Transcript of A Call to the Sane – Beauty, Truth, & Purpose: Douglas Murray

So, tough conversation.

We also talked about Douglas’s plan to do a speaking tour for the next couple of months, and he’s in a number of American cities. You could go to Live Nation and type in the name Douglas Murray and find tickets. I’d also recommend that. I think it’s going to go in LA on the 23rd of September. So anyways, on with the analysis of the strange death of the west.

Well, hello, Mr. Murray, it’s good to see you again. It’s been about a year since we’ve done a podcast already and it’s been some time since we’ve seen each other. We obviously saw each other when you were on tour with me last September. I guess first of all I’m pleased to be able to talk to you and there’s lots to talk about, that’s for sure. And I guess maybe the first thing I’d like to find out is, well, what have you got planned in the upcoming months? What’s on your plate?

Douglas Murray’s Speaking Tour

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, I’m in New York at the moment and in September I’m doing a tour here in the US, a speaking tour, doing six cities from LA to New York, finishing at the Beacon Theater where I saw you a while ago, and also doing Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Denver and maybe some more dates to add. But that’s in September and anyone who’s interested can go to the Live Nation website and you’ll find all the details there.

Otherwise, I am, as ever, living out of a suitcase and trying to keep abreast of all of the things that are happening as lots of things in our societies are falling apart. So I spent a lot of the last year in Israel in the Middle East, covering the conflict there in Israel and Gaza. I was there for almost six months after the 7th of October, but now things are kicking off in quite a number of countries, as you know.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So this speaking tour, let’s concentrate on that for a minute too. So what’s your goal and your plan? What are you offering people who come to and what are you hoping to achieve? What are you offering people who are going to come and listen?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Oh, well, one of the things is that it’s a follow on from “The War in the West,” which you and I discussed when it came out about 18 months ago. Since then there have been so many things that have happened, not least the 7th of October and the war that’s followed.

Because I’ve covered all of this up close and got some pretty extraordinary camera footage of this, I wanted to present it to an audience to be able to show what I’ve seen and what I think of as the realities that I think a lot of people are running away from at the moment. The realities of what happens when violence breaks out, and I think it’s a great warning to people in America and elsewhere, a great warning that this stuff can become very real, as it did in Israel last October.

And anyhow, there’s going to be some fun to be had along the way. My friend and colleague from the Monk debates in Toronto, Natasha Hausdorff, is going to be with me on stage to do the Q&A session and interview. And yes, and there’s going to be a lot of never before seen footage from a lot of crazy situations.

Lessons from October 7th

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that sounds in some ways like a live current affairs show that’s focused specifically on this issue. Okay, so you said that you’re going to use, if I’ve got it right, you’re going to use the occurrences of October 7th and afterwards as an object lesson, right? An object lesson in the consequences. What of the disintegration of a societal ethos? The consequences of like what? How do you exactly tie in what you were writing about in “The War on the West” with what you’ve seen unfold since October 7th, in relationship to what you’re going to speak about?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, one thing is, of course, that October 7th, for a lot of people in Israel was an example of what happens when you’ve been living in a delusion and are suddenly woken up from that. I’ve written a lot in recent years, as have others, about the way in which in all Western democracies we’ve had a sort of lack of seriousness, really, about some of the threats that we face. There’s a slumbering-ness that’s gone on for a long time, which I and others have warned against.

But I suppose, among other things, of course, it’s not just about that. It’s about how people react in the face of real threat and real crisis. And that’s one of the things that I’m very interested in at the moment, is the way in which a terrible situation like that throws up these two completely counter forces.

One is the force of real evil and what it’s like to stare into the face of real evil. The other is, of course, the face of true heroism, the people who, in the face of atrocity, become the person that they were meant to be. And I’ve seen a lot of that in the last year. And I think there are enormous lessons to be learned, not just of the negatives, but the positives of the way in which actually when extraordinary events occur, extraordinary people are thrown up. And we might all see a bit more of that in the years ahead.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So in what manner do you view what happened on October 7th and afterwards as a reflection of the sorts of things that you were warning about in “War on the West”? How do you see it as another step in the logical unfolding of the processes that you were assessing?

The Rebellion Against Western Values

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, partly from that and partly from the previous books, including my one, “The Strange Death of Europe,” that came out in 2017. A lot of that was concerned with saying, look, there are deep, deep challenges that are going on to what we used to call the liberal democratic society, and a deep unwillingness of people to realize that those challenges were not metaphorical.

Since the 7th of October, we’ve seen unbelievable scenes everywhere, from the streets of London and major cities in Europe to the most elite campuses of Northern America, Ivy League campuses where students who have the most privileged existence imaginable have decided to openly throw their lot in with the terrorists of Hamas.

This has gone further, a lot faster, I think, than a lot of people realized. But it is something I’ve been warning about for a very long time that, yes, there are deep, deep things happening in our society, including what I’ve described in the past as being people at risk of rebelling for the sake of rebellion and out of boredom. And this is a deep thing in American society in particular, the call for a great cause.

One of the student protesters at Columbia was quoted in New York magazine the other month saying that he was a first-generation low-income student who was the first member of his family to go to university. And you think, well, that sounds good. And then he went on to say, “And when I got to Columbia, I learned about the rich history of protest at Columbia and I decided, I knew that as soon as it kicked off, I wanted to be in the middle of it.”

The Search for Meaning and Purpose

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Let me ask you about that in some more detail. So this is going to be a complicated question, but you put your finger on something that’s crucial and deep. Psychological rather than political, or even spiritual, let’s say, rather than political.

As you know, from touring with me, I’ve been investigating what is it that makes life worthwhile. I talked to a philosopher this week on my podcast who has written a couple of books on a stream of analytic philosophy that’s been debating whether or not, if you weighed up the evidence en masse, whether existence itself is a net good or a net evil with whatever implications you might want to draw from that argument for its creator.

So I’m not trying to make a theological case, but part of this inquiry is like, if there was a God, is it more logical to conceive of him as good or as evil? And underneath that is a sense that the proper axis of evaluation for such a question is whether there’s more pain and misery in the world or pleasure.

And my sense is that the fact that that’s how the argument is constituted is actually an indication of the pathology of our culture. Because it’s a fool’s game to map pleasure and pain onto good and evil. Partly because there are evil pleasures and there are morally justifiable pains. So whatever the landscape, whatever the moral landscape is, it’s not reducible to the hedonic landscape and any axiomatic assumption that it is.

Okay, so there’s a corollary to that. And one of the corollaries would be, well, if we’re not built to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, let’s say, which is a powerful argument, because emotions are powerful, and the positive and negative emotion systems are powerful motivating systems. But if we’re not built to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, then what’s the cardinal call to existence?

And my sense is that it’s something akin to adventure. Maybe it’s romantic adventure, which is an even better formulation. All right, so then let’s say if that’s the case, and you and I talked about this the last time, we talked about the truth as part of the call to adventure.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Heroic adventure.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Well, so then if that’s the case and the cardinal motivation in life is something like the heroic call to adventure, then you might ask yourself, well, what if that’s not being pursued? What beckons as an ersatz alternative? And certainly protest in the name of ideology, the name of a cause is a very adventure.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: It’s very tempting. I mean, I would say, in general, finding purpose in a higher cause is, of course, one of the most useful ways to find a meaning in your life beyond the maximization of pleasure. Unfortunately, the rebellious attitude for the sake of rebellion becomes extremely appealing.

Another of the students at Columbia, I’m sorry to hark on about it, but it does show a rot somewhere at elite institutions. One of the other students at Columbia said that he started the year out as a protest in October against the climate emergency, the climate crisis, and within a month it was Hamas.

The Moral Vacuum in Universities

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So one of the things I noticed, I suppose it was in about 2014, which was approximately when I was starting to detect that something had gone seriously wrong with the universities, let’s say. One of the things I did recognize amongst my colleagues was this axiomatic presumption that part of what the universities were there for was to teach young people how to be moral by protesting. That protest itself had become a stand-in for morality.

And so, you know, you can feel some sympathy for that kid that you were describing. I mean, he’s gone off to an elite institution hoping to be taught how to live a good life in the classic sense by the world’s most profound experts. And what he found when he got there was that since the 1960s, the best thing that the universities have to offer to their students is the false reputation, the false claim to morality that can be had and the excitement that can be had by engaging in a protest.

The Activist Life and Social Unrest

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And yes, the life of an activist is the ideal life and the life that’s rewarded and the life that is seen to be virtuous. I mean, it’s all of that. And by the way, one of the other things that has struck me very much in recent times has been the fact that of course, a lot of the problems that we see emerging in our societies in the west come about not just from that boredom, but of course the fact that when the financial tide goes out, stops being able to lift people up, a lot of other stuff gets revealed.

We see this in the UK at the moment. It’s not by any means the only explanation for the riots that have been going on. But if you look at all of the northern towns in which the riots have been going on, the material well being of the population has declined in the last 13 years since the last set of riots. And you know, you sort of think, well, if the society isn’t working for you financially and joblessness has actually gone up and on top of that you have challenges to your identity. Well, of course there’s a cause right there and not an ignoble one. If it’s about saying I want to defend my culture and all that’s not ignoble. Once somebody thinks that the best way of doing that is to pick up a brick and throw it at a policeman or a place of worship.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, it’s no simple matter to distinguish the genuine protests from the false protests, that’s for sure. So let me ask you one more question about your tour and your talk and then maybe we’ll turn our attention to the situation in the U.K.

So you’re planning on showing your audiences footage from your journeys through the Middle East for the last six months. I guess I’m curious about – well, you didn’t step into the conflict in the Middle East as a naive observer, either of people or of societies, but my suspicions are that you’ve seen a lot more in the last six months than you ever really wanted to see. And so I’m curious about what you’ve seen, what you’ve concluded from that, and how it’s altered or extended your viewpoint or challenged it, for that matter.

Like you’ve been poking your nose into very dangerous places. And so what’s been the consequence for you, and what is it that you’re hoping to shed a light on with the imagery in particular? What are you hoping to shed a light on for the people who are going to come and hear you talk?

Confronting Evil in War Zones

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, there’s quite a lot of things. I’ve covered a lot of conflicts before, including in the Middle East, and a lot of what has been happening is sadly familiar territory to me. There are, though, as you and I have discussed before, reasons why hell is a pit that’s endless. And when it comes to violence and the ability to commit acts of evil, it seems to me that that axiom that the pit is just endless has really been shown in the last year.

I’ve been in Israel and Gaza most of the time since October 7th. And yes, of course, like anyone reporting from the front lines, I’ve seen lots of things that I’d rather not have seen. But my belief is that there’s a very important role in society for people who do that and come back and tell everyone else what it’s like, not least, of course, to warn people.

There are lots of things that I’ve seen as a reporter from war zones which I know I would not want other people to see. I know I didn’t want to see them myself, but in order for other people not to see that, you have to know where people can go.

One of the things that has struck me a lot in the last year has been that the terrorists of October 7th in particular were deeply gleeful whilst carrying out acts of unbelievable barbarism. And that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot because to be doing something you think is right, but still that is evil is one thing. To be doing something that is evil and being joyful about it is another, and for people around you to celebrate it and then at several degrees of remove that people who think they’ve got the same cause as you would excuse it or say, “well, context” or all sorts of things like that that are just alarming.

I’ve often thought actually in recent months of a late historian and writer called Gitta Sereny who died about 20 years ago, who made a great impact on me when I was growing up. She wrote, among other things, the biography of the child killer Mary Bell, and also the biographies of Stangl, the camp commandant of Treblinka, who she interviewed, and also of Albert Speer.

I remember reading an interview with Gitta Sereny towards the end of her life and she was not a religious person particularly, but she said having spent a lot of her life considering evil and staring at evil and writing about evil, she said it feels like a force that descends. It just manifests. And there’s no other explanation for it. It isn’t just about some problem in the developmental process or simply a matter of education or opportunity. It’s that on top of all those problems that do exist, sometimes there is an incarnation of evil in the world.

The Nature of Evil

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, in one way of thinking about that, I think even technically is that – because I’ve been thinking about this a lot in relationship to these new large language models – there is a statistical probability that any given concept will be associated with any other given concept. And if your mapping is technologically advanced enough, you can calculate those statistical relationships and that’s what the large language models do.

And then you can start to see, you can start to map mathematically what the psychoanalysts called complexes. And complexes are systems of ideas that occur in each other’s proximity and there’s a core to them. And one of the ways of imagining the theological representations of evil, the legions of devils, let’s say, that are behind the generation of the bottomless pit of hell, is that they are representations of complexes of ideas that hang together.

I think you put your finger on the core of it. Actually. The core of it isn’t evil. The core of it is gleeful evil. So it’s not merely the evil, it’s the rejoicing in evil. That is actually the core of sadism from a psychopathological perspective. It’s not positive delight. It’s a multi-dimensional characterization. It’s positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others.

And the unnecessary element is also cardinal because that plays up the element that’s parody. So in Auschwitz, for example, one of the games the guards used to play was to have the prisoners who got off the train cars shivering and frozen and accompanied by their dead relatives who died of asphyxiation or froze to death in the cattle cars. They’d arrive at the camps and then they’d be compelled to carry wet sacks of salt from one side of the camp, which was the size of a town, to the other and then back.

And so it’s a parody of work. And it’s a demonstration to the person themself that not only are they suffering for all the reasons that they’re in the camps and by the fact of the burden that they’re carrying, but the utter counterproductive pointlessness of the painful labor is also emphasized and insisted upon and then delight taken in that. And that is a very dark thing to observe.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes. I was in one of the maximum security prisons in Israel earlier this year and saw the Hamas terrorists from October 7th who had been captured alive. One of them was somebody who I recognized from one of the atrocity videos who had thrown – there were two young boys, about 10 and 12. They were with their father. They went into the safe room when the bombs started falling and Hamas terrorists came and they saw them go and they threw a grenade.

And the father threw himself on the grenade and was killed in front of his sons. And then one of them lost an ear and the other one lost an eye. And they were staggering around the main room of their house weeping and wailing in an unforgettable, awful way. And one of the terrorists came in, who’d just killed their father in front of them, came in and opened the fridge and helped himself to the food.

And the youngest of the boys, in total trauma, said, “That’s my mother’s food.” And the terrorist turned to him and said, “Where’s your mother? I want her, too.” How could anyone do that?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you put your finger on it. That idea of the descent is like one of the things that God accuses Cain of when he becomes bitter, is opening the door to evil. He said his suffering wasn’t merely a consequence of his failure in life, it was a consequence of his failure tempting him to open the door to evil.

And so if you think about it in terms of these complexes of associated ideas, there are ideas that if you let in, they bring a host of other ideas with them. And a host is exactly the right phrase. And you might be tempted in a moment of weakness to invite something in that you think that you could control or that you could bend to your own purposes.

But the problem is, is that you’re inviting in a complex that has been around forever and that once lodged inside you, whatever defenses that you might think you have there to mount are trivial in comparison to the power of what you’ve invited in. And that is, I think, something you can think of technically. And it is a terrible thing. And it is the kind of thing that is warned against at the theological level, although that’s a very complicated thing to untangle.

All right, so let’s turn from that a bit. So that’s the sort of thing that you’re going to explain as you’re communicating with your audience and what you’re hoping to demonstrate to people is that is the logical conclusion of the sorts of games, for example, that are being played on the university campuses.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: For sure. For sure.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, then, of course, the problem with that is, at least to some degree, is that that complex of ideas that takes possession of people in the circumstances that you’re describing has that end in mind?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, of course, of course.

The UK Situation and Tommy Robinson

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, all right, well, let’s turn our attention to the situation in the UK. I mean, let’s start with something contentious, I suppose. Tammy and I went out on a limb recently and interviewed Tommy Robinson. I’ve been watching Tommy for a long time and he’s struck me as particularly interesting for two reasons. First, because he is a genuine working class guy, for better or worse. Second, I haven’t seen anyone anywhere who’s been more unwavering in his commitment to reveal the atrocities of the grooming gangs in the UK, which are organized patterns of activity that are so pervasive, that are so terrible that it’s almost impossible to talk about them without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.

Now there’s no doubt that there are many things that you could accuse Tommy Robinson of, and many of those he would admit to, but to me and also to my wife, the fact that he’s pointed his finger at something that seriously needs to be attended to and has paid a major price for it is also not ignorable. It’s like, do we expect someone who’s brave enough to do that to also be perfect in every regard? That’s asking a bit much given that there’s many people who in principle have moral characters much more unsullied than Tommy Robinson, who are cowering in silence constantly in the face of this absolute brutality.

So we interviewed him and what did I think of Tommy? He’s very articulate. He can certainly make a case for himself. And then I thought it was up to the audience to listen and to make their own judgment. Now, that was before the recent march that Robinson and his crew organized in London, which in my estimation—I’m interested in your perspective—went as peacefully and well as the protests in Ottawa, which it was modeled after. And so I thought his crew handled that extraordinarily well.

Now, in the aftermath of those protests, of course, all sorts of chaotic hell has broken loose and, well, why don’t you—you are much closer to such things than me. I mean, being a denizen of that country, I’m looking from outside, trying to make sense out of it, but my sense at the moment is that the UK is somewhat of a tinderbox.

The Predictable Crisis in Britain

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes, yes, and I wish it hadn’t been so predictable. Again, I wrote about this so many years, warned about it. Strange Death of Europe was largely my last ditch attempt to warn my own society of birth and other Western countries not to go down the path that they were precisely going down. And as a former government minister said in the Times a couple of days ago, the thing about my predictions on that was that I made them not with any glee, but in a spirit of deep lamentation about what was about to happen to my society.

And as I see it there, Tommy Robinson’s a very interesting example of this whole thing, but let me just explain how I see it. This whole conflagration of recent days started when a 17-year-old went into a Taylor Swift dance class a couple weeks ago now and started hacking at young girls with a knife. Killed three girls, nine-year-olds thereabouts, wounded many others. And the news of that came out and a very typical modern British, modern European, modern Western thing happened, which was that in the aftermath people started to suspect something was being kept from them.

Now wiser heads would wait, but not everyone’s a wise head. After nine-year-old girls stabbed to death, false information went out online saying that the attacker had arrived on one of the many boats of illegal migrants that come across the English Channel every week. That was untrue. In fact, he was the son of immigrants from Rwanda. But people started to sense that there was a cover up of some kind, or at least the news was being managed.

The police in Britain seem always to think they’re being very clever at this and it’s always seemed to me that they exacerbate every problem they put their mind to. They insisted that the young man was originally from Cardiff, capital of Wales. And people just sense there’s something that they’re holding from us.

Anyway, the point is, very unpleasant, ugly and again evil forces can get unleashed at such a time. The spirit of revenge and some protests started peacefully at first, then some violent. A mosque was targeted nearby and then violence started to spread out to other towns. Then Muslim communities started to arm up, in some cases literally the people turning up with knives to defend their areas.

And maybe it’ll die down by the time this podcast has gone out, or maybe it’ll get a lot worse. But the one thing you can say with absolute certainty is it’s not going to go away. Because all of this is the consequence of what I call the problem of primary and secondary problems.

The primary problem in the UK, as in Europe in recent years has been the total unwillingness of the political and other classes in the UK to address deep, deep concerns of the public. And when people said in recent days, how could anyone leap to such a conclusion that the attacker would be… Because everyone’s seen this before. You know, people don’t actually forget very fast. The media class may, but they don’t forget very fast that it’s only seven years ago that the son of Libyan migrants to the UK went and detonated a suicide bomb at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

They don’t forget fast that three people who had no right to be in the UK, including one whose asylum claim had been rejected but who was nowhere near being deported, went across London Bridge in 2017, hacking at the throats of passersby and shouting, “Allahu Akbar.” They don’t forget that. They notice it.

But the British government and others have had this very clear policy that they don’t really know what to do to tackle that. They don’t know what to do really, to tackle the grooming gangs issue. There was another set of prosecutions the other day, and another case is coming to court in the coming weeks. You could say, well, they clearly do. They’re using the law. But a lot of the public say, well, not fast enough and not really. There’s an awful lot of rapists still walking around with girls who are their victims in the same towns. And the government knows that.

The public ascribe this to the government’s immigration policies, its integration policies, but the government can’t take responsibility for that because they’ve made that mistake now. The Conservative government that just left power that said that they would bring migration down to the tens of thousands a year, left office with a net migration of legal migration at almost three-quarters of a million a year, which is, by the way, completely unsustainable. But they just keep doing it anyway.

The interesting thing that Tommy Robinson speaks to and has always spoken to is what are you allowed to do about this or say about this? Now, if you’re me for the time being, you’re allowed to write about it. Sometimes you’re allowed to speak about it, sometimes you’re allowed to raise alarms, sometimes you’re allowed to speak your mind somewhat.

But if you’re a Tommy Robinson character, if you grow up in Luton and you haven’t had many advantages in life and you’ve had quite a lot of disadvantages, and you’re white and working class, what are you allowed to do about this? What are you allowed to say about any of this? And the government, for decades now has had the attitude, you’re not allowed to do anything. You’re not allowed to say anything. You can’t do anything, because if you do, we’ll call you a racist and we’ll call you far right. And this has all gone on for a very long time.

The Power of Labels

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s an effective epithet. You know, like when I first came across your work, and I’ve seen this reaction in the depths of my soul to many people when I first came across your work, which is quite a long time ago now, you know, I was leery of it. And I think the reason for that is that it’s something like this. It’s that there are a lot of people in the world, and I’m not going to be able to meet all of them or read all of them or have anything to do with all of them. And now and then some of them get tarred with some epithet.

Well, the cost to me of accepting that tarring is very low on average, because if I don’t pay attention to some person, there’s a whole bunch of other people I could pay attention to. So it’s not like the pool of people to attend to shrinks. Right? So. And that epithet of far right is a very effective brand of tarring. And even it’s even effective among people who are very skeptical of such things.

So I’ll give you an example. I talked to Michael Shellenberger after he released the WPATH files, when he was investigating the absolute pathological corruption and craven cowardice of the cadre who presented what purport to be the standard guidelines for enlightened care to the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association. And he was appalled at their lack of competence and their ideological possession. It was another bottomless pit.

And I asked him how he became aware of this, and he said, well, one way was that he had listened to Abigail Shrier and I talk about it. I guess it was two years ago when Abigail first put out her book “Irreversible Damage.” It was the first podcast I did after I’d been so ill, and I was terrified to do it because it was such a hot topic. And, you know, Shellenberger himself said he listened to that podcast, but he really couldn’t believe it, you know, and that’s another example of the effectiveness of that tarring.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes, it’s…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s so easy to demolish someone’s reputation.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And it’s especially easy to demolish a reputation for people who do not have, as it were, a backlog of published work. I mean, it’s relatively easy to weigh up someone’s views and make an estimation of them if they have seven books to their name, as I do, or thousands and thousands of articles. But it can’t be the case that only book authors are allowed to say anything about the disintegration of their societies. It’s not like you should only be left to people who write newspaper articles.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, God, no, not that.

The Dilemma of Democratic Response

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Like maybe, maybe least of all. But then you go to this question, which, as you know, has come up in Canada in recent years and is very live now in Britain, which is, what, again, what are people allowed to do now?

Obviously, by the way, and I’m aware, as you always are, of the deep desire of bad faith actors to seize anything I say in this discussion and misrepresent it. So let me do a very boring piece of throat clearing, if I may. The idea that people’s response to any problems in their society should be to go out and commit acts of violence is obviously insane and wrong.

What we’re seeing on the streets of the British cities, though, raises this question, as I say, of if the public keep saying something to the politicians and the politicians keep not just ignoring them but insulting them, what are they allowed to do? These people, these are populations that have every single election, like the rest of the British people, for 20 years, they have voted for less immigration and been told that they’d get it and instead it’s just gone up.

They’ve lived through an economy since 2008 where of the jobs created by the British government in the last 16 years, 74% have gone to people who were not born in Britain. So just people think about this for a second. The government refuses to do what the public keep on asking for and what the government keeps on saying it’ll do. It is seen to be, I think accurately, extremely lax on policing certain social cohesion issues. It’s extremely eager to crack down on anyone of a Tommy Robinson type.

And what material benefits have come about in the society in the last 16 years have largely gone to people who were not born in the country. What, I repeat, what is permissible in this situation to do, and I would say peaceful protesting would be one thing, or speaking up, or whatever you like to do. Except that every time even there is a peaceful protest, the peaceful protesters are defamed as far right neo-Nazis.

I mean, there definitely will have been and have been in recent days some extremely ugly people who’ve come out of the woodshed who I’m sure do include like one guy everyone’s obsessed with who has a swastika tattoo on his back. Is that guy representative of all the people who are angry in the wake of the slaughter in Southport? I would have thought not.

And in any other situation, every public official, political official, opinion writer and policeman would be very wary of trying to tar everyone with that brush. For instance, the police and authorities, even when you have discovery of an imam in a mosque preaching violence, everyone is incredibly careful—lawyers at all the newspapers and everyone else—to make sure that it isn’t implied that everyone who attends that mosque is somehow in favor of this. In fact, woe betide you if you did do that. You have to say this one person and no one else is responsible.

But somehow the actual desire to tar anyone who has, as I say, not got a voice and is wanting to make their voice heard, as a violent far right neo-Nazi, seems to me to be a big error by Keir Starmer and others. Because, you know, if you can’t say, “We recognize your deep, deep concerns about some things that have happened, including mass stabbings, terrorism and much more. We understand your deep, deep concerns and we are going to try to get onto this and on top of this. But there is no excuse to turn out on the streets and be violent against your Muslim brothers and sisters and neighbors or anyone else.” They can’t say that. They just cannot say it. They just have to go to the secondary thing.

What kills me about this is it’s exactly what I said for years. If you don’t deal with a primary problem, you get secondary problems. And if you just focus on the secondary problem, you will never not only not solve the primary problem, you will make it worse. Exactly what we’re seeing.

The Challenge of Cultural Integration

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so a couple of observations. The first observation is that the epithet “far right” is rapidly losing its utility. Now when I hear someone described as far right, I think, “Yeah, maybe, probably not, but maybe.” And I should also point out that I’m not unaware of the existence of bad actors. I don’t even know if right and left are the right dimensions of evaluation anymore, and I suspect not. But for now, we’ll stick with that.

Ever since I came out in defense of the defensive response of Israel to the October 7th massacre, I’ve had no shortage of far right trolls on my case. And I know what they’re like, studying them historically. And of course, that happened to me when I partnered with the Daily Wire to begin with because its head man, in some ways, at least in the public eye, was Ben Shapiro. And so I’m perfectly aware of what the far right agitators look like and they’re a remarkably despicable bunch. So we’ll get that out of the way to begin with.

The idea that they’re in the same camp, for example, as the working class protesters that you’re describing in the UK is absurd because first of all, what the UK working class protesters are doing isn’t fundamentally political. It’s fundamentally based in something approximating frustration.

So having said that, I’ve got a question. With regards to the drivers of immigration, you say the politicians campaign at least on the conservative side, at least some of the time, with the claim that they’re going to get a handle on this. But they don’t. In fact, quite the opposite. They seem to facilitate it.

Is that because it’s actually beyond their control or is it because—here’s a psychological reason—it’s like for decades our culture has insisted on something approximating a position of moral relativism? There’s no way of drawing hierarchical distinctions between the value claims that different cultures present. We can’t admit for a moment that there might be some reason to be leery, let’s say, of an immigrant class that would be associated with the kind of education that the madrasas are producing.

For all sorts of ideological reasons, we can’t make any allowance for the idea that some immigrants might be more difficult to integrate into our culture than others. And that is a thorny problem, don’t get me wrong. But now, so we open the floodgates, let’s say, and we find out that there are people who don’t have democracies in their own country because they don’t have the culture for it, let’s say, or the desire for it. And they bring those attitudes along with them. Surprise, surprise. Because they weren’t just freedom loving, oppressed people striving to be free who are now thrilled to death to be in a democratic country, but people who are pretty damn prone to bring all of the problems that they had in their own country along with them.

Now, my sense is the working class doesn’t get to have their say because if they had their say, everyone who’s modern and liberal and tolerant in that pathological manner that accepts everything without distinction would have to do some serious digging into the under structure of their own belief systems.

And then that touches on something else—here’s a weird segue or idea that popped into my head, an association. Richard Dawkins announced himself as a cultural Christian. So then one of the things that makes me ask is something like, well, what is it that the West has right, that the enemies of the West have wrong that’s percolating at the bottom of all of this mess? What’s driving the relativistic arguments of the pro-immigration types, but that’s also fulminating this terrible clash of cultures that we unsurprisingly see emerging on our streets?

So the first question is: what the hell’s driving the massive immigration into the West? Because we see it in Canada maybe worse than anywhere else at the moment, or at a more rapid rate than anywhere else. Canada is so damn peaceful it’s hard to destabilize it. But we’re working hard on that. So what’s driving this? Is it this ideological insistence?

The Challenges of Immigration and National Identity

DOUGLAS MURRAY: It’s a lot of things. One is, as I’ve warned about for a long time, one is something that isn’t inevitable but is hard to resist, which is a simple ease of movement in the 21st century, the relative cheapness of travel compared to any previous century, and the knowledge through the devices we have in our pockets around the globe. I mean, what 3 billion people are on WhatsApp alone? The ability of people anywhere in the world to discover the life of anyone else in the world easily.

Add to that the fact that most countries in the world are not even remotely approximating either the safety or the wealth available in 21st century Canada for instance, or Britain, and it’s inevitable that a lot of people will want that. Now, as I’ve said for years, just because they may want it does not mean that western liberal democracies can remotely be the place where everybody who wants a better life can or should go. It’s simply impossible.

You just crunch the numbers on people in sub-Saharan Africa who want to move into Europe, for instance. And if that happened, if the third of sub-Saharan Africa who want to move, moved, Europe would be totally unrecognizable.

The second thing that comes from that is that it is extremely difficult for politicians to maintain their borders. And I think this is highly regrettable because I think the only way in which, among other things, you can have an actual asylum system where you actually take in those unusual cases where asylum should be needed, just disappear once you have illegal migration every day coming in on boats, or as in the case of America, millions of people walking across the southern border in the last four years.

Add to that the fact that as was famously said in 1968 by somebody, it’s the easiest thing to put off any difficult decision you have to make today and leave it for your successors to address, all the time making it harder for your successors.

I said this to a European politician some years ago when they said that they were going to deport the million illegals that were in their country. I said, how are you going to do it? Because you and I know that on day one, if you rounded up everyone who is illegally in the country and put them on buses, trains, boats, the first woman or child crying would be on the front page of every newspaper the next morning. And by day two, you would have to stop because of public pressure.

That’s just the reality for the time being, until such a time emerges—and it could—where the society says we don’t give a damn anymore. That may well happen. But until that does happen, countries are absolutely incapable, politicians are incapable of answering this question.

National Identity and Cultural Foundations

Then you have a follow-on question which addresses what you mentioned about Richard Dawkins, among other things, which is America. It’s not quite true to say that America was a society based on an idea, but it’s a nice idea. America was based on an idea, but the idea came about because of the people who founded the Republic, the United States of America. And if they had been from somewhere else, even a different denomination, the United States would be very different. However, as far as states founded on an idea goes, America is probably the nearest to that.

European nations, Britain, are not based on an idea. They were not based on an idea. Now, that isn’t to say that they don’t have very distinct cultures. And my word, the different cultures across Europe are so different that everyone jokes about their neighbors and regards their neighbor in the neighboring European country being wildly different from them. To an outsider, it seems preposterous that the Swedes and the Norwegians would have distinctions between them, but they do.

But I say this to say that Europe and Britain were made up of ethnic identities. And those ethnic identities had ideas, of course, but even in Britain, you have the Welsh, you have the Scots, you have the English and the Irish. How do you integrate into that? How do you do it? Does anyone know? And the answer is no. Have some people? I’d say yes. Have a majority? It doesn’t look that way to me. And so this is just a bomb underneath the societies.

In Europe in particular, it has been about ethnicity. We don’t like things being about ethnicity, so we say it’s about an idea. But all my adult life, this idea has been so hard for anyone to pin down that they’ve just failed at it time and time again.

I’m old enough to remember when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and I contributed to a book that he edited about being British. What Britishness was. That was 20 years ago. And Britain is no closer to defining that today than it was 20 years ago. People say things like Britishness is about queuing or fair play. And that is so completely inadequate to the task at hand.

The Attack on Majority Culture

But the other issue that comes along with this, and this is one that white working-class communities in the UK deeply resent in particular, is the “You don’t have a culture” narrative, which is one of the nice things that race baiters of all shapes have been doing for years to these people. “You don’t have a culture.” It’s what I wrote about in “The War on the West,” the jabbing of majority populations.

And if you do have a culture, it’s not a good one, or it’s a rapaciously evil one, or it’s one that’s only to be described through the lens of colonialism or slavery or racism or institutional racism or patriarchy or whatever. And they’ve just done this for years.

There has been what I showed in my last book to be this attack: For instance, why do all the holy places of the British people keep being attacked, literally and metaphorically? Why does Winston Churchill, the great hero of the British nation, keep on being attacked by people? Because they want to hurt these people. They want to hurt the people who revere them. They literally want to strip their gods from them. They want to defile the holy places of the culture.

You might say, well, why do you want to do that? Revenge for some people, supremacy of a different kind for others, weakness among others, false adventure, cowardice going along with the tenor of the times, however bad that direction of travel happens to be.

But I said recently, before these riots happened, I said it would be madness if people from the Indian subcontinent made up 3% of your population, to try to demoralize that population or to try to find ways to just say that they were nothing and never had been anything and it was sort of best if they just tried to sidle through their lives without harming anyone. Why would you do that to 3% of the population? Among other things, it’s rude, it’s cruel, it’s unusual. And that 3% of the population is a significant amount of the population. You don’t want to demoralize 3% of the population.

Okay, why would you do that to a majority? Who is so insane that they want to do this to majority populations? And the answer seems to be, well, we’re finding out. We are finding out.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, okay, let’s delve into that on the ideational front. I mean, I would say, who would want to do that? Well, my sense is that it’s this metastasization of Marxism, it’s the spirit that metastasized Marxism that’s bringing this about, and consciously.

And so you have the people that hold the center, the majority of people who approximate some implicit ideal, however poorly. And then you have people who are perhaps unable to do that or who are unwilling to do it, or who are even opposed to it. And they occupy the margin. And there’s many of them, there are plethora.

And the postmodernists, especially the modern queer theorists, let’s say, want to bring that margin into the center by whatever means necessary. Now, I think there’s a profound philosophical misunderstanding that accompanies that desire. Although if the underlying desire at the base is just the desire for chaos, which is certainly possible, then it’s not a mistake, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

But we tend to believe in the West that an idea has its opposite and that progress might be obtained by watching the war of a thesis and its antithesis. But that’s not how things work. You have a thesis and you have a plethora of antithesis, in fact, an infinite plethora. And so if you try to center the marginal, all that happens is you demolish the entire structure.

And one of the ideas that I’ve been working on recently, conceptually, is imagine that now you’re motivated to center the marginal at all cost. And you presume to begin with, because you’re naive or corrupt, that those marginal are a community, and they’re a community with something in common apart from their marginalization.

Well, that’s certainly the claim of the Alphabet mob, for example. “We’re all a community.” It’s like… Yeah, I don’t think so. It doesn’t look like it. It looks to me like you’re a plurality united by your… what would you say? Your resentment.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And narcissism.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And narcissism. Okay, so then. But here’s the subtle part of the argument. Let’s say, and I think this is true, it looks to me that if you demolish the center by centering the marginal, you destroy the marginal first, not the center. Because the thing is… Well, the thing is, Douglas, the center is protected.

Let me give you an example because I think this is relevant. So since the 1960s, since the early 1960s, under the guise of the sexual revolution, there’s been an all-out assault, let’s say, against the structure of marriage. And the consequence of that is that many people aren’t married, but none of those people are wealthy and educated, because the wealthy and educated are just as married as they were in the early 60s.

The people who aren’t married are the economically marginalized, let’s say, the people who are in trouble. And so that freedom that came from the removal of the patriarchal ideal, which is a burdensome thing to bear and also a judgmental entity—let’s say, you know, single mothers aren’t to be tolerated, that finger-wagging sort of morality—it’s like, fair enough, okay, now we bring the marginal to the center. Who dies first? The center? No, the marginal.

The Unintended Consequences of Liberalization

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes, well, another example of that, which you see in drug normalization—I don’t want to go on a tangent—but the elite classes who almost always push for further liberalization in laws are actually the people who, if they do dabble in that themselves, are most likely to be able to be saved.

After all, there’s a reason that their job will probably support them if they want to go into rehab and they will be able to pay, and maybe even their office will pay, maybe their firm will pay. Not so for the people lying on the streets of this city with absolutely no safety net who have not benefited from that liberalization process, to say the least.

But it’s the same thing, absolutely. The people you bring in, you bring in the most marginal case. And then, yes, in the end, the marginalized become the people who suffer the most.

And by the way, I mean, we’ve just lived through this bizarre social stampede on the Paris Olympics thing. But what you said was just resonating with me because I say, why is it now so compulsory, completely predictable that an Olympic games will have to open with a sort of balls-out, bearded drag queen being the center of attention and a very obese trans person should be the kind of main figure of worship in this bizarre modern cult theology?

And I know you notice this. I notice this. The truth is everybody notices this. It’s absurd. It’s a complete replacement theology as far as I can see. And one that hasn’t been thought through at all well and doesn’t work and is hideous and ugly and does not encourage people to aspire to anything beautiful or true.

The Cultural Divide and National Identity

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s the dread abomination of desolation, right, that the theologians warned about. When it’s put in the highest place, then it’s time to head for the hills. And what does that mean? It means something like, well, when the social order is so inverted that the most monstrous is elevated to the highest place, then that’s a sign that all that chaos is about to return. And that seems to me to be highly probable.

While we can see it and everyone can feel it, absolutely everyone can feel it in one form or another. It’s very terrifying to see it start to emerge in such a dramatic form in the UK. And it is something, for as a Canadian, it’s really something to go to Europe and hear the elite types express doubt about whether or not they have a culture.

You know, I heard people in the Netherlands say that to me. I met a group of very well placed comedians and artists and writers and most of them were conservative people and they expressed doubts about the even the existence of their own culture. And I come from the hinterlands of northern Canada and I go to a place like Amsterdam, it just makes my bloody jaw drop. And it’s the same whenever I visit the UK.

It’s like, you people don’t think you have a culture. It’s like, well, who has pretensions to a culture then? If Europe doesn’t have a culture, then no one has a culture. I mean, Europe has a culture that’s so miraculous that people make pilgrimages there in the tens of millions just to see its remnants.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So, yes, like, what the hell is this claim?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: It’s the nicest way to interpret what has been attempted in that regard is it’s nicer to incomers if we do ourselves down a bit, because otherwise it’s boastful. And maybe that is the instinct of some people. It’s been a stupid thing to try to progress that from an instinct into an actual policy and to fall back on the sort of mantras of, you know, everyone’s a migrant, for instance.

I mean, this is one of the ones that has just been endlessly forced on people. And again, sorry to keep referring to it, but as I said in the Strange Death of Europe, people in Europe, Europeans, British people, others do notice that if they moved to China or India, they would not become Chinese or Indian. They do notice that. And they do notice that if they had children in that country, their children would not be regarded as Indian or Chinese either. And that’s just to pick out two countries that happen to be the largest ones.

But in that case, a lot of people think, how come anyone can move here and immediately become us? And the answer is that’s not clear at all. It doesn’t seem obvious at all. At the same time, of course, nobody wants to say nobody can become like us, because that’s too judgmental and too negative a thought, too pessimistic a thought. And so what happens is just a set of stupid and banal lies.

Diversity is our strength, that’s another one. Diversity is our strength is possibly the main mantra of British and European societies now. And actually, again, as mantras go, is false. Diversity does bring some strengths and it also brings some weaknesses. Diversity can bring a range of ideas and it can bring ideas so terrible that they could destroy the society.

It wasn’t great that Ali Habi Ali’s parents moved from Somalia to the UK, got asylum and their son then macheted an MP to death in his surgery. We didn’t need the Ali family to bring the worst of the war zones of Somalia to the streets of a British constituency. And so when you hear people saying things, insisting, everybody insisting all the time, diversity is our strength, people know it’s a lie. People know at the very least it’s a half truth.

And they get fed up with this stuff being forced at them because all the time they’re noticing the downsides of this. And the downsides include, by the way, I mean, it can never be said enough, the change of a society when the movement is so fast and the numbers are so large and the type of diversity is so difficult. People notice that for instance, a high trust society of the kind that Britain used to be becomes a very low trust society and then become poor.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And the belief in institutions that used to characterize Britain, once all of those have delegitimized themselves, what are you left with? And then they come for the holy places. They come for your gods, they come for your temples. And people are meant to suck it up endlessly. And I’ve never been sure that they would.

The Myth of Diversity as Strength

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So, well, here’s an obvious question too. It’s like, well, here’s a definition of war. War is the definition of irreconcilable diversity, right? So diversity is our strength. It’s like, okay, well, Hamas and Israel have diverse viewpoints and they’re not reconcilable. So what do we have? A war?

So what’s the story that people are supposed to swallow? It’s that although the world has been eternally mired in internecine conflict, the war between diverse viewpoints, if we import all that diversity into the west, magically we’ll wave a wand and all that diversity will be transformed into nothing but productive, complex cooperation in the absence, by the way, of any reconciling framework.

Because people like Trudeau, for example, dispense with the idea of any national identity whatsoever. So their presumption is something like the natural state of people, regardless of the diversity of their opinions, no matter how diverse those opinions are, their natural state is productive peace. Right? So that’s what, that’s Rousseau. Is that what that is? Is that an unbelievably naive Rousseau?

And is that the unwillingness, is that a reflection of the unwillingness to look at the aspect of the human psyche that’s gleefully pursuing murder and mayhem just to never cast an eye in that direction? It’s all sweetness and light. We’re all little children. And if that’s what it looks like something like that to me, it’ll be the strange death of Europe, will be something like the death of the over privileged at the hands of their own naivety?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yes. And you can see it. You can see it very closely. I mean, as I say, you know, some ways, I mean, it’s a horrible thing to say, but thank goodness the killer in Southport wasn’t a migrant who had arrived illegally into the UK a couple of weeks earlier. But you want the peace of your society and the possible peacefulness of your society for the foreseeable future to be reliant on that never happening again.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, there’s also reliable evidence, Douglas, that the children of immigrants are more likely to be radicalized than the immigrants themselves.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Absolutely. Reverse integration.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Yeah. Especially if they’re having a hard time integrating. Right.

The Challenge of Integration

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, I mean, that’s one of the most common ones. I’ve spoken with you about this before, but I mean, the most common one is, you know, a parent who flees a particularly ugly and warlike society like, say, Somalia might realize how lucky they are to arrive in Canada. They might. One would hope that they did. Will the child? No, the child’s expectation is that the place they’ve been born in is the normal order of things.

And then a load of other people in society, you know, have totally forgotten what the state of nature can be and has been for most of human history and forget that. Actually, you know, you can bang on all you like about disinformation or online and so on. Most people are just looking at the situation in front of them and then suddenly war breaks out, hell breaks loose. Hopefully it’s contained, but sometimes you see it completely uncontained.

That’s certainly what I saw in Israel. The absolute epitome of unconstrained hate that was unleashed on Israel on the 7th, by the way. Again, sorry, one other quick thing on that, because it’s something that is so often in my mind is onto communities, by the way, in the south of Israel, precisely overpopulated by people who dreamed the dream of peace with their neighbors and believed, for instance, that by driving Palestinian children from Gaza to Israeli hospitals every weekend, they were doing something in the cause of peace.

Literally. The woman who was doing that, who was in her 70s, was burned alive in her home on October 7th. So the simple dream, dreaming does not make it so. You may well be living in the most wonderful dream. But if everyone else is not, you better just hope you’re not woken up one day. But the likelihood is you will be. And again, what I’ve laid out about the situation in Britain, I hope is some example of that. A dream which maybe doesn’t work. Maybe you’re woken up from.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so now I have a better insight too, into your goal in the speaking tour. It’s like you’re doing. See, you’re destined to be Cassandra, so that’s always fun. And you can tell if you’re Cassandra if you make prophecies that you pray would not come true, but believe are likely.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Oh, my gosh. Okay. You can’t believe how much that’s been on my mind. My late friend Jonathan Sachs wrote after a Strange Death of Europe came out. He wrote to me with a message from. With a line from Ezekiel where he said, what’s the line? He said, “and whether they listen or fail to listen, they should know that a prophet stood among them.”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Which I have. When I got in, I really hoped that he wasn’t right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, so I can see. I see. So you know, what you’re doing at the deepest level with this new tour is I can see why it’s the logical next step in what you’ve been doing because you’re going to attempt to bring to public attention all those things that people would rather not look at. Right.

So there’s a very old idea, and I elucidated it in some detail in this new book I wrote, “We Who Wrestle with God,” that the way you become immune to the poison of the worst serpents is by looking at the things you least want to look at. Right. And the goal of the prophet, the role of the prophet is to identify what it is that people want to look at least, and to hold it up in front of them in the hopes that that will make the people who are viewing voluntarily stronger and that that will set the social order itself on a more appropriate path.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, we certainly don’t need, we certainly don’t need people to be more dreamy and weaker than they currently are.

A Call to the Sane – Beauty, Truth, & Purpose

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, so maybe we could turn our attention this direction. You know, in this conversation, we’ve done a lot of what conservative types often do, which is to point to what’s not good and to make a case for its pathology and danger. Now that proclivity gives rise to the accusations from the radical utopians of the reactionary nature of the right. I don’t believe that right and left is the right way to conceptualize what’s going on in society now. But again, we’ll leave that aside.

You know that with this Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, for example, that was started last year in the UK, we’ve been trying to outline something approximating a positive vision rather than merely pointing to the evils of the current pathway. And that outlining of a more positive vision is something that conservatives aren’t particularly good at.

I can understand that in a sense, because it’s strange times indeed, where you have to point repeatedly about what should be self-evident in relationship to your culture to remind people that it exists. At the deepest level, the confusion about what constitutes a woman is a cardinal example of that. It’s like we’re so lost that we can’t agree on the distinction between the sexes. There isn’t a form of loss that’s more profound than that, as far as I can figure.

So what do you see as what you offer? What do you console yourself with in regards to something approximating what it is that you’re defending? What is it that’s the West that you’re decrying the loss of? What’s at the bottom of this that we’re in such radical danger of losing? This is exactly what Dawkins was pointing to, however implicitly, when he described himself as a cultural Christian. He’s like, okay, the West is under assault. Well, what is it that’s worth defending precisely? And how do you conceptualize that and make it explicit?

When I go to Europe, what do I love about Europe? The great beauty of its artistic tradition. That’s something that if you have any aesthetic sense at all, drops you to your knees to go to Italy, to a town like Florence, and to go into a random church where there’s a painting that if sold, would be worth $500 million, and to see it just hanging on the wall, unguarded, with no one around. Well, what is that? That’s an indication of two types of treasure. One, the art itself. Two, the fact that that art can just sit there without having 100 men with machine guns around it, making sure that no thug comes along and purloins it. So that’s the treasure of that implicit trust that you described.

There’s the beauty, there’s the deep sense of voluntary civilization that characterizes Europe. There’s a remarkable history of valuation of the individual all the way down the economic framework that’s particularly present in the UK—probably it’s there in the Netherlands as well. There are other European countries that share that. This is not no civilization and no culture. So what is it that we should be promoting and fighting for as far as you’re concerned?

Preserving and Adding to Our Cultural Tradition

DOUGLAS MURRAY: The main thing is that what you’ve just outlined, we should be continuing. One of the things worth small-c conservatism is that if the most radical figures on the left come up with completely bizarre new manifestos for what should happen, like the complete forgetting of biology or anything else, others could resist that and say, no, we have an alternative utopian vision. I myself am not a devotee of that idea. I’m a devotee of the idea of returning to the sane and the normal and the pursuit of the beautiful and the true.

Now, those are all things which you don’t have to invent a whole new paradigm for. We had it. We have it in the civilization you just described and the institutions and the buildings and works of art and much more.

Think of it this way. What if instead of everybody in our age who has any intelligence being told that they should use it to problematize history and go over history, focus on things that were solved and try to unsolve them and make the situation worse, what if instead of that, people actually wanted to make history? What if instead of being figures who could make the past worse and approach it with greater lack of nuance than ever before, they decided to become historic figures themselves? Well, that would be something to aim for.

What if instead of seeing the dozen or so figures that stand over the courtyard at Columbia University, Dante, Aristotle, and so on, what if instead of viewing them as simply dead white men, you viewed them as part of a tradition that you can be a part of and add to? Well, that would be something.

I think it’s a very good vision for life, and I think it did our forebears well. And if you have a pride in that tradition, which certainly in Europe we have the right to—not to eradicate any dark times, goodness knows—but a right to have that tradition and to want to add to it and to want to preserve it and keep it going, that seems to me a pretty good basis for life and remembering things that everyone knew until yesterday.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And I wonder, is it pride or is it grateful aspiration? Because that word pride, that’s been a very thorny word, you might say, and increasingly so in recent years. It’s like, well, the right attitude to have towards the great figures of the past.

In this Peterson Academy that we just launched, we have one of the members of the House of Lords do a lecture series on seven great historical leaders of the past. I’m kind of rubbing my hands together about that course, because it’s not the sort of course that you could get at a university. All things considered, there were no great men. They were just pursuing their own power dynamic for their own narrow, self-serving purposes.

The Reality of Great Historical Figures

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Which is so preposterous. I was with some mutual friends of ours recently on the island of St. Helena and although I tend to take the British view about Napoleon, which was that he was a proto-tyrant, you cannot sit in Napoleon’s study in Longwood House looking out at the ocean and considering the battalions of the British army that had to stay on the island to keep the Emperor inside and the fleet of British boats that had to sit in the harbor facing inwards to make sure the Emperor didn’t escape, to just think, wow, this was a world historical force, this man.

You’re able to take the bad with the good sometimes, but goodness me, the idea that there were no great men in history or that it’s all just sort of relative is so preposterous. And you don’t have to go to a sort of Carlyle and great man theory, but by the way, that’s a much better theory of history than anything that’s being pushed on us at the moment.

I did an alternative commencement speech for some of the students at Columbia the other month because they weren’t allowed a commencement ceremony because of the protesters at their university. A nice group of students and their families asked if I would speak and I did as much as I could.

One of the things I said, as well as talking about the famous great figures of the past, I gave the example of a 16-year-old who Andrew Roberts mentions in his history of World War II, “The Storm of War.” The 16-year-old who lied about his age to get into the British Navy as a submariner in 1940 or so is on one of the submarines that sinks a German U-boat. They get the crew off the boat and it’s sinking. But this 16-year-old and a couple of the others get into this German U-boat as it’s sinking, find among other things, one of the encryption devices which is sent back to Bletchley Park and which allows the Allies to crack the Enigma code.

That 16-year-old ended up being chucked out of the Navy because he’d lied about his age. But that 16-year-old boy called Tommy changed the course of human history for the good. Now tell me it wouldn’t be better as a society, instead of telling people to wallow in grievance and anger and bitterness, to say, you know, it actually doesn’t matter where you come from, if you have it in you, you could be a world historical figure as well and improve things demonstrably for the better with your life.

The Pathway to Hell vs. Heroism

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I suppose one of the conclusions that you could draw would be that the provision of ideologies that claim the contrary are generated for no other reason than to alleviate the responsibility for doing so from the shoulders—to lift the burden of responsibility for doing so from the shoulders of the authors of those ideologies. Everything is pointless. All morality is relative. No one’s life has any true significance. I can do whatever the hell I want with whoever the hell I want to, with no consequences whatsoever.

Because in the final analysis, does it really matter? Well, the reason I concluded eventually that it did really matter was because that’s the pathway to hell. And it looks to me like even if heaven doesn’t exist, hell matters. And you’ll figure that out when you get there. And it sounds to me like what you’re doing with your new tour is bringing what, an expanded vision of the hell that awaits us if we don’t walk a little bit more carefully than we have been.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And the heroism that can await you too. That’s one of the things that I find extraordinary from my past year. I’ve seen it before, but wow. Until you see what people are able to do under unbelievable circumstances and to risk their lives and sometimes to give their lives for a common good, for a purpose, for a cause sacrificially, almost self-sacrificially.

I’m thinking of people who drove right into the fire on the 7th and were citizens and who stood up for their neighbor and saved a lot of people. And people often think heroism is sort of a thing from the past. No, it isn’t. It’s something that, if the time emerges, you would hope you’ll be able to raise yourself to. But I’ve seen many people who did.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s the purpose of education, is to prepare yourself for precisely that. I mean, you saw when you came on tour with me, you saw the lights go on in the crowd, let’s say, when a case was being made for the relationship between truth and responsibility and adventure and meaning. It’s like this call to take your place at the feet of the greats, let’s say. That’s not some cliché.

It’s so interesting to watch people’s response to the re-presentation of that pathway because so many people are so seriously demoralized. It’s like, no, you know, you could gird your loins, so to speak, and become something, and you have a cardinal role to play, and you’d find the meaning of your life in doing that. And that meaning is more real than anything else because it actually is the medication that you can take that doesn’t precisely make you immune to pain, but it makes you able to accept it without becoming bitter and murderous. And that’s not nothing.

Remoralization vs. Demoralization

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Well, it has to be that there is an answer to demoralization, and that is something like remoralization of people. A reminder of people to rise to their better instincts, to rise to their better pasts, to aspire to their better forebears. That’s all possible. There’s no reason that radicals on any side should have to drag us down into this pit. Absolutely no reason. And we should be able collectively to cut whatever rope it is that they are trying to link us to and pull us down on and saying, no, you can go that way. But you’re not taking me with you.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, you’re not taking me or anybody I can communicate with effectively. We’ve got 12,000 students signed up already to Peterson Academy.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: That’s fantastic.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, so that’s a good index of the hunger that people have for an education that has the goal that you just described, which is to remind people not only of where they could go if they weren’t awake, but also of who they could be if they decided to be who they could be.

The Importance of Shakespeare and Great Works

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Absolutely. I was with one of my fellow Saint Helenans the other week with Andrew Doyle, who had just done the Shakespeare series for you, and I said, what a fantastic thing to have Andrew Doyle teaching Shakespeare. And I said to him, you know, one of the funny things these days is that if you wanted to get a university grant to study Shakespeare, you’d only be able to get one if you were promising to queer Shakespeare or problematize him or look at him through the colonial lens. If you just wanted to study the tragedies or the comedies, it’d be extremely hard to get a grant.

But as a friend of ours pointed out, I like to reiterate—the stupid thing about that is the idea that it’s our job to judge Shakespeare, whereas maybe Shakespeare is able to judge us. And maybe if you read Shakespeare well and watch it well and listen to it well and think about it well, you’ll realize that sometimes Shakespeare judges us and finds us wanting. And, you know, maybe that’s just possible that one of the reasons why we keep on wanting to chuck out great figures from the past is because actually like anything beautiful, it makes us nervous.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Any ideal is a judge.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yeah, exactly.

Ideals as Both Judgment and Hope

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, and that’s a very interesting thing to contemplate psychologically because the conundrum there is. Well, that means the higher ideal, the more severe the judgment. So that’s a problem and that’s a non-trivial problem. Like, I’m not trying to make light of that, but there’s a corollary to that, is that, well, every ideal is a goal and there’s no hope without a goal.

So you can sacrifice the ideal to avoid the judgment, but then you don’t have a goal. And if you don’t have a goal, you have no joy, you have no enthusiasm, you have no hope. And then your life truly is the kind of bitter misery. This is what happens to Cain, right, when he kills Abel, he kills his ideal. And the first thing he says to God is, my punishment is greater than I can bear. It’s like, well, why? Well, you’ve just killed that which you most wanted to be. And so what do you do after you’ve done that? Well, there’s no place to go. There’s no place you can run to. There’s no place you can avoid your fate.

And the universities have become places that are dedicated towards the demolition of the very ideal that gave rise to them. And obviously that can’t stand for long.

Gratitude Over Resentment

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Yeah, well, no, and that’s why, I mean, the great answer, as I said at the end of The War in the West, the great answer to all of this, and it also comes back to what you were saying about pride. I prefer to use the term gratitude and to say that really the appropriate answer to much of the immiseration and much more is to turn it around and instead of resentment, feel gratitude. And that’s not impossible because millions and millions of people across the world have waged that war within themselves and won.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, I think, you know, part of what you experience when you go into a great cathedral, if you have any sense, is, I wouldn’t say it’s a sense of your own littleness, because that’s not right. But it might be something like a sense of your own littleness in pause in relationship to the wealth of possibility that’s pointed at by these remarkable architectural forms. It’s like, look what human beings can do.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And are you doing that?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Are you doing that? Probably not.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: And there’s a reason why people are demoralized about that, because there must be some reason that we haven’t been building things like the great basilica at San Denis in recent years. And there’s a reason that those places increasingly look like lost tombstones in a ragged urban dystopia. And yes, and that’s why all of these things point to the same direction. The way down and the way up and the way down. We know. And we’ve all been able to study and we’ve all been able to see quite enough of the way upwards. There’s a task.

Closing Remarks and Tour Information

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, sir. Well, I think we’ll close up. I always get the sense when I’m talking to you that our conversation has just begun, but we’ll be able to continue it as we have over several years now. And for those of you watching and listening, Douglas came on my tour last September for a number of events, and that was very useful and hopefully inspiring, certainly was for me, and hopefully it was for the audience. That certainly seemed to be the case. And with any luck, we’ll be able to continue that in the future. Good luck with your speaking tour. I hope that I can come and see you at one of those. You said where do people look?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: So if they go to Live Nation, to the website of Live Nation and type in my name, and we start on September 8th at Fort Lauderdale, although that’s sold out, and we go through Miami Beach, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York, and then Denver on October 13th. So it’s a little over a month.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: When are you in LA?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: I am in LA on September 23rd at the Wilton in LA.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Maybe we’ll come out to LA and see you. That would be fun. Okay. So. All right. Well, for everybody watching and listening, most of you know that we’ll continue this conversation for another half an hour, but behind the Daily Wire paywall, and I think what I’ll do is, with Douglas, focus a little bit more on the situation in Israel and what he learned and to delve into some of the geopolitical realities behind that, especially with regards to the conspiratorial involvement of players like Iran in fostering this bloody hellacious mess.

And so if you are inclined to join us for that, that would be much appreciated. Otherwise, Mr. Murray, it’s always a pleasure, a perverse pleasure in talking to you and well, good luck with your tour. Thank you. You said Fort Lauderdale’s already sold out. What size venues are you addressing?

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Pretty big ones. The I think we’re now filling the Fillmore in Miami Beach for the 10th of September. So, yeah, they’re nice sized theaters, but still tickets for some come along well.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that’s heartening, you know. It’s pretty strange, if you think about it, that you can make a live event out of what you’re doing, showing people this horror and atrocity and making an intellectual case and that there is enough public appetite for that to make it not only an event, but a mass event that’s in some ways unprecedented because you’re doing what, live journalism. That’s not something that we’ve seen before.

It might also have to do with the fact that as the online world becomes more and more pathological and more and more difficult to trust, the value of these in-person events is going to increase proportionately.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Absolutely. Among other things, it’s a community of people finding each other as well, finding other people concerned about the same things.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, yes, yes. And you’re actually there to watch. You can evaluate deeply. And so that’s an interesting unexpected consequence of the virtualization of the world. Right. Okay. And then I guess what I’ll close with, apart from an invitation to everyone once again to join us on the Daily Wire side is we’d love to have you lecture for Peterson Academy on.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: I love that. Yeah, we discussed this. I definitely keen to do that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, we could make a great course out of that. And that’s our goal. So. All right, we’ll talk about that further. And to everyone watching and listening, thank you very much. The film crew up here in my cottage in Northern Ontario appreciate the fact that you guys set this up and make it straightforward and also to the Daily Wire for facilitating this and Douglas. Well, on to the next interview and it was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for sharing what you’ve seen and been thinking about with everybody watching and listening.

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Thank you, Jordan.

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