Margaret Atwood
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It was a theocracy. And only those who'd seen God in a cornfield were full members of the church to begin with. Then, as usually happens with fervent utopian movements, which it was one, you have the first generation who were the fervent utopianists, let's say the original French revolutionaries, the original Bolsheviks. And then you win. And then what do you do when you win?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
What's supposed to happen is the golden age is supposed to appear. Then it doesn't appear. Then what? Well, you've won and you've eliminated your enemies, your original enemies, but it's still not working. So it must be betrayal from within. It must be witches. It must be capitalist rotors.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It must be somebody undermining it, secret monarchists in the case of the revolution, enemies of the revolution. It must be them from within your own country. So what you're seeing now is a wrestling match for what is the real America? What is the authentic America? And you see people wrapping themselves in the flag both ways and saying that they are the real America.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And you just saw that in Canada. So these people at the blockades wrapping themselves in the Canadian flag, we're standing up for the real Canada. pretty fuzzy about what that is. But that's what they were doing, and their role model was what had been going on in the States, where we're overthrowing the government in the name of the real America, like that. Did you ever play arm wrestling?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So that's what you're seeing. It's an arm wrestle for the soul of America.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
I'd actually started making notes on it in 1981, but it took me a while to actually work up to writing it because it was somewhat nutty, or such was the ambience at the time. So there I was in West Berlin, and because we weren't German, we could go to East Berlin more easily than Germans could. And we could also go to Czechoslovakia, which we did, and we went to Poland.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So we had experiences of three Iron Curtain countries at the time, and they were somewhat different. The East Germans, I think, were sewed up the tightest of anybody. And we now know from the Stasi files that indeed there were a lot of informants, so people were pretty careful about what they would say. In Czechoslovakia, we could talk to people, but only in open spaces.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So you couldn't have a frank conversation in a building or a car, because people just assumed it was bugged. In Poland, it was already pretty wide open in 1994. So Poland has had lots of experiences of people marching across them and occupying them. Some of those experiences for them were pretty recent. the general populace was not paying a lot of attention to what the rules were.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So I think the stories, if you go way back, the stories that start being told are partly about how to do stuff. like how to hunt the gazelle, and precautions that you might take around that. So I think stories were originally, or the reason they persisted, because of course there must have been a positive for stories, was to teach people so they didn't have to do it by trial and error.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So a taxi driver drove up and he said, dollars? And we said, zlotys? And he drove away. Once that starts happening, once you start preferring somebody else's currency, you know that the government is losing some authority. Anyway, very interesting to be there at that time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And I think some of the stuff that's been going on recently is that the people doing that stuff are too young to remember any of that. They don't know what a real totalitarianism is like, and they're not paying attention to the kinds of steps that lead to it. You know, how you get one of these things going, how you get buy-in What sort of propaganda is likely to be put out there to begin with?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And you never begin by saying, I'm going to be a tyrannous dictator and I'm going to ruin your life. You don't start out that way. You start out by saying, I'm going to make things so much better. And you want that to happen, don't you, Ezra? Because you're a good person. But first we have to get rid of those people because they're not good people.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, this is one of the things from East Berlin. And after I'd written The Handmaid's Tale, it got made into a movie. And we launched that movie in Berlin just as the wall was coming down. And we launched it twice. We launched it in West Berlin.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And the after party was talking about the acting, talking about the set design, talking about the usual things you talk about in movies when there aren't any other considerations. You're talking about how good a movie is it. Are you not? And then we went across to East Berlin and we launched it there and it was packed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
People watched it very intently and threw bouquets up on the stage afterwards and said, this was our life. And they didn't mean the outfits. They meant you couldn't talk to anybody because you didn't know if they were spying on you. So it was that sort of eerie feeling of things look normal, but who is really actually who? Prague was similar.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Similarly, rather shut down, and similarly, you didn't know just who was listening in. But when we got checked into our room in the hotel, the bellman said, pointed to the chandelier and put his finger to his lips. In other words, that's bugged. Whenever we wanted anything in the hotel room, we would just stand under the chandelier and say, I wonder why they haven't changed that light bulb?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And knock, knock, knock, there would be the light bulb. But after telling us about that, he then took us into the vestibule and said, want to change some dollars? Anyway, everything was sort of underneath. So we went in search of Kafka at that time in Prague, trying to find Kafka, because I'm a big fan of Kafka, and couldn't find any Kafka things.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Graham actually went to his addresses trying to find Kafka, knock on the door, Kafka, no, no, no, no, no, Kafka, no, goodbye, slam. So very verboten Kafka at that time. We then went back in 89. And already there were Kafka handkerchiefs, Kafka playing cards, Kafka tchutchkas were already beginning to appear. And then I went back a little bit later and it was full-blown Kafka. You couldn't...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
You sort of couldn't avoid Kafka. There's a statue, there's an award. I've got the award. I've got the Kafka award. I was thrilled. And in the hotel where I was staying, they had a whole sort of display of sort of Kafka's pencil, Kafka's typewriter, Kafka's chewing gum, you know, just anything that they could collect was in there. So this is a story about two things.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Number one, about how some literary figures get repressed under certain kinds of regimes. Why Kafka? Because he wrote stories about impenetrable bureaucracies, the justice of which could not be figured out. And that was a bit too close to the bone, I suppose. And the other part of the story is how something can disappear, but then reappear.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So Uncle Alf got eaten by a crocodile right there. Maybe better not go swimming there. So you don't have to try for yourself to see if there might be a crocodile there. I'm telling you this story. And it didn't end well, so don't do that. The other thing we did when we started with the complicated language was we started believing in things that might not necessarily be visible.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
How you can be a villain for one regime and a hero for the next. And that can work both ways.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Okay, so the answer to that question is, what questions was I attempting to answer? And remember when I start writing it, beginning of the 80s when there's already a backlash against a lot of the stuff that had been happening in the 60s and 70s. And things do tend to go that way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So you have 10 or 15 years of a certain period, and then you have a pushback against it by people who didn't like it when it was happening. So Joan Didion predicted it. She said, some of these people are not happy. This is not their idea of how things should go. And that also can work both ways, because any group over 200 people is almost bound to have a schism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Yeah, well, it's not my rule. I didn't make it up. So, 1980, you start getting the pushback, and you start getting the political organization of the religious right. And they were already saying things like women should belong in the home. And I was wondering, okay, so they're not in the home.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
They're out there running around like mice and opening bank accounts and having jobs and all this uppity stuff that they're doing. How are you going to get them back into the home if you decide that's where they ought to be? Well, easy peasy, you cut off their funds. We had invented credit cards by that time. And I would suggest that we retain the use of cash money.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Not for everything, but just in case. Some negotiable currency that isn't controlled by other people might be a good idea. Yeah, so I started writing it then in answer to the question, if America were to have a totalitarian government, what kind would it be? And under what flag, as it were, would it fly?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And my answer to that was go back to the founders, namely the 17th century Puritan theocrats who never went away. They took different forms, but they didn't vanish. So looking at what's happening in the 80s with the political organization of the religious right, that is who you see in League trying to get rid of the voting rights and all the rest of it. Those are the folks.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It's not everybody's interpretation of Christianity, by the way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Absolutely. And not only that, if you make it into a religion, which of course so many regimes throughout history have done, the divine right of kings, the Holy Roman Empire, if you connect it with a religion, then it becomes heresy to oppose it. It becomes a very powerful tool. You're not just against some prime minister or other, you're against God.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And that's a pretty serious thing in a believing community. And a lot of rulers have told a story about how they are there by divine fiat. In fact, you find it on the English money to this day.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Yeah, especially now. I think that's how we are to a certain extent as an entity on this planet, that if you tried to pay attention to everything that's going on, especially now with this deluge of information that is available, your head would explode. And a lot of people have immediate lives that they have to tend to. So if you have a young family, you know what that's like.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And I think we did that partly to... Make us feel we are getting a little help here. So it's raining too much. What can we do about that? Let's talk to the rain god.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It's an immersive experience, and you can't just say, oh, let's do that next week. It's now, and you are in the moment, whether you do all this meditation stuff, be in the moment. If you have young children, you cannot help but be in the moment. You are in that moment, and somebody is shitting on the floor right now, and you have to do something about it now. So people have their own lives.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
They have their immediate concerns. They have their own jobs and financial problems. They have stuff they have to deal with. And to try to take any sort of a wide or long view is quite hard for a lot of people because their own lives are so immediate, immersive, and stressed. So that's part of the problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And the other part of the problem is we would rather not look, especially if we feel powerless in the face of that which we are being asked to look at. Like, what do you expect me to do? So our really big problem and what is driving a lot of these other problems is what used to be called climate change and is now called the climate crisis.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And that is going to be more weather catastrophes, more fires, more droughts, more famines. And when you have famines, And water shortages, you're going to have social unrest, and you're going to have a great big refugee problem, which we already have now. So what are you going to do? And for most people, what can they do? And therefore, I would rather not look.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So it's like my friend who, when she sees a squirrel run over in the streets, she says, I don't want to look at that. Well, you know, who does? I don't want to look at a squashed squirrel either, but it's there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Yes, I wouldn't call it a gift.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, gifts from the gods usually have a catch. Somebody asked me the other day, would you like to live forever? And I said, well, I've heard that story. Don't ask for eternal life unless you also ask for eternal youth, because it's not going to work out well. They have to be treated with care, gifts from the gods.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So there are certain areas where I pay quite a lot of attention, but other areas where I probably just don't. Like everybody else, there are certain things that I just don't know much about them. I don't know what goes on. Therefore, they're not my focus.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
oh yeah, you can make up really destructive things and use them in an instigated and malicious way for your own ends. And that's the other thing that we really know about stories and going back as far as we can with the written record, among other things, those are the kinds of stories we find. So why were people so horrified by Odysseus? He made up these lies. He made up stories.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So the talent for insatiability kicks off around 1950, the most recent wave of it. In the 30s, the virtue was not to waste things. And in the 40s, that became very much more accentuated because not only did you not waste things, but you saved certain things up because it was the war effort. So you saved elastic bands. You saved fat in little tin cans. I don't know what they did with it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
You saved newspaper. You saved tinfoil. You saved all of those things up. And then they had war salvage drives, and you donated all of those things. You saved up your clothes. You donated them to Europe, to people that didn't have clothes. You never threw things out.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And then in came the consumer society, and that is pretty much driven, too, because everything is joined at the hip with the energy force driving that civilization. And if you want to read about that, you can get a book called Art and Energy by Barry Lord. So every energy source produces a culture which is connected to that energy source.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And what you saw between the 19th and the 20th centuries was the shift from coal a very worker-intensive form of energy, gave us labor unions, gave us Karl Marx, thanks a lot, gave us this emphasis on jobs. So controlling the means of production was supposed to solve everything. I can tell you that it does not.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
When I was in Poland, before the Iron Curtain came down, they had a big pile of overshoes. Because the workers controlled the means of production and they were producing overshoes, but nobody wanted to buy them. Uh-oh. So yeah, just making things doesn't necessarily work in and of itself. So you had coal shipped over to oil. Oil is cheap. It's cheap to produce.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It doesn't take a lot of workers compared to coal. And suddenly you had all of this cheap energy. And not only that, there are all these other things you could make out of it. So middle of the 1950s, in came nylon, those horrible nylon shirts, never mind. We don't have them anymore, they really stank. But new stuff, hula hoops, plastic things, and they were really cheap.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So a metal pail, a plastic pail, which are you gonna have? How many metal pails have you got?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Yeah, and no metal pails, right? None. Plastic pails are cheap. So cheap stuff, and therefore you had to have, to keep all the wheels turning, you had to have people wanting to buy stuff. And you got the throwaway economy, and you got a lot of plastic, and that's the big problem that we're dealing with now, or one of the big problems. Where is it all going?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, it's going into your bloodstream ultimately. going into the ocean, it's going into the water, it's going into the food, a lot of microplastic.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Oh, yeah. I think so. This largesse, you know, just completely. Think of all the food that is thrown away every day on the North American continent. That would never, ever, ever have happened in times of scarcity. You would not do that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Exactly. They are looking into happiness these days. They're looking into neurological happiness and they're looking into social happiness. One thing that they're thinking these days is that happiness and unhappiness are very tied to your perception of what other people have. And in a material world in which you're valued according to the stuff you've got, being poor isn't just being poor.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
He made up ruses. He made up deceptions. He's tricky. So we are a species that deceives. Other species deceive too, but we do it more elaborately and we do it with stories. Other animals go in for camouflage and deception, but we were able to go in for camouflage and deception using words.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Being poor is being undervalued and treated as negligible. The more equal people are from the point of view of what they've got, the happier they are likely to be. So it's not a question of what you've got, it's a question of whether what you've got is considered negligible, or whether what you've got is considered exceptional.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Yeah, well, you can't do it every day, but you might take time off now and again. So back in the days when people did these things, everybody said grace before a meal. Grace is of different kinds, but basically it was an acknowledgement that you were lucky to be eating grace. There was an old Scottish grace that said, let me see, what is it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Some have meat and cannot eat, some something and lack it, but we have meat and we can eat, and so the Lord be thanked. Like that. And then they got silly about it and said things like, good drink, good meat, good God, let's eat. So that was a normal thing that people did in their life at one time. It used to be a daily but often hypocritical thing that people did.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
However, any form of social convention is going to be hypocritical at times. And just so we realize how lucky we are. Wouldn't it be awful if we always had to tell the truth on social occasions?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Oh, I'm so glad you're here having dinner with us. When are they leaving?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Things are going to get nastier. We can afford to be neighborly and tolerant when there's basically enough to go around. When that starts diminishing, then people get angry and defensive. So if you go to Ireland, there's a time when people start building defensive towers. And that can be keyed pretty closely to a climate change that took place then. Things got wetter.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And when things got wetter, you knew that the food supply was going to be diminishing and people were going to be becoming more territorial and trying to protect that which they had. That is one theory. So yeah, if you have enough for three squares a day, are you going to go out and steal food? yourself. I'm just asking you, Ezra.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And we can, for instance, make up false stories about our enemies to get other people to dislike them and turn against them. And if you go into the history of propaganda in wartime, you will find a lot of clever inventions about stuff that wasn't true done for the purposes of deceiving. So we are a species that deceives. Other species deceive too.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
No, probably not, because you don't need it. You don't need to take the risk for that. But when you're starving, it's a different story. So sure, as I said, one of the effects of the climate crisis is going to be diminishing harvests. And another effect is going to be the moving around of invasive species and destructive plant diseases.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
I think there's no doubt about that. You know, when the French Revolution started, it was very hot.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So the French monarchy had put a lot of money into the American Revolution because they were pissed at the British for having... taking new France. We want to get back at them. So they overspent on the American Revolution, and then they upped the taxes, never popular, and then the price of bread went up. So perfect storm. People were angry enough to take the risk.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Okay, so we've had a lot of thinking along those lines. People interested in genetics say there's a genetic component. People interested in cultures say there's a cultural component. A very interesting book from years ago that I read was by a man who, as a child, being Jewish, had been rescued and hidden. in the Netherlands.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And when he grew up, he was tortured by the question, what made those people do that? Why did they do that? They're risking their own lives. Why did they? And he went back and he interviewed a number of people who had rescued children. under those circumstances. And he thought, is it religious? No, it was not religious. Some of them were religious, others were not. Was it political?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
No, it was not political. Some of them were left, some of them were right, some of them didn't have politics particularly. So what was it? And he said the only thing that he could conclude was that to have done otherwise would have violated their idea of who they were. But where did they get that idea of who they were? That's another question which he didn't pursue.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
But where do you get that idea of who you are, that you are not a person who, when presented with a child that needed to be rescued, you are not a person who would say, go away, and I'm telling them, SS on you. So what is the difference there? I don't know the answer to that. It's unknown.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
But we do it more elaborately and we do it with stories.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Oh, well now, let me see what kind of thing you might like. I think you might like a story about what a good person you are. You're a good person, Ezra. Do you want to do the right thing? Sure you do, I can tell. Well, you can really help out humankind. So all you have to do is sacrifice 17 children at the full of the moon. And you're going to do that, aren't you, Ezra?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Yeah, I think that's entirely right. And there's something that we always leave out of these kinds of conversations, which is it's fun. It's fun to sit at the guillotine and watch these people that you resent getting their heads chopped off. There were wild street dances over that, dancing the carmineule and singing this song about ha, ha, ha, got them back.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So it is a street party in some way, banding together with like-minded people and feeling you've accomplished something, especially if people tell you that this thing that you're doing is basically good. It's very potent. And if it weren't fun on some level, people wouldn't do it. Isn't that a terrible thing to say that it's fun?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
But I don't know whether you read Bill Buford's essay on joining football hooligan gangs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
the adrenaline, you know, the exhilaration, the feeling that I haven't had this much fun since like forever. I'm just having a, I feel so alive, you know, hitting people in the nose, etc. And people describe the sort of battle energy that comes over them. And there is a real adrenaline rush that happens. And we can't leave that out. You cannot leave that out.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, now. Now we're getting into it. Now we're getting into the problem, okay? 19th century was a century of utopias. So many of them were written that Gilbert and Sullivan write an opera called Utopia Limited, which has a satire on it. But you only satirize something that's a thing, you know, that's become a vogue. Why did they write so many utopias?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Because they'd already made so many amazing discoveries that had changed things. So germs, who knew about them? We know about them now. And look what we can do now that we know about germs. Maybe now we'll wash our hands before delivering babies and giving everybody puerperal fever the way we had been doing before. Steam engines, wow, this is amazing. Steam machinery in factories, look at that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Sewing machines, wow. Before that, it was all hand sewing. And what might be coming, Jules Verne writing about submarines on the way, air travel around the world in 80 days. So it was just going to get better. There were some problems like the woman problem, but the utopias usually solved those.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
by giving the women a better deal and less clothing, and all different kinds, and they solved overpopulation various ways. One of them was that the future people just wouldn't be interested in sex. So I read a lot of those when I was a Victorianist, and then people stopped writing them in the 20th century. Why? Because too many of them were tried in real life on a grand scale.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So Soviet Union comes in as a utopia. Hitler's Germany comes in as a utopia, though only for certain people. Soviet Union tried to be more inclusive, but first you had to kill those people like the Cossacks and Kulaks and what have you. But then But then you can have the utopia. And Mao's China comes in as a utopia. And lots of others. And then it's not great.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So instead we get We by Evgeny Zemyatin. We get 1984. We get Fahrenheit 451. It's not great. And it becomes very difficult to write a utopia because nobody believes it anymore. They'd seen the results. But I think we're getting back to, if not, let's have utopia, but first we have to kill all those people.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Because you're a good person and you want to help. I think most people want to be good. And they want to help. I don't take a really cynical view of human nature that way. I think we do want to be good. We do want to help. And so a really conniving person will pitch to that side of us rather than saying just let's rob a bank and make a million dollars.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
I think we're getting to the point where we're saying, unless we improve the way we're living, unless we change the way we're living, goodbye, Homo sapiens sapiens. You cannot continue on a planet as a mid-sized, land-based, oxygen-breathing mammal if there isn't enough oxygen, which is what will happen if we kill the oceans and cut down all the trees. So we are looking into the...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
barrel of a gun as a species. And the big debate now is, okay, how much, how soon can it be done, and will people even go for it? And meanwhile, you've got all of these other problems that the problem you're trying to solve is causing. So cascading series of events, can it be reversed? So some of the thinking is being directed towards yes, it can.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Because unless you do yes, it can, you're going to do no, it can't. And if it's no, it can't, goodbye us. So I am working with a platform called Disco to do an online workshop. Practical Utopias course in which people will, like Lego, like Minecraft basically, they will examine the components of our material way of living, like what house, what food, what clothing, what energy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Can we turn it around on the material level? And in order to do that, what will our social organization have to be like? So what form of government do you propose for this utopia that you're going to build?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So provide them with the tools that are now already available, different ways of building houses, different ways of making fabrics, different ways of providing clothing, et cetera, different energy forms. Let's see what you can put together out of that and who's going to run this thing. So some very fundamental questions.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Not yet. I know they're pitfalls, having read so many of them. You'll notice that I put one into Oryx and Crake and the Mad Atom trilogy, and that's an engineered species that lacks our drawback, shall we say. But they're also, for a human being like us, very boring.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
They're joined at the hip. And let us say also that one person's utopia is another person's dystopia, which is a theme you often find in the writing of utopia's dystopias. The other thing goes back to your initial queries about stories. What happens to stories once you have utopia? What are we going to tell stories about? Because surely there's no conflict anymore. We've eliminated that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It's a problem. So the utopia in which everybody absolutely lives happily ever after forever and ever is very unlikely because we are who we are. So what people did in certain kinds of communist societies was it was fine to tell stories about how awful things were before communism. That was great. You could do that. So certain kinds of stories become more possible than others.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
You know, I think you would say no to the bank robbery, Ezra. Because it's not helpful. You might say yes to it if we said, let's rob a bank and use the million dollars to help humankind and advance equality. You might do that. Yeah?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So in the middle of a totalitarian dictatorship, you don't want to be telling stories about how awful totalitarian dictatorships are, because off with your head.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Yeah, they're going to have to do preventing disaster plus improving people's lives plus it'll be fun.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, there is a puritanical self-flagellating streak on the left as it is currently constituted that if it's fun, it can't be good. They miss a point. If it's not fun on some level, people aren't going to do it. So is it about how virtuous you are, or is it about actually trying to better conditions? So if it's only about how virtuous you are, then you're probably an antinomian Puritan.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And if it's actually about trying to improve conditions, you might be a William Morris socialist. So William Morris thought that not only could you improve conditions, but you could make them more fun and more beautiful. Whereas a lot of puritanical antinomians think that beauty is beside the point, it's actually not.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, I think that report says it all. We don't know what to make of any of this. And if you then don't have more of the story, of course it's going to move on, because if the story is we don't know, there's not much to add to that. We don't know. Oh, and now it's Tuesday and we still don't know. And Thursday, we also don't know on Thursday.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So it isn't a story if it ends with we don't know and there's nothing else to add. It's again the nature of the stories. If there is no next chapter, what can you say? We still don't know.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
There are many disadvantages, but there are many advantages. And if there weren't many advantages, we wouldn't be doing it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Supposing it was a foolproof plan, you might do it then, but only if it were for the greater good. So I think we're more likely to be sucked into doing stuff by people manipulating our good side than by people appealing to our greed and power-hungerness, although there are enough of us who are interested in the greed and power-hungerness, so it's a motif.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Oh, how about mushrooms? Let's talk about mushrooms. That's a really good story. I love the mushroom story. So Merlin Sheldrake is probably the person you want to be talking to. And we are now learning how to make all kinds of things out of mushrooms that we weren't even thinking about a little while ago. So you can get a mushroom coffin. And you can make building blocks out of mushrooms.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
You can make fabric out of mushrooms. And this is even apart from any food and medical uses that they may have. So I'd say keep your eye on the mushrooms. They may be entering your life sooner than you think.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Don't do this to me.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Okay. So I did pick out, I was told, three. And I have three, and I'm going to show them to you. So this is Margaret MacMillan's book on war. pretty general reader book, How Conflict Shaped Us. One of the takeaways from it is apparently we're not teaching military studies or military history in universities anymore. That's a mistake. So good read, War, How Conflict Shaped Us, Margaret MacMillan.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
This one is by somebody who lives out near you called Jennifer Eberhardt. And it's called Bias. And it's got the statistics. So for people who want to know, well, actually, how does this skew life in real time in the actual world? Here's the book that talks about that. It's racial bias. And she's done the work. It's not just anecdotal. And this one will surprise you. I hope.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It's by Eliza Reid, Secrets of the Sprachar. And what is it about? It's about life in Iceland. You surprised? So Iceland, a small country where people tend to be related in some way to one another, and the fact that this land of the erstwhile Vikings, which always had pretty powerful determined female figures, how women's equality, gender equality, and financial equality play out in Iceland.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So is it possible to have a more equitable society? Yes, says Iceland. Not that they don't have problems. It's not a utopia. I've been there several times, and what's always impressed me about it is the resources are fairly sparse. They don't have a lot of stuff to make stuff out of. But what they have, they use. So you can get baked seaweed jewelry there. Pretty interesting place.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Maybe only works so well because it's not huge.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It doesn't always work. So Scotland wasn't huge, but they're always having battles.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Am I allowed to say Charlotte's Web? Absolutely. Okay, I'm saying Charlotte's Web about a spider who saves the life of a pig doomed for slaughter, interestingly enough, through words. So the spider manages to tell a story about the pig that makes him exceptional. Isn't that, it's a good use of words. So that, dare we delve into Lord of the Rings. Is that a children's book?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
If I say it is. It doesn't have sex in it, so maybe it's a children's book. Yeah, I got really interested in it because of my 19th century studies. It uses a lot of memes that occur earlier in 19th century fantasy. And the supernatural female tomb-dwelling figure in Rider-Haggard, she splits into two and becomes two supernatural female figures in Lord of the Rings.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
One is a good supernatural figure called Galadriel. She has the very same forecasting water pool mirror that she has. And the other one becomes a carnivorous, evil, huge spider creature called Shelob. Anyway, a lot of the antecedents to Lord of the Rings are pretty interesting to me.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And a pleasure to talk to you and good luck with everything that you're doing and also with the rest of your life.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, stories by their very nature have central characters, unless they're history stories dealing just with statistics. But we know that we're much more likely to be able to remember a story that is about a person or people, not one that is just about numbers, unless we make the numbers themselves into actors in the story. I'm going to tell you a story about the number nine, a very heroic number.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
I can relate. Yeah, so you make the numbers into sort of entities, and then we can be interested in them. But if they're just numbers, not so much. We didn't develop math until pretty late in our human history, whereas we developed language and music very, very early. So stories come naturally to small kids. You know this yourself. So this happens, then this happens, and then this happens.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
They understand that there's a plot and that there are actors in the plot like their teddy bear. So it's really built in. And I think what kids do before the age of two is pretty indicative of what comes with the toolkit. They already are doing little dances, they have a sense of rhythm, they're very interested in music, and they're very interested in words and facial expressions.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
But they're not interested in nine times nine at that age, if ever.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
I mean, there's a lot of sex, death, blood, and violence in there, which is one of the reasons it's remained such a popular book. These are dramatic stories. When you get into the begets and the begats, maybe not so much, but what we would call these sort of key stories are very dramatic. And they often feature something that we really like, which is underdogs making good.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So a number of the key stories are like that. And some of them are about really cataclysmic events. And some of them that we didn't get in high school are about very bad behavior. So the one that I put into the Testaments, which is the concubine cut into 12 pieces, for some reason they didn't parade that in front of the eight-year-olds. I don't know why. So what's a concubine, Mom?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
One kid writing a Sunday school essay said, King Solomon had 12 wives and 82 porcupines. It made me just... No. So yeah, it's very interesting to see what kind of bad behavior is actually condoned and permitted, but there isn't a lot of papering over in the Bible. If people are bad, they're bad, like it's right out there on the page. And even people who are favored quite frequently behave badly.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
and get called on it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, these stories are in flux, as you probably have noticed. There used to be a kind of shared mythology in the United States, and Canadians used to lament that they didn't have such a thing. And it would, in fact, be quite difficult to have a totally shared mythology in Canada because it was already made up of some diverse groups of people.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
But Americans had a kind of unifying story and unifying ceremonies that involved a lot of marching around on the 4th of July. The French also have been quite conflicted about their stories, but they managed to make it stick for a while. So it was Bastille Day, good or bad. I think they're still thinking it's good. But there was a lot of adjustment before that became the accepted stories.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
They had the revolution, then they had Napoleon, then they had the restoration of the monarchy, and then they had another republic, and then they had another monarchy, and then they had another republic. In order to hold any sort of nation state together, there has to be a story that most of the people agree on. And every once in a while, those stories fall apart.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
And if they're not replaced with another one, fragmentation is the result. So one of the things that stories do is they give members of a group a kind of unifying imaginary thing that they can believe in. When I say imaginary, I'm not saying it's necessarily false. I'm saying it is a thing of the imagination, like money. It's also a thing of the imagination.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It's a human thing that we make up because it works and it's convenient for us. But if we suddenly stop believing in a currency, that's it. You have to revert to the black market and bartering. So yeah, so the American story used to be liberty, democracy, freedom, equality, land of light. And it was that way all during the Cold War.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Okay, because the Cold War was the Iron Curtain, Land of Darkness. Don't know whether you remember that pop song, They Don't Have a God Behind the Iron Curtain.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Oh, they don't have God behind the iron curtain. To Satan they have given something crown.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
It's catchy. Catchy, yeah. So the story about America was that's where you wanted to be. That's where you didn't have all the things that were going on behind the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain then comes down in 1989. That story loses some of its grip. So if you're going to be Land of Virtuous Light, who is the foil to that? You know, who gets to play the Penguin to your Batman?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Or even worse, the Joker to your Batman. And that was a problem. I remember the 90s, which is probably when you were born.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
No, no, no, you can't possibly be. It was going to be the end of history. Capitalism had triumphed. Shopping was the future. It was just all going to be great. That ended in 9-11. That was the end of that particular phase. And there was another potential penguin joker to America's Batman, but it was kind of hard to coalesce that, especially if you were really rather dependent on Saudi Arabia.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
So we're now shaping up to another one, which appears to be Putin about to invade Ukraine. And who knows what is going to happen there. But America, meanwhile, has been examining the underside of the myth, if you like. So equality for whom exactly was the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Were those going to be for everybody? Apparently not.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Not at the beginning, but once you've started with that idea, it's kind of hard to stop it. And despite the setbacks, I think you have seen the franchise extending further and further. What you're seeing right now is an attempt to roll some of that back with the discouraging of voting for certain groups and a certain amount of historical revisionism. Well, we never actually meant equality.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
We meant... Something more like the Roman Republic in which it was only men and not slaves, women, or children that were supposed to be citizens.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Well, that would be tragic because the result would be another civil war. And there are no wars worse than civil wars. They're actually the worst wars. And that has been a motif actually throughout American history, that there were righteous people and that there were not righteous people. So the founding, going back to the original founding amongst the Puritans, that wasn't a democracy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism
Oh. Well, people have had a lot of theories about that. So let's say that once we had a language that included a past and a present and a future, once we could think about what had happened and transfer information to people about what might therefore happen, we were going to be telling stories.