Latest / Thinking Class / #125 - Theodore Dalrymple & Rob Henderson - The Ideas That Claimed To Help Britain & America's Poor And Made Everything Worse

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#125 - Theodore Dalrymple & Rob Henderson - The Ideas That Claimed To Help Britain & America's Poor And Made Everything Worse · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam, and in this episode, I'm speaking with two people I have been wanting to bring together for some time, Theodore Dolrymple and Rob Henderson.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Anthony Daniels, also known as Theodore Dolrymple, was, before retiring in 2005, practicing at City Hospital and Winson Green Prison in Birmingham.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Daniels is a contributing editor at City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weisman Fellow.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: His writing has also appeared in the British Medical Journal, The Times, The New Statesman, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, The National Review, The New English Review, and The Wall Street Journal.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Theodore has authored numerous books, including Life at the Bottom.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: The 25th anniversary edition is out now, Our Culture, What's Left of It, and Spoiled Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the memoir Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family and social class, a national bestseller selected by The Economist as one of the best books of 2024.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Henderson is best known for coining the concept of luxury beliefs, ideas that confer status on the educated class, while the costs are borne entirely by those at the bottom.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Rob has written the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of Life at the Bottom.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, we think out loud about what the book got right, why the ideology it diagnosed has spread upward through the culture, what luxury beliefs are doing to the people they claim to help, and what a serious individual level response to all of this might actually look like.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: If you find this conversation valuable, please subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack, and share this podcast with someone who ought to hear it.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Theodore Dolrymple and Rob Henderson Theodore Dolrymple, or should I say officially Dr.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Anthony Daniels and Rob Henderson.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, John, real pleasure.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's my pleasure, and uh I'm delighted to be able to welcome you twenty-five years on from a book written by uh you, Tony, um, a doctor working in the hospitals and prisons of of Birmingham.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you you described uh that the culture of the British underclass was not one just about poverty as material conditions, but it was also a moral and cultural issue.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh self-destruction was habitual, families had disintegrated, and our educated classes here in Britain seemed to look away in the name of compassion.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I I'd contend that I don't think the book is dated.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: If anything, the the underclass, uh and I know that term will be contentious for some people, seems to be growing, both in Britain, our country, and perhaps Rob, you might agree in in your own, but I I don't want to presume.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: And Britain's slums certainly seem to be expanding.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: American cities can can degrade in ways that I think would be unrecognizable for a country of its wealth.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: And there seems to be an ideology that sits beneath it all, which uh Tony, you and I have spoken about before.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Non-judgmentalism, moral relativism, um this tolerating the intolerable, you know, not naming destructive behaviour as destructive.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's it seems to have gotten everywhere now.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's part of the general culture.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, Rob, you've you've grown up inside the world that Tony documented in some way.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: You grew up in foster care, you have grown up in an impoverished background, and have had uh a flavor of the American version of those institutions.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And and you are now one of the most original thinkers on the educated class now.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's it's highly prescient that you're both here to talk about it, this this book, 25th anniversary edition.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Rob, you've written the forewords to it.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps Tony, we can we can start with you.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: So when you wrote the book, which I know is a series of of essays, uh, you you were describing something that most of the educated classes uh didn't really want to see.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh 25 years on, what did you th do you think the book got right?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And do you think anything has changed?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Have things gotten worse?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh in a way I'm not in a position to say whether anything has changed because my my life has changed and what I do has changed, and therefore I don't have contact with that world that I once had.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: But I would be rather surprised if it had changed fundamentally.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: There are of course things that have changed.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I didn't know anything about social media.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, I still know very little about social media since I don't practice any of that myself.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: But um that no doubt has changed things.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: I doubt in that uh milieu for the better.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um so uh I I was surprised that actually uh what has surprised me is that foreign uh countries have been interested in the book, and perhaps the most the most flattering, if I can put it like that, the most flattering comment I had was in Brazil, where the book uh sold uh quite a lot um for Brazil, and um it was in an audience uh most uh usually the average age of my audience is ninety-five.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: But uh in Brazil it was perhaps twenty-five or between twenty-five and thirty.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: And some people came up to me who had been born in the Favelas of Sao Paulo, which of course are pretty rough, although they're not the roughest in Brazil, and they said that what I had described in the book uh was what they experienced uh in uh Sao Paulo.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I I thought that possibly the book was of uh uh greater relevance than I thought, because originally I was very first I was very surprised that anyone would publish it or thought it would be interesting to publish, and secondly I was surprised that um other countries became interested in it.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: For example, the Netherlands.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh their interest, Tony, is that presumably if they were a of a younger audience, r it's not necessarily because they're going, wow, look at the problems in Britain, we thought they were so it was so well put together.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's more that they're seeing their own experience.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: But uh does that mean that they are seeing the same ideological approach to uh institutional uh care, so to speak, uh where there's non-judgmentalism sitting at the bottom of it and material poverty is put down as the reason for uh you know bad flight.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Violence and breakup of family and all that kind of thing, yes.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it actually goes beyond the anglosphere.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yes, I I think so.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: And uh uh uh it's been published in France and uh people recognise it in France as well.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: So it's uh I I think it's a problem probably in most Western societies, though it is in my experience the worst in Britain.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Rob, you you uh in some ways came from inside the world that the the book describes.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh when you first read the book, what was the experience like?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Was there a recognition like the Brazilians that Tony's describing?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh is that is there anything that you uh could add about what you saw from within on the other side of the institution?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well I first came across Tony's work.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I stumbled across an essay in City Journal, and I was in college at the time, undergrad, and I was an older student.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was 25 years old.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, took a long detour uh before I arrived in higher education.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: I um you know describe uh uh various essays and in my uh book Troubled uh that I had grown up in foster care and then um uh struggled to complete high school and then uh enlisted in the U.S.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Air Force and then uh at the age of 25 finally uh matriculated uh to Yale.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And at on campus, I encountered a lot of strange, uh to me bizarre, peculiar ideas that I had never heard before.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, in the foster homes, growing up in this dusty working-class town in Northern California, and then in the military.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then I arrive at Yale and I see people who had grown up with enormous wealth and privilege and advantage uh expressing these strange ideas about uh decarceration and how we need to open the prisons and how uh uh crime is not a serious concern, and that uh we should all be practicing open polyamorous relationships and that marriage should be completely dismantled as an institution.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I you know clicked around online, eventually came upon the archive of Tony's City Journal essays and started reading them, and then I Googled him, found that he had written uh uh this book, Life at the Bottom, and purchased it immediately and read through the essays, and uh was uh just stunned that someone like Tony, who um, in many ways grown up sort of the opposite of me, came from sort of the other side of the socioeconomic spectrum, uh, but through spending so much time with uh members of the underclass and people who had struggled, um, articulated uh a lot of the societal problems and how uh how this mechanism worked uh from people who are educated at elite universities who espouse these ideas and how they eventually start to um you know infect the institutions and the mindsets of everyone else, um, offering convenient justifications for misconduct and misbehavior.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and yet when that misbehavior starts to destabilize society or cause real harm, uh the very people who peddle these ideas are sheltered from the consequences.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the people who have the most influence are the least uh affected by uh a lot of those negative influences.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: I had a professor uh uh uh in college, uh the historian John Gaddis, and he uh liked to say that common sense is like oxygen, the higher you go, the thinner it gets.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, in spending a lot of time with the graduates of these elite universities, they seemed to have lost touch with common sense, or perhaps they did have some common sense, but it was unpopular to say uh what was true, and they convinced themselves that um uh ideas that that are harmful could actually be um uh beneficial for the people they claim to care about.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Tony, um you you, as we've described already, or intimated toward uh have said that um you were documenting not primarily material poverty, uh, but it was a cultural pathology that had taken root in Rob's gone some way to describe that.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you you talk about your own father's experience, you grew up in in an English slum, and um you you rather humorously wrote at the beginning of one of your essays in Life at the Bottom that um uh material poverty being a reason for bad conduct hadn't hadn't yet filtered through to him, which is why he ended up coming out of the slum knowing fluent Latin, German, French.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: He was you know effectively part of an autodidact tradition.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh I suppose Rob you your your own trajectory you latched on to something similar a little bit later once you got out of that that culture, which I I can recognise living having grown up in northern England, where uh there's this um there's a kind of coolness in not being too keen, uh being disinterested.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh Tony, I know you've written a lot about this where um you've dealt with so many people who never wanted to show they've got interests in things or to try too hard because they'll be told that they're trying to get above their their station.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: And um I suppose uh my my question then, and um Rob will go to you first is do you do you think that the the people who have created the conditions culturally um and they hold these ideas uh that they believe are compassionate um but they wouldn't do them themselves?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think they have any idea that they're actually the ones creating the conditions for pulling the ladder up on people and and almost incarcerating them in their own circumstances in ways where they wouldn't have done before?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I most of them I think are sincere.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: They have convinced themselves that uh defunding the police or dismantling marriage would somehow be beneficial for everyone.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: I just attended a debate here.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I live, you know, I live in New York and I attended this debate on uh whether porn, pornography, is a net harm or a net positive for society.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And on the uh uh pro-porn position, there was a woman who claimed she simultaneously attempted to make two arguments.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: One was that porn is beneficial for society.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and the reason why so many women get into porn is because we live in an inequitable society.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so society is inherently unjust.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so people complain about these women who uh go into the adult industry.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if we had uh a more equitable and fair and just system, so many women wouldn't be going in in the first place.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so she was celebrating pornography while simultaneously saying uh, you know, this this industry would wither away if we just had full-on communism.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um and both of these ideas are terrible, communism and you know, I think sort of the widespread availability of pornography, but she was attempting to make both of these arguments for both at the same time.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and she, I have no doubt in her mind she was sincere.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think she fully believed that what she was saying made perfect sense to her and that it would be beneficial for society.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um at the same time, I have met people who are cynical and duplicitous, and uh, especially at the height of the um Black Lives Matter movement, the progressive fervor that took hold in the summer of 2020 and into 2021.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I knew people personally who would tell me uh obviously defunding the police is a horrible idea, but they would still um post the right slogans on social media because they were afraid of losing their jobs or their employment prospects or out of reputational concerns.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so there was a fair bit of dishonesty going on.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, things got so crazy during that time that even if you if you, depending on the industry you worked in, uh, I'm thinking of uh certain journalism jobs or jobs in academia or in Hollywood, if you posted something as Anaki was as I actually like the police, uh, your job could potentially uh be at stake.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, people were uh, you know, they were lying or or concealing their opinions for professional and for social reasons.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: I've just been reading uh a book uh ahead of an interview with Professor Jonathan Rose at True University, and it's also from a similar period, Tony, to your book called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: It is an a magnificent book, and it effectively shows that um there was a time, a very long time, over a hundred years, where there was this autodidact tradition that had organically grown amongst the working classes of Britain.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't told to go and read the classics or learn about English civilization and read widely, but they just they wanted to, and then they they formed societies and associations.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, the reason why I bring it up is that in their societies and associations that they created so they could all have widespread access to material and knew that they could better themselves and maybe one day engage in the political process and further their own interests.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it wasn't in a kind of lazy communist uh uh class uh war aspect, but rather, no, we there's there's a way of imbuing ourselves with dignity here.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: You can read so many uh extracts from people's diaries talking about these lights switching on and how life suddenly became so much more interesting and they started to see so much more meaning and purpose in it.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was much better than just having a factory job and doing nothing outside of it.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um but anyway, those societies that they formed, they they pretty much 100% of the time were just a free-for-all, proper freedom of expression.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: You can say what you want, get everyone read a passage, go away for a week, think about it, come back and talk about it.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: And there are there there were similar institutions that were set up by the middle classes, um, like mechanics institutes, and there's one just down the road from where I'm living right now, beautiful building, uh, and it now doesn't get used for anything like its initial intent, which was a kind of social club.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's more like ballet classes for the local kids.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um but anyway, they they pretty much again to uh to an institution would say there there are you can talk about everything but politics uh and religion.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: So they wanted to be able to control uh the kind of religious conversation that were being had and the type of political uh debates that were being had.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of seems like this just seems to roll into different eras.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I've spent a lot of time around the corporate world, and there's lots of talking around subjects and using corporate buzzwords, but you're definitely, definitely not allowed to start bringing up anything that might cut against that cosmopolitan worldview.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: It usually ends pretty badly.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh I just I just wonder um how we get ourselves back to a point where um we're able to start acting with agency once more because it feels like there's quite a lot of stuff out there, a lot of resources quite literally to be had.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and yet we have become decidedly less interested in in some of these things.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps we've come to believe that our lot is set by our circumstances.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a bit of an earlier question than I'd I'd hoped to to ask it, but um Tony, what what do you what do you make of a world the world that we're in?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think we're we've kind of we're living in a world without agency, trying to lift ourselves up, that we've we've stripped ourselves of dignity in various ways?
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't I suppose it depends who you mean by we.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't really feel this myself.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't and I don't believe that I mean I think what has happened is uh amongst certain intellectuals is that they divide the world into people with agency and those without.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: And um and people like themselves have agency and therefore it is their job uh to rescue the people without agency, because if they left to themselves uh they will do terrible things, which turns out of course to be true, but not for the reason that uh that they um uh that they thought.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: Now I think the the uh the change is actually from a class society into a caste society, so I think it's actually uh now more difficult to probably probably to emerge from uh from uh a poor background uh and and move higher up than it was because people don't offer any model of how that should be done or can be done.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: And certainly schools don't do it very much.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: Though recently I went to a school in in uh in London, uh in the suburbs of London, you've probably heard of Catherine uh Burbelsing.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well her her view is that uh people who come from any unprivileged backgrounds uh can participate in um how can I put it higher things, shall we say.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: And um and of course not everybody will take the opportunity.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: That that has always been the case.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: But some people will take the opportunity, will grasp the opportunity.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that has a m it has a very important uh effect because it makes people think this is a just society in which no obstacle is actually being put in your place.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: There are obstacles.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I have nothing against facialism.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: Fatalism.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: One way to deal with life.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: What is terrible is fatalism and discontent.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: When you call fatalism and discontent, that is a terrible mixture, and that I'm afraid is what we have in a large part of the British population.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: But incidentally, going back to what you first you first mentioned, I don't like the idea of the underclass because I think that um that um that uh makes one think of uh think of um Marx's um uh London proletariat and if and and it's five percent and if it uh it doesn't really matter because we're rich enough we can afford uh five per cent of the population and it's hard luck on them, but nevertheless it's not disastrous to the whole society.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that is um an adequate description of what goes on in Britain.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't like the idea of the underclass.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, on this point, uh John, if I could just say you know, this this point about uh whether we're stripping ourselves of agency.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I I like Tony, I don't feel that way about myself.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and generally I agree with this idea that uh the intellectuals, the um, you know, in the US context, this kind of upper middle class, they view themselves as having agency.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I am noticing this shift now in the US where young people, uh current university students and recent graduates are themselves um starting to take on this belief that that they don't have agency.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: They have been immersed in this kind of quasi-Marxist, woke uh ideology of it's you know, everything is due to unjust systems.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're seeing that in elite universities, increasing numbers of students are claiming to be disabled.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: And many of them will openly acknowledge that they do this for purely selfish reasons.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: They will shop around for a diagnosis of ADHD or anxiety or depression, and this allows them multiple benefits uh such as um more spacious accommodations on campus, longer time to take their tests, um, extensions for deadlines for assignments.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they justify this by saying, well, the system is inherently unfair, so it only makes sense for me to game the system and get as much benefit out of it as I possibly can.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so for the longest time, you know, the elites would um create moral justifications for the misbehavior of poorer people with that same logic of, well, the system is unfair, so what can you expect from them?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they've been put upon, they've been beleaguered, they've been treated unfairly.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so, of course, it's okay for them to commit crimes and misbehave.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: But what's strange is that they're now applying those same justifications to their own behavior.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're exonerating themselves using that logic of an unfair system, so it's okay for me as a student at Harvard to claim to have ADHD and get a fake diagnosis so that I can uh obtain all of these unfair advantages for myself.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think uh I think actually the problem uh is slightly more severe than that.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh because I think uh if you if you um uh play a part for long enough, it eventually becomes what you are.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I uh probably won't agree with me here, but I think that uh the psychologization of life and the psychiatrization of life has played a large part in this, together with uh a rather peculiar um admiration for victimhood as such.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: So uh if the victim is the hero, uh then uh everyone aspires to victimhood.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I know uh and it's very beguiling because I've I've done it myself a little bit uh in my life, and it was only when I stopped doing that that I I became happy.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: So um so I would say that actually what we're seeing here is a kind of um uh a dog uh uh uh chasing its own tail.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: So we have more and more diagnoses, more and more people pandering to those diagnoses, and so the diagnoses constantly increase.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: I agree, I agree.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: I spoke to a professor of classics at a uh at uh an Ivy League university, and he says that now twenty percent of uh students claim uh some kind of um disability.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Disability.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: And uh he cannot challenge it.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: If he if he were to challenge it, he would uh lose his job.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the claims of disability among university students in the U.S.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: uh it's it's more than doubled uh in the last 20 years.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: Some universities like Stanford, uh it approaches 40 percent of students who claim to have a disability.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: And these are not hard to obtain.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And especially if you come from a family of means, your parents can go to different uh doctors and clinical psychologists, and you know, you you uh uh pull the lever long enough, you'll eventually hit the jackpot, and one of these doctors will give you the diagnosis you seek.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um then they can go to the Trevor Burrus, then you'll have to go to many, frankly.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're probably right.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh you know, there was an article about this phenomenon in the Atlantic a few months ago, and uh this reporter asked professors at these universities um, you know, where do you think we're going with this of all of these students claiming to be disabled?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh some of the professors said, well, it won't be long before we reach uh the threshold that crosses 50%, where more than half of the students will claim to be disabled.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and there's no one who is willing to challenge this, right?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because we live, as Tony said, this this glorification of victimhood, but also um we've all uh tacitly agreed that we're never going to challenge any individual student's claim of this diagnosis of mental health.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so they'll just accept every one of these.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um I spoke with a couple of students at Yale Law School about this, and we were discussing, you know, I asked them what is there a solution to this.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: They started thinking of um, you know, regulations, policies.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh maybe if we had a um a clear uh a sort of uh uh a benchmark, no, you know, once we reach a threshold of 30%, we cannot uh accept any more claims of disability, something along those lines.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to get the playmate first.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, then everyone will frantically start to submit their claims immediately.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think uh to Tony's earlier point about uh role models and examples, more so for you know poor kids, kids from low-income environments, deprived and dysfunctional areas, but you know, I think that's uh we're getting to the point now where even affluent privileged young people require some standard, some role model, some adult to say that's not the proper way to behave.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think that if we had um you know uh uh well-known professors, public intellectuals, uh university presidents, just someone saying, look, we have no way to obviously verify which of these claims is true or false.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if all of you submitted uh uh claims of disability, we can't challenge you on it.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: But we are holding you to a high standard.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: We admitted you to this university because we see potential for excellence, and uh we are trusting you to have strong enough character to be honest, because if you claim to have a disability, you're taking resources and accommodations away from those who truly are suffering.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And to just be clear and honest about this and to uh you know confer a bit of trust and confidence in these students and remind them of what their role is in society.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: You're the future ruling class, you are going to be running the institutions, and you have a duty to be honest, but we don't believe in those things anymore.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: We don't believe in things like duty and honor and sacrifice and honesty.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um all of those old virtues are unpopular, they're unfashionable.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't expect any of these older um authority figures to give a speech like that to the students anytime soon.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell We have more invalids than were created in the First World War.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean what what does what does all of that do to a culture over time?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because we we started off talking about the uh the life at the bottom, how uh people were making excuses for not having agency for poor decisions and that and that and uh and not just poor decisions, you know, violence against wives and girlfriends and those wives and girlfriends hanging around or drug use or just the abuse of the abuse of children, the never holding things down, being fly likely to fly off the handle in social situations who don't like to be challenged.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: And now we're we're talking about actually the people who are paying a pretty penny from some some decent backgrounds, who are, as you've pointed out, Rob, going to be our rulers one day, uh are now running the same code.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I I think I have pointed out, maybe not in uh Life at the Bottom, but in some other book, that actually uh what is what has happened is what the French call the return of the lift or the elevator.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: So what started as an influence downwards is now an influence down upwards.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: So uh and you can see this in all kinds of ways, i including I mean I I'm a bit of a fanatic about this, but but um uh um in the the vogue for tattooing uh when I was when I was uh young, um which is quite a long time ago now, um um uh tattooing was well I I don't think I would have known anyone who was tattooed.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I noticed the vogue for it.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think I again I was one of the early reb early recognizers of this phenomenon back in the nineteen nineties, where people who uh uh of a social uh class or standing were becoming to you know, getting themselves tattooed who would never have got themselves tattooed um uh earlier, uh only a a few decades earlier, um even a decade earlier.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I wondered whether what this was uh what this represented was an attempt at identification uh with uh with the with uh with the suffering uh classes because of course tattooing used to be, I mean it was sailors, but it was also particularly uh prisoners.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: It was a different kind of tattooing, it was self-inflicted, um very simple.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: But but that's what I I wondered whether it can't that can't be the explanation anymore, because in the United States about 33% of the population is of the adult population institute.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well the the tattooing thing is interesting uh because now you're you're seeing uh uh there's a trend now among celebrities where they're having their tattoos removed.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so Pete Davidson is a well-known actor.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there was a big story about him.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: He used to be covered in tattoos, and uh he was recently seen in a short-sleeve t-shirt, and uh his tattoos had been removed.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so now you're seeing and this is this links to uh uh this idea that I've been developing luxury beliefs of these ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent and inflict costs on people lower on the socioeconomic ladder, where you know they promote this idea of tattoos as being interesting and trendy.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: They sort of picked it up from the underclass and then popularized it.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then when they themselves tire of this trend, they can afford to get these tattoos removed.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, people who uh were um impressionable and got these tattoos because Hollywood celebrities said that they were the right thing to do, they are uh not in a financial position to have their tattoos removed.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, tattooing Yes, right.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I also wonder if there's this there's this interesting thing happening with tattoos where, as you mentioned, Tony, so now so many people have these.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: They are no longer associated with um uh the criminal underworld or prison inmates, uh, such that now if you are uh a member of the criminal underworld or you want to signify your um belonging to a criminal gang, in decades past you could do this with simple tattoos, you know, maybe just one on your upper bicep or uh maybe a neck tattoo, something small and simple, but but clearly uh identifiable.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: But now that uh ordinary middle class people have those tattoos, what I see with criminals now and with inmates is they have to tattoo their entire face and their entire body, something that it's a very costly signal because a middle class person would never tattoo their entire face, uh, no matter how interesting or cool they thought tattoos were.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so criminals actually have to make themselves even more uh unsightly uh in order to signal their membership in this criminal underworld.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and this is entirely the fault of the upper middle class.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh had they never gotten tattoos, a simple tattoo for a criminal would have been more than enough.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yes.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in the town in which I live, there's a kind of um how can I say um uh an example of Keynesian economics, because there's one brother on one side of the road who does tattoos, and his brother on the other side uh removes tattoos.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: As a business model, this this is absolutely uh magnificent.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: Although uh the actually uh interestingly, in England anyway, uh removal of tattoos is much more regulated than tattooing in the first place.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um because they're subjected to lasers and and they have all kinds of health conditions which are not which are not inquired into when people have tattoos in the first place.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, that that's beside the point.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: However, I I do remember in n I used to go to Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park in London, and uh I don't know whether you know what that is in uh Rob, but it was an area a little area in h um Speaker's Corner where people got up on their soapboxes and said whatever they wanted.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well there was a man there who didn't speak, he never spoke a word, but what he would do was stand on his soapbox and undress, and he was covered into twos.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: And everyone would go, ooh and ah and la And now of course we find that there are uh celebrities.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh unremarkable at this point to be covered that way.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well you're giving me a business idea, Tony.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'll uh I'll start to uh dispense uh drugs and you can open a rehab clinic, and together we'll get rich.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: I write books about it all.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um Rob, you you brought in the luxury beliefs framework.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh some people will be familiar with that already.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: You've described it uh very succinctly, much more succinctly than I could and was going to, so thanks for that.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why don't we talk about some examples of luxury beliefs?
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: I know we've covered some today, but what do you think might be some of the most harmful luxury beliefs that are uh prevalent in our culture?
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh yeah, just for for the listener, uh you'll repeat the luxury beliefs, these are ideas and opinions that uh uh confer a special status from uh the speakers or the expressor of this belief, it confers status from their peers.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but once these ideas and opinions uh uh start to become implemented into policy or throughout the broader discourse that these will have uh penalties for people uh who are less fortunate.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh one core feature of luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so I I just mentioned one uh uh earlier, uh defund the police.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this was a very popular movement that took hold uh in the US.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's it's a bit passe now, but when I started writing about luxury beliefs in 2019, um occasionally someone would ask me, what's the next luxury belief?
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: What's what's the next one on the horizon?
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I made a couple of guesses, but I said, you know, it's it's impossible to predict these things.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: I know, you know, regardless of how much money you would have offered me, I know I with certainty I would have never guessed that in a matter of months uh you would see in the pages of the New York Times, yes, we literally mean abolish the police.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I just it it was unthinkable to me as um uh uh misguided or uh depending on how cynical you are, how corrupt our um our elites are, I just never would have guessed that they would start to celebrate defunding the police as an idea.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so we saw uh from 2020 to 2022 this sharp increase in uh violent crime, in homicides and uh aggravated assaults, sexual assaults.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the majority of those victims were poor and marginalized people, the very people that um our modern elites claim to care about.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I also saw this uh inconsistency.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so they're espousing defund the police, but then they themselves often lived in gated communities.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you look up the zip codes of these people and they live in uh affluent suburbs, far removed from crime.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there were reports uh uh here in Manhattan of rich families uh uh fleeing to the Hamptons uh or going down to Florida and uh wealthy families in Chicago hiring off-duty police officers to patrol their neighborhoods.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um meanwhile, of course, on social media, they were saying we need to dismantle law enforcement.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and so as a consequence of this, the the fervor of this movement, many police departments did have reduced funding.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it also uh created this atmosphere of disdain for police officers.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, it in many cases they were uh either officially ordered to uh uh uh withdraw or to not enforce the law uh unless a violent crime was ongoing.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um shoplifting was uh essentially decriminalized in parts of California and in other major cities in the U.S.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so a lot of small businesses shut down, um, a lot of stores in low-income neighborhoods had to close, um, which indirectly uh penalized the law-abiding members of these poor communities who need access to those stores, but because the criminal element uh was essentially given a license to steal, um, everyone who was not a criminal was punished.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, meanwhile, the criminals went unpunished.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so you know there just made everything um much worse for these people.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, no one will ever be held accountable for this.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: No one will ever apologize.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was only in uh late 2022 and early 2023 you started to see these reports of um journalists um starting to be uh there were a couple of stories, one in Philadelphia and one in New York.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: Journalists were killed.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there was a video, a horrifying video of one journalist who was beaten to death in New York.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then there was a tech executive uh in San Francisco who was stabbed on the street.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: And these stories got a lot of attention in the media.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then as a result, you started to see cities like New York and San Francisco and Philadelphia start to reverse these defund policies and start to um return their support or you know uh for law enforcement.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it was only when it started to sort of trickle upward and start to affect these people that they recognize that, oh, maybe crime is actually something undesirable after all.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the attitudes.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is of course that crime is a kind of uh uh is a form of spontaneous social security uh for the poor.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well Rob, you you I I've noticed have just been posting about another New York New York Times zinger about um shoplifting.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe maybe you can describe that better than I can.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean it's uh I again I can never predict these things.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: I there there was a book a few years ago uh at the height of the 2020 riots, uh there was a book called Indefensive Looting.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and it got uh airtime in NPR and in the Atlantic and some prestige media outlets, but the public reaction was so um uh negative that it was very quickly memory-hold.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: And people don't remember that this book uh existed.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but just a few days ago in the New York Times, they um published this interview with Gia Tolentino, who's a writer at The New Yorker, and this other guy, Hassan Piker, who's a socialist podcaster who's got a large online following.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: And they're both essentially far-left socialists.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole New York Times piece was how um petty theft is the newest form of political protest.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: And they coined this phrase micro looting.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, it's looting, but it's micro.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a big deal.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay to go to your local Whole Foods and uh pilfer a few things uh if you want to shoplift, as long as it's from a major corporation, then it's excusable because it's a political act.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and they, I, you know, I read this interview and it was so absurd where they said, you know, if you're stealing because you want the rush, because it's exciting, because it's transgressive, um, you know, maybe that's not so great.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're stealing as a political act because you're trying to force change in an unjust system, then it's perfectly fine.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's the kind of mindset and action that we need to take to um fix this broken and unjust uh economic structure we live in.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: How is it fair that Jeff Bezos has so much money uh but you're not allowed to shoplift?
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: That was essentially the logic.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: Provided you uh shoplift uh um organic.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's uh right.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: It uh you can shoplift certain ideas.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what's funny is these these very same people um supported the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, even long after we recognized that the lockdowns were having extremely limited effect uh in terms of uh uh preventing the spread of COVID.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: But they supported these lockdowns and a lot of small businesses shut down because they couldn't afford the economic cost of uh uh maintaining their business when no one was allowed to go outside.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a result, uh only the major corporations um were able to endure those lockdowns.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: So Amazon and Whole Foods and so on.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're saying, okay, well, small businesses will support a policy that shuts the small business down.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're going to support action that will hurt the mega corporations.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of this just seems to be these people don't like when others make money, especially when others make more money than themselves.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because what's funny is Hassan Piker is a millionaire.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's a rich person, and he's saying we need to we need to stick it to the rich.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you see this so often that the people who uh support eating the rich, uh taking out the rich, it's us against the 1%, billionaires shouldn't exist.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you start digging into their their background and you discover that they are millionaires themselves or they're the sons or daughters of millionaires.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: But uh is there a kind of um um displa uh misplaced guilt about that, do you think?
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I think there's a a little bit of the misplaced guilt and also uh this wanting to um redirect any anger away from themselves.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but you know, I think it just goes to so much of what you write about, Tony, is that they have a misunderstanding of uh human nature that they believe that the only reason anyone would misbehave is because they live in an unjust system.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, if if if we live in an inequitable society, then of course people are not going to be able to behave properly.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we just need to redistribute the wealth.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell That of course explains why Adam ate the apple.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: He lived in an unjust society.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and so they think that if you if you just um you know repair or you know essentially implement some version of socialism or communism, you wouldn't have crime anymore.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: But what's funny is those same people will say uh the only reason someone would commit a crime is because they are poor and because we live in an unequal society.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: Those same people who say that are also the first who say that, well, actually the rich are the real criminals.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the billionaires are are are the ones who are who are actually the ones we should be uh punishing and imprisoning.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're they're simultaneously saying the only reason you commit a crime is if you're poor and the real criminals are actually the rich.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because they have agency.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_02: But uh no, Tony, go on.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: I was going to say I wonder whether the I I don't suppose vogue is quite the right word, although I think possibly it is, for uh transsexualism is of the same order.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's say it's an in-fashion thing.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the the people who support this, they also have the means to potentially reverse whatever um, you know, hormonal or surgical.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in some cases it's irreversible, but to the extent it is, these people can do this for their own children.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's irreversible for someone else.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: Oh friends.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_02: So uh I I I mean it is absolute to m to my mind it's absolutely extraordinary.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the I I quote this quite often is that if you look at the um the the the um the statistics given in the uh in the DSM five, which uh I for which I don't have a great deal of respect, but it says that the uh number of transsexual people who feel that they're uh transsexual um and this was in 2013, was something like naught.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what is that, one in a hundred thousand.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, anyway.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and um uh four years later, the New England Journal published um an editorial in which it quoted a figure of naught point six percent.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: So uh and it didn't even notice that there had been this enormous increase or that there was anything there to be explained.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: Now, of course, there are there are many possible explanations.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I know what mine is, but but uh but you could say it's the result of some kind of spread of virus or something like that, or it could be that things are being recognized now and people are willing to admit things that they weren't willing to admit before.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_02: There are there are those possible explanations.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_02: But what was striking to me was that uh this huge increase just went completely unremarked.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well the the uh the progressive uh view on this, I think, uh as you you alluded to, Tony, is that the these people have always been with us, but we are finally tolerant and progressive enough for them to reveal their true selves, um, which is you know, that's another sort of uh tenet of progressive ideology, is that we have this true self and we just need to the only in order for it to express itself is yes, if we can all just become more tolerant and and enlightened.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I I'm gonna start to uh land us um toward the end of the conversation now, but I I wan I want to try to start thinking about how how how we might uh uh those people concerned about um um what we've been talking about, uh lay out the steps for people in some way.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying give them a program, but let's think about it.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: Rob, you you said the first time you genuinely encountered a functional institution was was the the Air Force, and you had structure, discipline, clear standards, and it and it and it changed you, obviously, for the better.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: And here you are now, and a man in demand, and you feel in control of your life, and you following things that you find interesting, and you're inspiring other people.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: And Tony, you you yourself have had a positive influence on your patients, who those who thought that they didn't have any agency, and you were able to put them on a uh a new path through conversation, people leaving behind dysfunctional lives and deciding to become a nurse and help people and get away from their abusive husbands.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so, whilst we know our institutions are shot through with non-judgmentalism and luxury beliefs, is I also know from my own experience of having just been a a school dropout and a hedonist and annihilist and turning all that on its head and leading my life and following my uh i instincts, that um life does become much richer, that you can have these um these fascinating internal uh conversations and drives that lead you on to other things and make a life worth living.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, let's let's lay out a path to stop people from thinking that they uh are part of a a tyrannical system.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: So um um I suppose then we'll begin with you, Tony.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if if people um are to resist the idea of grand solutions, and I know in the past you've talked about uh getting involved with local engagement.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um what what do you think uh would you what would you say to someone if it was uh if they were to ask you how a life would be lived well?
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what would s how would you respond to that?
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the first thing of course is uh is I would recommend buying my book.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: The twenty-fifth anniversary edition.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: Not in hand.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it goes very well with Rob it goes very well with Rob Henderson's troubled green wine.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um Well, you see, I I I I've often been accused of not uh giving any solutions, and I'm afraid I I um I'm still not uh clear on solutions.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I used to say to people that uh who uh who said they uh they hadn't found themselves.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: I said the problem is to lose yourself, not to find yourself.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: And to lose yourself you have to be interested in something.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_02: And the question is, how do you get interesting?
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I find that and that is a difficult thing because I mean I my interests have changed over my lifetime, but but I can't remember not having been interested in anything.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I'm not sure what that I have a uh a complete uh solution um or even a a partial solution, except uh by small steps in uh schools, for example.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if we could get teachers to uh to stimulate their children, but not to accept low standards.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_02: To give them some kind of discipline to make them realize that people grow into freedom.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_02: Freedom is not a uh or should grow into freedom.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um they shouldn't be given freedom at the age of uh three or four.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, one of the things that appalls me is uh that children of three and four are now called students.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_02: And and in fact, uh universally in America, when eleven-year-olds are shot by some terrible killer, they're called students.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they're not students, they're pupils.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that semantic uh difference is quite important because what the the uh the uh the idea of the uh st uh pupil is that the teacher knows best or better uh and and and so on.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas a student is more self-generating interest in things, which an eleven-year-old, certainly if my child was anything to go by, uh couldn't be expected to to um uh to have.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: But so there are all these kinds of things, but how you actually institutionalize that um uh I'm not quite sure because I think if the government comes down and says, right, from now on, this is what is going to happen, I'm not sure that uh things would be better.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: And anyway, it uh the the government uh disp uh proposes, but it's the the lower part of the the implementation that disposes.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: So Rob, let's try and think about a small-scale individual level response then, because you you've got your own experience of being formed by specific people and institutions.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: So um instead of policy programs, what what would uh a practical approach to an agentic life for someone look like?
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, similar to Tony, I my my first book was criticized for offering uh little to no nothing in the way of solutions.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um and people wanted policy proposals, which I think you know, there's there's space for policy reform.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I think um there's uh uh a friend of mine, Rory Sutherland, he's an advertising executive, but he's a very smart guy who points out that uh the way that uh politicians and government tend to proceed is uh first they say, well, we need a policy solution, and then if that fails, they look at economic incentives, and then if that fails, they they uh attempt to uh use persuasion.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when in fact you should start with persuasion and then if that fails, try economic incentives, and then as a last resort, start to think about maybe policy solutions.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that that strikes me as correct to use persuasion first.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that can be something as as simple as you know, what what Tony does and what you do, John, of just sort of putting ideas out there and you don't know who's going to come across your work and how it's going to change their life.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: And this, you know, these are small examples.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I brought up this debate I went to uh yesterday, this porn debate, and I mentioned this uh uh this porn advocate who was you know against capitalism and and a socialist.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: And she asked, she turned to the audience at one point and says, um, how many, you know, we all live in an unjust system.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: How many of you believe that you uh have control over the structure in which you live?
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, there was maybe a hundred people in the audience.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: I raise my hand immediately because I think, well, I most of what happens in my life is because I acted in a certain way and it led me to this particular point and this outcome and the options that I have available to me.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: The friend that I came with, he also raised his hand.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's a startup founder, he works very hard, he works for himself, and you know, okay, he raises his hand.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_00: It starts with just us two, and then I slowly start to see a few more hands go up.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, out of a hundred or so people, maybe 15 raise their hands, but it started with my friend and I, you know, two guys.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: But you could imagine that if I had not raised my hand, it's entirely possible that no one would have.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I know this sounds self-aggrandizing and it sounds like I'm patting myself on the back.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's something important here where, you know, once people just start to become honest and to push back on these uh pieties that a lot of uh you know fashionable progressive intellectuals peddle.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um another example is uh since since I've been writing publicly, I've had um uh multiple um uh uh male readers approach me and they tell me, you know, they've read my book or they've read something that I've written.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the stories are often very similar, where what they tell me is uh these are men in their maybe mid-late 30s, recently married, maybe they have a couple of small children, and they say, you know, I was getting a little bit bored in my marriage.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I started to reconsider was this the right choice for me?
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm I'm making good money, I know I can provide for my children and my wife, or, you know, if we decide to separate.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and I started to wonder, you know, maybe this isn't uh the right choice for me.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: And this wasn't because of um uh uh intense conflict or abuse or anything.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is just pure boredom and enway.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then they tell me, I read your book or I read something you wrote about the effects of you know, selfish parents deciding to um go their separate ways and how this can um, you know, affect the way that kids feel about themselves or their life chances or their prospects and so on.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they tell me they decided to recommit to their marriage and they realized, you know, I was just being selfish.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to sleep with other women, or I I just got bored of my life as it is, and you helped me to realize, yeah, that uh I'm living for people other than myself.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just a guy with the substack and a book, and I write some things online.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I I think to myself, what if those messages were scaled up?
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you look at prestige media, you know, you'll you open the pages of the New York Times, you'll get the opposite message.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's maybe it's time to end your marriage.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe maybe divorce can be fun and liberating, maybe this, that, and the other.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are a person like these gentlemen who are on the fence about what to do about their lives, and suddenly you're seeing justification and validation for making a selfish choice, uh, you're going to have an increase in that behavior.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think there's you know, basically counter messaging uh for uh uh for these uh uh luxury beliefs.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_02: One of those uh one of the things that struck me about your anecdote about your raising your hand, I think what I might have done is point out the dishonesty of that question.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because it was uh asking for a yes or no answer to something which is impossible to give, a yes or no answer.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_02: So if you ask me uh, can I influence uh the British government's energy policy, the answer is clearly no.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: I can't individually.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um but if you ask me uh, well, can I help my neighbour if he if he needs a bit of shopping done, the answer is yes, I can.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_02: And uh there are many, many things and and from my day-to-day life, my life is a constant uh choice of what I do, of how I spend my time, and so on and so forth.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_02: I don't claim always to do it wisely, but nevertheless, it is a tri it is a choice, and the vast majority of my life actually has a choice, though I am, of course, affected by things over which I have no control.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean the whole that that question, it seems to me, was designed to get the answer she wanted.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, yes.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I know we're we're coming up against time, so I'm gonna ask the question I ask all of my guests, and I'll I'll ask Rob this first because Tony, I've asked you it before, and you can think about whether there's anything else you you'd want to answer this.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, Rob, what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: It could have been something big, a moral absolute, something about human nature, or it could have been something day-to-day.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and what was it that made you change your mind?
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um well, I'm I'm glad you gave me a fair warning before.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what what I'm about to say has oh, maybe it's chant tangentially related to the things we've been discussing, uh, but maybe, maybe not.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um well, one thing I've changed my mind about um is uh the uh I guess societal benefits of something like abortion.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the reason I I say it is this is something I I puzzled on for a long time.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because if if you were to imagine you get into a time machine and you go back to 1945 and you tell people in uh In Great Britain or the US, very soon you will have widely available birth control and it will be affordable and accessible.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if that fails, abortion will be widely accessible.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then you ask these people in 1945, do you predict in the future there will be more unwanted children born or fewer?
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_00: Do you anticipate more children being raised in broken homes or fewer?
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: Do you anticipate an increase in the number of kids in care and in the foster system and so on, or fewer?
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think just about everyone would say, well, fewer, of course, because people have complete control over their reproductive uh uh options.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, the very opposite happened.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I my suspicion is that uh the reason for this is that it is true that birth control and abortion probably did lead to an increase, uh rather a decrease in the number of relative children born uh as compared to the amount of sort of premarital sex that was occurring and promiscuous and casual sex, it did probably reduce the number of um children uh being born uh uh in in sort of non-marital situations.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: But the absolute amount of uh casual sex went up so much that as a consequence of this, a lot more children were born as a result.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so essentially there was this unanticipated consequence of now that you know you have this option available to you, casual sex dramatically spiked, and people aren't always careful with how they engage in this practice.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so suddenly the number of children being born in uh these uh less than ideal circumstances increased.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so now you know you had kids born into uh slums and poverty and dysfunctional environments and so on.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so you know, this is uh something I argue with my some of my friends about, where they have this belief, which I think was popularized in freakonomics, this idea that abortion actually reduces uh criminality.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it reduces the number of uh uh children born into uh uh uh unpromising circumstances.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the exact opposite is the case.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so this, yeah, this is something I've changed my mind about is the benefits of of these technologies.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I mean the statistics are startling.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in in uh the United Kingdom, since the Abortion Act in 1967 was passed, there have been 11 million abortions.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and of those that took place last year, I think one in five of them were uh abortions were um second or third abortions that had taken place with the same woman.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so that the data had been put out to say the reasons behind it.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: Often it can be to do with things like, well, we need uh we we need a fallback in case there are uh issues uh for the mother, um threats to her health.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think something like less than one percent of of them are for those reasons.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and for the most part uh it came about off the back of just un unwanted pregnancy and thus likely downstream from what you've just described.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the f the uh the fact is that uh the original abortion act's um uh conditions were never complied with, and one of the reasons they were never complied with was that the argument that any um any abortion is safer than any pregnancy, and therefore any pregnancy can be regarded as a threat to a woman's health that can be averted by a and that's the kind of leger de main which we we uh accompl but if I may talk just mention something that I've changed my mind on, and that is the importance of the ceremonial aspect of life and the willingness uh to accept conventions that uh sometimes appear to you illogical and which you did not yourself uh help to form.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_02: The idea that uh the that you should live your life in a wholly rational uh way uh rational as decided by yourself.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think when I was about twenty twenty twenty-two or something, I might have believed that that was possible and desirable, and of course I don't believe that anymore.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it'd be fascinating to hear why you think that, but this this is something that Dr.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Ian McGillchrist, the author of The Master and His Emissary, talks about, and uh at least uh in a small way, which is that this deritualization of life has actually uh started to strip it of any symbolic meaning.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: If if we are to be born uh and then die, but we don't fill it with things like rites of initiation, um symbolic wedding ceremonies, um evening funerals.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, funerals, yeah, and and try to um bring something which, as you've talked about, Tony, which you haven't created made yourself, um, but they are words that have been used to bring some uh pomp and occasion or some uh a kind of a sense of uh sobriety, uh that is so much all the better than living in this sterile bureaucratic world where we're born, it's all a bit pointless, marriage is just a bit oppressive, no point in that.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_01: And when I get when I die, just you know, send me off to the crematorium and you don't have to say anything, just play a couple of rock songs and that's fine.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I I think it's um it's it's uh a life uh not well lived in some way because we haven't experienced the highs and lows, and as as we talked about uh a little bit, is that those people who are exposed to um some of the heights of human civilization they become civilized themselves or they become uh uh more fully human in some way.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: So um, Tony, I don't know if that's what you're getting at.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: I hope I'm just put words in your mind.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's more or less uh I think people are more agreeable and you know.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_02: But uh so that's what I've changed my mind on, or one of the things I've changed my mind on.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, before I let you both go, Tony, we know you have an excellent book out, Life at the Bottom under your pen name, Theodore Dolrumpel.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's been out for 25 years, but there's another one coming out, and you've got much more uh to come, I'm sure.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_01: What what else can we expect from you?
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well I've got a book uh uh about a visit uh uh to uh Worcester, the city of Worcester, in which I uh saw quite a uh uh degradation of uh of a once beautiful uh town uh city, small city.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I've also got a book about uh coming out a bit later on the social, uh psychological and philosophical ideas of Agatha Christie.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that sounds fine.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's from Leftfield.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and Rob, uh you are the author of Troubled, uh, your memoir, which is excellent, and also your Substack, Rob Henderson's newsletter.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're both a must, I think, for anyone who wants to understand your your intellectual framework.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um what what else are you working on?
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Where can people find you in the dark corners of the internet?
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, those are good places to start.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I recently sold my second book, uh, which will be titled Luxury Beliefs and discussing a lot of the topics we've covered in this uh conversation.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, in the meantime, check out uh the first book, Troubled, and uh my Substack newsletter.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and yeah, I will say, you know, Tony is one of the few um authors who uh any any book he writes, I will read it.
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you have a way of making uh your um writing interesting, even if it's something I I would ordinarily not find uh uh exciting.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm just uh you know one of the few writers who whatever you put out I will I will read.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_00: So check out Tony's stuff.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_01: I second that.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_01: I second that.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_01: You've it's turned into a bit of a uh Tony Tony Daniels fan club for the ends here, and rightly so.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um well chaps, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_01: I hope to be able to speak to you both again.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Good luck with all your endeavors, keep fighting the good fight, and thanks for coming on the show.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, John.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.