are valuable and the interpersonal time you’re spending with the students is necessary and the whole enterprise is credible because these students have worked for four years and they’re usually at the top of their academic heat by the time they get into fourth year seminars and they need the attention and now you’re going to dilute it by a factor of two. And that means that if the seminars were worthwhile to begin with then yes you’re compromising them. So yes actually it does matter if the whole enterprise matters. But then if I was rude enough to point that out the response was often well if we don’t do what the administration wants we won’t they won’t give us what we want. And my observation was and I used to say this have you noticed that they’re not giving you what you want anyway. And then that was usually when I was hushed up in a variety of ways and we moved to the next topic. And so I watched my colleagues take micro retreat five thousand times. And then by the end of that they were in a situation where they had to ask a question like well what do we do to not be canceled by the woke mob. And the answer was don’t let the woke mob form. Well it has formed it’s like yeah yeah yeah it has a little late now. Now you’re paying the price for all that avoidance which we just talked about in the first part of this discussion. And so you know you know when you quell what you have to say right and you experience an inner disquiet think I have something to say but I’m afraid to say it. It’s like fair enough. How afraid are you not to say it. People have complimented me on my bravery which is something I’m not particularly comfortable with because I don’t think it’s the right way of thinking about it’s not how I think about it. I think now I’m just afraid of the right thing. It’s not that I’m brave. I’m way more afraid of not saying what I have to say than I am of saying it. And the consequences of saying what I have had to say have been dramatic and sometimes very painful as well and also extremely rewarding both of those at the same time. But I know perfectly well what the consequence of not saying what you have to say is because I studied totalitarianism for 40 years. And in a totalitarian state no one ever says what they have to say. We have this theory about totalitarianism. It’s sort of the theory we have about Putin right now. It’s like there’s a lot of innocent Russians and there’s Putin. He’s the tyrant and all these innocent Russians are the victims of the tyrant and that’s a totalitarian state and there’s some truth in that because power structures get extraordinarily warped and punitive in totalitarian states but it’s completely preposterous model of totalitarianism. The reason that totalitarianism is total is because everyone in a totalitarian state lies about absolutely everything all the time to everyone. To themselves, to their wife or husband, to their children, to the other members of their family, to their friends, to their colleagues. It’s the old Russian joke. They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Yeah, ha ha. Ha ha. Till everyone starves. Very funny. And you think well does everybody really lie all the time in a totalitarian state and if you ask that question the first proper response to that is you wouldn’t ask that question if you knew anything at all about what you’re talking about because the evidence is pretty damn clear. In places like East Germany we went and visited, Tammy and I when we were in Berlin, we had this very interesting day. We went and visited the Museum of the Stasi, the secret police in East Germany and the Germans are pretty damn efficient when they go in for the whole secret police thing they do it in that hyper efficient German way and so we went to this complex of administrative buildings that was quite large and walked through these 1970s offices where the Stasi operated and it was a huge complex, huge prison-like complex and it was run by this guy who was a dissident in East Germany when he was 17 who was arrested and put in there for a year along with his girlfriend who they tortured in front of him and now he runs the whole museum so that was his life and this bureaucratic infrastructure, hyper developed in the Germanic way was only part of the Stasi network in Eastern Germany. There were huge buildings devoted to the secret police all over Germany. Why? One third of the Eastern Germans were government informers, one third. So that means if you had a family of six people, two of them were informing to the government and so what did that mean exactly? Well, it meant they listened to everything you said and then if you ever said anything that would be displeasing to everyone else who was lying 100% of the time which would really mean anything that was ever true even remotely then you could be reported for that and that wouldn’t go very well for you, let’s say. But also if you were the person who did the reporting, well then you’d get a reward. You know it was very common in the Soviet Union where there was a terrible shortage of apartments and people were crammed into these small living areas because how much space does someone need after all when there’s more important things to be concerned with and one of the most effective ways to get a new apartment would be just to denounce your neighbour down the hall and get them sent off to the gulag, kicking and screaming at three o’clock in the morning in front of their family, stripped naked so they couldn’t struggle to, you know, effectively and then be rewarded by the government granting you an apartment. That’s a lovely basis for social organisation and so totalitarian state is a state that’s in the grip of the lie. And so what that means for each of us is that every time you lie, every time you lie, this is the truth of the matter, every time you lie you’ve just allowed yourself to become possessed by the same tyrannical spirit that’s at the core of the totalitarian state. And you might think, no I’m lying, it’s like no, the spirit of the lie is making itself manifest within you and you are participating in your own possession. That’s what’s happening. And so I’m way more afraid of that than I am of the consequences of saying what I have to say. Okay, so now we might be practical about it. You might say, well now you’re a high school teacher and you’re in this situation where the woke mob is everywhere and if you now dare to utter something that’s necessarily true, right, because you’re so desperate that you can’t even retreat now because push has come to shove and you say the wrong thing and you’re going to get taken out. It’s like, yeah, you are. And you might say, well can you withstand that? And I would say, I wouldn’t recommend it exactly. I probably know 200 people who’ve been cancelled now. I had a good friend, colleague, very admirable man who, very emotionally stable, very wise person, well situated in his life and he got cancelled pretty decently and it broke him enough so he was in a psychiatric ward for like three weeks. And so that’s pretty much what’s coming your way if you get cancelled. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who was cancelled who didn’t respond to it about the same way that people respond to a near fatal illness. Now there are some exceptions, very few. Douglas Murray is an exception. You know about Douglas Murray perhaps. He’s got the spine for a fight and so when the mob comes for him, his attitude generally is just bring it on you pricks. And so Murray’s got away with that pretty well, you know, but he’s a singular person. There aren’t very many people like that and you know, so good for him. Back to this problem. So now you’re in a situation where if you do, if you have been driven by desperation to finally understand that you have to say what you have to say or pay the spiritual consequences, let’s say, but now it’s gone too far because there’s been 3000 micro retreats. You’re going to face something like cancellation, which is justice at the hands of a vengeful mob, let’s say. It’s going to be pretty damn brutal and it isn’t necessarily even obvious that you’ll survive. So that’s pretty rough choice. Now I dealt with people who are in that sort of situation in my clinical practice because they were people who’d been cornered by ideologically possessed bullies at work and tortured beyond their ability to tolerate it and needed to figure out how to free themselves. And that usually took like a year of strategizing. And so the first thing you got to ask yourself is, well, is your CV or your resume in order? If you get fired, could you find another job? If you get fired so hard that you can’t find a new job in your profession, which is what happens if you’re really effectively canceled, do you have the wherewithal and the resources to find gainful employment somewhere else? Because you might be in a situation where you think, well, I can’t say what I have to say because I have a family that’s dependent on me. And that’s a real concern. You can’t just say, well, shoot off your mouth anyways. It’s just like, well, you’ve got people depending on you. If you now casually utter a truth and you’re fired, well, maybe you’ve been successful in some trivial regard in relationship to standing up to the woke mob. But what about your wife or your husband and your kids? You can’t just put all that aside. So you got to start thinking strategically here. You’re in a war. A war is a sequence of battles. You better get your arms in order. And so the first thing I would do with my clients was, well, let’s get your CV in order, get your resume in order and start setting up the situation so you have alternatives. You know, when I got mobbed first, when I objected to Canada’s compelled speech legislation, my job as a university professor was seriously threatened. I got two letters from the human resources people. And I know how human resources people work. They send you a letter and tell you to stop. And that’s letter number one. And then they send you another letter and tell you to stop. And that’s letter number two. And then they send you letter number three. Then they’ve documented your misbehavior sufficiently and given you fair warning. And then they fire you. It’s just a procedure. I knew I’d seen this happen many times. I knew exactly what was going on. They got to two letters with me. And at the same time, for similar reasons, not precisely the same, but similar, my clinical practice was threatened. So I had three jobs. I was a university professor. I had a clinical practice and I had a personal business. And so I wasn’t that easy to take out because you had to take me out three ways to be successful because I could have used any of those to keep myself going. But two of them got blown out of the water. Now the third was, third actually boomed as a consequence. So that was kind of nice. So yeah, but I mean, but I had set myself up. You know, I’d set myself up so that I had options. You could ask yourself this because this is the question here is the specific exemplar of a more generic question, which is how do you not put yourself at the mercy of tyrannical forces because maybe you have a job, you know, and your boss is a tyrant because that happens and narcissistic psychopathic exploitative tyrant and you’re not rewarded when you do your job properly. Maybe you’re even punished and you’re subject to all sorts of arbitrary and intrusive behavior and you feel trapped. This happens to people all the time. And what do you do about that? It’s like, well, you do what you can to think through the problem strategically and provide yourself with options. And you can’t negotiate with someone unless you can say no to them and you can’t say no to them unless you have options. And so what I would do with my clients to begin with is like, okay, well, let’s take a serious look at your situation and pull back and think, look, it’s going to take a year to sort this out because you’ve got to get yourself ready. Is your resume in order? Well generally the answer to that from people is no. And people are embarrassed about their resumes. It has holes and gaps and you know, it’s a record of their failures as well as their successes and they probably haven’t updated it in five years and they’re embarrassed to look at the damn thing to begin with because then they have to face all their avoidance and failure across their life and they’re not confident in putting that forward. And so they hide it. They hide it in the filing system in their computer and never look at it. And so the first thing was, well, bring me your bloody resume. And often people wouldn’t do that for like three weeks because they were so too afraid. And then the task would be just go onto your computer, find the folder with your resume in it, open it up and look at your resume. Don’t fix it. Don’t adjust it. Just gaze at it. And usually if I could get people to do that, then they would start to, that was looking the predator in the eye, then they would start to have enough courage to maybe start going through it line by line. We’d get their resume polished up and polished up didn’t mean falsified. It meant I’d look at it and think, look, well, how are you going to justify this gap in your employment? How are you going to justify this gap in your employment history if you were called on it? And if the answer was the person didn’t know how to justify it, then we had to figure out what they might have to do to fix it so that they had a coherent story. Take a university course. That might be part of it. Then at least you can tell the person if they point to a hole in your education, says, well, I know that hole is there and here’s the steps I’m taking to rectify it, which is pretty good. That’s the sort of response that would fill an employer with confidence if they had any sense. And so, and then we, well, then people would be worried. They say, well, I can’t handle the rejection, you know, because you send out 50 resumes and you’re bloody fortunate to get one interview out of that. That’s about the right ratio, generally speaking. And so that’s a good thing just to know that’s baseline. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It means that most job postings are fictitious, right? Because jobs are posted that have already been filled, but they have to post them for legal reasons. Jobs are posted because a company wants to keep a steady flow of resumes coming in, in case they do need someone and on and on. And then, you know, even if you do happen to have the qualifications, there’s probably 10 other people that also have the qualifications and your resume has to align with the judgment of the person making the decision that day. It’s pretty unlikely. And so you’re going to get rejected like 99% of the time. And so you need to know that. Maybe you get one interview for 50 job submissions and don’t take it personally. And so I would prepare people for that. And then, you know, they say, well, I just can’t tolerate the idea of sending out 100 resumes. Say, well, then send out five a day or 10 a day or one a day, whatever you think you can manage. And then they’d say, well, you know, I’m not very good in interviews. So I go, OK, well, that’s another complicating problem. So then we’d practice interviews. You know, I’d grill them about their lives and watch their eye contact and how they introduced themselves and torture them about inadequacies in their stories and get them to the point where, you know, they had a confident and compelling and honest story to tell. And that’s all part of that strategy. It’s not like telling the truth is easy. It’s difficult. You want to stand up to the woke mob? It’s get your act together. Because it’s not easy, right? Because you’re seeing the incursion of a of a serpentine and multidimensional bureaucratic tyranny that works behind the scenes and uses reputation, savaging and gossip and innuendo to destroy reputation. It’s a hell of a threat. And you’re going to have to put yourself together well enough to be able to withstand that. But if you do, it’ll be good for you because it’ll force you to put yourself together. It’ll force you to become the sort of person who can say no. And you can say no to someone if you have options. And no has to mean, I know what no means. People never like to talk about what no means. If you keep doing that, something you do not like will happen to you with 100% certainty. That’s what no means. And you have to be, that’s what no means when you say it to children. There’s a brutal element to that. People don’t even like to think that. It’s like, well, what the hell do you think no means? If you mean it. No means I can take more torture from you than you’re willing to dish out. So it means other things. Especially if you’re two years old. Yeah. So you have to sit down, whoever asked this question. You have to sit down. You have to ask yourself, OK, what is it that I want to say? And that’s going to be a pretty terrifying internal meditation. And it’s a form of prayer and it’s the invitation to a revelation. It’s a form of prayer because it’s predicated on humility. It’s like, OK, I’m not happy with this situation. Something’s gone really wrong at work. There’s something I need to say. What is it that I need to say? It has to be an honest question. You have to really want the answer. And you’ll figure it out. You can start playing with it. And then you want to formulate, this is what I have to say. And then you might have to figure out why. Because you have to be strategic about these things. Why do I need to say that? Boy, that’s a complicated question. Well, I’m not pleased with the way I’m being required to act at work. That’s pretty vague. What exactly are you not pleased about? What exactly have you been called upon to do that’s making you resentful and taking away your motivation? What exactly would you have to say or do to counteract that? That might require 100 hours of thinking and 20 pages of writing to get that straight. And then you might ask yourself, OK, well, that’s the problem. That’s what I want to say. This is what I’ll have to do to put myself in a position so that I have the ability and courage to say it. And then that’s what you have to do. And you might think, well, that’s real difficult. I used to talk to my clients. They would talk to me about being miserable at work. And then we would walk through what they would have to do in order to change. And they’d say, well, I don’t want to do that, which is why they were avoiding it to begin with. Or do I have to do that? Or I’m not sure I can do that. It’s like, fair enough. It’s no bloody wonder you’re terrified of it and avoiding it for obvious reasons. You don’t know how to conduct yourself well in an interview. You’re embarrassed about your CV, and that means your whole history. You don’t know how to stand up to the woke mob. You’ve compromised yourself. You’re in a situation where other people are dependent on you. You have reasons to be afraid. They’re real. But here’s something else to be afraid about. You’re 35. You don’t like your job. It’s dead end. You’re not motivated. You’re bitter. You’re resentful. You’re 35. You’re still, or 50. I don’t care, but whatever. Doesn’t matter, because the story will work out the same way. It’s like, and so you’re too afraid to change. So you’re not going to change. Well, that’s a stupid theory. Because yeah, you’re going to change. You’re going to get older. And if you’re already bitter and resentful and you don’t change, you’re just going to get worse. And in 10 years, you’re going to be in the same situation. Except it won’t be the same, because you’ll be 10 years older. And you’ll be 10 years more bitter. And you’ll be 10 years smaller. And the tyrants will be 10 years more powerful. And so you should just sit and think about that for about a week. And you should decide whether you’re more afraid of changing or more afraid of not changing. And so I think part of the reason that I’m disinclined to shy away from conflict when it’s necessary, even though I hate conflict, is because I’m way more afraid of not solving the problem right now than I am of the pain that would be necessary to make the situation clear. And that’s because I look ahead and I think, what’s it going to be like if we don’t solve this problem? It’s going to be just like it is now, except the problem’s going to be worse and I’m going to be weaker. I’m already disinclined to solve it. And so how disinclined am I going to be to solve it when it’s worse and I’m weaker? And that’s this, right? And what’s the bottom of this? Well, that was what Dante was trying to figure out when he wrote the Inferno. And you might think, well, I don’t believe in that. It’s like, well, that’s just because you don’t know what you need to know. It’s an intractable reality that you can spiral downhill. And you should be afraid of that. More afraid of that than you’re afraid of saying what you have to say. Because the alternative to saying what you have to say is a descent into hell. And it’s the kind of descent into hell that you will undertake and pull people along with you. And you know, you think, well, how do things go from bad to worse? How does a situation like Nazi Germany arise? Or how does a situation like Stalinist Soviet Union arise? Or Maoist China, all these catastrophes of history? Well, that’s how it arises. People spiral downhill and they take everyone with them. And so that’s a bad idea unless that’s what you want. I wouldn’t recommend it. So you have a serious problem, whoever asked this question, right? Because the question is, how do you stand up to the, how do you stand up to a distributed tyranny? It’s like, you better get your act together because you’ve got a war on your hands and you don’t want to lose.