A Call to the Sane - Beauty, Truth, & Purpose | Douglas Murray | EP 472

Why do all the holy places of the British people keep being attacked, literally and metaphorically? Because they want to hurt these people. They want to hurt the people who revere them. You might say, "Well, why do you want to do that?" Revenge for some people, supremacy of a different kind for others, weakness among others. Why would you do that to 3% of the population? Among other things, it's rude, it's cruel, it's unusual. And why would you do that to a majority?

Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to talk with Douglas Murray. Douglas is the author of The War on the West, The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds, among other books. He has been a cardinal voice signaling to everyone the danger of the culture war, trying to assess its reasons, trying to mount a defense against its most destructive aspects, and trying to call people's attention to the dangers that beset the Western World and freedom in general. Because freedom in general is essentially identical to the Western World, for better or worse. So, an assault on the West is an assault on everything that isn't nihilistic, catastrophic, and authoritarian in its essence.

What did Douglas and I talk about today? We talked a lot about the situation in the UK, the recent uprisings of the British working class, the incredible ethnic and cultural tensions that have been generated in the wake of an immigration policy whose rationale is, what would you say, incomprehensible. Not only incomprehensible, but absent. What's the function of the untrammeled immigration policies that characterize Germany and France and the UK, especially given the obvious fact that they're producing a tremendous amount of internal stress?

We talked a little bit about the more pragmatic aspects of the problem. It's easier to travel now than it ever was before. It's easier to share information, and certainly both of those factors play a cardinal role. But there's also this strange blindness among the political elite, a willful blindness or perhaps a motivated willful blindness to the catastrophic consequences of these kinds of indiscriminate policies. So, Douglas and I spent a lot of time delving into that, trying to parse it apart. Assessing also the strange union of the radical leftists with the Islamic fundamentalists, let's say, with regards to what's happened in Israel and in Gaza since October 7th.

So, tough conversation. We also talked about Douglas's plan to do a speaking tour for the next couple of months, and he's in a number of American cities. You could go to Live Nation, type in the name Douglas Murray, and find tickets. I'd also recommend that. I think it's going in LA on the 23rd of September. So, anyways, on with the analysis of the strange death of the West.

Well, hello, Mr. Murray. It's good to see you again. It's been about a year since we've done a podcast already, and it's been some time since we've seen each other. We obviously saw each other when you were on tour with me last September. I guess, first of all, I'm pleased to be able to talk to you, and there's lots to talk about, that's for sure.

And I guess maybe the first thing I'd like to find out is, well, what have you got planned in the upcoming months? What's on your plate?

Well, I'm in New York at the moment, and in September, I'm doing a tour here in the US, a speaking tour, doing six cities, from LA to New York, finishing at the Beacon Theater where I saw you a while ago. I'm also doing Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Denver, and maybe some more dates to add, but that's in September, and anyone who's interested can go to the Live Nation website and you'll find all the details there.

Otherwise, I am, as ever, living out of a suitcase and trying to keep abreast of all the things that are doing as lots of things in our society are falling apart. I've spent a lot of the last year in Israel, in the Middle East, covering the conflict there in Israel and Gaza. I was there for almost six months after the 7th of October.

But now, things are kicking off in quite a number of countries, as you know. So this speaking tour, let's concentrate on that for a minute too. So what's your goal and your plan? What are you offering people who come to and what are you hoping to achieve? What are you offering people who are going to come and listen? Well, one of the things is that it's a follow-on from, you know, I wrote this book The War in the West, which you and I discussed when it came out about 18 months ago.

Since then, there have been so many things that have happened, not least the 7th of October and the war that's followed. Because I've covered all of this up close and got some pretty extraordinary camera footage of this, I wanted to present it to an audience to be able to show what I've seen and what I think of as the realities that I think a lot of people are running away from at the moment. But the realities of what happens when, well frankly, when violence breaks out.

I think it's a great warning to people in America and elsewhere, a great warning of, you know, this stuff can become very real, as it did in Israel last October. Anyhow, there's going to be some fun to be had along the way. My friend and colleague from the Monk Debates in Toronto, Natasha Housef, is going to be with me on stage to do the Q&A session and interview. Yes, and there's going to be a lot of never-before-seen footage from a lot of crazy situations. So that sounds, in some ways, like a live current affairs show that's focused specifically on this issue.

Okay, so you said that you're going to use, if I've got it right, you're going to use the occurrences of October 7th and afterwards as an object lesson, right? An object lesson in the consequences of what? The disintegration of a societal ethos? The consequences of what? Like what, how do you exactly tie in what you were writing about in The War on the West with what you've seen unfold since October 7th, say in relationship to what you're going to speak about?

Well, one thing is, of course, is that October 7th for a lot of people in Israel was an example of what happens when you've been living in a delusion and have suddenly woken up from that. I've written a lot in recent years, as have others, about the way in which in all the Western democracies we've had a sort of a lack of seriousness, really, about some of the threats that we face. There's a slumbering that's gone on for a long time, which I and others have warned against.

But I suppose among other things, of course, it's not just about that. It's about how people react in the face of a real threat and a real crisis. And that's one of the things that I'm very interested in at the moment, is the way in which a terrible situation like that throws up these two completely counter forces. One is the force of real evil and what it's like to stare into the face of real evil. The other is, of course, the face of true heroism: the people who in the face of atrocity become the person that they were meant to be.

I've seen a lot of that in the last year, and I think there are enormous lessons to be learned, not just from the negatives but from the positives, of the way in which actually when extraordinary events occur, extraordinary people are thrown up. And, you know, we might all see a bit more of that in the years ahead.

So, in what manner do you view what happened on October 7th and afterwards as a reflection of the sorts of things that you were warning about in The War on the West? How do you see it as another step in the logical unfolding of the processes that you were assessing?

Well, it's partly from that and partly from a previous book, including my one, The Strange Death of Europe, which came out in 2017. A lot of that was concerned with saying, "Look, you know, there are deep deep challenges that are going on to what we used to call the liberal democratic society." And a deep unwillingness of people to realize that those challenges were not metaphorical. Since the 7th of October, we've seen unbelievable scenes on everywhere from the streets of London and major cities in Europe to the most elite campuses of Northern America, Ivy League campuses, where students who have the most privileged existence imaginable have decided to openly throw their lot with the terrorists of Hamas. You know, this has gone further, a lot faster, I think a lot of people realized. But it is something I've been warning about for a very long time, that yes, there are deep deep things happening in our society, including what I've described in the past as being the thing of people at risk of rebelling for the sake of rebellion and out of boredom.

And this is a deep thing in American society in particular, you know, the call for a great cause. One of the student protesters at Columbia was quoted in New York Magazine the other month saying that he was a first-generation low-income student who was the first member of his family to go to university. And you think, well, that sounds good. And then he went on to say, "And when I got to Columbia, I learned about the history of protest at Columbia, and I decided, I knew," he said, "I knew that as soon as it kicked off, I wanted to be in the middle of it."

So, let me ask you about that in some more detail. This is going to be a complicated question, but you put your finger on something that's crucial and deep, psychological rather than political, or even spiritual, let's say, rather than political. As you know from touring with me, I've been investigating—one of the things I've been investigating is what makes life worthwhile. I talked to a philosopher this week on my podcast who has written a couple of books on a stream of analytic philosophy that's been debating whether or not, if you weigh up the evidence on mass, whether existence itself is a net good or a net evil, with whatever implications you might want to draw from that argument for its creator.

Right, so I'm not trying to make a theological case. But part of this inquiry is, if there was a God, is it more logical to conceive of him as good or as evil? And underneath that is a sense that the proper axis of evaluation for such a question is whether there's more pain and misery in the world or pleasure. My sense is that that's how the argument is constituted, is actually an indication of the pathology of our culture because it's a fool's game to map pleasure and pain onto good and evil.

Partly because there are evil pleasures and there are exactly morally justifiable pains. Right? So whatever the landscape, whatever the moral landscape is, it's not reducible to the hedonic landscape. And any axiomatic assumption—

It's okay. So there's a core to that, and one of the corollaries would be, well, if we're not built to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, let's say, which is a powerful argument because emotions are powerful and the positive and negative emotion systems are powerful motivating systems, but if we're not built to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, then what's the cardinal call to existence? My sense is that it's something akin to adventure—maybe it's romantic adventure, which is an even better formulation.

Alright, so then let's say if that's the case—and you and I talked about this the last time we talked—about the truth as part of the call to adventure, the heroic adventure. Yes, exactly, exactly. Well so then if that's the case and the cardinal motivation in life is something like the heroic call to adventure, then you might ask yourself, well, what if that's not being pursued? What beckons as an alternative?

Certainly, protest in the name of ideology, the name of a cause, can be a form of adventure. It's very tempting. It's very tempting. I mean, I would say in general that finding purpose in a higher cause is, of course, one of the most useful ways to find meaning in your life beyond the maximization of pleasure. Unfortunately, the rebellious attitude for the sake of rebellion becomes extremely appealing.

Another of the students at Columbia said—I'll hark on about it, but it does show a rot somewhere—you know, at elite institutions. One of the other students at Columbia said that started the year out as a protester in October against the climate emergency, the climate crisis. And, you know, within a month, it was Hamas.

One of the things I noticed, I suppose, was in about 2014, which was approximately when I was starting to detect that something had gone seriously wrong with the universities, let's say. One of the things I did recognize amongst my colleagues was this axiomatic presumption that part of what the universities were there for was to teach young people how to be moral by protesting. That protest itself had become a stand-in for morality.

And so, you know, you can feel some sympathy for that kid that you were describing. I mean, he's gone off to an elite institution, hoping to be taught how to live a good life in the classic sense by the world's most profound experts. And what he found when he got there was that since the 1960s, the best thing that the universities have to offer to their students is the false reputation, the false claim to morality that can be had, and the excitement that can be had by engaging in a protest.

Yes, the life of an activist is the ideal life, and the life that's rewarded, and the life that is seen to be virtuous. I mean, it's all of that. And by the way, one of the other things that has struck me very much in recent times has been the fact that, of course, a lot of the problems that we see emerging in our societies in the West come about not just from that boredom, but of course from the fact that when the financial pie goes out and stops being able to lift people up, a lot of other stuff gets revealed.

We see this in the UK at the moment. It's not by any means the only explanation for the riots that have been going on, but if you look at all of the northern towns in which the riots have been going on, the material well-being of the population has declined in the last 30 years since the last set of riots. You know, you sort of think, well, if the society isn't working for you financially and joblessness has actually gone up, and on top of that you have challenges to your identity, well, of course, there's a cause right there, and not an ignorable one.

If it's about saying, you know, I want to defend my culture—and all that is ignoble—once somebody thinks that the best way of doing that is to pick up a brick and throw it at a policeman or a place of worship—yeah, well, it's no simple matter to distinguish the genuine protests from the false protests, that's for sure.

So let me ask you one more question about your tour and your talk, and then maybe we'll turn our attention to the situation in the UK. Okay, so you're planning on showing your audiences footage from your journeys through the Middle East for the last six months. So I guess I'm curious about—well, you know, you didn't step into the conflict in the Middle East as a naive observer, either of people or of societies. But my suspicions are that you've seen a lot more in the last six months than you ever really wanted to see.

I'm curious about what you've seen and what you've concluded from that and how it's altered or extended your viewpoint or challenged it, for that matter. You've been poking your nose into very dangerous places. So what's been the consequence for you, and what is it that you're hoping to shed a light on with the imagery in particular, let's say? What are you hoping to shed a light on for the people who are going to come and hear you talk?

Well, there's quite a lot of things. I mean, I've covered a lot of conflicts before, including in the Middle East, and a lot of what's been happening is sadly familiar territory to me. There are, though, as you and I have discussed before, there's a reason why hell is a pit that's endless. When it comes to violence and the ability to commit acts of evil, it seems to me that— I mean, that axiom that the pit is just endless has really been shown in the last year.

I've been in Israel and Gaza most of the time since the 7th, and yes, of course, like anyone reporting from the front line, seen lots of things that I'd rather not have seen. But, I mean, my belief is that there's a very important role in society for people who do that and come back and tell everyone else what it's like, not least, of course, to warn people. I mean, there's lots of things that, you know, I've seen as a reporter from war zones, which I know I would not want other people to see. I know I didn't want to see myself, but in order for other people not to see that, you have to know where people can go.

You know, one of the things that has struck me a lot in the last year has been that the— and I've made this comment a couple of times in pieces and elsewhere— that the terrorists of the south, in particular, were deeply gleeful whilst carrying out acts of unbelievable barbarism. That's something that I've been thinking about a lot because to be doing something you think is right but is evil is one thing. To be doing something that is evil and being joyful about it is— and for people around you to celebrate it and then at several degrees of remove that people who think they've got the same cause as you would excuse it or say, "Well, context," or, you know, much like all sorts of things like that that are just alarming.

I've often thought, actually, in recent months, there was a late historian, a writer called Gita Sereny, who died about 20 years ago, who made a great impact on me when I was growing up. She wrote, among other things, a biography of the child killer Mary Bell and also the biographies of Stangle, the camp commandant, whom she interviewed, and also of Albert Shar. I remember reading an interview with G. Sereny towards the end of her life, and she, she was not a religious person, but she said, having spent a lot of her life considering evil and staring at evil and writing about evil, she said, "It feels like a force that descends. It just manifests, and there's no other explanation for it. It's not just about some problem in the developmental process or simply a matter of education or opportunity. Sometimes there is an incarnation of evil in the world."

Are you tired of feeling sluggish, run down, or just not your best self? Take control of your health and vitality today with Balance of Nature. With Balance of Nature, there's never been a more convenient dietary supplement to ensure you get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables every day. Balance of Nature takes fruits and vegetables, they freeze-dry them, turn them into a powder, and then they put them into a capsule. The capsules are completely void of additives, fillers, extracts, synthetics, pesticides, or added sugar. The only thing in Balance of Nature fruit and veggie capsules are fruits and veggies.

Right now, you can order with promo code Jordan to get 35% off your first order, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. Experience Balance of Nature for yourself today. Go to balanceofnature.com and use promo code Jordan for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's balanceofnature.com, promo code Jordan for 35% off your first preferred order, plus a free bottle of fiber and spice.

Well, in one way of thinking about that, I think even technically—because I've been thinking about this a lot in relationship to these new large language models, you know, and there's a statistical probability that any given concept will be associated with any other given concept. And if your mapping is technologically advanced enough, you can calculate those statistical relationships, and that's what the large language models do. And then you can start to see, you can start to map mathematically what the psychoanalysts called complexes. Complexes are systems of ideas that occur in each other's proximity, and there's a core to them.

One of the ways of imagining the theological representations of evil, the legions of devils, let's say that are behind the generation of the bottomless pit of hell, is that they are representations of complex ideas that hang together. And I think you put your finger on the core of it, actually. The core of it isn't evil; the core of it is gleeful evil. Right? So, it's not merely the evil, and it's the rejoicing in evil.

Well, that is actually the core of sadism, from a psychopathological perspective, right? It's positive delight. It's quite a multi-dimensional characterization. It's positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. Right? And the unnecessary element is also cardinal because that plays up the element. That's parody. You know, so in Auschwitz, for example, one of the games the guards used to play was to have the prisoners who got off the train cars, shivering and frozen, accompanied by their dead relatives who died of asphyxiation or froze to death in the cattle cars. They'd arrive at the camps, and then they'd be compelled to carry wet socks of salt from one side of the camp, which was the size of a town, to the other and then back.

And so, it's a parody of work, right? And it's a demonstration to the person themselves that not only are they suffering for all the reasons that they're in the camps and by the fact of the burden that they're carrying, but the utter counterproductive pointlessness of the painful labor is also emphasized and insisted upon. And Delight taken in that is a very dark thing to observe.

Yes, I mean, I was in one of the maximum-security prisons in Israel early this year and saw the Hamas terrorists from the 7th who had been captured alive. One of them was somebody who I recognized from one of the atrocity videos who had thrown— there were two young boys, about 10, 12, with their father. They went into the safe room when the bombs started falling, and Hamas terrorists came and they saw them go. They threw a grenade, and the father threw himself on the grenade and was killed in front of his sons.

And then, you know, one of them lost an ear, and the other one lost an eye, and they were staggering around the main room of their house, weeping and wailing in the most unforgettable, awful, awful way. And one of the terrorists came in, who had just killed their father in front of them, came in and opened the fridge and helped himself to the food. The youngest of the boys, in total trauma, said, "That's my mother's food." And the terrorist turned to him and said, "Where's your mother? I want her too."

How could anyone do that? You put your finger on it. Well, you know that idea of the descent, it's like one of the things that God accuses Cain of when he becomes bitter is opening the door to evil. He said his suffering wasn't merely a consequence of his failure in life; it was a consequence of his failure in attempting to open the door to evil.

And so, if you think about it in terms of these complexes of associated ideas, they're ideas that if you let in, they bring a host of other ideas with them. And a host is exactly the right phrase. And you might be tempted in a moment of weakness to invite something in that you think that you can control or that you could bend to your own purposes. But the problem is, is that you're inviting in a complex that has been around forever. And that once lodged inside, you might prove that whatever defenses that you might think you have there to mount are trivial in comparison to the power of what you've invited in.

And that is, I think you can think of that technically, and it is a terrible thing, and it is the kind of things that are warned against at the theological level—although that's a very complicated thing to untangle.

And so, alright, so let's turn from that a bit. So, that's the sort of thing that you're going to explain as you're communicating with your audience, and what you're hoping to demonstrate to people is that it's the logical conclusion of the sorts of games, for example, that are being played on the university campuses?

For sure. For sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, then, of course, the problem with that is, at least to some degree, is that that complex of ideas that takes possession of people in the circumstances that you're describing has that end in mind.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, of course.

Alright, alright, well, let's turn our attention to the situation in the UK if that's the case. I mean, so let's start with something contentious, I suppose. Tammy and I went out on a limb recently and interviewed Tommy Robinson. I've been watching Tommy for a long time, and he struck me as particularly interesting for two reasons. The first reason, I suppose, is because he is a genuine working-class guy, and for better or worse.

Second, I haven't seen anyone anywhere who's been more unwavering in his commitment to reveal the atrocities of the grooming gangs in the UK, which are actually organized patterns of activity that are very persuasive, that are so terrible that it's almost impossible to talk about them without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.

So now, there's no doubt that there are many things that you could accuse Tommy Robinson of, and many of those he would admit to, but to me, and also to my wife, fair enough. But the fact that he's pointed his finger at something that seriously needs to be attended to and has paid a major price for it is also not ignorable.

It's like, do we expect someone who's brave enough to do that to also be perfect in every regard? That's asking a bit much, given that there are many people who, in principle, have moral characters much more unsullied than Tommy Robinson who are remaining in silence constantly in the face of this absolute brutal.

So, we interviewed him, and what did I think of Tommy? He's very articulate. He can certainly make a case for himself. And then I thought it was up to the audience to listen and to make their own judgment. Now that was before the recent march that Robinson and his crew organized in London, which, in my estimation—I'm interested in your perspective—went as peacefully and well as the protests in Ottawa, which it was modeled after.

And so I thought his crew handled that extraordinarily well. Now, in the aftermath of those protests, of course, all sorts of chaotic hell has broken loose. Why don't you—you're much closer to such things than me, I mean being a denizen of that country. I'm looking from outside, trying to make sense of it.

But my sense at the moment is that the UK is somewhat of a tinderbox. Yes, and I wish it hadn't been so predictable. Again, I wrote about this so many years ago and warned about it. The Strange Death of Europe was largely my last-ditch attempt to warn my own society and other Western countries not to go down the path that they were precisely going down.

As the former government minister said in The Times a couple of days ago, the thing about my prediction on that was that I made them not with any glee but in a spirit of deep lamentation about what was about to happen to my society.

And as I see it there, Tommy Robinson's a very interesting example of this whole thing. But let me just explain how I see it. This whole configuration of recent days started when a 17-year-old went into a Taylor Swift dance class a couple of weeks ago now and started hacking at young girls with a knife, killed three girls, nine-year-olds thereabouts, wounded many others.

And the news of that came out, and a very typical modern British, modern European, modern Western thing happened, which was that in the aftermath, people started to suspect something was being kept from them. Now, wiser heads would wait, but not everyone’s a wise head after nine-year-old girls are bludgeoned to death, stabbed to death.

So false information went out online, saying that the attack had arrived on one of the many boats of illegal migrants that come across the English Channel every week. That was untrue. In fact, he was the son of immigrants from Rwanda. But people started to sense that there was a cover-up of some kind or at least the news was being managed.

The police in Britain seemed always to think they're being very clever at this, and it's always seemed to me that they exacerbate every problem they put their mind to. They insisted that the first, the young man, was originally from Cardiff, capital of Wales, and people just sensed there was something—something—they were holding from us.

Sure enough, anyway, the point is, it's very unpleasant, ugly. And again, evil forces can get unleashed at such a time: the spirit of revenge. Some protests started peacefully at first. Then some violent. A mosque was targeted nearby, and then violence started to spread out to other towns. Then Muslim communities started to arm up, in some cases literally, people turning up with knives to defend their areas.

This is all—maybe it'll die down by the time this podcast has gone out, or maybe it'll get a lot worse. But the one thing you can say with absolute certainty is it's not going to go away because all of this is the consequence of what I call the problem of primary and secondary problems.

The primary problem in the UK, as in Europe in recent years, has been the total unwillingness of the political and other classes in the UK to address deep, deep concerns of the public. And when people said in recent days, "How could anyone leap to such a conclusion that the attacker would be?" Because everyone’s seen this before.

You know, people don’t actually forget very fast. The media class may, but they don’t forget very fast that it's only seven years ago that the son of Libyan migrants to the UK went and detonated a suicide bomb at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. They don't forget fast that three people who had no right to be in the UK, including one whose asylum claim had been rejected but who was nowhere near being deported, went across London Bridge in 2017, hacking at the throats of passersby and shouting "Allahu Akbar."

They don't forget that. They notice it. But the British government and others have had this very clear policy that they don’t really know what to do to tackle that. They don’t know what to do really to tackle the grooming gangs issue.

There was another set of prosecutions the other day and another case is coming to court in the coming weeks. You could say, "Well, they clearly do. They're using the law." But a lot of the public say, "Well, not fast enough, and not really." There's an awful lot of rapists still walking around with girls who are their victims in the same towns, and the government knows that the public ascribe this to the government's immigration policies, its integration policies.

But the governments can't take responsibility for that because they've made that mistake now. The conservative government that just left power said that they would bring migration down to the tens of thousands a year left office with net migration, legal migration, of almost 340,000 a year, which is, by the way, completely unsustainable. But they just keep doing it anyway.

The interesting thing that Tommy Robinson speaks to and has always spoken to is, "What are you allowed to do about this, or say about this?" Now, if you're me for the time being, you're allowed to write about it sometimes. You're allowed to speak about it sometimes. You're allowed to raise alarms sometimes. You're allowed to speak your mind somewhat.

But if you're a Tommy Robinson character, if you grow up in Luton and you haven't had many advantages in life and you've had quite a lot of disadvantages, and you're white and working-class, what are you allowed to do about this? What are you allowed to say about any of this?

And the government for decades now has had the attitude, "You're not allowed to do anything. You're not allowed to say anything. You can't do anything, because if you do, we'll call you a racist, and we call you far-right." This has all gone on for a very long time.

Well, it's an effective epithet. You know, like when I first came across your work, and I've seen this reaction in the depths of my soul to many people, when I first came across your work, which is quite a long time ago now, I was leery of it. And I think the reason for that is something like this: there are a lot of people in the world, and I'm not going to be able to meet all of them or read all of them or have anything to do with all of them.

Now and then, some of them get tarred with some epithet. Well, the cost to me of accepting that tarring is very low on average because if I don't pay attention to some person, there’s a whole bunch of other people I could pay attention to. So it's not like the pool of people to attend to shrinks.

Right? So, and that epithet of “far-right” is a very effective brand of tarring. And even it's even effective among people who are very skeptical of such things. So I’ll give you an example.

So I talked to Michael Shellenberger after he released the WPATH files when he was investigating the absolute pathological corruption and craven cowardice of the cadre who presented what purports to be the standard guidelines for enlightened care to the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association.

He was appalled at their lack of competence and their ideological possession. It was another bottomless pit; and I asked him how he became aware of this, and he said, "Well, one way was that he had listened to Abigail Shrier and I talk about it." I guess it was two years ago when Abigail first put out her book Irreversible Damage.

It was the first podcast I did after I’d been so ill, and I was terrified to do it because it was such a hot topic. And, you know, Shellenberger himself said he listened to that podcast, but he really couldn't believe it. You know, and that's another example of the effectiveness of that tar.

Yes, it's so easy to demolish someone's reputation, and it's especially easy to demolish a reputation for people who do not have, as it were, a backlog of published work. Yeah, I mean, it’s relatively easy, but to weigh up someone's views and make an estimation of them if they have seven books to their name, as I do, or, you know, thousands and thousands of articles.

But it can't be the case that only book authors are allowed to say anything about the disintegration of their societies. It's not like it should only be left to people who write newspaper articles.

Yeah, well, God no. Not that, like, maybe least of all. But then you go to this question, which, as you know, has come up in Canada in recent years and is very live now in Britain, which is, what again? What are people allowed to do?

Now, obviously, by the way, and I'm aware, as you always are, of the deep desire of bad faith actors to seize anything I say in this discussion and misrepresent it. So let me do a very boring piece of throat clearing, if I may. The idea that people's response to any problems in their society should be to go out and commit acts of violence is obviously insane and wrong.

What we're seeing on the streets of the British cities, though, raises this question, as I say, of if the public keep saying something to the politicians and the politicians keep not just ignoring them but insulting them, what are they allowed to do? These are populations that have had every single election like the rest of the British people for 20 years. They have voted for less immigration, been told that they'd get it, and instead, it's just gone up.

These are people who have lived through an economy since 2008 where of the jobs created by the British government in the last— since 2008, um, so in the last, we're talking 16 years—of the jobs created since 2008, 74% have gone to people who were not born in Britain.

So just, just people think about this for a second. The government refuses to do what the public keep on asking for, and what the government keeps on saying it will do, is seen to be, I think accurately, extremely lax on policing certain social cohesion issues. It's extremely eager to crack down on anyone of a Tommy Robinson type.

And what material benefits have come about in the society in the last 16 years have largely gone to people who were not born in the country? What, I repeat, what is permissible in this situation to do? And I would say peaceful protesting would be one thing, or speaking up, or, you know, whatever you like to do, except that every time—even if there is a peaceful protest—the peaceful protesters are defamed as far-right neo-Nazis.

I mean, there definitely will have been and have been in the last in recent days some extremely ugly people who've come out of the woodshed who I'm sure do include—there's like one guy everyone's obsessed with who has a swastika tattoo on his back.

Is that guy representative of all the people who are angry in the wake of the slaughter in Southport? I would have thought not. And in any other situation, every public official, political official, opinion writer, and policeman would be very wary of trying to tar everyone with that brush.

For instance, the police and authorities, even when you have the discovery of an Imam in a mosque preaching violence, everyone is incredibly careful—lawyers at all the newspapers and everyone else—to make sure that it isn't implied that everyone who attends that mosque is somehow in favor of this.

In fact, woe betide you if you did do that. You have to say it's this one person and no one else is responsible. But somehow, the actual desire to tar anyone who has, as I say, not got a voice and is wanting to make their voice heard as, you know, as a violent far-right neo-Nazi seems to me to be a big error by Keir Starmer and others because, you know, if you can't say, "We recognize your deep, deep concerns about some things that have happened, including mass stabbings, terrorism, and much more. We understand your deep, deep concerns, and we are going to try to get onto this, and on top of this," but there is no excuse to turn out on the streets and be violent against your Muslim brothers and sisters and neighbors or anyone else.

If they can't say that, they just cannot say it. They just have to go to the secondary thing. What kills me about this is it's exactly what I said for years: if you don't deal with a primary problem, you get secondary problems.

And if you just focus on the secondary problem, you will never—not only not solve the primary problem, you will make it worse.

Everything costs more. To reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform and one source of truth.

With NetSuite, you can reduce IT costs, cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems, and improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform and slashing manual tasks and errors. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move. Why haven't you? By popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com/jbp. That's netsuite.com/jbp.

Okay, so a couple of—I got a couple of questions out of that. Well, one observation. The first observation is that the epithet “far-right” is rapidly losing its utility. Now, when I hear someone now described as far-right, I think, "Yeah, maybe, probably not, but maybe."

Now, I should also point out that I actually—I’m not unaware of the existence of bad actors. I don't even know if right and left are the right dimensions of evaluation anymore, and I suspect not. But for now, we'll stick with that. I mean, ever since I came out in defense of the defensive response of Israel to the October 7th massacre, I've had no shortage of far-right trolls on my case, and I know what they're like of studying historically.

And of course, that happened to me when I partnered with the Daily Wire to begin with because its head man, in some ways at least in the public eye, was Ben Shapiro. And so, I'm perfectly aware of what the far-right agitators look like, and they're a remarkably despicable bunch.

So we’ll get that out of the way to begin with. The idea that they're in the same camp, for example, as the working-class protesters that you're describing is absurd because first of all, what the UK working-class protesters are doing isn't fundamentally political; it's fundamentally based in something approximating frustration.

Okay, so having said that, then I've got two, I've got a question. So, with regards to the drivers of immigration, you know, you say the politicians campaign at least on the conservative side, at least some of the time, with the claim that they're going to get a handle on this, but they don't; in fact, quite the opposite, they seem to facilitate it.

So then, is that because it's actually beyond their control? Or is it because, here's a psychological reason, it's like for decades our culture has insisted on something approximating a position of moral relativism? There's no way of drawing hierarchical distinctions between the value claims that different cultures present.

We can't admit for a moment that there might be some reason to be, um, leery, let's say, of an immigrant class that would be associated with the kind of education that the madrasas are producing for all sorts of ideological reasons. We can't make any allowance for the idea that some immigrants might be more difficult to integrate into our culture than others.

And that is a thorny problem, don't get me wrong. But now we open the floodgates, let's say, and we find out that there are people who don't have democracies in their own country because they don't have the culture for it, let's say, or the desire for it. And they bring those attitudes along with them. Surprise, surprise! Because they weren't just freedom-loving oppressed people striving to be free who are now thrilled to death to be in a democratic country, but people who are pretty damn prone to bring all of the problems that they had in their own country along with them.

Now, and we're not supposed to say that. Now, my sense is the working class doesn't get to have their say because if they had their say, everyone who's modern and liberal and tolerant in that pathological manner that accepts everything without distinction would have to do some serious digging into the understructure of their own belief systems and think, "Oh, well..."

And then that touches on something else. Now, here's a weird segue, or what would you say, an idea that popped into my head, an association: Richard Dawkins announced himself as a cultural Christian.

So then one of the things that makes me ask is something like, "Well, what is it that the West has right that the enemies of the West have wrong?" That's percolating at the bottom of all of this mess that's driving what? That's driving the relativistic arguments of the pro-immigration types, but that's also fulminating this terrible clash of cultures that we unsurprisingly see emerging on our streets.

So what is driving this? Is it the insistence? Is it this ideological insistence? It's a lot of things. One is, as I've warned about for a long time, one is something that isn't inevitable but is hard to resist, which is a simple ease of movement in the 21st century. The relative cheapness of travel compared to any previous century.

And the knowledge through the devices we have in our pockets around the globe—I mean what, three billion people are on WhatsApp alone? The ability of people anywhere in the world to discover the life of anyone else in the world easily. And add to that the fact that most countries in the world are not even remotely approximating either the safety or the wealth available in 21st century Canada, for instance, or Britain. And you—and it's inevitable that a lot of people will want that.

Now, as I've said for years, just because they may want it does not mean that Western liberal democracies can remotely be the place where everybody who wants a better life can or should go. It's simply impossible, and you just crunch the numbers on people in Sub-Saharan Africa who want to move into Europe, for instance. And if that happened, if the third of Sub-Saharan Africa who want to move moved to Europe, it would be totally unrecognizable.

Now, the second thing that comes from that is that it is extremely difficult for politicians to maintain their borders, and I think this is highly regrettable. Because I think the only way in which, among other things, you can have an actual asylum system where you actually take in those unusual cases where asylum should be needed just disappears once you have illegal migration every day coming in on boats.

Or, in the case of America, millions of people walking across the southern border in the last four years. Add to that the fact that, as was famously said in 1968, by somebody, "It's the easiest thing to put off any difficult decision you have to make today and leave it for your successors to address, all the time making it harder for your successors."

But I said this to a European politician some years ago when they said that they were going to deport the million illegals that were in their country. I said, "How are you going to do it?" Because you and I know that day one, if you rounded up everyone who is illegally in the country and put them on buses, trains, boats, the first woman or child crying would be on the front page of every newspaper the next morning. And by day two, you would have to stop because of public pressure.

That just seems to be a reality for the time being. By the way, until such a time emerges—and it could—where the society says, "We don't give a damn anymore. We don't give a damn." That may well happen. But until that does happen, countries are absolutely incapable.

Politicians are incapable of answering this question. Then you have a follow-on one which addresses what you mentioned about Richard Dawkins, among other things, which is—America—it's not quite true to say that America was a society based on an idea, but it's a nice idea. America was based on an idea, but the idea came about because of the people who founded the Republic, the United States of America.

And if they had Englishmen, right? If they had been from somewhere else, even a different denomination, the United States would be very different. However, as far as States founded on an idea goes, America is probably the nearest to that. European nations, Britain, are not based on an idea. They were not based on an idea.

Now that isn't to say that they don't have very distinct culture, and my word, the different cultures across Europe are so different that everyone jokes about their neighbors and regards their neighboring European country being wildly different from them. To an outsider, it seems preposterous that the Swedes and the Norwegians would have distinctions between them, but they do. But I say this to say that Europe and Britain was made up of ethnic identities. And those ethnic identities had ideas, of course, but even in Britain, you have the Welsh, you have the Scots, you have the English, Northern Irish, the Irish.

How do you integrate into that? How do you do it? Does anyone know? And the answer is no. Have some people, I'd say yes. Have a majority? It doesn't look that way to me.

And so this is just a bomb underneath societies, particularly in Europe. It has been about ethnicity. We don’t like things about being about ethnicity, so we say it's about an idea. But all my adult life, this idea has been so hard for anyone to pin down that they've just failed it time and time again.

I'm old enough to remember when Gordon Brown was prime minister, and I contributed to a book that he edited about being British, what Britishness was. That was 20 years ago. And Britain is no closer to defining that today than it was 20 years ago. People say things like, "Britishness is about queuing" or "fair play," and that is so completely inadequate to the task at hand.

But the other one that can come along with this, and this is one of the ones that white working-class communities in the UK deeply resent in particular, is the "you don't have a culture," which has been one of the other nice things that race-baiters of all shapes have been doing for years.

At these people, you don’t have a culture. It’s what I wrote about in The War on the West, the jabbing majority populations. If you do have a culture, it's not a good one. Or it's a rapaciously evil one, or it's one that's only to be described through the lens of colonialism, or slavery, or racism, or institutional racism, or patriarchy, or whatever.

And they've just done this for years. There has been, what I showed in my last book, to be this... For instance, why do all the holy places of the British people keep being attacked literally and metaphorically? Why does Winston Churchill, the great hero of the British nation, keep on being attacked by people?

Because they want to hurt these people. They want to hurt the people who revere them. They literally want to strip their gods from them. They want to defile the holy places of the culture. You might say, well, why do you want to do that? Revenge for some people, supremacy of a different kind for others, weakness among others, false adventure, cowardice, going along with the tenor of the times, however bad that direction of travel happens to be.

But I said recently, before these riots happened, I said, you know, it would be madness to—if I don't know if people from the Indian subcontinent made up 3% of your population—it would be madness to try to demoralize that population or to try to find ways to just say that they were nothing and never had been anything and it was sort of best if they just tried to sidle through their lives without harming anyone.

Why would you do that to 3% of the population? Among other things, it's rude, it's cruel, it's unusual. And that 3% of the population is a significant amount of the population. You don't want to demoralize 3% of the population.

Okay, why would you do that to a majority? Who is so insane that they want to do this to majority populations? And the answer seems to be, well, we're finding out. We are finding out.

Well, okay, let's delve into that on the ideal front. I mean, I would say, who would want to do that? Well, my sense is that it's this metastasization of Marxism—it's the spirit that metastasized Marxism that's bringing this about consciously.

And so you have the people that hold the center—the majority of people who approximate some implicit ideal, however poorly. And then you have people who are perhaps unable to do that or who are unwilling to do it or who are even opposed to it, and they occupy the margin. And there's many of them; they're a plethora.

And the postmodernists, especially the modern queer theorists, let's say, want to bring that margin into the center by whatever means necessary. Now, I think there's a profound philosophical misunderstanding that accompanies that desire. Although if the underlying desire at the base is just the desire for chaos, which is certainly possible, then it's not a mistake; it's not a bug; it's a feature.

But you know, we tend to believe in the West that an idea has its opposite and that progress might be obtained by watching the war of a thesis and its antithesis, but that's not how things work. You have a thesis, and you have a plethora of antitheses—in fact, an infinite plethora.

And so if you try to center the marginal, all that happens is you demolish the entire structure. And one of the ideas that I've been working on recently conceptually is that, imagine that now you're motivated to center the marginal at all costs.

And you presume to begin with, because you're naive or corrupt, that those marginal are a community and they're a community with something in common apart from their marginalization.

Well, that's certainly the claim of the “alphabet mob”, for example: "We're all a community." It's like, "Yeah, I don't think so." It doesn’t look like it. It looks to me like you're a plurality united by your, what would you say, your resentment.

Okay, and narcissism.

Narcissism.

Okay, so then, but here's the subtle part of the argument, let's say—and I think this is true. It looks to me that if you demolish the center by centering the marginal, you destroy the marginal first, not the center. Because the thing is, well, the thing is, Douglas, the center is protected.

You know, let me give you an example. Let me give you an example because I think this is relevant. So since the 1960s, since the early 1960s, under the guise of the sexual revolution, there's been an all-out assault, let's say, against the structure of marriage. And so—and the consequence of that is that many people aren't married, but none of those people are wealthy and educated, because the wealthy and educated are just as married as they were in the early 60s.

The people who aren't married are the economically marginalized, let's say, the people who are in trouble. And so that freedom that came from the removal of the patriarchal ideal—which is a burdensome thing to bear and also a judgmental entity, let's say—you know, single mothers aren't to be tolerated, that finger-wagging sort of morality.

It's like, fair enough. Okay, now we bring the marginal to the center. Who dies first? The center? No, the marginal. Yes. Well, another example of that, which is—you see that in—I don't want to go on a tangent, but you see that in the drug normalization, which is the elite classes who almost always push for further liberalization in laws are actually the people who, if they do dabble in that themselves, are most likely to be able to be saved.

After all, there's a reason that their job will probably support them if they want to go into rehab, and their firm will pay—maybe their office will pay. Maybe their firm will pay. Not so for the people lying on the streets of this city with absolutely no safety net who have not benefited from that liberalization process, to say the least.

But it's the same thing. Absolutely. The people you bring in—you bring in the most marginal case, and then, yes, in the end, the marginalized become the people who suffer the most.

And by the way, I mean, we've just lived through this bizarre—I know, sort of social stampede on the Paris Olympics thing. But what you said was just resonating with me because I said, "Why is it now so completely predictable that an Olympic Games will have to open with a sort of balls-out bearded drag queen being the center of attention and a very obese trans person should be the kind of like the main figure of worship in this bizarre modern cult theology?"

And I know you notice this. I noticed this. The truth is everybody notices this. It's absurd. It's a complete—it’s a kind of replacement theology as far as I can see and one that hasn't been thought through at all. Well, and doesn't work and is hideous and ugly and is not encouraging people to aspire to anything beautiful or true.

Yeah, well that's the dread abomination of desolation, right? That the theologians warned about. When it's put in the highest place, then it's time to head for the hills. And what does that mean? It means something like, well, when the social order is so inverted that the most monstrous is elevated to the highest place, then that's a sign that, like, all that chaos is about to return.

And that seems to me to be highly probable. Well, we can see it, and everyone can feel it. Absolutely. Everyone can feel it in one form or another. You can, and it’s very terrifying to see it start to emerge in such a dramatic form in the UK.

You know, and it is something—for as a Canadian, it’s really something to go to Europe and hear the elite types express doubt about whether or not they have a culture. You know, I heard people in the Netherlands say that to me. I met a group of, you know, very well-placed comedians and artists and writers, and most of them were conservative people, and they expressed doubts about the even existence of their own culture.

You know, and I come from the hinterlands of Northern Canada, and I go to a place like Amsterdam, and it just makes my bloody jaw drop. And it's the same whenever I visit the UK. It's like, you people don't think you have a culture? It's like, well, who has pretensions to a culture then? Like, if Europe doesn't have a culture, then no one has a culture.

I mean, Europe has a culture that's so miraculous that people make pilgrimages there in the tens of millions just to see its remnants. Yes, so it's like what the hell is this claim? It's been a stupid thing to try to progress that from an instinct into an actual policy.

To fall back on the sort of mantra of "everyone's a migrant," for instance. I mean, this is one of the ones that has just been endlessly forced on people. And again, sorry to keep referring to it, but as I said in The Strange Death of Europe, people in Europe—Europeans, British people, others—do notice that if they moved to China or India, they would not become Chinese or Indian.

They do notice that. And they do notice that if they had children in that country, their children would not be regarded as Indian or Chinese either. And that's just to pick out two countries that happen to be the largest ones. But in that case, a lot of people think, "How come anyone can move here and immediately become us?" And the answer is that's not clear at all. It doesn't seem obvious at all.

At the same time, of course, nobody wants to say nobody can become like us because that's too judgmental and too negative a thought, too pessimistic a thought. And so what happens is just a set of stupid and banal lies: "Diversity is our strength."

That's another one. "Diversity is our strength" is possibly the main mantra of British and European societies now, and actually, again, as mantras go, it's false. Diversity does bring some strengths, and it also brings some weaknesses.

Diversity can bring a range of ideas, and it can bring ideas so terrible that they could destroy the society. It wasn't great that the Ali family—that Hadi Ali's parents moved from Somalia to the UK, got asylum, and their son then macheted an MP to death in his surgery.

We didn't need the Ali family to bring the worst of the war zones of Somalia to the streets of a British constituency. And so when you hear people saying things, insisting all the time, "Diversity is our strength," people know it's a lie.

At the very least, it's a half-truth and they get fed up with this stuff being forced at them because all the time they're noticing the downsides of this, and the downsides include, by the way, it never can never be said enough—the change of a society when the movement is so fast and the numbers are so large and the type of diversity is so difficult.

People notice that, for instance, a high-trust society of the kind that Britain used to be becomes a very low-trust society, and the belief in institutions that used to characterize Britain—once all of those have delegitimized themselves, what are you left with?

And then they come for the holy places. They come for your gods. They come for your temples, and people are meant to suck it up endlessly. And I've never been sure that they would.

When a woman experiences an unplanned pregnancy, she often feels alone and afraid. Too often, her first response is to seek out an abortion because that's what left-leaning institutions have conditioned her to do. But because of the generosity of listeners like you, that search may lead her to a pre-born network clinic where, by the grace of God, she'll choose life—not just for her baby, but for herself.

Pre-born offers God's love and compassion to hurting women and provides a free ultrasound to introduce them to the life growing inside them. This combination helps women choose life, and it's how Pre-born saves 200 babies every single day. Thanks to the Daily Wire's partnership with Pre-born, we're able to make our powerful documentary Choosing Life available to all on Daily Wire Plus.

Join us in thanking Pre-born for bringing this important work out from behind our paywall, and consider making a donation today to support their life-saving work. You can sponsor one ultrasound for just $28. If you have the means, you can sponsor Pre-born's entire network for a day for $5,000.

Make a donation today—just dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby. That's pound 250, baby, or go to pre-born.com. That's pre-born.com/Jordan.

So, well, here's an obvious question too. It's like, well, here's a definition of war: war is the definition of irreconcilable diversity. Right? So diversity is our strength. It's like, okay, well, Hamas and Israel have diverse viewpoints, and they're not reconcilable.

So what's the story that people are supposed to swallow? It's that, although the world has been eternally mired in interesting conflict, the war between diverse viewpoints—if we import all that diversity into the West, magically, we wave a wand, and all that diversity will be transformed into nothing but productive cooperation.

In the absence, by the way, in the absence of any reconciling framework because people like Trudeau, for example, dispense with the idea of any national identity whatsoever. So their presumption is something like the natural state of people, regardless of the diversity of their opinions. No matter how diverse those opinions are, their natural state is productive peace.

Right? So that’s Rousseau, is that? Is that what that is? Is that an unbelievably naive Rousseau? And is that the unwillingness—is that a reflection of the unwillingness to look at the aspect of the human psyche that's gleefully pursuing murder and mayhem?

Just to never cast an eye in that direction? It's all sweetness and light. We're all little children. And if that's what it looks like, something like that to me, it’ll be the strange death of Europe will be something like the death of the overprivileged at the hands of their own naivety.

Yes, and you can see it. You can see it very closely. I mean, as I say, you know, in some ways, I mean, it's a horrible thing to say. Thank goodness the killer in Southport wasn't a migrant who had arrived illegally into the UK a couple of weeks earlier.

But you want the peace of your society and the possible peacefulness of your society for the foreseeable future to be reliant on that never happening again. Well, there's also reliable evidence, Douglas, that the children of immigrants are more likely to be radicalized than the immigrants themselves.

Yeah, yeah, especially if they're having a hard time integrating. Right, well, I mean, that's one of the most common ones. I've spoken with you about this before, but I mean the most common one is, you know, a parent who flees a particularly ugly and warlike society, like, say, Somalia, might realize how lucky they are to arrive in Canada.

They might—one would hope that they did. Will the child? No. The child's expectation is that the place they've been born in is the normal order of things. And then a load of other people in society, you know, have all but forgotten what the state of nature can be and has been for most of human history and forget that, actually, you know, you can bang on all you like about disinformation or online and so on.

Most people are just looking at the situation in front of them. And then suddenly, war breaks out. Hell breaks loose. Hopefully, it's contained, but sometimes you see it completely uncontained.

That's certainly what I saw in Israel—the absolute epitome of unconstrained hate that was unleashed on Israel on the 7th. By the way, again, so one other—sorry, one other quick thing on that because it's something that is so often in my mind as to communities, by the way, in the south of Israel, precisely overpopulated by people who dreamed the dream of peace with their neighbors and believed, for instance, that, you know, by driving Palestinian children from Gaza to Israeli hospitals every weekend, they were doing something in the cause of peace.

Literally, the woman who was doing that, who was in her 70s, was burned alive in her home on October 7th. So the simple dream dreaming does not make it so. You may well be living in the most wonderful dream, but if everyone else is not, you better just hope you're not woken up one day.

But the likelihood is you will be, and again what I've laid out about the situation in Britain is some example of that—a dream which maybe doesn't work. Maybe you're woken up from.

Okay, so now I have a better insight into your goal in the speaking tour. You're destined to be Cassandra, so that's always fun. And you can tell if you're Cassandra if you make prophecies that you pray would not come true but believe are likely.

Oh my gosh, yes. Can't believe how much, can't believe how much that's been on my mind. My late friend Jonathan Sacks wrote after the Strange Death of Europe came out, he wrote to me with a message from a line from Ezekiel where he said, he said, "And whether they listen or fail to listen, they should know that a prophet stood among them."

Right, right, which I have children. I got in—I really hope that he wasn't right. Right, well, so I can see—I see. So you know what you're doing at the deepest level with this new tour is, I can see why it's the logical next step in what you've been doing because you're going to attempt to bring to public attention all those things that people would rather not look at, right?

There's a very old idea, you and I elucidated it in some detail in this new book I wrote, We Who Wrestle with God, that the way you become immune to the poison of the worst serpents is by looking at the things you least want to look at, right?

And the goal of the prophet, the role of the prophet is to identify what it is that people want to look at least and to hold it up in front of them in the hopes that that will, that that will make the people who are viewing voluntarily stronger and that that will set the social order itself on a more appropriate path.

Well, we certainly don’t need people to be more dreamy and weaker than they currently are. All right, so maybe we could maybe we could turn our attention this direction. You know, in this conversation we've done a lot of what conservative types often do, which is to point to what's not good and to make a case for its pathology and danger.

Now, that proclivity, let's say, that gives rise to the accusations from the radical utopians of the reactionary nature, let's say of the right. Now, like I said earlier, I don't know if right and left—I don't believe even that right and left are the right way to conceptualize what's going on in our society now, but again, we'll leave that aside. You know, that with this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, for example, that was started last year in the UK, we’ve been trying to outline something approximating a positive vision rather than merely pointing to the evils of the current pathway.

And that outlining of a more positive vision is something that conservatives aren’t particularly good at. And I can understand that in a sense, you know, because it's strange times indeed where you have to point repeatedly about what should be self-evident in relationship to your culture to remind people that it exists.

You know, at the deepest level, you might say, well, the confusion about what constitutes a woman is a cardinal example of that. It's like we're so lost that we can't agree on the distinction between the sexes. And so there isn't a form of loss that's more profound than that, as far as I can figure.

So, what do you see, let's say, as what do you offer? What do you console yourself even, let's say, with in regards to something approximating a—what is it that you're defending? What is it that the West, let's say, that you're whose loss you're decrying? What's at the bottom of this that we're in such radical danger of losing?

This is exactly what Dawkins was pointing to, however implicitly, when he described himself as a cultural Christian. Like, okay, the West is under assault. Well, what is it that's worth defending precisely? And how do you conceptualize that and make it explicit?

And so, I mean, when I go to Europe, what do I love about Europe? The great beauty of its artistic tradition. That's something that if you have any sense and any aesthetic sense at all, that drops you to your knees to go to Italy, to a town like Florence, and to go into a random church where there's a painting that, if sold, would be worth $500 million, and to see it just hanging on the wall, unguarded, with no one around.

Well, what is that? That's an indication of two types of treasure. One, the art itself. Two, the fact that that art can just sit there without having a hundred men with machine guns around it making sure that no thug comes along and perverts it.

So that's the treasure of that implicit trust that you described. So there's the beauty. There's the deep sense of voluntary civilization that characterizes Europe, right?

There's a remarkable history of valuation of the individual all the way down, the economic framework—that's particularly present in the UK, probably. It's there in the Netherlands as well; there's other European countries that share that. This is not no civilization and no culture.

And then, so what do you—what is it that we should be promoting and fighting for, as far as you're concerned? The main thing we should be continuing—you know, it's one of the things where small-c conservatism is that if the most radical figures on the left come up with completely bizarre new manifestos for what should happen—like the complete forgetting of biology or anything else—if they come up with that, it's true that others could resist that and say, "No, we have an alternative utopian vision," and so on.

I myself am not a devotee of that idea. I'm a devotee of the idea of returning to the sane and the normal and the pursuit of the beautiful and the true. Now, those are all things which you don't have to invent a whole new paradigm for. We had it; we have it in the civilization you just described—in the institutions and the buildings and the works of art and much more.

It's what I—I mean, think of it this way: What if instead of everybody in our age who has any intelligence being told that they should use it to problematize history and go over history, focus on things that were solved and try to unsolvable before they decided to become historic figures themselves?

Well, that would be something to aim for. What if instead of seeing the dozen or so figures that stand over the courtyard at Columbia University—Dante, Aristotle and so on—what if instead of viewing them as simply dead white men, you viewed them as part of a tradition that you can be a part of and add to?

And add to? Well, that would be something. And I think it's a very good vision for life, and I think it did our forbears well. And if you have a pride in that tradition, which certainly in Europe we have the right to—not to eradicate any dark times, goodness knows—but a right to have that tradition and to want to add to it and to want to preserve it and keep it going, that seems to me a pretty good basis for life and remembering things that everyone knew until yesterday.

Today, and I wonder, is it pride or is it grateful aspiration? You know, because that word pride—that's been a very thorny word, you might say—and increasingly so in recent years. It's like, what’s the right attitude to have towards the great figures of the past? I mean, in this Peterson Academy that we just launched, we have one of the members of the House of Lords do a lecture series on seven great historical leaders of the past.

I’m kind of rubbing my hands together about that course because it’s not the sort of course that you could get at a university, all things considered. There were no great men; they were just pursuing their own power dynamic for their own narrow self-serving purpose, which is so preposterous. I mean, you just—I was with some mutual friends of ours recently on the island of St. Helena, and although I tend to take the British view about Napoleon, which was that he was a proto-tyrant, you cannot sit in Napoleon's study in Longwood House, looking out at the ocean and considering the battalions of the British army that had to stay on the island to keep the emperor inside, and the fleet of British boats that had to sit in the harbor facing inwards to make sure the emperor didn't escape, to just think, "Wow, this was a world historical force, this man."

You know, you’re able to take the bad with the good sometimes. And goodness me, I mean the idea there were no great men in history, or that it's all just sort of relative, is so preposterous. And you don't have to go to a sort of Carlyle and great man theory, but by the way, that's a much better theory of history than anything that's being pushed on us at the moment.

I mean, just very—I don't want to ramble, but I mean, there's a case. I was saying—actually, I did an alternative commencement speech for some of the students at Columbia the other month because they weren't allowed a commencement ceremony because of the protesters at their university.

And of course, a nice group of students and their families asked if I would speak, and I did, and I did as much as I could. And but one of the things, you know, I said— I said, you know, as well as talking about the famous great figures of the past, I gave the example of there's a 16-year-old who—who Andrew Roberts mentions in his history of World War II, The Storm of War—the 16-year-old who lied about his age to get into the British Navy as a submariner in 1940 or so.

Is on one of the summaries that sinks a German U-boat. They get the crew off the boat, and it's sinking, but this 16-year-old and a couple of the others get into this German U-boat as it's sinking and find, among other things, one of the encryption devices which is sent back to Bletchley Park and which allows the Allies to crack the Enigma code.

That 16-year-old ended up being, as it happened, he was chucked out of the Navy because he lied about his age. But that 16-year-old boy called Tommy changed the course of human history for the good.

Now tell me, tell me it wouldn't be better as a society instead of telling people to wallow in grievance and anger and bitterness to say, you know, it actually doesn't matter where you come from—if you have it in you, you could be a world historical figure as well and improve things demonstrably for the better with your life.

I suppose one of the conclusions that you could draw would be that the provision of ideologies that claim the contrary are generated for no other reason than to alleviate the responsibility for doing so from the shoulders, to lift the burden of responsibility for doing so from the shoulders of the authors of those ideologies.

Everything is pointless. All morality is relative. No one's life has any true significance. I can do whatever the hell I want with whoever the hell I want to, with no consequences whatsoever because, in the final analysis, does it really matter? It's like, "Well, does it really matter?"

Well, the reason I concluded eventually that it did really matter was because that's the pathway to hell. And it looks to me like