August 12, 2025 • 61 mins
Having recently listened to a few extracts from the last interview we had with Tom Harrington, I was reminded by just how good he is.
Tom’s capacity to expose wrong think, and inspire and develop how we do think is hinted in this comment:
“That having more educational credentials is no guarantee against the danger of believing in stories that seriously distort our understanding of imperial facts.”
He is a very inspirational speaker.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from news Talks It be
follow this and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio.
It's time from all the Attitude, all the opinion, all
the information, all the debates of the sis, Now the
Layton Smith podcast powered by news Talks It.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Be Welcome to Podcasts two hundred and ninety seven for
August thirteen, twenty twenty five. The Treason of the Experts
by Thomas Harrington underscores the need to apply intellectual discernment
on all pressing questions. In a case by case manner,
Tom suggests that having more educational credentials is no guarantee
(00:48):
against the danger of believing in stories that seriously distort
our understanding of imperial facts. Now I've just listened to
a few outtakes of this interview, and I've forgotten how
good Tom is. Is. Capacity to expose wrongthink and inspire
and develop how we think is well amazing. So if
(01:12):
you haven't heard this interview before, you'll get plenty out
of it. And may I say yet again, if you
have heard it, you'll get plenty more out of it
the next time you listen. Enjoy Buccolan is a natural
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(02:15):
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Always read the label and users directed and see your
doctor if systems persist. Farmer Broker, aucklumb Layton Smith, Thomas Harrington,
(02:49):
Senior Brownstone Scholar and twenty twenty three Brownstone Fellow is
Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College at Hartford, Connecticut,
where he taught for twenty four years. His research is
on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture.
It is. It's a great pleasure to have you on.
(03:11):
We got an extremely good reaction Tom to your appearance
in that last one, which was probably far too long ago.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
How are you, Yeah, I'm great. I'm delighted to be
here with you.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Really nice.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Now, the Brownstone Institute and Jeffrey Tucker, who I had
been speaking with before any any intimation of the Brownstone
Institute emerging, you had and you're part of it. You
had your third conference a few weeks ago entitled Rebuild Freedom.
(03:45):
It was held in Dallas, and I really wanted to
go and couldn't. But why don't you give us a
bit of a take on what it produced, how beneficial
it was, and how good it was, and what did
I miss well?
Speaker 4 (03:58):
I think one of the nice things about having gotten
involved with Brownstone is that you are part of a
movement where, for the most part, people are coming from
very different places and very different ideological positions. Despite what
our mainstream media would tell you is the case, and
we have joined together because we all believe in some
(04:21):
of these ideas about human freedom and dignity, and I
think the first time we came together there was a
giddiness to it. We couldn't believe we were together. Last year,
we were still giddy this year. I think in conscious
we have a consciousness of the fact that this is
going to be a long fight, and so there was
(04:43):
a worry, at least on my part, that the magic
would be gone and that the idea that we weren't
going to turn this around in a day might discourage people.
But on the contrary, I think the gathering show that
there are a bunch of people still flame inflamed by
what has been done done to them, and that they
(05:03):
are very much getting ready for the long fight and
are beginning to bigger and more expansive questions about our culture,
which are some of the things that I try to
bring to the movement, as I'm not a physician or
a policy person, but trying to look at some of
the big cultural problems that made this possible and some
(05:24):
of the cultural building we need to do to perhaps
spur renewal of some of those essential values you spoke
about in your introduction when you looked at the when
you were reading the cover from my book.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, well, I haven't finished with the introduction yet because
I'm going to quite a little paragraph written by Jeffrey
Tucker as the forward to the book. He says, being
on the editorial board of the Brownstone Institute's Operations, I
can report my excitements when an essay by Tom arrives
in my inbox, I know for certain that I will
learn something new, be encouraged to turn the prism in
(06:01):
a different direction at observe events and trends from a
new perspective, and feel infused by the power of his
mind erudition that emanates from his spectacular writing talent. In
so many ways, each essay is a gift. A full
book of them is a windfall, and just when we
need to understand what has happened to us and where
(06:23):
to go from here. Now that was that was some
commentary from him, because I don't think he's I don't
think he gives away platitudes like that unless they're unless
they're certainly warranted. But the conference itself, it would have
been extremely well run and there were so many people
there who I who I either knew of or who
I have had on this podcast, as as some we
(06:46):
have spoken in the past, and and I wanted to
to get together with. Mostly the only one that the
only one that I have met and we had dinner
about or two months ago, was Ramesh the kur And
and Ramesh I think is brilliant. I agree he was
the featured speaker, and I'm interested from you to find
(07:10):
out how I've read the speech, but I haven't heard it.
How was he received?
Speaker 4 (07:17):
He was received very very well. And Ramish is a
figure I can't claim to know him well. We said
hello to each other at the conference. He's to me
a very interesting fellow because he's been at the very
inner workings of all of at the very highest levels
of policy and health policy. And I'm very admiring of
(07:39):
him to have the wherewithal to take two steps back,
three steps back, and four steps back and question what
is going on? And I think that gets to one
of the big problems we've had throughout this that people
become so enamored of their positions in life and their
alleged expertise, they become locked into ideological positions that don't
(08:02):
allow them to look freshly at new problems and new realities.
And I think, what's so wonderful Ramus, and he's been
great from the beginning when I think I started reading him,
probably in the fall of twenty twenty, is that he's
been able to do that pivot and he's been able
to bring all of his vast experience along with him
(08:23):
into our camp. And I think it was that weightiness
that people understood as they were listening to him.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yes, his occasional position as Assistant Secretary General of the
United Nations one is one that adds weight. Well, it
adds weight because basically has rejected pretty much everything as
far as as far as I can tell, as far
as the uns concern, He's on a constant front foot
(08:53):
in attacking it wherever is appropriate, and there's plenty of opportunity.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, I mean, that's something.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
And this gets to one of the I think underlying
themes that I discussed in my book is, to what extent,
living in a consumer culture where success is the ultimate
gold in life rather than perhaps other transcendent ones, how
hard it is for people who have been brought up
on the model of success again to use the term
(09:20):
pivot away from all of the things that granted them
their accolades and perhaps their money. And I think that's
one of the biggest things we're going to have to
deal with. What can we do, how can we begin
to generate a new appreciation for things that are bigger
than perhaps material and career success. And that's something he did.
(09:43):
Another person who is there is an Australian David Bell.
I don't know if you've spoken to him, Yes, And
I consider David another extraordinary human being who's been at
the very center of things and again has in a
certain sense walked away.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Is by understanding and is absolutely.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
Integral in the way he approaches from a values point
of view, and he makes a huge contribution to the
Brownstone movement.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
I think I particularly like the fact that he that
he moved to I think it was Washington State, wasn't it.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
He moved from Washington State to Texas?
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, But he moved to wash into Washington State when
he gave up his position in Geneva, was it Yeah?
And then packed his bags and took the family down
to Texas because well, he realized where he was up
north was no place to bring up kids. Yep, so
he also has marched to his own tune after succeeding.
(10:50):
But just on that note of success, to me, the
greatest thing, the most important thing of all, is freedom,
however you want to construct it. We talk about free speech,
et cetera a great deal, but freedom overall is the
most important thing. Freedom to say what you want, freedom
to move where you want, go where you want, pretty much.
(11:12):
And the challenges are rising at a rapid rate of
knuts from what I see to put chains on that.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Yeah, And this is to me perhaps the most frightening
thing of what we've been through is that what to
you and me is self evident that freedom is the
most important thing, that without it we lose our sense
of dignity and we become playthings in the hands of others.
Seems to not always resonate resonate with a lot of people,
(11:45):
and that it seems to be trumped by, as absurd
as it may sound, convenience, that living a convenient life,
living a resistance free life is really more important than
living a free life and accepting the contingencies that go
along with being free. And I am especially troubled by
(12:08):
what appears to be a generational divide on this. I
was not long ago in Europe and I was on
a bus and there were some American young people behind
me in their mid twenties, and they were getting to
know each other, and I couldn't help but not eavesdrop
on them because their voices were coming over the seat
to me, and they were getting to know each other.
(12:29):
But they were getting to know each other on the
basis of their shared weaknesses. I suffer from this, I
suffer from that. I suffer I also have obsessive compulsive disorder.
And on and on it went for twenty minutes, which
isn't to denigrate real problems that people have, but I
(12:51):
was struck by how their weaknesses had become a sort
of currency between them.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
That when we go into.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
A relationship and we meet someone, we're not putting our
best foot forward, We're not putting our heroic self forward.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
We're putting our weeks self forward. And that led me
to a.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Whole bunch of reflections about what it is in our
culture that might be impelling people to see weakness as
a greater currency than self reliance or strength. We're all flawed,
and we're all weak in our ways, but nonetheless we
have to put on a good face and move on
sometimes and frankly be courageous even though we're not sure
(13:32):
sometimes that we can be. And yet here was the
polar opposite. And it's something I saw in the last
years of my teaching career that this idea that I
am a mass of pathologies and that as such need
to be treated with a certain condescension and or belief
in my own fragility, and that it would seem would
(13:53):
lead directly to the acceptance of tutelage from very big
powers from on high. And so I see it as
a very dangerous dynamic and one that begs a lot
of questions about what the social teachings were and have
been an are that have made young people portray themselves
(14:14):
in this way and play into a game of weakness.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
I don't know if that makes sense to.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
You, but it certainly makes sense. And I just want
to insert something here that occurred to me and I
didn't include it, and then we'll pick it up again
from where you were. Sure, well, it was just the
success that one for freedom. This is something I've tried
to teach my kids. For freedom, you actually need or
(14:39):
it certainly helps a great deal if you have financial independence,
and gaining that financial independence can appear to be agreed
a selfishness or however any individual wants to interpret it
because of how they see it. But to me, it's
a way of establishing yourself with the ability to be
(15:00):
yourself and not be under threat of all the threats
that we face these days, that are imposed upon you
by other people.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
I would agree with that, but I would just add
one caveat to it, and it would be this. I
have watched people who set out to do that as
their life goal, and who in the process of doing it,
have become co opted by the game itself such that
they get to a point of material success where they
(15:31):
probably could opt out or walk away, and yet the
game itself begins to exert a certain addiction on them
and begins to take over the freedom that they were
playing the game to earn. And you have a version
of it in academics, I mean academics. You spend these
years trying to get your tenure so that you can
be free. But in the process people make so many compromises,
(15:56):
oftentimes with the establishment, in order to get that tenure
that they learn that they forget how to exercise the
freedoms when in your late thirties or your early forties
you get that that wonderful tenure. So it's I would
just add that complexity to to what you just said.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And I accepted. So the where were we Where were
we going to pay?
Speaker 3 (16:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
Oh with with weakness as as a as a as
a performative value.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Let's put it that way.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
If any more on that, yeah, it bigs again. I
have more questions and answers, but it begs questions about
how child riving has been done in what I guess
is my generation, and why those simple things that are
both mythological and necessary like put on your brave face
(16:49):
and stick to it have given way to g I'm weak.
I need someone's help, and I will accept it, even
though it involves giving away my freedom.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Uh and and and and.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
That to me is where we should be really worried
that students are now saying they're not for free speech.
In fact, they believe they should be protected from free
speech from ideas that disturb them. I mean, what kind
of world is that? When the old sticks and stones
will break my bones becomes but names can never hurt me,
(17:27):
become names will always hurt me, and please owe great
power save me from them. It seems to be a
bit of a world upside down from the one I
grew up.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yes, so the question then, is, having painted the picture
that you have in the last five or ten minutes,
how do we make a break from it?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
To me, one of the things that makes.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
These attitudes, these what I consider unfortunate attitudes, possible, is
a certain degree of emotional and physical alienation. Another of
my favorite essays in the book as the one that
speaks to the lack of physicality in the in the
middle and upper middle classes, that we are become people
(18:14):
that live inside our brains and not with our bodies
by and I'm not just talking about physical work, which
of course is important and used to be part of
one's general upbringing to do physical work, but I'm also
talking about physical engagement with the senses, with other people,
eye to eye, across tables, in physical presence, with their bodies,
(18:41):
where we are engaging the full amount of our observational
qualities to become to become social beings, and to become
well socialized social beings. I think the intervention of technologies
has begun to ameliorate that training that used to be
just what you did as a young person. You sat
(19:02):
and watched older people. You watched how they interacted at
a table. You began to look at their ticks, and
you begin to look at the way they expressed themselves.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
You looked at the way.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
They when they told stories, are told FIBs, how you
could pick up on it in their physical being. I
think a lot of that, and this, I think even
pre dates technology has begun to slip away because of
the way we live. We don't sit around tables, We
don't have the what someone said to me the other
day the third place, which was the bar where you
(19:34):
go and you have a beer and you joke around
and you engage in formalized aggressiveness, in the case of men,
oftentimes with each other, verbal aggressiveness that is playful. And
if you don't know how verbal aggressiveness of the playful
sort exists, especially among men, then you're going to have
(19:56):
very little ability when you run into it, to understand
what it's about and that it's essentially benign in many cases,
and it is not this thing that's going to kill you,
and that you need to be protected from. But if
you don't have that training and that socialization, you're not
going to know that.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
How I've noticed it is when you talk about that
playful discussion or commentary verbiage, is that somebody that keeps
telling me that my sense of humor isn't isn't cutting through.
They don't get it well. And the sense of humor
I've got is one I've had for a long time,
and I remember, just to give you a quick idea,
(20:39):
I remember the days when I first moved to New
Zealand and it was a different country then to what
it is now, and the humor that I had, that
we had developed, you just couldn't utilize it because nobody
got it. And so I used to I used to
fly back to Sydney four times a year just to
(20:59):
get a break and enjoy my old sense of humor again.
Speaker 4 (21:03):
Yeah, I think there's a couple of course. Humor is
in many ways culturally culturally learned. I come from an
Irish subculture which tends to be verbally profuse and has
an undercurrent of aggressiveness to it that perhaps other subcultures
don't have. But I think in a bigger sense, the
(21:24):
problem of humor. Humor is in the final analysis, based
on irony, and irony, of course, is based on the
idea that a single set of words can have multiple
layers of meaning. Visual imagery, which is the dominant way
that or dominant way that most young people are getting
their information today, is very different from reading. Reading, if
(21:48):
you do it assiduously, teaches you necessarily that you have
to be thinking about several levels of meaning of a
given word, in terms of its intonation, in terms of
its context, and in terms of all those things. So
to be a reader makes you be multi vail, a
person who can understand multi valent understandings of words and
(22:10):
of statements, which of course makes you able to understand irony,
which in turn makes you able to understand humor. But
if you don't understand the language is multi valent by definition,
you're going to seize upon a literal utterance, an utterance
as a literal statement, and you're not going to get
the humor.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Indeed, so it's probably time we turned our attention back
to the book and the Treason of the Experts. Where
did you come up with the title? How did you
come up with the title?
Speaker 4 (22:43):
The title is for some scholars of French literature out there.
It's from nineteen twenty. I got the idea from a
nineteen twenty seven book by Julien Benda, who was a
French Jewish intellectual who in twenty seven wrote a book
called The Treason of the Clerques or the Clerics. It
has a double meaning there it goes again, which can
(23:06):
be translated into English as reason.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Of the clerks or as the clerics.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
So, in other words, he was stating or advancing the
argument that in the modern era the intellectual had supplanted
the cleric or the priest as the moral leader of
our society, and that as the people who had supplanted
the clericy as the leaders of morality and envision, they
(23:37):
had a responsibility to act in a very distance and
nuanced way, and as in a way that is least
contaminated by the jingoism of patriotism. So his book was
an attack on both the French and German intellectual classes
(23:57):
for the ease with which they were subsumed by the
jingoism that made possible the horrendous slaughter of World War One.
And he was saying that an intellectual worth his or
her weight is one who can distance himself from political
encroachments and say this is the truth as I see it.
(24:18):
And then if they're not doing that, they're engaging in
an active treason against the society because they're betraying the
role they have in the culture.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
I want to pick out a couple of chapters at least,
and have you addressed them, And this is the final
sentence of the first one. If we really are interested
in democracy, we cannot passivelyceede to the ethos of technocratic management.
That are lazy and cowardly politicians and their media servants
(24:53):
are now relentlessly foisting upon us. Keeping in mind this
was April of twenty twenty, the earlier days of the
pandemic of COVID. Would you adjust your approach to that now?
Speaker 3 (25:07):
No?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Okay, well that's I think that's the right answer. So
just walk us through that chapter. They're all short. It's
not a chapter. It's a called technocratic and authoritarianism.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Technocracy is, believe it or not, a term I came
in contact with through my study of contemporary Spain, and
Spain had a very interesting nineteenth and twentieth century, which
were the areas I spent a lot of time on
and what happened in Spain was that they were a
(25:40):
failing empire that had lagged behind the rest of Europe
in terms of the adoption of democratic forums, and that
in the early part of the twentieth century sought to
install democratic forms like those that inhered in France and
in Great Britain, but they had no democratic culture to
go with it, and so what happened is that democracy,
(26:03):
in the attempts to establish a semblance of it often
failed and brought on confusion. And the solution that was
begun to be advanced at the end of the nineteen
twenties was that we had to appoint a group of
people who were more clairvoyant and more far seeking than
the average person, who were technically intelligent that would solve
(26:27):
complex problems for us and save us and the common
people from the need to use their obviously impaired minds
in a democratic process. And that gave way in a
very real way to Franco's dictatorship. There was that impulse
(26:48):
of the twenties came to fruition really in the thirties,
when the Spanish Republic was established, and as you might think,
with a fledgling and separated society, it became conflictive. The answer,
of course, was to find people from on high who,
with force on one hand and supposed clairvoyance on the other,
(27:09):
would be there to direct the society and tell them
how they had to act.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
And that's technocracy.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
And then it came to a real four in nineteen
fifty nine in Spain when the Spanish economy under Franco
was not prospering, and he brought in a group of economists,
so they called technocrats. And what the idea they had
was that we would open up the Spanish market, but
we would keep closed the Spanish Spanish social life. And
(27:38):
so these people would be non ideological, or allegedly non ideological,
and because they were above the fray, we could trust
them and they would be the ones to lead us
to a better place. But of course, no expert is
ever apolitical, and that's one of the great dishonest conceits
of all of this. All people are political, whether they
(28:01):
want to admit it or not, and they have certain
inbuilt biases and tendencies. So to portray yourself as being
above the political fray, as our experts in Corona Corona
Land did, is an impossibility and we should be very,
very suspicious of anyone who proclaims themselves to be above debate.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
There's only one criticism I have of the book. Sure,
if you don't mind, there is no mention of New
Zealand or Australia, or Australia for that matter. But I
mentioned New Zealand specifically because this is where the bulk
of our audience is. But we had a prime minister
for most of the COVID era. We had a prime
(28:45):
minister who was faithed by the rest of the world,
but was very destructive of the weld the goings on
in this country and the recent election of course has
given way to that. But I would have thought that
she deserved your attention.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
She did get a lot of my attention, although I
didn't write about her, And the reason I didn't write
I try to write on things that I feel. You know,
I have a inadequate control of in terms of my background,
and I'm very comfortable in European and American politics. I
have spent little or no I've spent no time in
(29:28):
Australia or New Zealand. Although I followed it closely. I
followed that horrendous moralizing woman very closely, and in fact
I remember her saying you'll only get good information from us,
or something like that if you don't yeah, yeah, and
(29:49):
if and that's it. Anywhere else you ought to be
wary of.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
It was even worth a don't believe.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
I don't believe. And I was horrified at that. And
one of the things that that incident with Ardurn and
several others, with Dan what's his named over in Australia,
Dan Andrews. I mean, I followed them closely, but I
think in a broader sense they coincide with a lot
(30:16):
of what we saw here and in Europe, and I
think it has a lot to do with the infantilization
of the populace, and that there has been a long
term effort, through our media and through the great global.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Powers to infantilize us.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
I mean, when she said that, I couldn't believe that
eggs weren't thrown at her, that laughter didn't break out everywhere,
and so on and so forth, and yet she said
it with earnestness. It was taken with earnestness by a
by a soporific press, and on it went, and it
(30:57):
was only a few of us nuts in the in
the medical freedom movement, who saw it for the incredible
infantilization of the populace that it's vote for. And that's
that's a very vexcing question. Have we become infantilized? I
think I later have written an article called infantilized or Us?
(31:18):
And I really think we've got to ask questions about
infantilization and how we have come to accept clowns like
that woman who's an obvious corporate shill who was installed there,
and why we don't just laugh at them?
Speaker 2 (31:37):
The only response I can give is that it was
so painted as horrific that nobody had the wherewithal little
and the courage. I shouldn't say nobody, because there were
people right from the beginning, but and they grew. But
the majority of people were so concerned about frightened about
what was going to happen or likely to happen, that
(32:01):
they had no choice or they felt they had no
choice but to submit.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
Yeah, wow, wow, Where is skepticism?
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Where is? I can answer that question for you, okay,
because skepticism has been a word that has written the
climate change global warming train for a long time. From
some sources, the bulk of people again, because it's an
area that, going right back to the beginning, it's an
(32:30):
area that most people don't know anything about. And what
went on was that skepticism was essentially outlawed, and many
people lost their jobs, many people suffered from in various ways,
and skepticism got itself a bad name.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Yeah, I'll give you a concrete example of that, and
the one that I pushed back. Some of the articles
in the book or the chapters were written originally in Catalan.
At the time. I had a column there's much of
the pandemic. I had a column in a Catalan newspaper
and I used to write a monthly call there, and
(33:09):
in one of them I said that any well educated person,
especially one who is engaged in a great deal of
research in their lives, can and should read medical literature
and come to their own conclusions. And I was careful
to bracket that by saying, obviously, my ability to read
it on the granular level would be less than that
(33:32):
of a trained physician or scientist, but that even as
a humanist, I can make sense in broad break broad
terms of the medical literature and come, after reading a
number of things on a given subject to some tentative
conclusions about what they point to. I was roundly criticized
(33:56):
by the readers as.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
If to say, who are you. You're not a scientist.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
And there we get to this idea that there are
and I think a subproduct of the un fortunate overspecialization
of the university, this idea that.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
One must stay in his lane. If not, he's a faker.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
And if he's a faker, you can dismiss him because
the real questions come from the people within the field.
When in fact, if we know Thomas Kun's outlook on
the advancement of scientific knowledge, he says precisely the opposite.
It's the people who are the outliers, who are not
(34:37):
subsumed by the logic of the field, who are the
most necessary for advancing us to the next stage of knowledge.
So you need outsiders. But what we were told again
and again during the so called pandemic was that this
was protrietary information. There was a priesthood there who understood it.
You had no business thinking for yourself, and don't even try,
(35:00):
and if you do, you should be ready to be
mocked as an interloper and a fool.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
And people got that message.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Most people are terrified of being mocked, especially publicly. But
I think that I think that skepticism may be making
a return, because there are numerous fronts in which the
skeptics have shown themselves to be on track absolutely now
(35:34):
of the chapters.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
Sorry, go just one more note on that, just to
extend the metaphor of tunes thinking about the advancement of
scientific knowledge. One other thing that animates me is the
idea that we might in fact be at the end
of a historical epoch, and or, at least in the
sense of the United States, we're at the end of
(35:56):
an epic in which the US Empire and its assumptions.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
Fit and are fit to lead the world.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
And I think what happens at the end of a moment,
of a historical moment, a broad historical moment, is that
the people who can't adjust to the changing circumstances outside
that they can no longer control, double and triple down
on the articles of faith that have gotten them to
the to the dance. And I think that historical element
(36:28):
may have something to do with that. I think there
are a lot of people that know intuitively that the
paradigms we've lived by no longer work they don't know
what the new ones will be, and in their fright
they double and triple down and say you must believe this,
and if you don't, you're harming me.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
But that's just a sidebar, I guess.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
There is a book probably some years ago called Why
the West Rules for Now, And only yesterday I saw
a headline that I don't have I don't have with me,
but it was it was basically a no attachment to
the book, but basically a confirmation that we're in. We're
(37:07):
in right in the zone now for exactly that, or
the wist to lose its leadership.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
Yeah, the idea first came to me, interestingly enough, about
twenty years ago. I was doing some work in Uruguay.
And when you're in Uruguay or in Argentina or in Chile,
the world of the United States is far away. It's
really interesting, and all the things that we think the
whole world is thinking about in the Euro American space
(37:37):
are not so important. And a good friend of mine,
a very bright ice, is Tom We're at the end
of an epic. I know we're at the end of
an epic. And it was the first time that I
had ever been forced to look at my own country
in terms of its possible death as number one in
the world. And as I began to get over some
(37:57):
of my prejudices about the need for us to be
number one and entertain the idea, I began to agree
with the thesis of my friend and have begun to
explore it. But in my experience as both a teacher
and a friend of others and in conversation, I have
given versions of that idea to other people, and it
(38:18):
induces fright in them. Rather than saying, gee, that may
be true, and how can we adjust, the reaction is, oh,
come on, We've always been number one. And I think
you can see this in our elite class and especially
in our diplomatic core in the United States.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
We no longer do diplomacy. We will issue orders. We
go around the world.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
Issuing orders and saying do this or else. And if
you think about it from the point of view of
a mature and resilient society, that's something you don't do.
That's a panic move when you have to convert diplomacy
into a series of dictates.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
And I think it's a good sign that the idea
that we may be at the end of something has
some all its watch.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
This space the chapter or the article Bill Gates and
the frame game. A few weeks back, and this was
this was June of last year. A few weeks back
in the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Bill Gates
said some surprising things in the course of a fifty
six minute panel discussion. The vaccine pusher extraordinary admitted that
(39:33):
the and you even put in brackets starting at the
eighteen twenty two mark, that the COVID vaccines do not
block infection, and that the duration of whatever protection they
bring to the table is extremely short. People seem to
to well, if not worshiped Bill Gates, then they get
(39:54):
very some of them get very close. What words of
advice would you give?
Speaker 4 (39:59):
That intervention by Bill Gates at that forum, which went
almost completely uncommented on in the mainstream media, is one
of the most extraordinary things I think I had ever seen.
Here was the man who had told us we all
need to get this thing in order to save someone else,
(40:20):
and that it was our moral duty to do.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
So, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Here he was
basically admitting.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
That it was an absolute failure and it didn't get reported.
And then I began to analyze his intervention even more,
and I realized there was the second part, which you
have there in front of you, in which he says,
though though they saved millions of lives, you know they
didn't do this, which was the reason we told you
(40:49):
to get them. But they did save millions of lives,
which itself has been completely unproven and by the way,
looks completely specious as a claim.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
So what was Bill Gates doing.
Speaker 4 (40:59):
He was engaging in the old thing that the intelligence
services often called the limited hangout.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
He was trying to free throw overboard that which was.
Speaker 4 (41:11):
Troublesome to him from a rhetorical point of view and
save the overall frame of goodness about the vaccine, And
to my amazement, he got away with it. And so
after that we saw the press never talk more about
the problem of infection or transmission and started with a
(41:31):
new meme about how many.
Speaker 3 (41:32):
Lives it had saved.
Speaker 4 (41:33):
In other words, the vaccine wasn't a total loss, even
though it was a total loss on in the very
parameters that you had set out for it to succeed upon.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
And in that way, he was.
Speaker 4 (41:45):
Trying to keep the rhetoric of success alive. And it
appears he did so, because there are still plenty of
people who look at the failure, ignore that it happened,
forget all that was said about the moral need to
protect others because of transmission and infection. And and I'll say,
they were a wonderful success and a wonderful thing, and
(42:05):
we have to have more of them in the next pandemic,
which of course is bound to come along.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
Well. Extraordinary lieing of a very sophisticated.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Sort skepticism is required. Yeah, I'll say, I do want
to I want to go back a bit in the
book the Hitting what Everybody Knows Knows in quests, because
I thought that you hit on something extremely important. So,
just briefly, what was the purpose of that article?
Speaker 4 (42:39):
That article was took place in the late spring of
twenty twenty. I wrote that it was a time in
which the university in which the university I was teaching at,
was debating what would be done in the following academic year,
A time in which you had a group of well
paid and tenured, often mostly tenured, professors wondering whether it
(43:04):
was safe for them to have in person classes the
next year, or whether they would have to continue to
teach by zoom, as they had done through the latter
part of twenty twenty, something I was doing at the time.
On the other hand, I was working with my wife,
who's a handywoman of deluxe and likes to work on houses.
(43:26):
And she has a bit of a rehab business that
she does on a house that she has near a
lake in a rural area of the state I live in,
and so I sometimes help her as her gopher as
she's doing her renovations, And of course in the course
of that I talk with people of a class in
the rural areas of the state of Connecticut that I'm
(43:47):
generally not in contact with, carpenter's tradesmen of all sorts,
people who work at lumber yards, and the life. And
what was remarkable as my colleagues quaked in fear about
the possibility of being in classrooms six months away with
young people who are known not to be important vectors
(44:08):
of disease for a disease that we knew by then
really only killed zero point twenty percent of one percent
of the people who got it, and most of them
over the age of seventy five. While they were quaking
and saying, under no circumstances. When I get into the classroom,
here were people in the trades working daily, unmasked with
(44:31):
each other, and when I talked to them, they knew
much better than my PhD colleagues the actual statistics and
risk calculations having to do.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
With the COVID virus.
Speaker 4 (44:49):
And they could quote me chapter and verse and were
completely skeptical about the dominant discourse. I couldn't believe it,
and it was the world on its head. The people
who think that because they're information managers they have an
ability to tell people how to think, had completely missed
(45:09):
the boat, both in terms of fear but also in
terms of actual risk risk calculation. Well, the people who
generally were not college education but were outside working and
in touch with empirical reality knew an awful lot more
than they did about the issue.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
And it's amazing how when you approach it in the
right manner, how many people who are not educated in
the fields that or even not well educated in the
fields that might be under investigation discussion, can put two
and two together better than the experts.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
Yeah, it has a lot to do.
Speaker 4 (45:48):
I think I think we forget those of us who
have been lucky enough to achieve a certain middle class life.
How keenly you have to be observing when your life
is more difficult. People who are less insulated from life's difficulty,
almost by definition, have to be come better calculators of
(46:10):
risk than we do. We have we I say, we
you know a person like me, a college professor, we
have certain cushioning at a certain stage in our life
that relieves us from moment to moment, day to day
risk calculation. It removes us from the need to size
up people and their honesty constantly, as say a tradesman
(46:31):
would have to do.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
And yet, and.
Speaker 4 (46:34):
So we have certain qualities that have atrophied in us
that go back to what I was talking about earlier
about socialization. We either never got or we have let
atrophy many important social skills that have to do with
sizing reality up.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Indeed, so my favorite chapter, for personal reasons and in
relation to things that are happening in this country at
the moment, speed bumps is I think a very interesting
one from a variety of reasons. Not least of all
of course, is because speed bumps and traffic traffic control
(47:12):
is under full assault in this country. Let me give
you an example. Not far from where I am, there
is a nine hundred meter section of road which had
no traffic lights and no speed bumps. Now there is
going to be and they've they've put most of them
in five pedestrian crossings, and nobody can work out why,
(47:37):
because a golf course on one side and and you know,
housing on the other and no shops in this area.
So five traffic light controlled crossings. And then you get
to the roundabout that at the end of this stretch
of road where it goes off inwards. Four different inputs
(48:00):
into it, and each one of those inputs has a
speed bump, and they were actually the first things to
go in. And then these traffic lights started appearing, and
all of a sudden people are waking up to and
it's doing all the social media rounds and people are
getting really agitated. But for a cost of each traffic
(48:21):
light that's going in, there is a four bedroom home
that could have been built with less money. And we
have shortage of housing at the moment and the no
shortage tall of bureaucrats. So not only that, tom they're
reducing speeds in the city to thirty k's an hour.
There's even a few ten k's an hour, et cetera.
(48:43):
And the reason is, and I've always known this, is
because they hate cars. And it's a matter of whether
they hate the driver or the car the most, and
they are simply trying to drive cars off the road. Now,
in your speed Bumps, you refer to Wahaka in Mexico
where you first came into contact with speed bumps. Pick
(49:05):
it up from there and tell me what the story
is from your perspective.
Speaker 4 (49:09):
Yeah, it wouldn't be the first time, but it was
the place where I ran into speed bumps of such
an enormous size and interruptive capability that I just couldn't
ignore them any longer.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
And it got me thinking.
Speaker 4 (49:21):
You know, my job as a cultural historian, and one
of the things is to look at manifestations of culture,
which generally speaking, speak for values, and ask what are
the values underlying the sudden proliferation of speed bumps in
my own city of Hartford, Connecticut. After I began thinking
about speed bumps in Wahaka, I said, well, damn it,
(49:42):
there's going in everywhere here in the city of Hartford.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
What does this tell us about.
Speaker 4 (49:48):
The evolution of the culture we live in and what
I conclude in the article is that it tells us
that we are living in a time where there are
people who have come to see themselves not as our
electric representatives who are there to do our bidding, but
as people who see it as their role to nudge
(50:09):
us and cajole us, and if not force us into
behaviors that they have decided all on their own, are
what we need to be doing. And that in that
way they were expressing a general disdain for not only us,
but for the democratic processes on which the culture is
(50:32):
allegedly based. So they're saying, I don't trust you.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
You're not again.
Speaker 4 (50:38):
It goes along with the idea of infantilization. If left
to your own devices, you would just go ninety miles
per hour and you would steamroll people because you're a
dumb peasant that wouldn't know any better. And of course,
when you treat people with contempt, and you see this
as you're a parent raising children, If you treat your
(50:59):
children as if they're going to make mistakes all the
time and they don't have the ability to be sentient beings,
they will oftentimes jumped themselves down to the expectations that
go along with it. And in that sense, I see
speed bumps as an attempt to remind us that if
left to our own devices, we are fundamentally destructive and irresponsible,
(51:22):
and that if left to our own devices without the
loving tutelage of the better people, we would just be
abusive and kill people. And that's a very hefty indictment.
Although it's relayed to us through the symbolic means of
the speed bump, I think the message is absolutely clear.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
And it was interesting. I got a letter on.
Speaker 4 (51:46):
That from a young woman who's a graduate student at
Harvard afterwards, and she said, well, I take issue with
your article because I lived in Africa and people went
very fast on this road and they put speed bumps
in and it got better. And I said, well, there
may be a difference of generation here, because when I
(52:09):
was your age, the government basically trusted us to do
the right thing and knew that the idea of forcing
people to do things could never be a substitute for
the voluntary compliance of people who believe that they're part
of a social project. And I said, maybe the fact
that you've been brought up mostly in the post September
eleventh era were a lot of these measures that basically
(52:33):
say you are guilty until proven innocent, turning our whole
constitutional system on its head, were put into place, And
so I honestly think she had no means of contrastive
analysis because her whole life has been spent under this
sort of tutelage from the state, which seems to be
getting only worse all the time.
Speaker 2 (52:53):
I love the way that you put this in one
part of that chapter. It is rather part of a
clear campaign to render us all impervious to the natural
development and deployment of our own social instincts. In other words,
they're controlling the dives element of society.
Speaker 4 (53:10):
Yeah, and it carries on with the idea that I
spoke a little bit more in the realm of socialization
that people need to be left on their own as
young people and throughout life to give them sell space,
or to be given space to develop their own interpretive
capabilities about how the world works. And what our elite
(53:34):
classes seem to be telling us again and again and
again is no if left to your own devices, you
lack interpretive capabilities, and you will never figure things.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
Out in a way that helps us all.
Speaker 4 (53:48):
Or either that or you will find a way to
come to the wrong conclusion, and therefore you need to
be corrected or nudged into the right conclusion, because again,
left to your own devices, you will do something stupid
or you simply will not develop those skills necessary. That
flies in the face of everything that the American experiment
(54:10):
is about, which says that if you give people a
heavy degree of freedom and give them the ability to
organize themselves in community with others, more often than not
they will find an effective way.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
To do so.
Speaker 4 (54:26):
Which doesn't mean there won't be mistakes and there won't
be horrible things that they do do in organize themselves
to do, but that it was worth the risk to
give people that freedom in the trust you had, in
the trust that they would work things out on their own.
And again, I have to think that child rearing practices
(54:48):
of these later years have something to do with it.
I'm one of five children, and one of the things
in a family like that is you were left to
work things out. Sometimes there was a lot of mayhem
going on, and you learn skills by negotiating through them.
And my mother and father could possibly intervened all the time,
(55:10):
nor did they want to. They believed that it was
incumbent upon them to leave us space to learn.
Speaker 3 (55:17):
Things on our own and how to work things out.
I don't think that go ahead.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
Would it be unfair to say that when you were
growing up, when I was growing up, there were far
less damaging issues that we could involve ourselves in than today. Therefore, more,
more interference, more control might be required. Well, guidance that
(55:44):
you want.
Speaker 4 (55:45):
I'm not so sure of that thesis, because my teenage
years were spent mostly in the seventies late seventies, which,
if you look back, was a real sweet spot in
terms of human freedom, almost to an abusive extent in
the United States. As I look back on it, because
(56:07):
my parents have a World War two generation often didn't
know what was going on, and they just expressed trust
and our ability to ga navigate through it. And did
some people get lost in drug addiction and things like that,
They absolutely did as a result of that great freedom.
But a lot of people figured it out and moved on.
(56:31):
So there was an awful lot of freedom. I mean,
from the time I was fourteen or fifteen, I was
going places, going fireplaces on my bike. My parents didn't
know where I was, and they were good parents, but
they just didn't see it as their purview to be
knowing everything about me every moment I was doing something.
Speaker 2 (56:52):
Well, it seems to turned out a right. So The
Treason of the Experts, COVID and the Credentialed Class. It's
available via Amazon Australia. It's actually printed. My version is
printed in Australian by Amazon. And there you've just had
a taste of it. Because there are I've forgotten how
(57:14):
many well, the chapters aren't numbered, all the columns aren't numbered,
but there's a hell of a lot of them, and
there's a lot of wisdom in there and a lot
of experience as well. And it's a book I certainly recommend,
and I'm very pleased that we got the chance to
talk about it. It took six months basically for us
to get together after we first made contact on it,
(57:35):
because you were going away and I was going away,
and then all sorts of other things intervened. One last
quick question, now that COVID is over, and I suppose
you partly addressed this over the over the Institute Brownstone
at the very beginning, but where does this leave Tom
(57:56):
Harrington with his writing? Because you've got a boost from
this particular era. You have probably exhausted this particular subject
and associated subjects. So what are we going to mind?
Speaker 4 (58:19):
It's a great question and one that I think I'm
not alone in facing. In some ways, I suspect I
have it a little easier than some in that my
game has always been looking and trying to explain how
cultural systems work and trying to decipher for other people
(58:40):
that may have not spent as much time looking at
the dynamics of culture, how culture creation works, how what
my mentor Adamar Evan Zohar calls culture planning works, and
how the institutions that we live under are built, and
how and why they come to use the culture planning
(59:04):
tools and emphasies they do. And that's an inexhaustible subject
because if you look around your world, just as I
did with the speed bumps, you say, well, why are
those speed boats there? And then, as a cultural theorist,
if you will, you extrapolate the meaning of that particular
cultural artifact in the larger cultural field and say, who
(59:28):
is making who is imbuing that cultural object with its meaning?
And what does it mean that they're imbuing it with
certain meanings? And if you keep your eyes open. You
can do that endlessly.
Speaker 3 (59:40):
So in some ways I plan.
Speaker 4 (59:43):
To continue doing that. If you've also seen my website,
I have played around with photography a good deal and
I have a keen love of photography as an amateur,
and I'm trying to work a little bit more with that.
But I suspect the urge to explain and decipher the
(01:00:05):
dynamics of culture is going to continue to be what
I do, be it strictly on COVID or in derivative ways.
Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
Well, I congratulate you on what you've done, and I
look forward with anticipation to what comes next. It's been
great talking with you. Thank you so much for your time.
You've been generous.
Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
Thank you laden do the same thing.
Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
Now, was I right? Let me know Latent at newstalks
ab dot co dot nz or Carolyn at newstalks ab
dot co dot NZID. The mail keeps coming in and
we'll catch up with it when we return. And that is,
by the way, for episode three hundred, which is very
rapidly approaching. Next week. It's very likely that we'll be
(01:01:04):
joined by Christian Smith in London. In the mean time.
Thank you for listening and we'll talk.
Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
So thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
For more from News Talks at b Listen live on
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You're listening to a podcast from news Talks It be
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Speaker 2 (00:27):
Be Welcome to Podcasts two hundred and ninety seven for
August thirteen, twenty twenty five. The Treason of the Experts
by Thomas Harrington underscores the need to apply intellectual discernment
on all pressing questions. In a case by case manner,
Tom suggests that having more educational credentials is no guarantee
(00:48):
against the danger of believing in stories that seriously distort
our understanding of imperial facts. Now I've just listened to
a few outtakes of this interview, and I've forgotten how
good Tom is. Is. Capacity to expose wrongthink and inspire
and develop how we think is well amazing. So if
(01:12):
you haven't heard this interview before, you'll get plenty out
of it. And may I say yet again, if you
have heard it, you'll get plenty more out of it
the next time you listen. Enjoy Buccolan is a natural
(01:34):
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Buccolan can be taken throughout the cold season, over winter,
or all year round. And remember Buckelan is not intended
(02:15):
as an alternative to influenza vaccination, but may be used
along with the flu vaccination for added protection. And keep
in mind that millions of doses have been taken by
Kiwi's for over fifty years. Only available from your pharmacist.
Always read the label and users directed and see your
doctor if systems persist. Farmer Broker, aucklumb Layton Smith, Thomas Harrington,
(02:49):
Senior Brownstone Scholar and twenty twenty three Brownstone Fellow is
Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College at Hartford, Connecticut,
where he taught for twenty four years. His research is
on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture.
It is. It's a great pleasure to have you on.
(03:11):
We got an extremely good reaction Tom to your appearance
in that last one, which was probably far too long ago.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
How are you, Yeah, I'm great. I'm delighted to be
here with you.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Really nice.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Now, the Brownstone Institute and Jeffrey Tucker, who I had
been speaking with before any any intimation of the Brownstone
Institute emerging, you had and you're part of it. You
had your third conference a few weeks ago entitled Rebuild Freedom.
(03:45):
It was held in Dallas, and I really wanted to
go and couldn't. But why don't you give us a
bit of a take on what it produced, how beneficial
it was, and how good it was, and what did
I miss well?
Speaker 4 (03:58):
I think one of the nice things about having gotten
involved with Brownstone is that you are part of a
movement where, for the most part, people are coming from
very different places and very different ideological positions. Despite what
our mainstream media would tell you is the case, and
we have joined together because we all believe in some
(04:21):
of these ideas about human freedom and dignity, and I
think the first time we came together there was a
giddiness to it. We couldn't believe we were together. Last year,
we were still giddy this year. I think in conscious
we have a consciousness of the fact that this is
going to be a long fight, and so there was
(04:43):
a worry, at least on my part, that the magic
would be gone and that the idea that we weren't
going to turn this around in a day might discourage people.
But on the contrary, I think the gathering show that
there are a bunch of people still flame inflamed by
what has been done done to them, and that they
(05:03):
are very much getting ready for the long fight and
are beginning to bigger and more expansive questions about our culture,
which are some of the things that I try to
bring to the movement, as I'm not a physician or
a policy person, but trying to look at some of
the big cultural problems that made this possible and some
(05:24):
of the cultural building we need to do to perhaps
spur renewal of some of those essential values you spoke
about in your introduction when you looked at the when
you were reading the cover from my book.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah, well, I haven't finished with the introduction yet because
I'm going to quite a little paragraph written by Jeffrey
Tucker as the forward to the book. He says, being
on the editorial board of the Brownstone Institute's Operations, I
can report my excitements when an essay by Tom arrives
in my inbox, I know for certain that I will
learn something new, be encouraged to turn the prism in
(06:01):
a different direction at observe events and trends from a
new perspective, and feel infused by the power of his
mind erudition that emanates from his spectacular writing talent. In
so many ways, each essay is a gift. A full
book of them is a windfall, and just when we
need to understand what has happened to us and where
(06:23):
to go from here. Now that was that was some
commentary from him, because I don't think he's I don't
think he gives away platitudes like that unless they're unless
they're certainly warranted. But the conference itself, it would have
been extremely well run and there were so many people
there who I who I either knew of or who
I have had on this podcast, as as some we
(06:46):
have spoken in the past, and and I wanted to
to get together with. Mostly the only one that the
only one that I have met and we had dinner
about or two months ago, was Ramesh the kur And
and Ramesh I think is brilliant. I agree he was
the featured speaker, and I'm interested from you to find
(07:10):
out how I've read the speech, but I haven't heard it.
How was he received?
Speaker 4 (07:17):
He was received very very well. And Ramish is a
figure I can't claim to know him well. We said
hello to each other at the conference. He's to me
a very interesting fellow because he's been at the very
inner workings of all of at the very highest levels
of policy and health policy. And I'm very admiring of
(07:39):
him to have the wherewithal to take two steps back,
three steps back, and four steps back and question what
is going on? And I think that gets to one
of the big problems we've had throughout this that people
become so enamored of their positions in life and their
alleged expertise, they become locked into ideological positions that don't
(08:02):
allow them to look freshly at new problems and new realities.
And I think, what's so wonderful Ramus, and he's been
great from the beginning when I think I started reading him,
probably in the fall of twenty twenty, is that he's
been able to do that pivot and he's been able
to bring all of his vast experience along with him
(08:23):
into our camp. And I think it was that weightiness
that people understood as they were listening to him.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yes, his occasional position as Assistant Secretary General of the
United Nations one is one that adds weight. Well, it
adds weight because basically has rejected pretty much everything as
far as as far as I can tell, as far
as the uns concern, He's on a constant front foot
(08:53):
in attacking it wherever is appropriate, and there's plenty of opportunity.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, I mean, that's something.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
And this gets to one of the I think underlying
themes that I discussed in my book is, to what extent,
living in a consumer culture where success is the ultimate
gold in life rather than perhaps other transcendent ones, how
hard it is for people who have been brought up
on the model of success again to use the term
(09:20):
pivot away from all of the things that granted them
their accolades and perhaps their money. And I think that's
one of the biggest things we're going to have to
deal with. What can we do, how can we begin
to generate a new appreciation for things that are bigger
than perhaps material and career success. And that's something he did.
(09:43):
Another person who is there is an Australian David Bell.
I don't know if you've spoken to him, Yes, And
I consider David another extraordinary human being who's been at
the very center of things and again has in a
certain sense walked away.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Is by understanding and is absolutely.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
Integral in the way he approaches from a values point
of view, and he makes a huge contribution to the
Brownstone movement.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
I think I particularly like the fact that he that
he moved to I think it was Washington State, wasn't it.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
He moved from Washington State to Texas?
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, But he moved to wash into Washington State when
he gave up his position in Geneva, was it Yeah?
And then packed his bags and took the family down
to Texas because well, he realized where he was up
north was no place to bring up kids. Yep, so
he also has marched to his own tune after succeeding.
(10:50):
But just on that note of success, to me, the
greatest thing, the most important thing of all, is freedom,
however you want to construct it. We talk about free speech,
et cetera a great deal, but freedom overall is the
most important thing. Freedom to say what you want, freedom
to move where you want, go where you want, pretty much.
(11:12):
And the challenges are rising at a rapid rate of
knuts from what I see to put chains on that.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Yeah, And this is to me perhaps the most frightening
thing of what we've been through is that what to
you and me is self evident that freedom is the
most important thing, that without it we lose our sense
of dignity and we become playthings in the hands of others.
Seems to not always resonate resonate with a lot of people,
(11:45):
and that it seems to be trumped by, as absurd
as it may sound, convenience, that living a convenient life,
living a resistance free life is really more important than
living a free life and accepting the contingencies that go
along with being free. And I am especially troubled by
(12:08):
what appears to be a generational divide on this. I
was not long ago in Europe and I was on
a bus and there were some American young people behind
me in their mid twenties, and they were getting to
know each other, and I couldn't help but not eavesdrop
on them because their voices were coming over the seat
to me, and they were getting to know each other.
(12:29):
But they were getting to know each other on the
basis of their shared weaknesses. I suffer from this, I
suffer from that. I suffer I also have obsessive compulsive disorder.
And on and on it went for twenty minutes, which
isn't to denigrate real problems that people have, but I
(12:51):
was struck by how their weaknesses had become a sort
of currency between them.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
That when we go into.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
A relationship and we meet someone, we're not putting our
best foot forward, We're not putting our heroic self forward.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
We're putting our weeks self forward. And that led me
to a.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Whole bunch of reflections about what it is in our
culture that might be impelling people to see weakness as
a greater currency than self reliance or strength. We're all flawed,
and we're all weak in our ways, but nonetheless we
have to put on a good face and move on
sometimes and frankly be courageous even though we're not sure
(13:32):
sometimes that we can be. And yet here was the
polar opposite. And it's something I saw in the last
years of my teaching career that this idea that I
am a mass of pathologies and that as such need
to be treated with a certain condescension and or belief
in my own fragility, and that it would seem would
(13:53):
lead directly to the acceptance of tutelage from very big
powers from on high. And so I see it as
a very dangerous dynamic and one that begs a lot
of questions about what the social teachings were and have
been an are that have made young people portray themselves
(14:14):
in this way and play into a game of weakness.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
I don't know if that makes sense to.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
You, but it certainly makes sense. And I just want
to insert something here that occurred to me and I
didn't include it, and then we'll pick it up again
from where you were. Sure, well, it was just the
success that one for freedom. This is something I've tried
to teach my kids. For freedom, you actually need or
(14:39):
it certainly helps a great deal if you have financial independence,
and gaining that financial independence can appear to be agreed
a selfishness or however any individual wants to interpret it
because of how they see it. But to me, it's
a way of establishing yourself with the ability to be
(15:00):
yourself and not be under threat of all the threats
that we face these days, that are imposed upon you
by other people.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
I would agree with that, but I would just add
one caveat to it, and it would be this. I
have watched people who set out to do that as
their life goal, and who in the process of doing it,
have become co opted by the game itself such that
they get to a point of material success where they
(15:31):
probably could opt out or walk away, and yet the
game itself begins to exert a certain addiction on them
and begins to take over the freedom that they were
playing the game to earn. And you have a version
of it in academics, I mean academics. You spend these
years trying to get your tenure so that you can
be free. But in the process people make so many compromises,
(15:56):
oftentimes with the establishment, in order to get that tenure
that they learn that they forget how to exercise the
freedoms when in your late thirties or your early forties
you get that that wonderful tenure. So it's I would
just add that complexity to to what you just said.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And I accepted. So the where were we Where were
we going to pay?
Speaker 3 (16:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
Oh with with weakness as as a as a as
a performative value.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Let's put it that way.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
If any more on that, yeah, it bigs again. I
have more questions and answers, but it begs questions about
how child riving has been done in what I guess
is my generation, and why those simple things that are
both mythological and necessary like put on your brave face
(16:49):
and stick to it have given way to g I'm weak.
I need someone's help, and I will accept it, even
though it involves giving away my freedom.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Uh and and and and.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
That to me is where we should be really worried
that students are now saying they're not for free speech.
In fact, they believe they should be protected from free
speech from ideas that disturb them. I mean, what kind
of world is that? When the old sticks and stones
will break my bones becomes but names can never hurt me,
(17:27):
become names will always hurt me, and please owe great
power save me from them. It seems to be a
bit of a world upside down from the one I
grew up.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yes, so the question then, is, having painted the picture
that you have in the last five or ten minutes,
how do we make a break from it?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
To me, one of the things that makes.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
These attitudes, these what I consider unfortunate attitudes, possible, is
a certain degree of emotional and physical alienation. Another of
my favorite essays in the book as the one that
speaks to the lack of physicality in the in the
middle and upper middle classes, that we are become people
(18:14):
that live inside our brains and not with our bodies
by and I'm not just talking about physical work, which
of course is important and used to be part of
one's general upbringing to do physical work, but I'm also
talking about physical engagement with the senses, with other people,
eye to eye, across tables, in physical presence, with their bodies,
(18:41):
where we are engaging the full amount of our observational
qualities to become to become social beings, and to become
well socialized social beings. I think the intervention of technologies
has begun to ameliorate that training that used to be
just what you did as a young person. You sat
(19:02):
and watched older people. You watched how they interacted at
a table. You began to look at their ticks, and
you begin to look at the way they expressed themselves.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
You looked at the way.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
They when they told stories, are told FIBs, how you
could pick up on it in their physical being. I
think a lot of that, and this, I think even
pre dates technology has begun to slip away because of
the way we live. We don't sit around tables, We
don't have the what someone said to me the other
day the third place, which was the bar where you
(19:34):
go and you have a beer and you joke around
and you engage in formalized aggressiveness, in the case of men,
oftentimes with each other, verbal aggressiveness that is playful. And
if you don't know how verbal aggressiveness of the playful
sort exists, especially among men, then you're going to have
(19:56):
very little ability when you run into it, to understand
what it's about and that it's essentially benign in many cases,
and it is not this thing that's going to kill you,
and that you need to be protected from. But if
you don't have that training and that socialization, you're not
going to know that.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
How I've noticed it is when you talk about that
playful discussion or commentary verbiage, is that somebody that keeps
telling me that my sense of humor isn't isn't cutting through.
They don't get it well. And the sense of humor
I've got is one I've had for a long time,
and I remember, just to give you a quick idea,
(20:39):
I remember the days when I first moved to New
Zealand and it was a different country then to what
it is now, and the humor that I had, that
we had developed, you just couldn't utilize it because nobody
got it. And so I used to I used to
fly back to Sydney four times a year just to
(20:59):
get a break and enjoy my old sense of humor again.
Speaker 4 (21:03):
Yeah, I think there's a couple of course. Humor is
in many ways culturally culturally learned. I come from an
Irish subculture which tends to be verbally profuse and has
an undercurrent of aggressiveness to it that perhaps other subcultures
don't have. But I think in a bigger sense, the
(21:24):
problem of humor. Humor is in the final analysis, based
on irony, and irony, of course, is based on the
idea that a single set of words can have multiple
layers of meaning. Visual imagery, which is the dominant way
that or dominant way that most young people are getting
their information today, is very different from reading. Reading, if
(21:48):
you do it assiduously, teaches you necessarily that you have
to be thinking about several levels of meaning of a
given word, in terms of its intonation, in terms of
its context, and in terms of all those things. So
to be a reader makes you be multi vail, a
person who can understand multi valent understandings of words and
(22:10):
of statements, which of course makes you able to understand irony,
which in turn makes you able to understand humor. But
if you don't understand the language is multi valent by definition,
you're going to seize upon a literal utterance, an utterance
as a literal statement, and you're not going to get
the humor.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Indeed, so it's probably time we turned our attention back
to the book and the Treason of the Experts. Where
did you come up with the title? How did you
come up with the title?
Speaker 4 (22:43):
The title is for some scholars of French literature out there.
It's from nineteen twenty. I got the idea from a
nineteen twenty seven book by Julien Benda, who was a
French Jewish intellectual who in twenty seven wrote a book
called The Treason of the Clerques or the Clerics. It
has a double meaning there it goes again, which can
(23:06):
be translated into English as reason.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Of the clerks or as the clerics.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
So, in other words, he was stating or advancing the
argument that in the modern era the intellectual had supplanted
the cleric or the priest as the moral leader of
our society, and that as the people who had supplanted
the clericy as the leaders of morality and envision, they
(23:37):
had a responsibility to act in a very distance and
nuanced way, and as in a way that is least
contaminated by the jingoism of patriotism. So his book was
an attack on both the French and German intellectual classes
(23:57):
for the ease with which they were subsumed by the
jingoism that made possible the horrendous slaughter of World War One.
And he was saying that an intellectual worth his or
her weight is one who can distance himself from political
encroachments and say this is the truth as I see it.
(24:18):
And then if they're not doing that, they're engaging in
an active treason against the society because they're betraying the
role they have in the culture.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
I want to pick out a couple of chapters at least,
and have you addressed them, And this is the final
sentence of the first one. If we really are interested
in democracy, we cannot passivelyceede to the ethos of technocratic management.
That are lazy and cowardly politicians and their media servants
(24:53):
are now relentlessly foisting upon us. Keeping in mind this
was April of twenty twenty, the earlier days of the
pandemic of COVID. Would you adjust your approach to that now?
Speaker 3 (25:07):
No?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Okay, well that's I think that's the right answer. So
just walk us through that chapter. They're all short. It's
not a chapter. It's a called technocratic and authoritarianism.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Technocracy is, believe it or not, a term I came
in contact with through my study of contemporary Spain, and
Spain had a very interesting nineteenth and twentieth century, which
were the areas I spent a lot of time on
and what happened in Spain was that they were a
(25:40):
failing empire that had lagged behind the rest of Europe
in terms of the adoption of democratic forums, and that
in the early part of the twentieth century sought to
install democratic forms like those that inhered in France and
in Great Britain, but they had no democratic culture to
go with it, and so what happened is that democracy,
(26:03):
in the attempts to establish a semblance of it often
failed and brought on confusion. And the solution that was
begun to be advanced at the end of the nineteen
twenties was that we had to appoint a group of
people who were more clairvoyant and more far seeking than
the average person, who were technically intelligent that would solve
(26:27):
complex problems for us and save us and the common
people from the need to use their obviously impaired minds
in a democratic process. And that gave way in a
very real way to Franco's dictatorship. There was that impulse
(26:48):
of the twenties came to fruition really in the thirties,
when the Spanish Republic was established, and as you might think,
with a fledgling and separated society, it became conflictive. The answer,
of course, was to find people from on high who,
with force on one hand and supposed clairvoyance on the other,
(27:09):
would be there to direct the society and tell them
how they had to act.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
And that's technocracy.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
And then it came to a real four in nineteen
fifty nine in Spain when the Spanish economy under Franco
was not prospering, and he brought in a group of economists,
so they called technocrats. And what the idea they had
was that we would open up the Spanish market, but
we would keep closed the Spanish Spanish social life. And
(27:38):
so these people would be non ideological, or allegedly non ideological,
and because they were above the fray, we could trust
them and they would be the ones to lead us
to a better place. But of course, no expert is
ever apolitical, and that's one of the great dishonest conceits
of all of this. All people are political, whether they
(28:01):
want to admit it or not, and they have certain
inbuilt biases and tendencies. So to portray yourself as being
above the political fray, as our experts in Corona Corona
Land did, is an impossibility and we should be very,
very suspicious of anyone who proclaims themselves to be above debate.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
There's only one criticism I have of the book. Sure,
if you don't mind, there is no mention of New
Zealand or Australia, or Australia for that matter. But I
mentioned New Zealand specifically because this is where the bulk
of our audience is. But we had a prime minister
for most of the COVID era. We had a prime
(28:45):
minister who was faithed by the rest of the world,
but was very destructive of the weld the goings on
in this country and the recent election of course has
given way to that. But I would have thought that
she deserved your attention.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
She did get a lot of my attention, although I
didn't write about her, And the reason I didn't write
I try to write on things that I feel. You know,
I have a inadequate control of in terms of my background,
and I'm very comfortable in European and American politics. I
have spent little or no I've spent no time in
(29:28):
Australia or New Zealand. Although I followed it closely. I
followed that horrendous moralizing woman very closely, and in fact
I remember her saying you'll only get good information from us,
or something like that if you don't yeah, yeah, and
(29:49):
if and that's it. Anywhere else you ought to be
wary of.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
It was even worth a don't believe.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
I don't believe. And I was horrified at that. And
one of the things that that incident with Ardurn and
several others, with Dan what's his named over in Australia,
Dan Andrews. I mean, I followed them closely, but I
think in a broader sense they coincide with a lot
(30:16):
of what we saw here and in Europe, and I
think it has a lot to do with the infantilization
of the populace, and that there has been a long
term effort, through our media and through the great global.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Powers to infantilize us.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
I mean, when she said that, I couldn't believe that
eggs weren't thrown at her, that laughter didn't break out everywhere,
and so on and so forth, and yet she said
it with earnestness. It was taken with earnestness by a
by a soporific press, and on it went, and it
(30:57):
was only a few of us nuts in the in
the medical freedom movement, who saw it for the incredible
infantilization of the populace that it's vote for. And that's
that's a very vexcing question. Have we become infantilized? I
think I later have written an article called infantilized or Us?
(31:18):
And I really think we've got to ask questions about
infantilization and how we have come to accept clowns like
that woman who's an obvious corporate shill who was installed there,
and why we don't just laugh at them?
Speaker 2 (31:37):
The only response I can give is that it was
so painted as horrific that nobody had the wherewithal little
and the courage. I shouldn't say nobody, because there were
people right from the beginning, but and they grew. But
the majority of people were so concerned about frightened about
what was going to happen or likely to happen, that
(32:01):
they had no choice or they felt they had no
choice but to submit.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
Yeah, wow, wow, Where is skepticism?
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Where is? I can answer that question for you, okay,
because skepticism has been a word that has written the
climate change global warming train for a long time. From
some sources, the bulk of people again, because it's an
area that, going right back to the beginning, it's an
(32:30):
area that most people don't know anything about. And what
went on was that skepticism was essentially outlawed, and many
people lost their jobs, many people suffered from in various ways,
and skepticism got itself a bad name.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Yeah, I'll give you a concrete example of that, and
the one that I pushed back. Some of the articles
in the book or the chapters were written originally in Catalan.
At the time. I had a column there's much of
the pandemic. I had a column in a Catalan newspaper
and I used to write a monthly call there, and
(33:09):
in one of them I said that any well educated person,
especially one who is engaged in a great deal of
research in their lives, can and should read medical literature
and come to their own conclusions. And I was careful
to bracket that by saying, obviously, my ability to read
it on the granular level would be less than that
(33:32):
of a trained physician or scientist, but that even as
a humanist, I can make sense in broad break broad
terms of the medical literature and come, after reading a
number of things on a given subject to some tentative
conclusions about what they point to. I was roundly criticized
(33:56):
by the readers as.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
If to say, who are you. You're not a scientist.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
And there we get to this idea that there are
and I think a subproduct of the un fortunate overspecialization
of the university, this idea that.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
One must stay in his lane. If not, he's a faker.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
And if he's a faker, you can dismiss him because
the real questions come from the people within the field.
When in fact, if we know Thomas Kun's outlook on
the advancement of scientific knowledge, he says precisely the opposite.
It's the people who are the outliers, who are not
(34:37):
subsumed by the logic of the field, who are the
most necessary for advancing us to the next stage of knowledge.
So you need outsiders. But what we were told again
and again during the so called pandemic was that this
was protrietary information. There was a priesthood there who understood it.
You had no business thinking for yourself, and don't even try,
(35:00):
and if you do, you should be ready to be
mocked as an interloper and a fool.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
And people got that message.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Most people are terrified of being mocked, especially publicly. But
I think that I think that skepticism may be making
a return, because there are numerous fronts in which the
skeptics have shown themselves to be on track absolutely now
(35:34):
of the chapters.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
Sorry, go just one more note on that, just to
extend the metaphor of tunes thinking about the advancement of
scientific knowledge. One other thing that animates me is the
idea that we might in fact be at the end
of a historical epoch, and or, at least in the
sense of the United States, we're at the end of
(35:56):
an epic in which the US Empire and its assumptions.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
Fit and are fit to lead the world.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
And I think what happens at the end of a moment,
of a historical moment, a broad historical moment, is that
the people who can't adjust to the changing circumstances outside
that they can no longer control, double and triple down
on the articles of faith that have gotten them to
the to the dance. And I think that historical element
(36:28):
may have something to do with that. I think there
are a lot of people that know intuitively that the
paradigms we've lived by no longer work they don't know
what the new ones will be, and in their fright
they double and triple down and say you must believe this,
and if you don't, you're harming me.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
But that's just a sidebar, I guess.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
There is a book probably some years ago called Why
the West Rules for Now, And only yesterday I saw
a headline that I don't have I don't have with me,
but it was it was basically a no attachment to
the book, but basically a confirmation that we're in. We're
(37:07):
in right in the zone now for exactly that, or
the wist to lose its leadership.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
Yeah, the idea first came to me, interestingly enough, about
twenty years ago. I was doing some work in Uruguay.
And when you're in Uruguay or in Argentina or in Chile,
the world of the United States is far away. It's
really interesting, and all the things that we think the
whole world is thinking about in the Euro American space
(37:37):
are not so important. And a good friend of mine,
a very bright ice, is Tom We're at the end
of an epic. I know we're at the end of
an epic. And it was the first time that I
had ever been forced to look at my own country
in terms of its possible death as number one in
the world. And as I began to get over some
(37:57):
of my prejudices about the need for us to be
number one and entertain the idea, I began to agree
with the thesis of my friend and have begun to
explore it. But in my experience as both a teacher
and a friend of others and in conversation, I have
given versions of that idea to other people, and it
(38:18):
induces fright in them. Rather than saying, gee, that may
be true, and how can we adjust, the reaction is, oh,
come on, We've always been number one. And I think
you can see this in our elite class and especially
in our diplomatic core in the United States.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
We no longer do diplomacy. We will issue orders. We
go around the world.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
Issuing orders and saying do this or else. And if
you think about it from the point of view of
a mature and resilient society, that's something you don't do.
That's a panic move when you have to convert diplomacy
into a series of dictates.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
And I think it's a good sign that the idea
that we may be at the end of something has
some all its watch.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
This space the chapter or the article Bill Gates and
the frame game. A few weeks back, and this was
this was June of last year. A few weeks back
in the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Bill Gates
said some surprising things in the course of a fifty
six minute panel discussion. The vaccine pusher extraordinary admitted that
(39:33):
the and you even put in brackets starting at the
eighteen twenty two mark, that the COVID vaccines do not
block infection, and that the duration of whatever protection they
bring to the table is extremely short. People seem to
to well, if not worshiped Bill Gates, then they get
(39:54):
very some of them get very close. What words of
advice would you give?
Speaker 4 (39:59):
That intervention by Bill Gates at that forum, which went
almost completely uncommented on in the mainstream media, is one
of the most extraordinary things I think I had ever seen.
Here was the man who had told us we all
need to get this thing in order to save someone else,
(40:20):
and that it was our moral duty to do.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
So, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Here he was
basically admitting.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
That it was an absolute failure and it didn't get reported.
And then I began to analyze his intervention even more,
and I realized there was the second part, which you
have there in front of you, in which he says,
though though they saved millions of lives, you know they
didn't do this, which was the reason we told you
(40:49):
to get them. But they did save millions of lives,
which itself has been completely unproven and by the way,
looks completely specious as a claim.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
So what was Bill Gates doing.
Speaker 4 (40:59):
He was engaging in the old thing that the intelligence
services often called the limited hangout.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
He was trying to free throw overboard that which was.
Speaker 4 (41:11):
Troublesome to him from a rhetorical point of view and
save the overall frame of goodness about the vaccine, And
to my amazement, he got away with it. And so
after that we saw the press never talk more about
the problem of infection or transmission and started with a
(41:31):
new meme about how many.
Speaker 3 (41:32):
Lives it had saved.
Speaker 4 (41:33):
In other words, the vaccine wasn't a total loss, even
though it was a total loss on in the very
parameters that you had set out for it to succeed upon.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
And in that way, he was.
Speaker 4 (41:45):
Trying to keep the rhetoric of success alive. And it
appears he did so, because there are still plenty of
people who look at the failure, ignore that it happened,
forget all that was said about the moral need to
protect others because of transmission and infection. And and I'll say,
they were a wonderful success and a wonderful thing, and
(42:05):
we have to have more of them in the next pandemic,
which of course is bound to come along.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
Well. Extraordinary lieing of a very sophisticated.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Sort skepticism is required. Yeah, I'll say, I do want
to I want to go back a bit in the
book the Hitting what Everybody Knows Knows in quests, because
I thought that you hit on something extremely important. So,
just briefly, what was the purpose of that article?
Speaker 4 (42:39):
That article was took place in the late spring of
twenty twenty. I wrote that it was a time in
which the university in which the university I was teaching at,
was debating what would be done in the following academic year,
A time in which you had a group of well
paid and tenured, often mostly tenured, professors wondering whether it
(43:04):
was safe for them to have in person classes the
next year, or whether they would have to continue to
teach by zoom, as they had done through the latter
part of twenty twenty, something I was doing at the time.
On the other hand, I was working with my wife,
who's a handywoman of deluxe and likes to work on houses.
(43:26):
And she has a bit of a rehab business that
she does on a house that she has near a
lake in a rural area of the state I live in,
and so I sometimes help her as her gopher as
she's doing her renovations, And of course in the course
of that I talk with people of a class in
the rural areas of the state of Connecticut that I'm
(43:47):
generally not in contact with, carpenter's tradesmen of all sorts,
people who work at lumber yards, and the life. And
what was remarkable as my colleagues quaked in fear about
the possibility of being in classrooms six months away with
young people who are known not to be important vectors
(44:08):
of disease for a disease that we knew by then
really only killed zero point twenty percent of one percent
of the people who got it, and most of them
over the age of seventy five. While they were quaking
and saying, under no circumstances. When I get into the classroom,
here were people in the trades working daily, unmasked with
(44:31):
each other, and when I talked to them, they knew
much better than my PhD colleagues the actual statistics and
risk calculations having to do.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
With the COVID virus.
Speaker 4 (44:49):
And they could quote me chapter and verse and were
completely skeptical about the dominant discourse. I couldn't believe it,
and it was the world on its head. The people
who think that because they're information managers they have an
ability to tell people how to think, had completely missed
(45:09):
the boat, both in terms of fear but also in
terms of actual risk risk calculation. Well, the people who
generally were not college education but were outside working and
in touch with empirical reality knew an awful lot more
than they did about the issue.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
And it's amazing how when you approach it in the
right manner, how many people who are not educated in
the fields that or even not well educated in the
fields that might be under investigation discussion, can put two
and two together better than the experts.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
Yeah, it has a lot to do.
Speaker 4 (45:48):
I think I think we forget those of us who
have been lucky enough to achieve a certain middle class life.
How keenly you have to be observing when your life
is more difficult. People who are less insulated from life's difficulty,
almost by definition, have to be come better calculators of
(46:10):
risk than we do. We have we I say, we
you know a person like me, a college professor, we
have certain cushioning at a certain stage in our life
that relieves us from moment to moment, day to day
risk calculation. It removes us from the need to size
up people and their honesty constantly, as say a tradesman
(46:31):
would have to do.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
And yet, and.
Speaker 4 (46:34):
So we have certain qualities that have atrophied in us
that go back to what I was talking about earlier
about socialization. We either never got or we have let
atrophy many important social skills that have to do with
sizing reality up.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Indeed, so my favorite chapter, for personal reasons and in
relation to things that are happening in this country at
the moment, speed bumps is I think a very interesting
one from a variety of reasons. Not least of all
of course, is because speed bumps and traffic traffic control
(47:12):
is under full assault in this country. Let me give
you an example. Not far from where I am, there
is a nine hundred meter section of road which had
no traffic lights and no speed bumps. Now there is
going to be and they've they've put most of them
in five pedestrian crossings, and nobody can work out why,
(47:37):
because a golf course on one side and and you know,
housing on the other and no shops in this area.
So five traffic light controlled crossings. And then you get
to the roundabout that at the end of this stretch
of road where it goes off inwards. Four different inputs
(48:00):
into it, and each one of those inputs has a
speed bump, and they were actually the first things to
go in. And then these traffic lights started appearing, and
all of a sudden people are waking up to and
it's doing all the social media rounds and people are
getting really agitated. But for a cost of each traffic
(48:21):
light that's going in, there is a four bedroom home
that could have been built with less money. And we
have shortage of housing at the moment and the no
shortage tall of bureaucrats. So not only that, tom they're
reducing speeds in the city to thirty k's an hour.
There's even a few ten k's an hour, et cetera.
(48:43):
And the reason is, and I've always known this, is
because they hate cars. And it's a matter of whether
they hate the driver or the car the most, and
they are simply trying to drive cars off the road. Now,
in your speed Bumps, you refer to Wahaka in Mexico
where you first came into contact with speed bumps. Pick
(49:05):
it up from there and tell me what the story
is from your perspective.
Speaker 4 (49:09):
Yeah, it wouldn't be the first time, but it was
the place where I ran into speed bumps of such
an enormous size and interruptive capability that I just couldn't
ignore them any longer.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
And it got me thinking.
Speaker 4 (49:21):
You know, my job as a cultural historian, and one
of the things is to look at manifestations of culture,
which generally speaking, speak for values, and ask what are
the values underlying the sudden proliferation of speed bumps in
my own city of Hartford, Connecticut. After I began thinking
about speed bumps in Wahaka, I said, well, damn it,
(49:42):
there's going in everywhere here in the city of Hartford.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
What does this tell us about.
Speaker 4 (49:48):
The evolution of the culture we live in and what
I conclude in the article is that it tells us
that we are living in a time where there are
people who have come to see themselves not as our
electric representatives who are there to do our bidding, but
as people who see it as their role to nudge
(50:09):
us and cajole us, and if not force us into
behaviors that they have decided all on their own, are
what we need to be doing. And that in that
way they were expressing a general disdain for not only us,
but for the democratic processes on which the culture is
(50:32):
allegedly based. So they're saying, I don't trust you.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
You're not again.
Speaker 4 (50:38):
It goes along with the idea of infantilization. If left
to your own devices, you would just go ninety miles
per hour and you would steamroll people because you're a
dumb peasant that wouldn't know any better. And of course,
when you treat people with contempt, and you see this
as you're a parent raising children, If you treat your
(50:59):
children as if they're going to make mistakes all the
time and they don't have the ability to be sentient beings,
they will oftentimes jumped themselves down to the expectations that
go along with it. And in that sense, I see
speed bumps as an attempt to remind us that if
left to our own devices, we are fundamentally destructive and irresponsible,
(51:22):
and that if left to our own devices without the
loving tutelage of the better people, we would just be
abusive and kill people. And that's a very hefty indictment.
Although it's relayed to us through the symbolic means of
the speed bump, I think the message is absolutely clear.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
And it was interesting. I got a letter on.
Speaker 4 (51:46):
That from a young woman who's a graduate student at
Harvard afterwards, and she said, well, I take issue with
your article because I lived in Africa and people went
very fast on this road and they put speed bumps
in and it got better. And I said, well, there
may be a difference of generation here, because when I
(52:09):
was your age, the government basically trusted us to do
the right thing and knew that the idea of forcing
people to do things could never be a substitute for
the voluntary compliance of people who believe that they're part
of a social project. And I said, maybe the fact
that you've been brought up mostly in the post September
eleventh era were a lot of these measures that basically
(52:33):
say you are guilty until proven innocent, turning our whole
constitutional system on its head, were put into place, And
so I honestly think she had no means of contrastive
analysis because her whole life has been spent under this
sort of tutelage from the state, which seems to be
getting only worse all the time.
Speaker 2 (52:53):
I love the way that you put this in one
part of that chapter. It is rather part of a
clear campaign to render us all impervious to the natural
development and deployment of our own social instincts. In other words,
they're controlling the dives element of society.
Speaker 4 (53:10):
Yeah, and it carries on with the idea that I
spoke a little bit more in the realm of socialization
that people need to be left on their own as
young people and throughout life to give them sell space,
or to be given space to develop their own interpretive
capabilities about how the world works. And what our elite
(53:34):
classes seem to be telling us again and again and
again is no if left to your own devices, you
lack interpretive capabilities, and you will never figure things.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
Out in a way that helps us all.
Speaker 4 (53:48):
Or either that or you will find a way to
come to the wrong conclusion, and therefore you need to
be corrected or nudged into the right conclusion, because again,
left to your own devices, you will do something stupid
or you simply will not develop those skills necessary. That
flies in the face of everything that the American experiment
(54:10):
is about, which says that if you give people a
heavy degree of freedom and give them the ability to
organize themselves in community with others, more often than not
they will find an effective way.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
To do so.
Speaker 4 (54:26):
Which doesn't mean there won't be mistakes and there won't
be horrible things that they do do in organize themselves
to do, but that it was worth the risk to
give people that freedom in the trust you had, in
the trust that they would work things out on their own.
And again, I have to think that child rearing practices
(54:48):
of these later years have something to do with it.
I'm one of five children, and one of the things
in a family like that is you were left to
work things out. Sometimes there was a lot of mayhem
going on, and you learn skills by negotiating through them.
And my mother and father could possibly intervened all the time,
(55:10):
nor did they want to. They believed that it was
incumbent upon them to leave us space to learn.
Speaker 3 (55:17):
Things on our own and how to work things out.
I don't think that go ahead.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
Would it be unfair to say that when you were
growing up, when I was growing up, there were far
less damaging issues that we could involve ourselves in than today. Therefore, more,
more interference, more control might be required. Well, guidance that
(55:44):
you want.
Speaker 4 (55:45):
I'm not so sure of that thesis, because my teenage
years were spent mostly in the seventies late seventies, which,
if you look back, was a real sweet spot in
terms of human freedom, almost to an abusive extent in
the United States. As I look back on it, because
(56:07):
my parents have a World War two generation often didn't
know what was going on, and they just expressed trust
and our ability to ga navigate through it. And did
some people get lost in drug addiction and things like that,
They absolutely did as a result of that great freedom.
But a lot of people figured it out and moved on.
(56:31):
So there was an awful lot of freedom. I mean,
from the time I was fourteen or fifteen, I was
going places, going fireplaces on my bike. My parents didn't
know where I was, and they were good parents, but
they just didn't see it as their purview to be
knowing everything about me every moment I was doing something.
Speaker 2 (56:52):
Well, it seems to turned out a right. So The
Treason of the Experts, COVID and the Credentialed Class. It's
available via Amazon Australia. It's actually printed. My version is
printed in Australian by Amazon. And there you've just had
a taste of it. Because there are I've forgotten how
(57:14):
many well, the chapters aren't numbered, all the columns aren't numbered,
but there's a hell of a lot of them, and
there's a lot of wisdom in there and a lot
of experience as well. And it's a book I certainly recommend,
and I'm very pleased that we got the chance to
talk about it. It took six months basically for us
to get together after we first made contact on it,
(57:35):
because you were going away and I was going away,
and then all sorts of other things intervened. One last
quick question, now that COVID is over, and I suppose
you partly addressed this over the over the Institute Brownstone
at the very beginning, but where does this leave Tom
(57:56):
Harrington with his writing? Because you've got a boost from
this particular era. You have probably exhausted this particular subject
and associated subjects. So what are we going to mind?
Speaker 4 (58:19):
It's a great question and one that I think I'm
not alone in facing. In some ways, I suspect I
have it a little easier than some in that my
game has always been looking and trying to explain how
cultural systems work and trying to decipher for other people
(58:40):
that may have not spent as much time looking at
the dynamics of culture, how culture creation works, how what
my mentor Adamar Evan Zohar calls culture planning works, and
how the institutions that we live under are built, and
how and why they come to use the culture planning
(59:04):
tools and emphasies they do. And that's an inexhaustible subject
because if you look around your world, just as I
did with the speed bumps, you say, well, why are
those speed boats there? And then, as a cultural theorist,
if you will, you extrapolate the meaning of that particular
cultural artifact in the larger cultural field and say, who
(59:28):
is making who is imbuing that cultural object with its meaning?
And what does it mean that they're imbuing it with
certain meanings? And if you keep your eyes open. You
can do that endlessly.
Speaker 3 (59:40):
So in some ways I plan.
Speaker 4 (59:43):
To continue doing that. If you've also seen my website,
I have played around with photography a good deal and
I have a keen love of photography as an amateur,
and I'm trying to work a little bit more with that.
But I suspect the urge to explain and decipher the
(01:00:05):
dynamics of culture is going to continue to be what
I do, be it strictly on COVID or in derivative ways.
Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
Well, I congratulate you on what you've done, and I
look forward with anticipation to what comes next. It's been
great talking with you. Thank you so much for your time.
You've been generous.
Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
Thank you laden do the same thing.
Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
Now, was I right? Let me know Latent at newstalks
ab dot co dot nz or Carolyn at newstalks ab
dot co dot NZID. The mail keeps coming in and
we'll catch up with it when we return. And that is,
by the way, for episode three hundred, which is very
rapidly approaching. Next week. It's very likely that we'll be
(01:01:04):
joined by Christian Smith in London. In the mean time.
Thank you for listening and we'll talk.
Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
So thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
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