Douglas Murray Passionately Explains the Importance of Telling the Truth

I only desire the approval of a relatively small number of people who I respect. And if they said to me, I think you're totally wrong on this Douglas, and I'd listen. But when it's people who don't want me to do well, for instance, then of course I don't listen to them. And I think that's the same as it is in all of our lives. You know this. You know, if your wife says to you, you know, you're really onto the wrong thing here, then you know, then you listen because you know she wants you to do well. If some guy in the street with an I hate Joe Rogan t-shirt on tells you what you should do, obviously you're not going to listen to them. They don't want you to do well. And it's one of the tools we all have to hone in our lives, I suppose, to work out who wants us to do well, who wishes us well, and to listen to them, even if they're critical of us, and they will be at times, and to separate out those people, people who just, of course they don't want you to do well. You know, hate you, hate everything about you and whatever. But I'm just, you know, I don't have much sympathy for the people who bang on about being, you know, cancelled. I mean, I do when it's people who have, you know, ordinary jobs and they've just been horribly treated by the madness of this era. I have every sympathy for them. And a lot of the cases I write about in Madness of Crowds tries to highlight that. But I don't have much sympathy with public figures who say, I can't say what I think and I can't speak up and all this sort of thing. Can I just think, if you're not going to now, when are you going to? If you're not going to in this life, what life are you expecting to come where you'll do it? And so, no, I am comfortable and as comfortable as you can be in the end times, obviously, as everything's burning down and there's plagues of locusts coming our way. You know, I honestly urge other people to do the same. I can't say it's dandy, but it's a pretty good life. I mean, you know, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I'm not lying. And for young people watching in particular, this is just one of the most important things because as I say somewhere in Madness of Crowds, the problem with being told, the problem with going along with being told to bend the knee, raise the fist, jump through the hoop is that it demoralizes you and it makes you a smaller person inside. You will be demoralized because you'll know that you shouldn't have done that and at some level you will think badly of yourself for having done it. You'll feel regretful, you'll feel cowardly and it will affect your life in other ways. And the opposite is also true. The person who doesn't stand with the mob, the person who doesn't go along with the mob, the person who refuses to walk with the crowd will feel quietly but significantly better about themselves and I think will be a better person and they will achieve more in their lives whatever that is because they will have self-respect. And that's what totalitarian movements across history always knew was that you grind people down and make them agree to lies because you will then be able to make them do anything. If I can say this, there's this very, very telling thing that happened in the communist era in Eastern Europe. Vaslav Havel, great late Czech leader, says this when he was one of the great Czech dissidents and playwrights of the period in the 60s and 70s. He wrote a piece once which is really worth reading again today where he cites the example of a green grocer in Prague who has to put up in his window like everyone else the notice that says workers of the world unite and it's sent by party headquarters to all green grocers and you all have to hang it. And Vaslav Havel says a number of things happen from this. The first thing is that of course that the green grocer is showing to everyone that he is a party lawyer so he wouldn't be able to operate as a business if he didn't do this thing. But it also hangs there every day as a sign of his subjugation. It's a little thing but it hangs there as a sign of his subjugation and it reminds him that he's not the man he could be. Now one of the results of that is that such a person ends up hating the people who make him hang the sign, hates it because they have demoralized him. But Havel's point among others is you think you're doing a little thing but you're not. You are diminishing your soul by doing this because you know that you could be something more than the person who just has to hang whatever party headquarters tells you to hang this week. Well said. Thank you. Absolute outstanding. Those of the Joe Rogan Experience are now free on Spotify. That's right they're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere but after December 1st they will only be available on Spotify but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It will also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye. Me. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye.