Joe Rogan & Sam Harris on the Liam Neeson Controversy

Honestly, I think that is another consequence of live. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't be live because it has a massive advantage for you as well, but it is, there's just a different feeling. If I knew that this was being taped and I could rethink the thing we're about to say about Liam Neeson or whatever it is, it's different. Well, the Liam Neeson story is a perfect example. Let's go there. Yeah, let's go there. A perfect example of a story where, you know, if you were Liam's friend, you would go, don't tell that one. Don't tell that one. He's like, but I want to be honest. Like don't, don't. You could be honest with me. I'm not going to judge you. If you tell me that someone got raped and you went out with a baseball bat for a week looking for a black man to beat up. To kill. To kill. I'd be like, oh Jesus Christ, man. Like what the fuck was going through your head at that point in time? Like that's terrible. Yeah. Like I feel awful about it. I can't believe that was me, but it didn't happen. Nothing happened. And now, you know, people are calling him a racist and they don't want him in movies. And well, I mean, this is, this is fascinating to me because again, this is a much larger problem with, with massive implications. We need to think through the whole process of redemption for people in our society. Right. Like, like we, we have to understand what are the, what are the criteria for successful apologies and for forgiveness? Like what, like what just, what, because a special, I mean, we're in, we're in a world where people are having their, their reputations destroyed and their careers threatened for tweets they sent as teenagers. Yes. Right. And, and you know, more, this, this is the Dorsey's point. Things are not disappearing online anymore. And a certain point, you know, everyone, this is going to be a 360 kind of panopticon view of everyone's life. You know, there are people who have grown up on social media and everything is out there. And I mean, the irony here for me is that you have, you know, progress, progressives and you know, people on the far left who receive a disclosure like, you know, Liam Neeson, let's, let's take his, and they just want, you know, they just want to see him burned alive. Right. Let's, let's just do the wicker man on this guy because this is, you know, this is so awful. And yet alongside that, these same people on the left are people who have as a, as a genuine ethical norm, the rehabilitation of murderers. Yes. Right. Like you could be somebody who spent, you know, 20 years in prison for a crime you admit you commit it. And there's this norm around redemption. And so there's, you know, there's no way to square those two things. Well, they're constantly holding these two contradictions, right? I mean, here's another one, women's rights and support of the hijab. I mean, yeah, what? Yeah, this is what's going on there. How do you do that? You know, don't be Islamophobic, but also support women's rights and gay rights. Yeah. Okay. Well, Eric Weinstein, our mutual friend, calls these the, the Hilbert problems for social justice warriors. I mean, David Hilbert was a very famous mathematician who at the turn of the, the 19th century posed a set of problems in mathematics that, you know, were just, you know, the, on his list of the most desirable questions, like the hardest questions and the most consequential questions to answer. And so, you know, Eric has been a mathematician has flipped that around ironically. And so these are, these are the questions that social justice warriors have to answer. And there are these impossible oppositions of this sort. But so the Liam Neeson thing, and, you know, forgive me if I, if there's some detail that has come out that I'm not aware of, but my understanding of it is he, you know, he had a friend who was raped and then he reported this state of mind, this murderous state of mind he was in where he was walking around with, I think he calls it a kash. I mean, that's the British word for like a, it's like a small metal club, right? It's like a blackjack or like another term for it, I think. And looking for a black guy to kill, you know, like hoping someone's going to come out of the woodwork and threaten him so that he could, you know, kill this guy in this act of instrumental violence because his friend had been raped by a black guy, right? So it's like any black guy will do. Now that's, that's sort of like the extra horrific wrinkle to the story, right? Now, and he's confessing this as a kind of a symptom of transient mental illness, at least as far as I know, it's like he's horrified by the fact that he was in this state of mind, right? Can you imagine like I, you know, Liam Neeson, an actor, I have everything to lose. And although I don't remember what, at what point in his life he said this happened, can you imagine that I was in this state of mind, right? And this is, as you say, an all too honest disclosure, but it is damn interesting, right? And it is the kind of thing that we should be able to talk about, right? And it's not, and the fact that this is becoming synonymous with racism seems just wrong given, given how he's, he described her, at least how I've, I've heard this because he's saying, listen, if this had been an Armenian guy or an Italian or a Japanese guy, I'd be looking for one of them, right? I mean, what, what, what this was, at least on his telling is the virus of instrumental violence. I mean, the virus of like, this is how every blood feud ever in human history gets started. It's like you, like someone from your tribe killed my brother. And now what I want to do is kill anyone from your tribe, right? It doesn't matter who, right? And, and that's, you know, clearly, as toxic as it gets, you know, ethically, but that's not racism, right? That's just, that is that we have a word for it. It's in, it's instrumental violence. But, you know, yeah, obviously he's getting totally pilloried over this. But we need, we just need to figure out how to talk about how people can redeem themselves once something this unsavory is, is revealed about their past, whether they reveal it or whether it's just, you know, found out about them. Yeah. Um, I mean, it is racism though, right? Because he's specifically looking for a black guy. I mean, I understand that it's a part of the other tribe. No, but it doesn't suggest that he has a, that he disposed, that he feels one way or another about black people. It's like, like if you told me, um, uh, yeah, he could, he could have said, again, it could have been, uh, an Irish guy, right? Or it could have been, I mean, well, I guess he's Irish. He's Scottish or Irish. Um, it could have been an English guy, right? It could have been like any type, right? It's like the salience of the tribe is what he was reacting to, at least in his description. I don't know why you wouldn't take him at his word given that he didn't have to say any of this in the first place, right? I mean, like this is like an amazingly honest and unnecessary disclosure, but it's, um, and I don't think people would think of it as racism if he, if the story simply was, uh, you know, she got raped by a, a cop and I was just hoping to go kill a cop, right? You know, the same story, right? Um, and, uh, so yeah, I mean, but we're so trigger happy in our outrage with respect to anything like that. Why do you think that is like, what is going on? Because outrage seems to be more in season than it's ever been in my lifetime. I don't, I don't remember outrage being so just such a, it's, it's, it's recreational. Yeah. There's, there's a, I mean, it's back to Jack. I mean, it's a lot, it has a lot to do with social media and Twitter in particular. Yeah.