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"The price of safety is freedom" - Konstantin Kisin
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Update: Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Konstantin Kisin is a Russian-British comedian, podcaster and writer. His speech earlier this year to the Oxford Union on 'whether woke culture has gone too far' (watch) established him as one of the most influential social commentators in the world today. Each week he co-hosts the wildly successful Triggernometry podcast with another friend of Australiana, Francis Foster.
In this wide-ranging conversation, host Will Kingston and Konstantin discuss Ukraine, free speech, the decline of western culture and the rise of activist journalism.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Buy 'An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West' here.
Join the Triggernometry community here.
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Transcript
Intro & Subscription Offer
00:00:00
Speaker
This year is the 15th anniversary of the Spectator's Australian edition. Like many 15-year-olds, the magazine is bold, opinionated and cheap. A digital subscription includes one month free and is just $16.99 thereafter. To take advantage of this outrageously good offer, go to spectator.com.au forward slash join.
Introducing the Australiana Podcast
00:00:39
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life. I'm Will Kingston.
Quiet Desperation & Cancel Culture
00:00:48
Speaker
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. When Henry David Thoreau wrote those immortal words in 1854, he was referring to what men did. He observed that in order to survive, most people don't do what they want, but what they must.
00:01:05
Speaker
In 2023, the words are just as relevant, but for a slightly different reason. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, not because of what they choose not to do, but because of what they choose not to say. An insidious toxic council culture prevents so many people from standing up for what they believe in for fear of being fired, or being shamed on social media, or being ostracized.
00:01:32
Speaker
I speak to people every day who don't buy into the rigid, oppressive dogma of wokeism that has infiltrated all of our social institutions, but they are too fearful of the consequences to say anything about it. The quiet Australians are remaining quiet.
Konstantin Kissant & Speech Codes
00:01:49
Speaker
One man who has chosen to speak up is Konstantin Kissant. Konstantin is a Russian-British comedian, podcaster, writer and social commentator. He made international headlines in 2018 by refusing to sign a university behavioural agreement form which banned jokes about religion, atheism and it insisted that all humour must be respectful and kind.
00:02:14
Speaker
More recently, his speech to the Oxford Union on whether woke culture has gone too far became the viral political video of 2023, garnering tens of millions of views and lavish praise from people the world over. Each week he co-hosts the wildly successful Trigonometry podcast with another friend of Australiana, Francis Foster. Konstantin Kissen, welcome to Australiana. No thanks for having me mate, I appreciate it.
00:02:41
Speaker
So I'm a lazy interviewer and speaking to guests like you who have published books is great for me because the chapter structure of the book often makes for an excellent structure for a podcast and yours is case in point. So I'm going to be appropriating that shamelessly.
00:02:58
Speaker
In the preface to the book, you mentioned the war in Ukraine. Let's start there.
Russian Governance & Leadership
00:03:04
Speaker
A lot of people in the West continue to misunderstand the Russian psyche, and this is obviously something which is deeply, personally significant to you. What are the historical and the cultural factors that have led to someone like Putin to this day enjoying overwhelming majority support amongst the Russian people?
00:03:25
Speaker
Well, have you got about 10 hours for us to break that down? It's a very, very big question. The shorthand version perhaps of that is Russia has never had a single democratic transition of power worth mentioning in its entire history. So Russia first comes into being in 882 AD. So in the 11, 1200 years since there's never been a single democratic transition of power ever.
00:03:52
Speaker
It's a country that's largely been ruled by a form of dictator since forever. And the geography of Russia means that it was almost impossible to govern without that sort of approach. Because if you think about how massive the country is, and it was not a country that was created as a federation,
00:04:16
Speaker
which means that it's a gigantic country that has to be ruled from the center. And in the age before modern transportation and logistics and communication, it might take a month or two months, or maybe you couldn't travel to the eastern part of Russia during winter because it was just impossible physically to do.
00:04:38
Speaker
And so the people on the ground locally in a part that they govern the local governor of some western Siberian region or town was essentially unsupervised for most of the time and could get away with even to this day there was a scandal in Russia a few years ago.
00:04:55
Speaker
when the governor of some small city together with the local mafia, together with the local whoever media, they basically conspired to have the entire town be their stomping ground. They took bribes from all the businesses, had sex with whatever women they wanted. It was like that. So if you've got a country that big, it means that the person who is at the top has to be in complete control.
00:05:23
Speaker
otherwise the people on the ground locally are going to do whatever the crazy stuff they want to do i mean part of russia could break away and be four weeks before you find out about it in moscow you know what i mean so the most important thing and this is the maccyver thing is better to be feared than loved the leader of russia has to be strong and has to be seen as being strong and you see it in the in the polling date i mean the most popular leaders in russia are.
00:05:51
Speaker
vladimir putin cuz he's the current leader and joseph starlet. Who killed millions of his own citizens but in the russian mind made the country strong that's just one superficial aspect of it is a country that was repeatedly occupied first by the mongols and a lot of words in russian that.
00:06:10
Speaker
have to do with corruption and violence and cruelty and all these things. They come actually from that period. We still use words from that period, many words from that period, because the Mongol occupation lasted a long time and had a huge impact on the culture, the way that people behave. The Soviet Union didn't help because what happens in the communist system is that money is not an effective medium of exchange anymore.
00:06:38
Speaker
Because if you can't buy anything with money, then money is not worth anything. What is worth something in the communist system is connections and bribes. And if I can do you a favor, then a month later, I can ask you to do me a favor. And it became all encompassing. And so the corruption that we that you're talking about also comes from that to some extent as well. But if you come back to your earlier question, Vladimir Putin, like any Russian leader who's seen as
00:07:05
Speaker
being strong. He's spent 20 years consolidating his power in Russia, more than 20 years now. He came to power in 1999, when we were all worried about the millennium buck. It was a long time ago, so he's had time to establish himself. But generally in Russia, the leader, elections on Russia is in the democracy, just because the country has elections doesn't mean it's a democracy.
00:07:28
Speaker
And what happens in Russia is that once a leader has been chosen, and he's not chosen by the people, he's typically chosen by his predecessor. So, Vladimir Putin was put into position by Boris Yeltsin. And the deal was Vladimir Putin would leave Yeltsin and his family and his corrupt business partners and whatever alone, let them be.
00:07:52
Speaker
in exchange for being plucked out of nowhere and given complete power. And once a leader becomes leader in Russia, and it's interesting because this will sound like I'm being critical, but even many prominent people in Russia who support the way the system works will say this. In Russia, the leader is kind of considered to be anointed by God. Once you are leader, you can call him president or you can call him the general secretary of the Communist Party.
00:08:18
Speaker
But really he's a czar and a czar is anointed by God and so you have bad czars and good czars and the people don't revolt or rebel because if the leader is anointed by God, well it's an act of God and all you can do is celebrate a good one or endure a bad one.
00:08:39
Speaker
That's part of the reason but the other reason of course is Vladimir Putin as I
NATO's Expansion Debate
00:08:43
Speaker
talked to John Anderson, your fellow Aussie about his show. Vladimir Putin comes into power in 1999 when the country's in an awful, awful mess. I have a sub-stack piece I wrote some time ago called, Why Russians Support Vladimir Putin? And the 90s was the most chaotic and terrible time for most Russian people within living memory.
00:09:04
Speaker
other than world war two which was obviously was probably the worst time in the in the in the experiences of anyone who's left for an extraordinary level of instability corruption crime all sorts of terrible things suicide rate goes up prostitution goes up with because women don't have any other choice some women don't have a choice is not the way for them to make money to survive,
00:09:26
Speaker
The country is suffering from terrorist attacks, fighting a war in Chechnya. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong. In 1998, inflation was 84% financial crisis after financial crisis. And he comes in, and his period in power coincides, and to some extent, it's his achievements, with stabilization of the Russian society, Russian economy. He puts this
00:09:51
Speaker
country that's been humiliated by the collapse of the soviet union by the terrible things that are happening in russia for the subsequent eight or nine years the instability and everything he's seen a russia somebody put an end to that and he's he's got a lot of credit in the bank with people in addition to being anointed by god and you put all that together you know that's why he he is i don't i was gonna say as popular as and he is of course popular with with a large number of people but mainly
00:10:18
Speaker
He has the tacit support of a lot of people for those reasons. There's one comment there that I want to extend on because it's fascinating. That is the history of invasion of Russia as a country and as a geographic area. Because when Putin has used this line that NATO is encroaching upon Russia's borders, we from the Western perspective think,
00:10:40
Speaker
NATO is a defensive alliance. There is no interest in any of the NATO countries to go into Russia. This is pure gaslighting, to use the parlance of our time, from Putin. But what I'm hearing from you is that there may actually be a legitimate instinct, which is rooted deeply in history, that sees that NATO expansion and does fear that this could be a new wave of territorial invasion. Is that fair?
00:11:08
Speaker
I think there's a little bit more nuance to it than that, if you'll allow me to explain. Although the broad brushstrokes are not incorrect. It's slightly more than history. It's also geography. So if you look at a map of Russia, it's over 10 time zones, I think, in Russia. That's how huge the country is.
00:11:24
Speaker
But almost all of the economic, industrial, anything of value, really, other than natural resources, basically. I mean, this is obviously an exaggeration because, you know, you have cities in Siberia and you have cities in the Far East that matter and whatever. But generally speaking,
00:11:43
Speaker
as a shorthand version of explaining it. Almost anything that is of any value in Russia, and almost all the population in Russia, and the big population centers in Russia, are contained within the Western part, the Western European part of Russia, which is a very small sliver of the entire country. So imagine all your wealth was concentrated in one part of the country,
00:12:07
Speaker
and all your industrial manufacturing and your military assets and everything was concentrated in this tiny part of the country that is been historically, as you say, invaded over and over by Napoleon, by Hitler. And the problem is that there aren't really any major natural obstacles between Moscow and the Russian border on the western side. There are no giant rivers. There is no mountain ranges. There is no places where you could bottleneck
00:12:34
Speaker
the enemy army into because of the features of the landscape. It's just planes. You can go on horse, you can go on tanks, you can go on whatever you want. So geographically, Russia is very vulnerable to invasion and has been invaded repeatedly, including within living memory. So from that perspective, it's not so much about NATO encroachment, although NATO encroachment is hardly welcome in Russia. Russia's natural instinct
00:13:00
Speaker
will always be to seek to push its western border as far away from Moscow as possible. So is it true to say that pushing NATO eastwards is something that Russia doesn't like? Absolutely. Is it true to say that if NATO didn't push eastwards, then Vladimir Putin and Russia more broadly would be sitting there living happily and peacefully ever after? It's also not true.
00:13:24
Speaker
In a recent speech, in his later speech that I translated to Putin, he talks about how this big beef with America is they're trying to redo or undo the post-World War II order. When you think about what that means, post-World War II order was essentially yalta, and what was agreed there is
00:13:43
Speaker
the fact essentially that the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin would have complete dominance and subjugation over the entirety of Eastern and Central Europe, up to and including East Germany. Now, if Putin isn't happy that that is no longer the case,
00:13:59
Speaker
then if NATO didn't expand eastwards, didn't incorporate Latvist only Lithuania, I think it's very naive as people sometimes now say, well, if we hadn't expanded eastwards, none of this would have happened. I think it's true to say there would be no war in Ukraine if NATO hadn't expanded eastwards because there would be no Ukraine.
00:14:16
Speaker
It would be the Ukrainian federal subject of the Russian Federation,
Conservative Views on Ukraine
00:14:20
Speaker
of course, but I don't think people play that movie forward either. So it's all bad choices, I'm afraid, because the Russian strategic interest and I've been reading a lot of Alexander Dugan's philosophy. This is a guy they call Putin's brain.
00:14:35
Speaker
who's very revered in Russian political leadership circles. And the guy is very clear. Russia, in order to achieve its geopolitical objectives, Russia needs to control, either through alliances or through military and economic control, the entirety of the Eurasian continent.
00:14:55
Speaker
as in from the English Channel through to the Far East, and up including an alliance or control over Japan, and including an alliance or control over the entirety of the Eurasian continent. That's what they see as the natural order of things where superpowers, these massive blobs
00:15:16
Speaker
Control continents and then there is no conflict because there's no presence of the evil American Atlantic influence on the Eurasian continent and Russia won't be present in North America and America can you know the United States could control that that is the big standoff that's happening here and The question for us in the Western world is is it in our interest to be participating in that and
00:15:43
Speaker
Well, this this leads me on to a part of this story that I'm baffled by, and that is the response of elements of America and particularly elements of the American conservative right. So we've seen 20 years and trillions of dollars go towards less strategically significant and I would say less morally imperative conflicts in the Middle East. And now the same people who were pushing those conflicts are actively hostile towards involvement in Ukraine, or at least a large number of them are.
00:16:13
Speaker
How do you make sense of that shift on the American right? Oh, it's very simple. If Donald Trump had been president while this was happening, they would all be cheering support for Ukraine on. And if, given that it's Joe Biden, then they oppose it because it's, you know, the other guy doing it. I just see it very much as that.
00:16:32
Speaker
There's obviously a lot of disillusionment with, there are these very online people as well who are so frustrated with the way that, and rightly so by the way, with the mainstream media have generally behaved in the last 10, 15 years. We see that these people are not reporting the facts, they're taking sides, they're misrepresenting things, whether that's on COVID, whether that's on Brexit, whether that's on Trump, whether that's on anything. They're not giving us the true picture of what's going on.
00:16:59
Speaker
So a lot of people are rightly asking, are we being told the truth about what's happening in Ukraine? Now, as it happens in this particular instance, the media aren't doing nearly as much lying as they usually do. And so my perspective, I'm out there going, look, guys, I've written the book. There's a whole chapter in the book, as you know, about how we lost trust in the mainstream media.
00:17:18
Speaker
But just because the mainstream media are not to be trusted, that does not mean that everything they say is the exact opposite of the truth. And if they say gravity is real and it pulls things towards the earth, that does not mean that actually the truth is if you jump out of a window, you're going to fly into the sky, flow into the sky. So I think it's largely a Western political thing.
00:17:43
Speaker
where people simply oppose whatever it is that their opponent or their enemy as they now look at it is doing. And I think that's a big part of the explanation why, as you say, people who not only supported what you described as, you know, conflicts where there's a slight lesser moral argument, I would say that the war in Iraq was completely immoral and advocated by a large number of people.
00:18:06
Speaker
People like Tucker Carlson, by the way, who now spends the entirety of his show talking about how we shouldn't do anything in Ukraine, he's the guy who defended the war in Iraq, a completely immoral enterprise. And maybe, by the way, for some of those people, the realization that that was a mistake is why they're now reacting to this in the way that they are as well, because they've confused a war of aggression by the United States.
00:18:31
Speaker
with helping a country like Ukraine defend itself and defend its sovereignty. Which, by the way, I always say to Americans, Ukraine is kind of having like its 1776 moment. It's an invite for its independence. It's having a revolutionary moment where it seeks to throw off the shackles of being dominated by a country that used to control it. If you're an American patriot, you've got to look at them and go, well, that's exactly what we did. Surely we want to support that.
00:18:58
Speaker
That makes sense.
Social Media's Impact on Journalism
00:18:59
Speaker
And this is actually a nice segue into your thoughts around modern media and modern journalism. I have noted down here my first question was going to be, should people trust the mainstream media? But I'm pretty confident of the answer I'd get there after hearing that. So I want to understand more around the rise of the types of activist journalists that you've just mentioned at the expense of that old school model of journalist. Why are we seeing so many, many activists in modern media?
00:19:26
Speaker
Social media. That's why. Social media. I think it's completely changed the game. It's changed how politics is done. I always give this example. I remember I recently watched back a debate from the British House of Commons between a conservative, very posh
00:19:42
Speaker
well-educated he actually went to a grammar school but it doesn't matter he will you make is the guys name and on the other hand on the other side you had john press car who is a working class block who who was from a union background. And they have a debate in which basically will you make is taking the piss out of john press car for not being able to speak properly for not speaking in complete sentences for getting the grammar wrong and whatever.
00:20:06
Speaker
And guess what? John Prescott doesn't play the victim card. He doesn't say, this is the evil, eaten conservatives oppressing the working class man. Look at how they mock us. This is the contempt they have for the working people of this country. He doesn't do that at all. He says,
00:20:23
Speaker
Well on this side of the house of commons we may get the words wrong but we get the facts right or we get the judgment right. The conversation is had in an almost playful way there's a mutual respect going on it's understood that this is almost like a performance in which these two sides jostled with each other but it's not a fight to the death.
00:20:46
Speaker
Now you look at the way political debate is happening and it's very clear that there is no attempt from those people to communicate anything to each other. They are playing to the gallery and the gallery is millions of people on Twitter and on other social media who are going to comment. And so the point then becomes not to communicate, not to persuade.
00:21:06
Speaker
but to prove to your side that you are the best person at destroying the other side that you possibly could be. And they are not going to root for you if you're sensible, if you're reasonable, if you're talking about the facts and the truth. They're going to root for you if you are incendiary, if you are insulting, if you are
00:21:26
Speaker
confrontational these are the things that are gonna do well and i think with media a lot of journalist of realize that factor boring. People want the juicy content of conflict and drama and whatever and also they realize that they have power i mean if you're a journalist and you've gone from writing for some shitty publication and no one reads suddenly you've got a hundred thousand twitter followers.
00:21:49
Speaker
that you feel like, oh, I can make an impact on the world. I can speak to tens of thousands of people and use my, this is the thing that they all think, use my platform. And so that's, I think, where you get it from. I mean, social media has a massive impact on all of this, I think.
00:22:05
Speaker
I can't see an obvious solution. We've seen the same trend in Australian politics. Interestingly, I think most prime ministers of recent years have come in and one of the first things they've said is, I'm promising a kinder, gentler polity. I'm promising discussion and reason and not partisanship. And of course, as soon as the first question time rolls around, it's the same old story.
00:22:29
Speaker
the medium is the message. So if you create a system of I mean, I always say this people respond to incentives. If you create a system of incentives that encourages people to be assholes, most people are going to be assholes. And I and I happily hold my hands up, not happily, but I hold my hands up and say, I am not
00:22:49
Speaker
the person on Twitter that I am in real life. And I fight really hard with myself to try and behave better on Twitter than I most of the time do. But it is a platform that incentivizes you to be an asshole.
00:23:06
Speaker
And everyone is an asshole on Twitter because that's what the incentive structure is. And it's difficult to not fall into that trap. So the only way that's going to get fixed is if we change the medium, the way that we communicate. If the social media algorithms don't reward being an asshole, then people won't be an asshole. And if they do reward people being assholes, people are going to continue to be assholes. That is not going to get fixed by individual people doing anything.
00:23:33
Speaker
We have to work out these very disruptive technologies of social media. We have to work out some way, and I think we will over time, of managing them so that they don't have the huge detrimental side effects that they're having on our society. Because social media is brilliant. It is absolutely brilliant. You and I wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation. I wouldn't have the amazing job that I do now.
00:23:59
Speaker
if it wasn't for social media. It has tremendous advantages for connecting people around the world, for bringing people together for, I have friends and business associates and people, all sorts of things, connections as a result of social media. But we're going to have to work out a way somehow to mitigate the negative side effects of it. Because that's where I think a lot of this polarization is coming. Do you think that Elon Musk is a force for good in this conversation?
00:24:25
Speaker
I think that he has made a broadly positive impact on Twitter. It's not without its threats. I mean, one person being in charge of an institution and a platform of that size has its advantages where he's not able to be entirely consistent. For example, if we talk about something like free speech,
00:24:47
Speaker
You can see that he was trying his best, but he was also allowing his personal feelings and emotions get into it with banning certain people because they trigger him, so to speak. Now, I prefer a benevolent dictatorship in this instance.
00:25:04
Speaker
to the entire corrupt system that we had before, where it was very obscure and unclear how these things were being done. It was clearly politically biased to some extent. There was, as we know from the Twitter files, a lot of collaboration between Twitter executives and all sorts of entities in the American government and business worlds and wherever that I don't think any of us would want to
00:25:27
Speaker
to have so i'm cautiously optimistic about his impact so far in my opinion has been good some of the changes that he's made i personally really like i like the idea of moving to a paid model because it forces people to behave in a slightly better way i think
00:25:45
Speaker
I also like the fact that he's made it possible to post longer videos and the fact that they're working towards making Twitter a platform where content creators like us at Trigonometry can post our content and have it monetized. I like the ideas that he's working on in terms of filtering whereby you're going to get to a point where it's not about blocking and muting people, but you're going to see stuff
00:26:07
Speaker
first, that is much more likely to be the sort of stuff that you'd want to see. Because we talked before we started on the podcast, as your account gets bigger, I have somewhere like 365,000 Twitter followers. Now you get, unfortunately, there is a lot of crap that you have to sift through before you interact with the people who are actually trying to interact with you. And that's the thing I was like about Twitter is interacting with people that I don't know, who don't have a huge following.
00:26:35
Speaker
but you like what I think and my ideas and like interacting with me, I used to love interacting with them. But the bigger your account gets, the more you get just people who are coming in just because they wanna have a dig or whatever, which they're entitled to do, but it clouds the entire experience for me. And so I'm hopeful that he can work out some way of doing that because I also think that would reduce the asshole factor on there because if you're a big account and you're constantly bombarded with people being nasty,
00:27:05
Speaker
it encourages you to think that it's a nasty platform on which you should also act in that way. So the more I think people get to a point where they're not constantly seeing all that crap, the more I think you're gonna get healthier conversations on that. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And it also then just creates the perception on the left that all people who are right-wing are fascists and the perception on the right that all people who are left-wing are woke idiots and you can't ever have that sensible center.
Freedom vs. Safety in Speech
00:27:31
Speaker
You also pointed out, and this is bang on, that
00:27:34
Speaker
This conversation on social media is a thread in a broader conversation around freedom of speech. I'm fascinated looking at the role that the police are playing in the UK when it comes to issues of freedom of speech and specifically how they appear to be increasingly policing thought and words over crimes.
00:27:54
Speaker
So one example in your book came from a writer that you can read in the Spectator Australia, Rod Little, got my plugin, who was reported to the police for saying, and let me get this right. He said that there was a paucity of vows in the Welsh language. And rather than laughing this away, the police commissioner for North Wales referred this incident to colleagues to see if it could be classified as racially motivated. Why are the police buying into this nonsense?
00:28:24
Speaker
Well, because the laws that the politicians are passing on these issues are nonsense. And the police, I think, are attempting to enforce laws that the government is passing and the guidance from the College of Policing, which is telling them that herty words are really what they should be focusing on.
00:28:41
Speaker
That one example, there've been other examples, many examples. There was a guy who shared a meme on his Facebook, which, I mean, it was a distasteful meme, you might argue. He took the rainbow flag and collated it into a swastika and posted it to make a point about how. And the police turned up and they actually arrested the guy. And they arrested a guy called Harry Miller, who we've had on trigonometry.
00:29:06
Speaker
who came there to defend him as well. So the police are enforcing bad laws that our government is passing increasingly often now in order to try and deal with some of the issues that we talked about.
00:29:22
Speaker
You have an equivalent of, I think, the show that we call Question Time here in the UK on ABC. What's it called? It would be Q&A. Q&A, right. And when I was on our version of Q&A, they do a question that they don't release to warm up the panel and the audience.
00:29:41
Speaker
And there was a woman on the panel from the Labor Party. It was around the time that Donald Trump was unbanned from Facebook. The question was, is that OK and whatever? Are you comfortable with Donald Trump returning to social media? And I was like, well, look, I'm not a fan of his. But yes, he's one of the former presidents of the United States. I do think he should be allowed to express himself in public.
00:30:02
Speaker
And there was a woman from Labour next to me who said, look, we have to regulate social media. We want in this country to be the safest country in the world when it comes to social media. And the truth is, these people have no idea. They haven't thought it through because, of course, the safest countries in the world for social media are places like North Korea and China.
00:30:23
Speaker
and now increasingly Russia, where you're not allowed to say anything without being arrested. I just think a lot of politicians, they're not very bright. They haven't thought about this. They think in slogans. Particularly on the left, as Jonathan Haidt talks about, they think of
00:30:42
Speaker
care and harm as a primary way of understanding and in the west with generally forgotten this and our response to covid showed this i think very well we've forgotten that there is a trade-off between freedom and safety you'll never if you optimize for safety,
00:30:57
Speaker
you're going to pay the price and freedom and if you optimize for freedom that has a safety cost to it right there is a trade-off between all these things it's like you know you want to ride a motorbike and have the wind in your hair and whatever well that's freedom
00:31:15
Speaker
But if you really want to be safe, well, you've got to wear some gigantic suit of armor or some kind of massive rubber ball around you or whatever. If you fall off a bike, you're going to be safe. And there's a trade-off there. You wear a helmet. You might wear some leathers or whatever. But generally speaking, you're not actually safe riding a bike, right?
00:31:36
Speaker
And likewise, in every area of society, that trade-off between freedom of safety and safety is something that I'm afraid, it seems to me, we have gone too far in our consciousness, in the direction of safety, and we've forgotten that it comes with freedom. And so when it comes to words in particular, as the left increasingly reframes words as things that can have a physical impact on you, words of violence, it is very natural that the police will then seek to enforce laws that are made on that basis.
00:32:06
Speaker
Should I have the freedom to racially abuse you? I personally think you should, yeah. People don't, people obviously will be freaked out by this, but I personally think that we're two adults. Now, it depends on what you mean racially abused. You know, if you corner me somewhere where I can't leave and you make me perceive that situation as physically unsafe, like you're about to attack me,
00:32:32
Speaker
That's a little bit different. And I don't know how how the law works around that. But if if I. That would be covered as as assault under most Western criminal law. Which is why I make the point, right?
00:32:45
Speaker
But if I go on Twitter and say something, and by the way, what's funny is a lot of lefties actually do this to me. They don't know anything about me, but they know that I'm from Russia, and they assume therefore that I support what's happening in Ukraine and all of this. And they go, well, you're Russian, so why don't you go back there?
00:33:06
Speaker
I don't think that should be illegal. I don't think you should go to prison for calling someone names. Now, should you experience the condemnation of everybody in society? Yes. Should your employer be forced to continue to employ you after they see you racially abusing somebody online? No, I don't think they should.
00:33:28
Speaker
right? But you should have the freedom to do it. Because once we start censoring that, you just continue to go down the slippery slope. And before you know it, you can't have an opinion about a particular group of people. Or you can't, if we're trying to prevent people from being abused, there are fat people now, fat activists trying to claim that saying the word fat or suggesting that being fat is bad for you, or calling someone a chonker or a fatty is hate speech for which you should be prosecuted. Now, do we want to live in that society?
00:33:58
Speaker
I personally don't. This is the critical distinction. We can agree that things are morally bad or nasty, but that doesn't mean that they should be illegal. And I think particularly a lot of young people just can't make that conceptual distinction in their heads. There was a great conversation, a Jordan Peterson interview, and he had a really good argument here. He basically said in Western countries,
00:34:23
Speaker
We haven't really had an existential threat to our liberty since the end of the Second World War. We've forgotten, I guess, how to argue for the importance of freedom of speech on first principles. And some of these recent trends that we've seen, like woke-like identity politics, which do represent a threat to freedom of speech, have seemed to have come on so quickly that we've been completely unprepared
00:34:47
Speaker
for how to say this is why you should allow people to say nasty hurtful things this is why it's to your point we shouldn't allow it on a moral level and it should be morally condemned but we shouldn't be finding people or throwing them in jail for it right and it comes also back to the other thing we talked about which is a culture of prioritizing safety over freedom and that comes from safety ism and that's a generation of children who've been raised to be actually this is what i find very odd
00:35:17
Speaker
When people want to attack me, they'll call me a conservative, which I'm not. But what I find interesting is, if you think about wokeness, it is actually an extremely conservative ideology, and it's very core. You can't do this, you can't say this, you can't offend these people. When I was growing up,
00:35:35
Speaker
The people who were censoring comedians and saying, you can't make jokes about this, you can't mock that, were religious conservatives in America, mostly. And by the way, look at Monty Python here in the UK. Again, they had trouble releasing some of their stuff because it was religious people that got offended, Monty Python and Holy Grail.
00:35:57
Speaker
Wokeness is actually a very risk-averse conservative ideology in some ways. And we are now in a position where we have generations of people who don't seem to understand, as I made the point earlier, that safety has a price.
00:36:14
Speaker
It has a price and that price is usually your freedom. And of course it's about finding the balance between the two. But for me, we've skewed way too far to the side of safety and particularly emotional safety. Like I have very little time for that. I have very little time for that because one of the things that I know is emotional resilience comes from being exposed to things that you don't like.
00:36:37
Speaker
Yes. And if, by the way, you are someone who's experienced difficult things in life and you are, quote unquote, triggered by seeing things, then the answer to that is for you personally to go and deal with that through therapy or some other kind of personal development, not to change the world around you to make you feel more comfortable with reality. That's not going to work.
00:36:57
Speaker
I'm reflecting on your comment around the similarities with old style religious conservatives to the conservatism and the woke agenda. And if there's another one, it is the self-flagellating instinct that you see in so many woke people, which I imagine is similar to some very hardcore religious people paying for their sins.
00:37:18
Speaker
That self-flagellating instinct in a lot of the West is something that you've talked about and you've talked about in your book, and you've noted that it's not globally universal. You won't see the same levels of historic guilt in Asia, in Russia, for example.
Historical Narratives & Western Guilt
00:37:34
Speaker
Where does this self-loathing instinct that we've seen to have adopted in the West come from?
00:37:40
Speaker
I think we have become very uncomfortable with our own success historically, and so we look at things that we did in the past
00:37:51
Speaker
that everyone else also did in the past and we think that us doing it was somehow uniquely evil or bad when the truth is actually we were just more technologically advanced so we were able to do it on a bigger scale and more successfully. Slavery is a very good example of this.
00:38:12
Speaker
Slavery, universal constant throughout human history, every civilization throughout history used slaves, had slaves, never occurred to them that this was morally bad, or if it did, it was like disease. Disease is morally bad, but you're not going to get rid of it, right?
00:38:27
Speaker
And that's how people thought about slavery. And the only thing that makes Western, the two things that make Western slavery different. Number one, technological advancements, the ability to transport huge numbers of people across oceans.
00:38:43
Speaker
in a way that other civilizations weren't able to. However, the Middle Eastern, the trans-Saharan slave trade, which took slaves out of Africa to the Middle East, it actually captured more slaves, treated them much worse, the death rate was worse, it lasted longer, and it only ended because of pressure from the Western colonial powers. So yes, we had better technology, but really the main thing that makes the Western history of slavery different to any other country is we are the ones that ended it.
00:39:11
Speaker
Yes. And a huge amount of blood and treasure to force other countries who were desperate not to end it. Yeah. Yeah. Particularly the UK's role there. If slavery is the great historic guilt for the US, then you'd say that probably colonialism is the great historic guilt in the UK. Yeah. What is your, and this is another big question, how do you reflect on colonialism for good and bad? How do you reflect on it in its entirety?
00:39:37
Speaker
I think that like the transatlantic slave trade, the history of colonialism involves a huge number of terrible crimes and atrocities that we should look upon with horror and regret and learn from them on the one hand. On the other hand,
00:39:52
Speaker
Every great empire in history sought to expand its power, its region, its control over as much territory as they possibly could. Do you think the Ottomans were woke? Is that what we're saying now? Do you think the Russian – look at the map of the world. Do you think the Russian empire was created through people sitting down and having nice chats? Is that what you think happened?
00:40:17
Speaker
Unfortunately, the sad nature of reality is that human beings are bands of chimps that expand to control territory and resources, and are very, very comfortable with killing or subjugating people in order to make that happen, and have always been. So colonialism had terrible elements to it, but it was the way of the world until about two minutes ago. And by the way, as you're seeing in Ukraine, it's still the way of the world.
00:40:43
Speaker
The real tragedy for me is it feels like the fact that there were bad elements of our history, and that goes for the UK, the US, Australia, means that we are now ashamed to talk about the many wonderful things that happened as a result of the rise of Judeo-Christian values and the Enlightenment, all that sort of good stuff. We have, for example, in Australia, I don't know if you've come across this, basically this welcome to country ritual, which is now ubiquitous across sporting events, business meetings, public events.
00:41:11
Speaker
The fact of the matter is I don't have a great deal of personal affinity with indigenous culture, and I think it's disingenuous for me to pretend that I do, but we still have to basically go through this symbolic ritual. If, however, I was to, at the start of a business meeting, say I pay my respects to the heroes of the Enlightenment, or heaven forbid, if I pay my respects to Captain Cook, I'd probably be fired.
00:41:36
Speaker
How did we get to this point in countries like Australia and the UK where we've allowed ourselves to become so ashamed of so many of the good things that we've done in our past? Because we don't teach our history very well. I went to the Slavery Museum in Liverpool.
00:41:52
Speaker
which is in actually in many ways a good museum and learning and you know people go we don't teach about slavery enough and I'm like absolutely we don't except what we mean by slavery is the transatlantic slave trade what we should actually be teaching is slavery in context right but anyway I go to this museum
00:42:10
Speaker
Very good, very emotional, very powerfully delivered. There are people there doing some kind of demonstration, all sorts of stuff. Nowhere in that museum did it inform you about who actually made these people slaves. Nowhere. Nowhere did it tell you that white Westerners were terrified of entering the African continent. And in fact, the slave ships wouldn't even go near.
00:42:36
Speaker
They would go to the poor, get the goods that they needed, including slaves, as quickly as possible, and leave as quickly as possible, because the death rate from the diseases that were common in that part of the world were gigantic. So the people who enslaved the African slaves that were taken to America and elsewhere
00:42:56
Speaker
were the very same people who'd been enslaving them for centuries before, other Africans, because slavery wasn't a racial thing. It was about the strong enslaving the weak, which is how it's been throughout history, right? But we don't teach history very well.
00:43:12
Speaker
And so if you're a young child growing up in this country now the only thing you know about slavery is that we are the only ones that did it and it was very very bad. And we're very very wrong now if that's your perception of of your society then of course you're gonna end up in a position where a lot of people have a self loathing in a self legislation because what i am saying now to you no one wants to say.
00:43:34
Speaker
No one wants to say this in public because they know that they'd get attacked. I get a bit of a pass because I'm not from the UK. I've got a foreign name. I'm a first-generation immigrant, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And because, of course, in writing that part of the book, I rely on people like Thomas Sowell, to me, one of the greatest philosophers and writers in the modern era who happens to be black.
00:43:56
Speaker
Yeah, and there are others too, Orlando Patterson wrote Slaver and Social Death. I mean, the facts of this issue are actually not very conducive to the narrative that we're now being told. But if you shut down anyone who tries to talk about them, then of course you're going to end up in the position that we've ended up in.
00:44:12
Speaker
There's another reason why you can say this and then that is because in some respects you have become through your hard work and your success somewhat uncancellable. True. You've got a committed following and people love that you speak your mind and you now make money out of speaking your mind. Many people listening to this podcast are not uncancellable, quite the opposite.
Countering Cancel Culture
00:44:31
Speaker
And I speak to a lot of these types of people who have office jobs,
00:44:34
Speaker
who if they were to say some of the things that you say very intelligently on your podcast, they'd be fired. What advice do you give to people who are listening to this who are afraid to stand up for what they believe in because they are afraid of being fired or being publicly shamed or any number of negative consequences that may arise?
00:44:52
Speaker
I always had people often ask me this and I always hesitate to give people advice because I never know people's individual circumstances. Only you know what matters to you more. I mean, from my perspective, I do think that it really depends on also on your psychological profile. Like I struggle to keep my mouth shut about things that I think are important. And look, it's true that at this point, I'm
00:45:13
Speaker
It's harder to cancel me than it was at any point in the past. But when I was on the comedy circuit as a stand-up comedian five years ago before we started Trigonometry, the comedy circuit uber woke to the left of Mao and Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin.
00:45:29
Speaker
And I was saying all these things as well when it was clearly to my detriment. But I was saying them because I believe them and I believe in speaking the truth. Now, not everybody wants to abandon a career that they had or be forced out of it or be ostracized in it and have to create something new of their own. So it really depends on where you are. But I think generally speaking, we do need more people to be courageous. And I'm not saying you have to go out and
00:45:53
Speaker
give a seminar on the true origins of slavery or whatever. But whatever it is that you felt strongly about, if you felt strongly during COVID, for example, that the government had gone too far in the way that they were enforcing lockdown rules or the other things that they were doing, I felt it was a duty for people
00:46:10
Speaker
to speak up about it and it doesn't have to be in this kind of provocative or confrontational way. You could just say, you know what, I'm a reasonable person, I can see this from both sides, but I personally don't agree with the approach that we've taken. That's all they take sometimes, and just you don't have to be confrontational and angry. I think that's where you're more likely to get in trouble, is where you've got all these pent-up frustrations about the way society or the culture is going,
00:46:36
Speaker
And you go, all these woke idiots and whatever, like, you don't have to do that. You could just say, I don't want to, whatever, whatever it is, or I prefer not to participate in this thing that you guys are doing. And it's not because I'm angry or I oppose it massively or whatever. It's just not for me.
00:46:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is such an important point. And you mentioned your conversation with John Anderson before. I first heard this line from John Anderson and he said that the cure for council culture is courage culture. And what you're saying here is that that doesn't necessarily mean you have to go out on a limb.
00:47:10
Speaker
but it means that you can rationally put forward your beliefs, but doing it in a courageous way is the only way that we can start to see change in society. I couldn't agree more. Another thing I will say, well, sorry, sorry, before you, just something that occurred to me as well. And this obviously will seem self-serving and to some extent it is, but support the people that do do that.
00:47:30
Speaker
support them financially, support them in other ways, in every way that you can, right? So if you like that we on Trigonometry talk about these issues, make it possible for us to talk about them all because the way we approach it, we generate a certain amount of revenue and we are not going, oh, let's stick that all, let's buy a Ferrari. We hire more staff to produce more content, to get bigger guests, to grow our platform so we can have more of the conversations at a higher level. So if you don't feel comfortable
00:48:00
Speaker
speaking up on things yourself put your hand in your pocket and support people who are because you will make a difference in that way. As an aside to everyone listening all of your links that you need to access trigonometry are in the show notes, couldn't recommend it more. The other thing which comes through this whole conversation so strongly is that you obviously think very deeply about ideology. Let me quickly ask you about the very far left of this ideological spectrum, the communist side which
00:48:26
Speaker
again, has a very deep personal significance to you.
Culture Wars & Privilege
00:48:30
Speaker
I did chuckle reading your book. You characterise Marx and Engels as the archetypal people of privilege. And I thought back to when I lived in London and I was stunned by the amount of blue circles on posh houses that had communist names on them. And Marx was one of those. There is a parallel, I think, with the world today, and that is the culture wars generally are being fought
00:48:55
Speaker
pretty much by very privileged people, but the consequences are felt more acutely by the people beneath them. Why is this the case? Well, I think it's mainly the case in terms of the culture war, because it's only people who don't have a real job that have time to fight the culture war. That's just how it is, I think. But in terms of Marx and Engels, I was making perhaps a slightly different point, which is the set of beliefs
00:49:19
Speaker
that they propagated is only really something that works in theory and therefore is only something that intellectuals can come up with. At a practical level, I don't think that this would have been an easy sell to the ordinary working person because they understand very well from their own experiences and observations that people aren't born with equal talents or equal willingness to apply themselves. And actually, there is generally not a huge amount of support
00:49:47
Speaker
for redistribution of wealth at a high level among working class communities necessarily because they believe in the sort of get on and crack on and make the best of it spirit and they want to be rewarded for their success and they don't want to see the lazy people on their own council estate who don't go to work.
00:50:06
Speaker
rewarded for doing that. And so a lot of our audience of trigonometry are actually from what we call red wall seats, which is mining towns and whatever, because this is where people are concerned about the way the culture is going. But also, they understand that the reason the West is successful is the fact that it historically rewards people who create and build and generate new things and create businesses and industry and so on.
00:50:34
Speaker
They don't want a handout. They want an opportunity to bet on themselves. Yeah, that makes sense. For Australian listeners, the red wall equivalent in Australia would be the quiet Australians, which is a term that popped up in our political lexicon over the last five or six years. There are a million other things we could talk about, but we are running short of time. There is one question, and it's a predictable question, that I am keen to ask you.
00:50:57
Speaker
Trigger fans will know that at the end of every podcast, you and Francis ask your guests, what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
Vision for the Future Beyond Wokeness
00:51:06
Speaker
Constant kiss and what is the one thing that we are not talking about as a society that we should be?
00:51:12
Speaker
positive vision for the future. Some of us are talking about it. Jordan Peterson is talking about, in fact, he's starting some kind of organization that seeks to shape that. Michael Schellenberg is thinking about it. I've been talking about it for a while now, a bunch of people are, but not enough. We have to get past the
00:51:34
Speaker
woke people or idiots phase into what are we for? Why should you be on our, if there is a side that is our side, why should you be on it? What is it that we're offering? If I'm a young person and I hear all these guys in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s criticizing wokeness, okay, cool, you've told me wokeness is bad, fine. Let's say I accept that. Now what?
00:51:57
Speaker
Now what, what do I do? What am I supposed to do with my life? I'm 20 years old, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to think? What is the psychological journey I should be on? What are the right traits that I should be working on to develop in myself to advance in life? What are some of the life choices that I ought to look at in terms of family and money and jobs and attitudes and what I should do with myself and how I should think about the world?
00:52:25
Speaker
We haven't done nearly as good a job as we should be doing of articulating some of that. In 22 or 23 generations ago, maybe, the only focus that people had is, how do you survive? How do you get a job that is going to allow you to earn a living and feed your family? Well, we've got to a point where largely everybody's going to be OK on that front. You know what I mean? You're going to be all right in the West.
00:52:51
Speaker
Now the question for a lot of people is how do you find work that is fulfilling for you? How do you live a life that is fulfilling for you? And increasingly we see that young people are not living lives that are fulfilling for them. The levels of anxiety and depression and medication and all of that are going through the roof. The dating market, so to speak, is not making people happy, right?
00:53:12
Speaker
So what is it that is going to make you happy? What are the ways of thinking, the ways of being, the ways of behaving that will give you that fulfillment that you crave as a young person? That's the conversation I think we should be having.
00:53:26
Speaker
There's the outline of another very, very good book, I think, in that answer. An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West is one of the most insightful and important books I think I've read in a long, long time. I can't recommend it highly enough to our listeners.
Conclusion & Subscription Promotion
00:53:41
Speaker
We will include links to trigger in the show notes, all of your socials, all that good stuff. Thank you for coming on Australiana and please keep having these conversations with Francis because it is an incredibly important piece of our now global debate.
00:53:56
Speaker
Constant kiss and thank you very much. Well, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get the first month absolutely free. That will probably also be the case if you sign up tomorrow, but I'm told creating a sense of urgency is important in sales.