Eugenics: Flawed Thinking Behind Pushed Science | Alex Story | EP 294

This idea of using regulation and global laws in order to impose, uh, on weaker states is completely... You can see it now; the template was set, and it's been a process of establishing, through the offices of these international institutions, a world which would be governed centrally that strips you, or me, and anybody in this room of any actual rights. And suddenly, suddenly the state tells you it is unconstitutional, but we'll do it anyway. And the reason why is because there's a scientific body of opinion that says that you ought to have drugs. Uh, yes. And a scientific body of opinion never says you ought. Yeah, as soon as someone says that the science says you ought, they've made the leap from is to ought, and science concentrates on is, not on ought. And so the idea that you can somehow blindly follow the science and also that you're moral by doing so is about the most anti-scientific proposition that there could be.

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Hello everyone, I'm talking today with Alex Story. Born in France to an English academic, Professor Jonathan Story, and an Austrian artist, Heidi, Alex grew up in Fontainebleau, France, where he was expelled from three schools for being turbulent. He was then introduced to rowing by his father to get some discipline. Alex left home at 17, moved to the United Kingdom to pursue his rowing ambitions, and was an Olympian in 1996 and a competitor in the World Championship in '94, '95, and '97, where he ranked in the top ranks and held the world record from '98 for several decades.

Alex was then accepted at Cambridge to study modern and medieval languages. He stood for parliamentary office in 2005, 2010, and 2015 in the poorest parts of the UK and won the right to become a member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber in 2016. Although he didn’t take the seat, he attended the MBA program at Judge Business School in 2014 to 2016 at Cambridge and currently works in finance as head of sales at a U.S. broker. Alex also started writing publicly in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement during the Covid lockdowns and publishes weekly in the UK and U.S. press for The Express, The Critics, Spectator, Country Squire Magazine, National Review, and American Greatness. Today we're going to talk about a variety of topics, including Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Malthus, who originated the hypothesis that biologically minded political actors used to justify the claim that we are suffering from an excess of population.

So where do we go with that discussion? Very nice to meet you, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. It's my pleasure. So we talked a little bit about where we might want to start. If you had a bit of a biographical account that could lead us into the topic of today, I’m going to turn it over to you.

Yeah, um, so I'm a father. My first son has Down syndrome. When something like that happens, things happen, and the world is revealed in a slightly different way. When Joshua was born and we took him home, the initial question that anybody and everybody asked was, "Didn't you know?" Initially, I just said, "Well, we didn't know,” but it kept coming back and back and back. Then eventually, I just thought, "What are you saying? If we had known, what do you think we ought to have done?" Essentially, what they were saying is, "It's unusual to have a Downs baby. Of course, if you had known, you would have had an abortion or you'd have aborted the baby." That's their thinking process.

And, um, obviously, accidents do happen, but accidents sometimes can be very good for somebody in the sense that Joshua, I think, may be a much, much better person than I was before simply because I realized that on the day that I learned about his condition, I thought the most important thing is living and life. It doesn't matter whether he goes to Cambridge or not, and it doesn't matter whether he can speak a few languages or any of that. Actually, it became irrelevant.

And as my wife was crying when she discovered this, I tried not to cry because I am the man of the family. So it's really important that I don’t, and I stay stoic about these things. But I said to her, "Look, he's not going to be very good at maths. He's going to be like his dad. He's going to be quite clumsy like his dad. There are all things like his dad that he's going to be. We will love him." I think that really brought our relationship even closer.

So this discovery that suddenly my son was the subject of speculation about whether he ought to remain alive or not made me think very, very profoundly... In my view, perhaps not profoundly, because I’m thinking it felt profound, right? Because I had to really go into the nooks and crannies of the thinking process. So, this question, which keeps coming back even now, I think was the seed of some kind of thought process that started, and that led me to the field of eugenics and the study of eugenics, or at least trying to understand where this ideology comes from.

Well, you said that one of the consequences of Joshua's birth is that you became a better person, and that your relationship with your wife deepened. Yeah, and you mentioned that that was the benefit of the trouble, let's say, or the unexpected occurrence. In what way do you think, more particularly, do you think having had this experience, having had your son, has made you a better person? And why specifically do you see that it's deepened your relationship with your wife?

Because suddenly, I had to man up, and I had to take responsibility, and I had to be there for her in a way that was different than before. Absolutely. So why? What made it different?

Well, because we were both together, and this was our family that we were building. Everybody in that family would be my responsibility. So it was just something like a determination to take on a joint challenge. Exactly. When I heard that sometimes men leave their wives because of a birth like that, I was appalled, but also I thought, "I'm not going to be like that." I will be something; I'll be somebody else.

My life up to then had been relatively carefree. I was also extremely lucky because I fell in love with my wife on the day I met her, and I married her just a few weeks later. So how long had you been married before the...?

Not very long. We were married perhaps a year and a half. I see. So this, in some sense, was the first significant joint challenge that you had? Well, actually, the first one was the discovery that I knew nothing about a lot when she had a miscarriage. It was complete—she had two.

And I just stood helpless when she was screaming in pain, and I wasn't really sure what to do. I felt, and I realized how little I knew about things, and I had no idea about what to do when I—apart from trying to say empty words, you know, to try and...

So you felt at that point that there was something missing from the way you were looking at the world? No, no, it's just that—my point is simply that when my wife and I tried to have a child, the first two were miscarriages, and I realized how little I knew and how helpless I was to help her.

So when Joshua was born, the third... I was determined to be a good old-fashioned old-school father, and I thought that that was much, much more important than what people thought about me or my political views or anything else. But I think it did determine a great deal about what I became afterward.

When you said you wanted to become an old-fashioned old-school father as a consequence of this challenge, how did that manifest itself to you? What was it? You said you struggled to take on more responsibility and you made that clear to your wife. Yeah. And you also regarded the decision to take on that responsibility as something that was transformative morally but also intellectually, which is what we're going to get into.

And what did it mean to you to become an old-fashioned, old-school father as opposed to—let's say, as opposed to what? Well, by that, I mean the thing that did rescue me was sports. I got kicked out of a few schools mainly because I was always challenging authority, and I think if you speak to a lot of my peers—in fact, one of my friends, David, I won’t say a surname because I’d be upset if I told you—but I was with his son, and his son asked a question about me while we had been drinking a lot of really good wine at the time.

David just said, “Alex is just unmanageable.” This is something that had limited me to lots of problems at school. My father did the old-fashioned thing of saying, “You need some boundaries. You need a routine. You need to be able to work through a process in order to go from A to B. You need to be able to become good at something.”

So the adoption of a disciplinary framework? Exactly. And rowing is brutal in that sense. I mean, we don’t run into one another, but we lift a lot of weights. We train two or three times a day; it’s complete and utter dedication.

And this is... you know, once you get onto that treadmill, what happens is that your body changes very quickly; your perception of yourself changes as well. You become big and strong and fit, and also because you don’t do any of the things that your peers might be doing, such as taking drugs or drinking wine or getting drunk at parties—all of these landmines are avoided.

So why did you do it? If you were unmanageable and you were a discipline problem in school, why were you willing to subjugate yourself to the discipline of rowing? Because of glory. And I think glory is important. And I think we live in a glory-free world. In fact, when the Queen passed, what was interesting was suddenly we started to hear beautiful and sublime language again, and it’s in contrast to the very clunky bureaucratic language that we now hear more and more.

This idea of glory, for me, has always mattered. So when your father proposed the rowing as an option, were you familiar with it at all? No, not really. In fact, I was surprised that my father had been a rower, but then it turns out that my grandfather was a rower as well. And it also turns out that Story is a Norwegian name. S-T-O-R means “big” in Norwegian, and I’m six foot eight, and we have Norwegian origins. I think if you trace the Story family back, we are Vikings, so I think we were always boat people.

But no, it’s quite a transition to go from somebody who’s making trouble like that to someone who’s disciplined and athletic. So how did you perceive the opportunity for what you call glory? Like why did that beckon to you, do you think? And was it related to, in some ways, that impulse that had driven you to cause trouble to begin with?

Maybe. I got into trouble very often. I got into fights a lot, and I think the idea of being physically strong mattered to me at the time, and it’s something that I could control. I was impatient in certain things, but I liked the idea of feeling myself grow into a man, because I started at the age of thirteen, fourteen, and that transition... you know, I was six foot when I was twelve.

So I going to the gym—in fact, spending some time with my dad at the gym was important. So all of this was not subjugation; it was the desire to do it. It was this desire to be strong, and it was desired to push myself and to prove to others that that child that was always in trouble could become something much greater.

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Yeah, well, it’s a lovely way of conceptualizing the idea of the regulation of aggression, so to speak. Because generally, in our culture, we presume that a child’s self-expression is limited in some sense by force—by the external world—and so that there’s an intrinsic conflict between the motivational impulses of the child on the hedonistic front, let’s say, and also in relationship to aggression and the force that society applies to inhibit that. But it’s a much better idea to conceptualize that in the optimal sense as a kind of integration rather than as a kind of suppression.

And so you could say, if you were a child, you were physically larger, and so that is one of the predispositions to a more— that is one of the factors that predisposes to a more aggressive temperament. Because if you’re aggressive and little, you tend to get pounded flat. But if you’re aggressive and big, you tend to be more victorious, and so it maintains itself.

But then you might say, well, what do you do in the situation where you have a child who’s motivated, at least in part, by aggressive and competitive urges? And the answer should be that you sublimate that into something that utilizes those capabilities on the competitive front, let’s say, and but also disciplines and harnesses them.

And the thing that’s interesting to me about your story is that, for some reason, you laid out some of the answer to that. You were also willing to abide by that disciplinary routine. So did you start enjoying going to the gym rapidly? Like how did that all occur?

Whether the gym was, again, an accident and a happy one. My father walked into a French Olympic gold medalist who’d been a fencer, of all things, and a gym had opened just close to where we lived. My father got to speak to him, and the coach was great. He made it great. Well, because he was very helpful and also understood that there are certain things that, in terms of the training programs, were set and really clear.

He then, he’s the one, actually, that told my father about the rowing clubs that I should be able to join. So there was this fatherly nature to the coach, and also it enabled me to spend some time with my father. Because my father was an academic and at INSEAD, and he would have worked 16 to 18-hour days, and he was always writing—smoking the pipe in his office.

But, um, so you had some good paternal role models, both in your father, especially in relationship to the rowing and to his encouragement of you, but also with regard to this coach. Then, so then it also seems to indicate to me too that when you decided to take on the challenge jointly with your wife, because you mentioned that you wanted to be an old-school father, that you already had a model for what that might look like in mind—in some deep sense. Because you were socialized optimally when you were a teenager, even under relatively fraught conditions given the behavioral issues at that point.

But what’s interesting is—when people talk about privilege, I claim that I have privilege, and my privilege is that my parents are still together, and that the rock on which the Story family was built was solid. And that's something that I think is crucial. When I was politicking in Northern England, in Wakefield for instance, most of the trouble that you could see stemmed from the fact that lots of boys and girls had no father figure anywhere near the house.

And this is one of the things that we might be able to cover later, but there’s a strong Marxist tendency. What we’re witnessing is the implementation of Marxist policies. If you read Das Kapital, sorry, if you read The Communist Manifesto, the most important point in the book is the destruction of the family. It’s the number one thing in the book; nothing else matters as much as that and that’s standing in the way of the establishment of the communist utopia.

Exactly. But it’s the destruction of the family, as Marx says, it is important because it means we want people to have no past. We don’t want traditions; we don’t want people to be able to remember certain things. Because when you obliterate the traditions to rebuild—to build the man of the future. I mean, Mao did that during the Cultural Revolution, when he had his gang of young people go around and destroy a tremendous amount of China’s immense past in an attempt to wipe the slate clean. Which meant wiping a lot of people off the slate, by the way, to wipe the slate clean, so that the new utopian man could be built.

That’s also allied with that modern notion of radical social constructivism, which is that we’re only what our socialization makes of us. There’s no intrinsic nature. And so the idea, for example, that there might be a—what there might be multiple reasons for the absolute necessity of the nuclear family as the bedrock to civil society, that’s just an arbitrary supposition as far as the Marxists and the radical constructivists are concerned.

Yeah, and so I mean that we saw in the Black Lives Matter manifesto that the key point was the destruction of the western family structure. But, um, so my privilege is—if I have any—is that my parents were there. And it wasn’t always easy because, in those days, when you were kicked out of school, there was a 1920s style punishment that awaited me—I mean, uh, at home.

Yeah, it was pretty scary. And I remember, because in those days, it was just one phone, and we had some gravel in front of the house. And me, coming back knowing that I’d misbehaved, the teachers had already called saying I wouldn’t be welcome back at the school. And then I heard my mother pick up the phone, dial my father’s office; she spoke quietly, and I could hear on the first floor my father shouting down, and that was petrifying.

Why do you think you have a positive attitude towards your parents given that they were—because you could make a case that, you know, the school, you had multiple disagreements with the school. And it's an open question in such cases whether it's the school's fault for being arbitrary and not dealing with you properly, or if it's a consequence of your misbehavior. And they report you to your parents, your parents don't take your side. Exactly. Or that's one way of looking at it—there's punishment associated with that and some fear, but you speak of your parents with respect.

So why is that? Why do you think that despite your fear, uh, as a consequence of the apprehension of the consequences of your misbehavior, you still have this overlying sense of the support and integrity of your parents? Well, that’s big. Because I think they were right. I accept that I tried; I behaved badly. I don’t blame the school, and I don’t blame my parents; I blame my own behavior.

And I think one of the interesting things about the life we live in is that the person who takes responsibility for his actions is always a more pleasant person to meet than somebody who keeps blaming somebody else for his worries. Oh, it’s also hard to change other people.

Exactly. And it’s also easier to blame somebody else. And I think the introspection and this is the sense of self-discovery, you know, questioning what you’ve done and questioning how you did it and what impact you might have had through your words and your actions onto others, I think is a crucial aspect of humanity.

So that’s, that’s the confession; that’s the prerequisite for redemption and atonement fundamentally. Well, it is. I mean, that’s the, you know, it’s—you have to know what you did wrong, and you have to come to terms with it. Because how are you going to change it otherwise?

Exactly. You have to figure out exactly what you did wrong, and then you figure out how you might change that if you could, and then you have to be willing to... When you started rowing, when you started to discipline yourself, were you also, do you think, attempting to atone for your misbehavior? Were those things tangled together?

No, I had—there’s a very romantic side to the way I look at the world. So, um, I’ll give you an example. I had a job interview when I was much younger, and the person asked, “So where do you—what would you really like to be?” And I said, "Is this a real question?" The guy goes, “Yeah.” I said, “I would love to be a knight on a white horse with shining armor rescuing…”

How old were you? I was about 25. Oh, rescuing damsels in distress. So I didn’t get the job, huh? Uh, Spencer, but I just thought I’d let it rip. I was… I don’t need to be...

Where do you think that image came from for you? Um, I don’t know. It’s an interesting one. I mean I started reading a lot about medieval history and the more I do read about medieval history, the more intricate and beautiful it becomes. Because there are lots and lots of things in the tapestry of history that are worth looking at.

And so it’s not just that once you get involved in that kind of universe, it drags you all the way to the beginning of time in a way because you keep thinking that that one occurrence, in let’s say 1190, was actually based on a presupposition—a philosophy—for 500 years before, and then you start to dig into this really, really incredibly rich soil that’s our history.

Well, you can see the lingering attraction of such things in the popular imagination by, well, you could say the Harry Potter series, which has a real medieval element to it, and also by a series like the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. I mean, that’s a fantastically popular modern myth, and it's set in a medieval ethos in some sense, and that’s also associated with that idea you had that seemed attractive to you about glory, which is also kind of an anachronistic concept.

Well, it’s— but I think, um, I don’t know if it is, in fact, anachronism; that’s an interesting word that if we have time we could perhaps talk about it. Yeah, it wasn’t a criticism; just a reservation.

No, no, but I mean, it’s an interesting term. But because of the Queen’s passing, all those people who were saying that the monarchy was an anachronism are now proven completely wrong.

It’s not an anachronism; the simple reason is that it lives, it lives. Its dynamic—it grows. She helped ensure that it didn’t become a mere anachronism. Exactly. But the point is that that’s what families do.

And of course the monarchy has a very simple concept to understand: my son, Josh, understood that when she died Charles would become king. If you try to explain the French Constitution to him, you’d find it much more difficult. Right, right. So she embodies something that echoes very deeply for everyone.

Well, absolutely. And it’s a very simple—she's the top of the family. That’s essential, or she’s the mate. She was the matriarch. Right, and a lot of people, a very small number of people, have been talking about the demise, the eventual demise of the monarchy. But actually, you realize that their support is very, very, very thin.

And what you realize, it’s not just on this topic; it’s on every single topic that they push through. And the reason for this, in my view, is the fact that it’s not anchored in anything; it’s anchored in theories. And theories—they then try to impose these theories on a very complex reality; they’re always wrong because the one thing that they don’t do is try to understand the humanity.

Well, that’s why they deny that the a priori structures exist because that enables them to remain invisible. You know, if I start with the presupposition that you and your family are nothing but, uh, what would you call it?, a relativistic manifestation of the arbitrary social contract, then there’s nothing to understand. You can just replace that with another arbitrary construct.

And the danger in that, I would say, apart from the fact that it’s just, it’s incorrect on multiple grounds including biological grounds, but much more than that, it also justifies your use of power. And that might be the underlying— It’s so interesting because the Marxist types tend to claim that power motivates everything, and I always think of that as more of a confession, as an observation.

It’s like, well, your ideology sets you up such that you’re tempted constantly to use power because you believe that people are infinitely malleable and they should be made over in the image of your ideology. And since you believe that there’s nothing but power, that opens up the door for you to use power to obtain your hypothetical utopia, which usually results in the destruction of many people instead, which indicates to me that maybe that was the point to begin with.

So, okay, so back, if you don’t mind, back to your son. You said—and we delved into that quite deeply—that his birth and your decision to take responsibility for that, which I suppose was being a knight on a white horse for a damsel in distress, let’s say, also catalyzed an intellectual interest, and you started becoming interested in eugenics because of the comments that people were making to you obliquely about why your son was, let’s say, allowed to be born. So maybe we could track that a little bit.

Yeah, so I think the most shocking part of that was when I was walking with my son. It was only two very small—this woman came along and she said, “You know that your son will be a burden on the state.” Oh yes.

And, um, yeah, well, you know, when the Nazis started, before they launched their full-scale genocidal movements, they started to clean up the mental institutions and the old folks’ homes and so forth—any people who were in long-term care, let’s say, who were a burden on the state. And they definitely regarded them as a burden on the state. And they further pushed forward their pre-genocidal movement by making the case that, well, not only were these people a non-productive burden, but their quality of life was so low that it was actually more merciful to dispense with them altogether.

And that really, in a very serious way, went out of hand very, very rapidly. People don’t understand the genesis of these sorts of movements, but a lot of the Nazi eradication policies had their origin in public health policy. This is quite frightening, and it’s interesting to realize that the Germans, in fact, considered it, if I’m correct, considered eugenics as a medical miracle solution.

And that was in the 1910s, so I think the law was passed in 1913 long before the Second World War. So this concept was already there. And that says—and this is the interesting thing that we witness at the moment, and I think that’s the reason why my son’s Down syndrome I think has been such an interesting catalyst is the fact that we seem to live in an era where our betters and leaders—whether they’re political or corporate—are increasingly anti-human.

And you initially—you wreck—it’s a bit like the glitch in the matrix. You see something, you wake—you wake up a little bit, and then you keep pulling on that string and then you suddenly realize that there’s this massive effort to try and depopulate the world.

You know, Freud, when Freud described what came to be known as Freudian slips, that was exactly the observation he made. He said you listen to someone talk, and there’ll be a disjunction in their speech; something will emerge, right? If they say a non-sequitur or they make a joke that’s slightly off-kilter and there’s some emotional awkwardness—there’s something that just doesn’t flow—and Freud—and you learned that behind that there was an assemblage of complex sub-personalities that in some sense part of them had grip control of the speech flow for a moment, and then if you delved into that, you’d start to see all sorts of unresolved conflicts and pathologies that characterize the person’s personality.

And so that’s all there in a Freudian slip, and people will reveal themselves in some sense. And you said when you were taking your son for a walk, this woman—it was a woman who came up to you and said that he would be a burden on the state. It’s like, you know, what happens is the persona falls in a situation like that, and you see something utterly monstrous reveal itself, and then it snaps shut again.

And generally what people will do is they’ll just jump over that and continue on, but you weren’t able to do that because you had this relationship. Because, uh, I think the reason why I wasn’t able to move away from it and ignore is because it was a daily occurrence.

I mean, she was the worst one, but again, this idea of “Didn’t you know?” kept becoming a heavier and heavier sentence for me to hear and to carry because I kept thinking, “You are asking me whether I should have aborted our son before we even gave him a chance to live.” I mean, that’s the right—

Yeah, and you had his living, breathing reality right there to contemplate while that was occurring. No, I noticed when my—when my wife had—when we had little kids, I lived in Boston. And when I was in Boston with my wife, we were the youngest parents we knew with the oldest kids. And we weren’t young; my wife and I didn’t start having kids until our late 20s, right?

And so we were already pushing the envelope in some sense, but in that community at that time, we were still the youngest parents with the oldest kids. And one of the things I really noticed was that my wife was often not treated well, especially at restaurants, but often shops too when she entered the shops with our little kids. And our little kids were very well behaved, and we had helped them learn how to act properly, let’s say, in a restaurant. They didn’t cause trouble, but they weren’t treated well.

And I thought, there’s something very, very pathological going on here because there’s my wife, and she’s a perfectly pleasant person, although she has a bite, and that she has these children; they’re very cute and they’re well behaved, and yet when she goes into a social situation with them, she’s immediately treated like a second-class person.

And she’s treated like she, in some sense, she and the kids have no right to be there. And I thought, that’s a hell of a way to treat a young woman with children. It’s not only wrong; it’s the opposite of what it should be. And that there’s something very dark lurking under there, which is also associated with the reasons why we were the youngest parents with the oldest kids.

That’s part of that anti-human proclivity that you were outlining. So you were experiencing this, you said, on a relatively daily basis?

Yeah, because that’s a lot, in particular, because it was obvious. Interestingly enough, I couldn’t see that he had Downs, right? So I just was the proud father of a good-looking child as I saw it.

I asked my friends, “Can you see that he has Down syndrome?” And they went, “Uh, yeah.” Oh, see, because I can’t see it. I mean, they used to think I was slightly mad or in denial, you know. But it wasn’t— It wasn’t; it was just something I couldn’t see, really. It’s weird.

Okay, so how do you—and how did you account for that? I mean, obviously, and I just thought he was a— I said to my wife, Nadine, who has to bear me, she’s a saint, really, I said, so you know he’s going to be the best-looking Downs there’s ever been! He’s going to be a good-looking one. He’s going to look just like me! And she obviously cried; she didn’t laugh. I was hoping to try and make her laugh.

So you saw that you were able to see the person behind the syndrome, let’s say. Well, I was just—I don’t know; I mean, I knew, and I thought actually it’s amazing. Oh, he’s crazy; he looks good; he’s very strong; he’s big and—but he’s fine. But yes, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t read, and I can’t really explain why or exactly why I couldn’t see it, but it was just an observation.

And I used to—by the way, when I used to ask my friends, they probably thought I was a bit— I was perhaps denial or, you know, if you’re a psychiatrist, you might go deeper into it.

But I just—how long after he was born, do you say, that you loved him? Oh, but as soon as I saw him. So it’s interesting that you were able to manage that despite the challenge, let’s say.

Yeah, and I mean, it seems to me that that’s something that you’re relating is that you had a relationship with your son immediately that superseded the condition, yeah? And then you could think of that as a form of blindness; that’s one way of thinking about it.

But I’ve often thought about this with children, you know, because everyone thinks their child is special. And of course, there are millions of children, and you don’t necessarily think that every child that you encounter on the street is special.

And then you might say, well, are you blind about your child, or are you blind to every other child? And I would say it’s the second that’s true, is that you can actually see your children, but you don’t have enough mental energy or maybe enough breadth of character to see all other children.

And so maybe I’ve thought too that love, in some sense, is the grace of God. You know, is that if you’re in a relationship with someone that’s characterized by love, you see each other in some deep sense, and you can’t see other people like that because you don’t have the ability.

But it’s not like the love is a delusion; it’s the opposite of it, exactly, and that’s the interesting thing perhaps is the negation of love by imposing—and very smart people who tell you that love is nothing but a chemical.

Yeah, right, right. Well, that’s—yeah, and so, and it produces a delusion. It’s a hell of a way to look at things, I know, and of course, but what they’re robbing people of is the most beautiful thing, which is the ability to emote for somebody else and to invest yourself in something else.

Well, and also to live in that condition. I mean, if you’re around someone that you love and that love defines the relationship, there isn’t any better thing you can do. And so then to minimize that, to call it some sort of biological or biochemical aberration, which is the worst form of unconscionable reductionism, is to reduce the highest possible goal to something that’s nothing but, like, a trivial consequence and some underlying materiality. It’s appalling, and it’s really demoralizing.

Well, yeah, because the thing that elevates everybody, that enables you to sacrifice for, for the greater, you know, good of your family, or whatever it is, is that notion of love. It’s what gives you the ambition; it gives you the motivation to do greater things.

And once you start to get into that thinking process, you realize just how established in our institutions this idea of lack of love has become.

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And so, and I think that’s the—that's again the dial of the human being. And it’s, you know, it’s the heart of stone versus the heart of flesh. In order to be a good human being, you don’t go through a tick-box exercise; you have to be—you have to emote for the other person.

And there’s this reciprocity, essentially has been dismantled; it’s no longer—you know, it’s like you love your neighbor as you love yourself. You treat everybody equally; everybody has worth now—all of these things as a reciprocal.

And I think that’s the beauty of the old religion that we’ve lost. The new religion, which I know that’s just—a bit of a sidebar, but not really. There's a Dutch primatologist, Frans de Waal, who’s a brilliant primatologist, and along with Richard Wrangham, those are probably the two top primatologists in the world.

And Wrangham has been studying chimpanzee behavior for decades at the Arnhem Zoo and also in the wild. And there’s this idea: I had a graduate student once who—who’s now a business colleague of mine—a very smart guy who doesn’t say much. But when he says something, he’s thought about it for like ten years, and he thinks all the way to the bottom because he’s also an engineer.

And he told me once that I should stop using the term dominance hierarchy. And it took me quite aback because I understand and believe that social animals organize themselves into hierarchical structures, and I’d never really considered the implications of the term dominance hierarchy.

And he said, “Well, what do you mean?” He said, “Well, it’s predicated on the idea that the fundamental process that arranges the hierarchies of social order is the expression of power.” And I thought, “Oh my God, that’s true.” I’d have thought, really, that that strain of Marxism had invaded biology to such a degree that that became an axiomatic presumption. It was really shocking to me.

And then I started talking about hierarchies of competence and, more recently, of hierarchies of voluntary play. Now De Waal—and this isn’t just an arbitrary reconfiguring of my thought— it was a man named Jacques Panksepp who studied play behavior in rats, and he showed quite clearly that if you paired juvenile rats together and allowed them to play, because they wrestle, that in the first contact, the bigger rat could win over the smaller rat; a ten-weight advantage would be enough to guarantee victory.

So if you just studied one play bout, you could derive the conclusion that the bigger, stronger, and more dominant animal won and that play was based on domination. But he paired them together repeatedly. And this is key to the issue of reciprocity.

He paired them together repeatedly, and rats live in social groups, so they interact repeatedly. Once they have established that initial hierarchy of ability, let’s say, in the wrestling ring, it’s incumbent on the little rat to invite the big rat to play. But the big rat, if the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win at least 30 percent of the time across repeated bouts, even though he could win every single time, if he doesn’t allow the little rat to win 30 percent of the time, the little rat will stop asking him to play.

That’s a stunningly brilliant observation. And then De Waal has shown, you know, you have this notion of the alpha chimp, right? And everybody has kind of a creature in their mind of the alpha chimp. It’s like chest-bumping playground bully thug rises to the top, has preferential sexual access and thus is more reproductively fit.

And De Waal has taken that idea completely apart; it’s simply not true. The first thing he’s demonstrated, or one of the things he’s demonstrated, is that some chimps do rise to positions of sexual predominance and social authority through the use of physical intimidation.

But they tend to have short-lived rules; their troops tend to be very fractious and emotionally unstable and rife with conflict, and they tend to meet a very sudden and violent end. Because if they ever weaken, then two of the chimps that they’ve intimidated will band together and tear them into pieces, and he’s documented that quite continually.

And then he showed too that in many of the troops that he studied, sometimes the smallest male has the highest social status, particularly if he’s extremely good at reciprocal interactions and peacemaking. And he showed that these stable alphas are the most reciprocal animals in the troop, male or female, and that they cultivate reciprocal social relationships and mutual grooming constantly and track their friendship networks and are extremely reciprocal.

And so De Waal has shown, like Pancsepp did, that the true basis of stable social organization is reciprocity, yeah fundamentally and consent as well, well, exactly.

And that’s a voluntary, yeah, exactly. And this may, if we go back to sports, that’s the voluntary investment of your life in a discipline; it’s voluntary. You want to do it, and because you think you can get something out of it.

But the consent bit is an interesting one because we live in an era of revelation, in my view. Things have happened where suddenly, you know, we’ve opened a world for those students, for those who want to see, that the idea that we were living in a system where consent had needed to be sought has been dismantled.

How did we see it? Now in the UK, we had Brexit for instance. It took six years; we still have these backlaws, but what you see is more and more people on the remain side of the argument denying that the vote nearly took place or attacking those people who voted in the wrong way.

The idea—the notion that you should seek consent or consensus is complete, and the reason for this is because, as we said, humanity—if you think about this—uh, the this anti-human nature, you can say, “My opinion’s worth much more than yours.” We are not the same; there is no reciprocity.

What we know, well, and there’s no reciprocity if the fundamental basis is power. Exactly. But that’s what—that’s the interesting thing about the alpha male.

Because I completely see—and I think most of us see—that without consent, there can be no stability. You cannot, you know, you cannot create stability out of perpetual warfare. But the thing about perpetual warfare is that it enables dilettantes to think that something is changing.

So in other words, they require discord in order to have meaning for themselves. So hatred is a powerful emotion that replaces everything. That’s, in my view, one of the things that we’re witnessing at the moment where you have one group that’s hoping—it doesn’t matter how many they are—they will represent what the numbers they represent, but they are quite happy to impose their worldview because they’re righteous.

So you’re serious something like the generation of chaos produces a landscape where the narcissists are more likely to thrive? It’s something like that, yeah, because it’s a question of self-importance.

I asked my wife what—because she’s from East Germany, and East Germany was an extremely unpleasant place. One-third of the people there were government informers. I know.

But we don’t have the time to go through it today, but some of the stories that her parents—my parents-in-law—told me were quite interesting. But what she said is, “I just want stability.” In other words, I don’t want perpetual revolution; I want stability.

And if you think about societies, most people—and you know, most of us here want stability. And yet what we keep being sold is change—changes—absence; change is the only constant. You need to go for change, change, change, and the faster, the better.

Yeah, especially in the face of an emergency. Well, exactly. And so what does that lead to? It leads to a confusion. It can only lead to confusion. If the one thing that you go for is change, and if you completely disregard stability—stability, whether it’s in society or in the family, within the family setup, is the thing on which you build everything else.

Without it, it’s even the thing within which—so, you know, there are two fundamental personality traits. So there are five dimensions, but they clump, and one clump is stability, and the other clump is plasticity. And people who are higher in plasticity tend to be the entrepreneurs and the artists and the entertainers.

And so they are agents of transformation, but both of those personality elements working in tandem are necessary for—let’s call it the most stable solution to emerge across the longest span of time.

And so you have the proper elements of ordered stability with an interleaving of necessary transformation as the environment transforms your dreams sort of do this. So imagine that during the day, when you’re conscious and awake, the parts of your brain that are responsible for that operation are imposing a stable order on the world despite its aberrations.

Because, of course, you don’t know everything, so you don’t map everything accurately. There’s another part of your brain that sort of keeps track of the things that don’t fit in, and then when you go to sleep at night, you become more plastic, and your brain starts to try to make order and sense out of the things that don’t fit in.

And the monstrosity of your dreams and the, what would you call it, the cherubic and monstrosity-like imagery in dreams is an attempt to aggregate those aberrations and to start feeding updates slowly into the system that regulates stability.

Artificial intelligence engineers have found, too, that in order to build a system of apprehension that doesn’t collapse, you need part of the system to impose something approximating regularity, and then you need a separate system to keep track of deviations and slowly update the first system because otherwise, it will precipitously collapse.

And so there’s a balance. And here’s another—this is something very cool, too—so imagine that there is a balance that needs to be maintained constantly between the forces of stability and the forces of transformation. And then it’s an open question how much stability you need and how much transformation, because it depends to some degree on how rapidly things are changing around you.

And so it moves with the situation, and so you need to be able to mark the shifting boundary. Well, one hypothesis that I think is a very good hypothesis is that the spirit of play emerges when the balance between stability and transformation is attained properly.

So imagine, so if you’re in a team, or you’re even competing against yourself, you’re pushing yourself to the edge of transformation, right? And if you’re playing properly, you’re pushing yourself so you’re transforming as rapidly as you can without exhausting or undermining yourself, and that manifests itself as a sense of deep—and maybe as the sense of deep engagement that you found when you decided to start rowing instead of misbehaving.

Yeah, right, so you hit that— you hit that point of optimal play. That also catalyzed your development, and you could say that play is reciprocal in the most fundamental sense. And we to play with other people or to play against yourself in some sense.

And the sense of meaning that emerges is a signal that you’ve balanced the necessity for transformation with the necessity for stability. It’s a lovely idea, right? Because it gives some real deep grounding to the notion of existential meaning.

Yeah, and I think also in order to—the stability presupposes something else as well. So the modulation—the way that things modulate. In other words, you’ve got new technologies. New technologies don’t necessarily mean that we as human beings are better or worse, but we have more; we have expanded trouble and opportunity.

So it’s not technology, obviously, changes all the time; we can see it. But actually, the reason why you and I can read The Odyssey and feel for Helen is that we can read a story from two or three thousand years ago, and the arc of the story remains the same. And the tragedies—

Well, that’s sort of the fundamental religious claim in some sense is that the arc of the story remains the same. Exactly, yeah.

And so there’s the eternal, and there’s the ephemeral, and that’s—that’s the... So what is immovable is the thing that I think a lot of our leaders refuse to accept.

So what they’re trying—so in order to—what presupposes stability is the desire to keep something as it is. It’s your respect for something.

If you keep selling the change story, what you’re essentially saying is that you want to dismantle what is there because obviously, in this particular context, because it’s bad.

Well, if you're low status, let’s say, within the current hierarchy, one medication is to advance yourself according to the rules of the current game. And maybe you can't because you can't fit in, but maybe you can't because you're unwilling to be able, let's say.

And then you take the path of false presumption, and that’s a narcissistic path. But then your best bet under those circumstances is to destabilize things, because that way you destroy the order that that implies that your particular contribution or that there is a contribution at all.

And I hadn’t thought through exactly the idea that the sowing of chaos by, what would you say, overvaluing transformation is another trick of narcissists and psychopaths and Machiavellians to gain the upper hand. But that’s highly probable.

You know, I’ve seen, for example, I’ve had a lot of demonstrations levied against me—a lot—and some of them were very intense and unpleasant—like very intense and intense and unpleasant—and they were often mounted against me by people on the left. Although that happens on the right as well, and it’s happened to people I know, by radical right-wingers.

What's very interesting for me as a clinician to observe the people who are fomenting the protests, in my case a lot of them were female—about 60, probably 70 percent—and a lot of them were left-wing activist types, university students.

And so, but intermingled with those women were a handful of men. And in Toronto in particular, and in Ontario, I encountered a lot of protests and at a number of the protests the same men showed up. And as a clinician, I could just spot who those people were immediately.

Like one of them, for example, stood with a girl about two feet behind me that I think it was at the University of Western Ontario—it’s one of the worst protests that I was in—and they had an air horn. And air horns are plenty loud enough to damage your hearing, and they were both blowing that air horn right on the edge of where it was damaging to me.

And I looked at the guy and the girl, well, I thought, “Yeah, well, I don’t know what you’re up to, but he was, I could tell what sort of person he was.” He was there to upset things so he could prey on the women in the crowd who were the protesters.

So he would come and advance himself—“I’m on your side; I’m one of you.” And it’s like, he was 100 percent a predator, and I saw him and his ilk at all sorts of different demonstrations.

And so that notion that chaos can be sowed so the narcissists and the Machiavellians can flourish, that’s a very interesting idea and highly probable.

Well, you certainly see it on the protest front. So, okay, so back to your son. People were questioning the ethics of your decision to continue with his life, essentially, yeah, and also questioning you about the blindness that you had; that in some sense enabled that.

And then, then you started, you said that gave you an insight into something that was deeply anti-human going on underneath the surface. Exactly.

And so, um, I like reading, and so I read the biography of Keynes, and the biography of Keynes is all about Keynes as the economist. There are some segues into his politics; he was liberal or labor—certainly of the left. Can you fill people in a little bit? Tell us a little bit about Keynes and the figure and the position he occupies now among economics.

Keynes is the cornerstone of the Western economic thinking infrastructure, in a way, because GDP is essentially the way that we calculate our wealth across the world. It’s an equation that he came up with, so he set the metric.

Yeah, he was extremely influential. What was interesting about Keynes is that he is the one that negotiated the reparations that Germany had to pay with the French after the First World War. So he was a very, very influential character already in the ’30s and ’40s. He obviously was an asset manager, but he was also very involved in politics and in the field of think tankery.

In other words, he was very close to Mosley, interestingly enough, which he was our fascist leader, and Mosley had been in the UK, the fastest leader in the UK, right? And he had been, unsurprisingly, a very prominent labor MP, and he was also very interested in sociology.

So he was part of the Bloomsbury group that was very close to the Fabian group, and the Fabian group became the labor research group. So this is Keynes specifically, not Mosley—Keynes. I’m just explaining the kind of groups that you had. So yeah, Keynes was part of the Bloomsbury group but was very close, intellectually, to characters like Sydney Webb, Beatrice Webb, and Bernard Shaw, and all these all these people who were extremely influential.

In fact, the LSE is a product of the London School of Economics. Yeah, exactly.

And so when you read the book, it’s nicely written and obviously a substantial amount of research. But the thing that completely goes by the wayside is the most important part of what Keynes himself believed about society, and you can only see it in an asterisk—a little asterisk.

And, as I said, you read the sentence and it says, you know, John had to go to this place, and the slight description below is, he went to speak to the Eugenics Society. And of course, that, Freudian slip, exactly.

And so again, it’s the glitch in the machine because you’re going, hello, it’s 1943. We have a war going on with somebody who’s very, very for eugenics. We are at war; we’re sacrificing the entire British Empire to defeat that man, and that man’s cornerstone ideology is eugenics.

What is somebody as substantial as John Maynard Keynes doing at a Eugenics dinner? And it turns out that he was the president of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, and his last speech at the Galton Institute—Galton being the cousin of Darwin, importantly—Galton was a very prominent eugenicist.

That speech, he stood up and he said, “The most important field of social endeavor is eugenics.” And so we should do a sidebar quickly so that everybody understands what the field of eugenics proposes.

And the idea is it’s an offshoot of a pathological streak of Darwinism that claims that it stems in some sense out of the claim that the fittest survive, but then there’s a twist on that to imply that the fittest are therefore morally and physically superior in some moral sense.

Which is not an implication, by the way, of of standard modern biological evolutionary theory. And then more that you can identify those who are fit, let’s say, by looking at those who are currently successful in society, and you can infer their moral and physiological superiority, and then you can rank order people by that superiority.

And you could improve the race by not allowing those who were substandard, let’s say, to multiply, and that’s technically wrong from the perspective of evolutionary biology because it’s a tenet of modern evolutionary biology that you cannot select for fitness.

So you can select for a given attribute, and you can presume that that attribute is associated with fitness, but you have no—there’s no justification whatsoever for that claim because what constitutes fitness, in some real sense, varies unpredictably as the underlying landscape transforms.

And so there’s no basis for eugenics claims in modern, in the tenets of modern evolutionary biology, but that didn’t stop hypothetically biologically oriented thinkers who were saying “follow the science” to lay forth our Eugenics movement that did capture much of the left wing and the right wing in very many ways, all from about 1890 to about—nine, well, till 1945.

Well, actually I’d go much further than that. Eugenics is now the core of modern societies, I think. Eugenics has seeped through. Don’t forget that Keynes was one of the drivers of the formation of the United Nations, and giving the pound sterling’s supremacy to the Americans by allowing the dollar to be the only currency pegged to gold.

All the other currencies in the world would have to translate or exchange their currencies into dollars, and then from dollar to gold. And that’s a really important point. So in other words, he was already going for this idea of one global government.

And there are some really interesting books that you can read—else I’ll send them to you because they’re so interesting. One of them is “Fabianism and the Empire.” And in there, the pamphlet states very quickly, very clearly, “We start with national socialism; we will then go to international socialism.”

So this idea that you consolidate socialism at home nationally—and that’s important because the national socialists and the international socialists, the communists, I essentially are not on different sides of the equation; it’s just a progression. One is national, and then it goes into the international—it’s a progression towards radical centralization, and exactly predicated on the idea of implicit superiority.

Yeah, exactly, and it’s— but it’s always done with the imposition; force is always needed. And you can see that you can read it—everything’s power, you know, we know.

Well, that’s right. And if you, if you read my income, for instance, what happens is that Adolf is very, very clear about his views: you use power to impose, and you don’t dwell too much in the detail. That’s what he says in his book. He says, “I don’t want to be criticized because of my policies; I just want you guys to understand the broad picture.”

Right. So in other words, it’s a replica. Oh, yeah, well, and Hitler definitely led by inference because if you look at his statements, the statements of the sort that you described, he would lay out a low-resolution vision and insist in some sense that other people fill in, let’s call them, the “gory details.”

No, exactly, and so the idea, when you start to think about what it implies—this booklet is so interesting because they talk about the idea of free trade as being an imposition on less cultured nations.

And that book says that China will have to—we will have to impose free trade on the Chinese. It’s 1902 at this time because these people, because their culture doesn’t move on, and therefore, because it hasn’t moved on, it’s subject to, you know, Darwinian eradication.

Exactly, and so you’ve got—the reason why that’s so important is because if you then bring it to the United Nations and what Keynes's view of the world was—yeah.

So there’s a strange implication in that phrase, “survival of the fittest.” Yeah.

Because in some sense—and this is the case scientifically—the Darwinian proposition is a tautology because it really means those who survive survive; it doesn’t mean those who survive are most fit, except in—if you gerrymander the meaning of the term fit, and you don’t know what it means.

Right. Well, it changes too, you know. So the way mosquitoes solve that problem is each mosquito—there’s not a lot of variability in mosquito behavior as a consequence of socialization, so mosquitoes have a lot of offspring—who knows how many tens of thousands of potential offspring per mosquito?

And there’s some biological variability across the set of offspring, and almost all of them are eradicated before they reproduce. Otherwise, we’d be knee-deep in mosquitoes in no time. But you can’t predict a priori which of the variants that are produced by a given mosquito pairing are going to survive. You can’t predict that without running the process.

And so you cannot, again, you cannot define what’s fit before it manifests itself. And so in some sense, the notion of fitness is a bad verbal choice because it implies something like moral superiority. And there’s—or superiority even on biological grounds.

And there’s no evidence for a kind of ethical or value-laden superiority. So what’s interesting about that, if we start to go deeply into this, is the, um, is the fact that once you start to repeat that slogan—the survival of the fittest—all sorts of politics, right, all sorts of, um, things become doable.

The one thing that is removed is the emotional aspect of humanity because you can be cast aside because if you don’t survive, as you said, it’s because you’re not fit, and so if you’re not fit to survive, perhaps you shouldn’t be allowed.

Exactly. And that’s what this—that's what happens when you start looking into the think tanks of the Fabian Society from 1884 to, just—and then they were precursors to the modern socialists with the English twist. Marx's socialist, precise.

Say they were their own brand, exactly. But the template is the same. Musolini was good friends with Lenin. It’s really important to realize that he was the head of the Italian Socialist Party, and then he became a fascist because he was of the opinion—as was Lenin—that you could use power and force to take the reins of God, catalyze the revolution, exactly.

And so, but Mussolini himself says it as well, “Take nationalism first, and then international socialism. That’s the way we're going to do it.” And so this idea of using regulation and global laws in order to impose, uh, on weaker states is completely—you can see it now.

There is—there’s the template that was set, and it’s been a process of establishing through the offices of these international institutions a world which would be governed centrally—through the offices of the United Nations or the World Health Organization—all these bodies that strip you or me and anybody in this room of any actual rights.

And you could see it in places like Austria where the vaccine mandate was imposed, and suddenly, suddenly the state tells you it is unconstitutional, but we’ll do it anyway.

And the reason why is because there’s a scientific body of opinion that says that you ought to have drugs. Uh, yes, and a scientific body of opinion never says you ought.

Yeah, as soon as someone says that the science says you ought, they’ve made the gap— they’ve made the leap from is to ought, and science concentrates on is, not on ought. And so the idea that you can somehow blindly follow the science and also that you’re moral by doing so is about the most anti-scientific proposition that there could be.

You know, in that, the COVID mandates as well in Canada have precipitated what I think will be a constitutional crisis there too, yeah, because Trudeau is being taken to court right now on the grounds that his travel ban— which had no scientific justification whatsoever, even by the admission of the health personnel in Canada.

That he attempted to compel to produce a post-hoc scientific justification found that the grounds for his actions were so threadbare, yeah, and directed towards ensuring his hypothetical electoral victory in the last election that they couldn’t even fake a scientific rationale post hoc when they were demanded to by their bosses.

Yeah, so, but Canada is in such rough shape conceptually at the moment that a scandal of that nature—I think a scandal of that nature is so preposterous to Canadians that they can’t even apprehend it.

But I think that the... what’s really difficult is that these scandals are coming thick and fast. Nothing changes.

So the one constant that we were talking about—which has changed—the one thing that is not changing is the fact that these characters who are intellectually bankrupt, um, are brazen to get out.

Yeah, well this video might change all that! As soon as, uh, energy costs hit mortgage rate levels in the UK, then that game is going to be up because it just won’t be sustainable.

But that’s true. And that’s why the interesting thing is, though—I mean, we probably shouldn’t spend too much time on the political landscape in the UK, because it’s complex, and it’s probably not that interesting in the long term.

But what’s interesting here is that some big things are happening which prove to us, to the observers, that the current leadership and thought—the current leadership structure and the kind of thought process has led to complete—has led us, or has been led by people who are constantly, constantly wrong.

They’re wrong about everything they do; they’re wrong in everything that they say. They’re wrong in their vision; they’re wrong in every strategy; they’re wrong in their use of power in particular because, uh, what we’ve seen in Europe over the last, let’s say, 200 years is a desire through the Fabians.

It’s interesting—I will send you that book; that’s very important—but Fabianism in the empire, what you see is people despising people who work for money.

Yeah, right, right. The markets are... that’s like The Dutch’s not paying attention to the farmers. Exactly. Or the Trudeau government demonizing the truckers. But it’s deeply set.

I mean this—and the reason why the Fabians decided to permeate the institutions—that’s the terminology that you should perhaps keep in mind when you read these books, the permeation of institutions.

So that’s where the Long March for the institutions exactly—that's the idea. That’s where it’s developed. So it’s really, it’s a very interesting, a bit dry, but it’s an interesting book.

And then suddenly what you see is that they notice very quickly in the early 1880s that the working man doesn’t vote for them or for their policy. Right, right.

And they’re really upset. They really like this chap called Disraeli because Disraeli was a very erudite, smart, funny kind of—the working class is intractable in its refusal to see its own best interests. Exactly, and so they decided: we cannot win, but what we can do is become experts, and through our expertise, we go through the channels, and we enable politicians to implement our policies because we will advise them on the solutions.

And that’s detailed out in—yeah, it’s in a book. And so once you start to look at these things, you realize that the enemy of these people is the person that says no to them.

Yeah. So you need force and you need to—there is no consensus to be had. And therefore, what we were talking about, which is this relationship between you and me, this reciprocity, this is a sign of respect, and sustainability absolutely.

So if we—lots can change. Technology can change, but if we as human beings choose to accept that we are the same in terms of value before God, if we choose to accept that for my actions, you might—that there are certain things that they will have an impact on you and vice versa, then we create a society that actually is quite stable and worth living in.

If the moment you accept the Fabian premise that there is a small group of people who are right and therefore the others are wrong, that is when you start to create a—and that’s justified by reference to expertise. Exactly.

And so there is a quick quote in that in the book where one of the Fabians says, “Our aim is to make sure that when the people come to the barricades to make all the change, of the constitutional changes, so that the moment they come to the barricades, we will be able to crush them.”

In other words, you use the Constitution and the law; you change them through the experts and you strip the masses, as it were, of their of their frightening power.

Once they get to the barricade, it’s too late; that was the idea that they were developing. And so all of that becomes, I think, with hindsight, that’s the reason why we live in this era of revelation, in my view.

So much, if we choose to see what these discussions and the—where these ideas come from and really just try to map them on today’s world, we see lots and lots of strands that lead from the 1880s to 2022.

Do you have any sense—you talked to me before we started the podcast about the entanglement of Keynes’ ideas with those of Marx and Darwin and Malthus, and you talked about this profound anti-humanism that you saw manifested, say, in relationship to your personal life because of the existence of your son now.

And we talked about, we took a pathway through the notion that talk down force is justified by the existence of a privileged and fit elite with the rest of the people, let’s say, being in some real sense necessarily expendable.

So I would like to know how you think that the Marxist ideas is the connection with Marxism. The notion that the masses need to be transformed in their conscious apprehension by the elites, is that the fundamental point of contact?

So, uh, in The Communist Manifesto, both, by the way, Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto say the same thing: one of them is, “We will lead the revolution. There will be a small group of believers who will lead this world, or these people to the promised land.”

So it’s again the experts; the reason why Marx is part of the picture, in my view, or the kind of the ring, as it were, is because he sees humanity through the lens of something that actually doesn’t exist, which is class.

I don’t think that people see themselves as part of a class. They might say it; they might say in their speech because it’s a shorthand for if somebody is here, somebody is there. But actually, conceptually, there is no such thing as a defined class.

And you can see it in elections. I mean, lots of politicians make mistakes. And a mistake they make is that they assign somebody’s views about something on their political, on their supposedly presupposed class consciousness.

And this presupposition leads them to making the wrong decisions, or to be taken by surprise, because the assumptions they made are not based on anything observable, but they’re based on their own delivery.

You could see that in the US with the Democrats surprised that the working class is no longer on the side of the Democrats. And then, of course, they’re to blame because they’re—right, right?

Well, you see this in Canada. If the populace was just as enlightened as the leaders who were working on their behalf, they’d obviously be supportive, let’s say, of Trudeau’s radically socialist policy. Yeah, they’re not enlightened enough for that.

Well, no, of course, because they’ve got real jobs. Real jobs, as we know. I worked in a restaurant when I was a kid that was run by a couple of small businessmen. A guy who I worked directly for was named Scotty Kyle, and Scotty was a rough guy; he was about 32 or 33, I was about 14, and he’d had most of his teeth knocked out in fights.

And he’d been an alcoholic for years. He quit drinking about five years before I knew him. Unbelievably funny person, and very, very bright. And I was working for the Socialists in my town at that point when I was 14.

And they had a pretty good small business policy at that point in my province, Alberta; there was one socialist and like 200 conservatives; that was it. And the Socialist was an old labor leader, and he was actually a pretty good guy. In any case, people voted for him in this small town not because he was a socialist, but because he was a good guy.

And the Socialists—the New Democratic Party had a pretty good small business policy. And so, but the guy I worked for and the owner of the restaurant, who was also a working-class guy, they didn’t have anything to do with the Socialists.

And I asked Scotty one day, I said, “Why in the world don’t you and, and, uh, Ken, support the NDP? They have way better small business policy, and you’re a small business.”

He said, “Yeah, but we don’t want to be a small business.” He said, “People vote their dreams, not their reality.” I thought that was so bloody smart.

You know, and I think that’s—and that’s part of the issue that’s problematic with regard to class consciousness because a lot of people who are in the lower strata, let’s say, of the socioeconomic hierarchy don’t identify, to use that horrible word, with that strata.

They have aspirations, and if not for themselves, for their children, and they would like to set up a world where the successful can thrive. Partly because they would like their children to be successful.

And then so that’s a great reason. I never forgot that, and then about the same time I’ve been reading George Orwell, and Orwell talked about the Fabian types a lot. Even though Orwell had some socialist sympathies, being what would you say, the avatar for the working class, the road to Wigan, yes, yes, I must read.

He said in that he said that he couldn’t understand the middle-class, you know, shoulder or elbow patch-wearing socialists who identified with the working class but