 Hello, and welcome to Navarra FM on Resonance 104.4 FM, London's very finest radio station. I am James Butler. This week I have been joined by Will Davies to discuss his new book, Nervous States – How Feeling Took Over the World. The book is expansive and its central concern is a dethroning of reason and of expertise both of which were central to the construction of the modern state by the passions or by the irrational. There are a plethora of books trying to define this shift, most of them seek to defend the beleaguered crew of experts from a rather caricatured, irrational mob, or at least bewail the state of democracy that it should have come to this. That knee-jerk defence isn't present in this book, so I began by asking Will what prompted its writing. What sparked it was, I suppose, in the first place the Brexit referendum of 2016 and I wrote a series of blog posts over that summer and other pieces trying to make sense of what had happened. And I think that what most interested me about that particular political event and I think there are other populist uprisings and surges that this is also true of was that it seemed to dispense with economic reason. A lot of my work in previous books, The Limits of Neoliberalism and the Happiness Industry, has been trying to understand where a particular ideal of economic rationality comes from over the last 100 or 200 years. And what interested me most about what happened with Brexit and is still there and of course is also what drives a lot of hardcore remainers mad is the sense that this is a moment of economic irrationality, that this is a dispensation with self-interest on the part of individuals and the collective. So that was where it started and I wanted to rather than just to bemoan that because in some ways I found it, if I'm done it's quite exciting in its own way, although also rather frightening and I think both of those emotions are in the book, was to try and understand it really and to use a sociological imagination and historical perspective and the history of ideas in order to understand that and to understand it necessarily means not simply bemoaning it but also means trying to understand that there is a logic to what is arising at the moment. It's not just a demolition job. It's not just a collapse of truth and facts and so on as so many of the post truth books have suggested. There is something else coming along and we might not like that other thing and certainly a lot of remainers and liberals don't like that other thing but nevertheless it has a shape to it and we can understand where it comes from and if we're to try and cling on to what came before and there's aspects of the book, the aspects of that which I take very seriously. I don't want to simply celebrate the collapse of what came before but I think we need to understand what it would mean to reconstruct bits of it. What are the contours of that kind of dethroning or that rejection? The book starts by suggesting that there are a couple of key philosophical binaries that have been dissolving for some time but are now visibly no longer credible. The first is the core Hobbesian distinction between peace and war which was established by not only the work of Thomas Hobbes but also by the key legal liberal institutions of the mid 17th century. The second is the distinction between mind and body that was most famously proposed by René Descartes at a similar point in history and these are, as I suggest in the book, these are really the kind of cornerstones of modern thinking about the self, about politics, about society. So this is to suggest that these have dissolved is obviously quite a grand claim but I'm not suggesting it happened kind of overnight on the 23rd of June 2016. I mean I say that the pressures on these have been underway for some time, the rise of the psychological and psychiatric and psychoanalytic sciences since the late 19th century have gradually kind of weakened the idea of the mind as a separate rational entity. Meanwhile technological changes in the nature of war starting with the rise of aerial bombing but now right through to things like drone warfare and so on have meant that the realm of civilian power, civil power that traditionally was kept separate from war, the police forces, prisons, probation services and so on used to be completely separate from military power. This distinction no longer makes sense either. So we're in this kind of, I suppose, post-modern might immediately rustle up ideas of Jean-François Léotard or Derrida or something but it's post-modern in a particular sense that in a chronological sense that the key props of modernity are no longer working and maybe they haven't been working for a long time but they were nevertheless credible for some time. And part of the book is trying to understand why that has come about and that's partly a technological set of trends that have happened but it's also I think trends within the economy that have been pushing against those. Like what? Well I mean for one thing part of the achievement and I think it's an achievement that we should value while also recognising it's the harm that it's done at certain points in history but part of the achievement of the 17th century was to achieve a scientific perspective on society and I talk about some of the earliest technocrats, the earliest statisticians people like William Petty and John Grant and so on who were pioneers of the application of techniques of measurement and mathematics and of calculation that had first been put to work in the study of things like the movement of planets and that sort of thing in the solar system but put it to work in the study of population and this has a dubious history in some ways, it has a bloody history, it also is a history of empire but nevertheless it's also how we gain any sense of what society is as an empirical object if we're to understand things like poverty empirically or inequality empirically or other forms of exclusion in a scientific sense rather than just in a sort of suspicious or theoretical sense. We need these techniques. Now one of the things I argue in the book is that the experts or some of the key indicators that have the modern nation states have depended on in recent decades such as GDP, unemployment, inflation, these have been losing credibility partly as a result of rising inequality. In the United States for example 50% of people have had no increase in their real income since the late 1970s, so that's 40 years in which half of the population have not been experiencing economic growth, meanwhile the political discourse is constantly focused on economic growth as the main indicator of progress. So just to use that as just one example, why would progress continue to make sense as a political project if it's not, if it's including only half of the population? There are other sorts of cases and I think unemployment is another one that I talk about in the bit in the book but the aspiration to apply an objective perspective to political issues depends on that perspective having some kind of broader public credibility. It's not, experts don't have some God-given right in order to be listened to or to be deemed credible. The pronouncements of experts and of statisticians and social scientists and economists depends on the capacity to tell plausible stories about the world. In that sense it's a pragmatist thesis that runs through much of the book and I think those stories have lost credibility in quite fundamental and profound ways meaning that alternative ways of understanding the collective necessarily kind of start to fill in the space. It's an interesting thing that emerges I think in the book that there is obviously a sense that a mere defense of the existing order is insufficient and also as you're suggesting that maybe some of the features of the contemporary aren't novel per se so the antipathy between reason and emotion is an old one, it fears with the crowd as you know it certainly stretched back to at least the 19th century probably frankly a lot longer. I guess in one sense I have, I always wonder about that when crowds come up in a book because that question about when you have someone like Jefferson even talking about the democracy, hating the idea that being fearful about the unrestrained passions of a mass or of a mob, so one thing that perhaps is new and it's something that occurs again at various points throughout the book is speed and at some points you seem to praise a certain kind of slowness, a sort of resistant slowness, a rational slowness so just the speed of contemporary communications technology have a qualitative effect on politics and political discourse. Yes and you're absolutely right to identify that, this is a key theme in the book. I mean I suppose to put it in quite simple terms the book is organised around two ideals of what knowledge is and why we value knowledge, one which emerges I argue in the mid 17th century and the other which emerges around about the time of the French Revolution and the first is an ideal of knowledge as consensus, as the capacity to tell a, to give a picture of the world that we can all then agree on and this is basically what liberals value when they value expertise and reason and objectivity. It's the idea that there is a perspective on the world that is neutral and which therefore everybody can sign up to and that really is what animates BBC journalists or climate scientists or orthodox economists and there's something of that that we need to cling on to quite tightly despite the fact that I just called it liberal and I'm on Navarra, there's still something there that we must value and I think that even someone like Karl Marx would have recognised that in the sense that political economy comes out of that tradition and political economy allows you to be able to understand how capitalism is changing in a way that has some sort of philosophical, epistemological credibility. So that's one ideal of knowledge. The second ideal of knowledge is that what is valuable about knowledge is knowing stuff before you know it and so if I'm a hedge fund manager or for that matter if I'm in some kind of theatre of war of some kind or if I'm a troll or if I'm some kind of you know sort of underhand kind of political spin doctor or something it's all about being able to get things first and it's all about being able to control the situation through knowing more than my rivals in one way or the other that involves secrecy that involves encryption that involves intercepting what other people are saying now these this idea of knowledge is in some ways what how social media works in lots of ways that it's how meme culture works because meme culture is really about trying to tell jokes that most people aren't going to be able to get except your allies and hopefully to undermine your enemies in some way. So that ideal of knowledge is the is one that I argue originates in war and it's one which I traced through the ideas of the Prussian general and theorist of war Carl von Klauswitz who was this he was kind of bowled over by how Napoleon had turned war into into a modern highly technical rather kind of nihilistic phenomenon of trying to kind of completely demolish other nation states. But everything that Klauswitz was interested in about Napoleon wasn't his ability to sort of achieve broad public consensus far from it. It was the ability to know stuff before other people knew it to manipulate the truth so that other people were kept in the dark to Napoleon was a extremely able propagandist in terms of printing newspapers that were sent back to Paris for people to read and were full of things which were not strictly true and so on. So there is the second ideal of knowledge which is the ideal of not of war the idea of knowledge that I would argue emerges in war and the technologies that are developed in war which include things like radar and satellite and the internet and the computer are all about trying to speed up my capacity to know things before you have the chap capacity to know them or the capacity to react to them. Now in a way the infiltration of that mentality of and that and that idea of knowledge into civil society which is really what social media has enacted in lots of ways and ways that are exciting as well as rather kind of de unsettling has meant the politics has come to take on some of the qualities of war and has meant that the civil discourse has started to in some ways feel more like violent discourse and that's the kind of one of the key claims in the book. It's interesting you draw on a distinction made by Hannah Aaron between power and violence which I think is maybe a useful way to think about this. Yeah, I mean this is in aren't on violence and in that she argues that the idea of power is the capacity to in a sense coordinate people to create institutions to achieve certain kinds of outcomes. So if you build a bureaucracy or you create a constitution or a parliament or a firm for that matter, you are constructing something new in the world that has some kind of durability and can and can can change the world can do can can get things done can achieve positive outcomes can also achieve negative outcomes. I mean the as you know, Sigmund Baumann writing about the Holocaust, for instance, it was writing all about how all of the same instruments of modernity that achieve the positive effects can be put towards the most horrifying one. So there's nothing innately good about power. It's just that power has this constructive quality in the world. Violence has a purely destructive quality. It's purely instrumental. And violence is in a sense the the capacity to simply to I mean, I use examples that I mean, one of the ways I use this in the book is to say where does this notion of weaponization come from. And in a way, if you terrorism operates purely through through violence, it doesn't it doesn't produce in something in the world, it doesn't, it doesn't render the world more governable or controllable. It simply undermines the capacity of others to do so. Equally, you could say that in in the discursive and symbolic space, that's in a way what what trolling does on online is it undermines the capacity of others to maintain to achieve kind of forms of coordination and cooperation and so on. So it has this purely instrumental capacity. It doesn't there's a line that aren't users, which I rather like, which is that violence can undermine power, but power can never come out of violence. The main effect of violence, she argues, is a more violent world. So that yes, you can I mean, I could I could hurl something you right now. And it would have changed the situation. But it wouldn't have actually it wouldn't make a really interesting show. But it wouldn't have achieved we wouldn't have sort of we wouldn't have constructed anything, it just simply would have undermined the capacity for the rest of this conversation to go in any kind of sort of productive way. I mean, I sort of and in all these questions, I think about your your two kind of early modern kind of forefathers of this day. And obviously, in one sense, you know, Descartes is important because he gives us, you know, the thinking thing, the thing distinct from the body, i.e. that that is defined primarily as ratio synative that, you know, receive sensation, but is in some in some important sense distinct from them, right? And, you know, I think you use a metaphor in the book of it being, you know, as an astronomer in an observatory, which I thought was quite a nice way of putting it. So so that, you know, that figure, certainly, and there's, you know, there's a very clear history of that no longer being quite sufficient to our understanding of how the body works, how the mind works, and also of simply the phenomena that have, you know, the social phenomena that have arisen since Descartes time, that includes, you know, the rise of democracy. Yeah. The other thing, though, from your other forefather that I think is interesting is, is Hobbes and Hobbes. You know, Hobbes gives us the first modern account of the state. You know, I think you could cogently argue that all of political philosophy is for the native Hobbes, in that sense, in that he's, you know, the defining account of the state for all subsequent theorists, you know, whether they agree or disagree with him. And for him, it's an account that's intimately bound up with fear. Yeah. You know, Hobbes in, in, he writes a poem near the end of his life where he calls himself, you know, he says, I was born a twin of fear, right? Yeah, rather sort of wonderful line. And I wonder if there's, there's something about that specific emotion that's really integral to your account, because it seems to me that fear and popular fear is something that recurs, both in accounts of Trump, of Brexit, of these kind of phenomena, but that has like a, maybe a sort of more undergirding role in contemporary politics. Yeah. Well, I mean, to take the, the, the Descartes and Hobbes together for a minute and to say, to look at these two binaries that I mentioned earlier of war peace, mind body and, and what does it mean for both of those to become murky at the very least, if not to say that they've completely kind of been demolished? Well, what it means is that the status of violence is no longer clear. And we see this all around us every day. We see it in arguments about free speech and when is speech violence. We see it in discussions which hover around syndromes and diagnoses such as post traumatic stress disorder, which I discuss a bit in the book, because I think it, although it's not something that fortunately most people actually experience in their lives, nevertheless, it indicates, I think, a cultural problem that is, that has become politically very fraught in our society, which is the question of at what point does a cultural experience or a set of or do words start to achieve the status of violence? And I think that it's something that is raises so many kind of important philosophical questions as much as anything else. But I think that this question of fear is in some ways tied up with the uncertainty of where violence might lie or what violence might consist of. And I think so for the reasoning that Hobbes goes through for just to kind of recap on Hobbes is that Hobbes argues that human beings might all be angelic. They might all be utterly virtuous and peace loving and altruistic and so on. But there is this, I suppose, tragedy of human beings, which is they don't know what's going on in each other's heads. They can see each other's behavior. They can listen to each other's words, but people can lie. They can be given various pieces of proof and so on, but the proof could be fabricated. There is this fundamental problem that suspicion is actually quite a natural condition for human beings. And suspicion then breeds fear. Because if I don't know, you might tell me that all you want is to be my friend. But I don't have any real way of knowing that for sure. Now Hobbes was writing in towards the end of 30 years of a very bloody religious warfare across Europe. And he also had actually fled the English Civil War for France in fear of his own life because he was being read as a monarchist. And that I think casts some perspective on this as well. But I think that for Hobbes, all of the other fruits of modernity, whether that be commerce, science, great arts, great political debate and so on, none of them could happen until this condition of fear could be got rid of, first of all. He was in some ways a great sort of maybe not an optimist, but he certainly had great hopes that these things might come about. And it's interesting that with the period we're talking about is really over 100 years before what's generally called the Enlightenment. So the Enlightenment came quite a long time after these sorts of debates were going on. But yes, it's true that the first role of the state is to overcome this problem of mutual suspicion and mutual fear. Now that suggests that when fear starts to arise, that is in some ways a legitimacy crisis for the liberal state on its own terms. And there is plenty of evidence, particularly across mainland Europe at the moment, that fear is rising in various ways. And that is to do with the refugee crisis. It's to do with a general loss of credibility of political elites. It's to do with the austerity. And so I think that in some ways what Hobbes reminds us is that the liberal state, the modern state, starts with a kind of psychological trick, which is to say that, or in game theory terms, to a kind of overcoming of the prisoner's dilemma, which is to say, right, I'm going to, in some ways, achieve a sort of willing suspension of disbelief, where we're all going to have to believe that we're all good people. And we're going to do so because we're going to centralize all powers of violence in the hands of the state, and they're going to punish people who are bad people. And this is a sort of a clever sort of leap of faith that occurs. From where on you have this thing called civil society, which Hobbes believes is the most important achievement of all. But I think it's true that this kind of the blurring of the definition of violence, which is also going hand in hands with the rise of fear as a as a emotional and cultural phenomenon, is at the heart of some of the crises that are facing the liberal state right now. So they're both symptomatic in that sense. I mean, it's interesting, I was thinking as you were as you were talking, there is here, you know, something that seems like a connection to me, both between, you know, your two early modern giants and it has to do with authority, right? And so and in one sense, that's the thing that's also being questioned with our experts, etc. Nowadays is that authority derives from, you know, whether you're credentialed or, you know, so you have a kind of degree of social trust, you know, it arises in the case of, you know, it rises partly because you are the sovereign, in some cases. But that sense of there being, you know, generalized crisis of authority is something that actually stretches back a bit further than the contemporary, right? It's something that you can see emerging in the 60s. Certainly there is this kind of generalized distrust of any kind of claim to authority, right? So it, you know, it manifests in various ways. You have obviously social movements that contest, you know, that they're all about bringing things that are excluded from the definition of, you know, political concerns into the political. So that might be feminism, it might be gay rights, might be, you know, whatever. You know, while at the same time saying that the kind of regimes that are founded on, you know, this particular definition of politics are no longer sufficient. Now that anti authoritarianism plays out in the academic humanities and some of you know, this wild distrust of ground narratives, etc. You should say that I'm not adhering to an argument that everything is Derrida's fault, which I think is now very fashionable in America. But there does seem to me to be something there that's a problem, right? And it's something that's mirrored or that, you know, for me very often that, you know, the test cases or, you know, the political situations that I go to simply because I know a lot about it are the kind of post-war politics in Italy, which is of course very interesting because you have a very weak and not necessarily very credible democratic state, you know, very fragile constitution, and you have the rise of kind of armed and violent political groups, which seem to me not only to be, you know, a consequence of the crisis of that kind of state, but also because they these are people who have returned from war. These are people who were involved in partisan and anti-fascist struggles. And so who had, you know, not only a kind of psychological proximity to violence, but also the means to use it and we're also less likely to be convinced about the way in which the state was operating. Now, that's that particular situation. There's a, you know, there's a history to that. So we find ourselves today in perhaps a similar crisis, but without such clear proximity. That's a good, very good point, yeah, to war. I never thought about it quite like that. I mean, it's also true that if you read histories of the 1930s, I mean, you read some of Eric Obstborn's Age of Extremes, for instance, he points out how important it was that the Nazi leaders had been in the trenches because once you've seen people being mowed down by machine guns without anyone appearing to care politically, your understanding of the value of a life politically is transformed and it doesn't get changed back suddenly. And I think that's a very good point, which is that it has been this sort of extraordinary period that most people have been a long way from war in the traditional sense. Meanwhile, of course, the kind of metaphor of war seems to spread everywhere. And that's one of the things that kind of interests me in the book, partly. I mean, I think what you're saying, another way of exploring this is that to go back to Hobbes for a second. Hobbes, in a way, and he was a dualist in Descartes sense as well. He also believed, broadly speaking, in a kind of philosophical distinction between the rationality of the free mind versus the completely causal physicality of the body. But in a way, what Hobbes, I suppose, was doing with his ambition to exclude all violence from politics was to exclude the body from politics, was to have a politics that was purely governed by the mind. And in that sense, it was a kind of prototype of enlightenment, but a kind of the sort of pessimistic beginnings of what would later become seen as enlightenment. And the body has been coming in, back in, in all sorts of ways that you alluded to in the work of the various social movements and the various critiques of liberalism that have drawn attention to the fact that different bodies get different statuses in the political realm, that this ideal of rationality that Descartes sort of called human actually was never human. It was white, male, Western privilege and that actually it wasn't something that and of course also the same as true equally of Hobbes' idea of civil society was not something that colonized spaces. They didn't have the virtue of being governed in a legal liberal fashion. There was no distinction between military and civil violence in those spaces. So of course and that is the post colonial and the feminist argument that has been made over the over the past 70 years or so. But there's one other figure that I want to want to throw in here and which is the neoliberals. And there's a whole chapter about I don't use the term neoliberal if you notice but I couldn't be bothered to sort of go there really. But but I mean it's about Friedrich Hayek and in particular and Ludwig von Mises. But Hayek was I sometimes provocatively say the most influential post modernist of the 20th century because Hayek was very very suspicious of these experts with their objective facts and their claims to some kind of authority over the rest of society and asked these quite cynical questions about what what what were they trying to achieve with these with these claims knowledge what interests were they serving. And this turns into things like public choice theory which it seems all bureaucrats and experts are ultimately just out for money and like more job security and that's something. And the thing about Hayek was that he also in some way brought the body back in in quite interesting ways because Hayek although he was ultimately believed that the market and the price system would be the way in which we could sort out all of our differences. And that was his kind of answer to the Hobbesian sort of challenge was well you don't really need law or you kind of do need law but not more important than law mostly is a price system through which all these disagreements will sort of be resolved. But he believed that the market was such a sort of brilliant kind of mediator that we could all be as impulsive and emotional and as and a sort of kind of enslaved to our bodies as we liked and the market would do all of the kind of rationalising and the calculating on our behalf. Therefore we don't need things like statisticians and economists and experts to kind of take decisions about things like the allocation of goods or any of that kind of thing let alone planning the economy because the market will allow us all to be as irrational and sort of impulsive and and sort of impassioned as we like and it will all get sort of sorted out via the rising and falling of prices. Yeah, that worked. Well, and the other thing which you know is to come back to the question about kind of how did you know in a sense neoliberalism elevates the ideal of knowledge, which I argue is a kind of war like ideal, which is good knowledge of stuff you don't know yet, but I do. If you see how that works out in financial services, which is the kind of icon of neoliberalism, it leads to people taking brain supplements or investing in better kind of screen technology or in high frequency trading investments, such as my computer server is like two meters closer to the Atlantic than your computer server. Therefore, I'm going to get the price signals faster than you. So it turns knowledge into an entirely physical problem, which is that rather than knowledge being something that kind of enters my immaterial, rational Cartesian mind, knowledge is all about getting the equipment through which I'm going to be able to grasp the world before you do so that I can live in a bigger penthouse. That question of of secrecy, or, you know, advantageous knowledge, private advantageous knowledge. I mean, there's another early modern figure is the one who's who I'm very, you know, very interested in is Francis Bacon, who writes in his, you know, little utopia of the new Atlantis he talks about, you know, he envisions a state which is, you know, frankly, primarily technologically run has a system of government. But in fact, all the innovation and all the intelligence goes on in the kind of technocratic cast who live in a big tower called the House of Salomon. And so, you know, what arises from that question is like a straight early kind of instance of a kind of desire for technocracy. Yeah, right. Yeah. But also that, you know, the question of where power actually lies in that kind of system, because for someone like Hayek, you know, law certainly has a function, but it's primarily to guarantee that, you know, you're not kind of rip people off. Yeah. In the sense that, you know, once you make a payment, you have to carry out the payment. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we should leave. We should leave the early modern period, because apparently we're in the 21st century now. Despite how similar they are sometimes seen, I want to think just a little bit more about violence. And one of the things that occurred to me while reading is the modern state has a capacity for violence that's largely been undreamt of in sort of previous centuries, you know, even if we define violence quite conservatively, you know, that says, you know, just the ability to kill someone. And so, you know, there have historically been occasions where it was plausible to think of political change as arriving merely by the application of force from below. So this is true of Lenin, but it's also it's also true earlier on. It's true in the 1848 revolution. It's true in the 1789 revolution in France. It, you know, and it's baked into the Second Amendment, right? So the idea that you would have, you know, a bunch of people with some guns so that, you know, you could ensure that your leaders don't become too despotic. That option doesn't seem to exist in politics in Europe or in the United States anymore, certainly because all of those states are far too powerful to be subject to that kind of political change. So that kind of changed the form of politics that we have. Yeah. And I suppose that's right, is that that is that that is lacking and it's something which doesn't really really talk about in the book. I mean, the book, I talk quite a lot about things that are becoming quasi-violent in that Arendtian sense of a sort of purely instrumental sort of form of obstacle or deconstruction or demolition or something. But but I think that I think that's absolutely right. But I think that also the other thing which has happened, which I think might be part of that as well, is the way in which violence has has has moved into the private sector as well, which I mean, is clearly, I think associated with neoliberalism in some sense in that in as much as there is the sort of privatisation of both civil powers of violence such as prisons and policing, but also of course war is for increasingly via commercial entities. And I mean, there is I mean, my book kind of I'm not quite answering your question because I don't I mean, I hadn't really sort of hadn't thought about it quite quite in those terms. But I think I think you're absolutely right. I think that the some of the sort of power imbalances or certainly the violence balances of violence are such that the capacity for that sort of insurrection doesn't seem to kind of shape the elite imaginary in the same way as it once did, which may actually also been in some ways one of the reasons why elites have lost legitimacy in the way that they have because they haven't fundamentally cared what was on the in the minds of the masses in the way that even something like Roosevelt was quite worried about what all these trade unions might want sort of thing and and had to sort of kind of think about that. And no doubt that should probably did as well to a greater extent than is than is the case right now. So I think that I think that that that that has certainly been a shift. I think that I mean the you know, I think the the what's coming along in the future, which I talk a bit about in the book is the is the sort of rise of these kind of Palantir and Amazon for that matter type companies where the the the tools of of war certainly in terms of information war but also the sort of these tools of data analytics that kind of move kind of seamlessly between the realm of the military civil society, the economy forms of kind of exceptional overseas violence that are kind of now normal in American foreign policy and so on, which and a and a very largely invisible to most people. I mean, that's the other thing. So yeah, these are those companies that they always strike me as you know, very, very state like that they have properties that we would typically associate with the state, which including, you know, Jeff Bezos with the wave of a hand being able to, you know, dispense and public spending on his employees and raise that, you know, raise their wage as a, you know, a way of ensuring that that there isn't work organization, you know, see notoriously anti-union anti-union guy. Yeah, I mean, the point of that question in one sense is is is just that sense that certainly throughout probably the last 500 years, there's a sense that as a mass public gradually emerges, the possibility of violence and the possibility of a kind of and kind of violence that's either brought about by demagogues or orators or people who are cynically out to stir up passions for for their own ends arises, you know, and has potential consequences that are that are kind of earth shattering and obviously, you know, that the classic study in this is Edmund Burke and, you know, when he's writing about the French Revolution is that he's terrified that there is this, that there is now the capacity for, you know, for an idea to stir people up because Burke thinks it's not just passions, it's an idea, right? And the thing that's really interesting is that his writing sort of seems to oscillate between on the one hand, you know, this kind of Jacobin dogma is also an amazing people. And then at the same time, the crowd is also like deeply irrational. And so for him, you know, the power of the of the crowd is is bound up with its capacity for violence. Now, absent that, and I think in some ways, it's quite good that that actually, you know, marauding bands of a fraction of civil society can't impose their will entirely violently, you know, regardless of what critiques you have of the state, I think it's probably good that fascists will find it harder to seize now than they did historically. Yeah. You know, so absent that, it seems to me that that you do have the kind of things that would stir up that kind of movement that would find that kind of expression. You have that kind of energy, again, you have that kind of, you know, ideas with that kind of impact, but they find themselves blocked at the level of political expression. Yeah. And whether that the question for me is whether that feeds back into democratic forms or whether it takes the form necessarily that I think is sometimes adumbrated in your book, which is, you know, an anti-systemic politics that can't find its expression, I think I think the latter, you're right. And that's a nice reading, actually, because I hadn't thought about it quite like that. But I think that I suppose to go back to Arendt's distinction between power and violence again, which I think is so, so rich. And I think that you could argue if you're an optimist about crowds, and I talk a little bit about Gustave Le Bon's very pessimistic view of crowds. But if we can, if we can try and flip that around into seeing the crowd as potentially a marauding force, but also as being able to do something different, because a crowd brings something into existence that previously didn't exist in anti-war march or the march for our lives, or, you know, there are all sorts of marches, the civil rights movement. There are various marches that have brought something into the world that previously didn't exist. That's what Arendt was very interested in, was that the way politics had this what she called a natality about it, the capacity to give birth to new things. So in that sense, a crowd has a positive political potential. Now, I mean that clearly, and I talk about crowds in the book, crowds have become part of our political landscape in a way that simply wasn't true in the 90s. In that sense, I think that maybe we could see that as progress in its own rather kind of complicated way. I think that the difficulty is that for those movements that get kind of thwarted in some way that you've been leading to, one of the themes that runs through the book, I suppose, is resentment. And resentment is a very interesting emotion, because resentment in a way turns powerlessness into its own form of power. And in a way, if you can cultivate a mood of resentment amongst people, it has, which is what obviously what something like Trump can do to a great extent, it's what aspects of Brexit and all the aspects of Brexit, but it's a it's a powerful emotion in the sense that it turns, it turns the feeling of weakness into a into a feeling of strength in some way, which is to say, I'm going to take my the fact that I've been ignored or victimised or marginalised in some way and I'm going to, I'm going to sort of flip that round in some way. And I talk about how Carl von Klauswitz was very interested in the uses of emotion to build a German nationalism or Prussian nationalism in the in the mid 19th century. This is like, maybe the fact that we've been stamped on by Napoleon repeatedly could become the basis of a new type of mobilisation. Now, the thing about that is that the question is what type of mobilisation arises. And to some extent, is there a distinctive type of intervention that stems from that, which is, which is, which is a, which is a rather than one of one of power, which is what a crowd potentially can do in its best form, which is to build something, to create something does, is there a risk with resentment when it's the trigger that it that it that it leads to what our own call violence, i.e. because it stems from a feeling that one has been been mocked or marginalised or ignored or something, does it then simply turn into a politics of wanting to just do harm to the person who, who did that. And they're in a way, you know, that that that I mean, I use the example of sort of troll culture or something like that, where effectively you think, well, I've got no power anyway, so I'll use the one power I have, which is to go and undermine what other people are up to. Now, I don't know if that if that's true across the board, but I think that that's something we can see in potentially the way in which certain Brexit leaders are operating right now, which is that they don't have a positive vision for Brexit. What they have and what animates them is a sense that Britain has been, I mean, as absurd as it sounds, being sort of stamped on by Brussels for too long, or the in Bannon's terms, the Steve Bannon's terms that the globalists have been kind of colonising us and these elites and so on. And and it's time that the small people kind of fought back. Now, this is a very, very kind of mobilising, very mesmerising type of politics. And I think one of the dangers of it is that it's effect is simply a desire to do harm back to the to the party that appears to have have been doing the colonising. Now, obviously that you could argue that, you know, that that that type of politics also operates on the left as well. But I would. On that, I'm going to stop. Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, I was thinking immediately of Bannon, as you were talking, and that that desire to kind of, you know, what was it destroy the administrative state that this is going to be his kind of great achievement. And that, you know, rather frustrated, I think, actually, in execution at the moment, absolutely, which is itself interesting, right? Is that is the way in which these administrations change as they that, you know, that these effectively these institutions have, you know, quite significant power in constraining the individuals who, you know, who enter them. Yeah. Not absolute power as we're finding out. No, sure. But I mean, the other thing that occurs to me, I guess, is that is that question about what all the when we're thinking about resentment that I was thinking of the work that Wendy Brown did, you know, now some time ago, where she writes about wounded attachments. So that and it, you know, you mentioned in the book that the quite quite significant observation that Freud makes about, you know, an infant sort of throwing a toy away and then then taking it back as a kind of repetition. And so for Brown, you know, she she doesn't draw on the Freudian example as far as I can remember, but she talks about, you know, the way in which actually kind of wounded or kind of traumatized subjectivities, you know, tend to form these kind of wounded attachments, right? Yeah, either repeat or kind of inscribe, you know, that they're different. And so, you know, she's arguing about, you know, the needs to not merely, you know, critique power, but also think about taking it and, you know, project of universities in that sense. It does strike me that it's a useful way of looking at the way in which that stuff is mobilized on the left, perhaps, where there is a kind of resentment that is often awkward and uncomfortable, partly because it's grounded in things we think about, right? But nonetheless has these potentially kind of, you know, dissolving or destructive effect. Well, that's, I mean, that's one of the, yeah, I mean, I talk about Freud's beyond the pleasure principle, which is such a sort of, in some ways, kind of go back to what I was saying earlier about the book beginning with the question of what happens to politics when self-interest is no longer the kind of governing sort of rationality. Something like beyond the pleasure principle is a great place to turn, to try and understand that. And I mean, Freud in that talks about the compulsion to repeat. And his argument is that we repeat painful experiences and we return to painful situations or painful relationships or whatever it might be. In the hope that we might be able to take control of them in some way, become the master of them in some way. So that although it doesn't give us pleasure or reduce our pain, we become the agents in some sense, we achieve some kind of agency in that situation. Now, the, and that's something I think we need to understand and in some ways to respect, although it can be destructive and self-destructive in various ways. But I think that also the other, I mean, this is the kind of key principle of psychoanalysis that may never work. But is that, is that, you know, that you can get, you can kind of escape that by, by through an act of mourning in some way. I mean, that's the sort of. Now, I don't really kind of kind of develop that in the book, but that I think would be the the way to sort of think about that question of wounded attachment is to, is to ask what the force forms of public mourning might be that that people do move beyond wounded attachments. But I suppose and I'm conscious of my own privilege here, so I don't really talk about that, particularly in the book. And I, and nor do I particularly want to. I mean, and I think that I hope the book is more punching up in that respects and hopefully I can sort of contribute something useful in that respect. Because I think that what's interesting and kind of very frightening is that some of that logic is now at work amongst very powerful people. And that's really, I suppose, more what the book is about. Yeah. I mean, for me, that question of wounded attachment is much more about the sort of stuff that goes on with, you know, when you have kind of this kind of cabal of centrist journalists or, you know, or kind of, you know, the Blairites or whoever who are, you know, in one sense, you know, attempting to repeat this. Yes, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, possible. But equally the sense that which I talk a bit about in the book that someone like Fintano Tool, I think, has been writing a lot about recently, which is that Britain's only real understanding of itself is either as an imperial force or as an, it was a colonised force and it hasn't really got anything kind of in between and therefore really Brexit. And of course, this is exactly the language that Steve Bannon uses and we shouldn't exaggerate Bannon's influence, I know, but he nevertheless he's a kind of interesting kind of example, but which is that the nation has been colonised by the technocrats in some way. Now, it is the case and this is the interesting issue which I which I touch on a bit is that, of course, these technocratic powers were designed partly to be colonising imperial powers. This is kind of what this is central to their rationality. And in a way, the the the force of someone like Jacob Rees-Mogg's thinking or Steve Bannon's thinking is that the nation is now has now been kind of enslaved by some kind of foreign technocratic global power that includes the European Commission. It includes Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, Hillary Clinton, you know, that there is a sort of this this this kind of network and there's also, of course, the grain of truth when particularly in something like the European Commission about about that that characterisation. So I think that the but I think that the the mobilisation of a logic of of of of woundedness and resentment by well, partly by the sort of white male electorate that that was so important for the election of Donald Trump, but equally by people who are extremely rich, like Jacob Rees-Mogg and others is extremely worrying and needs to be kind of understood in all those terms. There's a distinction that arises, I think, in the course of the book that's that's really interesting to me. And it's something that I think about all the time, which is the distinction between public and private. And in one sense, one of the things that the whole book is about is the gradual disappearance of a public sphere. And, you know, one of the things that I always think about is that it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? It's one of the things that Nancy Fraser points out is that the classic public sphere, for all its virtues, you know, was founded on a logic of exclusion, you know, and she talks about kind of contestation. She says, you know, look, it took, you know, long period of contestation to drag things out of the private into the public sphere. And it involved a certain dissolution of the public sphere. And she's the example of domestic violence. She says it took a long concerted feminist campaign to drag something like that out of the domain of the private into the public. You know, it's one of the things we can, you know, I tend to think of something like the recent Me Too stuff in that sense as well. But I wonder also about, you know, and it's a story that's really terrifying in your book is, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's interest in Facebook telepathy. Yeah. So is there a concept of a distinction between private and public that's worth rescuing? Well, I think that there is a at least something that needs to be rescued, which is the idea of a shared world. And maybe this is something that can be found in the work of someone like Arendt or something like that. And no doubt in the work of Habermas, as much of a sort of idealist you might as he might have been about the liberal bourgeois public sphere, who I assume is sort of the sort of figure that Nancy Fraser was probably kind of kind of criticising. But I think that the alternative to having a shared world in that is constituted by a combination of facts produced by bureaucracies and experts, by reports made by journalists working for newspapers and boring old broadcasters and so on. And, you know, publishers that are seeking to produce things for a broad readership and in a public public. I think that the alternative to that I think is becoming clearer, which is while it's the more plausible alternative to that that is emerging at the moment, which is that there are sort of hidden depths of data that are held largely under private and perhaps military control, which occasionally will kind of erupt like a sort of volcano through some kind of leak or whistleblowing or sort of WikiLeaks type thing or something like that. But for the most part, the rest that we end up congregating around shared commitment. Now, of course, that has all sorts of political energy that it that it that it generates and so on. And you can but it also, you know, Twitter at its worst is is a complete inability to even reach any kind of shared starting point for a disagreement. And ultimately, what the sort of the bit of liberalism that we I don't I don't want to get rid of is the bit that goes the whole way back to the 17th century, which is to say. And I think what I think is interesting about Hobbes is that Hobbes was saying we need at the very minimum to guarantee life for people. And I think that that has some potential radicalism that is not actually being kind of because you think of Hobbes as a conservative and a liberal and sort of all this sort of stand a realist and so on. But there's a kind of radicalism about that. I mean, you know, Black Lives Matter is making a is attacking the US state for not valuing black lives as much as white lives. And in a way, there's a kind of radicalism about this kind of, you know, getting liberalism right back to its its most its barest essentials, which is how can modern society be possible in ways that people are able to live among strangers and people who they don't know. And I think as a good thing, I enjoy traveling around London among strangers and people who might have all sorts of things going on in their heads that I have no idea about. And I don't consider any of my business. That is an achievement of modern politics and in some ways of liberalism, I'm afraid. And I think that there is there is some sort of bare essentials to that that I don't think that we can trust the likes of Mark Zuckerberg to actually preserve. Now, you know, Zuckerberg has an interest in the body that you mentioned. And I'm talking about, you know, in a sense, he's imagining a sort of a kind of brain to brain communication, a sort of cybernetic fantasy that and this is the second meaning of the word feeling in the books. It's not just emotions. It's also about sort of sensation in a in a in a in the way that is how you might feel your way through a dark room or something, which has always been a kind of an obsession in warfare is how to kind of navigate situations where you don't have a map in a way. And in a way, what Zuckerberg is seeking to do is to render the world controllable by Facebook, but not transparent to itself. He's not seeking a world that is transparent to that world in any way. And that's what we've discovered with the form of all of these adverts that were floating around during the 2016 elections that ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of people had no idea they were going around. Now, that that looks like the alternative to some basic idea of of a shared public sphere. I mean, I what what you're saying, I think it rings true to me. And it's always struck me that, you know, the promises of liberalism are often very good. Yeah, the fact that it hasn't been able to know that's right, which is, I think, is also I mean, it has to be seen as as the the the essence of the Marxist critique as well, which is that liberalism, you know, you don't reverse liberalism. You can you finish it. You finish it in the way that that it that it was that it was too legalistic and and and delusional about the nature of human beings to ever manage to do. So I think that that's yes, how I agree with that. I mean, so my final question to you then, I think, is and it sort of circles back to the discussion you have about war throughout that second half of the book. And it sort of it goes alongside that question or that matter in Hobbes that you just raised, which is, you know, so Hobbes is all about, you know, the basic guarantees that we are able to prolong life. Obviously, there's a species level problem with that at the moment. But it's also it seems to me that, you know, there is something about, you know, war and the attraction of these kind of metaphors of war that are now everywhere, right? The rhetorical wars that proliferate, etc., etc. And as you've kind of suggested about Brexit, these sort of war nostalgists. And the thing that's striking in them, in, you know, in other things like suicide bombing is that there is a desire for meaning there as well. So are there collective projects that can offer a sense of meaning that is as kind of fundamental as those things? Well, this I think is a question that people have grappled with since probably since the French Revolution or so. And I mean, William James actually wrote a wrote an article about this in the in the late 19th century about exactly this. And I haven't read Francis Fukuyama's new book on identity politics. I imagine I won't. But I read from one of the reviews that he recommends as some sort of citizen service in there, which is one of these kind of recurring ideas, which is, oh, well, couldn't we have all of that sort of togetherness, but without the nastiness in some way? And I mean, in some ways, bits of my book kind of, I mean, it's not that I'm sympathetic to that argument as such, but I can sort of see why liberalism ends in that sort of place, in a way. You know, it's the idea that actually there is this sort of existential vacuum at the heart of liberalism. Which is that, you know, all you want is to be kind of left alone to in order to live long and prosper in some way. Of course, it looks extremely attractive if it's 1946 or 1849. Or, you know, this, oh, sorry, I was actually meant to 1649. The end of the Thirty Years' War. But but, you know, so now I I don't have the answer to that, but I do. I mean, I think it's interesting to consider something that I talked about at the end of the book, which is the climate mobilization movement. And of course, people have said, well, surely nothing can mobilise people in that sort of visceral, existential political sense like the threat of a sort of planetary level existential threat. Now, sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to make fascism more plausible in certain respects. But I am interested in what the climate mobilization movement is about. And they, for those people who don't know it, I mean, it's well worth looking into. I mean, they it's partly a macroeconomic proposition, which is all fiscal propositions, which say actually the way to actually decarbonise the economy in the next, well, now we're told, 12 years by the IPCC is to do something roughly like what the US state did during World War Two, where you requisition whole sections of the private economy. You change everything that they're doing pretty much overnight, which is what the US state did with with manufacturing when it entered World War Two. And but also it sort of turns the entire venture into something more like war. Now, the question is, and this in some ways comes back to the the viability of a left populism and the sort of arguments of Chantal Mouff and so on, is can you do that without the enemy, without the other? And I mean, I mean, this idea that climate change is like a world war. So there's something that doesn't quite, it doesn't quite work in a way. And in a way, our vocabulary kind of seems to sort of let us down here and maybe, you know, if I was maybe the one of the the the flaws in my book, I suppose is that it sort of is it remains trapped in this kind of Hobbesian vocabulary of war and peace and violence and non violence and so on. But maybe we need to kind of invent some some different sort of vocabulary for the for the for the Anthropocene or capitalism. Well, that's a challenge. Well, thank you for joining me. Thank you very much. That's it for this week. Thank you for joining me. I have been James Butler. This has been the VR FM on Resonance 104.4 FM. We'll be back at the same time in the same place next week. Goodbye. For regular updates, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Navarra Media, media for different politics.