Leading with Integrity ｜ Australia's John Anderson ｜ EP 313 (h9hzAGHa-5s)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=h9hzAGHa-5s

I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible, a Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. If democratically people want to address this issue, that is their right. But secondly, you must do so on an informed basis, and you must look for high quality policy, and you won’t get that without a good debate. And if you ask me to make a trade between saving the planet tonight on a whim and feeding people, I’m sorry, I’m going with feeding people. You’ve got to have conviction, you’ve got to be guided by the data, you’ve got to actually think facts matter, taking people with you matters. The fundamental spirit that has imbued the West is the only spirit that has ever actually lifted people who are oppressed out of their oppression. And so what that means is this radical critique that’s been aimed at Western culture in the name of freedom for oppression is actually attacking the very spirit that has lifted people out of oppression to the degree that that’s been the case. If there’s no intrinsic worth that’s divine in some sense, so sacred, then why can’t I just do with you what I want if I have the power? But I don’t see how you can make a moral case that if I can do it, I shouldn’t. If you’re going to make the moral case, you have to make the assumption that each person in some sense is created in the image of what is sacred and you can’t violate that regardless of apparent evidence for hierarchical difference. Hello, everyone. I’m just concluding my tour in New Zealand and Australia with a wrap up discussion with Mr. John Anderson. And so I’m looking forward to that. And I hope you all find it valuable. The Honorable John Anderson, AC FTSE, spent 19 years in the Australian Parliament. This included six years as Deputy Prime Minister as a member of the reformist government led by John Howard. Amongst other step changing initiatives, this government oversaw enormous economic reform, including taxation modernization and the maintenance of a string of miraculous budget surpluses, which resulted in leaving a cash surplus on leaving office in 2007. Since then, John has remained active in public commentary, various advisory bodies and in the not-for-profit sector. He’s been a sought after speaker in both Australia and abroad. In recent years, he’s hosted a successful YouTube and podcast interview series. I’ve been on that a couple of times, the preeminent one of its kind in Australia. He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2022, the nation’s highest civic honour for his various services to the community. On leaving politics, Anderson, known for his character in Christian faith, was saluted by figures on both sides with praise. The then Prime Minister John Howard said, I’ve not met a person with greater integrity in public life. I’m looking very much forward to talking to John for YouTube today and then also following that up, as I frequently do with an additional half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform, walking through his bio. And thanks to the Daily Wire types for facilitating these conversations. Welcome to all of you who are watching and listening. So, Mr Anderson, I thought we could start talking by discussing something that you accomplished, along with other members of your government, several years ago. You managed to run a sequence of balanced budgets and to also pay down a substantial part or all of Australia’s debt in a relatively short period of time. All of Australia’s federal debt. All of Australia’s federal debt. And left money in the bank. And left money in the bank. OK, and so what years over did that, over what years did that take place? Began in 1996. And the Future Fund with surpluses and sales from, revenue sales from a couple of assets, would then put aside as a wealth fund, if you like, for the future. In from memory about 2006, 2007, just in time for the Great Financial Crisis. So Australia went into the Great Financial Crisis with no debt, money in the bank, at a federal government level. OK, so why don’t we delve a little bit into exactly what that means? Because there’s a bunch of mysteries there. The first mystery is, I suppose, why that hadn’t happened before. Then the second mystery is, how did you possibly manage it? And the third mystery is, given that it was possible, and that you demonstrated it was possible, why did that stop happening? And why did more countries around the world also not do the same thing? So let’s start with the first one, which was, why did the governments prior to the one that you were integrally involved in, find it necessary to run at a deficit and rack up a tremendous debt? Well, I think probably a lot of it was born with the idea of Keynesian economics, that in flat times, governments spend more money to help, if you like, smooth out the highs and the lows, and then they withdraw and repay that debt in the good times, but they never do. Right, right. So the idea was to smooth out the variability in the so-called business cycle. That’s part of it. I think that’s a good thing to do, as long as you have the discipline to start putting money back into the system when you’re trading well, the economy’s strong, taxation revenues are flowing in, and that’s what countries have not done. It’s also a good thing to do if you presume that you can, by fiat, in some sense reduce that kind of variability. And that’s not self-evident, right, because most systems that are reasonably stable have to oscillate to some degree, and you might think it would be a good idea to flatten out the oscillations. It is a good idea. Well, if you can do it. But the key is to do it in the better times. Discipline yourself to prepare for the next downturn. And one of the reasons that the whole of the West and beyond the West, in my view, is in such a dangerous place today is that we haven’t done that. We’ve got spending, spending, spending. Right, so the theory’s predicated on the notion that you’re going to do both. But the reality is that it’s very unlikely that governments will do more than one. Yeah. Right. And so why had they not done it in Australia? To be fair, they had been. The previous government deserved some credit. They’d done a lot of good things. They’d floated the dollar. They’d started on making the place more productive, better industrial relations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But they had left a rapidly building set of deficits and a ballooning debt. By today’s standards, I’ve got to tell you, compared to the sort of money that is owed as a percentage of GDP around the world, China being a horrendous Britain, America, France, we saw Greece, they got to 175% debt to GDP ratio. And we saw what that looked like, a first world country where kids went to school hungry, literally, because their parents couldn’t put food in the refrigerator and there was no longer a government program to put it there. These things can happen. Italy went very, very close to the same. We should clarify for everybody that’s watching and listening the distinction between deficit and debt. And so a deficit is overspending, generally calculated on a yearly level. Yeah, that’s right. And then the debt is the cumulative consequence of the deficits. And so to attack the deficit, then each year the government doesn’t spend more than it brings in. And to pay off the debt means that the cumulative consequences of the deficit are also eradicated. And so the government you were involved with demonstrated that this was possible. And so how did you do that? I’m very interested in the mechanics. So how did you analyze what needed to be reduced, let’s say, or what revenues needed to be increased? How did you prioritize the spending? And how did you bring that economic overspending under control without simultaneously dooming yourself to substantive, let’s say, unpopularity? Well, there was plenty of that. But let me just backtrack a little bit. And I should pay some credit here. When we first met together, the first formal meeting as a new government, having been sworn in only a few days, about a week after winning the election in 1996, March 1996, we met for the first time. And the Prime Minister, who was a man of conviction, you’ve got to start with conviction. You’ve got to think these things matter. You’re there to make a difference. You’re not there just to satiate the latest political fad and to smooth over people’s feelings. You’ve got to actually believe in something. But he said, we need to recognize this is intergenerationally unfair. And we need to start to do something about winding back these deficits. And then after that came the issue of, well, here’s the opportunity not just to pay down the debt, but maybe to get rid of it altogether. And then we should say the Treasurer of the Day, Peter Costello, was very single-minded, ably backed by a finance minister who’d been a state Premier, John Fay. And we had the Health Minister, we had the Junior Treasurer and me. And I, in theory, was asked by the Prime Minister to help with the economic portfolios because I had agriculture and mining in my brief. So conviction, believing in something was important. In today’s world, we sometimes lose sight of the Judeo-Christian beliefs that built our society. This is why it is so important to study scripture and develop a dedicated prayer life. There’s no better way to do that than with Hallow. Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the US and the number one Catholic app in the world. It’s filled with studies, meditations and reflections, including the number one Christian podcast, The Bible in a Year. Download Hallow today and try their Advent Pray 25 challenge, a 25-day journey through Bible stories from both the Old and New Testament leading up to the birth of Jesus. These meditations are led by cast members from the largest Christian streaming series in history, The Chosen. Advent Pray 25 will help grow your understanding of mankind and develop a disciplined prayer habit during a season when our discipline is put to the test. Download Hallow for three months completely free and experience a personal development that can come from regular prayer, meditation and reflection on who the Bible calls us to be. Get Hallow for free at Hallow.com slash Jordan. That’s Hallow.com slash Jordan. Give yourself the gift of peace, calm and discipline this Christmas. Go to Hallow.com slash Jordan today. The second thing I would say is that teamwork is important because the thing you just alluded to, how do you not get slaughtered? Mm-hmm. You’ve got to tell people, you know, people would speculate, oh, they’re going to do this, they’re going to do that, they’re going to take something else away. And the minute someone had broken ranks and said, oh, yeah, look out, you’d better go out and protest on such and such an issue, it would have destroyed the process because people were very wary. Everyone agrees in principle, oh, this is great, they’re going to be economically responsible, but what happens if they inflict some pain on me? Right, right. And in this day when governments are, I’ll say it, less and less coherent, less and less convicted of anything. They don’t have philosophical underpinnings. They’re into ad hocery and managerialism and opportunism. And opinion polls. And opinion polls. And then you combine those with, you know, a strong sense of activism, a reluctance in the day of identity politics to identify the national interest as opposed to sexual interests, and the explosive cocktail becomes then with social media. You know, you can mount a campaign against almost any government program. So here’s the staggering thing. I mean, we did that side of it. Then we did a major tax reform. Neither were popular, but we got away with it. There have been no major reforms in this country, to my way of thinking, that have involved great difficulty and great persuasion for over 20 years. So why not, so let’s play devil’s advocate. Why not run a deficit and burden the future with today’s debt if you can thereby generate more revenue to help people who are in trouble? What’s the downside to that? Well, it’s a very good question. And it really needs to be split into two. Some government expenditures can be reasonably described as investing in the future and valuable for our children and our grandchildren. The obvious ones would be high quality education, research, and we know that even if it’s debt financed, very high quality infrastructure, including communications and so forth, can help build wealth. But many other forms of government expenditure, in fact most of them, are entitlement driven. And if you let them get out of hand, so you legislate that if something unfortunate happens to you, it might be a very desirable and compassionate thing to do, but you’re entitled to X, Y, and Z benefits, and then you get mission creep and more and more people are led into the net, and you’re spending more and more on an entitlement basis locked into the law of the land, can only be undone by the parliament, and the parliament won’t play ball because the opposition’s got the numbers in the other house, or whatever, then you can get into a spiral that’s really difficult. And you combine that now with the information age and social media, and a lack of willingness to clearly focus on the national interest. And it’s really hard. I don’t make light at all of the fact that modern governments, even though I can be critical of their lack of philosophical underpinnings, don’t do much about it in one way because we electors, we are in danger, Jordan, I’m sorry to say this, but I’ll give you my view. In the West, we are in danger of turning our countries into places that can’t be properly governed. I know that’s a tough thing to say. And I’m not saying we’re there, but I’m saying I think we’re close. We could also point out, I suppose, that the evidence that relatively unconstrained government spending produces inflation seems to be incortravertible. And then we might want to discuss exactly what inflation does to people. So inflation makes each unit of currency purchase less units of value. Too much money charging too few goods is a neutral. Exactly. And then you might say, well, who does that punish? And the answer is, well, inflation punishes people who’ve been wise enough to forestall gratification. So if you’re somebody who has been sensible and taken the medium to long-term into account, and you’ve saved money, so accrued wealth, let’s say, and the sort of wealth that enables you to have a house and air conditioning and some opportunities for your kids, we would generally regard that as a social good, because we hope that people who are not profligate and impulsive and who put a little aside for the future, for future contingencies, so that they can take care of themselves and others, those people should be valued. And if you inflate the currency by overspending, then those are the people who are preferentially punished. Because the people who spent all their money, well, they don’t have any money. Inflation only affects them tangentially, but it destroys the wealth of the very people who’s careful and conscientious striving have produced wealth to begin with. And that seems inevitable. I mean, we’ve already seen that inflation break out across the Western world to quite a remarkable degree, even a degree that was unforeseen by the central banks who claimed that they had it under control. I don’t know what inflation is running out in Australia, but I know in Canada, I think on the food front, it’s about 8% right now. And on the energy front in Europe, it’s far higher than that. That’s not all because of government overspending, but it’s certainly contributing to that. So you punish, inflation punishes exactly the people who should be being rewarded by taking a medium to long-term view. And it differentially benefits people who were impulsive and profligate in their spending. And so that seems like bad social policy, as far as I can tell. I agree with all of what you’ve said, but I think it’s really important to understand that actually we’ve done something worse than that. Because what happened was that Australia went into the great financial crisis. I don’t know whether you use that term internationally, but that’s what we call it here. The meltdown, Lehman Brothers, a real story about the link between culture and good policy outcomes. That one was because they didn’t break the law, but by gee, they broke the spirit of everything that was decent. And these are important things. Where’s personal responsibility? Where’s decency? Where’s doing the right thing in banking more important than making an instant bob? But leave that aside. Most countries actually were starting to worry about their debt to GDP ratios in the buildup to the great financial crisis. They were starting to try to do something about it. Take a line through it. It was around 35, 45, 50 per cent in a lot of Western countries. And they were saying, this is getting, you know, need to wind it back, prepare for a rainy day. These are good times. They would have right to do so. Then the Lehman Brothers, you know, unsound money everywhere, exposed all over the place at one side. The system nearly collapsed at one stage. So governments did extraordinary things. The government of America bought General Motors and Chrysler from memory. I don’t think they bought Ford. Governments everywhere bailed banks out. Insurance companies. All that debt went onto the public sector balance sheet. You know, private citizens. Suddenly owned, in theory, owned General Motors. What do you call that? Privatising profit and socialising risk? Well, I’m an Australian farmer. We sometimes get accused of wanting to do that here. But I would push back against the charge that all farmers are guilty of it. But that’s right. However, what then followed was that governments looking at this mountain of debt say, what do we do now? Because the discipline, you asked, let’s come back to how we did it. Of tough decisions. There was no stomach for it. Matthew Paris wrote, you know, at the time, face it, we’re broke. You know, we’ve overdone it. We’re all going to have to live much lower living standards because none of us have got the stomach, you know, to do the hard work to wind back this debt that’s going to be so bad for our kids. We’re just going to have to. But what governments did then is they looked for inflation because inflation and makes the debts smaller. And they looked for it and they pumped money into everything. We had very low interest rates for an incredible period of time. We pursued endlessly quantitative easing, which is basically printing money in a fancy way. It’s always ended in tears. Think Weimar, Germany. And people kept saying, where’s the inflation? We want the inflation to devalue the government debts to get it under control so that we don’t have to cripple people with taxation. But the inflation was there. It was in asset prices. Housing prices. And who did that hurt? Where’s the social impact of that? It’s in housing prices, especially for young people in this country. It really, really worries me. When I left school, I’m a bit older than you, Jordan. I might not look it, but I am. And when I left school in the mid-70s, an average Australian house cost four times the average annual earnings today. It’s 11 times. And in Sydney and Melbourne, it’s more like 13 times. Now, that impacts a lot of things. Social cohesion, I would argue, it impacts. Perhaps more seriously and related is family formation. In a time when 92 countries in the world have collapsing populations, and we haven’t realised how difficult that’s going to be to handle. So I think it’s a very dangerous story all around. And again, I say to you, I actually have a lot of sympathy for modern politicians. I could say to them, you’ve lost your philosophical heart. Where are the great strands of thinking through which you used to look through to see, will this policy advance or take backwards my dream of what the country ought to be? So I could be harsh at that level. But at the other level, I’d say, we’ve not been prepared to delay gratification, to make tough choices to say, yeah, look, we want to elect a government that’ll do some hard things for our kids’ sake to get the whole show back on the road. And here in this country, we’ve had a minerals boom. We’re back in debt. Debt to GDP ratio now is creeping out over time. It will get out to around 40 per cent on current projections. 40 per cent is the level at which those European and American countries started to lose control at the time of the GFC. This stuff matters. And as interest rates rise, more and more taxpayers’ money is just going into servicing the debt. So it’s not buying hospitals or looking after schools or providing reparations to countries for climate change damage. All of those things, that’s all going to be debt financed from now on. And who’s going to pay that debt? Men, is it time to stop mindless scrolling? Time to finally gain that higher quality of life you know you’re missing out on? If this sounds familiar, then on January 9th, join thousands of men all over the world to embark on a 90-day journey together in search of a better life. It’s called Exodus 90, and it was built to help men enjoy the freedom of becoming who they were truly made to be. Exodus 90 guides you in removing the attachments that are holding you back from a better life. And it actually works. Independent research shows that Exodus 90 men report considerable shifts after the first 90 days, including stronger satisfaction rates in their marriages, more meaningful prayer lives and dramatic decreases in time spent on their phones. For the past seven years, Exodus has helped more than 60,000 men build a roadmap for living with virtue in a culture that offers far too many paths to self-destruction. Is it time for your Exodus? We start January 9th. Find resources to prepare for Exodus at Exodus90.com slash Jordan. That’s Exodus90.com slash Jordan. So what did you do to bring down the deficit and to pay off the debt that was hard? And what worked well? I’m very interested in the actual mechanics. How did you decide where savings could be obtained? How did you do the analysis? And where were the major savings garnered? And how much of that was a consequence of tax increase as well? No tax increase. We promised not to. And we kept to it. I mean, look, there are a few little things like airport charges and passport levies and so forth that we adjusted, but there were no tax increases worthy of the name. We said we wouldn’t. We relaxed no tax government. We committed to that. And we delivered. And the only answer really to your question at the headline level is it was incredibly hard work. And those five people with their helpers, I was one of them, and I don’t want to take all the credit. I mean, this was the Prime Minister saying, this is what we’re going to do. This is a very capable man called Peter Costello and the little team around him and the rest of us working ridiculous hours. Was that his primary goal and your primary goal was to… In government? Yeah. We saw it as a vital part of what we were doing. Now, industrial relations reform, a more productive economy. For me, rural recovery because it was in a very bad way at the time. That was very important. And I think it’s fair to say that we had a deep commitment to tax reform, but we’re unsure about how we were going to do it. But we saw that as… Yeah, getting back to what might have been called in Britain in those days. I don’t know whether they use it in Britain anymore than they talked about sound money. We thought that really mattered for a trading nation like Australia, a mid-sized nation. We were very deeply committed to it. But essentially it involved going through everything that governments… The level of detail. Everything. I often tell people, forgive me if somebody’s listening, oh gosh, is you going to try to tell that story again. We spent three hours debating whether to continue a $90,000rat-baitingprogramonLordHoweIsland,whichisalittleislandofftothecoast.Ratsgotthereoffashipinthe1960sandtheyweretryingtoeradicatethem.Andwethoughti{t}^{\prime }snotworking.Shouldwecontinueitorcanwesave$90,000? So you’ve got the leaders of the country sitting around a table spending three hours on $90,000.Wegotthebureaucratswho,I^{\prime }vegottosay,theyserveduswell.Theyputuptheoptions.Butwegotthemtobringinalistofallofthecommunitygroups.Andmanyofthemweregentlyactivistinthosedays.The{y}^{\prime }dbewildlyactivisttodaywhoweredrawingonagovernmentteatsomewhere.Irememberbeingstaggered.Theyputthisup,thelistonthe\dots Doesthislisteverend?Oh,no,ther{e}^{\prime }sanotherpageandther{e}^{\prime }sapageafterthat.Andwewentthroughthatlaboriously.Youtrimhere,youtrimthere.Yousay,do{n}^{\prime }tneedthatgroup.Thatgrou{p}^{\prime }sjustworkingagainstthecountr{y}^{\prime }sinterests.Andtha{t}^{\prime }sanotheronewewillsupport.And,youknow,whetheri{t}^{\prime }staxdeductibilityorgrantsorwhatever.Sowhydid{n}^{\prime }tthefuroraroundthat?BecauseIcanimaginepeoplewereverythrilledaboutthat.Teamwork.Right,becauseyouguysdid{n}^{\prime }t\dots Isee.Wedid{n}^{\prime }tbreakranks.Youdid{n}^{\prime }tbreakranks.Andneitherdidthebroaderpoliticalteamaroundus.Itwasteamwork.Itwasconvictionandteamwork.The{y}^{\prime }rethethings{I}^{\prime }dwanttoemphasize.Whydidthepublicputupwithit?Well,theynearlythrewusoutafterthreeyears.For12months,thefirstbudget,withsometoughmeasuresinit,waswellreceived.Wewentupinthepiles.Thesecondbudget,whenTreasuryandfinancesadvisedusthatinfactwewere{n}^{\prime }tmakingtheprogresswethoughtwewere,sowetightenedthescrewsabitmoreandwewereindeeptroubleandwewerenearlyaone-sitter.Butthenwhathappened?Thisisareallyinterestingthing.Therewardsstartedtoflow.Oh,look,Ishouldjustsayonhowwedidit.Therewerestillsomeassetsthatwefeltcouldbeprivatized.Tha{t}^{\prime }snotalwaysapopularidea,butthereweresomewefeltcouldbeprivatized.Andwemadeasolemncommitmentthatsellinganyfamilysilverthatwassoldwouldgotodebtreduction,nottoanewkitchen,ifIcanputitthatway.W{e}^{\prime }regoingtopaythehouseoff.W{e}^{\prime }renotgoingtobuildanewkitchen,ifyouseethepoint{I}^{\prime }mtryingtomake.Andwedidthat.Andwestucktoit.AndIthinktherewasaslowbutbegrudgingrespectintheAustraliancommunity,theseguysactuallybelieveinsomething.Ithinkconvictionandbelief,wellinthosedaysitcarriedforsomething.Ihopeitstillwould.Andsoweprogressedthroughallthat,onlyjustwonasecondtime.Wewonit,promisingtodosomethingastough,whichwastoreformthetaxsystemandtoscrapthewholemessyoldarrangementandreplaceitwithwhatwascalledanewtaxsystem,withoutitsheartaGST,agoodsandservicestax.Andsomepeoplesay,oh,thatwasathingthatnearlydidkillyoualltogether.ButactuallyIthinkmypersonalviewistheotherwayaround,becauseweweresayingwebelieveinsomething,theyjustputusback.AndIthinkthemoodofthecountrywouldhavebeen,wedo{n}^{\prime }tlikethisverymuch,w{e}^{\prime }rereallysickofit,butatleasttheybelieveinsomething,sow{e}^{\prime }llgivethemasecondterm.Butthenthefruitstartedtoflow.Unemploymentstartedtodrop,realemploymentstartedtorise.Forthefirsttimeinthiscountryforaverylongtime,realwagesstartedtorise.W{e}^{\prime }vegotarowgoingoninAustraliaabouthowtogetrealwagesup,andthecurrentgovernment,theydid{n}^{\prime }ttellustheyweregoingtodoit.I^{\prime }mnotheretobepolitical,buttheydid{n}^{\prime }ttellusduringthecampaigntheyweregoingtodoit.No,theyhave.Togetwagesup,w{e}^{\prime }regoingbacktoanoldsystemofindustrialrelations.Youcangraphitout.Wagesrosewhenweengagedinindustrialrelationsfreedommeasures,youknow,tofreeuptheworkplace,letpeoplenegotiatebetteroutcomesandbemoreproductiveandaskformorepay.Tha{t}^{\prime }swhenwagesstartedtorise.Andsobythetimethenextelectioncamearound,wehadoursortofamazingresultsandeverybodylovedusanditwasallturnedaround.Soyougotrelativelyrapidresultsinwaysthatpeoplecouldactuallydetectandenjoy.Yeah,yeah,yeah,yeah.Absolutely.Imean,wedid{n}^{\prime }tthinkw{e}^{\prime }deverseeunemploymentdownatthoselevelsagain,butwegotthere.Thebureaucratsweresaying,youknow,moderneconomiesdo{n}^{\prime }tgetthatlow.Andwegotthere.Sowhydiditgosidewaysandthingsreturntotheirnormalstateofaffairs,le{t}^{\prime }ssay?IsaidIwould{n}^{\prime }tbepolitical.LetmebehonestandsaythatIthinktowardstheendweweregettingalittlelaxandtheoppositionwaslookinggoodandthealternativeprimeministerwaspromisingtobefiscallyconservativei.e.tocontinuewhatweweredoing.Right,right.HelookedlikeJohnHoward,likeJohnHowardisoursecondlongestservingprimeminister.Man,Iadmirehugelyandcountasafriend.Andpeoplethoughti{t}^{\prime }stimeforachange.Sother{e}^{\prime }sabitoftheAustraliansortofgivetheothergo.Yeah,yeah.Well,ther{e}^{\prime }ssomethingtobesaidforthat.Thereissomethingtobesaidforthat.I^{\prime }mnotknockingit.No,no.Well,oneofthereasonsthatdemocraciesworkIthinkisbecauseyouconstantlyreplacepeopleatthetop.Andsoyourpointisthat\dots Butnottooconstantly.Yo{u}^{\prime }vegottoleavethemtherelongenoughtogetthere.See,ittookusthreeyears.Wedidallthathardwork.ButittookusthreeyearsIthink,ifIlookback,asagovernmentofconviction,becauseitwasagroupofpeoplemadeup.The{y}^{\prime }dbeeninoppositionforquiteawhile.Wewereconvictedandwewerecommittedtoworkingasateamandtotryingtodosomething.Havingtheleversofpowerwas{n}^{\prime }tjustaboutkeepingthem.Andpeoplewouldsay,oh,John,yo{u}^{\prime }rejustapolitician.Youallsaythat.Butitwastrueofus.Therewereenoughofuswhobelievedinthecountry,andinmycase,notparticularlyaddictedtopoliticsassuch.Itwasameanstoanend.Ibelievedinthesethings.MyfatherhadalmostlosthislifefightingduringtheSecondWorldWar.AndIthought,well,Ido{n}^{\prime }thavewatertofight,thankGod.ButIcantryandmakeacontributionhere.Andifi{t}^{\prime }sabitpainful,well,i{t}^{\prime }snotlikelosingalife,isit?Lyingonahospitalbedfor18months,shottopiecesandspendingtherestofyourlifecoveredinscarsandwithbitsofleadcomingtoyourshoulderandstomachsthatdo{n}^{\prime }twork.Andtha{t}^{\prime }swhathehadtoputupwith.Right.So,youknow,alittlebitofcouragedoes{n}^{\prime }thurtsometimes.Haveago.Yeah,well,IdidapodcastwithBenjaminNetanyahuhererecently,andhetalkedaboutthepricetheypaidinIsraelforhisgovernmen{t}^{\prime }seconomicreforms.Andtheytriedto,whiletheiractionswereanalogousinsomesensetoyours,hewasmoreconcernedwithcuttingtaxratesandtransformingtheenvironmentawayfromthehypotheticallysocialistparadisethatIsraelhaddegeneratedinto.Andtheypaidabigpriceforthatelectorally.Butthemediumtolongtermconsequencesforthecountryseemed,Iwouldsay,seemedtohavebeenspectacular.Andofcourse,nowh{e}^{\prime }sbackinchargeofthecountryorwillbesoon.Heseemedalsotobesomebodywhowasdrivenfundamentallybyprincipleratherthanby,whatwouldyousay,adesireforthetrappingsofpopularityandpower.Keepingyourhandsontheleversforthesakeofit.Well,yeah,well,Ithinkalotofthepoliticiansthat{I}^{\prime }vewatchedandtalkedto,whentheydo{n}^{\prime }trulebyprinciple,le{t}^{\prime }ssay,orwhenthe{y}^{\prime }renotgovernedbyprinciplethemselves,theydevolvetoshorttermopinionpollmanipulatingandtheydeliverpeoplewhattheyhypotheticallywantintheshortterm,eventhoughi{t}^{\prime }sveryhardtomeasurewhatpeopletrulywant.Andyouca{n}^{\prime }tdothatveryaccuratelywithopinionpolls.Andno,youca{n}^{\prime }t.No,no,youdo{n}^{\prime }tgetthechoices.Youca{n}^{\prime }tsetthechoicesoutclearly.No,no,no,i{t}^{\prime }sveryhard.Firstofall,insomereallycomprehensivesense,peoplewantmanycontradictorythingssimultaneously.Andsoscattershotaskingthemaboutwhattheywanttodayinaverynarrowmannerdoes{n}^{\prime }tinformyouabouttheirtruewishes.Tha{t}^{\prime }saverydifficultthingtoactuallylearnabout.Well,i{t}^{\prime }svery,veryhardindeed.Wouldyoulikea$10 pay rise? Well, yes, we’re all for that. But if it means that you’re going to have to repay it because it’s borrowed money, it’s going to cost you $12.Well,no,maybeIdo{n}^{\prime }twantthat.Right,right,exactly.Thisisaproblemyouget.Youca{n}^{\prime }tpresentthemwiththerealcostandtheimplicationsofthedecisionsthattheymake.Veryimportant,justtogobacktotheissuethough,wegot,bythegraceofGod,reasonablyquickresults.Andpeoplecouldseethebenefitsofbettergovernance.Andintheend,maybewegotabittired,buttheyfeltthattherewasanalternativethatwouldbesafehandsandperhapsalittlebitlessedgythanw{e}^{\prime }dbeeninsaying,perhapswesoundedabitlikeweweresolittle.Andmaybesometimesevenalittlebitself-righteous.Lookwhatw{e}^{\prime }vedone.MaybethatwasthewaysomeAustralianssawitatthetime.Buther{e}^{\prime }sthepoint.ItunraveledveryquicklybecausetheGFChit.Andthe{y}^{\prime }resayinginAustralia,itwasgohard,goearly,gohouseholds.WepumpedawholeheapofmoneyouttheretotryandcountertheGFC,inmyview,fartoomuchfortoolong.Andsomewouldsay,well,thatwasthevoiceofreasonandexperience.I^{\prime }dsaythattalking.Othersmightsay,oh,Anderson,yo{u}^{\prime }rejustatightscott.Ithoughtitwastoomuch.Andthen,youknow,sowestartedtobuildupthedebtagain.AndthenwehadCOVID.Andnoww{e}^{\prime }vegotclimatepolicy,whichinmyviewisoftenbeingill-advisedandnotsubjecttorigorouseconomicanalysisandenvironmentalanalysisfortherealimpactthatthosepolicieswillhave.Andher{e}^{\prime }sonepointthatIwouldchallengepeopletoreallycorrectmeon,butIthink{I}^{\prime }mright.Rightthroughall,thetendencyinpolicytermshasbeentoproduceresultsthatdiscriminateagainstyoungerpeople,thatmakeitharderforthemtoimprovetheirrealwagesandharderforthemtogettheirfootontotheassetladderunlesstheyinheritit.Howmuchdoyouthinkthattha{t}^{\prime }sdriven,insomesense,consciouslyandexplicitlybysomethingapproximatingananti-growthethos?Imean,myunderstandingisthatthemoreradicalvoicesontheclimateameliorationfrontpresumethati{t}^{\prime }ssimplyimpossibleforupcominggenerationsofpeopleintheWestandcertainlypeopleinthedevelopingworldtoaspiretoanythingevenapproximatingthestandardoflivingthatwecurrentlyenjoyandthattheyshouldbloodywellgetusedtohavinglessandthesoonerthebetter.Andsothefactthatyoungpeoplearebeingpricedoutofthehousingmarket,le{t}^{\prime }ssay,andfaceamoreuncertaineconomicfutureinsomewayslookstomelikeafeature,notabug.I{t}^{\prime }ssomethingtha{t}^{\prime }sactuallypartoftheplan.BecauseifyourviewpointisfundamentallyMalthusian,youthink,well,humanbeingsuntilther{e}^{\prime }sfartoomanyofusandther{e}^{\prime }llbeacatastropheasaconsequence,whichisprettysimple-mindedbiologicalmodeling,bytheway,thenyo{u}^{\prime }regoingtoassumethateverythinghastobeorientedtowardsplacingextremelysevereconstraintsongrowth.Andifthatmeansimpoverishingpeoplenow,well,yo{u}^{\prime }reforestallingsomehypotheticalfuturecatastropheandtha{t}^{\prime }sentirelyjustifiable.Anditseemstomew{e}^{\prime }rerunningdownthatroadasfastaswepossiblycan,youknow,withmoralflagfirmlyintheairsayingtoyoungpeopleandthedevelopingworld,well,youknow,wehaditprettygood,butweprobablyburnedupmorethanweshouldhave.AndIthinki{t}^{\prime }stimeforyouguystopay.Andso,andlikeIdo{n}^{\prime }tbuyanyofthatbecauseIdo{n}^{\prime }tthinkthelimitstogrowthmodelisbiologicallyappropriateintheleastbecausehumanbeingsare{n}^{\prime }tyeastinapetridishbyanystretchoftheimagination.AndIthinkthattheideathatweneedtoimpoverishthepoorandtheyoungtosavetheplanetwillnotonly,isnotonlymorallyreprehensibleandarrogant,butwillalsoproduceafarworseplanetontheenvironmentalfront.Imean,Ithinkallthedatasuggeststhat.AndsoIdo{n}^{\prime }texactlyunderstandwhypeoplearebuyingintothiswithsuchaviditybecausether{e}^{\prime }snoevidencewhatsoeverthati{t}^{\prime }sproducingtheresultsthatareintendedevenbythepeoplewhoarepushingforwardthepolicies.BlackRifleCoffeeCompanyishelpingyouknockoutyourholidayshoppingwithatonofawesomenewproductsthisyear.Shopthebestbrewinggear,thermoses,mugs,andappareldesignedforfolkswholovecountryandcoffee.BlackRiflesourcesthemostexoticroastsfromaroundtheglobe.AllcoffeeisroastedhereintheU.S.byveteran-ledteamsofcoffeeexperts.StuffyourChristmasstockingswiththelatestroastsfromAmeric{a}^{\prime }sCoffeefor10$5,000 a year in terms of average, say, contribution to GDP, then they stop adopting a short-term view and they start to adopt a long-term view because they have the luxury of being able to think beyond the moment. And I suppose partly why we want security, which is what wealth can offer, at least to some degree, is so that we’re not bound by the absolute emergencies of the moment. Absolutely. And we can stretch our minds across a longer span of time. Couldn’t agree with any more. Well, and so if you make people… It’ll impact on family formation as well. Right, right. Well, one of the things you see is that as soon as you educate women, that family size tends to fall. And… Don’t accuse the women of being dumb. I hate the way we do that. Women in the developing world are not stupid. How can we be so patronising? If you get them to a point where they think their children are going to survive and they’re going to get an education deal, you know, and what have you, they will do what everybody else has done and control the size of their families. Actually, they might overshoot because of what’s being missed. Ninety-two countries in the world today have declining populations. Ninety-two, there’s only 180 countries in the world. Half of them are in decline. Some demographers believe China might go from 1.4 billion to 5 or 600 million by the end of this century. Right, right, right. They’re not having child policy, they’re not having children, the surfer of boys, not enough girls, that’s a horror story in itself. And you’re going to have massive loneliness and a terrible burden on young people trying to support the old people. So you’re going to overshoot. And the possibility of a collapsing economy. But the real point here is your point. It’s a really relevant one. Lift those people out of poverty. Give them a perfective where they can make wise decisions and what have you. And that issue of global… So then we could talk… It’s only the Middle East and Africa, Nigeria, countries like that, that look like they’re going to keep building populations for the next few decades. Other parts of the world, it’s stabilised or coming down. Well we could talk about… We’ve got a high immigration policy here because the government’s worried about our low birth rate in Australia. Well we could also talk about perhaps what some of the preconditions for that wealth generation are. So first of all, we could point out that if you get people up to about $5,000 per year in terms of their ability to generate income, then they start to be concerned about the environment. But the environmental concerns start to be expressed in a way that’s, I would say, truly sustainable because you could imagine that we could take a top-down approach to environmental planning. But top-down solutions have the problem of first of all being unitary and second of all, so they can go catastrophically wrong if they’re wrong. They’re also difficult to impose. And if you make enough people, if you free enough people from absolute poverty, they start to be concerned about environmental maintenance locally. And so what you get is a distributed attempt across the world of people to improve the quality of their local environment. So that’s maybe hundreds of millions of people that have a longer-term viewpoint instead of a few centralist utopians trying to govern the whole planet. And that’s a much more stable solution. So we should be doing everything we can to lift the world’s absolute poor out of their absolute poverty. And we do that, so then we can say, well, how do we do that? And one of the ways we do that is by moving towards the provision of free and ample energy. That’s a crucial issue. That’s how we fed five billion extra people over the last 25 years. And so that means we have to give some serious consideration to intelligent use of fossil fuels, which we’re doing anyways, except badly and stupidly. We’re using too many. We are. We’re hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels. And there are many downsides and precautionary principles. We should pursue technologies and so forth that lower our reliance, that help us absorb more carbon. That’s a good thing for farms and our soils. I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood as saying we should stop technology or what have you. But here’s the rub. It’s the point that you’re making. If we’re going to pursue policies which drive people back into poverty, we will defeat ourselves unbelievably and no one’s paying enough attention to it. We lift them out of poverty with available and affordable energy. And if we break that, we will drive them back into it. It’s your point. Yes, and we will destroy the planet while we’re doing it. That’s the other aspect. We won’t save the planet. That’s right. That’s because of badly designed policies driven by, I hate to say this, by the fact that we’ve become so emotive. So I was staggered to discover that if you go out and do a poll in Australia, it’s been done, and ask Australians, what is our contribution to global emissions? 50% of people say it’s somewhere between 10 and 20%. It’s 1%. And so here’s the rub. I’m a farmer. Okay? Well, I work on a farm now. My son and daughter-in-law, as you know, run the business and they do a terrific job and they are looking for ways everywhere to be better environmental stewards and to absorb more carbon. Pull it out of the air. Good. We happen to meet on that one. That’s good. That’s a good thing to do. And farmers recycle. Cycle and recycle carbon. So you’ve only got to absorb a little bit more and if people are worried about carbon in the air, there’s part of the solution. But here is the point that we’ve got to do this in ways which continues the upward march in lifting people out of deprivation and poverty. The improvement, we don’t realise how well we’ve done, not just in lifting people out of poverty by improving their nutrition. Education, with the exception of a few cultures now, even the girls around the world are getting much better education, we thought. Most people have much better access to electricity than has been thought. We’ve fallen behind in our understanding of the progress we’ve made. It’s been so rapid, it’s hard to believe. And to stop it. I think we should take great pride in it. And we’ve done it with research, with extension, compassion, concern for others. That’s not a bad thing to have. Well, we’ve also done it. We’ve also done it. And free marketing. Well, that’s okay, so we can turn to that. So not only, so we know that we’ve made tremendous progress on the economic front, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. The last ten years, here’s a little fact to it, I’m told, by people I believe, I’ve met a lot of people in this area, the world’s farmers have produced enough food in each of the last ten years for ten billion people. That’s well in excess of global population. And I don’t think we’re straining our ecosystems to do it, to be honest. We’re producing more fertilizer perhaps than I would like, and that’s a story in itself. But of course, that’s made out of gas. It’s one of the great emitters and all of that things that people are worried about. But Germany is a country where a lot of gas is used to make ammonia. Half the world’s grain production depends on the artificial fertilizers that are made out of it. Right, on fossil fuel. And BASF, as I understand it, in Germany, one of the biggest producers in the Western world is moving their operations to China. We talk supply chain security. It’s going to move. I think that as a farmer, I’ll be blunt about it, I’m worried about that. Yeah. I’m worried about that. And anyway, we have made this solid progress that we’re in danger of reversing because we don’t know what we’re doing. And here’s the other point I wanted to make, sorry, as a farmer. One thing I know is that it doesn’t matter what we do in Australia. Our chief scientist no less confirmed this in Senate hearings only a little while ago. When we talk about floods and fires and damage to the… It doesn’t matter what Australia does. So as a farmer, whatever is going to happen globally is not going to be influenced by Australia. I have to prepare, my family have to prepare to farm in whatever circumstances come. What’s the point? At a practical level, for politicians to say, we’re doing the things that will save you the next flood or the next fire or whatever in this country is just dishonest. It’s not going to make any difference. We know that. We know since then any of the things we’ve done so far haven’t made any difference. But the whole, even if the whole globe did it, maybe we don’t know what the outcome would be. It doesn’t matter what Australia does. Well, one of the things that with regards to carbon dioxide output, one of the things that people are listening and watching might want to think about is, you know, I’ve been attacked many times for being a climate change denier, let’s say, and I don’t really care for that accusation one way or another. One of the things I know recently from my investigations is that one of the consequences of carbon dioxide overproduction over the last 15 years, because carbon dioxide levels have been going up and some of that seems to be a consequence of anthropogenic activity, human industrial activity, let’s say, is that paradoxically and contrary to all predictions on the environmentalist side, the planet is now 15% greener than it was in the year 2000. And 15% is, that’s a tremendous amount. It’s an area that’s larger than the United States. And it isn’t obvious to me that that’s a bad thing. And it’s more than that. The most remarkable greening has occurred in semi-arid areas. And so the deserts are supposed to expand as the globe warmed or the climate changed, because that was a fate accompli in terms of terminological transformation. And what’s happened instead is that the plants have invaded the semi-arid areas to a large degree. And the reason for that is because plants have to breathe through pores. And if they open their pores to get more carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide levels are relatively low, let’s say, they let water evaporate out of these pores. If there’s more carbon dioxide, they can close their pores. And then it turns out that they can grow where it’s drier. And that’s driven not only an expansion of greening everywhere there already were plants, but the proliferation of plants into areas that couldn’t support them before. And so that, it’s very hard for me to look at that, because that’s a huge change, 15%, and not think, well, maybe more plants is a good thing. But there’s an additional feature that’s going along with that, that also has to be contended with. And I don’t see people on the environmental front grappling with these issues in any manner that strikes me as credible. Not only has the total biomass of plants increased tremendously, 15%, but crop yields have gone up, because it turns out that carbon dioxide is a pretty damn good fertilizer. So instead of having less food because of climate change forced by carbon dioxide, we actually have more food, and we have more food with less fertilizer. And so I think you could make a case, and I know this is utterly heretical, and it might not even be true, that carbon dioxide outputs a net good. And I also know, for example, that we have somewhere between 300 and 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now. And that’s actually a historical, it’s actually low by historical standards, quite low. And plants really have a hard time even living at 150. So that’s the cutoff for plants to breathe. And so a carbon dioxide-intensive world is actually a lot more friendly to plants. Now you could say, well, we’re still risking catastrophe by changing the biosphere that rapidly because a 15% increase in plant coverage is nothing trivial. And there may be elements of that that are destabilizing in some ways I don’t understand. But the prediction that we were going to produce an expansion of desert, for example, and a denuding of a transformation of semi-arid areas into desert, that all seems to be completely wrong. That did not happen. The opposite happened. And so I don’t know what to make of that fact because as far as I can tell, that fact is incontrovertibly true. And so I don’t see that there’s a leg for the apocalyptic environmentalists to stand on, especially given that their policies have been counterproductive and they’re driving people into poverty. So different question. Now… For what it’s worth, just a brief encapsulation. I think I’d make a few comments. I’m not a scientist. I would only say I don’t think the science has ever settled. I don’t buy that line because science always moves. It should always be questioning for more knowledge, more information. So I will assume that the science broadly tells us that things are changing and a 15% increase is extraordinary rapid change in yourself. So I expect volatility. But there’s a couple of really important points to make out of this. If democratically people want to address this issue, that is their right. But secondly, you must do so on an informed basis and you must look for high quality policy and you won’t get that without a good debate. So we’ve been talking about some of the things here that really matter. There’s a trade-off to be made if you go too far with these things. And if you ask me to make a trade between saving the planet tonight on a whim and feeding people, I’m sorry, I’m going with feeding people. Why educating them too? That’s a moral choice. And I’m going with feeding people. If you were to say to me, do I think we should be looking for new technologies for reducing agriculture’s reliance on fossil fuels and artificial fertilizers as it happens? Yes, I do. But I don’t think we ought to be doing it in a way that sacrifices production and feeding people. That’s what I’m saying. And so it comes back, we were talking earlier about budget deficits and what have you. You’ve got to have conviction. You’ve got to be guided by the data. You’ve got to actually think facts matter. Taking people with you matters. Well, you also talked about the necessity of being guided by principles. And so one of the things we could talk about too is if we accepted the proposition that it would be good to develop policies that would ameliorate absolute poverty and that would be good for poor people and that would be good for the planet too. We’ve done a lot of it. Well, we might also ask how we’ve done it. Because I would say that it’s clearly the case that in places like communist China, let’s say, which has undergone this economic revolution, that the degree to which that economic revolution was possible was because even the Chinese communists accepted the necessities, the necessity of some of the principles that go along with open and free markets, open and free trade. And so one of those would be, so the West is getting a pretty rough time now on the radical front. And this is feeding into ideas like we owe the third world reparations for our climate damage for being colonial and oppressive. And that the ethos that’s associated with the West is fundamentally colonial and oppressive in nature. And the thing that really bothers me about that is that I believe that the fundamental positive spirit that has imbued the West, which is actually not a Western creation because it’s actually a Middle Eastern creation, the fundamental spirit that has imbued the West is the only spirit that has ever actually lifted people who are oppressed out of their oppression. And so what that means is this radical critique that’s been aimed at Western culture in the name of freedom for oppression is actually attacking the very spirit that has lifted people out of oppression to the degree that that’s been the case. I’m sure you’re right. Well, we could start with, so what are the bedrock assumptions of Western culture that make such things as free trade possible, assuming that that generates a sort of generous wealth, which seems to be the case. And one of them is that there’s an idea, and the West hasn’t been, what would you say, without sin in applying this idea, that every single person is a locus of implicit divine worth, regardless of their particularities. It’s a very weird proposition, right? We differ so much in our obviously admirable attributes. Some of us are more intelligent, more attractive, more powerful, have more physical prowess, are more ethical, are more hardworking. There’s endless dimensions on which you can rank order human beings, but there’s this strange proposition that emerged essentially in the Middle East that despite all that surface variability and that hierarchical rank ordering, every single person, man and woman alike, regardless of race or creed or color, has to be treated as a locus of divine worth. And I don’t think that you can even make a credible argument against slavery on moral grounds without accepting that as an axiomatic presumption. And so then I think, well, if that’s the case, because look, if there’s no intrinsic worth that’s divine in some sense, so sacred, then why can’t I just do with you what I want if I have the power? Why is that wrong exactly? It might be inconvenient for you, and you are no doubt going to be motivated to rebel, maybe if you don’t want to succumb, but perhaps you’d be motivated to rebel. But I don’t see how you can make a moral case that if I can do it, I shouldn’t. If you’re going to make the moral case, you have to make the assumption that each person in some sense is created in the image of what is sacred, and you can’t violate that regardless of apparent evidence for hierarchical difference. And so it’s that spirit, as far as I can tell. We were talking about William Wilberforce just before the podcast started and the British attempt to abolish slavery, which is the real miracle, right? Not that they were ever involved in slavery, because that was true everywhere for all time. Every empire, including Black empires. Right, right. Well, and it was part of the alternative hypothesis that something like might meant moral virtue, and might-inspired moral virtue meant right. And that was the ethos that governed everyone, everywhere, until this strange idea emerged that regardless of appearance, somehow each person was characterized by intrinsic and inviolable worth. And so then you see the radicals go after that in the name of the poor and oppressed. And I think, wait a minute, guys, like, you’re failing to understand something here, which is that the spirit that emerged to push back against slavery is the central spirit of the very system that you’re trying to demolish. So how in the world is that going to work out for the people you purport to stand for? Practically. It’s definitely the case that the distribution of the biblical corpus throughout Europe, to begin with, was part and parcel of the process that indicated to the oppressed peasantry of Europe that there was something fundamentally wrong with serfdom, for example. It was a violation of something like a divine order. And that all happened, that happened in large consequence because of the Gutenberg Bible and the distribution of the biblical corpus far and wide, which also helped people become literate and to also start to understand that no one had the right to oppress them. We can go into that issue of, like, inviolable individual worth, but I don’t see how that idea can be challenged on historical grounds, because as far as I can tell, that’s what happened. Those ideas, strange ideas that led to the abolition of slavery. We can talk about Britain. You know a fair bit about Wilberforce. Why don’t we talk a little bit about what he did? Because it’s quite the bloody miracle. We will be right back with our conversation with John Anderson. First we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series, Exodus. So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything, and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. Yes exactly, I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question. Well, thank you for asking, it does. Before I do, to take up this point that you’re alluding to, Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister and probably the deepest intellectual leader certainly since the Second World War, not the only one, but a very deep thinker. He was not a religious man, but he had a religious tradition in his education, I suppose you’d say. And he said that democracy is not so much a machine as a spirit in which despite our different abilities and our different positions in society, we all have a responsibility to acknowledge that all souls are equal in the eyes of heaven. That’s where that idea comes from. So a higher authority is saying, you know, you and I might disagree, but I can’t laud it over you because somebody else is, you’re just… Right, even if I have the ability to. Yeah, that’s right. And what we’re now reduced to, I think it’s really important to understand this, you hear this bleeding that, oh yes, we’ve got to recognise that everybody’s important, everybody has dignity and worth. Well, on what basis? Which is your question, if you’d strip out the idea of the godhead, the higher authority, on what basis? Because you run into trouble straight away. The most common reason now given would be to say, well, human beings have either high intelligence or they have a sense of morality or both, both arguments are used usually together, therefore they’re unique, therefore they’re special. But you’ve just alluded to the problem. Some are brighter, some are less bright. Some are stupid, some are wise. Some behave well, some don’t. So immediately you’re in trouble because you can’t say they all matter equally. You’ve lost a model. So the Wilberforce one is example. In the context of Black Lives Matters, I’ve thought about this a lot because I abhor racism, I think it’s the most appalling doctrine because I’m deeply imbued with a Christian view that whether I like somebody else or not is irrelevant. Somebody else says they matter as much as me. The constituent who attacked me on the back streets of my, and it happened a few times, sometimes on racial grounds, where I was attacked for my race. And I had to stop and say, don’t respond in kind. This person matters just as much as I do. I might be the Deputy Prime Minister of the country, but our higher authority is just as worried about him and places just as much value on him and his life as he does on mine. And that’s genuinely where I happen to come from. Now, okay, so every empire we know of has kept slaves, and there are 45 million estimated slaves today, so it hasn’t gone away. But only one empire having kept slaves then moved from within to abolish it. And it’s the very empire we seem to most want to hate most now of all. It’s the British Empire. And so you had this evil slave trade known as the Triangle. Ships would go out to the west coast of Africa. They would buy slaves who’d been rounded up by Africans themselves. They’d gone into the inland, slaughtered the weak and the infirm. Pretty brutal stuff. And the infants and what have you, marks the able-bodied ones that could be sold for a few trinkets back to the coast. They sold to people in this reprehensible trade, taken to the East Indies. The way they were packed into the ships, it was just absolutely inhumane, mind-bogglingly inhumane. But there were times when they were thrown overboard so that they could just, alive, to drown so the ship owners could, and slave traders wanted to pick up on the insurance. Oh, what a way to… The depravity that we’re capable of slipping into. And then they’d sail home with cargo or whatever from the… Right, well, and we need to point out that that’s par for the course, right? That’s just straight historical reality. That was also the case with the Roman Empire and with the Greeks. You can trace slavery back as far as you want. Every empire. Right, right. So this is the classic human condition and that’s the condition in some sense of might makes right. So what happens in Britain after the Protestant Reformation? It had predated that. To be fair, Rome was pretty good on calling it out too. They just never had it, although they often had power. They didn’t seem to have much power in that area, particularly in terms of what some of the European countries did in South America. But in Britain you had the rise of a deeply uneasy conscience about this. You had a slave trader himself called Newton who wrote Amazing Grace, the famous hymn. He was engaged in the slave trade at one stage. He was himself enslaved by a black African queen and made to be a slave to her slaves. This is not a one-way street. And Newton is influential in the life of William Wilberforce. And William Wilberforce, who’s unbelievably privileged, he inherits a fortune, four or five hundred million in a day’s money. He’s seen as a young gadfly really. He goes to Oxford, does no work, just entertains everybody because he can sing and he’s got money so he’s always got a pie in his office for the others to enjoy and they booze their way alive. It was all pretty rough stuff. He goes to London with Pitt the Younger, who’s elected to parliament at a very early age. They become friends. He’s seen as a future prime minister. He goes off on a tour of Europe with the most brilliant mathematician of the age, a man called Isaac Milner. And as they’re going along, and he’s tiny and Milner’s huge and the buggy’s right over on an angle, they’re deep in philosophical conversation. Then Wilberforce decides that he actually thinks Christianity’s true. So he goes back to England and says, I’ve got to leave the parliament. That’s a dirty place to be involved. You know, it’s not for good people like me now. But before I do, I’ll go and talk to Newton because he’d known Newton when he was younger. And Newton, the ex-slave trader, says, no, stay in the parliament. Fight slavery. Commit your life to getting rid of this evil. Well, he did. And he teamed up with some remarkable women in the day, remarkable women. Anna Moore, one of the most gifted drama people of her time, communicator, educator, the Thorntons, who are the wealthiest families in Europe, banking family in the world, in other words. They resourced it. Terribly inconvenient, but you had a bunch of white privileged Christians led by William Wilberforce. They abolished slavery. The trade first and then slavery itself. Terrendously, they forked out so much money that it impacted the debt of Britain for a long time when they actually banned slavery because they compensated the slave owners, including the Church of England, I’m ashamed to say. That’s how bad that trade was. They didn’t actually compensate the slaves themselves who had been set free by the owners. Now, more than that. Well, here’s a question, and it’s worth delving into. So obviously Wilberforce was arguing from, at least to begin with, something approximating a minority position. Yeah, very nice. But his words didn’t fall on deaf ears, right? He was able to elicit an echo of conscience in the people that he was speaking to. So to me, the consequence of that is, or the reason for that, is that by that time, the notion that all human beings were made in the image of God had permeated the English narrative consciousness enough so that when what that meant was made explicit by someone like Wilberforce and people were being called on their hypocrisy, their own conscience echoed the claim. Yep. Yeah. But there’s another aspect to it that’s really interesting. Just to finish on what Britain then did is to try to end it everywhere else. And so they sent the most powerful navy in the world to stop slavery on the high seas. And a lot of white sailors died. Were they racist because they were white males? No. Dying to end black slavery. So this is much more nuanced. This idea of calling out one race against another for all the evils of the world, it does not stack up for a moment. Now, to come back to your question, because it’s germane to that, I reckon it would be fair to say that it did start to fall on fertile ears. But the shocking part of it was that he was saying it’s not just we white Europeans who are human beings who need to be valued. See what I’m saying? He’s saying that these people who were regarded as less than human, the Africans, were also fully human. And the famous text is from Galatians. So for we’re no longer slave and free, we’re no longer gentle or Jew, we’re no longer man and woman, we’re all one in Christ. In other words, all equal value. God doesn’t discriminate. Loves each of his creations and loathes it when they’re violent to one another. That’s what he took out of it. He went away and studied. He wrote a book. You can still get a modern translation of it called Real Christianity. And the subtitle is The Difference Between What People Think It Is and What It Really Is. And that was very interesting in itself. One of his great supporters was Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery maker. And he struck what is regarded by a lot of people, historians, as the first political slogan in a brilliant piece of pottery, incredibly intricate bas relief, I think that’s the word you use for it, of an African man looking up pleadingly. It’s incredibly lifelike. It’s a beautiful piece of work. It’s white on a Wedgwood blue background. And the thing underneath it is not, am I not a man and a brother? Now this is really radical stuff. But it’s fantastic stuff. And Churchill said when a culture stops talking about its history to its children, the story of its beliefs and its heroes, it’s saying they’re null and void. And young people don’t have a sense of place. And they’re thus open to Karl Marx’s dictum that a people that don’t know their history are easily persuaded. Yes. We don’t know any of us. What a hero is Wilberforce. This guy could have had the life of Riley, could have been Prime Minister, got his hands on those levers of power, but he dedicated his life… Successfully. …as a very wealthy man, a very privileged man, to people who were not regarded as full members of the human family. Right. Why would you not be inspired by that? The British fought slavery for what, 175 years on the high seas, if I remember correctly. The British fought slavery for 175 years on the high seas. Well, they were still fighting it. Well, right. I mean, we thought it had gone in Australia. The Australian Federal Police were called to a house in 1975 in the suburbs of Sydney because there was a story going around there that was a brothel that had slaves in it. The police said, no, no, no, that’s not slavery in Australia. And they turned up there. They’d been told there were 20, but there were 23. It was true. And we started to realize we had to pass laws because there was no laws against slavery in Australia. There were no laws. We assumed it didn’t happen anymore. But now we know there’s 45 million Indians. There’s a lot of them. I’ve been trying to think through. You talked about this book Wilberforce wrote about, let’s say, true Christianity. And I’ve been trying to think through what it might mean practically and graspably, I suppose, that each person is in some sense of axiomatic worth. That’s the axis around which all belief must turn, all productive belief. And so I think it has something to do with the nature of consciousness itself. All of us are very particularized creatures, right? So we’re only going to make ourselves manifest in the world once. We’re a very unlikely combination of genetic improbability. And so biologically, we’re each unique. And then the circumstances we’re thrown into are also unique. So we’re each the conjunction of two unique situations, let’s say, highly unique. But each of us, within those unique circumstances, with those unique talents, have to grapple with, let’s say, we have to grapple with the possibility that’s laid out in front of us. And we each have to do that in a particularized way. And if I, as a conscious being, if I grapple with the possibility that lays itself out in front of me, I can bring something into being that only I can bring into being because I’m particularized. And then the thing that’s so remarkable about that is that because I can communicate, and that’s part of this fact that I’m imbued with this logos, which is really the capacity to communicate, if I create something unique, if I realize something unique because of that particularity, I can then share it with other people. And so that means they can, weirdly, even though we’re all particularized, we can all benefit from the operation of our own particularity. And you know, there’s this idea that’s deeply embedded in the Christian belief system that whatever Christ is, is the Word that generates order out of chaos, made flesh. And then He’s God Himself, which is the process that generates habitable order out of chaos, made human. And it’s a very interesting idea because what it means is that there’s a universal principle, that’s the logos itself, the Word, that finds its embodiment in the particularities of time and place, right? So that unites, let’s say, a little town in the Middle East 2,000 years ago with the divine itself. And that’s a model for a human being, is that we each embody this process of encountering chaos and potential and transforming it into habitable order. That’s what’s laid out in Genesis 1. And we each do that in a way that’s communicable and that’s universally valuable because we can share it. And insofar as our societies are set up to insist that that be allowed to happen, then our societies can be productive, reciprocal and generous. And then we can operate collectively to compete and cooperate in a manner that elevates all of us. And I don’t think any of that’s arbitrary. So when we’re talking about, it seems necessary that every culture has to establish itself in relationship to something like axiomatic presuppositions. You have to make some presuppositions. Maybe the left makes the presupposition that the motive force of the world is power. It’s something like that. Certainly the postmodernists do that. But you could say that, well, Western culture, insofar as it’s been guided by the highest possible spirit, has made the axiomatic presumption that every person is of a divine value. And that means they have something that’s intrinsically valuable to offer, to bring into reality itself. That’s why you’re not supposed to hide your light under a bushel, let’s say. And then I think you can make a very practical case that, well, isn’t it valuable to learn from the particularized experience of someone else? I mean, what an unbelievable advantage that is, is that I can sit here and talk to you. And everything that you had to learn painfully, you can communicate to me. And if I have any sense at all, I can listen. And then I can learn that without having to undergo all that suffering. And then you might think, well, isn’t it the case that if we set up societies on that basis, so that everybody is regarded as a valid source of redemptive information, we can all exchange that. And isn’t that the proper pathway to life more abundant and peace and generous reciprocity? That all seems to me to be just true. And that’s instantiated in voluntary free market economies, fundamentally, because we get to freely exchange the goods that we can freely produce. So we can both profit. So that, yes. And so that, yes. And more than that, even, I would say, so that we can both profit in a way that helps us walk uphill more and more efficiently. And that we can both do that in a way that’s simultaneously good for everyone around us. We can actually do that. And I don’t think any of that’s arbitrary. So one of the things that’s worth pointing out is that if your stated goal is something like the removal of oppression, we can say, well, congratulations to you. You’re not on the sides of the tyrants. But if the consequence of your critique of Western civilization is that you throw the the divine baby, we might say, out with the bathwater, and you don’t recognize that this insistence on the intrinsic worth of each individual is actually a precondition for your objection to slavery, you’re going to destroy the very thing that you think that you’re promoting. I think we’re doing that right now. I think we’re doing that as well. That is what I think we’re doing. Yeah. And so you put it beautifully. And I agree with what I’ve understood you said. But I’d just add to it. How stupid are we if we not only fail to learn from one another, but we won’t bring back the great figures of history and the learning of time to the table for their wisdom as well? Why not tap into that? And we’ll avoid a heap more mistakes. Well, we can certainly do that with regard to Wilberforce. That’s my point. Well, it’s kind of a miracle in some sense. And I truly don’t understand this. I was in the UK earlier this year. I went to one of the chapels there that had a, I think it was in Oxford, but might have been in Cambridge, that had a statue of Wilberforce. That was a rather emotional moment for me because I know that he was a stunningly remarkable person. And it was out of his efforts that, well, that Britain organized itself for 175 years to suppress slavery. With his teammates. No, forget his teammates. Right, right. Just like budget repair in Australia. It’s team. But he led it. And also with his alliance with great figures of the past. His morality was informed by his Christian faith and that emerged out of this great Judeo-Christian tradition. I mean, he didn’t do that. He did that by allowing that spirit to inhabit him. He didn’t do that on his own. But what I can’t, I really can’t understand. It’s very difficult for me to understand why that story isn’t more well known and more especially among people who purport to be advancing the doctrine that we need to fight against oppression. It’s like, well, here’s a man who did it. Here’s why he did it. And the historical evidence on that is quite clear. And like you said, it’s a perverse story because he was extremely entitled and an attractive person and put a wild way his time. He died penniless. He gave it all away. So why don’t we teach that story? What the hell is going on exactly? Why would that be suppressed in some real sense? It’s really quite stunning. It is stunning and it troubles me deeply. And perhaps, Jordan, it’s because it raises the question of this. Was the Christ that he believed in real? And oh no, we don’t want to confront that possibility. But I say personally, I think every one of us should. Well, it seemed to work for Wilberforce. And so, you know, I’ve been thinking about this in detail too. And so, of course, these questions always hinge on what you mean by real. But I would say that pain is pretty real. Everybody acts as if that’s true. That’s for sure. We feel it. Everyone acts like pain is real. And so then you might say, well, if pain is real, what allows you to cope with pain or transcend pain must be more real. Because if something’s real and you encounter something that is more significant than that, you have to attribute reality to that. So, I just walked via Dolorosa, the stations of the cross with Jonathan Pagio in Jerusalem. And whether or not the events that took place at each of these stations actually took place there is in some sense beside the point. You can think about it as a dramatic forum, Jerusalem itself. If you’re a pilgrim, you can go walk through this catastrophic story of tragic suffering. And because I’m a psychologist, I’m always thinking, well, what exactly, strip away the religious issue for the moment, what exactly are people doing when they apprehend the figure of the crucifixion and when they do something like consider Christ’s passion or walk the stations of the cross? What are they doing psychologically? And I actually think it’s quite clear. I think that what people are doing is voluntarily exposing themselves to a portrait of tragic suffering. And more than that, there’s more to it than that, but that’s a good place to start. It’s like, let’s say we all have to deal with the catastrophe of life, with the pain and limitation of life. And so then you might say, well, how do you do that? Is it even possible to do that? And one answer might be, hide from it, bury your head in the sand. And I’m not being smart about this. It’s like, the less you think about your mortal vulnerability, the better off you’ll be. It’s an insoluble problem. Your best bet is to run away from that realization, to keep yourself blind, and maybe to busy yourself with as much hedonic pleasure as you can possibly manage. Or drown your sorrows. Well, and that’s understandable, right? You could say, okay, well, a case can be made for that. But it’s not a very psychologically astute case, because one of the things that psychologists have figured out in the last hundred years is that if you want to stabilize people psychologically, and if you want to imbue them with courage, then what you do is you help them expose themselves voluntarily to the things they’re afraid of that they’re avoiding. It’s a very powerful technique. That’s exposure therapy. And what exposure therapy seems to do is to make people braver. I’ll tell you how exposure therapy works, because it’s no joke. So I had a client who was afraid that he would cut himself, and he was afraid that if he was on the top of a building, that he would jump off to his death. And one of the exercises we worked out was that he would sit at the top of his building near the edge with a knife. Right? And that’s a very frightening thing to do as a therapist, because he’s saying, look, I have this impulse to slash my throat and to jump off a building. And I thought, well, why don’t you confront both of those things at the same time? Now we worked up to that, you know, but I’m just using that as an example to show you how intense that exposure therapy can be. It’s like we need to identify what… Okay. So then you might think, well, what are people most fundamentally afraid of? And I would say, well, it’s something like pain and death. And then even more particularly, it’s unjust pain and death. And that’s really at the core of the crucifixion image and story, because it’s unjust suffering and death. And so the psychological… What would you say? Why have people been compelled to gaze upon this image of unjust suffering? And the answer is something like, the best way to adapt to life is to gaze on the image of unjust suffering, to do that fully. And I think that’s true. It’s been a big… Yeah. It’s a strange idea too, and this is a very strange idea, that the spirit that guides the Israelites out of the desert, say, in the Exodus story, so the spirit that stands against tyranny and that stands against slavery, is the same spirit that confronts tragic mortality voluntarily. Right? There’s an equation. That’s the equation of the New Testament and the Old Testament. And I also think that’s likely true. That the pattern that calls to us from within to object to tyranny and slavery is the same pattern that enables us to have the courage to look upon our own mortality, like forthrightly. And I would say that has to be that way to some degree, because imagine you want to stand up to a tyrant. Well, you could put your life at risk to do that, right? I mean, if you’re going to speak truth to power, to use that terrible cliché, you’re going to have to face the fact that you might be hurt and even killed in doing so. And so how can it be different to face the inevitability of your own mortality for a moral cause and stand up to a tyrant? Those have to be the same thing. And so I would say it’s time for all of us to learn that these axiomatic presuppositions, I like the idea that part of what gives us intrinsic value is the fact that we’re reflections of the word made flesh. That actually turns out to be true. It’s true in the deepest possible sense. And if we abandon that, which is what we’re doing, we’re not going to eradicate tyranny. We’re going to fall prey to it. And the fruit of abandoning it is all around us and it’s wrong. The misery is extraordinary. But you see, I mean, I think if I could respond, you’re talking to somebody, of course, who believes that that gospel story is actually true. I should say that right up front. And as you and I have talked about, people actually, some say, they say it to my face sometimes. I don’t want to say this gently. I don’t want to say it judgmentally. But they say, John, you wouldn’t know what suffering is. Look at you. You had everything. That’s easy to say about someone else. Well, on the surface of it, look, I’m privileged just to be an Australian. Right, right. I’ve enjoyed good health. One of the happy marriages, I’ve had four kids, I’ve had grandkids, I’ve had opportunities. A claim. But I’ve known it by some. Right, right. Not many. I think there’s about five out there somewhere, including the dog. He loves me because I feed him. But I have known real suffering. I’ve known pain. I’ve known to grapple with it. And I’ve had to ask, why suffering? Well, I think we bring suffering on ourselves because we are so selfish. It’s an old-fashioned word for it called sin, but we’re self-centered. But then does anybody understand? Well, I think the Christ understands. I think Jesus does. That’s the thing I’ve come to realise has been so humbling when I thought, poor little me, I have suffered. And by any stretch of decent evaluation, I’ve known some pretty awful things, times, you know, loss and what have you. But what we see there is a picture of the god man knowing injustice that exceeds any injustice I’ve known. Loneliness that exceeds any loneliness that I’ve known. And loneliness is a dreadful thing. And pain, physical and emotional, beyond anything that I can compare myself to in order that he might take mine from me. You know, the story is a culmination of all those things in some real sense. And in taking that on himself, I then, in a way that I don’t fully pretend to be able to explain, I can place that back on him. And because he rose, he’s not captured by it. We can rise too. And that’s, to me, the most important issue that each of us need to grapple with. Can this possibly be true? It’s something like adopting a form of metaphysical courage that’s transcendent, right? Because let’s say you have to take on the suffering of your own life, forthrightly, and to the degree that you’re able to do that, you’ll be able to maintain your moral compass despite your suffering and maybe work to ameliorate it. And in order to do that, you have to adopt a particular pattern of being. And that pattern of being isn’t just unique to you. Like you have to manifest it in your own life, but the pattern is universal. And it’s divine and sacred for exactly that reason. And the pattern is something like forthright confrontation with those things that terrify you. So there’s a story. This is very cool. And some people have heard me talk about this before, and maybe we can close with this. Here’s something that I’ve been chewing on that’s quite the miracle. And I don’t know how else to really explain it. So when the Israelites are lost in the desert, they start to become fractious and idol-worshipping. And so they fall prey to ideological possession fundamentally. They lose faith in the spirit that brought them out of tyranny. And no wonder, because they’re in the desert. It’s like they’re not having a good time. So it’s no wonder they get faithless. But what happens when they get faithless is that God sends poisonous snakes in to bite them. And you might think, well, that doesn’t reflect very well on God. That’s one of the interesting things about the Bible, is that there are plenty of stories that have that strange paradoxical twist. It doesn’t matter. The story really means that just because you’re lost doesn’t mean there isn’t something stupid you can do to make it worse. And so faithlessness will certainly make it worse. And so God sends in these poisonous snakes. And the Israelites are getting bitten pretty good. And so they go to Moses and they say, look, we’re sorry that we’re so faithless and useless and fractious and divided. But the snakes are getting a bit much. So maybe go have a chat with God and get him to call them off. And so Moses says, OK. And he goes and talks to God. And God says, God’s irritated with the Israelites. But he can be bargained with, apparently. And Moses makes the case for the Israelites. He said they’ve been punished enough. And God, what should happen or what could happen is that God just gets rid of the snakes. He sent them to begin with. He can just chase them away. That isn’t what happens. And this is very strange. And I defy anyone to come up with a simple explanation for this because it’s really something uncanny. So what God tells Moses to do is to make a bronze stake, a staff, which is like the staff of Moses and it’s like the tree of life. That’s another way of thinking about it or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To make a staff out of bronze and then to cast a serpent in bronze and to put the serpent on the staff. And then to have the Israelites come and look at the serpent. And if they look at the serpent, then the poison will no longer destroy them. So he doesn’t get rid of the poison. He doesn’t get rid of the snakes. What he does instead is he gets the Israelites to gaze upon that which poisons them. And the consequence of that is that they’ll be strengthened. And that’s the… Now, the cool twist on this is that that’s what Christ says about himself. Like thousands of years later. He says, unless his image is lifted up the same way the serpent’s image was lifted up in the desert, that there’s no possibility of redemption. Now that’s a very weird juxtaposition of ideas, right? Because you think, well, what the hell’s going on in the desert and what’s up with the bronze snake? That’s a mystery in and of itself, which I think is associated with the necessity of facing that which can bite you, right? To pay attention to it, to adopt a stance of challenge in relationship to it. That’s a very deep idea. But then to make the case that that’s analogous in some sense to the crucifix, that’s an unbelievably sophisticated psychological move. Because you might say, well, what’s the sum total of all snakes? And I think you can make a very straightforward and compelling psychological case that there’s no confrontation that’s more ridden with snakes than the confrontation that’s laid out in the story of the passion. It’s a limit story. So it takes all possible snakes into account. Betrayal, death at the hands of the mob, innocent suffering, like you name it. It’s part of the suffering in that story. So it takes that snake and it makes it into a meta snake and it says, well, it’s one thing to look at just a snake and to get braver as a consequence. But you should instead look at the mother of all snakes and get as brave as that could possibly make you. And then you think, well, if you’re going to cope successfully with your life, with all of its particularized catastrophes, do you really think that you’re going to be able to manage that without admitting that the problems are there? Who in the world would ever think that? And so then is it not the case that you have to look at what’s darkest in order to be able to contend with it? And then you might say, if that’s the spirit that redeems you, in what manner is that not a sacred spirit? If it’s the universal pathway to redemption in the face of suffering, which seems to be the case on psychological grounds as far as I can tell, then I don’t see how you can claim that that’s not real, true, foundational, all of that. I can’t see a ray out of that. Strange conundrum. So… Well, I think the thing that I would say, I think, is that when you look into that darkness and into that pain, you’ve got to recognize your own role in it. And the answer is to flee to someone who offers redemption and restoration and the ultimate return to you being the person that you should have been. And each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made and absolutely magnificent, flawed as we are by our own failings. We are, in my view, an extraordinary combination of unique, made-in-the-image of a higher being, destroyed by our own selfishness, but offered the opportunity to return. That is my perspective. And Jordan… Well, I think that partly what happens if you do look very deeply into the suffering that characterizes your life is that one of the things that will happen is that you will start to understand the role you play in that suffering. And life seems to have an arbitrary element. And there’s plenty of sick children who don’t seem to deserve it morally, let’s say. But when you look very hard at your own suffering and you contemplate it, the probability that you’re going to see some causal role that you’ve played is pretty high. And then you have the option then of not doing that anymore. And that’s something like confession and redemption. And that’s something like also following this divine pattern, right, is to stop doing those things that are dooming you to unnecessary suffering. One of the things I’ve wondered about for a long time is that if you stop doing everything that you could that was off-target, even by your own criteria, if you stop doing all of that, how much suffering would be alleviated, not only for you, right, but for the people around you? Most of it. Well, that’s… Not all of it, but most of it. Well, yeah, and an indefinite amount of it, right, because it also seems like that’s a sort of struggle without end, is that you can get better and better at it. And you can get more productive and you can get more generous and you can get better at staving off suffering and you can get more helpful to other people and to yourself. We don’t know what the upper end of that is. I met a fellow once and he said, he was an old man, he said, when I was a young man, I was knocking on doors inviting people to come and worship in our church in Edinburgh. He said, I knocked on a door and an old man came out and he said, no, I’m not interested in God, I was in the trenches, the First World War, I don’t want to know, but I stopped believing in God. And this young fellow said to him, I can understand your hurt, can I just ask you how you would react if I were to say to you that I think if I’d been in the trenches, I would have stopped believing in man. And he said, the old fellow teared up, he said, you better come in, I want to talk. And so we need to be much more honest with ourselves, I think. I think the thing that I would say is that hope is so important and for me, the hope is the eternal hope for me. And the only thing I would say humbly to others is think carefully before you dismiss it too lightly. I’ve had to try and make sense of the conundrum that is life, of good and evil, of joy and of pain. And what keeps me going is the secure hope, it is for me very real, that the wounds will be bound up and the joy will be complete and I’ll be the person I should have been. A lot of people would be very relieved to hear that. And restored in relationship. Yeah, well part of that is the injunction we talked about earlier, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s like, you know, we should all be concerned about the continuing possibility of atrocity and oppression in the world. But then, and we should be very cognizant of the role our own cultures, the cultures that have delivered to us our privilege, let’s say, that have played in maintaining that oppressive regime. But at the same time, we should very carefully differentiate what has been done that’s been right and good. And Wilberforce is a great example of that. By their fruits. By their fruits. And we sort of say, oh, Sansa was a religious nut. Look what they did. Look at the towering figures. Just think of them. Yes. And ask yourself in all seriousness if you could have done as well. He was followed by Lord Chaspery, another privileged man, who got the kids out of the mines and out of the chimneys and got some basic rights for women and some labour laws at work. Right. And we could do as well in our own life. All right, Mr Anderson. I’ve enjoyed it hugely as always. You bet. You bet. And so thank you all on YouTube and the other platforms that you’re listening to or watching through for participating in this conversation. And we hope that it was useful. I’m going to spend some time talking to Mr Anderson on the DailyWire Plus platform at a more biographical level. Talk to him a little bit about the journey in his life that took him to the places that he’s been and helped him draw the conclusions that he’s drawn. And that’ll take place on the DailyWire Plus platform. And thank you to them for facilitating this conversation and making it possible technically and practically and to all of those of you who are listening and watching.