Michael Knowles - The Problem With Political Correctness | Modern Wisdom Podcast 331

1. 0:00 – 0:30

   Intro

   1. MKMichael Knowles0:00

      None of these radical, woke, politically correct people seem all that happy to me. I don't, I don't know about you. I've never seen not one of them, a radical feminist, a radical leftist, or ra- any, you know, any of the constituent parts, I've never seen one of them that seems happy. Well, you know, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Uh, perhaps that's because that premise is wrong. Maybe the truth actually will set you free and maybe lies actually will delude you and make your life worse. (whooshing sound)

2. 0:30 – 6:00

   The Problem with Political Correctness

   1. MKMichael Knowles0:30

   2. CWChris Williamson0:30

      What's the problem with politically correct speech?

   3. MKMichael Knowles0:33

      The problem with politically correct speech is that it attempts to transform reality by redefining words. So, I, I think we can all agree at the most basic level, that's what PC does. It, it redefines all of our terms and in so doing, it hopes to redefine reality itself. The problem for conservatives though is that it lays a trap whereby basically any way you react to PC strengthens PC. And I use the term PC, you could also use the term wokism or cancel culture, but you know, part of, part of the issue is they change all the words, so it, we're talking about the same broad phenomenon. Obviously the one way conservatives can react to help PC along is just by giving in, right? You just, you use the new terms, you call Bruce Jenner "she", you, whatever, you obliterate women's sports, you use all the kind of new jargon. Obviously that gives them what they want. But then there's another group of conservatives who say, "No way, I'm not going along with these new standards. You can't make me do it. I'm a free speech absolutist," right? And I think a lot of us have, have maybe used that kind of language in the past at various times, but the problem here is that the whole point of political correctness is to destroy the old standards, right? So if you, if you go along with that, then you're helping them to do that. You're destroying the old standards. But if you throw your hands in the air and you say, "You know what? I'm a free speech absolutist. Say whatever you want, do whatever you want. I don't care. I'm a purist," right? You are also destroying the old standards because now no one's... So either way, PC gets what it's after. And this is why, you know, the phenomenon has, has been in our public consciousness probably about 30 year- a little over 30 years or so now. It's been building for, for more like 100 years, and it's why in that whole period of time there is no sh- shortage of conservatives who said, "Oh, we're fighting back against PC. We, PC has gone too crazy." Donald Trump basically staked his 2016 campaign on this issue of political correctness, but we keep losing. I mean, this is the, the first day of pride month where now first graders in the United Sta- I don't know about the UK, it's probably the same there too though, in the United States first graders are being taught transgender ideology and Kellogg's Cereal is telling them to pick their own pronouns. So obviously we haven't done a great job pushing back against PC, and I think the reason is no one is willing to stand up and offer a substantive vision to defend the old standards.

   4. CWChris Williamson2:53

      Does that make political correctness conservatives' fault then?

   5. MKMichael Knowles2:56

      Yeah, basically. You know, Chesterton, one of your, uh, fellow countrymen had a great line where he said, "It is the job of the liberal to go about making mistakes, and it is the job of the conservative to make sure that they never get corrected." And I think that's basically what conservatives have been doing the past 30 or so years. Part of this, I think, is because we don't want to offend anybody. We want to be very nice. We're sort of generally content. That's why we're conservative, right? That's why if, if we were not content, if we thought everything had to be ripped down, we would, we would be radicals. So we don't, we don't want to be offensive, uh, really. And then the other issue is a lot of conservatives basically share the liberal's central premises. Um, and this is especially true in the United States because in the United States there is a, a robust liberal tradition, and I mean even the classical sort of liberal tradition. Um, I think it was Tocqueville who made the observation that Americans behave like conservatives, but they talk like liberals. So the language of liberty and individual rights is all, you know, it's throughout all of our, uh, founding era and throughout really all of our history. But we don't talk a whole lot about tradition. We don't talk a whole lot about order. We don't talk a whole lot about l- l- l- well, law and order even. I mean, Donald Trump, you know, kind of brought this back in at the end of his presidency. But it, it's, it takes the, the second position to this idea of emancipating yourself from everything, this individual autonomy. And, uh, you know, ultimately I think that the only logical conclusion of that is going to be this transgender ideology. And you see it actually with the development of political correctness. First you're trying to, uh, liberate yourself from social mores, from traditions, from religion. Then you're trying to liberate yourself from the family structure. You saw this a lot with second wave feminism. And then ultimately you're trying to liberate yourself from nature. I mean, this is, this is why... I know a lot of people believe that transgenderism is kind of the opposite of feminism, right? One says women are real and need to be protected, and transgenderism says women aren't real, it's just men can actually become women too. But it, it's kind of that logical consequence of this radical liberation, which I think is kind of the theme that defines Western modernity the last 500 or so years. And, uh, I, I think we're kind of on the fumes of that, you know? We're... That, that only lasts so long as you've still got some animating principle and tradition in your society. But goodness gracious, it seems like that's fallen down around us. So I, I just sort of think either we will defend old standards, r- return to tradition, if you will, uh, or, or we're totally lost because the, the momentum of the, the radical left as expressed in, in political correctness is just so great and it's only been accelerating in re- in recent years.

   6. CWChris Williamson5:42

      If you're stuck in this Catch-22 though, and it's essentially impossible or the situation that you've laid out is very difficult semantically for conservatives not to fall into one of a number of holes, or anybody that isn't a leftist to not fall into one-

   7. MKMichael Knowles5:55

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson5:55

      ... of these holes. You don't need to be a conservative to disagree with some of the semantic and lexical games that

3. 6:00 – 11:25

   The Need for Censorship

   1. CWChris Williamson6:00

      are being played.

   2. MKMichael Knowles6:01

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson6:01

      What do you do?

   4. MKMichael Knowles6:04

      This is the hard lesson, I know a lot of, uh, a lot of people aren't gonna wanna hear this, especially conservatives. We need to embrace a just and prudent censorship. Now, people are gonna tune out. They're gonna say, "Michael, you're no-"

   5. CWChris Williamson6:19

      That's the word. That's the word.

   6. MKMichael Knowles6:21

      And it's like, "You can't say that, Michael."

   7. CWChris Williamson6:21

      I knew, I, I was always suspicious of that Knowles fellow.

   8. MKMichael Knowles6:24

      And you, you know, you're a censor. You're an-

   9. CWChris Williamson6:26

      Yep.

   10. MKMichael Knowles6:26

       ... authoritarian. Okay. From the very beginning of our country, there have been whole swaths of speech that you cannot engage in, that are not defended by the First Amendment or our broader free speech tradition. That includes fraud. You're not, you're not allowed to engage in fraud. That includes obscenity. Increasingly, you are actually encouraged to engage in that, but still, we have laws on the books against it from the very beginning. We were, we were throwing pornographers in prison for obscenity as recently as 2009. I mean, it wasn't that long ago. A- and that was at the federal level. Uh, you, you're not protected from, uh, sedition in certain forms. Uh, going back to the earliest days of the country, all the way, well into the 20th century, uh, you're, you're ... There, there are whole swaths of speech that you're really not allowed to engage in. And the argument for that, by the way, is that certain speech undermines speech. Uh, actually, I'll go back to Chesterton, who has another great line. I think he's the most quoted man in the history of the world. Chesterton says, "There is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped." There ... And it, you see this especially in some of the p- woke PC educational ideologies now, uh, critical race theory is the one that's very popular. But all the kind of critical theory derivations come out and they say, "There's no such thing as objective truth." If you teach a child that there is no such thing as objective truth, first of all, it's completely incoherent because you're making a claim of objective truth that there is no such thing as objective truth. But you're, you're also undermining their education. You're not expanding the curriculum, you're not opening their minds, you're undermining the, the whole purpose of education, which is grounded in the existence of objective truth and higher faculties of reason and all these sorts of things. Uh, same thing with fraud, right? If you can abuse your speech to commit fraud, you've undermined speech because now speech cannot be relied on to, to convey any sort of truth. If you, uh, rely on free speech protections to defend obscenity, you're undermining free speech because obscenity and all sorts of licentiousness, uh, undermine our own freedom. The Founding Fathers were very clear about this. The, even, you know, the, some of the greatest liberal writers in the classical tr- liberal tradition will say, "You can't abuse your liberty to the point of licentiousness because then you've undermined your liberty." And the example I use on this is a heroin addict, right? Right now, there's a big push to legalize all sorts of drugs. You, you see that from the derelicts on the right, on the left rather, but you also see it from some more libertarian-types on the right, and they'll say, "We gotta legalize drugs because, uh, it's an unjust infringement of your personal liberty for the government to say otherwise." W- I think, uh, most of us have known drug addicts in our lives, right? Think of the heroin addict who, according to the modern definition of liberty, is the freest man in the world. He is... As long as he's got a buck in his pocket, he c- he can go buy whatever he wants. He can shoot up. Oh, the pinnacle of liberty. The whole purpose of the United States, right? I don't think so. I think, actually, we all know that man is a slave. He's a slave to his lower base passions and appetites, and this is because man, uniquely, has intellect and will. We actually have two kinds of will. We have the lower will, which is when we wanna just stuff our face with cookies or drugs or booze or whatever, and then we've got a higher will. And very often, they're in conflict. Saint Paul writes about this. He says, "The things that I want to do, I don't do, and the things that I don't want to do, I do." And we all know what this means. You've got, you know, you're, you're at the bar and there's a cute chick at the end of the bar and you say, "I n- I don't, don't, Michael. Uh-uh. Don't." But the lower part of you, it's the little devil on your shoulder, right? He says, "Go, go down there." So we've, we've got the lower will, we've got the rational, higher will, and the rational, higher will is mediating between the lower will and the divine will, which is this divine logic of the universe. And we have an intellect to help sort it all out. And Aristotle says this is what makes us a political animal, m- you know, m- more so than any of the gregarious animals, and the, the expression of that is in our speech, right? That we're, you know ... We don't just grunt. We don't just holler. Increasingly we do, actually, in, in US Congress and elsewhere. But, you know, in, in our best selves, we are speaking or persuading one another. We're using these symbols of words to communicate things about objective reality. And the, the moment that you compromise that, the moment you say, "There is no truth to convey," or you say, "You're not permitted to say these, these things and you're gonna muzzle everybody up," we've just come out of a year where we've literally been muzzled by these masks everywhere, then you are cutting to the heart of what it means to be human, and, uh, trying to liberate oneself from, from reality, I think. And I think that's the whole purpose of it, and it's why the Left has been so focused on this sort of thing. And unfortunately, the whole time, so many conservatives will look at, at PC and wokeism and they'll say, "Oh, it's just a distraction. Oh, who ca- who cares if you're gonna call Bruce Jenner a she or ... It's not ... (sighs) Don't get hung up. We outta talk about real things that matter, like cutting taxes a little bit more again." And you say, "Well, you know, I like tax cuts as much as the next guy." But if you lose our relationship to reality, if you lose the whole culture, then tax cuts and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee.

4. 11:25 – 21:35

   Language Has Been Politicised

   1. MKMichael Knowles11:26

   2. CWChris Williamson11:26

      The problem is semantic games can be thrown away as, "Oh, it's just semantics. It doesn't really matter," but as anyone that's read 1984 knows, the, uh, breadth of your language is directly proportional to your ability to think the thoughts that the language enables.

   3. MKMichael Knowles11:41

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:41

      And given that the quality of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts, the quality of your thoughts depend on the breadth of your language. You restrict the language, you restrict the thoughts, you restrict the life. And yeah, I, as someone that adores speech and language and, you know, it's our language after all, Michael, although you guys deploy it as best-

   5. MKMichael Knowles11:59

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson11:59

      ... and as worst as you can sometimes. Um-

   7. MKMichael Knowles12:00

      We, we took all the you's out. I know. We did.

   8. CWChris Williamson12:02

      (laughs)

   9. MKMichael Knowles12:02

      We made some alterations.

   10. CWChris Williamson12:03

       Kept hold of faucet, though, for some reason.

   11. MKMichael Knowles12:06

       (laughs) That's true.

   12. CWChris Williamson12:06

       We dispensed with faucet, uh, but yeah, you kept all of that. But yeah, it, it is-I understand why some people think that it doesn't matter. I understand why the death by a thousand cuts, the very, very slow erosion of language seems like there are bigger problems out there. But it's so fundamental to your ability to communicate with other people, but more importantly to abil- your ability to communicate with yourself.

   13. MKMichael Knowles12:29

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson12:29

       Because if you can't put the thoughts that are in your head into words, even for yourself, it's really the same as not being able to think them, because the process of formulating thoughts into words, it concretizes them in a way that nothing else does. Otherwise, it's just a notion, right? It's just this cloudy, ephemeral sort of wishy-washy thing, and you can't really grab ahold of it. You put it into words and it, it takes form, and slowly eroding away at this, I think is, it's something that we should all be really concerned about. But it's, it just smacks massively of conspiracy theory. "Oh, you know, they, they're coming for the words." And you think, "Well..." It's, it's hard to find a, uh, a narrative that puts across the seriousness of it without getting caught up sounding like a cancel culture devotee yourself.

   15. MKMichael Knowles13:21

       George Orwell, as you point out, saw this happening s- 60 years ago, 70 years ago. Uh, so, uh, was he a conspiracy theorist? A- Aldous Huxley saw this happening around the same time. Is he a conspiracy theorist? This has been building for a very, very long time, and just because some people don't know anything about history d- doesn't make the rest of us conspiracy theorists. And, and Orwell was very explicit. He said, "The purpose of limiting the lexicon is to limit the range of thought," exactly as you say. And just think about what the words do to you. I mean, you're, you're so precise and insightful here to say that our consciousness, the way we view the world comes out of the words that we use. One of the, the recent coinages out of the, the university is this phrase "justice-involved person."

   16. CWChris Williamson14:09

       That was my favorite.

   17. MKMichael Knowles14:10

       Do you know what a j- I love that one.

   18. CWChris Williamson14:10

       That was my favorite one from yours. It used to be "young criminal." It's now "justice-involved youth."

   19. MKMichael Knowles14:16

       The justice-involved youth. You think, "Well, hold on. The one thing I know about these kids, the only thing I know is that they are not involved in justice."

   20. CWChris Williamson14:24

       (laughs)

   21. MKMichael Knowles14:24

       "They are actually involved in injustice," but they've totally flipped it around. And so if you're thinking of "young criminal," right? What, what image does that conjure? You say, "Well, okay, some guys walking around, they got some weapons. Maybe they're terrorizing granny or something. Okay, we gotta be a little harsh on them." But if someone is a justice-involved youth, well, it would be very wrong to punish them. Another one is, uh, a bum. You know, a bum is no longer a bum or, or a... and now, then they become a homeless person, then they became unhoused, the unhoused pe- Well, okay, if they're unhoused, that's, uh, that seems like it's kind of my fault, is it? You know, I mean, everybody else is housed. What is w- what's happened to them that they've been unhoused? Well, no, they've unhoused themselves, uh, usually through poor choices or through mental illness or whatever. Uh, but we don't want to deal with any of that. Uh, and we can, we can never permit there to be a moral explanation or consequence for people's behavior. It's always got to be somebody else's fault. And if, if you use all that language... I guess the, the clearest one is just the pronouns. If you refer to Caitlyn Jenner, well, even if you call him Caitlyn, that conjures a certain image. Uh, but if, if you, if you refer to Bruce, you know, the future governor of California, if you refer to him as her, and you say, "She's this and she did this, and she won the decathlon, you know, some years ago, and she did this and she did that," you're going to picture a woman. And the issue is he is not a woman. And he might very much wish to be a woman, and he might f- even think that he is a woman, but, but he isn't. And the insistence that, that we participate in this lie, the insistence that we participate in a delusion is not only deeply offensive, but it is the end of society. I mean, if we, if we cannot agree on the most basic aspects of reality, then we are not going to agree on anything else, and self-government will not be possible.

   22. CWChris Williamson16:17

       What it seems to me is that it's compassion poorly aimed.

   23. MKMichael Knowles16:24

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson16:24

       That a lot of the concessions that I make and, and I'm sure that you make with regards to your language simply out of the lack of assed-ness to be able to just get into another argument, um, a lot of those come from a place of goodwill. They come from the place that, "Look, I think that this is perhaps a good concession to make," or you, you bring up in the book that there's the, the, some variance to do with people that are, um, mentally disabled, and there are ways to remain factually correct which are emotively less, uh, harsh, right?

   25. MKMichael Knowles16:56

       Yes. Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson16:56

       So those are ways that we can play around with it. But how do you avoid that being a slippery slope? How do you stop it from going from perhaps something which most people would agree is offensive and accurate, to something which is less offensive but still accurate, to something which is neither offensive nor accurate?

   27. MKMichael Knowles17:16

       I, I love this point. By the way, I, it just occurs to me, I think you are the first interviewer who has read the book, and it's not, this is not to knock o- other interviewers who... but we, we've only just recently sent the book. I mean, it, it only went to the printer about a week or so ago, and we sent out some advanced copies. So I am very honored. Thank you for reading the book.

   28. CWChris Williamson17:32

       Welcome to the UK, Michael.

   29. MKMichael Knowles17:34

       I know. (laughs) It's, they're really... People in the UK, they read, you know. They're very, uh, sort of urbane. There are two different kinds of euphemisms, right? A euphemism just sugarcoats harsh realities with nice terms. And PC is certainly a form of euphemism because you're, you're redefining all these words. But I'm not... Ju- just like I'm saying that I'm not against all forms of censorship, just like I'm saying that I'm not against all forms of ostracism or cancel culture even, I'm also not against all euphemisms. Whe- when I see a woman of a certain age, (laughs) I w- I'm not gonna call her an old hag. I'm going to call her, I'll call her a woman of a certain age. Now, that's obviously a euphemism.... but it's not a euphemism that contradicts the reality. The thing is, she is a woman of a certain age.

   30. CWChris Williamson18:21

       But technically, every woman is.
5. 21:35 – 28:10

   The Inner Citadel

   1. CWChris Williamson21:35

      language at the moment. Are you familiar with a concept called the retreat to the inner citadel? Do you know this?

   2. MKMichael Knowles21:40

      I don't, actually.

   3. CWChris Williamson21:41

      Let me educate you. So this is-

   4. MKMichael Knowles21:43

      Please do, yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson21:43

      This is from Isaiah Berlin.

   6. MKMichael Knowles21:45

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson21:45

      Uh, and he says that, "When the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain that from the world which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world." So, a simpler way to put that would be if your leg's wounded, you could try to treat the leg. If you cannot, then you can cut off the leg and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. So basically, if you can't win at a game, you stop playing. You say that you never cared about the game and you create your own game with rules that you can more easily win at. So, this is something that I've been trying to put in for years, and a buddy explained this to me, and it's a red pill that I can no longer stop seeing. So, um, if people can't get a relationship to work, how many of them declare that all monogamous relationships are just restricting and they go polyamorous? Or they can't gain status in a meritocracy, so they announce that the sy- system's rigged and they're gonna... it keeps people down and now they're gonna gain status by being a critic of status structures at large. Or you struggle to be popular and well-liked, so you convince yourself that you're an introvert. Or you find losing weight difficult, so you say that losing weight has no bearing on health and that any encouragement to lose weight is a, an attack on your identity. Or you have trouble staying out of jail, so you say that jobs are for suckers and you just retreat to a life of crime. All of these different things, these retreats to an inner citadel, to me, seem to be a big explanation for what we're seeing with much of the language. It's, look, here are some things, some levels of discomfort that I've come up against in the world. Reality and my experience are not meshing as smoothly as I would like them to.

   8. MKMichael Knowles23:35

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson23:35

      Therefore, my solution is tr- to try and change the rules of the game so that they do.

   10. MKMichael Knowles23:42

       At a social level too, it, it reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron story where, where, another, another terrific story where the, the last capable man is being (laughs) hunted down because this, this, uh, what you would now call woke tyranny is trying to drag every single person down to take away excellence, to utterly upend our, our traditional understanding of society and say, you know, "Yeah, my leg can't be healed. Well, yeah, who needs legs? Legs are, legs are awful." Um, uh, people are v- are very wrapped up in this themselves, you know. Uh, uh, a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed, and o- one of the issues, I suspect, is that, uh...... that people are thinking of themselves a lot. You know, if, if you want to break out of that, if you want to kind of re-engage with society and have a better chance at, at a, a flourishing life, it's not that you need to think less of yourself, it is that you need to think of yourself less. Uh, we're or no one's asking you to think less of yourself, but there, we are now told that, uh, w- we are not allowed to tell the man who thinks he's a woman that he's really a man because, gosh, you know, that's, it would be so awful for him. It would be so, he, he just has this problem and so we all need to go along with that. We're not allowed to say that it's better to be married than n- not to be married, you know? And going back to our example at the bar, you know, hit, hitting the bar every night and picking up the cute chick. "Well, some people just can't get married." Right, that, that's too bad. Yeah, people suffer. Everybody suffers, okay? You and I have suffered, everybody watching this right now has suffered, and the, the fact of that is, is not a, a reason to deny that there is such a, such a thing as the good or the true or the beautiful. The fact that we don't always get to attain it, the fact that not every kid gets a perfect SAT score is not an argument for d- doing away with the SATs, right? It's an argument for hopefully people can work a little harder and we need to be nicer to people maybe who can't, you know, succeed in a certain way and we've gotta bring them in and help them flourish in their... Yeah, sure, I'm all for that. But don't, don't destroy the, the conception of excellence, don't destroy the understanding of good and, and true and beautiful. And th- this is, this is something conservatives have really fallen for, because c- what, what... When the Left comes in and destroys the old standards, they'll say, "Look, what you think is good, I think is bad. What you think is true, I think is false. What you think is beautiful, I think is ugly." And the, the modern conservative response to that is like, "Well, I guess you're right, man. You know, I'm guess, yeah, no accounting for taste." Uh, but that's pretty lame and gives away the whole game to the Left. The, the true a- response has to be, "You're wrong. (laughs) You're w- uh, we're right and you're wrong. And by the way, if, if you're right and we're wrong, you need to convince me of that. You need to make an argument that persuades me." But the radical subjectivism (clears throat) that we have all fallen into is what has allowed these kooky theories to take hold. I mean, you, you, uh, referenced this point I made in the book, uh, earlier on, which is that it, the revolutions need to take control of the common sense. This is the insight that began political correctness. It began about 100 years ago. Uh, you know, Marx failed to instigate his worldwide revolution. He wanted all the, the lower classes or the working class to unite across the world. They were gonna throw off their shackles and the chains of industry and didn't happen. Turns out that the working class, uh, has, feels much less of a bond to its fellow proletariat- proletarians than it does to its fellow countrymen, its fellow parishioners, its fellow, uh, members of their race, its fel- whatever the c- what- whatever the, the group is gonna be. And so Antonio Gramsci, this brilliant Marxist theorist and communist politician, he said, "Ah, the problem is the conservatives have the common sense. They have the culture."

   11. CWChris Williamson27:34

       (laughs)

   12. MKMichael Knowles27:35

       "And so what we need to do if we want the revolution to succeed, we need to go in, infiltrate all of these institutions through a war of position, and then transform the common sense such that, you know, the, the workers who won't get on board with our theories right now in the factory, they will, uh, be so steeped in our cultural and our ideology that they will naturally follow us." And, uh, you know, it, it's hard to deny that the Left has been s- fairly successful at that over the last 100 years.

   13. CWChris Williamson28:03

       My favorite quote that summarizes that is, "The Left won the culture war and now they're just driving around shooting the survivors."

6. 28:10 – 31:45

   Why the Left Hate the Working Class

   1. CWChris Williamson28:11

   2. MKMichael Knowles28:11

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson28:12

      Which is just the most accurate thing. It really does seem to me like the Left really hate the working class at the moment though. Do you get this sense?

   4. MKMichael Knowles28:20

      Yeah, there's a, there is a clear disdain and contempt. I mean, you see this over the past year with the exaltation of our, our Dr. Fauci, peace be upon him, and all the other high priests of progressivism. I mean, these are the, the experts who know much better than the deplorable, irredeemable, bitter-clinging... I mean, these are the words that just the Democratic presidential candidates and presidents have used to d- describe the lower classes, uh, also known as the, the American people, a huge, a huge portion of the American people, uh, o- over the past 10 years. Uh, they, they hold them in great contempt. And it, it's, I think, comes from an irony that, uh, that the Left purports to love humanity and fight on behalf of humanity, uh, and they're so focused on humanity they, they can't concern themselves with actual humans. (laughs) The humans really drive them nuts, but humanity they love.

   5. CWChris Williamson29:13

      It's weird as well because the vast majority of immigrant populations, of Black and ethnic minorities in America are probably going to be working class. But it seems like their label of ethnic minority has superseded their label of working class. So the culture-

   6. MKMichael Knowles29:33

      Well-

   7. CWChris Williamson29:33

      ... provides them a, an exit route out and kind of a safe space within the leftist ideology. Is that right?

   8. MKMichael Knowles29:40

      Yes, and that, this was Gramsci's observation too. He said pe- people actually don't really identify with their job (laughs) or their, their economic status. That's a little too abstract.

   9. CWChris Williamson29:49

      Well, not anymore. Definitely not anymore.

   10. MKMichael Knowles29:50

       Yeah, I mean, but, but they, they, they could identify much more with say, their religion, their nationality, their race, their w- whatever. Um, and, and so that, that does give the Left an out. It's why the, the Left has done very, very well certainly with, uh, with Black voters, but with other minorities too, other immigrant groups, uh, is b- because they can really gin up that kind of, uh, grievance and, and resentment.... and where it didn't exist before they'll, they'll sort of manufacture it like they did through institutions like the Ford Foundation and other, other groups in the 1970s. Um, you know, even (laughs) the, the moniker Hispanic did not really exist, you know, before about 50 years ago. The idea that someone in Mexico and Brazil and Peru and Guatemala and Spain are all somehow the same thing-

   11. CWChris Williamson30:37

       (laughs)

   12. MKMichael Knowles30:38

       ... is quite offensive, I think, actually. But s- same thing with Asian. The idea that Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, all the ... somehow it's all just the same, uh, is, uh, i- offensive and silly, but politically it's very useful. And, um, so th- you know, they've, they've ... Unfor- unfortunately, the Left seems to understand politics quite a bit better than we do. And, and it's a point I make in the book, uh, I think we, uh, as conservatives tend to pat ourselves on the back and we say, "We understand reality so much bet- we understand speech. Free speech? Oh, we're way smarter about that than the Left is." But th- the fact is, we're not. (laughs) They, they n- understand it much better, they understand its role in a, in a polity much better, and it's how they've been able to manipulate it so successfully while we twiddle our thumbs.

   13. CWChris Williamson31:23

       I definitely think they understand the delivery mechanisms better. Uh, everything that the Left creates is slicker and sexier and cooler. And I know that you guys at The Daily Wire are trying to slowly sort of claw your way back into the culture at the moment, but it really does feel like the Left won the culture war and now there's just a few silos left over from the Right that are, are trying to sort of hold on.

7. 31:45 – 38:28

   The End Goal of Political Correctness

   1. CWChris Williamson31:45

      What about the destination for the PC types then? Like have they got an end goal that they're trying to achieve here? Does it ever stop?

   2. MKMichael Knowles31:53

      So, uh, I think it is a purely negative campaign. Uh, I don't think that it is exactly like, uh, we- we've got the traditional moral standard, which asserts that certain things are good and true and beautiful and, and others are not. And then we've got the PC standard, and that's going to assert certain things. I, I just think the PC version, the leftist version is a, is an inversion of the traditional. It's just seeking to destroy. And it, it's why leftists don't ever seem to really edify anything, right? They just ... The, the BLM mostly peaceful protests left rubble in, uh, in their wake. Where, I mean, it was an a- they actually burned down the country. Uh, this is true of Antifa, this is true of, um, of so much of the leftist political action. So, the, the only thing th- if I were trying to be charitable to, toward the Left, something I don't do very often but I'll, I'll try, I'll try. Um, but if I were trying to, if I were trying to give a, uh, charitable read, and in many ways that's what my book is trying to do, I would say that the Left is interested in the most radical extreme of liberation. And the most radical extreme of liberation is self-undermining. It destroys your liberty, because it, it requires you to liberate yourself from reality, from nature, into, uh, uh, this m- mad mind. Another one of your countrymen, John Milton, I think described this quite well in Paradise Lost, where ... And actually, he described, uh, your, your discussion of, you know, the guy who can't get his leg to work, right? He says, "Well, I hate legs, you know, I don't want it." When, when Satan's cast down into hell, he says, "Well, good. Who, who needs heaven? I don't." The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heaven, and heaven a hell. And of course it can't, you know, the, the problem is that isn't ... Heaven is gonna be heaven and hell is gonna be hell, and the moral order is gonna be the moral order. But people can delude themselves o- a lot and it's, it will lead to misery as is happening right now.

   3. CWChris Williamson33:53

      Turning the bar stool upside down can only last for so long though. You can't-

   4. MKMichael Knowles33:57

      (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson33:57

      You can't create a foundation upon nothing. So what I'm interested in, you know, i- it's fascinating living through this slow motion car crash and kind of watching it all unfold. But, what I'm interested in is where this continue, where this ends up and none of us are clairvoyant but, I still do think it's a fascinating thought experiment to go, okay, so just roll the clock forward, let's say that everything becomes deconstructed in this utopia, the utopia arrives. Uh, what then? Like if every, if all of the conservatives decided that they were going to back off, what would be the end goal? Because all of the groups that we're talking about o- whichever group they decide to latch onto to use as the vanguard of ne- the next particular political push forward, that then gets sliced up and sliced up into increasingly finer and finer slivers so it's not just-

   6. MKMichael Knowles34:46

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson34:47

      ... Black people, it's Black feminists, then it's Black feminists who are differently abled, then it's Black feminists that are differently abled that w- like Mexican food and then so on and so forth, you know, it just continues to be chopped and chopped up. And you think, "Well, that's self-defeating. That's the snake that eats its own tail." And inevitably all of those groups have differing ... You see this with LGBTQ+, right? You see-

   8. MKMichael Knowles35:07

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson35:07

      ... the T's don't really have an awful lot to do with any of the other groups that are in there, and the G's and the L's actually don't have anything to do with each other other than their mutual disdain for each other because they don't care about each other sexually. And then it- s- my interesting thought experiment is where does it end up? You roll the clock forward, what happens then?

   10. MKMichael Knowles35:26

       It, it ends up in the abolition of humanity.

   11. CWChris Williamson35:29

       (laughs)

   12. MKMichael Knowles35:29

       And what I mean by, I hate, I hate to sound hyperbolic but-

   13. CWChris Williamson35:32

       Cataclysmic. Yes.

   14. MKMichael Knowles35:33

       Uh, yeah, but I, I think that's exactly what it does, because it's, it's an antisocial ideology that says we, we ... Our, our only obligation is toward our own, uh, selves, and ultimately even to our own basest appetites, and so it views social relations such as they are, as merely contractual or predatory. So, you know, the, the traditional understanding is that we love one another, we love our fellow man, we treat our neighbors as, as ourselves, and, uh, so when one loves someone, you, you are willing the good of the other. I'm not just ... If I love you, I'm not, it's not, I'm not just gonna treat you as an object for my personal pleasure, I'm actually g- uh, maybe I'll have to sacrifice. I mean, no greater love has a man than to die for his friends. Maybe I'll have to give you some tough love if you're going in the wrong direction, but I'm really willing it for you. But I think the, the modern radical vision of it ...... is that other people are merely a- a- around for our financial betterment, for our sexual pleasure, for our personal amusement. But these- this deeper foundation of society is, is totally gone. And, uh, it actually, another Englishman, C.S. Lewis, describes this kind of demonic love in The Screwtape Letters, where h- where he, uh, d- depicts this kind of love as a desire to consume all your... You know, uh, the, the uncle demon loves his nephew demon because he wants to eat him, you know? He wants to totally devour him. So I think it, it ends there and then it, it, it w- it breaks society, so no longer is man the social or political animal. Uh, but it also robs us of our speech, because if there is no such thing as objective truth, and if, in some cases, we- we're litera- literally not allowed to speak, you know, we're, we're being shut up and censored from, from speaking the truth, then, uh, our essentially human quality is gone too. And so when I, when I say that, that the end game of, of this radical leftism is the abolition of humanity, I mean, anything that distinguishes human beings from animals, from the beasts, uh, w- would be taken away. Our, our social bonds and our ability to, to communicate, uh, reality, to perceive truth and, and to communicate that, that would be taken away. And so we'd be divvied up into essentially a, a, a perfectly atomized world, just individuals with no bond to anybody else, and we would be grunting animals with sticks because we couldn't persuade anybody of anything. We wouldn't speak the same language. We increasingly don't speak the same language, so then politics becomes less a, a practice of persuasion and, uh, consen- building consensus and, and much more a process of imposing one's will and interest on, on another person or another group, which increasingly you, you are seeing that happen and you're seeing the decline of, of, um, uh, deliberative government and, and you're just seeing a bunch of yelling and screaming and violence in the streets. And that's, uh... So my, my bleak picture of that utopia is, uh (laughs) , it would look a lot like, uh, warring tribes of animals.

8. 38:28 – 45:22

   Should Intolerance Be Tolerated?

   1. MKMichael Knowles38:28

   2. CWChris Williamson38:28

      Well, you see this with the eco-movement at the moment, right? Green-

   3. MKMichael Knowles38:32

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson38:32

      ... as Alex Epstein calls it, is human racism. He says that it's such self-hatred-

   5. MKMichael Knowles38:38

      Yeah. W-

   6. CWChris Williamson38:38

      ... of the human race. And it's almost cool at the moment within certain circles to talk about the disdain that you have, a, a curse on the, on the Earth, destroying Mother Nature, as he calls it, the, uh, perfect planet hypothesis, that everything would be fine if only we weren't here. Um, and yet in the same sentence, many of those people will have an overlapping ideology with people that want to completely change the current way that the planet is made up and the way that everybody's preconceptions about how the world works should operate. And it seems as well, encouraging people to be mindful and precise of the language and the words that they use makes sense to me, but demanding tolerance becomes undermined when the people doing it are insanely overbearing and intolerant. It's like punching someone in the face in the name of peace.

   7. MKMichael Knowles39:28

      Yeah, right. (laughs) But, but, you know, to give them their due, uh, there's a very famo- infamous essay on this topic by Herbert Marcuse, who was one of the Cr- Frankfurt School critical theorists who then reappeared in the 1960s as the father of the New Left. And he wrote this essay called Repressive Tolerance, and it's a diabolical little essay where he says, "Look, the, the current mainstream tolerance that we have in the West is very wicked and evil because it, there are certain things are off limits and certain things are censored and ostracized, but the, the dominant sort of Western view is protected. And, uh, so what we need to do is go in and correct this." And, and so a liberating tolerance, according to Marcuse, would not tolerate conservatives, right? It would just censor conservatives and encourage speech from leftists. And hi- his argument is that the conservatives are not tolerant, and so you can't coherently tolerate intolerance. And I, I think he actually makes a, a decent point, uh, not in the particulars, but in the broader principle. You cannot, uh, have any sort of society that e- no matter how tolerant the society is, that would undermine its own existence. You, you just can't do it. It doesn't make any sense. And even the great philosophers on toleration talked about this. John Locke, who is f- the father of liberalism, for goodness sakes, he wrote in The Letter Concerning Toleration, he said, "Well, look, we've got to tolerate everybody and we've got to be really nice and tolerant, except for atheists."

   8. CWChris Williamson40:56

      (laughs)

   9. MKMichael Knowles40:57

      "We should never tolerate atheists. Those guys, man, they'll..." Because a- according to Locke-

   10. CWChris Williamson41:02

       Does- doesn't that l- align with what you suggested at the very beginning?

   11. MKMichael Knowles41:06

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson41:06

       That there needs to be a concession, there does need to be a small, small amount of this that's, that's permitted?

   13. MKMichael Knowles41:13

       There, there does, yes. I mean, there, there needs to... We want to have a nice broad society. We, we want to, uh, be able to, you know, perceive the truth. But that is the point. You know, let's, let's not... The, the purpose of, of keeping an open mind is not so that it can stay open forever and, and your brain falls out. The purpose of having an open mind is to close it again around truth that you have perceived. Uh, a good line from this, uh, comes from Bill Buckley. He was quoting actually a liberal president of Yale University, and he said, uh, "Skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction." You've got to ultimately believe in certain things. And, uh, uh, Buckley actually, as mainstream a conservative as it gets, he described himself as an epistemological optimist.

   14. CWChris Williamson41:56

       (laughs)

   15. MKMichael Knowles41:56

       He said, "Look, I, I think..." You know, and h- and h- he even made fun of what a silly phrase that is. And he said, "You know, I believe..." A ty- typical Bill Buckley way, he uses a $20 word to describe a very simple concept. He said, "I believe that some things are true, we know them to be true, and we don't need to relitigate them every five seconds." You know, w- there are certain premises that our society is going to, to embrace. And so he, he said, for instance, that, "We don't, uh, we don't need to, uh, constantly be, uh, entertaining the ideas of the Nazi or the communist. These are, these are bad ideas. They're antithetical to our civilization." And so it... We're done with that. Uh, and your point is so perceptive on the self-hatred involved here. There is, there is no-... uh, country or no civilization ever in the history of the world as self-hating as ours is. I mean, we're the only, we're the only people on earth who are constantly prattling and babbling on and on about how terrible we are and how ... As though we in ... Uh, people in the West pretend that we invented slavery. Sla- we're the only civilization in history that has abolished slavery. (laughs) Slavery still exists in vi- virtually every other part of the world except for in the West, and yet we pretend that we're unique. Uh, we ... Or, I suppose, we are unique in the fact that we abolished it. Uh, we, we pretend that we're the only racist civilization. We're the least racist civilization in history. Every other country in the world is extraordinarily racist. Uh, not us, where we take people in from all sorts of backgrounds and things like that. But I, I suspect a lot of this comes down to a very personal point, which is that people hate themselves. Uh, they, they ... We've gotten to a point in society where people really seem to hate themselves, and they say that, um, there, uh, "Mankind is overpopulating the Earth." And none of these people, by the way, who talk about overpopulation ever wanna take themselves out of the population, you know? It's always somebody else comes at. But, you know, we, we kill our children through abortion, a million a year in the United States. We are trying to convince people not to have children quite as much, whether for ecological or social reasons. This is why the birth rate has plummeted. I mean, it's now at a historic low, but you could say that every single year we seem to hit a new historic low. Uh, we want to give away territories, cede them back to conquered peoples. It's, it's a, a bizarre thing. And I, I suspect there's a religious component here as well, you know? Cardinal Manning has a good line, he says, "All human conflict is ultimately theological." Cult and culture come from the same root word. And I suspect a little bit of that self-hatred reflects a hatred of God, in whose image we are made. And it's, it's why there, there seems to be such a, a bizarre religious component to all of these, uh, these various ideologies, notably transgenderism which, which adopts a Gnostic view of human nature, the idea that, that our bodies have nothing to do with who we really are, you know, that we're ju- we're purely soul, in, in contravention of the, the true understanding of our self, which is that we're body and soul put together. Uh, it's, uh, curious to me that the radical left simultaneously advances these two apparently opposite views, one, that we're just meat puppets, just synapses firing off in our brain, all our hopes and joys are illusions, the materialist view, and then the other, that our bodies have nothing to do with who we are, and, you know, a man can be a woman if he really feels that way, the Gnostic view. Uh, uh, they're, they're opposites, but they both contradict the traditional view. And I think actually that's a good example of the way that political correctness works. It doesn't matter what argument they're putting out at any given moment as long as they destroy the, the traditional understanding of the society.

9. 45:22 – 51:29

   The World Without Woke

   1. MKMichael Knowles45:22

   2. CWChris Williamson45:22

      Talking about the big picture and the globe at large, I often think about this. I read a lot of Existential Risk, which just in case the current situation wasn't cataclysmic enough, it makes it feel even worse.

   3. MKMichael Knowles45:31

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson45:31

      And what I'm thinking is, how much of the smartest minds of our generation's time has been taken up debating stupid shit over the last five to 10 years or so? Literally, the, some of the best brains on the planet have had the lion's share of their online time spent debating whether men are men and women are women or not. And-

   5. MKMichael Knowles45:52

      Right.

   6. CWChris Williamson45:53

      ... the concern is ... I can't quite put my finger on it. The debates around semantics are immediately visible. You can see the unfolding of all of the consequences of at least the speech itself, not the second-order, third-order effects of what happens due to the speech, but you can at least see the argument on its own merits, right? But what you can't see is what happens down the line from that. What is the world that we could have had if we hadn't got caught up with this or that or the other? And it seems like, um, y- you look at the, the Wuhan lab leak, uh, flip-flop from Facebook that occurred recently, right? That's a, a prime example of a semantic game being played, "This type of speech is not allowed." Okay, so the speech is obvious, it's very d- easily defined, and it's immediate. You can shut that down. But when the facts starts to catch up to the narrative eight months, 12 months later, you think, "Okay, so actually what we did was we punished people who had truth as opposed to people that had falsehood." I'm not sure if it's true. It might be it's purported, it's possible. It might be probable. But, you know, at least it should have been permitted. And you think-

   7. MKMichael Knowles47:04

      Of course.

   8. CWChris Williamson47:05

      This, um, asymmetry in the pace at which arguments are visible I think lends, um, unfair weight toward people that want to play semantic games as opposed to people that want to root what they're doing in reality. 'Cause reality is always going to move more slowly. The consequences are always going to be seen down the line. Does that make sense?

   9. MKMichael Knowles47:26

      It does make sense. And I, I th- it brings to mind that meme that shows up where someone will say, you know, "This would be the world if so-and-so had never been born." And it's futuristic, and it's, you know, everyone's in flying cars and everything, you know? "If only Dr. Fauci stopped speaking, then, you know-"

   10. CWChris Williamson47:41

       This would've happened.

   11. MKMichael Knowles47:42

       Usually, usually it's, uh, they come from the left, but right, then we'd all be in this very advanced civilization. I think that's true. However, the thing we've gotta grapple with is, is where the fault lies in ourselves. And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm all for owning the libs and dunking on the left when they're going crazy, which is all the time. But, uh, we can't just leave it there. I mean, the, the fact is that the left has developed its ideas in a, in a certain culture. And so when we say we want to defend the West against the predations of the radical left, well, the, the radical left arose out of the, out of the West, right? I mean, and it ... The, the left, even the term the left, goes back to the French Revolution. And the French Revolution was a, was a historic tragedy. But w- that came from somewhere, too. And so, uh, one does wonder. And this, this thesis has, has been advanced in recent years by people like Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed and, and other writers and thinkers, too, that, that something went wrong-... somewhere along the way. We somehow lost the thread somewhere along the way. I mean, the, uh, Oswald Spengler's book, now it's, uh, not really read quite as much, but, you know, uh, 60, 70 years ago it was read quite a bit. The Decline of the West, uh, maps out why the West has to go into decline because of the, uh, circumstances that have arisen from within it. And so I think it, it's very frustrating. I wish that we didn't have to spend all this time saying that men are men and women are women and babies are babies, (laughs) and there isn't such a thing as truth or whatever. Uh, but, uh, I think maybe the reason for that does not lie in, um, you know, just j- only in Herbert Marcuse 50 years ago, or only in Antonio Gramsci, or only in Karl Marx, but actually goes back even further than that. Where, where did we lose this thread? Uh, because there, there are, you know, major ideas at play, and ideas obviously do have consequences. And, uh, I, I just think if we, if we try to fix the problem solely based on, you know, the Clinton administration to the present, uh, we're not, we're not going to get very far. And one, one of the things I've tried to point out in this book is that political correctness, which seems like it's 30 years old, it's m- it's at least 100 years old. And so the m- the modern radicalism goes back so, so far. Where are we gonna find those answers? Are we gonna find it in Science? You know, capital S trademark over the E? So many of our debates now are so reductive and shallow over, over gender or babies, right? They'll say, "Uh, a baby should not be killed because he has unique DNA." You say, "Oh, uh, okay, sure, yeah, I agree. Yeah, that's true, he's obviously a distinct entity." But plenty of things have unique DNA. Why should I not kill the baby? Well, 'cause the baby's a human being. Well, why shouldn't we kill human beings? Uh, well, because, you know, they can, they, they h- they're self-conscious. And you say, "Well, no, a ba- a baby's not." A baby's tot- completely unconscious basically, or I mean, even a, even a newborn baby is not, uh, a walking, talking... B- the, the reason we do it is because humans have dignity, because they're made in the image of God, because they have souls and they, they, you know, are this very dignified being. Well, now w- we've left the realm of science now, haven't we? Now we're in the realm of philosophy and, and religion, and, uh, we're, we're very uncomfortable talking about those things. Th- the way that we talk in the West today about philosophy and religion is like, like an anthropological exhibit. We talk about it like we're in a museum, and we say, "Oh, look! Here's philosophy over here."

   12. CWChris Williamson51:01

       (laughs)

   13. MKMichael Knowles51:01

       "People used to think this, then they thought... Oh, look at religion. Those... Look at these grunting idiots who used to think whatever."

   14. CWChris Williamson51:07

       Yeah.

   15. MKMichael Knowles51:07

       Uh, we, we don't treat these things as though they... W- we don't treat Aristotle as though he tells us something about the way we're living today. We don't treat Thomas Aquinas, for that matter, eh, as though he has something to say about the way we're living today. It, it's not... Uh, our, our understanding of philosophy and religion is not a living one, and so, (laughs) our civilization is not a living one. (laughs) It's, it's a dying one, and, uh, that's, that's a sad fact.

10. 51:29 – 55:43

    History's Grounding Effect

    1. MKMichael Knowles51:29

    2. CWChris Williamson51:29

       I wonder how much of the difference between how the UK and America at the moment culturally is split, that's not to say that there aren't sort of progressive crazy policies and stuff like that over here, but it, it really is orders of magnitude different to where it is with you guys. How much of that do you think is because your country is based in a history which is only a quarter of a millennia old? That we can roll back, yeah, fair enough, Vikings and Normans and, and so on and so forth were hardly sort of genetic purists ourselves. We are a amalgamation of a lot of different things. But, you know, there's castles in the UK that are thousands of years old, and we can track that history back. I wonder whether the, um, the roots lie sufficiently deep with regards to tradition over here, that there are more, um, tangible artifices that people can grab onto. Do you know what I mean? That there's, there's...

    3. MKMichael Knowles52:17

       Yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson52:17

       ... there's a, a, a genuine sense of history. Whereas for America, you know, the history very much still is unfolding. There is still a lot to be discovered about what the country is. It just seems unfortunate that it's occurred at a time where the free movement of information has enabled some bad actors to weaponize that.

    5. MKMichael Knowles52:38

       Uh, I think your point is totally right, um, eh, because w- when you even say, "What is the founding story of America?" you could get different answers. Is it the Pilgrims? I tend to trace it, I suppose, to the Pilgrims. Is it the settlers in Virginia, in Jamestown? Well, some people would say that. Is it 1776, that was the very beginning, nothing happened before that? Uh, I don't think that's quite fair. That's a little shallow. Is it the Wild, Wild West? Well, it might be. A lot of people trace it to that as well. Or is it the story we're increasingly told, that we're a nation of immigrants, and really America begins at Ellis Island? A lot of people want to believe that. Well, depending on which story you pick, you're gonna have a very, very different understanding of America. And they all seem equally plausible, because the country is not particularly old. Add to this the problem of totally open borders, which effectively is, is what we have today, and you have a country with, with, uh, historic levels of immigrants who have not assimilated in any way. America always did a b- basically a good job about assimilating its immigrants, and then when it wasn't able to do that, it would restrict immigration, and this gave us a relatively stable society. Uh, but, but now that's gone, and so (laughs) if you, if you have a country and you, uh, at the corporate and governmental level try to replace and undermine its institutions and traditions, and then the, you actually change the people of the country such that now a huge, uh, something like one-fifth of the country was not born here and does not really know particularly much about the country, well, then you're gonna get a different country, you know. And, and, uh, th- the UK has probably survived a little bit better because of that weight of history, um, and, and you see it especially at the religious level. You see this in the, the pro- Catholic-Protestant split, you know. The, the idea when Martin Luther was nailing his theses to the, to the church door was that finally we were going to have a recovery of truth after the absolute corruption of, of the Catholic Church and the Rome, the, the, the Roman hierarchy, and what happened? Did you get a reformation? No, you didn't get a reformation. Did you get a, a new singular church to challenge the Catholic Church? No.... you got 30,000 churches, uh, because there was that, that crack, you know. And, and the Catholic Church, despite its many, many problems and scandals that continue to go on and have gone on for a long time, remains, I think because of its divine institution, but also, without question, because of its history, because of its tradition. Hilaire Belloc has a good line on it, he says that, uh, you know, he has to take it as a matter of faith that the Catholic Church is divinely instituted, but for non-believers, an evidence of its divine institution is that no other institution conducted with such knavish imbecility-

    6. CWChris Williamson55:16

       (laughs)

    7. MKMichael Knowles55:16

       ... would have lasted a fortnight. And, uh, this is, uh, certainly true, and it's true of, of other places with, with a, a long history. But what are we doing now, especially in this country, to our history? We're tearing down all the statues, and, and, uh, I think that's why the le- the Left focuses on language and, and, of course, on our national memory. Tear down Washington, tear down Jefferson. When Trump said that would happen four years ago, everyone laughed at him. Within 18 months, they were pulling down those statues. And, and where does it go from here?

11. 55:43 – 59:20

    'Seasons' Are Triggering

    1. MKMichael Knowles55:43

    2. CWChris Williamson55:43

       Did you see that summer and other seasons have been added to a list of triggering terms?

    3. MKMichael Knowles55:48

       (laughs)

    4. CWChris Williamson55:50

       Did you see this?

    5. MKMichael Knowles55:51

       I di- I did see this, because you see summer in one hemisphere-

    6. CWChris Williamson55:55

       Yeah.

    7. MKMichael Knowles55:55

       ... may not be summer in another hemisphere.

    8. CWChris Williamson55:56

       Let me, let me read this out for the people that haven't seen it. So, this is Laura- Lara Hogan adds summer and other seasons to list of triggering terms. Twitter state, "This is a think tank for the nation's brightest minds took a hit once again when Lara Hogan announced that she will no longer use the word 'summer' because it may be 'triggered for some.'" Uh, according to her Twitter profile, Lara Hogan is the founder and leadership coach at Wherewithal. The company website states that Hogan spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and an engineering director at Etsy. So, she makes nice posters and stuff like that. Uh, Hogan's full tweet reads, "A teeny tiny 'inclusive language' thing I've tried to get better at this past year is avoiding Northern hemisphere specific seasonal language. Like instead of 'this summer,' I say 'the months I mean' or a 'Q3.' Because it might be that season for me but not that season for everybody." Joining the call for the seasons-sensitive lexicon are chipmunks and squirrels notorious for the preferring of hum- uh summer season over the snow-laden winters.

    9. MKMichael Knowles56:56

       (sings) Q3 time and the living is easy.

    10. CWChris Williamson57:00

        (laughs)

    11. MKMichael Knowles57:00

        I, I don't think anyone's going to be singing that. Do you know... I love that she suggested Q3, because what she thinks she's doing is this very liberal impulse to take away all considerations of particularity, of time and of space. She's going to take away, you know, yes, you're right, it's, when it's summer here, it's not summer somewhere else. She's gonna take that away. I'm no longer a citizen of this country or that country, I'm no longer... I am in the, the realm of the universal. Okay. But she's using terms that are used almost exclusively by neoliberal elites. The idea of Q3, what are we ta- now we're, we're, we're gonna replace the language of summer-

    12. CWChris Williamson57:36

        (laughs) The sales report for this season, yeah. (laughs)

    13. MKMichael Knowles57:39

        (laughs) Yeah. Finally, we're gonna adopt the much more inclusive language of a McKinsey associate or someone at Goldman Sachs. Yeah, okay. Sure. I mean it j- but, but they, they do this so very often. You see now, uh, you know, there, there's a move against the American flag in the United States. A lot of the Left will protest the flag on football fields or they'll take it off of clothing or they'll say it's a symbol of, of, oppression. But they will wave the BLM flag or the Pride flag, especially now where I guess we're in Pride Month. Pretty soon we're gonna have Pride year, it's just gonna be 12, 12 months of the year. And, uh, I, I think the reason for this, in part, is because the American flag is particular. It, it's, it exists in a place, it exists in a time, it has certain people, and it's got the, the mountains and, you know, the various seas. But the, the Pride flag is universal. It applies to everybody. It, it makes imperial claims. This is why I think they're now flying it on embassies around the world. Uh, uh, the American flag makes no claim on someone in Iran or the, on the Iranian society. The Pride flag does. BLM, the same thing. It de- d- describes this worldwide phenomenon of the oppression of Black people at the hands of white people. And so, that, that flies around too. They, they want to, to, uh, in the name of liberty and tolerance, talk in this, these universal terms-

    14. CWChris Williamson58:53

        Universality, yes.

    15. MKMichael Knowles58:53

        ... as a citizen of the world.

    16. CWChris Williamson58:54

        Yes, that's exactly what I had in my head.

    17. MKMichael Knowles58:56

        Right. But, but the irony is, it's as imperialistic as anything. It's actually more imperialistic than the national claims, which are at least somewhat modest-

    18. CWChris Williamson59:03

        Well, they're bounded.

    19. MKMichael Knowles59:05

        ... They're at least bounded, but even that, even now our nation is not bounded because the borders are totally open.

    20. CWChris Williamson59:10

        (laughs) Yeah, I couldn't believe that you just think like if you didn't say good day to someone is that it's nighttime somewhere, or if you say good morning-

    21. MKMichael Knowles59:18

        Yes.

    22. CWChris Williamson59:18

        ... it's evening time somewhere.

12. 59:20 – 1:10:00

    1984 or Brave New World?

    1. CWChris Williamson59:20

    2. MKMichael Knowles59:20

       (laughs)

    3. CWChris Williamson59:20

       I don't know, man. I don't know. I, um, I can't work out if we're closer to 1984 or A Brave New World. It feels like some awful lovechild of both.

    4. MKMichael Knowles59:33

       S- I think it's Brave New World. I agree, yes, it i- but it's not a lovechild like 50/50.

    5. CWChris Williamson59:38

       No. No, no, no, no.

    6. MKMichael Knowles59:38

       You know, sometime in the future they're gonna figure out how to engineer our DNA so we're only like 10% this guy and 30% this guy and this, whatever. I think it's about 10% George Orwell-

    7. CWChris Williamson59:48

       Mm-hmm.

    8. MKMichael Knowles59:49

       ... uh, specifically 'cause of the language focus-

    9. CWChris Williamson59:51

       Correct. Correct.

    10. MKMichael Knowles59:51

        ... of, of the radicals. But I think it's about 90%, uh, Huxley, because Huxley, and, and Huxley actually made this point to Orwell, 'cause Huxley was Orwell's teacher.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:00:00

        French teacher, right?

    12. MKMichael Knowles1:00:01

        He was, he was a French teacher. Right, yes, I think so. And, uh, so-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:00:03

        Read the book. Read the book, Michael. (laughs)

    14. MKMichael Knowles1:00:05

        Yeah, that's right. You, yeah, y- this, truly, I'm, I'm so honored, uh, because you've read the book now probably more recently than I have, so you could probably tell me things about the book.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:00:13

        Yeah, maybe.

    16. MKMichael Knowles1:00:13

        But yes, H- Huxley was, was, uh, Orwell's French teacher, and he said, "You know, George, y- your, your dystopia is fine, the language stuff is good, but you think that the totalitarian government is gonna rule with an iron fist and it's going to, you know, t- take away all people's sorts of pleasures and..." But no, actually. What's gonna happen is, the, the totalitarian government is going to rule by, by playing to people's pleasures, by getting people so drugged up on actual drugs, by getting people so oversexed with casual, non-committed sex that they're totally outside of their faculties of reason and they're, they're susceptible to being controlled, and when you look around our society today...... worst opioid crisis we've ever seen. Uh, you know, marriage rates in the doldrums, but people having creepy sex, you know, all over the place, doing all sorts of things with any number of people and, and that being normalized. Uh, we're seeing that and we're, we're seeing the, the idea normalized that any sort of sacrifice, any sort of burden, any, any sort of suffering is wicked and evil and has to be overcome so that we can just pursue our passion. You do you. Don't yuck my yum. This kind of language. I mean, that's the language of Huxley's world state. That, that is not the language of, of Orwell's Big Brother.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:01:32

        Even if you think about what social media is doing, right? It's an internal, it's a systemic rather than exogenous, uh, way to manipulate the chemicals that you've got in your body. Immediate guilt-free pleasure.

    18. MKMichael Knowles1:01:44

        Yeah. Good point.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:01:44

        Uh, the same goes from Amazon. You know, you can Amazon Prime yourself a lovely new item that will give you that hit while you DoorDash or Deliveroo a Michelin star meal while you sit on the couch and watch million-dollar produced TV shows on Netflix. It's, it really is, um... Yeah, for all of human history, we've had problems of scarcity, right? And now our problems are problems of abundance. And I think you're right. I think that Nineteen Eighty-Four might have happened if technology hadn't enabled Brave New World.

    20. MKMichael Knowles1:02:15

        Mm.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:02:15

        Without the technology, I don't think that Brave New World can happen because you re- it requires such sophisticated coordination, it requires, um, a, a degree of siloing of information whilst also free, free communication across that. And the levels of comfort and convenience that are required in order to enact a brave new world, you need to have... Here's, here's the thing, right? So I think about this to do with existential crises all the time, how luxurious of a position it is to have an existential crisis. Because the only way that you can get to that situation is if the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have all been sorted. So much... Like, if, if you're worried about where the next meal is coming from, you don't have the luxury to concern yourself about whether you are contributing to your own highest good within the world.

    22. MKMichael Knowles1:02:58

        Right.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:02:58

        Um, so yes, Brave New World. I'm, I'm with you on that, 90/10. It's a language from Nineteen Eighty-Four and everything else from Brave New World except for the soma, which we're still yet to get.

    24. MKMichael Knowles1:03:10

        Except for the soma, although, I don't know, I guess OxyContin or something is the soma now. And I, I think, uh, th- this, uh, issue of that existential ennui, people who work a lot don't have existential ennui (laughs) 'cause they're busy working. They have, they have needs to meet. And, and beyond that, by the way. It's not even just that we don't work enough or we're all telecommuting or something. It's, uh, because there are plenty of people who can't telecommute. I mean, this was one of the arguments, uh, for the lockdowns is all the g- genius experts said, "Oh, no, you can work on Zoom." And I said, "Oh, right. You, none of you know people who work physical jobs. So you don't... You think that everybody can just telecommute in on Zoom. Actually, believe it or not, there are some people who do real things in real places and they can't do-"

    25. CWChris Williamson1:03:50

        Wait until you need your plumbing fixing via Zoom. Yeah, exactly.

    26. MKMichael Knowles1:03:53

        (laughs) That's right, yeah. Yeah. Get... That's right. Get the electrician in on Zoom. It's, it's not going to work very well. Um, so yes, you've got this problem of, of abundance. And the, the chemical aspect of social media is, is pretty clear, too. Uh, the one that I get sucked into is Twitter. I'm on Twitter a lot. I'm just the one... I don't do Facebook as much, I don't do Instagram, but Twitter I do. And I was talking to a friend of mine and he said, "Why are you on Twitter so much?" And it just came out of me, I said, uh, "Because I, I don't want to look at porn." So I don't...

    27. CWChris Williamson1:04:23

        (laughs)

    28. MKMichael Knowles1:04:23

        If I don't want to look at porn, I still want to get the same sort of, you know, pleasure, oxytocin, whatever. And so now instead I'm just getting sort of political (laughs) , you know, rage tweets or something. Uh, but everybody seems to be hooked on these things. And for a lot of people, I suppose, it i- it is literally porn, right? It's not even just... Which is, which is this other issue of a, of abundance, right? I mean, truly that there... You know, if you can think of it, there's a porn for it. And I think it's why you're seeing a reaction among younger conservatives, you know? There was a big debate that busted out, um, in... Par- partaking in some ways of the PC debate, because we do have laws against obscenity, and yet they don't really seem to be enforced very much with porn. And the debate to ban porn or not, or to regulate porn, you would imagine it would be the old fuddy duddies are against porn and the young, you know, rapscallions are for porn. But actually, it was totally reversed. The people de- defending porn were the boomers. The boomers who were using this kind of p- pseudo-quasi-libertarian language of the '80s and '90s and saying, "Oh, well, you know, if it feels good, do it." And the younger people who grew up on this stuff, who I think the, the median age of, of porn exposure for boys is like 11 years old or something. And they were saying, "No, man, this is really bad stuff. It's kind of messed me up. It's hard to work through. Like, how are we not regulating this?" And, uh, you know, they are obviously much more in tune with political reality than these p- than these throw-your-hands-up conservatives who, who get rid of all the standards.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:05:50

        I'm so glad. I don't know by what quirk of this version of the simulation I managed to avoid a porn addiction. But I'm so glad that that's not one of... You know, of all of the vices and, and odd quirks and behavioral problems that I've managed to sidestep through life, I'm really glad that porn addiction isn't one of them because it's so inconvenient.

    30. MKMichael Knowles1:06:07

        (laughs) And I, and I suppose it's, it's just available all the time. But, uh, you know, part of it might just be that if you're a millennial, you've kind of just missed it or, you know, maybe it was-
13. 1:10:00 – 1:15:35

    Reality & Accountability

    1. CWChris Williamson1:10:00

       is so dangerous. There's this quote from Donald Knuth which I adore, and he says, "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems." So good, and yet when you have collapse of grand narratives and the lack of religiosity, you have the changes with regards to the way that family structures are, are accepted and so on and so forth, it doesn't, s- doesn't surprise me that you have this. Like it, th- there is, again, to use the bar stool analogy, it's been upended and now it's sat in some sta- some sand, and there's, there's nothing... There's, uh, as soon as you start to pull away at the traditions of the past, there isn't anything to hold onto it. And this is coming from someone, um, from a very salt of the earth normal northern town in the UK. All of this sort of stuff wouldn't come to us in terms of culture wars, and yet I'm seeing now even somewhere that is fairly traditional, I'm seeing this hearkening back, this desire for people to have their older ways a little bit more. And, um, yeah, man. It's, it's the bifurcating that you're seeing as well with regards to how sort of people are living their lives. But again, to, as you brought up there, um, first we make our habits, then our habits make us, right? You can tell anybody that you want, "You can do what you want. You can eat the ice cream, you can..." But when the diabetes comes for you in-

    2. MKMichael Knowles1:11:22

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:11:22

       ... in 10 years time, reality will end up winning because reality doesn't stop, and if your language-

    4. MKMichael Knowles1:11:29

       Yeah.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:11:30

       ... and the lexical manipulation is malleable, that's going to fold around reality as it comes in. Okay, so now diabetes is what? Like, an accepted side effect of you eating whatever you want because you shouldn't be told that you're supposed to diet? That doesn't seem like a very healthy way to go through things. But because the effects of a semantic game are immediate and the consequences of a semantic game are delayed, we've come-

    6. MKMichael Knowles1:11:56

       Mm-hmm.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:11:56

       We've got to it. I've done it. Uh, that's what it is, I think. That plays a big part in it. You have these lagging measures that occur down the line, but you have the lead measures that happen during the argument, and those are the ones that people are playing about with at the moment. But as Douglas Murray says, "When the barbarians are out the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are." If you don't focus on the here and now-

    8. MKMichael Knowles1:12:16

       (laughs)

    9. CWChris Williamson1:12:16

       ... with the future, the consequences-

    10. MKMichael Knowles1:12:19

        Yeah.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:12:19

        ... of the future in mind, you're going to end up with a future that you really, really don't want to live in.

    12. MKMichael Knowles1:12:24

        We do, and we, we also have to acknowledge something that the Left gets right, uh, and, and the diabetes example is a very good one. Uh, people's private decisions and private behaviors have public, and therefore political, consequences. Public and political are, are synonyms. Uh-Now, the- the Left uses this. They'll say, "Look, you know, we, we ought to be able to tell you whether you can smoke or not because we're going to pay for your healthcare. And we've got this federal healthcare pr- city healthcare program, and so we ought to be able to tell you whether you can smoke or not." And you say, "Okay. Oh, I actually, I don't want you to tell me whether I can have my nightly cigar, but I do understand the logic here." And conservatives, while obviously we want to have some sort of a private sphere, we want certainly protections for the family, for local, local government, local community, uh, it is, it is the case that if you have a country of vicious people, if you have a country that just engages in every vice under the sun and they are allergic to virtue, uh, then it doesn't matter how nice your Constitution looks, doesn't matter how beautiful your Supreme Court building is, you're gonna have a vicious country. The- the- your private life will have that public effect. And this is why, you know, I- I- I think the collapse of relig- any kind of traditional understanding of religion is so bad here. What you've seen actually is, as- as religion has fallen apart, right? And religion entails that every time I commit a sin, at least my religion, 'cause I'm Catholic, every time I commit a sin, I've got to take note of it, I've got to count it, I've got to think of the circumstances. I have to go into a little black box and tell a man in a collar-

Episode duration: 1:27:13