Truth as Glorious Adventure ｜ Douglas Murray ｜ EP 376 (2FEvLaApGz8)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2FEvLaApGz8

The people you and i spend a certain amount of our lives rating against is in part because they are sensorials bollings they want to tell you and me and everyone else what we should find funny what we should read what we should say what we should think how we should act and. My mind. It’s an invitation which i decline these people who are so prim so unfunny so. Teasley repressive and everything they do don’t stand a chance in the long run. Hello everyone watching and listening. Today i’m speaking with author columnist and political commentator douglas murray who’s been on my podcast a number of times we talked about his latest book not so long ago the war on the west. We discuss how a misguided purpose leads to abject misery and hopelessness the cowardice of experts who choose silence experts and others let’s say you choose silence in the face of malevolence the psychology of fear. And the necessity of willful exposure to combat that fear. So we went out for dinner last night to royal 35 which is very good that’s a steakhouse that looks like a classic mafioso place as far as i’m concerned but they make great steaks and one of the things we talked a little bit about was. Your burgeoning interest in purpose and so i’m curious about that so the first question i have i guess is why why you think that’s attracted your interest that particular topic. I think it’s because i just increasingly notice that i’m sure you do that it’s the question underneath almost all questions in our day. I’m a lot of the things that you and i spend a considerable amount of our time railing against. I’m things we critique criticize find holes in push back against. But you’re always confronted by the fact that you’re dealing with somebody who believes that they find their sense of purpose from the thing that we find you know i’m truthful. Irritating or worse. And you see all of these versions in our day i think of misguided purpose purpose use the wrong ends. Mean meaning found in places that really don’t give much satisfaction. I’m but but give people the drive to get up in the morning and act sometimes well often malevolently. I’m more often than not have some level of need but that it seems to me that this sort of meaning crisis is one that. Many of the people that you and i have problems with should we say. Are actually addressing i mean in their own inept and sometimes malevolent way they are speaking to a death. Well one of the things the left does very well there’s a developmental psychologist named Jean Piaget who is a great psychologist and he called himself a genetic epistemologist actually because he. Was interested in knowledge structures and how they developed and so he really thought he was a practical philosopher but in any case he noted that. Human children as they develop go through stages of development each stage was in some ways a different you can say a different theory of being. And that the last stage that he identified was the messianic stage and. Developmental psychologists haven’t paid much attention to that because they tended to shy away from anything that smacked of let’s say religious thinking even though Piaget was motivated. Fundamentally by the desire to bridge the gap between science and religion which, by the way, I think he did quite well. The messianic period is late adolescence and you might think about it anthropologically I suppose, as associated with the need for. Individuals of that age to move away from their immediate local friendship group which would have been the bridge from dependence on their parents to identification with the broader culture and so what they’re trying to find at that point is. Something like a sense of universal purpose right and and that that touches on this issue of purpose, obviously, and meaning and you you in the way that you laid this out when we began this discussion you you implied a number of. Presuppositions of that there are. Malevolent purposes that there are fractured purposes that there are counterproductive purposes that there is purpose I presume you would also agree that there are shallow purposes and purposes absolutely. Absolutely. There are there are shallow enjoyments and deep enjoyments one of the things that Burke says. His work on the spline is that, of course, there are there are there are things you immediately know to be enjoyable and they’re required pleasures. And that’s just on the level of pleasures and he gives you example, I think, of cigar smoking or whiskey, I think, as an example of a pleasure you don’t get. Straight away. A lot of. And so, yes, I mean, there are things that can drive people and give also an ephemeral sense of purpose, but the issue of deeper purpose is one I just see as being very dangerously unaddressed in our day, and I think I think it’s it’s. I referred to this recently in a speech in London saying if, for instance, the left approach you with the opportunity to spend your life rampagingly campaigning to provide, you know, I know cosmic social justice on this earth now. The planet. Saving the planet. Not burning to death tomorrow, various other things and also driven by things like envy, resentment, very, very deep, deep. Human instincts in a radical human instinct that if you don’t like what they’re doing and what they’re suggesting, you can’t just answer on a technicality. And the example I gave quite or gave in that speech in London was, you know, if if if you have people telling you and get a burning sense of of of meaning in your life by being resentful. Conservative or somebody on the right cannot simply say, well, we’ve got a tax break. We’ve discovered. Right, right. I mean, it might be something simply say. That resentment is wrong because the alternative isn’t well fleshed out. Well, the alternative, as Nietzsche says, is gratitude. Well, right, right, right. Which is which is doable, but you need to work at that more than you need to work at resentment. If you feel that. OK, so there’s a bridge there between the idea of longer term and acquired purposes and practice and work. You said that you have to work at gratitude. Right. And so that makes it a practice. And I don’t think that I think that people generally presume that a sentiment or state of mind like gratitude is something that descends upon you rather than something that you acquire through effort. And I think that that’s a real mistake. Right. Absolutely. I mean, you and I, I think both probably have the same attitude on this, which is that we know that, you know, we’re very lucky today to be sitting in a city which has its problems, but is very successful. You’ve got some chance of being mugged in the street, but not all that much. If you do, you can get justice. There is a justice system. There are people who hear you if you have suffered an injustice. We know that all of these things are actually worldwide at the moment and also historically very, very unusual. So you and I might have quite a developed sense of gratitude because we might remind ourselves of these things on a daily basis. I might remind myself, I walked past St. Patrick’s Cathedral this morning. I think, what a building. Now you can take that for granted or you cannot. And you can think even for a second about the amount of labor and devotion that went into that. But that is something that some people need to be reminded of. My suspicion is that the societies we live in now in the developed West, you do have to work at it. And the reason why is that there’s this massive context collapse whereby we assume that the state that we are in is the natural state of mankind. And somebody I know who’s… Well, and there’s also conservatives and the progressive types tend to differ on what constitutes the natural state of mankind. Absolutely. The conservatives, and I would say the wiser people, tend to be more influenced, you might say, by Thomas Hobbes than by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And we assume that, let’s say, that the state of natural life is brutish and short and miserable, rather than some pre-industrial, paradisal state where everyone lived in harmony with nature. Well, I gave the example in my last book, In the War on the West, of this rather delicious, but savage lesson that a group of French sailors learned after Rousseau. They’re big Rousseauians. They land on an island in New Zealand and assume that the natives live in a state of nature. And I think they’re all killed and eaten. The ones who survive the expedition end up with a very low opinion of Rousseau. Right. They learned it the hard way. That’s the same Rousseau that led all his children rot in orphanages, right? Yes. But anyhow, I think that this issue of, are you talking at comparable depths remains important. Gratitude is obviously a part of this. Gratitude becomes easier to feel if you know what the alternatives are. One of the things I always say about… Resentment, that’s a good opposite, I think. Yeah. And I know a schoolteacher who says that the single biggest thing that will change the behaviour of a child is if they are of an immigrant background and go back in a school holiday to their country of origin. Right. If you meet your second, third cousins in Pakistan or Algeria or Sudan, you have a different view of Canada, Britain or America. Yeah, well, that also touches on part of the reason that you laid out for ingratitude, the way you conceptualised it to begin with, say, talking about walking down the streets of New York, being unable to compare that with anything outside of New York in this present. So ignorance is actually one problem, is that if you don’t know anything about history, and there’s also, I suppose, as well as ignorance, there’s willful blindness and the unwillingness to put in the effort that it would require to be grateful. Absolutely. So, you know, I’ve been considering the book of Job in some depth recently, and it’s a very interesting book and it pertains to purpose, I would say. So by the time the book of Job is written and eventually introduced into the biblical corpus, there’s a real transformation in the conceptualisation of God. And there’s a key figure in that transformation, which is extraordinarily interesting. The figure is Elijah. So when Christ is transfigured on the Mount, two prophets appear with him. One is Moses, and that’s obvious why that is, but the other is Elijah. And Elijah, compared to Moses, is a relatively minor figure. And so there’s some chapter or some verse is devoted to his story, but not a lot. But here’s the key psychological significance, let’s say, of Elijah. So Elijah set himself up against Jezebel, who was a queen at that time, a foreign queen of Israel, who had introduced the worship of Baal into the Israeli culture. And Baal was a nature god. And so Elijah has a famous dispute with the prophets of Baal and ends up with Yahweh’s help defeating them. And so he establishes supremacy over Baal. This is a golden calf. He builds an altar, he builds an altar, and challenges the prophets of Baal to have the sacrifice destroyed by their god, and that doesn’t happen. And then he calls on Yahweh, who sends down fire to destroy not only the sacrifice, but the altar itself. And then he has the prophets of Baal put to death, which doesn’t exactly thrill Jezebel. And then he runs away because she’s after him. And this is where the radical transformation occurs. So he’s hiding out in a cave, and he feels he’s the only one left who’s still an acolyte of Yahweh, in the entire Israeli, Israelite polity. And a thunderstorm happens, a very, very violent thunderstorm, followed by a very violent earthquake. And Elijah realizes that God is not in the earthquake and not in the thunder, that he is instead the still small voice. That’s where that phrase comes from. So it’s the first marked internalization of the notion of the deity, is that whatever the highest deity is, is something that you can commune with internally, that is roughly equivalent, let’s say, to the voice of conscience. And so that’s Elijah. So now what happens in Job is so interesting, because in the story of Job, God has a bet with Satan. It’s a very nasty story, right? It’s the most brutal story. It’s a brutal story. It’s a brutal story. It makes you wonder why it wasn’t edited out of the biblical corpus. And the consolation at the end isn’t much of a consolation. Well, exactly, exactly. And so Job is a good man, and God thinks so, and so does Satan. And Satan is invited by God to have a few words with him, and says, I bet you that I can destroy the faith of your good man Job. And God says, yeah, I don’t think so. Have at it, buddy. And so Job loses everything and in the most painful possible manner. And what he does, as far as I can tell, is that he uses that internal guide of conscience, which was now, say, allied with the voice of God in some sense, against these terrible external forces that are conspiring to bring him down, right? Because his wife dies. The children will die. Children die. The cattle die. He’s covered in boils. Yeah, and his friends are making fun of him because they think he must have done something to deserve this, right? So he’s like taken to the bottom of reality. But he refuses to lose faith. Now, you might say, and this is where the story, I think, transcends something like mere rationality, but we can argue about that. You might say that the logical consequence, the logical conclusion from that misadventure is that Job has every rational reason to shake his fist at the sky and curse God, right? But he doesn’t. He maintains faith in the goodness of being despite the fact that he’s suffering dreadfully. Yeah. And despite what the voice from the whirlwind says to him, which is the least comforting thing that the voice could say, which is, who are you to question the Lord thy God? Right, right. But see, this is such an interesting issue here because I’ve watched people in the deep throes of misery, and I can tell you that one of the things that will make misery hell is ingratitude. And so, part of the story of Job seems to me to be an injunction, and that is that no matter what happens to you, and that means in some sense, no matter the facts at hand, that you are called upon never to lose faith in the essential goodness of being, right? To conduct yourself as if, what would you say, the cosmos itself is well structured despite the evidence that happens to be being presented to you within the confines of your life. I think that’s the same as the practice of gratitude. I’d agree, by the way, bringing that to a rather maybe not obvious segue, but we were also talking last night about the fact, I saw you discussed recently the question of euthanasia and the way in which the Canadian authorities have been doing this. I mentioned to you that some years ago, I went to speak with euthanasia doctors and the patients in Belgium and the Netherlands, and they’re very advanced on this. I wrote several long essays on the subject. It’s a horrible subject to dwell on, of course, but actually one of the reasons why I’ve always remained exceptionally suspicious of legalized dying, so to call it. I have, as we all have, friends who you think at the end, I wish suffering could just stop. So I recognize that. Do you want it to be in the hands of the government or any more in the hands of doctors than it already is, let alone in the hands of the family or anything? I’m not sure about that. Allow the crossover of physical suffering to be equated with mental suffering and you start putting down depressed youths as they are on the continent. Or an example I’ve been giving recently. And then moving towards that in Canada. Absolutely. I mean, as this poor girl who survived the Brussels airport attack, she saw most of her classmates blown up. Her life didn’t really recover and she was put down, the view thnae by the Belgian state last year, the age of, I think, 24. Now, apart from the insanity of a society that will not, out of principle, execute the perpetrator of an attack, but will kill a victim, apart from the insanity of that and all we know about the genuinely slippery slope in this area. One of the instincts I realized I had that I just couldn’t let go of was that there was something fundamental about us as human beings that means that it is deeply ungrateful to what we have to give it up even a minute earlier than you have to. And that, you know, in the end, I quite often revert to literature, but I think it’s Gloucester who says in King Lear, you know, man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither. And that actually endurance, endurance of birth, endurance of death is part of the cycle. But there is something, but the resentment you feel, for instance, when somebody commits suicide and people around, somebody who commits suicide very often do feel resentment as well as deep guilt, is partly you’ve broken the pact at a fundamental level. You’ve made all of us see something we didn’t wish to see or concede something we didn’t and left us powerless and left us powerless. And anyhow, I mean, it’s all independent of whether or not you want to put the power to euthanize people in the hands of the state, which and the answer to that is most definitely 100% not. Well, I mean, absolutely. I would say if the Canadian government can’t work out how to organize the banking system or passport delivery or passport delivery or some of the roads, I don’t want to give them life and death, particularly not over mentally ill people. So, so when you see people suffering, I mean, I saw this in my clinical practice a lot is that if you and I saw this with my daughter, you know, we talked to her too about this when she because she was very, very ill as a child and we did everything we could to stop her from being bitter. And the reason for that, and this is an interesting, it forces an interesting consideration of the relationship between facts and values. So she had 40 deteriorating joints and each of them were painful. And that’s a lot of joints and that’s a lot of pain. And that was only a few of the things that were wrong with her. And but had she become resentful and bitter, then she would have had all those problems. Plus she would have been resentful and bitter. And as far as I can tell, the way you turn tragedy into hell is by becoming resentful and bitter. Now, you here’s a fact value problem. So you tell me what you think about this. So I, she could have said to me, you know, dad, given the facts at hand, the logical conclusion to derive. So that’s an induction, let’s say the logical conclusion to derive is that, you know, life is terrible and unjust and it would be irrational of me not to be bitter. And you know, I think and this is the conundrum that you see in Job too, is that, you know, when you set up a story so that someone loses everything, you set up the story so that they have lost everything. And the conclusion to derive from the loss of everything, the logical conclusion seems to me almost pro forma, given that you’ve lost everything is that you have every right to shake your fist at the sky. Yes, but the oddity of it and the oddity is, you know, about resentful people or bitter people is that, and again, it’s a point I’ve made a lot since the war in the West came out is we are, I think we probably all have the same experience, everyone watching and you and I, which is we’ve probably all come across very bitter and resentful people in our lives who seem to have quite a good lot. I mean, for instance, who are financially secure. I suspect we’ve also come across people who seem to have, who have nothing materially or otherwise, who live lives of gratitude and great grace. Those are the people that really strike you. Those are the ones to learn from. Those people really strike you when you meet them. Absolutely. Sure. But at this one, the reason I’m interested in this is because it seems fascinating to me that you can have an attitude which every socioeconomic thing doesn’t actually matter. You know, if you’re a resentful person and you’re given a million dollars tomorrow, you will be a resentful person the day after or the week after as well. This isn’t going to make any difference. Well, so does that imply? See, this is, I’m trying to wrestle with the distinction, let’s say, between faith and reason, let’s say. And so, like, it seems to me, first of all, I don’t think faith is the willingness to believe in superstitious nonsense for which there’s no evidence. Which is the definition that has mainly written through the last few days. Yes, exactly. But I think faith is a decision to act in courage and trust. And I think it’s a decision to make that a practice. And I think in some ways, it’s a decision to make that a practice. God damn it. Regardless of the evidence. So, you know, I have a friend who was brutally tortured in a Canadian residential school when he was a kid. And you can’t listen to what happened to him without it like tearing. You can’t listen to it. It’s unbelievably brutal and awful. You know, and he was devastated by that and was on the street for a good while drinking and doing drugs and like tearing himself into pieces. And he he had great grandparents who really loved him. And he was an inheritor of his cultural tradition, a genuine inheritor. And so he made a decision that he wasn’t going to live a bitter and resentful life, that he certainly wasn’t going to pay that catastrophe forward with his children. He learned to play. He learned to look at himself in the mirror again. No. And he’s he’s conducted himself as a good man for decades now. And that’s it. You already made the case, you know, that you see people who have everything in some real sense and who are bitter and resentful nonetheless. And then you see people who have nothing, who aren’t. And so you can take the same set of facts or even an opposing set of facts and derive different conclusions. This points at the fact value problem. Right. Is that the facts don’t speak for themselves in some deterministic manner. And it seems to me that there has to be something approximating. Well, something we’ve always defined as a leap of faith in the positive direction. And that that’s tied to it’s tied in a strange way to something you said earlier, which is that, you know, there are shallow pleasures and meanings and deep pleasures and meanings. And the proper faith is faith in the deep pleasures and meanings. And so, yes. And I’d add one other thing to that, which is and the faith that the recognition of the depth is telling you something. Yeah. Well, so I’ve been trying to puzzle through what depth means technically, let’s say. So. In the scientific literature, your work is more. Is deeper. That’s one way of thinking about it. The more other people cite it. So it’s a dependency network. Right. So here’s it. Here’s the definition of depth. More ideas are dependent on a deep idea than ideas than the number of ideas that are dependent on a shallow idea. So it’s like criticality. Right. So you can imagine a web of presumptions with some presumptions at the Fundament. OK, so I think that religious axioms are the deepest fundaments. And I think that I think we could say that by definition. And here’s here’s part of the reason. At the very least, they speak to the deepest fundaments. Well, but I think that’s part of and this is where it gets complex again. That’s part of the evidentiary structure. You know, if you’re if you have a profound aesthetic sense and so some things move you deeply. And in principle, those are profound things. Then the reason they move you deeply is because they shift large sections of your perceptual and conceptual structure simultaneously rather than the shallow things, which are evanescent and irrelevant. And so and I think as well that we do, in fact, feel movement in the depths. So, yes, I mean, of course, you know it when you feel it. I mean, that’s why music as an art form is so extraordinary because it it speaks to a depth that speech can’t do right. Or it speaks at a register that speech can’t do. If you say, why why did you find this particular piece so moving? It’s often extremely hard, even harder if you’re a musicologist to explain why. There are certain ways you can explain why. Certain things to do with harmony, tonality, a phrase of music returning to its natural home. I mean, that’s a very almost all things that move people are the resolution. Yeah. However long delayed is, in fact, the longer delayed it is, the better the resolution, the greater the satisfaction in it. But it’s not just that. It’s that sense that this is speaking to us in a register that we understand. And we see, but we can’t quite reach. But it speaks. It speaks to my in to my mind. Music is the closest thing you have to religion, not because I want to make a religion of it. Various people tried that, including Wagner. But but rather that it’s it’s the language of religion and sound. President Trump recently issued this warning from his Mar-a-Lago home. He said, and I quote, Our currency is crying out. He said, and I quote, Our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world’s standard, which will be our greatest defeat, frankly, in 200 years. There are three reasons the central banks are dumping the US dollar inflation, deficit spending and our insurmountable national debt. The fact is, there is only one asset that has withstood famine, wars and political and economic upheaval dating back to biblical times. Gold. Birch Gold can help you own gold and a tax sheltered retirement account. That’s right. Birch Gold will help you convert an existing IRA or 401K, maybe from a previous employer, into an IRA in gold. When currencies fail, gold is a safe haven. How much more time does the US dollar have? Protect your savings with gold. Birch Gold has an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and thousands of happy customers. Text Jordan to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold. Again, text Jordan to 989898. Yeah, well, and that I would say that’s also that’s an embodied that’s an embodied phenomenon rather than an abstract than a conceptual phenomena. See, I think one of the problems that we have in the West in our conceptualization of meaning is that we’re so obsessed with the semantic and the descriptive that we presume that meaning itself is secondarily derived from the semantic and descriptive. I mean, the postmodernists make this case when they say that everything is encapsulated, say, in language. Well, that’s just a game. I mean, that’s a game they’ve been playing since the last war. And my explanation of it, I gave a few books ago, was that my explanation for that is that it was very important after 1945 to keep philosophy behind police crime, cordon and tape. So what do you do in philosophy departments? You play language games. You talk about. So why was it important to do that? Oh, it’s absolutely crucial because nobody knew how it happened. And they feared that this was one of the components. And we’re still working that out. I mean, we’re still working that out. That’s that’s why there are certain. And as you know, if you speak to somebody who teaches philosophy at any university, there are several philosophers with enormous regularity that always appear as the philosophers that students want to study. Nietzsche outranks most people 30 to one. If you’re in political philosophy, people love Machiavelli. Some might go for Heidegger or something. My point is, is that there are known to be dangerous thinkers. Well, and Heidegger is a good example. Heidegger is a good example, although the actual texts give you really very little compared to what you could take from Nietzsche if you hate Nietzsche badly. Yeah. Or Machiavelli. But it’s very interesting to me that there is this awareness that philosophy, like culture, actually in general, which again, you can see in the visual arts and others in the last in the latter half of the 20th century, become about not very important things. And it’s because there has just been this fundamental whack at the belief that, for instance, philosophy can make you good, that art or culture makes you good. In fact, it’s just had the biggest blow and the answer in the late 20th century to how did the most civilized societies on earth end up doing the worst thing? One answer is maybe the civilization was the problem. And a lot of people took that idea away or haven’t had the discipline to… Just made the evil more efficient. Absolutely. I mean, it didn’t have the discipline to disentangle accurately what could have happened and what did happen and what didn’t. But I think a lot, I think I’ve always been sure that the games that philosophy plays in our day are games of deliberate distraction because people aren’t sure they can cope with the questions that they should be asking. And that’s a shame. Well, it is very difficult. Well, you know, it is very difficult to cope with that. I mean, I spent my whole life, I would say, probably since I was about 13, really, trying to solve the Auschwitz puzzle. You know, the Auschwitz puzzle is how could you enjoy life as an Auschwitz guard? And for me, that was an attempt to understand what happened in Nazi Germany at the level of the personal. It’s like, well, what sort of person did you have to be like in order to do the terrible things that were done? And the answer is, well, now and then you were a psychopath. But otherwise, everyone was like you and me. Yeah, you were like you and me. Right. Which means that we’re not the creatures that we think we are. No. And that’s a very terrifying… So tell me what you think about this. So I’ve been spending a lot of time walking through the biblical stories recently because I’m writing a new book, which is called We Who Wrestle with God. And it should be out in February. And I’ve thought a lot about the crucifixion story. And so one of the things you can say about the crucifixion story, and Jung said this, was that it was an archetypal tragedy. And he had a technical reason for that. And the technical reason for that was that it’s kind of like an AI idea, like a large language model idea. Imagine you took the corpus of all tragedies and then you extracted out from that a meta-tragedy, which would be like the essence of tragedy itself. The tragedy of all tragedies. Okay. And so the essence of tragedy is something like the most unjust possible thing happens to the least… The most virtuous person. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So that’s pretty clear, right? It’s pretty clear that that is the passion story in essence, right? And there’s decorations on it, like you’re betrayed by your best friend. And not only are you a good person, but even the people who put you to death know it. And your mother has to see it. And yes, exactly. Your mother has to see it. So like all the details are in there. But you know, what’s very interesting about that story is that it actually doesn’t end there, right? Because there’s a mythological corpus that’s arisen around the crucifixion story per se, that after Christ was crucified, he had to descend into hell and harrow it. And so, and the way I read that psychologically is that you are called upon, if you want to get to the very bottom of things, not only to face the ultimate tragedy of existence, right, to face that full on, but that that’s not enough, that you actually have to face the problem of hellish malevolence itself. And that that actually, that’s a worse problem than death. And that, and I think maybe the reason that philosophy degenerated into triviality, following up on your logic, was that it was a lot easier to avoid the problem than to take on both of those burdens. Because I don’t think you can understand Nazism. How can you understand Nazism without journeying to the heart of darkness? Let’s say. And by the way, even if you journey there, you may learn nothing. I mean, that’s that’s, as you know, is the worst possible. I mean, we hear in our age, you hear people all the time saying things like the lessons of Holocaust. Yeah. So what are you talking about? Which lessons? And generally, right? It generally revolves into kind of banality of like, be nice to people. Like don’t mass murder people. Sure. OK. Right. Beyond that. Right. The devil’s in the details, unfortunately. The devil’s in the details on this. In fact, by the way, it’s very hard to say anything new about Auschwitz. And you sort of feel everything is being said that could be said in a way. And at the same time, we know nothing about it. But I was very struck. Martin Amos, who died recently, wrote a novel in the 90s. It was very, very controversial at the time called Time’s Arrow. Everything goes backwards. The whole plot of the novel goes time is reversed. So if somebody is sick, they go to a pile of sick and inhale it and then walk happily around their day. So it’s anyhow, it’s a device that works well at times as an abusive parent. The child is crying. The parent smacks the child and he stops crying. It’s a device that makes you able to look at things in an interesting way. But he was much criticized for Amos in the 90s because he does the Holocaust. He addresses the Holocaust in the book. And everyone said, oh, you’re using it as a literary device. I actually think by doing what he did, he actually showed one of the very few new insights I’ve ever seen about the Holocaust, which is that the people whose job it is to take the bodies out of the ovens. We give birth to these people from the ovens. Late in the novel, one of them confides to one of his colleagues that he’s getting nervous because the people that they’re bringing out of the ovens now don’t seem right. They’re more and more disabled. They’re more and more ill. Is it worth even taking them out of the ovens? So strangely enough, by doing it in reverse, you get an idea of how it started. You get an idea of how it started. Yeah. Well, the thing is, terrible things start one thing at a time. And in this case, again, by a desire on behalf of some people to alleviate suffering or to claim to alleviate suffering. Yes, to claim to alleviate suffering, to view some lives as less valued than others, perhaps hardly worth living, goes back to what we were saying about Canada today. I urge people to think of it this way around, because if you think about it this way around, it’s much easier to see how you start. Well, that is how things started in Nazi Germany too, right? Because the progression towards the death camps was a progression through euthanasia. And I’ve looked at a fair number of the propaganda films from the mid-30s, where the Nazis were starting to clean up the asylums. Yes, that’s right. And they would go in and like I’ve been in back ward asylums. When I worked at the Douglas Hospital in the 1980s, there were still people there who had been on the wards who hadn’t been deinstitutionalized, who had been on the wards for like four decades. And they would kind of lurk in the corridors that were underground at the Douglas Hospital because it was like a university campus that was connected by underground passageways. And it was like Dante’s Inferno down there. I mean, and you could easily you could easily go there and make the case that, you know, oh, my God is a life of being on a back ward in a psychiatric hospital, you know, wrapped up in a in a straitjacket for three decades worth living. And. Well, that brings that brings that whole terrible conundrum up in front of you. And and there’s no there’s no like there’s no simple answer you can jump to there. But one of the answers the answer that that is something that should therefore be handed to the state to deal with in some efficient manner, that’s definitely not a good. But the idea that it’s a question that the individual should wrestle with is is naturally the case. I mean, that that this is something that people should think about and will always think about as long as people think. It seems to me very obvious. I was I’ve always been struck by one of Elie Wiesel’s works. It was, of course, in Auschwitz. I don’t even know the trial of God. Did you ever read that one? No, it’s it’s it’s worth reading. And there’s a version of it he plays in another of his books, I think. The Gates to the Forests called there’s anyhow. It was something that I think Wiesel saw in Auschwitz, but there was a night where in the in the camp, they have some rabbis decide that they will put God on trial. And they visor describes it in extraordinary detail. And it’s riveting the silence in the room. And eventually the case of the prosecution, the case for the defense of the given by very, very learned rabbis from Poland. And nobody could know more than these men routinely knew. She’s a reminder of what was lost. But in the end, they find God guilty. See, the Jews never did that in the Old Testament. Well, no. But then something very important happened. OK, OK. Which is that they find God guilty and there’s a silence in the heart when they realize what they’ve done. And then somebody says, one of the rabbis says, OK, it’s Friday night. We need to go and do our prayers. And they do. That’s kind of reminiscent of what happens in the in the Grand Inquisitor. Yes, when the when the Inquisitor leaves the door open for Christ, right? Even though he’s doomed him to hypothetically to death because he’s no longer necessary. Well, you know, in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain puts God on trial because Cain is making these sacrifices, which are second rate. Abel’s sacrifices are lauded in the stories, but Cain’s aren’t. And there’s an intimation that they’re not of the highest quality. Now, Abel offers up animal material to God and Cain vegetative material. And that plays into it as well. But Cain calls out God and says essentially something like, you know, I’m breaking myself in half here, working on my life and nothing’s going my way. And your favoured son Abel, for reasons that I can’t really understand, is thriving on all fronts. What the hell is the problem with the cosmos you created? And God says, and I got this from reading multiple translations. God says, first of all, he says, if you do well, will you not be rewarded? That’s the first rejoinder. And the second rejoinder is something like, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you’ve invited it in to have its way with you. And so I’ve read a lot of the diary material of serial killers and sexual slayers and that sort of people. And you can be rest absolutely assured that they invited that spirit of resentment in and have been creatively interacting with it. So I was thinking too, you know, this issue of suffering and death, you know, imagine that you have a parent, let’s particularize it. Because maybe the question isn’t, what should the state do about exceptional suffering? Maybe that’s the wrong level of analysis. Maybe the right level of analysis is something like, what would you do if your father was dying a terrible death? And I would say what you should have done was live the life that you should have lived so that at that point of unbelievable complexity, you’d be wise enough to make the appropriate decision and to see your way through. But that there would be no way that you could generalize that decision. It would only have to be made in a particularized manner. And you wouldn’t have the wisdom to make that decision properly if you hadn’t conducted your life with exceptional care. Nobody can make it for you, that’s for sure. No function. That’s… So one of the things that frightened me again as a clinician was that, especially when I saw people deceiving themselves, I thought, well, why not deceive yourself if you can escape from responsibility and pain and anxiety? And if you can gain things through minimal effort, why not deceive yourself and other people? And one reason to not deceive yourself is that there will come a time when you’re called upon to make a judgment of exquisite delicacy. And if you’re fuzzy minded and demented enough because of your own lies, that you’re incapable of such judgment, you’ll make the wrong decision and you’ll regret being alive as a consequence. Well, that’s one good reason not to not to do something that you’re going to regret. I mean, I’ve said for a long time that there should be a category. Perhaps there is one. Somebody watching can describe it to me. But I’ve thought for a long time there should be a category of argument which is recognized cannot be solved because somebody involved in the argument has done the thing and regrets it deeply. But at such a deep level that they could never face up to it. So the example I’ve always had in my mind is if you have an argument like the ethics of abortion, if there’s one person in the room who’s had an abortion, you’re very unlikely to get anywhere in the discussion because there is somebody who has everything on the line, everything at stake, and either they regret it, in which case nothing. You can’t get anywhere in the discussion because you don’t want to open up that pit. Or they have to pretend not to care, in which case you have another glimpse into a pit. Now, actually, again, you and I talked about this last night. Helen Joyce made this brilliant observation about the trans issue recently, which was that we for the rest of our lives will all be facing a certain type of person who cares more about that issue than anyone else in the world because they’ve done the worst possible thing to their child and they will never concede it. Or to themselves. Or to themselves. They will never concede it. But moving away from that negative, if I may, I mean, we get back to this thing of people deceive themselves very often unless somebody comes along and says exactly that. That’s one of the things I’m fond of Nietzsche about, the person of resentment, is Nietzsche’s observation that the secular priest would be required to stand over the person’s life and say, you are right, there is somebody who has destroyed your life in this world, the person is you. Now, our mutual friend, Anthony Daniels, said that when he was a prison doctor, he was one of the few people who actually used to do this with his… Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah. He’s a remarkable person. He’s a wonderful man. And… That’s Theodor Delrimpel, for those of you watching, listening. He’s written great books. And he had the observation, he told me once that he quite often in prison would have people coming to him saying, oh, doctor, I think I need some pills, some antidepressants. Why would you, why do you want antidepressants? I go, I think I’m depressed. Why do you think you are depressed? I think I’m suffering from low self-esteem. He said he would reply, well, there’s one thing you’ve got right. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, right. Almost without exception, whenever he did this, the patient laughed. Yeah. He was being caught out. Right? The point is, you’re in prison for doing a terrible crime. You ought to be depressed. That’s why it’s a penitentiary. It’s why it’s a penitentiary. You ought to be suffering. You ought to be questioning your self-esteem at this point. This is a very good time to do it. And you ought to… For like a decade. Yeah, and you ought to medicalize it away. And the state maybe shouldn’t help you too easily medicalize away whatever you’re feeling in that situation. But I was always struck by that story because I thought how few adults… I always say there are so few adults in the room these days, but there are so few adults who will stand over the life of anyone and say, I’m sorry, Baco, but it’s you. And I had this… You know, it’s so funny because one of the reasons that my lectures have become popular is because I have done that for young men. Yeah. And suggested to them, well, if you’re miserable, it’s possible. It’s because you’re useless and you’re not doing what you should be doing. And you could think perversely and should think likely that why in the world would that possibly be a salable message? You know, and the answer is, well, if the person that you’re addressing is genuinely miserable and hopeless, and you say, well, maybe there’s something that you’re not doing quite right, then they now have an avenue of movement forward. Right. And if you say instead, well, it’s no wonder you’re miserable because the cosmos and the patriarchy are structured such that you’re a victim of circumstance without recourse. I had this… I was on a program the other day where there was a black British woman on who claimed to have suffered hurt from slavery. And I’m fed up with that claim now. I said, you’ve not suffered anything. You haven’t suffered any hurt and no one alive has caused you the hurt. Now, of course, a lot of people would say, who are you to say that? You’re just another privileged white guy or something. But I actually think it’s necessary to say that to people because actually, as Clarence Thomas points out in his recent Supreme Court judgment on affirmative action, if you don’t get that out of the way, the rest of history is going to be a competitive grievance competition. And so you actually need people to say, no, I’m not falling for this. You may have fallen for it. You may have decided that everything in your life would be sorted out if reparations were paid to you by the state of California. I’m not convinced that would help you. I think you’d have a fantastic shopping binge for a few days and be as unpleasant and unhappy a week from Tuesday as you are today. But it’s very striking that there’s something missing in our societies of people saying that, of just saying, you know, we’re not going along with your self-perception. And that’s on so many things. We’re not going along with your self-perception and agreeing to it, not just because it’s bad for you, but it’s bad for all of us. It’s bad for them and for all of us simultaneously. And you know, one of the things I’ve been really shocked by, I would say, with regard to my fellow therapists, is their absolute cowardice, and almost universally so, on the self-identity. I assume cowardice on behalf of almost everybody. So I don’t expect terrorism in our ages. It’s wonderful when it happens, but you should assume cowardice. I think it’s particularly egregious on the therapeutic front with regard to self-identity. So here’s two things that every psychologist who’s actually trained knows, if they are worthy of the name. The first is identity is negotiated by anyone who isn’t, two, like literally. By three, you negotiate your identity. And the whole, the definition of being a civilized person is that you negotiate your identity and you do it constantly. I mean, you and I sitting here in open dialogue are negotiating our identities, right? Because we’re attempting to modify the manner in which we perceive ourselves and present ourselves as a consequence of exchanging information. We couldn’t even talk. Well, of course, the people who push the self-identity mantra also claim that there’s no such thing as free speech, right? There’s no honest exchange of ideas between men of good faith, let’s say, or good will. So that’s one thing psychologists know, and they absolutely know this. And part of what you do as a psychologist, if you have any sense at all, is you teach people how to negotiate their identity more effectively. And so the second thing that psychologists know is that you expose people voluntarily to the things that frighten them, instead of protecting them, you know, in this trigger warning fashion. And all psychologists know that that kind of over, what that overprotective attitude is definitely a pathway to psychopathology. And yet no one will stand up and say that. It’s, I have a habit, which I learned from a late friend who was a journalist, which I’ve tried to stick with throughout my adult life of always going to one dangerous country a year. And I do it for lots of reasons. One is just curiosity of the world. Another, I suppose, is it is one of, to go back to what we were saying earlier, one of the best ways to actually feel a sense of gratitude about where you’re from and what the good things are in your society. Because unless you’ve seen a society at war, you don’t understand quite how blessed a state peace is. I mean, and how easily what happens to other people could happen to you. But there are other reasons to do it. And what a miracle it is that that isn’t happening all the time everywhere. Absolutely. And as it was. Because that’s the state of nature. That was, yes, absolutely. I mean, that’s one of the things that Pinker’s write on in The Blank Slate is deaths in tribal societies, pre-modernity. Violent deaths way higher even than the average violent deaths of a European male in the 20th century. Right, right. So yes, to some extent, this is a natural state. But I also do it just partly because I learn so much about how societies deteriorate. And as a sort of very, very minimal final thing, you’re not going to see it in the very minimal final thing. You always find out something about yourself. It’s never the purpose of doing it. But there is something you find out. Okay, so here’s a very interesting clinical finding. It was a revolutionary discovery in the 50s. The psychoanalysts following Freud would walk people through what they wanted to avoid and they did that autobiographically, right, by going back into the past. And there’s some utility in that. The behaviors came along and what they did instead was expose people to what they were afraid of here and now. So, for example, if you were afraid of balloons, which is rare, but does happen upon occasion, a therapist would sit you down, have you relax, run you through a relaxation exercise, maybe show you a picture of a balloon, ask you to imagine it, then put a balloon 15 feet away, and then 10 feet away, and 8 feet away, and then a balloon on your lap, and maybe that takes a number of sessions, and then the fear would disappear. Now, the theory was, the reason the fear disappeared was because you paired the exposure with relaxation. But then it was discovered that you didn’t have to pair it with relaxation and it still worked. You could be in a hyper-aware state. As long as you’re doing it voluntarily. You have to do it voluntarily. So then the psychoanalysts rejoined her to the behaviorists was, the person isn’t really afraid of a balloon or an elevator, they’re really afraid of death, and if you eradicate the specific fear, it will just move low-cal because you’re not dealing with the root cause. Now, that also turned out to be wrong, because what happened is if you exposed people to, say, three things they were afraid of, they would go out voluntarily and expose themselves to all sorts of other things that they were afraid of. So you didn’t make them less afraid, you made them braver, which is very different. Yes. And so what you did with exposure therapy was that you transformed people’s conceptualizations of themselves. You transformed their conceptualization of themselves from passive victims of malevolent circumstances to active contenders with challenge. That’s seriously, maybe I’ve been doing, maybe I’ve been unwittingly doing this to myself all my life. I remember the first time I was covering a conflict, there were rockets landing, and it was, as it actually is, it’s quite exhilarating if you’re in a, it isn’t if you have no choice to be there, but if you’re a war correspondent or something, it’s famously a problem of the job that you can find it exhilarating. Well, that’s that distinction between voluntary and involuntary too. And Winston Churchill famously said there’s no greater feeling than the feeling of being shot at without result. It’s an enormously enlivening thing that you think. You think not today, death, not today. But the first time I was ever in a conflict where there were rockets landing, funnily enough, when I got back from the area where it was happening and got back on the first evening, my immediate instinct was this very strange one to me, which I thought about a lot afterwards, which was that I thought I could look my grandparents in the face. Now, what I mean by that is that all my grandparents are long dead by them, but what I meant was they’d all gone through the blitz or the Second World War. And I’d always wondered how on earth you coped with that. And I suddenly sort of thought, oh, I see it’s like that. So I would say what you did, okay, so there’s a mythological tone to all of the things that you just related. So the first thing you said was that perhaps you had been doing this unwittingly in some sense your whole life. Well, one of the things that psychologists eventually figured out was that people are unwittingly doing this their whole life because that’s how you learn. The way you learn is by facing an optimized challenge voluntarily, and that pushes you slightly beyond your current limits. Now, that’s where meaning emerges. So meaning is the instinct that puts you on the edge of transformation. Yes, so you think I’m going to learn something from this. Yes, and you may learn something about the world or where you are in the world, but you may also learn something about yourself or change as a consequence. Right? And so the instinct of meaning actually puts you on the edge of chaos. Okay, so that’s the heroic path, by the way. But the grandfather comment’s extremely interesting too, the grandparent, because one of the tropes, mythological trope, is that if you go into the belly of the beast, you can rescue your forefathers from the belly of the beast. That’s Pinocchio in the whale. Well, that’s what you did in some ways when you… I think I just wanted to know if I could sort of stand… I just always thought that that generation, the heroism, what they went through, you always have that thing of what would one do in that situation, how would one behave, you know, and even just getting the smallest glimpse of, okay, I think I could hold it together. That means that you kindled that inside you. The spirit that you saw in your grandparents that you admired, you kindled inside by that exposure, and you said that brought you to a position of, you know, not full equivalence, but at least partial equivalence, right? Well, so here’s part of what happens. So if you expose yourself to optimized challenge, well, first of all, you gather more information. So these countries you went to, I mean, you’re learning about the countries, you’re learning about yourself, that’s pure information. But here’s something else that happens. This is so cool. So if you put yourself in a new situation, new genes turn on inside you, and they activate parts of you that have not yet come alive. Right, right. No kidding. So then you might say, so there’s a maze at Chartre Cathedral, I think it’s at Chartre, and there’s an idea in the maze. So you enter one side of the maze, it’s about 40 feet across, and then you have to walk every quadrant, north, west, south, and north, east, south, and west, every quadrant, and if you’ve walked every quadrant, you get to the center. The center is also the center of the cross, right? So that’s the place of maximal suffering. But there’s an idea there, and redemption, there’s an idea there, and the idea is that if you go absolutely everywhere, every bit of you will turn on, right? And a fair bit of that is right, right? Exactly. And you know this, we know this is true, and you think, well, how could it be any other way, right? And you know, too, these experiences that you had where you’re voluntarily confronting what’s dangerous, that changes you in a way that can’t be attained by anyone who hasn’t had that experience, right? If you haven’t pushed yourself to your limit, especially I would say with regard to the fear of death, then there’s a change that hasn’t occurred within you, and I would say it’s a fundamental change of maturation. It’s definitely an enormously enlivening feeling, I would say. So what do you think was at the core of the enlivening element of it? I mean, you said it was probably having cheated death, but that’s not all it is, right? Because you also, I had a client who was terrified of death enough to dose herself with sleeping pills constantly to be unconscious, and she had a dream, and in her dream, the figure she saw was a dwarf in a forest, told her that unless she could learn to work in a slaughterhouse, she wouldn’t be able to graduate from university. Wow. And so we talked this dream through, and I said, well, I don’t think I can arrange to have you visit a slaughterhouse. She wouldn’t eat meat, by the way, and she couldn’t go into a butcher store. Wow. So I said, I can’t get you into a slaughterhouse, but maybe you could think of something that you could do that would be equivalent. Why don’t you think about it for a week? And so she came back and said, I think I’d like to see an embalming. So I called up some furniture funeral parlor directors, like right then and there, and I said, I have this client who’s terrified of death. You guys deal with death all the time. She has this sense that if she came and saw an embalming, that it might be helpful to her, and we’d also like to talk to you about how the hell you do this, because you face death every day, and she can’t face it at all. And they were very, very understanding and just said yes. And so we went there two weeks later. I’m very squeamish about that sort of thing as well, about that kind of gross physicality, let’s say. And so it wasn’t something that I would just wrap off as if it was nothing. But my client was absolutely terrified, but it was so interesting, and this is part of the enlightening element. So we were in the hallway, separated from the surgical room, so to speak, where the embalming was taking place, which is a very visceral occurrence, as all the bodily fluids drain, for example. And first of all, she went to the funeral parlor. Second, she sat in the hallway. Third, when this first started, she was looking to the side, but she’d do this. And then every time she did that, she’d look a little longer until finally she was watching it completely. And then she said, can I go in the room? Can I put my hand on the body? They put her on a glove, and she did that. You know? And now what happened to her? And this was so interesting because she had a lot of neurotic concerns, and part of them reflected her own sense of her own weakness. She came out of that knowing that she was a lot less weak than she thought, because she could do it, right? She didn’t think she was that sort of creature, and it turned out that she was that sort of creature, and quite quickly. That’s… Learning that about yourself, I mean, is so to be encouraged. So to be encouraged, because the first thing that happens, I’m struck by your example that the first thing that happens is looking away. That’s the most natural of instincts, and we all have it. I mean, you’d have to have something slightly wrong not to. But to train yourself to be able to look at the thing that terrifies you, whether it’s death or something ugly, it seems to me at any rate that it’s one of the things that drives me is that if you look at enough, and as long as you don’t tip over into the void, if you look at enough, you can get to that place of stillness. Mm-hmm. There’s a metaphor that’s always on my mind from the end of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, where a very curious man who’s an architect in the book and a rather minor figure is at the very end, well, it’s the whole plot, but at the very end, after all the terrible things have happened to various people and the human comedy of the whole disaster of the novel, the one of the main characters sees this architect, this mysterious figure sitting watching this fairground ride, and the fairground ride is one where this thing spins around, and there’s a net around the outside, and people pay a shilling, and they go on. They try to climb up the side, and they’re flung to the sides all the time. And I think his name is Dr. Silenus is just watching this as all the people, and he says how loud they laugh and how they cackle and how they get flung around, and they all try to get to the top, and he says, occasionally the circus pays for somebody who knows how to do it to get to the top and sit there, and he says that’s where you want to be, because at the top, in the center, it’s totally still. There’s no centrifugal force there. Okay, so I’m curious about something. You made a comment earlier about the fact that your more natural presumption now is to assume that cowardice will be the order of the day. Yes. Okay, so there’s something about you that’s always struck me, and like I’ve met a lot of people over the last six years particularly, and I’ve met a lot of people who have remained silent when they shouldn’t, and I’ve met a few people who will speak, but they’re rare. I’ve probably met 50 or 100 now who will speak, and you’re one of them. And Iain Hersey-Lee is another one, right? And there are these people who, Jonathan Haidt is another one, right? They don’t remain silent. And so now you talked about a pattern through your life of going farther, and going places that challenged you. And you talked about the fact that you have seen cowardice as the order of the day, especially that willingness to stay silent. Okay, you’re not one of those people. As far as I can tell, do you know why? Is it tied into that proclivity? Is it tied somehow into that proclivity to push? Well, naturally, I don’t think of myself as a particularly brave person. There’s lots of people I know who I do think of as brave, but I’ve always wanted to make sure I didn’t not say what I saw. Why? It would be so embarrassing, humiliating, self-humiliating. I couldn’t live with myself if I… Yeah, but I don’t think anybody can live with themselves if they fail to do that. So the fact that you observe… Well, maybe you… It may be that people don’t know that so explicitly. My experience has been that everyone who remains silent when they have something to say pays for it. Oh, right. Well, somebody said to me years ago that they thought that what motivated me was I have a very low tolerance threshold for lies. I just don’t like them. I hate being told. And particularly big, big lies on the, you know, sort of, let’s all pretend that we now agree to this thing today that we didn’t agree to yesterday. I can’t do it. I just won’t do it. And I suppose one of the things that also motivates that is that the people I liked and the people I admire are like that. And I’ve known Ayan for 20 years. And I mean, actually, somebody said something I think my 40th birthday said, are you aware you’ve surrounded yourself with courageous people? And I said, I wasn’t actually, but actually it was true that around the time there were some people like Ayan, a friend of mine was very brave in the conflict in Northern Ireland, and other people, you know, academics I know who I like, who I think are, you know, great. And I actually hadn’t particularly noticed it, but it’s true. Now, there’s two lessons I took from that. One is, I just like courageous people. I like people who say what they think. And they’re much more fun, of course, and they’re much better friends. And you have a much better time and you actually get somewhere because you don’t have to all lie to each other and all that sort of thing. You actually get to somewhere in the discussion. And that’s a pretty good idea. The second thing is probably, I thought actually maybe it is deliberate because I probably recognized, rightly I think, that if you surround yourself or near courageous people, it’s more likely you’ll be courageous yourself. So for instance, you know, sometimes people say, well, if you said this thing and everyone hates you for it. And I genuinely, I don’t care. Now, why do I not care? Because I only care about a small number of people whose opinion I care for. And I don’t understand why understand why anyone cares about the opprobrium of millions. If you have four people, three people who you admire and who you know admire you, and you’re fine. I don’t think it… Okay, so let me ask you about that admiration, you know. So I’ve thought a lot about admiration, because I think admiration is what it’s a manifestation of the religious instinct. Yeah. So because to admire someone is, if you admire them enough, you’re awestruck in their presence. Yeah. That would be the ultimate manifestation of admiration. And awe is a primary religious experience, right? It’s the experience of seeing something that’s beyond you in a manner that’s compelling, right? And so, and you said you admire people who tell the truth. Yes. And so, what I would, what I’m curious about, if I said to you, is there any difference between that and the religious proclamation, let’s say, that the truth will set you free, right? That’s part of the doctrine of the word, right? And I mean, we and I have had discussions and more and more of them with people like Jonathan Paget about what a moral system has to be grounded in, right? And the humanist types, we sort of began our conversation today with this, the humanist types think that you can ground morality in something like a system of facts. And see, I don’t think that’s true. And I think it’s actually technically untrue. I think that we ground morality in something like, God, it’s something like the religious instinct. And I am trying to figure that out technically, like, certainly one of the things that orients you morally is the sense of admiration. Yes. Well, then you might ask yourself, what provokes admiration appropriately and naturally? And we could say, well, courage does. Courage does. Definitely courage does, right? Should. Should, yes. But I think it almost invariably does. Yes, you have to work really hard as we are in our age to discourage people from admiring courage. Right, right. Well, and you even see among bad guys, let’s say, like if you look at mafioso movies, I mean, the mafioso villain types are at least courageous. Yes. Right? Yes. And they have their own system of ethics. And they have their own system. Very strict system. Yes, yes, yes. And so even though you might not say that that’s the most profound set of orienting guidelines, because it’s criminal in its orientation, it’s not nothing. And there is a certain amount of courage. And you could also point out, and this is sort of what would you say, comment on the necessity of integrating the shadow is that someone who’s forthright enough to be a mafioso at least isn’t terrified into dependent neuroticism. Right, right, right. So there’s a hierarchy of virtue. And the forthright bad guy isn’t the lowest entity. Right. So there are valid markers for admiration, right, courage. I think brotherhood in some sense is also, that’s something you also alluded to, you know, you said that you noticed that you had aggregated around you people who were willing to speak their minds. And I think the reason for that likely is, is that if you speak your mind and you pay the price and you reap the benefits of that, pay the price for that reap the benefits, other people who’ve done that notice, and you find them and they find you. I mean, that’s certainly, that’s happened as I’ve risen to notoriety. And so, and that’s also a huge reward. Yes, absolutely. So is the opportunity to meet people in different spheres who’ve done great things. And that’s, I mean, that’s an enormous benefit of the life I live. And I’m sure the life you live is incalculable, you know, the gift of meeting people who’ve done extraordinary things. And from a bewildering array of backgrounds, you know, I mean, it’s like, I don’t know, my last cycle of people who we know and are friends with, I think, I think there’s nothing they have in common other than probably a similar desire to say the truth as they see it, to do so in the face of whatever comes their way. And that might be a Yonemee Park, or it might be Jonathan Pagio. There’s no commonality of background experience. And by the way, then that’s one of the things I would say is that we’re to encourage people is that in that case, like you can do it too. And, you know, one of the reasons I’m sort of rather actually optimistic about the next generation coming along in America and in the Western democracies in general is, I think the smarter ones, I’m sure you see this all the time, the smarter ones have all seen through the dogma of the day, and they don’t like it. And although there are these sorts of prim, censorious, you know, tittle tattle, telltale people in their 20s, and some pathetic people in their 30s and 40s and so on. Nevertheless, the people coming up in their teens and early 20s now have seen through those people, they don’t like them. They’re right not to like them. And so actually- That’s why they look to people like Joe Rogan. Right. And then they’re right to look. They are. They are. Because he’s very successful, very funny, very smart. Very tough. Very tough. Lives the life he wants to live. As you know, if you go to Joe’s studio, it’s pretty much what, I’d say, what at the age of about 15 you thought you’d do if you’ve got some cats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s really great. I mean, you know, and I think that the more that happens, the more people see that there’s a way through, the more we’ll have this sort of aggregator effect. Okay. So let me ask you this, that, you know, you said that you can’t, for one reason or another, you can’t or you have decided not to abide lies. And so I would ask you, to what degree has the adventure of your life, that’s a good way of thinking about it, been a consequence of exactly that? So I mean, well, let me, I’ve started to understand, you tell me what you think of this. So you can use language two ways. You can either decide what you want from someone before you talk to them, and then you can craft every word that you utter in order to extract that. That’s instrumental use of language. I’ve talked to lots of journalists who do that. For sure. Or you can just sit down and you can say what you think and see what happens. And those are very, very, now this is what Rogan does in his interviews. He just says what he thinks and he sees what he thinks and he sees what happens. Now, the advantage to the former strategy is that in principle, you get what you want, but the disadvantage is, well, you might have to manipulate people and they’ll catch onto that. And the second and more profound disadvantage is what the hell do you know about what you want? You know, it’s not like you’re transparent to yourself. And so you might have some bloody scheme that you think you’re seeing through and you might manipulate to get it, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be good for you when you get it. And so you could contrast that instead with a different proposition, which is, and I think this is a correct proposition, and I think it’s maybe the fundamental religious proposition possibly, is that whatever happens if you are acting in accordance with the truth is the best thing that could have possibly happened, regardless of how it seems to you at the time. And so that’s a dubious proposition, but here’s one that’s not so dubious, I think, although I do think it’s true. If you have to let go of the consequences of your words, because you’re just going to let the cards fall wherever they’re going to fall, you get to have an adventure because you don’t know what the hell’s going to happen. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So you think absolutely. Okay. So why do you think that? Of course, it’s the most exciting thing because you’ll actually be off on an adventure, which is predicated on an idea, which I believe to be true, which is that the point of truth is not just a sort of, it’s not a game, it’s to get you somewhere. And it’s like the search for meaning. You either devolve, I think I said this with you and Jonathan before, but you either devolve into the sort of idea that we’re meaning-seeking creatures, but there’s no meaning, or you say, we’re meaning-seeking creatures, and there’s a reason for that. And the reason is, it’s because we’re hoping to get somewhere. To that center that you talked about. That center that I talked about. That’s the same as the center of that- Of the maze. Of the maze. Exactly. It’s the same thing. You hope that if you, it sounds like Vassalov Havel, but I mean, if you tread in truth, if you follow your instinct towards truth, you’re bound to make some missteps, you’re bound to get some things wrong, as everybody does, but the orientation of where you’re going to is correct. It is correct. And at the end of it, whatever it was you were meant to be in your life is more likely to be what you’ll be than if you set off in error and deliberately suppressed what you believed and what you wanted to do in your life. So here’s a corollary to that also, I would say, is that if you say what you think, then it’s you saying and you thinking, and that means that whatever happens is your life. But if you engage in falsehood, then I think you’re the devil’s puppet fundamentally. And the reason I think that is because if you’re engaging in falsehood, then whatever it is that you’re saying and thinking, it isn’t you by definition, because it’s not what you think. You can tease that out of people rather like Theodore Dalrymple did with those prisoners. You can tease it out with people, we survive people like Joe Assone’s thing in comedy, because my late friend Clive James had this beautiful saying, he wrote somewhere, he said, he said, common sense and humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. Humor is just common sense dancing. Now, I love this quote. And one of the things that says just about it is that a comedian, or indeed anyone, any of us who tell a joke, if it’s a good joke, irrespective of whether or not it’s offensive to some person, people laugh. And the laughter is the recognition that what has happened is real. It’s reality dancing. It’s reality riffing on itself at a higher speed. And transcending itself. Absolutely. And one of the greatest things, why I’m very confident that if you have enough comedians in our society who are good, we might get out of this. Those are the ten good men in Sodom, by the way. Absolutely right. Who dare to tell the truth. Exactly. And the fact that our age might need to rely on comedians who will tell us something about our age. But nevertheless, if you make somebody laugh about the thing, they recognize it and they laugh. Quite often, there’s a type of person who will then pull back, because they’ve basically admitted that they also recognize this thing to be true, because otherwise they wouldn’t have found it funny. They wouldn’t have been able to laugh about it, because laughter wouldn’t be the response, the response would be disgusted. Well, it’s interesting, too. Quite often they laugh and then they have to fame disgust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s interesting, too, there. This points to something like an instinct for the truth, because one of the things I was really struck by when I had little kids was how early their sense of humor developed. It’s ridiculously early. It’s there at nine months, for sure. You can coax it out of them. But certainly, by the time kids are two, they’re doing ridiculously clowny things all the time. And it struck me, because it’s pre-linguistic even. It’s so deep, that sense of humor. And I do think it’s part of the orientation towards truth. It’s the playful orientation towards truth. Well, that’s why I quoted Martin Amis earlier, but he famously said once that the reason you should be suspicious of people with no sense of humor isn’t just they don’t know what’s funny, but they don’t know what’s serious either. Yeah, well, the funniest comedians are the ones that can take the most serious thing and make it funny. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And you dare to do that. The Monty Python troupe was great at that. Yeah, and I mean, that’s why it’s also dangerous to be a comedian in this stage, because everyone can take it out of context. I was with Amba the other day and pretend that you’re doing something you weren’t. But in a good faith environment, yes, these are the people who can point to things we all know to be true. We get to laugh at them and with them. And this this reveals something very important in our era, it seems to me, which is the people that you and I spend a certain amount of our lives railing against, and we should get on to some positives, but the railing against is in part because they are censorious bullies. They want to tell you and me and everyone else what we should find funny, what we should read, what we should say, what we should think, how we should act. And in my mind, it’s an invitation which I decline. But in that case, these people who are so prim, so unfunny, so tediously repressive in everything they do, don’t stand a chance in the long run. If 10 comedians can take down a million social justice activists, and I reckon they can, then I’d bet long on the comedians. We’re going to move very quickly to the Daily Wire Plus side and I’ll ask you about this, about the development of that sense of truth. Let me see here what else I’d like to ask you about. Okay, so let’s go back to what we discussed right at the beginning, which is this idea of purpose. So, you said that meaning gets you somewhere, right? Okay, so I think that’s exactly right, by the way. I called my first book Maps of Meaning because I understood, I came to understand that meaning was actually a navigation guide, right? And I actually think that’s technically true because meaning manifests itself as the instinct that tells you that you’re on the path to the proper goal. Yes, I say that you can orient yourself by seeing the flares on the path. Yes, yes, yes. Well, and that’s part of the idea of a calling, by the way. It’s also part of the fact, and this is an interesting fact, that people are beset with their own particularized problems. So, I learned in the Exodus seminar that I ran a while back, when the Israelites are lost in the desert, God appears to them as a pillar of light during the day, and a pillar of darkness during the day, and a pillar of light at night. And Jonathan Pagio made the claim that that was the same idea as the yin and yang idea in Taoism, and that there’s this tension of opposites that guides you. And here’s a way of thinking about it, is that you’ll find a calling in your life, and things will beckon to you as opportunities. Now, not everything beckons to you as an opportunity, but some things do. And that’s the positive side. That would be the light, let’s say, in the darkness. On the negative side, there’s going to be things that aggregate around you as your problems, right? And there are things that bug you. And God only knows why those things bug you, because there’s a trillion things that could, but some things really grip you and won’t let you go, right? And you could think about the interaction between opportunity and problem as something like calling, right? And then the truthful grappling with that produces that not only a sense of meaning, because you’re taking your responsibilities seriously and taking advantage of your opportunities, but it also propels you down the appropriate developmental path, because if you take on the problems that beset you that are yours, you’ll develop, and if you exploit the opportunities that present themselves, you’ll develop as well. Yeah, I mean, drive is something that fascinates me, because there’s a sort of presumption that people either have it or they don’t. And that is the case to some degree. I mean, there’s certainly very driven people, and there are all sorts of reasons we know why some people are driven from an early age and why that might be. But I’m struck by this lack of talking about vocation in our era. I don’t know if it’s because people are embarrassed about it. Some people undoubtedly are. Or whether it’s just that we don’t particularly encourage it. It’s probably a combination of all of these things, plus a sort of sense that there’s no particular meaning, so why bother? Everything’s been shown to be flawed. All ambition is pathological and destructive. Yes, and there’s different ways of passing it. But I’ve always been struck by something Alan Bloom said in one of the early parts of The Closing of the American Mind. He said, and he said even then in the 80s, it concerned him that he said, we know what a beautiful body would be like. We don’t any longer know what a beautiful soul would be like. And although that’s a rather high way of saying it, I would say we don’t know what a, we haven’t agreed what a meaningful life would be, really. And I once asked a sociologist friend about this. I said, what do you think in your life has been the biggest change? And he said, I think the biggest change in my life is that if you were a man who provided for your family and your dependents, whatever your job, you were a man of dignity. And he said, that isn’t the case anymore. You can work very hard for people who are your dependents or someone else’s dependents, but you’re the mug. So there’s a lot of sort of demoralization around that, I think. And I’m very keen that we, as it were, without saying being moralistic, we rectify the demoralization. Well, you know, we did a series of studies on vision development. I built this program with some colleagues of mine to help people develop a vision. And the first part of the exercise is that you contemplate yourself five years in the future. And then you adopt an attitude of appropriate respect for yourself. So you try to put yourself, people don’t necessarily want the best for themselves or think they deserve it. And so it’s useful to entice people into giving themselves the benefit of the doubt for a moment and letting them contemplate the notion that it might be okay if they were successful. And then the next part of the exercise is, well, write for 15 minutes about what you could have and who you would be, if you could have what you needed, if you were treating yourself properly, and if you were the person you want to be, just write it down, just get it out. And then we have them do the reverse, which is, imagine that your idiocy took the upper hand and that you created your own particularized hell out of your stupidity. What would that look like? Or now you’ve got polls, right? It’s like, not there, that would be better. Then we have them break the positive vision down into seven sub elements, family, friendships, career, etc. And say, just make a plan. Yeah. Right. So we gave this to college students in three different campuses, 50% decrease in dropout. This is with a 90 minute exercise, particularly effective for young minority men who had poor academic backgrounds. Yeah, no kidding. And a 35% increment in grade point average. Yeah. Well, so that’s part of that conjuring up a vision. And we’re trying to do that, you know this, because you’re involved in this art project in the UK. We’re trying to do that on a more international scale, even though there’s perils to that. And that’s partly, well, how could we formulate a vision of the future that was positive and invitational instead of fear based and what’s serving the demented interests of power mongers? How about that? Yeah. Or the one I dislike the most, which is, you and I have talked about it before. The last time Roger Scruton appeared in public, we did a discussion together just a few months before he died. And we got talking about this strange way in which the era wishes you just to be harmless. Right. To come in and out and not be noticed. Yeah. Which is so preposterous to me. If all ambition is pathological, then harmless is the only- Yes, and all you’re doing is emitting carbon. Yeah. If it weren’t for you, the damn moss and trees would be getting on just fine. Yeah. You just pull everyone’s teeth out and wrap them up in styrofoam and set them in a corner and the planet would get along just fine. Exactly. Human beings are the problem. In fact, we’re the point. Well, you know, Douglas, that’s probably a good place to end. Oh, there was one other thing we were going to talk about. This is relevant to vocation as well. Barry Weiss invited you to contribute to her new enterprise and you decided to do that in a particular way. You’re already writing columns and so you weren’t particularly interested in doing more of that, having been doing enough of it. What are you doing with Barry? It was a brilliant idea of hers. She wanted me to do a column for the Free Press and I said, well, I’m sort of columned up. I write about three or four columns a week on various issues of the day. And she said, well, I want you to write about something else. And I said, well, look, I’ve always tried to have a deal with my editors. I write about something I love for every piece about something or someone I hate. And actually, the equilibrium has never been quite right on that. There’s much more news coverage in the things that annoy you. But nevertheless, I do try to write about things I love. And it was Barry’s idea. She said, well, look, whenever I’m on a stage with you, you always sort of seem to have things you can pluck out of the quotes from things. Why don’t you just explain why you got them in your head and where they’re from and why you think they’re worth having that. And so we came up with this idea. And every week I write a column about a poem I have by heart. Sometimes it’s a longish poem. Sometimes it’s a few lines. And really, it’s about why it’s up there. How much poetry do you know by heart? Well, I’m doing 50 poems for this year, ranging from, well, I mean, it’s mainly within what you’d think of as the classical canon. Why did you start doing that? Well, there’s several reasons. One is if there’s something I read, which hits me in the solar plexus, I want it up there. That’s a very strong, I think, oh, I need that. Do you know why you need it? Well, then the answer to that is, and I actually addressed this in one of the opening columns, there were several people who made a great impression on me when I was growing up. One was a sermon I heard from Terry Wait, who was a captive in Lebanon in the 80s. He was taken hostage after being the Amnesty of the Archbishop of Canterbury. And I heard him give a sermon as a schoolboy where he talked about when he was chained to a Beirut radiator for about five years. One of the things that made it bearable was that he had four quartets by T.S. Eliot in his head. And he recited the opening, time present and time past, both perhaps contained in time future. And he did that whole opening, which culminates in that great footfalls echo in the memory down the passage, which we did not take through the door we never opened into the rose garden. And when he, there was something immediately struck me, immediately went back to my room and got my Eliot off the shelf and finally understood Eliot or began to understand Eliot for the first time. But the other thing was, and I wrote this recently in a column about an extraordinary Russian woman who should be better known called Tatyana Gnedich. Now she was a woman, I tell the story in the piece and I’ve only seen it in one other English version. She was a woman who studied English literature in St. Petersburg in the 1930s and 40s. In The Height of the Terrors, she was actually denounced at her university because one of her forebears had translated, I think it was Ovid into Russian. And she was very proud of this forebear, but somebody denounced her as having noble lineage. Oh, yes. So she was denounced and thrown out of the university. She was eventually allowed back in. And to cut a long story short, but it’s an amazing story. She ended up after she was at the siege of St. Petersburg, her house was burned down and her mother was killed. In about 1944 or so, she handed herself in to the authorities. She’d got it into her head that wanting to go to England constituted activity against the state. That was how bad it was, the sense that you were doing wrong. It’s like trying to leave California. Right. She handed herself in and she was given straightaway 10 years in Gulag. And on the night she was at the holding prison, she was told by the guard, there are books in the prison before you’re taken to Gulag. And she said, shut up, I’m working. And he said, what are you working on? She said, I’m translating Don Juan of Lord Byron’s in my head. Now the poem is 17,000 words long, 17,000 lines long. And he said, okay, I’ll give you a piece of paper and a pen and I’ll come back in the morning. And when he came back in the morning, she had translated into Russian all of the canto in which Don Juan goes to Moscow. And he laughed uproariously at the brilliance of this translation, the humor of Lord Byron. She had exactly done in verse in Russian in the same rhyme scheme that very complicated rhyme scheme that Byron uses in the original. So he said, if I keep giving you paper, you can think you can finish it. She said, yes. It took her two years and she was in a cell on her own and they gave her the paper. At the end, the guard allowed three copies to be typed up and gave her one, then sent her to Gulag for the next eight years. And she completed her sentence. And when she came out of the Gulag, she had her pile of papers and she went to a friend’s house and there was an apartment and five people were living in the room and she joined them. And she stank of the Gulag by all accounts, as did her manuscript. But she then typed it up again with the revision she’d made in the Gulag. It was subsequently published and it is still to this day, the standard translation of Byron in the Russian language. Some people, man. And some people. And it was actually put on stage, it was a massive hit within her lifetime. So she went from, she had a heart attack on the first night, which she fortunately survived. But I tell this story and I told it after the one on Byron and on Don Juan, because it’s always been my belief and to me it’s an insight that’s not original, but I’ve got it from various people, which is what you have up here, the bastards can never take. They can… How much of that… So I have a friend in Canada, Rex Murphy, who knows, who’s extremely erudite and literate and charismatic and maybe Canada’s most remarkable journalist. The sort of person that CBC actually produced, because he was a CBC production, so to speak, and would have produced more of had they actually done their job. And instead of even setting themselves at odds against him, which they eventually did, he has knowledge of a vast corpus of poetry and it’s evident in the manner in which he speaks, because he has that lilt and cadence and rhythm that’s part and parcel. Juan, you’re very, very well spoken. How much of that do you think, can you tell how much of that is a consequence of having internalized? It’s probably that and in my case, the great good fortune of being brought up with the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, which if you have them in your head and you recite them every Sunday, gives you a pretty good idea of how to cadence the English language. Right, right. So that’s an extension of the same thing, some real sense. But I do think that, and I don’t know, as I say, I got it from various people when I was growing up, but I think the sense that you have to furnish your mental furniture and you have to furnish that well with the best things because you might need it someday. In fact, you’ll need it any day. It’s more like a tool house than furnishing. Absolutely. You bet. You’ll need it any day, but there might be a day you really need it. So far, I’ve managed not to be changed to any radiator for years upon end, but I like to think that I could try to get by. Right, but you also do get by with these tools that you have at your disposal. Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. This is one of the things that’s really struck me about how badly we educate young men because it’s harder to get young men interested in literary issues than young women. But if you tell young men, well, you want to be successful or not, they’ll usually say, well, yeah, I’d rather be successful. It’s like, well, you could hypothetically do that by being a manipulative bully, which doesn’t really work very well and is counterproductive and will turn your life and everyone around you, the dirt life into hell. So I wouldn’t recommend that. Or you could master a few things, one of which might be language, since you think in it. And since everything you plan, you’ll plan using language and everything you communicate about and bring people on board with will be linguistically mediated. But the other thing is, is that if you choose right and you read right, you read well, that also will guide you in your life. I mean, in a few weeks time, I’m doing a favorite poem, a poem of mine, which is by Constantine Cavafy, the 20th century Greek poet, his most famous poem, Ithaca, which is really a description of course, like our great hero of setting out to the Isle of Ithaca. But Cavafy just describes in this beautiful poem, really, what an ideal life would look like. And he says towards the end, he says, Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey. Right. Okay, so we could sum up with that in some ways, you know, we started this conversation talking about purpose and we delved along the way into the domains of courage and truth, and then into beauty and language. And I would say those are all manifestations, you could think of those all as manifestations of the word, right? They’re manifestations of the divine word. That’s a good way of thinking about it too. And it’s very useful to know that there isn’t anything more powerful or meaningful than that. Right. And you said that’s been your experience in your life, right? Is that there isn’t a better pathway than to think and speak in truth. You have the most amazing possible adventures doing that and you meet the highest possible caliber of people. And weird and unexpected things happen to you all the time, and they’re often magical. And then there’s also an element of that. And that’s especially true on the poetic front, that’s allied with beauty. And that’s a good deal, because why not add to truth and courage beauty? And one of the things that a number of the great poets notice, Keats perhaps most famously, but Rilke in his famous poem on the torso, an antique torso, he says in the poem that the bust, the beautiful antique bust of the torso is telling him something. If you remember Rilke is trying to work out what it is. Same thing music tells you. Exactly. And this is my belief is a beautiful thing is not just beautiful, it’s telling you something. And what the antique torso says to Rilke is you must change your life. Right, right, right. That’s Rilke. That’s Rilke. Okay, okay. Yeah, well that’s why people are terrified of beauty too. Because, you know, and you might say, you’re terrified of beauty in proportion to the distance your life is from what’s beautiful. Absolutely. Because it’s a judge, right? It’s an ultimate judge. And for it to say nothing about you is this, it’s a terrible judge. That’s why Roger used to say the great thing of modern selfie culture was isn’t this work of art lucky enough to be in this photo with me? Of course, it’s exactly the wrong way around. Aren’t I lucky to be standing in front of this beautiful thing? Right. Well, that’s the proper attitude of gratitude as well. Yeah. All right, Mr. Murray. Thank you everyone for watching and listening and walking with us through these complicated and hopefully promising domains. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. We seem to get a little farther with each conversation and that’s always useful. I’m going to switch over to the Daily Wire Plus side and talk to Douglas a little bit more about biographical issues and about the manner in which his calling, you might say, made itself manifest. I’m very curious about that. And so if you’re inclined to join us there, do so. Otherwise, thank you very much for your time and attention and to the Daily Wire Plus for making this possible and for you sitting down and talking to me today. It’s always much appreciated to the film crew here in New York, to all the policemen and firemen who have their sirens going pretty much through the entire podcast, which is one of the things that makes New York so exciting. And apart from that, until next time, good to see you all. Thanks, Douglas. Thank you.