Introduction

John Anderson: [00:00:00] Well, Douglas Murray. Thank you very much for giving us your time. This will be, I think, widely appreciated in Australia in particular, where you are well known now as a writer, a commentator, an appearer on television programs, uh, a writer of great Note you’ve written about in the Strange Demise of Europe.

Uh, and now you’ve launched a second book, the Madness of Crowds, gender, race, and Identity, which is also flying off the bookshelves and creating a very great deal of interest. I look forward to talking to you about that, but before I do that, can you just tell us a little about yourself and how you came to your current positioning?

Douglas Murray: Well, I’m, um, I’ve just turned 40 and actually the author of five books I wrote my first and I was very young. Uh, book of literary biography, uh, came out when I was at university at Oxford, and so I’ve been a writer all my life. Um, I write journalism as well, uh, write for almost all the newspapers in the UK and various others abroad, including the Australian.

Um, and I, it’s a rather unusual career path in some ways because, uh, I, I think that I’m in an incredibly fortunate position and I don’t underestimate that in any way. And the fortunate position I’m in as I see it, is that I am allowed to say things that are true, even if they are unpopular or politically incorrect, or, um, likely to be howled down by some group or other.

Um, some people mind that sort of thing and for some reason probably just. Hm. Having learned along the way, I don’t especially, and I think it’s the job of the small number of us in any society who are not beholden to some wobbly boss or weak hierarchy to say things that large numbers, if not majorities of people recognize to be true but cannot say themselves.

So that’s my self-appointed role.

John Anderson: Terrific. Now, before we start to unpack some of, uh, the things that you, you do say, can I just say, I think the book is fantastic. I was lying in bed this morning, uh, early thinking to myself just for the writing, it ought to be a textbook. Oh. Uh, in schools. Then there’s the incredible research, very detailed.

But thirdly, the thing that struck me is, Takes a lot of guts to do what you’ve done regardless of, I mean, you just sort of said you’re in a position where you can be your own boss. You can say what you believe to be true, but it takes a lot of courage. You know, I don’t think you’re a person who’s simply seeking to be controversial.

You think truth, uh, and deep exploration of issues mm-hmm. Actually matters.

Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah. I, um, there are people who simply seek controversy. I, I don’t, I mean, um, the, uh, British English philosopher Roger Scruton said of me a little while ago that, um, I’m actually a very, um, amiable person. It’s just I’ve been bullied into being occasionally not amiable by not amiable people.

And, um, uh, I, I, there is some, there’s some truth in this, uh, I think that all ages engage in forms of self deception. Yeah. And we are very, very good at looking at the past and identifying that, you know, what were they thinking of? Mm. Why did they do that? Um, and we are inevitably rather bad at recognizing that our own age is likely to be doing things that our successors will look back at with at least equal amazement.

No. And say, what were they thinking of? Mm-hmm. So I think one of the self-appointed roles of a writer should be identify the things now that we are doing, that our successes will recognize to be insane and try to stop doing them early.

John Anderson: Sounds terrific. Uh, line of reasoning to me. Uh, one final point on this issue though, uh, I think it was [00:05:00] Robert Louis Stevenson once observed as a kid and I read that he’d said something like, courage is not knowing.

No fear. It’s pushing ahead. And overcoming the fear.

Douglas Murray: Um, yes. The truth is, I always say to people that if there’s something they’re worried about saying, which they think is true, they should probably say it anyway. Say it early, get used to saying it early, uh, because otherwise you’ll find yourself in a whole world of hell where you have to sustain lies, sustain ideas that you know not to be true.

It’s profoundly demoralizing. It’s demoralizing for society, and it’s demoralizing for an individual. Um, I don’t think anything I do is, is courageous. I, I know a lot of very courageous people from all sorts of different walks of life, but, um, I think that it would be a very sad situation if telling the truth as you see it was or deemed to be any kind of act of courage.

Uh, the water is always slightly warmer than people fear. Um, You know, people, people are very fearful of putting, even dipping a toe in to certain issues. So again, I mean, one of my, one of my beliefs is that writers should try to, as I say in the madness of crowds, try to clear some of these minefield of our times so that it’s safe for everyone else to, or safer for everybody else to cross as well.

John Anderson: I think that’s very valuable. It fits with Jordan Peterson, who told an audience in Sydney, uh, when he was asked a question about being battered by social media. Mm-hmm. He said, look, get it out there after a couple of weeks of fury blows out. Mm-hmm. And you can move on, but you’ve got it there. You’ve established a bit of a beachhead.

Douglas Murray: Yeah. And, but also, I mean, I’ve, I’ve just not got that much tolerance for the people who think that, for instance, being flamed on Twitter is that big a deal. I mean, uh, you know, My parents grew up in post-war era rationing, and then under the shadow of total nuclear annihilation, my grandparents fought in and lived through the war.

We’ve got it very damn easy in our day. So when people boast about being really attacked on social media, I think, oh yeah, that must be hell for you.

John Anderson: Again, useful perspectives.

Living in a Postmodern Society

John Anderson: Uh, well, the sale end of the book, uh, the contents page tells you that, um, you’re not gonna back away gay. And then there’s an interlude.

The Marxist foundations. Uh, women interlude the impact of tech race interlude on forgiveness, which I found really interesting and we’ll come to that, uh, for trans. And then the conclusion we’re to, from here, what can we do? Now, your thesis, as I understand it, in essence, is that we’re living through a postmodern era.

The grand meta narratives of the past have been laze discarded. We’ve moved away from the Judeo-Christian basis of Western culture. In fact, uh, there seems to be a determined attempt now to de authorize it and to paint it as evil and terrible and oppressive and cruel. Uh, and even our political structures, all the main political philosophies have essentially broken down.

And you see managerialism and ad hoary. Yeah. Uh, and lack of conviction and great cynicism in the community about that. But you are saying, we’re trying to build a new metaphysics Yes. On basis that simply won’t sustain it. You say, uh, put together as a new foundation blocks. As the foundation blocks of a numer reality in metaphysics, uh, they form the basis for a general madness.

Indeed, a more unstable basis for social harmony. Mm, could hardly be imagined. The products of the system cannot reproduce the stability of the system that produce them. And then this very important remark, we’re now asked to agree to things that we cannot believe.

Douglas Murray: Yes, I became fascinated. I, I like you, I’ve had less than you, but I’ve had to do a fair amount of media in my time.

And one of the things I started to notice in the last 15 or so years in particular was that effectively a new metaphysics that is the new, a new foundational morality appeared to be getting installed in our society. Um, and it went something like this. Uh, and again, one can. One can regret this or admire it, but I think most people will recognize something like it that, uh, not very long ago, uh, if you wanted, uh, to be seen, to be an ethical or good person, there were certain things that were perhaps expected of you.

Broadly speaking, they were the inheritance of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Um, and this included things like, um, charity, uh, forgiveness, um, virtue as, as [00:10:00] understood in that tradition and, and a lot more. And then at some point in the last 15 years, I, I say, sped up very clearly in the last 10 years, and then weaponized in the last five.

Uh, we see this another form of, of morality, not totally dissimilar in some of its, um, some of its appearances. And that is that in order to be a good person to be seen as a good person in a society like, uh, Australia or, or Britain, uh, you would need to stress, for instance, that you were anti-racist. As if everybody else in society was profoundly racist and you were one of the few brave souls willing still to battle racism, you would need to present yourself as being entirely on the side of women in any and all circumstances, and really talk about it an awful lot.

You know, if you’re a man, stress your feminist credentials. Uh, a tendency which as you know, from reading the matters of crowds, I’m tensely skeptical of you needed to talk about L G B T all the time, or at least as often as possible. And, uh, uh, and these, and, uh, as well as a few other things you might add in, uh, uh, green and, uh, perhaps a couple of other things became what you stress in order to show that you are a good person.

Now, these, these, in the end, I, I started to realize were becoming load-bearing walls, which I became very worried about and I’m very worried about because they don’t, they can’t bear the load. My view is, is that L G B T rights equal white rights for women, equal rights for people, whatever their racial origin is a very desirable endpoint, but it’s an endpoint of liberalism in the good sense, as we might understand it.

It’s a hideous foundation. Why? For two reasons in particular. The first is that all of these, these bases for numerology have intense friction among themselves. So as I point out in the trans chapter, trans and women have intense friction as rights claims. For reasons I explained. Trans and gay have intense friction between them for reasons I go into in the madness of crowds.

But there’s a second reason as well, which is that all of these things that we have been in societies like Australia trying to base our morality on are themselves much more unstable components than we’ve been willing to admit. So I say in the gay chapter at the outset, and I do gay at the outset partly cause it’s the only, only one of these minority things I can claim to have any, any crampons on, on the wall of, uh, the important Everest of, uh, of liberal rights.

Um, uh, uh, gay is much more unstable than we’re willing to admit in our societies. We still don’t know very much about it. Uh, I think we have to be a bit more humble about some of the issues around it as a result of that. But I get on then to the women chapter. I say we, this one also is much more unstable than we, than we’re willing to admit.

Are women and men exactly. Equal? Are is are men. More competent than women in certain areas. Are women more competent than men in certain areas or have we just for convenience, for the time being landed? For instance, in this strange place I think we’re in where we have to pretend that women are exactly the same as men and also magically better.

Um, we’re very uncertain about this. We’ve tend to be totally certain, we’re very uncertain race, absolute mess, which we are, we’ve been trying to think about and deal with as well as we can, but there’s a whole load of hell waiting for us if we keep leaning on it this hard. And then trans, which we know almost nothing about, and our societies are pretending to be incredibly certain about.

And if I can sum up the problem in this, in a sentence, it is that this new morality we’re trying to construct relies on us pretending we know about things that we don’t know about. Trans and simultaneously demands that we pretend not to know about things that we all knew till yesterday. Relations between the sexes.

The myth of the ‘LGBT community’

John Anderson: It’s very interesting to me that you clearly spell out your, the thing that you’ve just said in the book, uh, uh, on gays, that there are enormous differences within each grouping, under their heading. So gays, uh, lesbians and so forth, and enormous differences, even frictions between them. Yes, and in many ways it’s, I would imagine quite deeply resented.

I mean, during the gay marriage debate in Australia, anybody who was watching the debate closely could see there was quite a range of views in the gay community. Right. Quite a range. And in fact there were quite a few who said, we’ve never believed in marriage. Mm-hmm. Why would we want to do it?

Douglas Murray:  Yeah. There were some who said, yeah.

John Anderson: But of course you didn’t see [00:15:00] that in the media. It didn’t suit the narrative. You’ve got other people, it seems often using inverted commas. Um, these groupings that they’ve put together and insist our cogent and Right. Hang together to pursue, amend agendas of their own

Douglas Murray: Well, often, often to pursue a specific political objective.

Yeah. I mean, I wrote a, a piece in the Spectator in the UK in support of gay marriage before it was popular to be in support of gay marriage and explained what I regard as being the conservative case for it, which was an article which David Cameron used as a basis for his first main speech on the issue.

Um, I defended as a right, but I also am worried by, and have been worried for a long time by the extraordinary intolerance of elements of the so-called gay community, which I say so-called cuz there is no such thing. Yeah. I mean, you know

John Anderson: See this is one of the interesting aspects of this. Um, there, there must be a, there are a lot of gay people who don’t wanna be defined by their sexuality.

Douglas Murray: Well, just like, yeah.

John Anderson: There are a whole heap of other things. Yeah. They’re citizens. They’re, they might be boilermakers, they might be Sydney ex, you know, city executives or what have you, but suddenly there’s an insistence that they define themselves. Yeah.

Douglas Murray: And this is, this has come in very recently and it’s come in, in each of the ones I describe, and it’s a basis for madness.

Um, uh, when people say the gay community, who are you talking about? It’s like, women think this. Oh, really? 50% of the species all agree on something. Uh, blacks say this. Really? Mm-hmm. Um, now this is, let me put it another way. If, if somebody said, I know, um, I just love the working class. Who? Yeah. Um, I just love the middle class, who, I love the upper class.

Who, who, who are you talking about? And it’s the same with this. Why, why would we be, why would we be falling for this interpretation of society as depending so, or primarily on interest groups based on gender slash sex, sexual orientation, race, and a bit more. Why would we be doing that? Why would we be taking the individualism out of individuals and lumping them in these demonstrably incoherent bodies that don’t even exist?

They don’t even exist. The L G B T community. Take me to your leader. Come on.

John Anderson: I suppose in a way, you know, in, in public office, the thing that would’ve struck me about so much of this is that it. It actually ends up dividing us hopelessly. Yes. So we’re forever focusing on the, on our differences. Mm-hmm. On the things that divide us as citizens rather than the things that unite us and that we have in common.

Douglas Murray: What if that’s the point? Well, that’s what, if that’s the point.

John Anderson: So that’s your second chapter is, is really on, uh, on the Marxist, on the Marxist thing. Yes. Now, now, now this pulling together of, of disparate groups who have grievances that can be stoked and sort of, uh, if you like, used as battering rounds for political objectives, often without them probably even realizing that in a sense they’re being used.

Mm-hmm. That perhaps they, the modern version of Lennon’s useful idiots. Yeah.

Douglas Murray: Yeah. This is, um, this is, there’s a pattern in all of this. Uh, as I say in that chapter, you can, you can see the intellectual underpinnings. And they come from this idea that if it’s a, it’s a Marxist idea, but it’s just transferred to the modern era where instead of talking about society and class structures, you talk about it in minority interest group structures and you lump people like this.

What, what is, what is the primary aim of this? Um, among other things, it is a different interpretation of society, which is therefore intended to segregate and pull apart societies as you and I might understand them. So that people’s primary affiliation is not that I’m an Australian Yeah. But, or I’m British, but I’m a member of the L G B T community in the greater Sydney area, for instance.

Um, you can predict with 100% accuracy the people who. Encourage this, the people who will grab the latest claim by an interest group and run with it. And it is always people, always people who in the past had another way of trying to attack our societies. Had a radical Marxist view of the world. For instance, we know this with the green issue, where, and again, like, like the rights issues I’d write about in this book, they succeed because they’re not onto nothing, you know?

Um, the green, uh, uh, [00:20:00] movement is onto something with the environment and with our planet, but it has this hideous red interior which keeps exposing itself. Yeah. As desiring not, not a better relationship between ourselves and our environment, but for instance, the end of capitalism. Yeah. And it’s the same with this, uh, uh, I expose in each of the chapters that the people who make it repeatedly and desperately plain, that they believe, for instance, that being a woman is, should be merely the first step in a wider mission to bring down capitalism.

Now, I don’t think most women are on board with that, and most women would be rather surprised to be utilized in this fashion. Mm-hmm. But that is very clearly and explicitly, and I quote the, the various scholars and writers who’ve been pushing this for, for years. This is explicitly the aim, and it’s why, as I say, you can always predict exactly who is going to latch onto the latest claim when, when, for instance, the big bearded man.

Yeah. With male genitalia. Wins the women’s weightlifting competition. You can predict with 100% accuracy, who is going to say, yeah, what’s the problem with that? And the people who are going to say, Hmm, I’m not sure Clive, the big weightlifter should be winning the women’s category. You can predict it. And the people who say, why have you got a problem with that?

Bigot are always the same people who believed in the past that our societies needed to be pulled apart in another fashion, and now they’d like to do it in this fashion.

How Cultural Marxism Stole Educational Institutions

John Anderson: So this, uh, what might be called, I think, accurately cultural Marxism, people grown. Mm-hmm. And say, oh, here we go again. Yeah. But in reality, it is the case, isn’t it, that from the twenties on Frankfurt school and the thirties, you had Grams ski and so forth saying there’s a problem in the overthrow of capitalism.

The working classes are not rising up. Yes. They’re always a let down. They’re always a let down. They haven’t done the job for us, so we need to find a different way to achieve the same objectives and as to attack the cultural underpinnings of Western society. In particular, I would’ve thought things like, uh, capitalism itself, um, uh, democracy, course

Douglas Murray: nation states, but also

John Anderson: Christianity of the churches Yeah.

And family. Mm-hmm. Family. So the, the great loser out of a lot of this, frankly, I would say these culture wars are our children. Yeah. You know, we’ve deconstructed the family in so many ways and there’s further attacks the environment in which our kids grow up. Yeah. I’ve never quite understood how though the cultural Marxists managed to so capture academia in the West, and particularly it seems to me in the English speaking countries.

Douglas Murray: Oh, well that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s easy. I mean, they, first of all, um, academics can be. I think fairly characterized as not among the bravest people in the world, um, that once they get, um, tenure, they become very comfortable in a position they are. This isn’t always the case, but they are to a considerable extent.

As long as they tick the right boxes and have the right views, an unusual beast in nature, and they have no predator, um, they are able to have a very comfortable position in which they can, should express perhaps uncomfortable discoveries. But the comfort of recent decades has become the comfort of espousing and following a basically culturally marxist view of the world.

Um, I. Uh, the, the literature, the evidence of this is so overwhelming now, particularly from America. It has to be said, and there are, there are reasons within that, why that’s the case. I mean, look at the amount of money that is now that, that people now run up to get an, an education in America. Uh, it’s happening in the UK as well, but if you, if you massively increase the number of people who, who, who go to university and think they should go to university, um, you, you can’t keep up a system that rewards people for having gone to those universities and you create a Ponzi scheme, which is what a ca academia has to a great extent to become where social science departments grow and grow, where the human resources departments grow and grow.

I can’t remember the, the multiple now, but it’s only like three or four times more money is now spent in the American Academy on the purely bureaucratic elements of it than even 20 years ago, which means that. Young people in countries like America are running up massive debt in a Ponzi scheme that [00:25:00] cannot reward them because there aren’t roles at the end of it for all of these people with the degrees they’re given.

I think, by the way, there’s a massive amount of resentment coming in the next few years from the people who realize they’ve been had.

John Anderson: I think this is one of the great dangers, frankly, for Western society.

Douglas Murray: I agree with you. Yes. Uh, but, but, but to go back to the origins of why academics might be in this position.

I mean, let me put it another way, and this is one that make, will make me enormously unpopular with some remaining friends in academia, but it’s also the case that to a great extent, this isn’t where the bright people have gone in recent years. Um, tell me, outside of specific sciences and competencies, tell me a situation where in the last 20 years we would say, this is a really big problem, let’s go to the universities and ask them for the answer.

Um, When, when in recent decades we’ve had massive issues, have we been saying we must ask the professors what they think? No, we haven’t for all sorts of reasons, but one of them is they’re not very good at giving us the answers anymore. And, and by the way, the, the place you’d go last for an answer would be the gender studies department of a West Coast University.

You know, let’s go and see what they can tell us about the sexes. Oh, there aren’t sexes. There’s just a hundred genders, including two spirit people we just invented yesterday. Oh, great. They’re useful. This is a useful department. Thank goodness. Kids are getting into massive debt being lied to by these people.

Um, they’ve, they, they’ve lost, they’ve lost in large part the competence they had. And I think that there’s all sorts of reasons for that. As I say, among other things, a massive expansion. Of that sector beyond where it should have gone.

John Anderson: Mm-hmm. Well, astonishing, and one of the reasons it matters now is it’s such a high proportion of young people in the west go through university.

Yeah. And then they filter out into teaching our children into the media, uh, into all sorts of influential places. Now, the boardrooms, they’ve become centers of great wokeness. Yes.

Douglas Murray: In our country. Yes, of course they have. I mean, it used to be said, the only small c conservatives you would find in university were generally in the economics departments.

They would also always have Marxists in the economics departments. Uh, but you would, you would, you would often find that was where some conservatives were because the economics still needed conservative thought. That’s not the case so much anymore, and it’s certainly not the case in the humanities and the evidence and the, the, what studies have been done showed us the overwhelming preponderance of.

Marxists self-identifying socialists and others. You know, I’ve often said in recent years, and the only place you can really find open radical Marxists after the cold, the clo, uh, the Cold War closes is in the university system, although now we also have it in our political system. So that’s the development

Narcissism and the Obstruction of Truth

John Anderson: I have to say.

I’m still amazed at how willingly, how readily, how lazily people give up that much heralded sort of pursuit of evidence-based reasoning, problem solving. Mm-hmm. That surely lies at the heart of Western progress.

Douglas Murray: Well, um, but I accept your thesis one, one way I would argue it. I just, 1, 1, 1 way of also thinking about this, I think is the pursuit of truth has now got a massive blockade in its way, and the blockade is me.

I the self, um, so that you and I know this and we, we, there were so many examples of it, some of which I give in the book, but don’t go into that very difficult area. Why shouldn’t I go into this very difficult area? Because it offends me. Yeah. Now, the obvious thing that the adults in the room do at that point is so, so now we have become hostage to these people.

Any people, anyone who says don’t go there, it offends me and we step back and as I like the other issues I mentioned earlier, there’s a good reason for that. There’s an advantage, which is. Generally speaking, in our societies, we recognize that being nice to people is better than not being nice to people.

That being polite and not offending people is a good idea. It’s not been a view throughout human history, and it’s not globally at the moment. But, but in, in societies like Australia, we, broadly speaking, we Okay. I, I’m sorry I offended you. I’ll try to avoid that. Um, but if this means that there are whole areas we don’t look into, let me give, give an example quickly.

Um, the issue of child rearing, child production parenthood, um, there are a whole set of very, very painful issues within that almost unending number of painful [00:30:00] issues and a lot of truths that need to be said and a lot of facts that need to be explored. Many things though, we, we know about, we’ve been doing it for long enough as a species.

Um, however, if somebody says, if even one person says in a room that offends me. We are likely to step back cuz we’re treading on one of the most painful, important things in the person’s life. Um, so we’re hostage to that. And it means that you can very easily as a society, once you say we’re not going to talk about or explore difficult and painful things, it’s very easy as society, as a result to fall back and rely on lies or untruths.

And you now see the consequences of this. I’m now 40. I see the consequences of it in my contemporaries who for instance, were told at the outset of their careers you can have everything. Yeah. That was an easy thing to tell people. It was a nice thing to tell people. It was a very encouraging thing to tell people and it was also a little bit untrue.

John Anderson: So. This is really important stuff. I was talking to one of my neighbors at home in rural Australia, highly intelligent man, very thoughtful man, very pragmatic man. And he said to me, John, you worry too much about this stuff. People have got a lot of common sense, but he’s got three kids. They’re being educated in systems now where this madness has taken over.

Douglas Murray: My interpretation of your society, correct me if I’m wrong, this is a audacious thing to explain from Australian, and afterwards you can explain Britain to me. But, um, but I was in Australia last summer, summer before last. I was very struck, did a multiple city tour. I I was very struck by the fact that I thought that, that the, I have relied, um, and I’m sure this happens the other way around.

I’ve relied in recent years on the assumption that your average Australian retains a common sense that is perhaps absent from the average American these days. Uh, not to mention perhaps the average breadth that there was some. Um, core of common, we haven’t got quite as far down the road Yeah. Is the way we would normally put it.

And while that may be true for many people, I was very struck in city after city in Australia and in New Zealand that what I describe in the madness of crowds was, was at its Yeah. Heart in your country. Yeah. That and I, I was trying, I’ve been trying to work out, cause I read a little bit of Aus about Australia in the, my previous book in the Strange Death of Europe as well as you know about the immigration question and specifically on the historical guilt issues.

And it seems to me, among other things that I would love you to correct me on this, but it seems to me among other things that Australia has had a massive shift in its sense of itself. It has in your lifetime. Yep. And that as a result, huge, it’s become very vulnerable to this sort of

John Anderson: It has. Yep. I agree with that.

Right. And another man who’d agree with both of us as Frank Far Rudy now, he would not identify. On the political spectrum where you and I might, but he too would say, yeah, Australians still display a lot of common sense, et cetera, et cetera. But I said to him, do you think our universities have avoided the worst of this?

And he looked at me quick sharply and he said, no, I think you’ve fallen lazily into the worst Yes. Of the British and American track. Yes. But to come to the Australian psych, because there’s something I wanna draw out here. You think of, uh, perhaps our most renowned sportsman. Certainly the one that I think I respect most personally.

Long gone, of course. Now Donna Bratman. Right? Unbelievable. Uh, Australian cricketer. What was he known for? His character. And it was seen to epitomize what we thought mattered in character. He was extraordinarily gracious in victory and humble in defeat all the way around. He was extraordinary gracious in defeat and humble in victory.

We admired him enormously. He was a legend for that. At what point in Western culture did pride, which is another word for self-centeredness, eclipse, humility as a premier value, something to celebrate, if you

Douglas Murray: like. Well, it comes down to the, the same, um, axle shift as everything else, which is broadly speaking.

Did you think your society was a force for good or was it evil from the start? Uh, since 1945, every western society has gone through this shift at some point. Usually for similar reasons. And again, the basis of it has some good things. Accounting for historical errors, for instance. By the way, the oddity of this is that, for instance, all the countries that are, that are made [00:35:00] to feel worse at the moment.

Are the places with the least reason to feel worst? I mean, we don’t see massive self interrogation in China. No. There’s a reason, there’s a reason, and there’s a reason by the way, which we should be proud of in our countries, which is perhaps perhaps the free countries. One of our freedoms is to beat up on ourselves.

Yeah, I agree. Sure. But we

John Anderson: have the capacity to self examine mm-hmm. And work our way to a better position. Right. Which is a large part of the thesis of your book. But the, we’ve done it well, but having almost arrived at the railway station, suddenly we’ve decided we’ve made no progress at all. We’ve gone backwards.

Yes. We’re absolutely terrible. And the trains just run off down the platform.

Douglas Murray: That’s right. That, that, that new generation comes along with the, with believing in many cases. I mean, having been lied to that societies like Australia and Britain are. The most racist societies on earth, or the most sexist societies on earth or homophobic or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, compared to which societies precisely in the world.

Um, so the staggering lack of geographical and historical context in our countries. I mean, this is another, this is another failing of the university system. If the university system had merit, it would, it would be inculcating in young people among other things. A sense of damn gratitude. For starters, just for starters, um, uh, some sense of perspective on the world.

I mean, I’ve been very lucky in my career. I’ve traveled extremely widely across every continent in the world. And one of the things I know everywhere I go is how lucky I’ve been, how lucky I’ve been to be born in a society I’ve been born into at the time I was born here. Privileged, even privileged. And, and it’s such a hard thing to

John Anderson: measure, as you say in the book, but I, I interrupt.

Yes.

Douglas Murray: But, um, But as I say, all of our societies at some point got shifted onto this idea that actually we weren’t very good. We weren’t very virtuous, that we’d done so much wrong. And this is where we become susceptible enormously susceptible to anybody who claims to have a different way of doing things and who claims to have the answer, for instance, to everything.

One Greatest Lesson from History

John Anderson: Let me just tease this out a little. The loss of historical knowledge mm-hmm. Of background seems to me to be terrible. I don’t think you can work out where you are, where you want to go if you can’t establish where you’ve come from. Yes. Basic map reading if you like. It seems to me now, one of the great lessons I would’ve thought of history is that deny to deny people freedom of conscience.

Belief religion is deny to deny them the most fundamental freedoms of all. And again, Frank Far Rudy made this point. He said the first. Freedom in a way in the west was freedom of conscience. Yes. We stopped burning one another at the, the stake because it was barbaric. It was not Christian and it was also stupid.

Mm-hmm. Today’s minority mm-hmm. May turn out to be tomorrow’s majority. You talk about that a bit, that it appears that some people who have been pushing for rights, having achieved them, then turn the Jack book that they once Yes. Were on the receiving end around and attack others. Yes. Yes. In fact, you make, uh, there’s something in here that really jumped out at me.

Uh, you said almost immediately after gay marriage became legal in Germany, acceptance of it was made a condition of citizenship. In the state of, uh, Baden Wittenberg. A condition of citizenship and I ask for stuff, where does that leave the left? Those figures, and in free country, they’re right to believers who don’t believe in marriage at all.

They suddenly have to say, right, we do actually sign up and we now believe in marriage and it’s new version,

Douglas Murray: but only for gays.

John Anderson: But that’s absurd. That is to deny everything that our own history’s taught us. See, I would be one who’d say, we ought to learn our history. So much of it has given us the freedoms that we have.

But if you want to understand where we’ve gone wrong, we can learn from the things we’ve gone wrong as well. We’re not prepared to even learn the things we got wrong or from the things that we got wrong. Yeah. Than the things we got.

Douglas Murray: Right. Well, one of the reasons why the, the, the new metaphysics, new religion I describe in this book is identifiable is because the people who follow it behave with all the zealotry that religious fanatics have behaved with in the past.

It’s not enough that they believe something. You have to believe it too. Um, I wrote in The Spectator recently about the, uh, as a, a minor, it’s a, it’s a minor thing, but, uh, there’s a restaurant in America called Chick-fil-A. Yes, I saw that article. Um, chick-fil-A, uh, some of the people FA family is a Christian family business.

Um, pretty big chain, honestly. It’s big chain’s. Third largest. Chain, uh, a restaurant in America opened, uh, [00:40:00] um, uh, uh, for the first time in the uk, uh, in October, and, uh, announced shortly afterwards that it’s closing, uh, because of protests by local self-appointed gay activists, uh, because Chick-fil-A in America, the Christian family found it, gave donations about 10 years ago to a family, charity, family, uh, oriented charities, which included opposition to gay marriage and so on and so forth.

Now, here’s the thing with that, like with the Equinox gym controversies in the summer in the US is it’s not enough that, that these people choose not to eat their chicken nuggets at this place. You mustn’t either and they mustn’t serve chicken nuggets and they must close. Well, even if the family who run Chick-fil-A are the most opposed to gay marriage ever, I still think if some people want to eat their chicken nuggets, they should have the damn right to do so.

But that, that instinct is not there in the social justice warriors of our time. It’s not just that they don’t want the thing, they don’t want you to do the thing either or to have the right to do the thing, because only by total decimation of their enemies can they win. No, that isn’t liberalism. No. In any interpretation of the term, any interpretation.

John Anderson: And how does it fit with the insistence of gays in America, for example, but also we see this in Australia that, um, you know, the, the, the baker issue, the, uh mm-hmm.

Baking of a wedding pack. Oh, no, no. You, you cannot possibly exercise your conscience. Uh, if a gay couple want a wedding cake, you must provide it. Mm-hmm. How does it fit with the right on the other side to close a business down? Because it has a different perspective.

Douglas Murray: How about going back to the courage issue?

Maybe these people are all just incredibly cowardly and lazy. Maybe that’s all that’s going on. You see it, it’s, it’s quite easy to say, I refuse to eat my chicken nuggets at that place in Redding. That’s quite easy. I mean, I’ve spent all my life ducking eating chicken nuggets in Redding. I, I can keep doing it if I want.

Uh, um, but, but it’s, if you think that’s the main issue in that rights issue, it means among other things you can avoid the harder ones. Well, here’s a harder one. There are still dozens of countries in the world where it’s illegal to be gay. There are still around a dozen countries where you can be executed from being gay.

If you’re gay rights activists, mightn’t that be a place to start. Mightn’t that be a mightn’t that be one closer to the boat as it happens. I know nobody’s meant to say anything at all. Uh, um, Praising of him. But as it happens, Donald Trump has said he wants to make this a priority. Actually, the he, he is, his administration is looking at trying to stop the countries which still make being gay illegal from doing so.

They going to tie it to aid and all sorts other things. That strikes me as being a very good laudatory gay rights move. Let’s, let’s make, let’s try to make sure that there’s nowhere in the world you get hanged or stoned for being gay. It’s also for, for many individuals, a bit of a hard one. Why? Well, it means you have to make a value judgment.

It means you have to say, actually, I think the way we do things in our society is better than the way they do in that society. Well, you know, oh, that’s cultural imperialism, deep cultural imperialism. Who are you to say that they shouldn’t shove the wall on the gaze? Um, and again, much of the lazy, cowardly, social justice movements that pretend that they’re incredibly brave.

Don’t want to get into that.

Run an awfully long way very fast. Hmm.

John Anderson: Power seems to be at the heart of a lot of this new, if I can put it this way, anger. Mm-hmm. Uh, the sort of desire to uproot everything. Why is it that we don’t see the pursuit of power for the ugliness that it is? I mean, Acton was surely right. We should be wary of power.

It does. Corrupt and absolute power does tend towards, uh, absolute, uh, corruption.

Why Forgiveness Matters

John Anderson: We don’t seem to value things like love, harmony, community. Mm. Turning the other cheek, forgiveness. Mm. They seem to be under ruthless attackers belonging to an era we despise, which. Enjoyed a Christian conception, uh, uh, uh, consensus.

Yes. In terms of, of the way we viewed the world and our neighbor.

Douglas Murray: Well, it, one of the striking things about going to societies that are radically different from your own and why it’s worth doing is because it can wipe you of some of your presumptions about what the natural state of mankind is. Yeah. You know, um, [00:45:00] a lot of people in countries like Australia who think that, for instance, loving your neighbor is the natural default condition of people have an awful shock coming to them, not just in their own countries where of course, nobody can entirely live up to that very strenuous command.

But in all sorts of countries and societies around the world where people act and behave differently, where the state of nature is a always is, is is different. Um, Our societies put a premium or did put a premium in the past. As you mentioned earlier, the cricketer example on magnanimity and victory, for instance.

Um, humility and defeat or graciousness and defeat among other things, these are not the natural defaults. These are learned behaviors learned because there was a deeper undertow beneath them that told you that these things were worthwhile. Charity, for instance, is not the state of nature of mankind to be charitable, let alone charitable to people you haven’t even met and are very unlikely to meet.

These are learned behaviors, taught behaviors from a very specific tradition. That isn’t to say that other traditions don’t have elements. It themselves, they do, they have versions of it, but our societies today have become fixated in the post-Christian era, have become fixated on power. As the primary dynamic and understanding mechanism for human society.

And my view is, as I say in the part about fuco in this book, I think this is a really deeply perverted way to look at society where we interpret interest groups and others as forever scurrying to achieve power. And we entirely ignore what for most of us remain the more important drivers in our lives.

If you were to say to somebody what drives you, if you went up, the average person in Melbourne said, what drives you? If they said power, you’d step away slowly. More likely. They would say something along the lines of, um, love for my family, friends. They might have a wider group of people. They express that towards community.

Towns civic, perhaps even nation, um, they wouldn’t say power. Now the reason why we’re bad at talking about this is among other things because it’s a more embarrassing, icky thing to talk about than power to purely look at power dynamics are the men powerful over the women are white people, powerful over people of color, and so on and so on.

And infinitum is, it’s slightly easier to do than to talk about the flip side of that, which is love, forgiveness, charity and more. And I think conservatives have been bad about talking about some of this as other people have. Um, conservatives in recent decades have to a great extent thought that the point of their philosophy is to talk about the marketplace and economics and leave the rest.

That’s been a disaster, been a disaster.

John Anderson: Uh, one thing that brought it home, uh, I’m, I’m reviewing a book at the moment in which he, uh, an economist has written, uh, about the collapse of Lehman. Mm. And when you actually, his thesis is essentially that the abandonment of the classic virtues, prudence, integrity, courage, and so on and so forth, was what led to that frightful mess.

Mm-hmm. In other words, the abandonment of morality mm-hmm. Has disastrous economic outcomes. And conservatives have, by and large missed that as I think, yeah. Those who might have been classic liberals and uhhmm, small ill libertarians by and large have missed it as well, and short termism, and they played right into the hands of those who dislike capitalism in the first place.

Douglas Murray: Yes. I mean, well, there’s been, I mean, because capitalism is, Produced a better system than any other system we know of, of course doesn’t mean it doesn’t have flaws within it. And one of the flaws always has been, um, short term, it’s why, why family businesses can often be so successful is because as you know, the, um, uh, if you were to raid the whole thing, strip it, present a false version of itself is that you are going to suffer for it.

Um, there’s a phenomenon I’ve often noticed of family businesses, for instance, ending up in the hands of outsiders who squeeze, maximize profits because they want to run off quite shortly afterwards. And having made their pile, um, a conservative approach to this small city conservative approach to this, among other things would say, but this is a, this is an immoral thing to do in it itself [00:50:00] because.

It’s not your right to simply squeeze the value that’s been accumulated by others, run away with it and then allow it to collapse. That’s not a decent thing to do. There have, by the way, there are versions of this, and I’m sure there are in Australia, there have been quite public versions of people who are now being shamed for that kind of behavior.

Oh, absolutely. And it’s a very, I think it’s a, I think it’s a positive step. Uh, people like Philip Green who, uh, asset stripped a major, um, high street chain here in the uk, it’s a good thing It’s being exposed.

John Anderson: Yeah. But it’s a terrible thing that it’s happening and it’s, there’s a sense in which. It starts to wind back freedoms, doesn’t it?

We had a commission of inquiry, right? And the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the banks and the financial sector in Australia, it revealed some terrible behavior. To be fair, a lot of people behave very decently and they get tared with the same brush. But nonetheless, there’s a massive problem. And the reaction is people say, oh, thank heavens.

We had the Royal Commission of Inquiry. Now we can have 78 new sets of pieces of legislation, more surveillance, more monitoring, greater fines, and then we find that credit starts to become a problem because everybody becomes cautious. So the problem in essence is that the bankers weren’t asking themselves what they ought to do.

Rather, what can we get away with?

Douglas Murray: There is a, um, there’s an additional problem we’ve, uh, put upon our shoulders, which is there are, I, I’m sure the Germans would’ve a term for this, but there are, there are categories of problem which we, we don’t address because the only people who’ve been trying to address some are people with the worst possible answers.

Capitalism, I think falls into this basket. Um, uh, the people who have been critiquing it the most for many years have made a lot of other people not want to critique it because those people who’ve been critiquing it all along have an answer. And it’s Marxism. Yes. Yeah. So we avoid the, we avoid having the discussion.

Cause we simply don’t want, it’s the same thing with the inequality discussion. I, I think, which is that there is a, there are so many discussions to have about inequality and, and actually there, there’s been quite a lot of literature about them, about that issue over the decades. It’s sort of been run through already.

Uh, it’s nothing new that debate that we’re going through, but it’s very striking to me that, again, the political rights tended to avoid inequality dispute debate. Why? Because the people who’ve been thinking about it have an answer. It’s Marxism. Yeah, sure. And we want to be absolutely sure if we have that conversation.

Yeah. That they’re not going to smuggle Marxism in when we’re not looking. Mm-hmm.

Why Radical Autonomy is the Enemy of Freedom

John Anderson: Uh, uh, if I can go back though to this issue of the way in which we’ve actually completely turned on its head now, the beliefs and values that underpinned Western society. I mean, we really have, I mean, the Christian model of relationship with your neighbor is established by the idea of Christ dying on a cross.

Not for his friends even, but for his enemies. Mm-hmm. You know, turn the other cheek. Yes. Um, do unto others. You’d have them do under yourselves. Um, and then the, I suppose the sort of the, the sort of minimalist version of that. At least do no harm out of mil. Right. But it’s all gone. We’ve actually reversed it all together in the, in, in, in the interests of the big me of selfism, of radical autonomy that says, I will do with my life and my body, and my money and my time and my relationships, what I choose. We’ve actually inverted the worldview.

Uh, if you like, that, that drove our freedoms. And I think for me, as someone of Christian belief, the greatest question, I mean, I accept that people have absolutely the right to choose or not choose faith, but the greatest check a question of all the greatest challenge for the secular institute.

On what basis will we establish a workable respect for others? Because no society of a Democratic tradition can possibly survive. I, I, I believe it’s impossible to survive if you can’t find a basis, a rational basis that’s powerful enough to change people’s behavior so that we break free. I mean, you make good point.

We’re reverting to type progressives say we’re moving endlessly to a better future. But in reality, as you say, from your looking at other societies, as you travel the world, Hmm. We’re losing, if you like, what we had and reverting rather than progressing.

Douglas Murray: Well what’s the single hardest command within Christianity?

Um, you can get almost everything you’ve Christianity from earlier or other sources. You can get almost everything in Christianity of Jesus’s teachings from, uh, the ancient Greeks. Um, [00:55:00] a lot of the wisdom is very similar. What is the thing that I is totally revolutionary about? What Jesus says. It’s the commandment to love your enemies. Yes. That is a

John Anderson: And demonstrated in Christian belief. Yeah. By him actually dying for his enemy. He was dying for them.

Douglas Murray: This is, this is, this is a world historical change. Of com a command that demands a world historical change. My own view of this is that it is possible in individuals on occasions with exceptional grace.

Um, and that it is, that it is almost impossible for most people, most of the time. But that the commandment to, to do that at the very least, reigns in the worst of our nature. That knowing how we should behave ideally means that we can step back from the worst of ourselves, which we know and intuit. Um, this is not an easy thing to replicate without its foundational claim, which is a foundational claim.

The truth claim made within Christianity, it’s what I, I quoted in the Strange Death of Europe that. German, uh, uh, uh, Juris book Andfor who posed this question in the 1960s. Can a society, can a society, the sort short version of his, of his, um, challenges can a continue in the same manner if the thing that gave the source to the society is itself now cut off and as I say, in the strange death of Europe, possibly for a time when you are running on the, the fumes still Yeah.

Of that implication. Yeah. Um, can it sustain forever? No, because if you don’t, if you don’t believe in the driving force of it, then once the people who did believe it have died out, you are, you are, you are still going on a memory of it and then that dies out. So this is a very big challenge, and it’s a challenge, which I think the intersection lists and the social justice warriors and so on have knowingly or otherwise recognized, which is why they’re trying to dig in a new metaphysics fast, the metaphysics of L G B T, women race, et cetera.

John Anderson: And I can only say, I am absolutely convinced that the thesis of your book is right, that cannot sustain a free functioning, workable society. It just isn’t. It’s hopelessly inadequate to the task.

Douglas Murray:hopefully in hopelessly inadequate and divisive and doesn’t provide very much meaning. Um, uh, but so, so here’s, here’s a big, here’s a big challenge, and I wish I could get more people to think about this.

I, I’ve given the chapter on forgiveness in the matters of crowds as you know, a, um, a challenge, which is we live in the most unforgiving era that history could ever have known, because we live in an era in which. Action in the world. As Hannah Aaron, uh, puts it in the s her, as I quote s hers in the early fifties, action in the world was always our biggest problem as human beings because we, we could never undo our actions and we always knew that it’s, uh, it’s one of the main catastrophes of being a human.

Yes, we don’t know how our words will reverberate. We dunno how our actions will reverberate and we can never undo them. Never. What’s the only mechanism? As Hannah Aaron says, what’s the only mechanism we ever came up with to try to deal with this terrible catastrophe? It’s forgiveness or something like forgiveness.

It’s a mechanism to try to undo the undoable thing. Yeah. Now, nobody in our societies today spends any time thinking about forgiveness at the moment in history when acting in the world has never been more precarious, where a young person can. Tweet Yes. And destroy their lives like that.

John Anderson: Yeah. Where they can, I’m not burning of the burning of the state.

And it can happen to you. Cancel someone, anyone all the time. They take their life.

Douglas Murray: Yeah. It can post the wrong photo on Facebook. I give examples in the book terrible, pitiful examples of, you know, and I, I, that’s why I sort of resent the, the looking, the looking to millennials and afterwards being snowflakes or, you know, I said they’ve got a, they’ve got a very good reason to be worried and to be tiptoeing like never before.

Yeah. Because say the wrong thing, which everyone’s only agreed is the wrong thing 24 hours ago. And you’re toast, you’re over, you’re, you may not ever get a job. You are online forever for the, you’re stuck with your worst joke, your worst photograph. You, you only slip. We thank goodness grew up in an era before this where we could make mistakes and they weren’t with us for.

The Lost Art of Forgiving and Forgetting

John Anderson: So, so there’s two aspects to that. Really. There’s forgiveness and forgetting. And Rabbi Jonathan [01:00:00] Sachs observed that, um, with the abandonment of the main source of the concept, uh, of forgiveness and our insistence that we practice it to the best of our ability and that we look to it for relief when we know we’ve done the wrong thing in our society.

The Judeo-Christian influence with its loss, it’s washing out, said that, I said to him, what happens when that’s gone? He said, well, you have to hope that people will forget, but the age of social media makes that impossible, so you have neither forgiveness nor the capacity to forget.

Douglas Murray: It’s pretty devastating for young people.

It’s devastating situation, and I’m very sympathetic to young people growing up in, and they need a lot of, yeah, help and advice and care and love, I think, to try to get through this and the adults have a disproportionate duty to help them. I mean they always did, but they, especially now, so the adults should be careful, um, about joining in the retributive era.

Here’s the other thing, the bigger point, if I may, which is, um, we don’t know exactly what we are doing. Maybe we never did, but it’s worth trying to think of answers your answer. And the answer of a lot of people is, we knew what we were doing till not long ago. So why don’t we, as we’re going through this unbelievable fog at the moment, why don’t we reor ourselves, reor ourselves to our origins in religion, faith.

That’s, that’s one answer. And by the way, It’s so striking that that answer is not given by the churches themselves. I mean, the place with honorable exceptions, with some honorable exceptions, but by and large, the, the, the bishops, certainly in the Anglican communion where Archbishop Welby was once again this week discussing Brexit, uh, um, in a society where the archbishops talk about Brexit an awful lot and not very much about the resurrection, the church turns out to be one of the last places you’d go for Christianity.

Um, that’s a terrible, terrible down by the churches who’ve decided in large part to jump on the bandwagons of the day, to jump on green, to jump on social justice issues and so on.

John Anderson: In the belief, it seems to me you’re emasculate Christianity if you make it captive to the reigning culture.

Douglas Murray: Yes. And uh, and one of the reasons why people flee, but the churches, at any rate, should.

And those who, who, who follow the teachings of the churches should I think much more distinctly say, there’s a reason why we hold onto this still and there’s a reason why we think it would be good for you as well. Now for all sorts of reasons I, I’ve written about in my last book, um, I’m not in the position of being a believer myself, although probably like various others.

I describe myself as a believer in belief, uh, and certainly a beneficiary of elements of it. Um, I think that those who are in the position I am in on this also have a lot of work, if not a lot more work to do, and particularly for and with young people on this because we all have the same questions we always had as a species.

We try to work out what the hell it is we’re doing here.

John Anderson:We don’t really believe we’re just a collection of atoms. Do we?

Douglas Murray: I don’t think we do. I think that there’s something very instinctive in us. I, I, one shorthand I say for this is, um, if you said to, if you said to me, well, as a consumer, Douglass, and I said, well, well, I mean, sure.

I mean, I’m, I’m a consumer. I consume things. I buy things and consume them. But, but there’s a bit more too than that. There’s a, a bit more, I sense you’re not just a consumer. I sense there’s more to myself than that. As you do. As we all do. Yeah. And that’s why we don’t live as though we think we’re a collection of Adams.

Right. Um, we don’t, we don’t live as if we are merely the thing we have that we are in. There’s a, there’s a very deep sense in which ourselves know something about ourselves. We find it extremely hard to communicate, but we know it and. This instinct is to the generation growing up. Now in the west, this instinct is only being spoken to by people saying, okay, there’s a dearth of meaning.

But you can find it. You can find it in endless retributive wars for justice issues on smaller and smaller minority points. So you will find meaning in the world by insisting that the big bided guy with a penis can [01:05:00] win the women’s weightlifting competition or the people that say otherwise are bigoted.

Go for it guys. Now at the end of this process, there is a presumption that there is a presentation that somehow, somehow we get to utopia. You know that within our lifetimes, utopia is graspable and it looks like total equality for everyone all the time, and. Yeah. Even if we got there, and I would submit that we’re never going to, we never could.

Things can be better, but they’re never gonna get there. Even if we did, what do we do then? We’re still stuck with the same questions about ourselves and for ourselves, and I have some answers to that, some suggestions for that. Um, which largely rely on suggesting to people that we should live the lives we recognize to be good lives until yesterday, and that lives of meaning can be found in the 21st century, not with great ease, with significant challenge, with an awful lot of work, a lot of commitment, but they can be achieved and that deep meaning can still be found.

But the first thing people need to do is to realize that it cannot be found in the things that are being offered. And so in a way, what I’ve tried to do with the madness of crowds is to say, I’m gonna take apart this thing you are being offered to show you why it isn’t going to work. And I’m doing that cause I want to then say, do something better with your lives.

What is better? Almost anything other than this, but get off this, get off this fast. Don’t waste a minute more of your life on this, on working out where you are in a hierarchy, on working out when you have a right to speak or think or how privileged you are, or how privileged you are compared to the person beside you or the person to your left or your right or in front of you.

And where you’re allowed to speak and where you’re allowed to think in this. Well, don’t spend a minute longer doing this game, this unwinnable, horrible game because we live in an era of history where we could do so much. We have access to information that we never dreamt of when we were growing up. I can, I can get to the source of a, any book at the click of a finger, press of a button.

We can save so much time. Um, we can get access to so much. If you are a smart person anywhere in the world, in the developing world or the developed world, and you have access to YouTube and to Google, you can do miracles that your ancestors collectively could never have done. So why spend our time doing the retribution privilege game?

Why not work out what we should be doing and start doing it?

Conclusion

John Anderson: Well, Douglas, I don’t think you could finish on a more important note. I think the one thing I would say as. Someone who admires your work enormously and thinks that you’ve provided an invaluable service with this book, you’ve given us a mirror, which if we look into it, shows us just how ugly our state is.

And surely any thinking person can only respond by saying, I need to rethink, is to encourage you to use that very powerful mind you’ve been blessed with. I see it as a gift to all of us to keep teasing out those answers for me personally. Uh, who has, you know, if you like, in over my lifetime, come to a profound belief that the resurrection was real.

Uh, I have to say that I think we need ex something extraordinarily powerful to change ourselves. In other words, we can only be renewed by the transforming of our minds, and that is no small thing. But thank you so much for the way in which you. Tell us so much about ourselves and challenge us so deeply.

It’s, it’s admirable and I wish you all the very best with it.

Douglas Murray: It’s a pleasure.