Ownership of the Truth Subverts the Pursuit of It | Ayaan Hirsi Ali

You want conversations between people who don't hold the same viewpoint if they're reliable people because that's where the real thinking takes place. And so for me, what you just described was the defining feature of Western Civilization. I came from— I was born in Somalia, and I lived in Saudi Arabia, and I lived in Kenya, and I lived in Ethiopia, and then I landed in the Netherlands in 1992. There were so many differences between the non-Western world I grew up in and the Western world that I came to. But the one thing that I would say was really different was this: you can't really have these radically different views. You can be religious; you can be atheist; you can be pro-market; you can be anti-market. You can, in fact, in the streets of America, shout the most anti-American things, even burn the American flag, and that is protected. That, for me, was wow.

When I say let's talk about restoration, I'm now seeing a breakdown of that, a near collapse of that on the political level, on the academic level, on the civic level, on the journalism level. We are breaking up into tribes like the world where I came from, where you have not the pursuit of the truth but ownership of the truth: My truth versus your truth. That kind of nonsense is now a serious, serious, deep-rooted problem in the West, and I think that is an outcome of subversion.

Well, okay, so let's take that apart further. So you talk about a relapse into a kind of tribalism of idea ownership. There's a disintegration of something that was unified into a more pluralistic tribal landscape. Okay, so that's one of the things. Let's identify some of the other characteristics of the collapse. So we could talk about purposeful and accidental subversion. So let's start with the Marxists with regard to purposeful subversion.

Okay, so Karl Marx split the world into oppressor and oppressed in an envious manner, presuming that all the moral virtue was with the oppressed and all the evil was with the oppressor; and that all could be understood from within the framework of economics. So the primary axis of oppression and oppressed for Marx was the economic axis, and he presumed that the reason that that inequality between oppressor and oppressed exists was because of the structure of capitalism. At least that's what he claimed. Now, whether or not he believed that is a whole different issue.

Okay, so now I want to take that in two directions. I want to point to how that's metastasized into what I think is less than ideally conceptualized as cultural Marxism, and I want to also discuss its precursors, its archetypal precursors. So what seems to me to have happened, and I want your thoughts on this, is that Marx established the framework for an elaborated victim-victimizer narrative, but he basically stuck to the economic realm when he made that case. Now, as the revolution unfolded, what we found out was that the subversion of the capitalist order in favor of the oppressed only produced the universalization of poverty and produced no viable redistribution of equity or income.

By the 1970s, the hollowness of the economic approach to the victim-victimizer had been demonstrated so thoroughly that even idiot Marxists in France were forced to accept it. And so, you know, the proof is compelling when a French intellectual is forced to swallow it. And so then what happened, as far as I could tell, is the postmodernists, who were all Marxist at their core, decided that there was no utility in beating the economic inequality drum anymore but that they could fragment the victim-victimizer narrative into a metastasis and say, well, the basic idea that it was a power dynamic that ruled everything was correct, but we underestimated the seriousness of the power dynamic because it shows up in the relationship between men and women, and it shows up in the patriarchal structure of the family, and it shows up in the dynamic of sex, and then the dynamic of gender and race and ethnicity.

So all of a sudden you have victims between countries, sure, sure, between races, between tribes. You can understand the postmodern claim was you could— was that even though they purported to dispense with the idea of a superordinate meta-narrative, they smuggled in the power narrative as the fundamental exploratory concept and then metastasized it to account for, to explain the relations between human beings, regardless of how they categorize themselves. So that every group categorization became a locus of power and exploitation, right? And so now we have a metastatic Marxism.

Okay, so that’s bringing it forward. Now I want to bring it backward, and you tell me what you think about this because I think Marxism itself is a variant of something deeper, much deeper. So there’s a Marxist-like spirit that inverts the French Revolution soon after it occurs, and that was well before Marx. And I’ve been thinking more archetypally, let’s say, in relationship to fundamental stories that Marxism is a variant— Marxism versus capitalism, let’s say, as a variant of the story of Cain and Abel, right? Because Cain and Abel is really the first victim-victimizer narrative and it basically presents the human moral landscape because it’s the first story about human beings in history, right?

Because Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, let’s say Cain and Abel are the first two human beings that are born in the world of history, and they develop modes of being that are antithetical to one another, with Cain being the oppressed, angry, bitter, malevolent, murderous, and then genocidal victim, and Abel being the successful, right? The successful individual who strives forward, aims up, and makes the proper sacrifices. Now that’s presented in the biblical corpus as the fundamental spiritual division, and Cain’s failure to make the proper offering and then his rebellion against God— there’s a Luciferian touch to that, and it's definitely something that attracted Marx because Marx was an admirer of Mephistopheles, and Mephistopheles was the variant of the usurping spirit whose motivation was nothing but destruction.

You know, you talked about the attack on all levels of subsidiary society simultaneously, right? I mean the Marxists definitely planned that. We can’t have marriage because men and women are in a power battle. We can’t have families because the family is a patriarchal oppressive institution. We can’t have communities because all power should be deeded to the state, seeded to the state, etc. But it seems to me that all of that has its roots in that fundamental antagonism that’s laid out initially in the story of Cain and Abel. And what we are seeing is we’re seeing variants of that story play out and also at an accelerated rate because of the rate of technological change.

Well, so I’ve been thinking about those things a lot. That’s what I’ve been lecturing about on this last tour, and in part that’s what my new book is about. So I’m curious about your reaction, first of all, to the idea of a metastasizing Marxism and then to the idea that Marxism itself is a variant of a— it’s a retelling of a more fundamental story.

Um, so fascinating, and I’m glad you’re doing this. Okay, so my two reactions, then, or just as I was listening to you. One thing that has occurred to me is Marx and his work and his legacy and what we’ve done with it. So, you know this history better than I do, but the reaction he was hoping for— he had created a new religion, Marxism. It failed because instead of people sticking— his followers, his own disciples— sticking with his revolutionary goals, what sprung up is the reformists. Basically, what I’m getting at— I’m schooled in political science, you’re a psychologist— but it was, you know, the left and the right. The left divided up into these two branches and one branch is fully Marxist and revolutionary and committed to the revolution, and the other one becomes reformist.

I think that is the first defeat of the Marxist idea, that instead of overthrowing the capitalist system, you work within the capitalist system, and through incremental means, everybody’s life gets better. So that was the first defeat. Up until 1989, that whole economic argument of “take from the rich, give to the poor” falls apart when it becomes, I think, obvious if you stick with the material economic topic that the Soviet Union collapses. And not only does the Soviet Union— it also had satellites everywhere, that these five-year plans touch. You have devastation, you have masses of deaths, you have concentration camps, you have starvation.

And then you look at the West, and there’s growth and so on. So in 1989, I think there is this sense the winners— the victors, maybe you want to say— you were comparing Cain and Abel, you can say those who are victorious make one big mistake in my view after 1989, which is they forget about it. They think, we’ve won this— right? History is over. History is over. Let’s move on. The loser— for the loser, history is never over. For the loser, history begins when he loses. He has to shake off all of this and come up and come back. And they come back now with this idea of identity groups, of culture. The person who can tell this way better than I can is James Lindsay, who has been through all of their creeds and is really eloquent in the way he tells this.

Right, right, but they divert towards the cultural thing. But my takeaway, as a relatively new Westerner, is I come into this world of ideas— good ideas, bad ideas. I’m 22 years old. I’m trying to find an explanation for why are these rich countries rich and powerful? Why are poor countries poor? I was a Muslim, so it’s like, if we have the— as a Muslim, if I have God’s last prophet, God’s last book, God is on my side, then why are we miserable? And so on.

And so in that world of ideas, in the 1990s, when I’m going to university, I’m acquainted with the idea of National Socialism that nearly destroyed European society and Western society. And what follows, after the defeat— listen to this, Jordan— after the defeat of National Socialism, what happens is an intense process of denazification, in fact using some of the tools of subversion that Beauvoir speaks about. And after the process of denazification, what follows is another reckoning of what was National Socialism and why would a society as advanced as Germany fall victim to ideas that later on we all understood to be so destructive. This is in my classrooms, okay? This is what’s happening.

I come into the West just as it’s going through that reckoning of the idea, and the idea is forensically scrutinized, and it becomes, after we fully understand what Hitler’s ideas were, that this is something that would never, and should never, happen again. Now, this is something we did not do to communism.

Right, right, definitely not. Yeah, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no campaign of decommunization or demarxification of everything and anything. There was no reckoning. So up until, I think, 2002 or 2003, we were still finding individuals who had been found to be active or sympathizers with Hitler. We were trying them still. We were still trying to go after them and put them in jail. But we never did anything of the sort with Marxism. So the first thing I noticed, the big thing, is of course this terrible idea keeps recurring, and it metastasizes, and it manifests itself in different ways because for the young generations it never really has been here. This is what Marxism led to—the death toll.

I mean, we all have been schooled in how many people actually died, but more interesting, I think, more fascinating is the Nazi psyche. Do you know we explored it to the point that right now there are conversations we can't have without everyone referencing Nazism? In fact, I think one of the reasons why Europe is completely paralyzed when it comes to the issue of immigration is because there is this terror, this fear that they might fall again into that nasty collective madness of putting people in concentration camps. We haven’t done that to Marx; we haven’t scrutinized the ideas of Marx and communism, and I think we are a bit on the later side, but we should do it.