 Hi everyone and welcome once more to a Yaron Debates Europe event. Today I'm super excited because I'm sharing a debate between two of the people who have been very influential in my life and my intellectual development. Frank Fureti is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. He was my PhD supervisor and he was something that changed my views in so many ways. So where to begin with Frank's work? He has written a lot of books, some of them you might have heard, I mentioned them often, like the book Therapy Culture and the book The Culture of Fear. So many of the things that we've experienced in the last year, Frank has been writing about what are the cultural forces behind them from the early 2000s or if not from earlier. Also Frank writes often in spiked. Usually many people don't like the things he writes. One of the things that people don't like is his take on his country, the country he's from, Hungary and how its government is dealing with the so-called culture wars and it's part of the discussion we're going to have today. And of course on the other side you have Jaron Bruk, Jaron is the chairman of the board of the Anran Institute and the host of the Jaron Bruk show. Again, a big thank you to the Anran Institute for supporting and sponsoring these events and you know the format. Frank is going to begin with his introduction. Then we go to Jaron and then we go to you, the audience for your super chat question. So Frank, thanks so much for being with us. The floor is yours. Thank you very much everybody. As I understand it, what we're discussing today is how to fight against this very significant development in Western societies, which is the whole war cancer culture phenomenon. And I think that the big problem that I identify as being central to this is that most people who are on the right side of this battle don't really understand what wokeism is really all about. And I think very often when I read people criticizing wokeism, they think it's the continuity of something that has gone on beforehand. So a lot of people think it's like the equivalent of Marxism in the 21st century, a kind of cultural Marxism. Other people think it's some kind of sort of romanticized, Rousseauian idea that was already sown centuries ago. And my view is, and in my new book coming out in September, I try to make this point, is that in a sense what people see as being woke, what people see as cancel cultural is not something that is external to Western capitalism to bourgeois ideology, but something that is imminent in it and something that evolved within capitalist culture itself in a very kind of surprising kind of a way. And to me, the contemporary version of wokeism, what it really is, is a synthesis of what I call on the one hand technocratic governance, which is the rule of expertise which is the rule of, of people, bureaucrats and individuals who claim to know better than you and I, what is in our best interest and these are people from health, public safety, all the way through so-called science on the one hand, but at the same time, technocratic governance needs a kind of legitimation, how you can legitimize itself and win the hearts of people. And therefore what you've got is a fusion of technocratic governance with what we see as being identity politics, the cultural politics of identity. And I think what's very interesting is that if you look at, for example, the way that it works, people think, oh, it's a problem with snowflakes, it's universities, it's a bunch of radical, you know, sort of academics. Well, they do exist and it's a problem there, but people have overlooked the fact that if you look at where it's really become very deeply embedded, it's in capitalist corporations. And not only in capitalist corporations, but the more successful, the more technologically advanced sort of capitalist companies we're talking about, particularly Silicon Valley, everything from Google to Apple, all the way to the banking sector to Goldman Sachs, you'll find that these kinds of ideals are really embedded in there. A lot of people think, oh yeah, these capitalists are only using this to make money, they're just being very pragmatic and opportunistic. They don't realize that the people that run these companies have gone to the very same universities that in a sense influence young people today. So their MBAs come from the Ivy League universities of North America and other countries. That's the culture that they kind of, you know, in a sense evolved in. And therefore, for me, the impulse behind wokeism is much more powerful than people imagine. It's not just simply a bunch of snowflake kids, you know, demonstrating in Portland. It is something that's deeply embedded within contemporary capitalist society, particularly in the Anglo-American context, but it is actually much more sort of widespread. I think we've got a very big problem because I think this kind of cultural dynamic is very corrosive, and it calls into question virtually everything that Western political culture believes in, both from the conservative extreme to the liberal extreme. And all those ideals, which emerged in the modern era, which are very, very important, are hated and challenged by this kind of ideology. I mean, particularly it's interesting that the hatred for what they call neoliberalism, which is really a roundabout way of talking about enlightenment liberalism, and the hatred for cultural legacy, which is a roundabout way of talking about conservatism is comparable. So we're in a very interesting position now because we don't want to fight the snowflakes because that's like fighting, like the way that the Poles fought the Germans in 1939, with their horses against the tanks, you know, over the French with the holding onto the We've got to fight the enemies, as it is now is, and we have some very strange alliances to be made, because anybody who wants to uphold what I think is really quite important about modern culture and modern, you know, the modern sensibility has got to kind of somehow find ways and means of joining forces. When you look back historically at the early traces of this development, you can find the one of the first persons that identify something like this is Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian political economies, who basically identified that within capitalism itself. There are corrosive forces at work, which seek to undermine what capitalist values are really all about the kind of empty bourgeois values that kind of cynical skeptical sensibility is already there. But he's really talking about at a very early stage of development and I think that's become much more powerful over the years. So the first point I would make is that all of us, regardless of our political, you know, sort of sensibilities, we got a common interest in fighting this war. And laterally, I've been fighting alongside libertarians, even religious people, myself I'm an atheist, but often I find that sometimes you got to join with people because, in a sense, everybody's sort of cultural values are being called into question by this fairly horrific sensibility. That's summed up. If you don't know what wokeism is really all about, every time you hear somebody say, we're here to raise your awareness. You know, that's what they really are saying, we are going to raise your awareness. That's like saying, we're the gods, you're the idiots, we're going to tell you what it is to be aware about. So how do you find this? Well, the first thing is, I think that's quite important, is we need new institutions. Because I think that the attempt to somehow weave your way through the old institutions is going to founder, because they're occupying, they got a very powerful positions there. I think new institutions are particularly needed in the domain of culture, when I'm talking about education, schools, universities, which they have totally hegemonized. I think the media is a really important area where, at the moment, the media is almost entirely under their control, and they are able to have a power that's in many ways stronger than that of government. When you think about the way in which Google, Facebook, and all these big technical companies can actually censor people, can determine what can and cannot be said. You don't need governments to censor you anymore, when you got these institutions to kind of doing that. So you need new institutions, you need a new media. I think what you also need, and this is something that a lot of people that otherwise agree with me or on the same side find difficult to accept, we need to actually accept the fact that the really important battle to be fought today is not about economics, it's not about the way that the economic system works, it's really the culture war. And at the moment, what we've done on our side is always reacted. Every time some new person gets cancelled, every time some new freedom is taken away, people react against it. And the point is that a backlash is never as effective as what it's reacting against. So what I say we need to do is to take a more active role in the culture war, and we have to be proactive, particularly in relation to freedom, because I think freedom has effectively become a second order value. Everybody says I believe in freedom but the way what they really say is I believe in freedom but and what comes after the but is much more important than what goes on beforehand. So freedom to me is a really important question that we have to kind of almost kind of make to come alive to work kind of effectively. I think that liberals and libertarians and conservatives are guilty of one big sin over the last few decades, which we need to correct, which is that they don't take democracy seriously. I think that very often liberalism have been complicit in saying, thinking, well, you know, ordinary people are not as intelligent as the really smart people. You know, liberals have often said that, in a sense, we need to rely on experts or the really clever individuals who know what needs to be done, they're really afraid of majoritarianism. And they're really not taking democracy seriously at all, conservatives have done the same thing. They basically said, well, you know, there are people who are almost like intrinsically wise, they got this wisdom because they're old or because they have certain religious insights that nobody else does. And they've tended to believe that there is a kind of implicit elite that knows much better than anybody else than what needs to be done. And I think that democracy is important, not only because democracy is important in and of itself, but at the end of the day, who's going to fight against war culture? Where is the energy going to come from? And I think that the energy came from the people in Brexit, you know, when they basically set two fingers to everybody else. I think the energy comes from your sort of the individuals who have been excluded and we look down upon. And we need to develop a sophisticated intellectual orientation that can harness people's desire for a voice, their desire for solidarity, so that we have a relationship where we are able to develop a kind of a new kind of balance between solidarity on the one hand and individual self-realization and autonomy on the other hand. That is the challenge. How you basically make the value of moral independence or moral autonomy relevant for the 21st century, which is the underpinning of freedom, whilst at the same time legitimate people's desire for solidarity for being really kind of part of something. And sometimes I feel that this is going to be a very difficult war to win. Sometimes they're very optimistic. All that I know that is that the stakes today are much higher than at any other time in my lifetime. I think the stakes are really, really high. I think our idea of what freedom is really all about is really kind of quite critical because most people at the moment don't take that particular battle too seriously and are really simply reacting. And they imagine that the problem will go away eventually. They always tell me, Frank, how long do you think this will go on? And the implication is that in four years' time we'll be free of this disease, not realizing that unless we do something in four years' time, we're going to be royally screwed by these individuals. Thank you, Frank. And it's very important coming from you saying that it's as bad as it's worse than it was in my lifetime because usually you avoid hyperbolic historical comparison. So you don't like when people say, oh, it's the Weimar or it's communism again. So I think that that gives it even more, even more gravitas. Yaron, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you, Frank, for doing this. I appreciate that. And I think we're going to disagree on a lot of things, but I think there's also some areas where we might not. I definitely agree with regard to the danger of war culture and cancer culture and everything that it represents. And I think the thing that I see in it is a deep nihilism. I mean, there's a real sense of nihilism. It's not that the woke of building anything. It's that the woke are more interested in destroying the foundations and the nature of Western civilization more than anything else. It's not that they have some beautiful utopia that they seek to establish. It's they want to knock ability and they want to knock success and they want to knock beauty out of this world and whatever remains remains. They don't they don't really care. I don't think they thought it through that far in advance. So it is a massive danger because nihilism, we know what nihilism can do and it's destructive power and and and the force. I, I'm going to disagree about its origins. While I agree with you, I don't think it's Marxist in particular. I don't think this is neo Marxism and then you form Marxism. I do think it's influenced by Marx. I think it's influenced by so I think it's influenced by by these thinkers. I think it's a logical, the logical development of much of Western thought over the last 250 years and fortunately I'd say since the end of the Enlightenment, we've been heading in this direction one way or another. And when you say things like, you know, they want to raise your awareness. Well, I mean that's Plato, right. I mean what is Plato trying to do we're all in the cave, and the experts are coming out there and they're trying to raise our awareness and make us better people and the understanding is is what many of these woke types are trying to be and that mentality of the philosopher king of raising your awareness of the experts of somebody else knowing better for you, the the undermining of individual reason, the undermining of the capacity for the individual to reason is really being a project of the German romantic philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer. I mean, this is just a combination of all I'm not saying any one of them is that direct descendants but it's a combination of a long line of thinking that is undermined, the value of the individual, and most importantly, the value of the individual's capacity to think for himself to discover truth. You need to be told what the truth is and the total truth can be explained to you, because the truth is achieved through revelation in that sense, this whole attitude is very similar to religion. The religion assumes that truth is revealed truth. It's not truth that can be explained it's not truth that can be observed, or discovered through reason. So, I think what we're experiencing now is the inevitable consequence of bad ideas, since in the post enlightenment in the post enlightenment era, an undermining of individualism and undermining of reason. And ultimately, and here I think we'll disagree in undermining of the ideals of capitalism. I don't think this is embedded in capitalism. I think this is part of the consequence of what I call, I call the mixed economy. We don't have capitalism today, not capitalism as I understand it, and as I believe we should strive towards. Capitalism is a system where the government doesn't intervene in the economy. We're basically leaves us alone. You talked about freedom. Capitalism is a system where the government only protects our freedom and leaves us alone otherwise. We have a government that does a lot more than that. I mean a lot more than that. We have a government in the United States where I in order to market my business have to go through 500 pages of regulations to figure out what I can and cannot say, talk about free speech with regard to marketing my business. We have a government that regulates every aspect of business life every aspect of our commercial lives. The Supreme Court that recognizes that Supreme Court is not protected under the First Amendment in the United States. And I assume that's the case in Europe as well. Commercial speed is somehow separate. It is open to government regulation and government control. We have a world in which my wealth is not mine. It is subject to the whim of politicians, what I get to keep and what I don't get to keep. We live in an era where capitalism is dying and it's dying because it's under attack and very few of us will defend it. We live in an era where for the last 100 years where capitalism has been chipped away and chipped away and chipped away. And again, I think war culture is the next frontier of the battle against capitalism in America at least. And this is why I think woke is so popular in America. Marxism failed. Socialism never caught on. Nobody won. You know, unions faded. Labor unions faded. Socialism faded. Marxism faded from the intellectual scene in the United States. And the left needed something to awaken the animal spirits among the people. Wokeism is what they've turned to. And I think it's much worse in a sense that it is nihilistic and destructive. It doesn't even present a positive vision for anything. But it is the antithesis of capitalism. Now it's true. The capitalists, the people who work in corporations today are all studied in the same universities. So they got the same professors and I agree completely. They got the same methodology as these young people and I agree with you. We shouldn't blame the snowflakes. They are snowflakes, but we shouldn't blame them because in many respects, they're the victims of their professors. They teach us there and to some extent the culture in which they grew up that's protected them from fear and danger and then coddled them and so on. But it's also true that many of the people running the corporations today are trying to be democratic within the business. And the fact is that their employees are demanding from them much more social involvement, much more engagement in this wokeism. If you look at the number of petitions Apple employees submit to management around the woke issue, Apple is amazingly restrained in terms of how many of them they actually comment on. They typically don't say anything about it. This is driven to some extent from the bottom up, but it doesn't find resistance in the leadership of these businesses because the leadership doesn't have a basis on which to stand. What are they going to resist it with? What ideology exists out there in the world today? There is anti-woke in a philosophical sense, in a fundamental philosophical sense. Liberalism as practiced in the US is weak and has been in many respects defeated by wokeism. Conservatism in the United States is weak and relies on religion. People ask me why Silicon Valley is so left and one of my answers is always, you talked about being an atheist, I'm an atheist too. I always talk about the fact that it's unlikely that the engineers in Silicon Valley are going to vote for political candidates who say they're not sure if evolution is true or not. Conservatism is too religious to rally smart people in the United States around and it's its biggest challenge. It's too dedicated to the worst elements within religion. So corporate leaders, even the ones who want to fight against wokeism have no basis on which to do it. They have no ideological or philosophical basis. Finally, I want to talk a little bit about the institutions. I agree we need new institutions and most importantly we need new educational institutions. There's no question the corruption is an educational institution. The power they have because they train the media, they train our politicians, they train our corporate leaders, they train our corporate employees. They're the ones where ideas are generated. Our best chance of disrupting the institution of education is getting the government out of the business of education. The best way to disrupt education is to privatize it and to phagmatize it and to allow for innovation and competition within education. The fact that education today is standardized, we have standardized tests, we evaluate everybody the same, we have a universal curriculum, allows for the woke intellectuals to have massive power over their students. We need to break up the monopoly of the state over education and allow for real competition in education. And we I think those of us who represent the better the classical kind of liberal ideas. We need a formal and educational institutions to compete with the ones that are teaching the horrific nihilistic views embedded in world culture. So I definitely think we need to compete in education and for that we need more freedom not less. We need to compete in media. I think it's a mistake for the state to intervene in media. Just like I think it's a mistake for the state to intervene in education, the state can only do damage can only do harm. What we need is to provide real competition to the media that exists by creating alternatives. And I think you're seeing a lot of that already happening with it's on some stack on other forms. I think we need much more of that. And, and finally, let me end on this note, because you mentioned freedom and you mentioned the culture was. I agree with you this is all about freedom. I'm not sure we'll define freedom in the same way and that's part of the challenge. So I would define freedom is, is the absence of coercion is leaving people free to pursue their own values their own happiness in any way they choose, as long as they don't hurt other people. And as long as they're, you know, as long as they're not using coercion or fraud, they should be left alone. That to me is what a capitalist society would really be like and we don't live in one unfortunately. That's the kind of freedom in which I don't think wokeism can catch on, because it would be competed out of existence by better ideologies. I think what makes wokeism wokeism acceptable is the confusion the alienation of the mixed economy of the of the bad ideas that are out there. And the lack of a real alternative to them. And here I again I'll go to, you know, something you said about democracy. I don't think the solution is democracy in a sense of majority rule in a sense of majority voting and everything, because I think the majority is a product of the educational system. And if the educational systems corrupt, the majority is going to be corrupt. I'm not against voting, but I'm against, I'm forgiving voice to individuals, maximizing the voice of individuals. And I think the only way to do that is to limit the power of politics, and in that sense limit the power of democracy, limit the power of politics of our lives. One of the real evils, and one of the things that world cultures really benefited from is the fact that we have politicized everything. The government is involved in everything. What we need is to depoliticize our world to get government out of our lives and to to reduce the power of majorities and minorities over the life of individuals. And in that sense the solution is freedom. It's individual liberty. Thanks. Thank you, Aaron. So before we go to question Superstance, Frank, pick anything that you found interesting or you disagree, and you can have let's say a second, a rebuttal for three, four minutes. Right. Thank you. I think we agree on individual freedom. I think where we disagree on is, for me, a strong individual is inseparable from the quality of social solidarity. Because I think that when you feel that there are people watching your back, you as an individual are much more able to give meaning to your own aspirations and to your own sense of autonomy and self determination. So for me, that's why democracy is really quite important. And I think that we have to understand that democracy is messy. And, you know, when you have a corrupt educational system, people will have some very bad ideas, but I think it's a question of whether or not we believe on bounds in our capacity to influence events, particularly influence people to kind of adopt views that are very similar to us. I think where I disagree a little bit with what's said is the way that capitalism is explained. You see, I find it very, very interesting that the first person raised serious questions about what we're discussing was Milton Friedman in the 1970s. He was really worried about the fact that he had the beginnings of stakeholder capitalism, ethical capital, the basic attempt to corrupt capitalist enterprises by giving them a social cultural quasi religious mission. And he wrote this very important article in the New York Times, which has been cited time and time again. And what I find very interesting is that since Milton Friedman wrote this in the 1970s, there's been very very few contributions that go beyond that. He laid down the alternative, quite eloquently, but there's been completely nothing worthwhile written by people who presume to defend that kind of free enterprise. And I think the reason for that is that if you look at capitalism in America, you know, the problem for me is not the left. The problem is that from the 19th century onwards, a significant section of the American capitalist class had opted for social engineering. They opted for supporting regulation. They got involved with the business of law being governments and inviting governments to make rules that could help them and assist them. And I think that kind of alliance that was built between the so-called progressive movement and the big American capitalist entrepreneurs created a culture where governmental intervention in economic life was seen as, okay, that's the norm. It was something that, you know, wasn't external to capitalism because many of the capitalist entrepreneurs asked the government to play this kind of very active role within economic, economic affairs. So in that sense, we have to understand that these are trends that are very old, but at the same time, you know, something new has happened. And I think that I wish we had more time to kind of explore this one issue. And the issue is, you know, I agree with you when you say that there's Rousseau and there's a 19th century romanticist, there's a German prospectivist, all these anti-enlightenment, they're there. I think that something very important has happened in the recent decades, which these ideas, which you can trace back to two centuries ago, mutated into something else, something new has happened, where for whatever you think of Rousseau and these people, they still believed in something that was true. They still had an idea of what the utopia would be like. There was something that they were striving towards. The people we're confronting today haven't got that. They're actually calling to question the fact that there is such thing as truth. They are simply, as you yourself said, cynical and corrosive in terms of their impact. And what they really are against is the world that we've created. It's a kind of very powerful anti-humanist impulse. And I think in that sense, the struggle for freedom takes on a very different dimension than before because in the past people at least paid lip service. People said, yes, freedom is important. Now a lot of them are saying, forget about freedom. It's not that important. Freedom is a privilege of some people. They're saying that freedom can be kind of pushed aside. So I think in that sense, we've got to look at the novel challenges that we've faced with as a way of trying to give meaning to at least, I think what we agree on is at least that we, all of us in this discussion, understand that the enlightenment values are something that we want to build on. And we believe in, you know, sort of negative freedoms. I mean, we all think that negative freedoms, as I've learned, it's what it's really all about. So how do we build a culture around? How do we create a political movement around? How do we react against it? And you're right, we have to depoliticize many, many things. But at the same time, we do need to politicize our reaction against it because we cannot let freedom just slip away while we're kind of standing there with our folded arms. Yes, I agree with much of what you said about the evolution of the ideas. Absolutely. This is a, I think, a logical consequence, but it is an evolution, a change. And you're absolutely right. I think these are the children of the postmodernists and the postmodernists were a reaction against the kind of the German Romantics. But what they reject is any notion of truth and any notion of ideal and any notion of beauty and any notion of success. They want to destroy. They want to knock everything down. And in that sense, they are pure evil than those other ideas that were bad enough. But this is the challenge that most of the people opposed to them, while maybe giving lip service to the Enlightenment, stand with the ideas of those German Romantics and Rousseau. And as such, I don't think can offer an alternative to the world, because the often alternative to world culture, you have to have a positive view of truth. You have to have a positive view of human reason and a capacity to discover truth, to reason, and a positive view of human freedom and a good definition of human freedom, what it actually means. And I think in the world today, we have basically two camps that are fighting wokeism. One is the religious camp. And they can't defend reason, because at the end of the day, and they can't defend what you call negative freedoms or individual rights, because at the end of the day, they believe it all comes down from God. And that's just silly, right, for most of us that's silly. And to imagine that they will win that debate that, you know, that we have to go back to the 16th century of pre enlightenment, in order to save the Enlightenment is just not going to happen. You know, religion might achieve political success over wokeism, but if the expensive freedom and expensive liberty in my view, it's not going to be the anecdote to wokeism. And then on the non-religious, so the secular part of the attack on wokeism has a real difficulty of defending individualism and again defending reason. Reason I think was undermined by Kant and again Hegel Schopenhauer, the whole German list. And who are we going to use to defend our secular view of reason in the world out there? When I meet classical liberals or liberals, European style liberals, they have no philosophical defense for the view that they have. In the same as true of individualism, I think individualism is under attack by the woke. But that attack is to a large extent shared by many on the left or not woke. So the woke are taking advantage of the fact that they have no real opposition. And to have a proper opposition, we have to have a view of reason. We have to have a view of individual morality and individualism. And we have to have a view of the role of government. Now, I think Rand provides their view. And I'm excited about fighting for their view and against these guys. But I fear that most of the people fighting woke don't have a good enough view of the positive of what they're fighting for to be effective. What we need is to provide young people with an ideal, right, with an ideology that they can get excited about that they can be passionate about. And I just don't see that with the enemies of wokeism being able to provide that and that's what worries me. I'll just say, I think social solidarity comes from trust. And I don't think trust comes from democracy. I think the opposite. I worry in a democracy that you are going to gang up on me. The majority because the whole point of democracy is ruled by majority and that means the minority is in danger. And I worry about minorities, particularly the smallest minority, which is the individual. I worry that the majority is going to screw me the individual. And I think a world of real social solidarity, a world of real trust, is a world in which the individual is protected from the majority. And this is the world the founding fathers of America try to create with the Bill of Rights with the Constitution. I think they didn't do a good enough job. There's certain flaws in the documents, but that's the direction and we've moved and I think most people have moved far away from that. Democracy is not the kind of system of government the founders of American vision. There's is a kind of a very limited constrained democracy, if you will, where the will of the people is quite separated from those who make the decisions. But those who make the decisions are impotent, have very little power. And that's the kind of political system I would like to see is a politic that has very little power over our lives. And a majority that can't mess with my rights. And that that's going to have to go back to the founders and or something better and newer than that. Yeah, very small point. See, you might be worried about you and the minority being messed around by the majority. I can understand that we need protection. I'm much more worried about what's going on today where the majority is being messed around by a very small minority. And where you have a situation where the mass of society has got no voice and I think that at the end of the day, you know, our argument is not simply about freedom because I think on the question of freedom. We agree quite a bit in terms of what we think, you know, freedom, we also agree on, you know, I think both of us agree on the desirability of the state, having the most minimal role imaginable in our everyday life. I think the really important thing is asking the question, who's the best guarantor of freedom. And I think that the best guarantor of freedom to me, at the end of the day, is still the demos. And within the demos, I think there are individuals, you know, who are able to exercise their creativity and come to their end. That's really that it's that combination that we got a fight for because if we regard the demos as this bunch of idiots, we're always going to, you know, sort of play the role of Santa, then by the theorist of the tyranny, the majority. Then we write off the possibility of individual freedom, you know, sort of really coming into and acquiring that kind of really important existence. So for me, the individual, my individual freedom and my capacity to determine my will, you know, according to my inclination is inseparable from the fact that there are people who will watch my back under those circumstances. Unfortunately, I'm not just entirely on my own. And those people are necessary to protect you and me from the power of the state, the power of the influence that they can exercise and that's something that we're going to strive for. There's one important thing you said, which I think that you haven't got an answer for I haven't got an answer for the moment. Unfortunately, which is that we do need to give young people an unambiguous inspirational ideology or something positive that they can, you know, their energies can be harness to. And that's to me, that's that is the real challenge. How do we create and you're right to suggest that at the moment the reaction against woke ism is really third rate. It's not really very much significant. So we do need to have a more creative way in harnessing that idealism that aspiration for freedom that young people have and to give that a real substance that at the moment is lacking. So Frank, some weeks ago, you wrote an article on spiked about how you found very interesting that in a game in Hungary, the audience in a way revolted against the gesture of the knee and the BLM salute. Now, you've, you've been the subject of a lot of criticism about what is about your let's say tolerance towards the regime in Hungary and the question is, is this kind of conservatism and is this kind of in some ways authoritarian agenda. Is this a good reaction to work is with you. Well, number one, I don't accept that Hungary is any more authoritarian than England is or Francis, I think that there are there are kind of there's too much government all over Europe at the moment and I think Hungary gets a special sort of focus which is, I think unfair, because I think if you go to Budapest you'll find that it is as free as London or Paris in terms of the last time you can carry out, which is not to say that I agree with a lot of the things that the government puts forward any more than I agree with governments, you know, in general. I don't think the way that I look at it is that what Hungary has is doing at the moment is in its own way trying to stand up for its sovereignty. And to me, sovereignty is important because it's inseparable from both individual and popular sovereignty. At the end of the day, a real individualism real individual rights are inseparable from the right to self determination that we as an individual can determine your future, as long as you're prepared to live with the consequences of your action. I think the same thing happens with nations as well. So to me that, you know, what Hungary is doing is useful and it's important. The point that I would make is that they're more proactive in relation to fighting against wokism than anywhere else. But at the end of the day, the political outlook that they project, I would say is insufficient. It's too reactive. It suffers from all the other anti-wokist reaction that we have where people are reacting to the symptoms of the problem rather than to its kind of substance essential. And I'm interested in going to Hungary because I speak Hungarian. I think I got some influence that to try to kind of divert, you know, young people in particular to understand that the stakes are very high. And they have to, in a sense, have a more positive freedom oriented reaction towards the whole kind of wokist threat. And I think that's what I see as part of my mission. But I will defend Hungary against the unbalanced unfair criticism that is often leveled at it by people who are far worse in terms of their authoritarian inclination than the Hungarian government is. Yaron, any comments on Hungary or Eastern Europe? I mean, I'm not an expert in Hungary, but you know, from my understanding, the limitations that Hungary is placed on media and Hungary and Poland is placed on gays and just the focus on nationalism. I mean, I completely agree about sovereignty, sovereignty is good, but placing the state as the moral standard as the thing that I'm going to fight for. And again, a devaluation of individualism and the individual, I think it's very dangerous. It's very dangerous. And I think this is the problem I see in many people who want to fight wok. They see world culture taking over the mechanisms of power like corporate leaders and others using politics. And the antidote to that their answer to that is, we need to take over the mechanisms of power in the name of freedom, but freedom, I think it's in quotes because I don't think it's real freedom anymore. So instead of the left controlling the media, we need to control the media or in front of the left cancelling people, we need to cancel people. That is, we need to do what the left has been successful at doing or the woke left has been successful at doing, we need to do. And I think if that happens, and I think that's that's the thrust of most anti woke mentality today. If that happens, then we've given up on freedom, then we've given up on the ideal on the vision of what if we behave exactly like them in seeking power for the sake of power, then we're just as bad as the enemy and and when I see, on news media being shut down be in Hungary because they don't align with the government. Then that scares me because that now says that the government should have that power. And it's okay for the government to have that power and when a woke government does that to our kind of media media we support, then you know we've played right into the hands by allowing that. So I worry that the anti liberal forces on the right are the ones that are going to be victorious against the anti woke. So we'll fight woke, and they will turn wake up one day and we'll live in an illiberal right wing. Nationalists maybe religious kind of society, and we'll have to fight them right so it's one fight after the other. And maybe that's inevitable maybe that's what's going to necessarily has to happen. But that's what scares me today. And I see that in the US you see that you see that in the in the in many people's in many people who support a Trump in that in the mentality and the attitude. And you see that and who are the rising star within the Republican Party today the anti woke people within the Republican Party it's people who want more government, more government involvement in our lives more government involvement in the economy more government in the role of everything, but from the right. And so what are we getting rid of what are we fighting the left for so we can hand the government over to people who want to violate our rights just from the right is that better. So that's what scares me I would like to see a true liberal in the proper sense opposition to wokeism and to the statist right at the same time and I know that's a two front battle and we're likely to lose but I don't see matters what's right. Okay, let's. I think that, you know, there's a problem and the problem is, is that the moment the the reaction to wokeism is it's mirror image. Very often, people understandably react to the attack on their identity by inflating their identity so suddenly, you feel, you know, being white, you kind of spoiled you kind of called horrible things. I'm proud to be why that becomes the way you react against and that's really unfortunate and that seems to be the dominant way that these things it will just have mirror image kind of reaction which is happening everywhere not just in East Europe but everywhere in terms of the way these things are. And I think that's a problem that we have to deal with. I do think that we have to be sensitive to certain circumstances so if you believe in freedom that I think that it's understandable that a lot of Europeans who are religious are worried about what is the first starting point of modern freedom which is the freedom of conscience, the freedom to think in accordance with your inclination, which they see as being under attack kind of kind of religious freedom being spoiled and negated. And you can understand why in reaction to that. You know, they kind of basically then elevate their religious ideals as a kind of defense. That's an understandable problem. It's not something that I would, but we have to understand why that is going on. And that's not different than what's happening everywhere in the world. So, I don't want to go and defend East Europe because or hunger in particular because I think that it is wrong to imagine that the media laws in Hungary are more restrictive than in Britain or France. I'm against all media laws I think that there should be no laws that control the media I believe in total. I'm a free speech absolutist no matter where you are. But I do think there's a kind of double standard that, you know, distorts the reality but the one that I would make is that at the moment, or the allies that we have are not necessarily allies that, you know, sort of sign off to the same kind of enlightenment ideals as, as I kind of possess. But nevertheless, I know that when push comes to shove and when they, you know, when the battle lines are drawn, you're going to be alongside a lot of people whose views on an individuality, whose views on the state, whose views on freedom is very different than than than yours are. So the question then becomes how do we, you know, sort of, in a sense, fight alongside them in some in some of the battles in time, create a much greater appeal for what I what I what I see as being a genuine freedom oriented kind of political kind of orientation. And that's really what I think my role when I see my role in this kind of very messy world that we kind of live in, engaging with people and trying to get them to understand that, you know, just because they deny your free speech, you mustn't, you mustn't, you gotta avoid the temptation of doing the same thing to them. And I've done this with anti Zionists, who hate Jewish people as I defended their rights to speak in universities, you know, when everyone wanted to shut them down because, you know, if we're going to say that everybody's got a right to have a free voice, people that we dislike so I think that we have a messy, very messy problem here. And at the end of the day, we just got to find a way of making sure that it's our view of freedom that influences people, rather than some of the other ones. You have to make a distinction between the walk and the anti walk because at the end of the day, you know, there is a thirdest pragmatism, it's the fact is that there are people who really are being destroyed by walkism, who feel that they just for them to live, they need to kind of do something and unfortunately all they do is just react. Okay, let's go to the audience and then you both gonna have a last outro. So thanks Kirk and Jeff for your super chats Bonnie says what he says others can't know. So it's a war on reason. Here's another superstar the question. John Stosser's new video is big business uses big government to cross small business. How good how do we cut the special interest lobby off at the knees to let competition determine winners and losers. Yaron, let's start from you because it's your. I mean, as long as as long as government has power over business. Business will do its most to try to make sure that initially maybe the government stays away from it and then over time, they will figure out they can use that power to actually manipulate business into manipulate government into helping them. The only way to stop cronyism is to make politicians to give the politicians no power over business. It's the separate economy from states. You know the founders try to try to separate religion from state the church from state. We've gone one step further and separated economy from state. If the government has no power over economic lives then we're not going to lobby when I'm going to try to control so I blame politics look if politicians and they do politicians try to run my business. They tell me what I can and cannot do constantly. Why wouldn't I then try to lobby to protect myself and to defend myself. And yes, some get tempted to use that against their competitors, but we're never going to get away from that until we make government, you know have no power over us and again this is my fear of democracy. I don't want to get anybody overpower over my business. So, thank you Christopher Super Charles from Eric says it's fantastic to have these discussions that delve into the social individual philosophical conditions and possibilities thank you and Rick. So let me close then with this question to both of you first we're going to go to your own and we're going to sorry to Frank and we're going to end with your own. So, you both mentioned some things that we could do in terms of new institutions and promote the positive alternative. So someone who hasn't got to say the capital or the audience to do that so someone who works and is afraid of their HR or of their boss, or think salad right this tweet or not so the average job so to speak the average person. How should they fight walkness in their personal and in their, let's say, public life, and that will be the last round so let's start with Frank. I think you need to be fairly subversive. I think the way you got to think of yourself is your countering the dominant cultural norms, and that requires that you find ways and means of looking for allies in small places of, you know, talking to people even during lunch to the people that you work with to give them the confidence to not censor themselves but to kind of express their views. And I think in every single situation, it's, it's almost as if the individual's got a very important role because if you can set an example in your workplace or at the university or in a school, as somebody that is prepared to speak at somebody who is not going to conform to the dominant narrative, then what you can do is you can give confidence to a significant minority of people who probably think the same way as you do, but who for some reason or another are a bit intimidated about expressing their views. And I think it's, to me, it's a question of setting individual examples in these places so that people can see that they're not alone. There's somebody else who thinks the way they do. And from my experience, a small group of individuals can have a disproportionate positive impact in all kinds of institutional settings. So I'm relatively optimistic about the possibility of making at least a small impact in your own immediate environment. I agree with Frank completely on this. You know, that's exactly the case. Look, the fact is most people are not woke. The majority is not woke. And what, but the majority is either timid, afraid, insecure, and doesn't know what they're for. They know they might, this work stuff is confusing and it's wrong, but they don't know what they stand for. And one thing an individual can do who knows what their values are, who know what they're fighting for, who know that woke is wrong, is to express themselves. And I agree with Frank completely, do it in small groups at the lunch table, you know, do it among friends, do it in relatively safe places where you're not going to get penalized by the boss or whatever. But also, you know, to the extent that you can do it on Twitter, do it in social media, give voice to an alternative. And I think if we can do that and try to be inspirational and aspirational, try to present a positive ideal. Because if we can do that, if we can make freedom sexy, right, if we can make freedom interesting, if we can make freedom and ideal that young and you think young people, we could get them excited about it. If we can turn against wokeism, I think, relatively easy. If everybody who actually held these ideas were willing to speak and again it takes some courage, and you've got to be brave because I agree with Frank it's an existential threat. You know this is a real threat to our culture, it's a real threat to our lives and our children's lives. And you know we better be brave. So we need to speak up. We need to talk about it. We need to once in a while stand up to ourselves. I mean, one of the things that you discover is that some people can't be canceled partially because they're willing to speak. They're willing to stand up, they're willing to make it public, they're willing to fight. So we need to engage in the battle. And if we engage in the battle, I have no doubt that the anti-woke forces will win. I still think we'll have a battle in our hands in terms of what replaces wokeism. Yaron, there's a last second super chat specifically for you. It says, don't you think that Silicon Valley CEOs have capacity to know better and cannot be let off as victims of this movement? I don't view them as victims of the movement, although I think they partially are. I think they know better as much as anybody in our culture knows better. They're smart, but they're good at business. That doesn't mean they're intellectuals. It doesn't mean they understand philosophy. It doesn't mean they've studied their Aristotle or whatever. They're just as susceptible to the ideas of the culture and the ideas of their professors as everybody else. They should know better in the same sense that any human being should know better. And yeah, I'm disappointed in them and think they should be held accountable for their ideas. But punishing them through the political process is playing into the woke's hands. It's playing into wokeism's hands. It's using politics to rule everybody's lives. There's a lot of things. I would like to see corporate leaders do differently and they should know better. But then that's true of more scientists. That's true of more social thinkers. That's true of more politicians. They all are vast disappointment. So to finish off, Frank, so your last books was the one was on borders. Why borders matter? Why humanity must? We learned the act of drawing boundaries. And democracy under siege. Seeds don't let them lock it down. And you have a book coming or in September 100 years of identity crisis, cultural war over socialization. So it's probably on the themes that we discussed today. So looking forward to reading. So thank you both for being with us. I really appreciate your time. I hope the audience also got value out of it and all the best and see you all next week. Bye, Frank. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Thanks everybody. See you guys. Bye bye.