The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
Thu, 12 Dec 2024
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with playwright Andrew Doyle and comedy writer Graham Linehan. They discuss their near-cancellations, the woke epidemic which has made comedy a criminal offense in the United Kingdom, the broader decay of the cultural landscape across Europe, why progressive ideals ruin honest works of creativity, and the totalitarian hellscape awaiting the Brits should they not change course. This episode was filmed on November 27th, 2024 | Links | For Andrew Doyle: On X https://x.com/andrewdoyle_com?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@andrewdoyle983 On Substack https://www.andrewdoyle.org/ For Graham Linehan: On X https://x.com/Glinner?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamLinehan/videos On Substack https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/
Chapter 1: What is the main theme of this podcast episode?
Thank you.
So a couple of announcements. First, I'm on tour again. And so if you go to jordanbpeterson.com, you can find out cities and dates. And that starts in December and runs through April. So check that out if you're inclined. The tour deals with the issues that I raise in my new book, which came out on November 19th. It's called We Who Wrestle With God.
And in that book, I take apart a sequence of Old Testament stories and explain, at least as far as I'm concerned, at least part of what they mean. And I try to do that in a way that's comprehensible and as profound as I could make it, but also very practically applicable. And so that's a good combination of high-level abstraction and immediate practical applicability.
You need to know these stories because they're the stories that are fundamentally about you and about everybody that you know and about how society is structured and our relationship with nature and... the divine. So come to the tour, pick up the book if you're inclined. Today, I had a chance to speak with Andrew Doyle, with whom I've spoken before. We've been in touch for a number of years now.
Andrew's a comedian in the UK. The infamous creator of Titania McGrath, who was one of the most effective characters ever devised to satirize the woke left, and Andrew's been at that for a very long time. So we spent a fair bit of time discussing what he's up to as an immigrant to Phoenix.
And along with Andrew, I spoke with Graham Linehan, who is joining Andrew in the establishment of a new entertainment enterprise in Phoenix with Rob Schneider and some other people. Their hope is that they can actually do some things that would be funny. And that would be a lovely thing to see since humor is in short supply in the woke totalitarian world that we inhabit now.
Although maybe the comedians, the true comedians, like Joe Rogan, will in fact have their last laugh. So we talked about Graham's life in fair detail at the beginning of the podcast because he went from riches to rags, right? Quite traumatically. Graham was...
maybe the most successful sitcom writer in the UK, and the man who penned a number of shows that were beloved by, well, by very large audiences. And despite that, when he had the temerity to have some perfectly reasonable opinions about perfectly reasonable subjects, his life was demolished. His marriage ended.
He was persona non grata in the artistic community, which is a complete bloody catastrophe. And eventually was inclined, not least by necessity, to sever his ties with his home country. Everyone he knew virtually turned the other way. And that's a terrible thing. And Andrew, by contrast, has sort of ridden the woke wave, I would say.
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Chapter 2: What are the key points discussed about woke culture?
Exactly, exactly. He's now sharing living space with female prisoners.
Well, no psychopaths would pretend to be women just to get access to women. They're not that sort of people, you know.
I used to say about the Catholic Church, at least priests had to learn Latin, you know. These guys, all they have to do is put on some eyeshadow, and every door is open to them.
Or complain about the fact that the bigots are using eyeshadow as a marker of gender, and that's not fair. Yeah.
Yeah, well, the rules change all the time. And that's something I didn't realize as well, is that the rules were very fluid. Just like identity. Yeah, yeah. But it's like they try and pretend that identity is fluid by making the conversation fluid and hard to understand. I mean, part of me is very angry for the fact that no one in my career stood up for me, you know. But another part...
kind of understands because the language around this issue is so deliberately confusing.
They did a... And the cost of standing up is high. Of course, the cost of not standing up is higher, but it is understandable why people... You can understand why people choose to remain silent. That doesn't excuse it, but you can't understand it.
Well, there's an interesting... I can't remember who did the... People are wondering, who the hell is this guy on Graham's left? LAUGHTER I know, I feel terrible that I'm talking so much. But this guy, I can't remember who said it, but he said that during the Nazi years, there's a kind of widespread assumption that everyone was afraid of being tortured by a guy with a dueling scar on his face.
And he says, no, the reason that ordinary Germans went along with it for the most part was because of career advancements. They did not want their careers to stall.
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Chapter 3: How have Andrew Doyle and Graham Linehan been affected by cancel culture?
But she did a famous one about Stonewall where this, it was the early days, so they were quite kind of upfront about saying these ridiculous things. And it was a guy with a beard named Alex Drummond. And he was saying things like, I want to expand the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman, you know.
And Magdalene said very, you know, in one of her many famous lines, why don't you expand the bandwidth of what it means to be a man? You know, and there's people like him in any normal world. Someone like that would just be an eccentric whose friends tolerated them. And oh, it's just Alex being Alex. But now he's like the figurehead for a movement.
Well, a bearded woman that also might be a man woman.
That also might be a consequence to some degree, an unintended consequence of the technology that unites us, the internet. Because before, if you were an eccentric, by definition, there was one of you. But now online, you can find the other thousands sprinkled throughout the world and you're no longer an eccentric. You're a movement. Yes.
And we have no idea what it means, what that possibility of, what would you say, aggregation of the truly, not even the eccentric, but the monstrous. We have no idea what that aggregation means.
I suppose what I mean, though, is that if we don't cherish the eccentricity, we don't have the arts. We don't have creativity. Absolutely. And so we've been demanding conformity from artists. from the most free-thinking types. And I don't think it's a coincidence that at the same time in our history, we've empowered these extremists.
Yeah, well, maybe one of the ways that you can tell when empathy for the marginal has exceeded its boundaries is when the marginalized who are being empathized with start to restrict eccentricity. When the now included marginalized become intolerant, the empathetic endeavor has gone too far.
Because they've become the powerful. Yes, exactly.
Because they're now making the rules.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does the UK face regarding free speech?
Well, because even though I know that this thing happens all the time, and even though I know that I knew that in all likelihood you were one of the people that it happened to, I still wondered, well, you know, as everyone does, where there's smoke, there might be fire. And it's just, that's in addition to Andrew's point. It's like, You're asking a lot of people to defend you.
They have to admit to the existence of an evil that, first of all, they can't comprehend. And second of all, they do not want to admit to. And no bloody wonder. It's not surprising.
So, I mean, it happened recently where a well-known author, Boyne, John Boyne, came out and defended, who was someone who had attacked. He wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, very famous novel. He had attacked Graham back in the day. And I saw this, it was an incredible post. He wrote an apology online and said he now understands it. He's now looked into it. He says, I was wrong. You were right.
I'm sorry. He said that to you. It's quite a brave thing for him to do. By doing that, he's also put himself in the fire online to a degree. But of course, every time someone does that, and every time they are piled on and destroyed and demonized and monstered, it sends a message out to everyone else that you don't want to be that person. It takes a certain kind of strength.
Well, it's also the case, too, that a lot of this is now instantiated in law. So, for example, in Canada, if you're a physician or a psychologist and you object to gender-affirming care, which is one of those phrases that's so pathological that it's truly a miracle of deception, then...
The probability that you'll be reported by an activist somewhere and that you'll face at minimum like years of legal entanglement at your expense with a high probability of losing your professional status and your license, like the probability of that is virtually 100%.
Is it worth exploring? I mean, the weaponization of the law in the UK. You've mentioned non-crime hate incidents. Would it be worth me explaining what that is? Because that's the key weapon that activists have.
Well, we do want to delve into that because one of the things we also want to explore is why you guys decided to move to the United States. And I'm spending a lot of my time in the United States for very similar reasons and know of very many other people who are doing the same thing. It's no bloody wonder this country thrives, say, because whenever any other place becomes unstable,
You can flee, so to speak, if you're the least bit creative and pursue whatever it is you want to pursue here and actually be, I would say, actually be appreciated for it. Okay, so talk about the situation in the UK and define this non-crime, non-crime hate incident.
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Chapter 5: What are non-crime hate incidents and their implications?
But, you know, I did that.
No, it's important to highlight these sorts of things, though, because you want to see where you're, just like I said, it took me like six months to trust you on X. You want to see, it's not like only those people are susceptible to this like mass hysteria. You got to watch and see where you're susceptible. And if you have been susceptible in some manner, you should admit it.
Well, you know, at one point during the pandemic, COVID epidemic, the so-called COVID epidemic, I got vaccinated twice. Now, in my defense, I was very ill at the time and wasn't really able to think. But I did get vaccinated. But I also said at the end of one podcast, and I would say in some ways, despite some inner prompting, that people should just get the damn vaccine.
And my thinking at the time was, seriously, I was like, I'll take the shots. Here's the deal. I'll take the shots. You leave me the hell alone. And then I found out instantly that the deal was you take the shots and then you take six more and forget about being left alone. And that was the end of that as far as I was concerned. But still, I made a mistake. You know, I made a mistake.
And I would say... It was very difficult for me at that point to believe that the pharmaceutical companies had become so corrupt that you couldn't trust their vaccine policy. You know, it was easier to think that it was the more conspiratorially minded, you know, alt-right types that were pushing this doctrine.
And saying something cures that cognitive dissonance. Even briefly. You get to turn it off just for a few seconds and think, oh, at least I've made a decision.
Yeah, right, there's that too. All of this is suggestive of this idea that there is a real problem we have at the moment where there's an expectation of moral purity from all sides. I've seen a similar thing there, like where people either didn't understand what was going on during the pandemic and maybe supported lockdowns or et cetera.
And they get piled on and attacked by these very sort of, almost like an equivalent of the woke, on the sort of lockdown skeptic side as well. I don't think any particular group is immune to this idea, this kind of expectation. Everyone must think the same way as me on every single point.
Well, it's part of group identity, really. Like, I mean, it's necessary for human beings to cooperate, to reach consensus, That's almost universal on everything rapidly, right? Because otherwise we can't cooperate.
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Chapter 6: How does the conversation around gender identity evolve throughout the episode?
Because you just have to go click and away you go. You know, it's like there's no lag. It's just not the forum.
It's not the forum for discussion. It just isn't. Something about it, it rewards extremism. Well, it rewards impulsive behavior. It does.
It's set up to incentivize impulsive behavior. We have no idea. Impulsive behavior is a bad medium to long-term strategy, and that's the sine qua non of Twitter. And so it just might be a game that degenerates as you play it.
I'm kind of confused by Elon's decision to put in the For Utah, which seems like a surefire way to create...
kind of discord and arguments i just don't look at that tab i look at the things that i'm following yeah i also don't look at it it's because it's too pathological yeah like it just aggregates bad actors well they're trying to no one knows what to do with twitter like and they're so i have to ask you another question because my daughter won't forgive me if i don't okay and there are other reasons too you taught a course for peterson academy i did
We live in a time when many of us think that human progress is inevitable. When it comes to the arts, this is a kind of wishful thinking. It's the psychological complexity of his characters and his insights into human nature, not the plots. He wasn't interested in plots. Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet.
This is a girl on a balcony, her lover below. Could you change a single syllable and improve it? It's not possible. You can read Shakespeare. I don't care who you are. These are plays about human beings. This is why they've never stopped being relevant. He broadens our sense of what it means to be human. People found it very uncomfortable. because it doesn't have poetic justice.
His characters, Iago, Cleopatra, Titus, Cordelia, Brutus, they all think differently. I do think that Shakespeare has the capacity to illuminate our modern world. As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. I like the fact that Shakespeare absolutely doesn't attempt to preach at you.
It's incumbent on us to have a familiarity with, well, the greatest writer who ever lived. Tell us about the course. So the course is on Shakespeare's tragedies. And we filmed it in London. Was it last year? I think, yes. My sense of time has completely gone. And it was excellent. And I'm not saying that just to be a sycophant.
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