Socialism & Postmodernism For Dummies | Stephen Hicks | Modern Wisdom Podcast 171

Stephen Hicks is a Professor at Rockford University and an author. Socialism & Postmodernism are terms thrown around a lot but I don't really understand what they are. Thankfully Stephen does. Expect to learn a great primer on the foundational principles underpinning socialism and post modernism, how these movements came about, whether socialism can work in modern society, whether postmodernism came about because of the failings of socialism and much more... Sponsor: Listen to Zion Radio's episode with Peter Marks - https://podlink.to/ZionRadio0016 Extra Stuff: Buy Explaining Postmodernism - https://amzn.to/2YYmXtB Buy Liberalism Pro & Con - https://amzn.to/2T1Dfy3 Follow Stephen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SRCHicks Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #postmodernism #socialism #politics - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hello my friends, welcome back. My guest today is Stephen Hicks and we are talking about postmodernism and socialism. The words have been thrown around an awful lot if you've been involved in the internet for the last few years, but I haven't got a clue what the underpinnings of them are. I don't know what socialism is as a philosophical perspective. I don't know why postmodernism believes the things that it believes, or really even what it believes. So I wanted to get someone on who does actually understand what they're talking about so that we can all appreciate the words that we're using. I think a lot of the time you just hear something on the internet and then assume a definition of it and then just start moving forward with your life.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  Imagine if you found out that tree wasn't the name for a tree and it was actually something else. You'd be like, "Oh God, I've been calling it a tree all my life." But anyway, yeah, so I spoke to Stephen, I wanted him to explain it to us. So this is Socialism and Postmodernism for Dummies, really great primer, especially as we're about to enter the US election cycle. The UK was so at odds with each other during the general election and hopefully the next time that someone decides to bring up politics and uses socialism or postmodernism in a sentence, you will know what they mean.

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• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Stephen Hicks.

• 3:10Chris Williamson?

  So, postmodernism and socialism, right? They're words that are thrown around a lot. And yet, I can't define them myself. I don't, if you asked me to tell you what are, what do these words mean? I couldn't give you a definitive answer. And I don't think many other people could either. So, can you?

• 3:31Speaker 06

  Well, fair enough, yes. All of those are high-level abstractions. And we're a smart species. We take huge amounts of information in about the complicated world. And so, it is a process to go through to, to, to define any high level of abstraction. Now, those two are not unique. If you try to define liberalism or conservatism, right? Or, you know, Christianity or religion or Islam. Again, there are going to be lots of variations and lots of things that are being included in those concepts. So, you should expect that it has to be some work right before a definition arises. Now, to take postmodernism first. The labeling is well-chosen.

• 4:17Speaker 06

  I didn't originate the term. But if you just break it down, post-modern, right? So, that means we understand what post is. It comes after, or it's a replacement, right, of. And then, modernism. So, what do we take modernism to be? Then we start to break that one down. Well, different areas of inquiry, literature, history, philosophy, they often use labels like that differently. So I'm a philosopher by training and I do history of philosophy. So I am using it the way philosophers and historians will use modernism.

• 4:55Speaker 06

  And basically, that means the last 500 years or so of history, especially in the Western world. And that makes sense, because if you look at what was going on in the world 500 years ago, well, it's within a generation of Columbus crossing the ocean. And that's a game changer, right? On all sorts of dimensions. It is the generation of the High Renaissance. So we have Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other revolutionary artists who are functioning.

• 5:39Speaker 06

  So the art world is changing dramatically. It's going to be the century in which Vesalius is publishing his anatomical works. So we have a first study of how the human body actually works. It's Copernicus coming up with the idea of the sun being at the center of the system instead of the earth. So modern physics and astronomy are being revolutionized. It's the century of, actually in the 15-teens, Martin Luther and the beginnings of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. So it makes sense that historians and philosophers were saying, you know, there's a huge amount

• 6:23Speaker 06

  going on in all of these sectors. The world is being upended and so forth. So we're into the modern world. We are global. We're doing religion differently. We're doing science differently. We are going to be starting to think about politics and economics differently, and art is changing. So that's what we mean by the modern world. Now, what the post-moderns are going to be arguing... And is that we understand there has been a revolution in all of these areas over the course of the last several centuries. We think all of that has come to an end. And we need to go beyond that.

• 7:06Speaker 06

  And then more normatively, most of them will say, we think the modern world has been a mistake. Or that all of those revolutions that have occurred have led to negative disastrous pathological results. And so we need to transform society in another direction. Now, to try to summarize more quickly, what they will typically then say is the modern world is marked by capitalism in economics that replaced feudalism. It's been marked by an effort to have democratic republican politics, again, replacing feudalism.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  And they're going to argue that we think both of those are fundamentally flawed and/or mistaken. So all of the leading postmodernists will be anti-democratic republican. And that's why we see a lot of authoritarianism, the worst versions of political correctness. And rather than solving our differences socially and politically through voluntary methods, you see a dramatic increase among postmodern friendly people in adversarial, in-your-face, outright authoritarian types of tactics. They're also, to a man and woman, anti-capitalist, anti-free market.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  So you will see all of those criticisms that the modern economic world is a disaster, it exploits the poor, it has dramatic inequalities, all of which are sickly and so forth. Yeah, the postmodernists will argue that the modern world has also been marked by high science and high technology. But they will mount an argument that science and technology, the results are negative, the dangers outweigh, or they will be making arguments that science is just a male way of thinking, or a white way of thinking. So you'll get racial and gender attacks on the scientific and technological project.

• 9:12Speaker 06

  But also you'll find that the modern world has been marked by a strong amount of individualism. You know, the individual rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, pursue your own dream, become an entrepreneur, high levels of tolerance for other people of different political persuasions, different religious persuasions as well. But that individualism that underlies much of modernity, the postmodernists disagree with that as well. That's why you find the rise of identity politics and the postmodernists want to organize and see people as members of groups. You're primarily a member of your racial group, or your ethnic group, or your gender group, and it's your group identities that make you who you are.

• 9:55Speaker 06

  It's not individual choices and so on. So, modern world, individualism, science, technology, freedom in markets, liberal democratic politics. The postmodernists reject all of them and want to replace them with something else. So, that's a few minutes on postmodernism. How's that?

• 10:16Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. It doesn't sound like postmodernists agree with much. There was a big list of things that postmodernists disagree with.

• 10:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, right, yeah, the modern world is this big complicated set of revolutions on a number of dimensions, and the postmodernists are very well-educated individuals, particularly in the first generation, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and they are taking a big-picture perspective on what's happened in the world over the course of the last 400 years, philosophically, historically, and subverting and rejecting all of it in fundamentals.

• 10:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, absolutely. So, where's socialism? Where's the differences and the similarities here?

• 11:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, let's start socialism differently. We can make connections to postmodernism later. Socialism is an ancient philosophical/ethical/political/economic idea. As the name suggests, we prioritize the social over the individual. So, you know, if we ask, "What's the purpose of having social organizations, family, teams, businesses, political units and so forth?" Right? One basic political answer to that is to say, "Well, it's for the purposes of the individuals involved."

• 11:49Speaker 06

  So, we formulate family groups primarily to nurture individuals so that children can grow up to pursue their own individual dreams. Or we form business associations where we work together socially, but each of us is pursuing our own individual careers and so forth. We join in sporting teams, and there's a lot of value to following a sporting team as part of a group. But primarily, we're individuals coming together and we're enjoying sports as individuals, as participants and so forth. So what socialism wants to do is to say that we should always prioritize the social over the individual.

• 12:32Speaker 06

  The group is more important than the individual. And if there's a tension between what's good for the group and what's good for the individual, the individual should sacrifice or be subordinated for the sake of the group. By contrast, individuals will say, "Look, if the group is not just working out, then we will just go our own ways as individuals." So, you know, an interesting example might be religion. If you're familiar with, say, within Christianity, the big split between Catholics and Protestants. So... So, you know, we're Catholics and we're having some arguments about what Christianity

• 13:17Speaker 06

  really means and ultimately it seems, you know, you and I just can't agree on what proper interpretation of some religious doctrine could be. The Catholic position is that you as I, you and I as individuals, we should be willing to set aside our individual judgment for the good of Catholicism as an institutional religion and that the tradition as a whole should take precedence over my judgment or your judgment. Whereas the Protestants would be more likely to say, all right, suppose you and I are Protestants and we're a member of the same church and we're having some arguments about how should

• 13:57Speaker 06

  we properly interpret Christianity and we've been back and forth a lot, we just don't agree on this. So what should we do about that? Well Protestants are more likely to say, well, you really need to do your thing because the state of your soul is your primarily individual responsibility and I need to look after my soul, so what we should do is just go our separate way, right? You'll go and start your own church and I'll go and start my own church and we'll pursue our individualistic path and associate only with individuals who in their heart of hearts agree with what we have there. So that individualism versus socialism is not only a political economic thing, it's

• 14:37Speaker 06

  a deeper understanding about whether individuals or the social takes precedence. Now, when we turn to economic matters, the individualists are more likely to end up being free market capitalists. You'll decide for yourself what your career is going to be, what you're going to make, you'll offer it on the market, customers may be interested, you'll negotiate as an individual, particular individual deals, and then the same thing for me as a consumer, I'm going to take responsibility for making my own decisions about what I'm going to buy, what prices I'm willing to pay, how much I'm going to save and so forth. So we're all autonomous free agents entering into the market as...

• 15:19Speaker 06

  Buyers and sellers, and so markets are going to be an emergent phenomenon. What socialists are going to argue is that we should not be functioning as individuals when it comes to economic matters. We should have society as a whole and there should be institutions that will decide for society as a whole. What's going to be made, who's going to get what and how much? And each of us as individuals, producers and consumers should not be making our own decisions. We should be following the decisions that are made at the society as a whole level. So how's that for two or three minutes?

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, yeah, it's um, it's so interesting as someone who doesn't delve massively into politics. Other than when, other than when it's forced upon me, so for instance, the recent British general election. It's only been a few months since that happened. And you have this big resurgence of patriotism for one side or the other. Uh, in the UK, I guess there's a little bit more of an even split, at least there's numerous parties that you can vote for in the UK. Whereas in America, it really kind of is just one or the other. Um, and words like postmodernism and socialism get thrown around as slurs.

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  You know, you accuse someone of being a socialist or you accuse someone of being a, the, the term in the UK is a Tory, which is a conservative. And um, each side's mudslinging at the other with terms which. Well, I'm not actually too sure what the, where Tory comes from, what the etymology of that is, but yeah, the, the socialism, you know, it sounds like a. A perfectly well thought out system, which is not just about, as you say, not just about economics, not just about. Political theory, but on a much broader scale to sort of a philosophical position. Uh, and yet you can take pretty much any word like call, calling someone a carrot. Or you know, calling someone, calling someone like a tire or something like that.

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  You could take any word and start to throw it around like a slur. It's, I wonder what your thoughts are or why it's come about that you socialist. Why does it have baggage attached to it?

• 17:38Speaker 06

  Well, yes, you're absolutely right about how political debate goes. And by the time it gets to politics and election cycles, you know, that in a parliamentary system like Britain's or like Canada's where I come from, you know, the election cycle is just a few months and nobody has time for careful or nuanced positions in the give and take and emotions running high. So where all of this should be happening better is in schools, in universities, in newspaper columns and so forth, in the years leading up to elections where people are discussing these issues in a more leisurely and hopefully less emotionalist, an emotionalist context.

• 18:20Speaker 06

  But yes, you're right, though, also that all of these labels have baggage attached to them and that's, that makes perfect sense because all of them have a historical track record and the history matters absolutely. So in our generation, anybody who's thinking seriously about being a socialist or being an antisocialist, they should recognize that there have been in the modern world, two centuries now of theory and practice and socialism. And before you make up your mind whether you're pro or antisocialist, you should know something about that, that history. Now, why I think in the Western nations and increasingly around the world, socialism

• 19:01Speaker 06

  has a bad aura is that for centuries in the modern world now, we've been committed much more to individualism, free markets, liberal democracy and so forth. And socialism is opposed to all of those things. And then if you look at the history of the 20th century, the major experiments in socialism were in the Soviet Union.

• 19:28Speaker 06

  And that's the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. And that was a 70-year experiment from 1979 to about 1990 in trying to have a very authoritarian form of socialism. And the end result of that was quite brutal. Millions of people killed and an additional hundreds of millions of people over the course of generations' lives impoverished. So the human rights track record and the economic track record of the Soviet Union was a disaster. And people who know something about the history then get worked up about it and say, "Look,

• 20:08Speaker 06

  if in the current generation you want to reinstate socialism, that's a bad thing." The other major experiments in socialism in the 20th century were in China. Communism is a type of socialism. And so again, under Mao Zedong, a major experiment in socialism. And again, it was a disaster with millions of people dying of starvation and millions more killed for political repression reasons as well. Cuba in the Western Hemisphere, some of the South American nations, African nations, other Southeast Asian nations, there's a long history.

• 20:48Speaker 06

  And I think quite rightly, people who are anti-socialist are insisting that socialists now need to confront that history and be articulate in what they say in response to that history before just in any casual way saying, "Hey, let's try socialism again."

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that sounds, it sounds like quite a commitment. You know, if that was, if someone, if someone said, "Hey, this is the, this is the track record of what we're in for. Do you, do you fancy a go at this?" You know, that, that, it doesn't, it doesn't sound fantastic.

• 21:26Speaker 06

  Right, yes. So what then is interesting, though, about socialism and the way it typically has an appeal is for people who don't know very much about the history, don't know much about the political theory, haven't yet taken some economics, and they're younger people, and younger people are idealistic. And what socialism says to them is, "We will give a lot of power to the government, but the government will look after all of society's resources, and we're, say, in Britain, we're in quite a prosperous country, so there's enough to go around, and the government will just make sure that everyone is looked after, and it will have smart people in power, and they will make sure that the economy runs in a proper direction."

• 22:11Speaker 06

  And for naive people, I can understand, you know, that that sounds nice, you know. Who doesn't want everybody to be looked after and to have wise people making the kinds of decisions? But if that's just as far as you've gone in your political thinking, then I would say, "Don't yet vote, please. Study some history, study some politics, study some economics, and make sure you understand how your initial nice-hearted intuition are necessarily going to work out in practice."

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  That's a lot of effort, you know, having to go and read, having to go and do research and learn about economics. It's much easier for me to just pick a side and start mudslinging, right?

• 22:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, oh, well, for sure. So, yeah, but then what I would then say, you know, if you recognize that you're looking for short cuts and you're just emotionally interested in attacking people on the internet, well, you're not a serious person yet. And again, please, don't vote. But you're right, it is a lot of work, but that's, you know, what this huge investment we have in education, basically, in the rich countries, what we say to young people is, you know, "For 18 years, we're going to give you relatively an easy life. We just want you to go to school, you know, clean up your room once in a while, play sports, and take music lessons.

• 23:32Speaker 06

  But in that 18 years, pay attention in your history class, pay attention in your literature class, and do some reading, so that by the time you are an adult, you actually know something about the world, so that when you have the vote, you can exercise that vote responsibly."

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  The problem, and this is the same in every election, is that the vote of a stupid or purely passionate person is worth the same as the vote of a person who is well-informed and has a concrete grounded position.

• 24:06Speaker 06

  Yes. So, one immediate response then is to say that, you know, hopefully, the vote of one stupid informed person voting Labour is cancelled out by the vote of one stupid uninformed person voting Tory.

• 24:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, unless it skews stupidity one way or the other, yeah, I get you.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  Right, and it does, depending on, you know, the passions of the moment and so forth. And then also, we do know that there are a large number of people who are just apathetic about politics, and they don't vote, and those tend to be the more uninformed people. So, you know, they self-select out of the process. So, my view, though, is that electoral politics matters, but it is more the vote of people who care about politics and who are active, and those people tend to be more informed than the average. So, you know, democratic politics, for all of its weaknesses, is not that bad, and it

• 25:12Speaker 06

  certainly is better than the alternatives historically.

• 25:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it sounds to me like post-modernism is quite a luxury position, and given the fact that we're currently in the middle of a global pandemic, what does that mean for post-modernism? Does it mean that we're going to see post-modernism receding? Is it a luxury that can only be indulged when times are good?

• 25:43Speaker 06

  Yes, now that's a very interesting question because it is the case that postmodernism has been initially a high intellectual project coming out of philosophy departments in the middle part of the century and then extending through higher education. And much of higher education now is a luxury good consumed by relatively well-off people in well-off countries. So a large amount of it is subsidized. So that does seem to be borne out that when you go to the poorer nations of the world, they tend to be much more reality focused. They're aware of poverty. They want their lives to be improved.

• 26:27Speaker 06

  And so when they look around, they're more likely to say, you know, what are the policies economically and the political systems that have succeeded at putting food on the table? And the track record there again is that it's been the individualistic, free-market-friendly, liberal democratic nations around the world that have been successful. So those models are much more attractive. Postmodernism is less attractive. When I was visiting professor in Eastern Europe, in Poland in particular, they had the experience of socialism. They knew what political brutality is like. They know what socialism in practice means.

• 27:10Speaker 06

  They're looking at Western Europe. They're looking at North America where again, individualism, liberal democracy, being pro-scientific have worked. They're much more attracted to that. Postmodernism has much less traction there. So I think your hypothesis has a lot to it.

• 27:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get that. So looping back now to socialism and it's less than rosy track record. I know this is a complex question that would require a lot of different iterations to make it, to give it an answer. Can socialism work full stop? Because it doesn't sound to me, based on the examples that you've given, that a fully socialist society has a tremendously long shelf life.

• 27:58Speaker 06

  Right. So, yeah, the evidence, sure, if you want to have a particularly a medium or large-sized society, the only way to do that is through giving individuals lots of freedom, and then we're pretty good at working out voluntary networks. Large-scale businesses, large-scale markets, stock markets, bond markets to move capital around and make investment decisions and so on. So those are very effective at harnessing the intelligence and the efforts of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people. And just at an organizational level, concentrating power in the hands of the government and leaving it up to a few dozen decisions to make, people to make the decisions for all

• 28:43Speaker 06

  of an economy, that ends up always being very bureaucratic, very cumbersome, and it just sets itself up for an abuse of power, and you end up in a dictatorship-type of society. But over and beyond all of that, just on moral grounds, there is something offensive about telling young people that you cannot pursue your own dream, you can't make your own choices about what your career is going to be, that we don't trust you enough to take self-responsibility for your own economic lives, to be your own entrepreneur. So on moral grounds, I think the liberal capitalist nations are far superior, because

• 29:24Speaker 06

  what they're saying to individuals is, "Look, your life is yours, you should take responsibility for your own life, you're not a child anymore, we have confidence in you that you can make a go of your own life, and be your own entrepreneur. If you want to be an artist, you want to go and make beautiful cars, you want to be an actor, you want to start whatever business it is, go for it." That strikes me as a much more moral approach to human living than saying, "You know, we all have to band together in a group, we don't think people can make it on their own, we need to have wise people make decisions for you and make sure that you're looked after."

• 30:08Speaker 06

  It's very condescending as well. Now, all of that said, I don't want to say that socialism can't work. Because there are small-scale experiments in socialism that have proved to be quite long-lived. So, for example, if you think about religious communities, there are lots of monasteries and convents where you have a small group of like-minded religious people who all have the same goal. They all want to worship in the same way, and they will all live very socialistically. Everybody is sleeping in communal halls, eating and praying at the same time and working

• 30:51Speaker 06

  together on all projects. And it seems to be the case that if your community is no larger than, say, 100 people or so, where everybody can keep track of everybody, that you can have a pretty long-lived socialistic community. There are also examples now, multi-generational, of non-religious communities. There are lots of hippie communes or communalists, people in California or Oregon, who say, you know, "We want to drop out of larger American society. You know, somebody's got a couple of hundred acres. We're all going to live on the farm. We're all going to work together on the farm and live and eat and share families communally."

• 31:35Speaker 06

  And again, as long as the commune doesn't get too large, those do seem to be able to -- and everybody's committed to the same goals, those do seem to be workable. My only question then is, you know, as someone who's liberal libertarian the way I am, I have no problem with people dropping out of society and starting their own communes if they want to, but, you know, is that really your moral ideal for how human beings want to live? And if you are a communalist, you want to start your religious commune or your hippie commune, are you respecting other people's freedom not to have to join your commune? And if people do join your commune and it's not working out for them, do you give them

• 32:20Speaker 06

  the right to opt out and go back and pursue their own dream in some other form? So. That's what I would say to that.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, um, people need to be liberal liberal enough to allow individuals and groups to go and do that, but also liberal enough to accept the opinions of the dissenters and or the people who want to exit and then leave or never even enter in the first place. Um, there's a lot of moving parts.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  That's precisely what strong socialists will say. They will, and that's why they often want to go the political route rather than starting a voluntary commune. They want to enact socialism politically.

• 32:59Chris Williamson?

  And they.

• 33:00Speaker 06

  But once it's enacted politically, then you've got the power of the police on your side and you can make people follow your vision.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  So what happens? Where does the slippage occur from going from, because that sounds, you know, the I might not do it for the rest of my life. But if if you said, hey, Chris, there's 99 other people on this on this farm. Do you fancy, you know, a couple of years just chilling out and hoeing some ground and eating some vegetables? I'm like, you know, that doesn't sound too bad. But at some point between that and a nation state, there is, there's a, there's a problem. Is it that the total cumulative amount of power is too easy to wield in a way which is militarized or sort of dictatorial?

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

  What's the, what's happening?

• 33:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. One of the problems is the problem of scale. So the small sales communes don't seem to max out at about 150. Because then there's the question of the enforcement mechanism. You get, say, 100, let's keep the number simple. Suppose you have 100 people and you might then say, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a voluntary person. I'm wanting people to opt in and out. And but you're still going to have the issue. What happens if you, you know, you talk about the issues, you get together in your local council and 92 of people agree, but eight people disagree. What are you going to do about the minority who disagree in that case? And in those cases, what seems to

• 34:36Speaker 06

  happen is most of the time, the eight people will, with some, you know, mild pressure put on them, say, okay, I will go along with it in this case. But once you get beyond one hundred and fifty, it's becomes unwieldy to be having councils. Let's get everybody together and talk over this decision and that decision. So you start to have delegated groups, delegated committees, who are then authorized to make decisions in certain areas. And they then are a minority that has power over the majority. And then, once they have the power of the minority over the majority, they will start passing legislation

• 35:18Speaker 06

  that will protect their power, increase their power, and the majority is increasingly not able to respond. So, once you then start to say, okay, now we have ten thousand people, you know, that might be a relatively small town, but there's no way you can get ten thousand people together on a regular basis to discuss policy. So necessarily, you have a town council of ten or twenty people, and they have a lot of power. And eventually, that power is necessarily abused. Then, when you start talking about organizations that involve a million people or ten million people, it slips into dictatorship pretty quickly.

• 36:02Chris Williamson?

  It does seem like a very slippery slope. The distribution of resources requires a concentration of power in order to determine how to distribute those resources. And because the distribution of resources appears to be mostly frictionless, that the people who are in power therefore have even fewer barriers in order to be able to take advantage of the situation. Is that right?

• 36:30Speaker 06

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  I've got it. I've got it. I understand. Yes, Stephen, you've done it.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  And even if, yeah, even if it's not the minority grabbing the power and then turning it to their own purposes, even to the extent that you have a majority, you might say, okay, now we're still going to do it democratically. We have this small group, they're just going to be able to make proposals, but every time it's a major proposal, we have to put it to the electorate. You're still going to have the majority of people voting for something. And if you're in the minority, your rights and your individual prerogatives can be suppressed. So, you know, what happens if we say, you know, a majority of people are of one ethnic group?

• 37:17Speaker 06

  And they want to vote to suppress the rights of a minority. Or the majority happens to be women, or males, or they're a racial group, or they're a religious group. You still have the suppression of minority interests. That's a, that's a, that's a chronic problem. So that's why the seriously liberal individualistic societies have had severe checks on the power of, of, of, of, of society. They said, you know, we're, we're going to separate the legislative branch from the executive branch, from the judicial branch, so that no one part of the government has too much power. Or we will have explicitly constitutional provisions, things that we're just not going to vote on.

• 38:02Speaker 06

  We can't vote on whether you are allowed to believe in this god, or not to believe in, in, in gods at all. Religion is off limits. Individuals can do their, their own things. If you decide that you're going to be married with a woman, or with a man, yeah, we're not going to vote on who gets to have sex with your husband or your wife, right? That's your voluntary choice, right? The democracy and the government has no say in those sorts of things. So we explicitly take things off the table to protect the individual's freedoms in all those areas. But socialist principles in, the socialist approaches and principles can't do that.

• 38:44Speaker 06

  Because to the extent they say that you as an individual belong to society, or you as an individual have to be subordinated to social decisions, and all major decisions about the economy, about politics, about religion, about science, about sexuality, should be social, well, there are no protections for individual freedom in the long run.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  It seems like there's been an awful lot of work over the last, let's say, half millennia, on creating freedoms, removing barriers, allowing people to have sovereignty, and creating a meritocracy where people can vote with their actions, specifically, obviously, their money, and their votes, literally.

• 39:30Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  Looking at

• 39:33Speaker 06

  And vote with their feet.

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, vote with their feet, whether they want to move, especially, especially in a country, you know, even Canada, it's so big, it's so big, just go somewhere else. There's loads of different places. The UK, if I drive 300 miles in any direction from where I am, I'm in the water. So I can't, I can't go quite so far. And we've now left the European Union. So I can't even, I can't even go, go to Europe quite so easily. But, um, yeah, you know, this meritocracy thing, the, the people whose successes are theirs to bear, great. The people whose failures are theirs to bear, also, you know, not, not, not so great for them. But hopefully, if the system has not enough, not too much friction in it, everybody can reach the top or at least start to move themselves up it. That seems, you know, on a fundamental level, it doesn't seem like

• 40:18Chris Williamson?

  that's an outrageous proposition. And it doesn't surprise me that that's the most popular setup for a nation at the moment.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, absolutely. You know, a lot of it depends on an individual's self-assessment psychologically. And we've been talking about ethical principles and political principles. But, you know, there is a difference also psychologically between people who will look at a liberal individualistic society and embrace it. And they'll say, that sounds great. I have all of this freedom. I can do whatever they, I want. But it works with their self-esteem and their sense that they can make a go of it in their own life. But there also are individuals who will be frightened by that degree of self-responsibility and freedom, because then

• 41:08Speaker 06

  they will say, I don't know that I am really that competent. And you give me all of these choices and say, it's all up to me. Well, what if I fail? And they're afraid of failure. And they then more naturally want to have someone look after them. They want a guaranteed insurance policy. So there also is a psychological element that has to be attended to here.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose that's why you try and litigate little successes for everybody whilst mandating that no one can take all of them. I've got a quote from, so your book explaining postmodernism, you said that the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary. So that suggests that if socialism were to succeed, postmodernism would no longer be necessary. We've got an economy that's all over the place at the moment. There's a populist yearning for some form of socialism right now. So as socialism becomes more prominent, will postmodernism lose its appeal? And also, I guess, how do you see the current global

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  environment relating to people's socialist desires?

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. So that's a connecting postmodernism to socialism to loop back to where we began. And thanks for the plug of my book. I appreciate that.

• 42:32Chris Williamson?

  LinkedIn show notes below, available at Amazon and all good book suppliers, of course.

• 42:38Speaker 06

  Nice. Yes. Good. So yeah, that is a thesis about how postmodernism arose. So what is interesting about the first generation of all of the major postmodernists is that they all were far left in their political orientation, some form of socialism. And the problem was, from that perspective, was that socialism was becoming a disaster in all of its major experiments and also in terms of the, just the academic and intellectual arguments for and against socialism. So the issue then is, you know, what happens if you are a true believer in a political ideology, but just all of the data and all of the arguments

• 43:21Speaker 06

  seem to be going against you? Well, we do know that some people will be open minded and they will be intellectually honest and they will say, okay, you know, I had this hypothesis, I had this theory and the arguments are against it and the data are against it. I just have to reject my theory and change my mind and try some other kind of politics. But we do know that there are lots of people who will double down on a theory that they know is failing. And try some intellectual machinations in order to save the theory in various ways. So if I can, you know, an analogy I like to use in this is if we think about religion, you know, there are lots of people when they are young, they're raised in a given religious

• 44:03Speaker 06

  tradition, and they think it's beautiful, and it's true, and it's noble, and a big part of their identity is tied up in believing that that religion is true. But then you become older, and you are aware that there are lots of criticisms of your religion, and they seem like they're pretty good criticisms. And you study the history of your religion, you see that people who are members of your religion did all sorts of nasty things and so forth. Well, what do you do? Well, a lot of people will change their mind about their religion. They will, you know, not be religious anymore, or they will leave that religion and go looking for a better religion. But we know there are lots of people who will double down on their religion and reaffirm

• 44:47Speaker 06

  their commitment to religion, and they will resort to all sorts of, you know, transparent sometimes, but other kinds of more sophisticated, but nonetheless dishonest strategies to try to deflect any criticisms of their religion, or they just close their mind and double down on their faith. The same thing happens in politics, and for some sub-movements of socialism in the latter part of the 20th century, a generation or so ago, that's what happened. And the postmodern connection is quite clear. Lots of people were attracted to socialism, but at the same time, they recognized the bad track record of socialism, and that the prevailing strategies, intellectual strategies

• 45:31Speaker 06

  for socialism, were not working, and postmodernism was an attractive new strategy for them to adopt.

• 45:40Speaker 06

  Now, that's the first half of your question. The second half of your question was about the current global climate. And there are people who are not left politically, or not socialist politically, who are also now adopting some postmodern strategies. So you can see some people on the far right also now catching up and using some postmodern strategies. So they will argue, you know, this liberal individualism, the idea that everybody should be scientific and rational, and that we should have maybe one open global economy. We're opposed to that.

• 46:23Speaker 06

  And instead, they will argue that we're not socialists, but we do believe in our ethnicity, for example. I'm Hungarian, or I'm German, or I... You can find these people in Britain as well, and as well as in America. But what they will do is they will say, it's my national identity and my ethnic identity that makes me what I am. So again, it's not me as an individual pursuing my dream, but rather I'm born into an ethnic group or a national group, and that has made me who I am, and my first loyalty should be to that national group. And if you were born in a different ethnic group or a different national group,

• 47:08Speaker 06

  there's no way that you and I can rationally discuss our differences. Ultimately, it's your group versus my group. And so they're arguing for kind of a nationalistic or an ethnic collectivism, and they're opposed to this modern individualistic, free-market, globalist society, as they put it as well. But at the same time, they're not socialist. So postmodernism is having its inroads in other sectors as well.

• 47:38Chris Williamson?

  That's so interesting. It's a little bit like a Hydra.

• 47:41Speaker 06

  It is. Yeah, for sure.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  Um, so one of the things, again, my particular interest is more in the way that individuals operate. And as you're talking and explaining, I'm genuinely just learning along here, as I'm sure that a lot of the audience are as well, kind of treading on fresh ground here and learning about these new areas of different ways of political thought, philosophical thought. I'm relating this to the way that I understand people to operate. Right. So I know everyone that's listening has had a discussion with someone, it might be their partner, it might be their friend, might just be a person on the street, but probably definitely someone on the internet where you know they're wrong. They might actually kind of know that they're wrong as well.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  And you say, hey, you're wrong, Stephen, you don't know what you're talking about. Or you do know what you're talking about, but you're still wrong. And those people decide to double down. They dig their heels in further. They decide to push their position even harder and it increases how militantly they believe in what they're doing now. Yes. You know, when, when we're talking about, I think Iron Man's better than the Hulk. And you actually think that the Hulk's better than Iron Man, or Thor's better, or Wonder Woman, or whatever. That's fine.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  I, I feel like when people are talking this vehemently and allowing cognitive biases, that really you should have overcome with a bit of, a bit of life experience, some learning and a couple of hundred hours of mindfulness practice. When you have people who are able to create entire intellectual and political arenas of thought, which have effects for generations thereafter, that can there not be, is there not a way that we can protect ourselves, that we shouldn't be allowed, people shouldn't be able to have wield so much power.

• 49:50Chris Williamson?

  It's like, it's like giving a child a nuclear bomb. You know, it's like this, the individual that is wielding this incredibly powerful weapon. Actually doesn't have a clue what they're doing and is completely at the mercy of all of the same idiotic primal responses that me and you have and everyone that's listening.

• 50:13Speaker 06

  Hmm. No, I think that's, that's right. That's perceptive and it's well stated about a fundamental problem that we have. Now, I'm somewhat optimistic. I think we're doing better in the early 21st century than people did in previous centuries, but it still is easy to be dismayed when we're on the internet and we realize still how widespread the problems are. And it really does come down to an individual moral choice that each of us has to make for ourselves. Am I, no matter what I want to believe, am I really paying attention to the evidence, doing my best

• 50:53Speaker 06

  to follow trains of logic, particularly on things that I know are complicated and that I've not necessarily studied for a great deal of time? Am I willing to say, I made a mistake? And that's, that's hard for everybody to do. But if you're intellectually honest, you know, some things you've not thought a lot about, you know, some things are complicated, you know, that along the way, when you were younger, you probably picked up lots of beliefs semi-consciously. Are you willing to reexamine those beliefs and say, I made a mistake? Yes or no? Am I willing to change my

• 51:35Speaker 06

  mind? And then even more difficultly, am I willing to do that publicly? So,

• 51:46Speaker 06

  if I go on the internet and I'm having a discussion, I really would urge many people to try this as an actual experiment. Get into a discussion about something and make a point to say,

• 52:02Speaker 06

  You are right and I am wrong about something. You know, get into an issue where you know someone is smart and knows more than you do. And open yourself up to that. It can be very cathartic to publicly admit that you have made a mistake, you know, on on some issue. And if you're not willing to go that that route, then you do need to do some some self examination.

• 52:30Chris Williamson?

  Stephen, I absolutely love that as an experiment. I had I had a Dave Rubin from Rubin Report on last night, talking about very similar, very, very similar topics. And I said exactly the same. Eckhart Tolle says in in one of his books that the reason that we fear being proved wrong in an argument is because it is tantamount to the destruction of our ego. And that sense, that dread, it's like standing on the edge of a of a cliff. You know, and you're looking over and you can feel it rises inside of you, you feel it in sort of moves up from your stomach up into your chest and it get you get all hot. And you your shoulders start to come up and you start to hear that slight tinnitus sound in your ears. Or, you know, everyone that's listening has experienced this.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's anger and it's rage and it you like just it's fine. It is absolutely fine.

• 53:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's that's nicely put. There is an ego issue there. The way I like to phrase it, though, is to say that you you need to recognize when that is going on, that you have a a weak or developing ego. Because the the calmness that you end up with, the way you nicely put it just a few seconds ago. That is the sign of strength. To be able to say, I recognize that I am not an omniscient being. And that making mistakes along the way is a normal part of the process. And if I am strong minded enough to say, what really matters to me is the truth.

• 54:09Speaker 06

  Then the strongest person is the person who says, I have made mistakes along the way. And that I'm not going to think less of myself because I because I did so. It's the same by analogy to physical development, mental development and physical development are perfectly parallel on this point. If you are going to become good at any physical activity, a sport and so forth, you are going to make a huge number of mistakes along the way. You're going to fall down, sprain ankles, stub your toes, get dirt on your face and so forth. And to be able to to recognize that you screwed up, you hit the ball out of bounds, someone scored a goal on you and they made a good shot and you screwed up.

• 54:54Speaker 06

  Being able to admit that and learn from those mistakes, that's the sign of a strong person. It's the it's the weak person who says, yes, I'm 14 years old and I'm the best tennis player in the world. Well, sorry, that's that's just childish.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I um, I wonder how much different the world could have been if some intellectuals over the last century or two had been able to admit that they were wrong.

• 55:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's a particular occupational hazard for intellectuals because, you know, we all like to think of ourselves as smarter than the average person and our whole career is based on credentials and and being smart. So admitting that you are wrong is is is a higher stakes enterprise. But at the same time, there are lots of intellectuals in history, you know, from Socrates to Bertrand Russell, and a large part of their reputation has precisely been based on being able to say, you know, I don't know, right? Or, yeah, I thought that was right, but I made a mistake and I've changed my mind and here's my new and improved theory. So so so be strong minded.

• 56:05Chris Williamson?

  Hey, if Bertrand Russell can do it, there's there's, you know, the rest, the rest of us can as well. Look, Stephen, I've I've genuinely learned an absolute ton this evening, so thank you so much for coming on. Your book's Liberalism Pro and Con, that's the new one. You've got a couple of minutes. Tell us, tell us what liberalism and why is it pro and con and not pros and cons?

• 56:30Speaker 06

  Yes, well, it's a little bit generic. The book is a primer. That then is to say, I don't take a position in that book, except for a methodological position. And that is then to say, if we're going to think about liberalism, socialism, conservatism, libertarianism, or whatever, the first thing we need to do is to recognize that these are complex issues and there are lots of smart and well-meaning people who develop lots of really good arguments. So what I've done is identified 15 most prominent, powerful arguments for liberalism and presented them in the book. But then, at the same time, 15 powerful anti-liberal arguments in the book.

• 57:12Speaker 06

  And given lots of quotations from the major protagonists from historical times and contemporary times. So my marketing pitch for the book is, before you make up your mind about anything in politics, these are the 30 arguments, pro and con, that you need to know. And if you don't know those arguments yet, you still have some homework to do. So hopefully, it should be some fun homework, but nonetheless, this is what you need to study to get up to speed. And by reading those 30 arguments, then you know Marx, you know Aristotle, you know Nietzsche, you know Heidegger, you know all of the big names and the arguments. Then you're in a position to make up your own mind where your political views stand, whether you're more pro-liberal or anti-liberal.

• 57:56Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I think that's really, really good. And what did we say, you know, looping it right back to the very beginning, people need to be educated. This is the sort of thing that people should be learning in school. So maybe you're the surrogate teacher that we never had, Stephen.

• 58:11Speaker 06

  Well, thanks for that. Yeah, I am a philosophy professor, so I think a lot about my students and how to get them up the learning curve. And yeah, this book is part of that project. It's directed primarily to thoughtful-thinking people of any age, but especially for university-level students who are taking their first serious steps into thinking about politics, economics, and philosophy.

• 58:36Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Well, it will be linked in the show notes below along with explaining postmodernism and Stephen's fantastic Twitter. Stephen, man, I'm gonna have to find another reason to get you back on. Hopefully not a global pandemic, but.

• 58:49Speaker 06

  We will work it out. Yes, for sure, Chris. Great questions. Enjoyed your tone of voice, your benevolent spirit, and thanks for having me on.

• 58:58Chris Williamson?

  Thank you so much, Stephen. I'll catch you later on.

• 59:01Speaker 06

  All right. Bye for now.

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend. It would make me very happy indeed. Don't forget, if you've got any questions or comments or feedback, feel free to message me at Chris Willek on all social media. But for now, goodbye, friends.

• 59:33Speaker 01

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