Frank Furedi

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. Before we dive in, a quick word about who I am and why we're here. I'm Jim Bier, corporate lawyer and restructuring professional. I've spent the last two decades helping companies navigate their toughest transitions. And about eight years ago, I found myself having fascinating conversations with clients and friends about everything from venture capital to the broader shifts happening in our economy and society.

Those discussions were simply too good, so the puck was born. Now while we started on venture capital, hence the podcast name, the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, We've naturally evolved to focus more on the and beyond portion of the title. Today, we explore how business intersects with the bigger forces shaping our world. I still run my restructuring practice by day, but now I get to host these conversations by night. It has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

Today's guest continues that tradition. Very often we seem to be much more interested in kind of tackling the injustices of two centuries ago about which we can do nothing because these things have already happened, than dealing with the problems that confront us in the here and now. So I think we are in a sense, in a state of transition where we to some extent intellectually and morally paralyzed, and I think that's one of the distinct features of our time. On today's episode of the Puck, we talk with Frank Ferretti, a sociologist, social commentator, and an author serving as the Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent in Canterbury. We discuss the changing educational norms, the generational schisms that exist today, and the current state of open debate and dialogue.

It's a revelatory conversation, so let's get to it. Frank Ferretti, welcome to the puck. Pleasure. Can you take a minute and tell us a little bit about yourself? Well, my name is, Frank Ferretti.

At the moment, I'm the executive director of a think tank in Brussels called MCC Brussels, but I've spent most of my life being a professor of sociology in different universities. And, my big passion is I write books. So I'm an author of books, and I I write common pieces in on the media. That's more or less my background. I'm originally Hungarian, left in the Hungarian revolution in 1956.

Grew up, we kind of fled to Canada, and I grew up there. Went to university there, and then I decided to do my doctorate in England. And, I somehow or another, I ended up in England during most of my adult life. So my home now is more or less in in the South Of England, in Canterbury. Well, Frank, your background is very diversified.

And as I understand it, you've, as a sociologist, you've you've studied liberalism. You've gone through, I believe, a communist phase, a libertarian phase. You've been a critique of global warming initiatives at times. I mean, you have some controversial views. You've grown a lot.

How have these transformations changed your life, and how do they shape where you are today? I think that although it seems that I've changed a lot, I think what has changed is the world around me. And essentially, I'm pretty much the same person. Although, obviously, we we kind of learn from our mistakes and we interact with friends and, alter our views. But, essentially, I got involved in radical left politics in nineteen sixties, being kind of caught up with the sensibility that said that anything is possible, you know, and that was a very exciting period for me where you felt you were potentially in control of your life and you can make things happen.

I got involved there in, radical left politics and while I was doing my PhD and, and and and doing some teaching at the university. But, essentially, there were certain things that defined me in the sense that I all all the way through this period, I think I was fairly conservative when it came to certain things like family life. I was always, committed to people's national affiliations. The the nation was something I felt was really quite important. And particularly, I was always committed to freedom and free speech.

Essentially, the reason why we fled Hungary was because we felt it was a tyrannical regime. We had to fight for our freedom. And I remember getting into trouble with my left wing friends in nineteen seventies when they tried to ban certain groups and certain people from speaking on campuses. And I argued against them that, you know, either you believe in free speech or you don't. And you that there's no kind of, I believe in freedom, but and that I got accused of being right wing and fascists and everything else because I stood up for some people, who were being canceled before the word canceled existed in the in the nineteen seventies.

And that was the point at which I I I kind of realized that I wasn't really like my colleagues on the left, even though I had very strong social commitments and very strong sense of right and wrong and and felt that society needed changing. So I was this, individual kinda caught in the middle of left and right trying to make my way. So, Frank, I understand coming from Hungary and what you talked about in terms of, you know, the clampdowns on freedom and and and so forth that wanting to live in a culture with freedom and free speech makes a lot of sense. But in the world of algorithms, how do we maintain our sanity with what we're having to be subjected to on the Internet? Well, you know, it's very difficult.

For I've been talking to my friends in the last few days about the fact that you have this polarization of views where people only talk to people like themselves. And you've got that now since the election of Donald Trump where a lot of people are saying we're leaving x, and we're going to join a different platform. So, basically, they're saying they're gonna be in their kind of nice, safe space talking to themselves, leaving behind people who have very different view. And that is really bad for democracy because, essentially, if the social media becomes so ghettoized as it's not seems to be, then the idea of public debate, public discussion, even of public life, becomes significantly compromised. Well, as an immigrant and coming from a country where you didn't feel free to now a country where we're clamping down on immigrants, where we're vilifying immigrants, and where we are on one hand, we have the right saying we want free speech, but we don't have it.

And the left saying we want free speech, but then trying to ban Trump from Twitter. How do we make sense of all of this? I think we we need to become free speech absolutist. I think you're right to point out the fact that people are very selective about their commitment to free speech. So the right wants their free speech for themselves, and the left wants free speech for themselves as well.

But when it comes to their opponents, they are very intolerant. And I think one of the important values that we need to uphold and celebrate is that of tolerance. I mean, tolerance, you know, people think it's a really wishy washy idea, you know, about being nice to each other. But what tolerance is really all about is that even if you hate somebody's ideas, you you kind of see it as being unthinkable. You nevertheless feel that, they have the right to express views that you find objectionable.

Tolerance doesn't mean that you allow people who agree with you to speak. It it basically means the opposite, that it's precisely those people whose views you kind of find very objectionable. And that's that's a value that people pay lip service to, but its presence and its and its impact is very, very weak in the Anglo American world and impact the whole Western world. So you talk about tolerance, and I understand that in these echo chambers, we avoid having these difficult conversations. But if we're asking people to come out of their comfort zone and have these difficult conversations, do we need to get something regulated on the Internet to to take down the vitriolic nature that is triggering us by algorithms?

I don't think so. I mean, there's a real danger that somehow we get focused on the idiots on the extremes of of both wings of of the debate. And forget the fact that there's always been a certain section of society whose views were very, horrible, unrestrained, and, you know, kind of made a lot of people feel uncomfortable. But the important thing is, at the end of the day, we have to realize that, pulling up with those people is a very small price to pay from ensuring that the freedom of speech, which is which is the foundational freedom on on which everything else rests, is upheld. And one of the problems that we have is that so many people I know, good people, will say, okay, Frank.

I believe in freedom, but not for these people, not for this kind of speech. And once you begin to indicate that there are certain things that cannot be said, certain forms of speech, that are intolerable, then it basically creates a precedent for other people to come along with their objections to other kinds of speech that they wanna hear. So I think at the end of the day, you know, the first amendment, America is very blessed in having that first amendment. It's really something that needs to be upheld and defended, especially today, when it's being violated in practice by so many people. Being bombarded with all these echo chamber, biased sources of news, how do you ferret out the truth?

Well, you're asking a question that's been posed for a very long time. In the nineteenth century, when you had the beginnings of what's called the mass press, the mass media, there was a very, interesting debate that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic where people said, look, everybody now has a say. Everyone is not able to publish stuff and, make their views heard. The uneducated person has got the same, access to the media platforms of the nineteenth century as the educated people do. Yeah.

And people were kind of really worried about the fact that how do you tell the difference between truth and lies? This is the first time that there's a big discussion about what today we call disinformation or fake news. And to to be absolutely clear, there is no answer to that other than educating people in society so that they got the intellectual resources to be able to, discriminate, to be able to evaluate arguments, and to make up their own mind. And in the end, it's the maturity of our citizens that is the best guarantee that, these the the kind of horrible sentiments and views and lies that are circulating today just as much as in the past, do not have a damaging impact upon our public life. I couldn't agree more.

Do you think the American people are evolved enough to do the work, to have the intellectual honesty, to get to the point where they can come to the right decisions in this environment. I think the American people are kind of mature enough, at least met most of them, many of them, to think for themselves. I was really surprised, for example, by the outcome of the election. And in particular, I was talking to people who are friends of mine who spent a lot of time in the swing states, Pennsylvania and Michigan. And they were telling me that people were basically very clear what the issues were.

So, for example, very many of them told my friends that we think that Trump is unreliable. You know, we cannot trust Trump at all. Some said he's even an idiot. But, nevertheless, if I have to make a choice between Trump and Harris, given her kind of, inability to articulate any kind of vision, I'll go for Trump any day. And I I I just remember very clearly, one of my best friends came back from Pennsylvania, back to England, and he was actually certain on the basis of his research that Trump would win just because, you know, he was really surprised how people had views that were very different, in many ways, more nuanced than the one than the ideas that were communicated through the legacy media.

And I and I just think that we often underestimate. We think that, people are easily swayed by demagogue that are are easily swayed by money, by advertising, but there's a kind of, honest clarity that comes to the surface. Not always, but comes to the surface. And that's what we gotta build on. We gotta believe in the capacity of of our people to be genuine citizens, responsible citizens, not just simply passive consumers of information.

So what troubles you today in terms of an issue that we need to focus on to bring us back together as a country? A lot of things trouble me, and I don't think that there is enough time, you know, even if you spent eight hours discussing this to go through some of this stuff. I think the the first thing that troubles me are, is the phenomena of what we call the culture wars, the cultural conflict, and the very fact that, regardless of which side you are on the culture war, there is a a lack of understanding about the importance of there being at least a a numb some foundational basic values that can bind us together. When you have a a society that is so deeply divided, and it isn't just simply The United States, we have the same problem in Britain, France, Germany, many other parts of the of of Europe. When you have such a polarized, political landscape, then basically, you have a situation where people don't talk to each other.

And you have a situation where, you know, if I criticize you, you don't react by saying, okay. Frank is criticizing me. I disagree with him, but he's allowed to criticize me. My criticism is experienced as an annihilation of your existence, that somehow I'm attacking you. I'm calling your very existence into question.

And we gotta somehow change the attitudes that we have towards discussion and debate. We gotta almost educate ourselves or reeducate ourselves, in the foundational values of democracy. And that to me is is really the starting point because I got very clear views on on cultural issues. I'm happy to argue with anybody against it, but prior to that, there needs to be at least clarity about what the rules of engagement are, you know, how we expect to talk to each other, how we expect to engage each with each other, and that does not exist. I think that's even that is contested.

But you say that we, as a people, have to have the education and the maturity to have these discussions. And yet it seems like you're also saying, but we're not acting maturely. Yes. I think that's a paradox. Because what I'm really saying is that, you know, both of them both of these trends coexist.

But the way you become and I become clearer about where we stand is when we argue with each other, when we discuss with each other, when our views are tested. I mean, one of the points that, the great philosopher JS Mills made in the nineteenth century is that you might have strong views, but unless those views are the product of debate and argument, they are just simply, you know, received ideas that, you know, you got from somebody else. And therefore, they don't really mean all that much to you because you never had to fight for them, never internalize them and made your own. It's when you have to stand up and be counted and and argue for those sentiments that you really come to understand what is right and what is wrong about what you think, what is the balance, maybe how to modify your sentiments, and how to go forward. So in a sense, for me, debate, is an exercise of democracy.

It's democracy in action. It gives democracy a life that it doesn't have, when you don't have that. Because otherwise, democracy becomes merely a a formal procedure for electing candidates rather than a everyday living culture. Do you think part of the challenge is that we are in a society that is trying to eradicate pain and that there's discomfort in having debate, and we have lost the understanding of the importance of the ability to bear discomfort while having a debate? I think here is a very important issue because, you know, you very often hear people saying that, you know, I'm offended by what I hear.

And then some people say, I'm not only offended, but I'm traumatized by what I hear. And suddenly, people's views are seen as as kind of weapons rather than just simply words. And you got to a point at which, especially those involved in identity politics, who regard a a criticism, not just a criticism, not just simply criticism of their belief, but their very existence. So for example, if I'm having a debate or a discussion with, somebody, a trans person, and I I basically argued that as far as I'm concerned, I don't I don't believe in giving my pronouns or that what I see in front of me over there is is a woman rather than a man or vice versa, then from their standpoint, I'm not just merely giving a point of view, calling to exit into question their very existence. I'm attacking them.

I'm deadnaming them. There's a number of expressions they use. What they're really saying is that any criticism of their identity, kind of ideals represents not just simply criticism, but a physical attack upon the very being of which they cannot be expected to put up with. And that kind of sensibility, that kind of a therapeutic sensibility that somehow words cause such a profound psychological distress that is far better to shut your mouth and and to be censored and or to be canceled is in part the product of this, very radically new way of understanding what a human being is capable of putting up with. In sociology, we call this personhood.

And our version of personhood compared to ten, twenty, forty, fifty years ago is much more like that of a patient rather than that of a citizen. So you are a sociologist, and so let me ask you a question. When I grew up, I was taught sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never harm you. As a boomer and as a parent of millennials, if I had talked to my children the way people talk to me, they would have called the police. So as a sociologist, something has shifted generationally.

Yeah. And I think it's the boomers that are responsible for that. Because I think what happened was that, you know, a lot of the boomers felt that, they had to immunize their children from disappointment, that they had to insulate their kids from the experience of pain. And they basically assume that their children was capable of far less uncertainty and confusion than they were. And and and in that sense, they unfortunately miseducated their kids to the point at which, you know, they began to deprive children of their independence.

I wrote a book about this called paranoid parenting back in 02/2001 because I noticed that so many things that I could do as a child, which were really important to me, were now a no go area. I mean, I used to go to school by myself from the age of five or six. I used to be able to get on a train and and go 40 miles, 50 miles by myself. I was able to, but not able to, but I was expected to, have a much more independent existence. And my parents, who I think were great parents, were not hovering over me in the way that especially American middle class parents are hovering over their kids.

So I always remember that's why I wrote the book. I was in New York City with my son. My son at the time was, like, six, five or six. And it was a Sunday and gone to the park, and I had the New York Times with me, which as you know, is a very big paper on a Sunday. And I told my son to go play in the monkey bar.

And I'm there reading the newspaper, and, he's on the monkey bar. And you have this group of parents come up to me and says, sir, do you know that your son is playing by himself? I said, yes. They come back again. Sir, do you know that that boy over there has been playing by himself for, like, ten minutes?

And this happened three or four times. And I just said, look. Of course I know. I'm not an idiot. I want my son to be able to play.

And then I looked, and then I saw on the monkey bar that for every child that was up there on the monkey bar, there were, like, two parents hovering over them, you know, being worried that something bad would happen. So when you got this kind of attitude towards your child, when you see them as this kind of precious, vulnerable, fragile, you know, little things, then the way you bring them up is very different. And you teach those children not to basically, be very oversensitive to be to kind of have a strong sense of vulnerability rather than encourage them to cultivate their independence. And I think that's the process, that you're describing, and it's all pervasive now. It's fascinating as I'm listening to this.

I'm trying to weave it into the book that you wrote, War Against the Past, which we'd love to hear about. But specifically, what's interesting as I'm hearing about this is I am a boomer, and I am listening to you agree with you that I, in certain ways, you know, sheltered my kids too much. But as a student of history, I am aware that the pendulum typically swings too far back and it needs to self correct. And in my case, the reason I overcorrected was that my parents had no clue what I was up to whatsoever as a kid. None.

And I it's a miracle I survived. And so I'm like, woah. Woah. Woah. I'm gonna at least know what's going on with my kids, and getting to that sweet spot is really hard.

Well, you could argue that your parents were like my parents and a lot of other parents, and they just assumed that you're capable of growing up. You know, children had have managed to grow up for thousands of years without there being a a therapist checking out their most intimate inner thoughts. And, you know, obviously, they're also probably very busy. They might have worked you know, it wasn't you know, their working week was much longer in those days. I know my mother and father, they put in fifty hours, fifty five hours.

They had assumed, rightly or wrongly, that, you know, when I went to school, the teachers would, you know, and and the schools would look after you to some extent. And they'd also assume that my sister or my my or my peers would back me up in certain situations. And I think that at the end of the day, you know, we weren't necessarily the worst for that. Now I'm not saying that that was perfect. All I'm saying is that, within that regime of child rearing, there was a very clear objective which we lost, which is that you want to emphasize, not your kids' sense of powerlessness, but you want to emphasize their capacity for independence and autonomy.

And that's the really key element. And if you if you believe in that, then you also understand that the more you intervene as an adult, the more time children spend under adult supervision, the less scope they have to, you know, gain those kinds of strength. And as you know, if you look at child rearing, children behave very differently when they just feed other kids than when there's adults in the room watching them. It's a completely different way that they interact because it's when they have little children that they learn how to take risk. They learn about their strengths and their weaknesses.

And in a sense, that often gives them the kind of power which, allows them to overcome their identity crisis to gain a sense of adulthood and an aspiration to adulthood. Whereas now in America, the transition from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood is taking longer and longer and longer and longer all the time. So, essentially, you have a situation where a lot of 27, 28, 29 year olds still think of themselves as adolescents rather than as, men and women. And and that kind of, process on balance, diminishes their capacity to gain control over their lives. And and I, again, I I agree with most of what you're saying.

And I guess one of my questions is, where is the wisdom literature that we should be turning to to actually reeducate the millennials, so to speak, and the boomers for that matter? Well, again, I mean, it's it's a difficult in in the end, it doesn't just depend on books. It it also depends on on on attitudes and commitment. But there are some wonderful books written by people who, have noticed that the existing form of child rearing is very dysfunctional. It it kind of creates all kinds of mental health, psychological problems for children, and it compromises kids' ability to kind of essentially gain immaturity.

So we we're kind of producing biologically mature people, but biologically mature people who don't think of their selves as being adults. And, you know, I was fortunate in that I I work with a group of people in Kent University in Canterbury. And we we got a a website called the parenting studies website. And on that website, you'll find there are loads of books, loads of articles, loads of debates precisely about these kinds of questions. Because what that's one of the things we try to pioneer of how how we kind of engage with some of these problems in a way that, helps not just parents, but society as a whole.

So in reading this material and in your writing about war against the past, how do you balance proper critique versus kind of historical injustices? I think, it's always important not to have this, one-sided glorification of a nation's past. It's, you know, very important that we look at, the historical record and and recognize that human beings from the beginning of time did some excellent and brilliant things, but also some horrible things as part of our history. So my argument is is that at the moment, we tend to have see the past as a story of shame, not realizing that many of the historical injustices that people are concerned about were actually tackled because people, despite the mistakes they made, eventually developed the sensitivity and the empathy to be able to deal with, those kinds of atrocities or those kinds of problems. You know, very often people look down on the individuals of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, But they're the ones that first began to give equality real meaning.

I mean, sense of equality didn't just grow on a tree. It wasn't, like, natural. It came about through a lot of intellectual arguments, struggles, arguments between people. And we need to be proud of the fact that, individuals could look at something like slavery or could look at something like oppression and not just fold their arms and and say, oh, yeah. That's a fact of life.

They were able to begin to criticize it, question it, and eventually develop a sophisticated understanding of how to project another way. So to me, the past is gonna be seen as not one of shame. But to me, the past is something that, unbalanced, I'm really pleased about that when you when I look back at humanity's contribution over the centuries, we do see that, we've developed a very kind of formidable ability to to correct our errors and not just simply give in to them. So how would you then if you were looking back historically right about the period we're in right now? It's difficult.

You know, it's, it's very difficult to take a bit of distance from your own era. I think that I would see my ear as one where we've kind of lost our orientation towards the future. You know, we we've, you know, for centuries now, since modern times, we always had a sense of the future could be better than it is now. And people had this desire to discuss and debate how do the world next year or ten years, twenty years from now could be a better version of our existing world. And at the moment, we don't have that.

We if you look at all the political parties in all the Western countries, it's very rare when they basically say this this is the, the world that we would like to build. These are our ideals. This is the shape that it would take. Instead, we have this very what I call in the book a very presentist outlook where we're kind of stuck in the present as we kind of immobilized. And, basically, very often, we seem to be much more interested in in kind of tackling the injustices of of two centuries ago, about which we can do nothing because these things have already happened, then dealing with the problems that confront us in the here and now.

So at the moment, I think we are, in a sense, in a state of transition where we, to some extent, intellectually and morally paralyzed to some extent. And I think that's one of the, distinct features of our time. Is it substantively or is it a state of mind? And what I mean by that is we brought a few billion people out of poverty in the last thirty years with globalization. Americans are dying of death of despair, but they're not dying from physical violence at the rates they've died from it in the past.

There is food, not great shelter for everyone. That that is an issue. Homelessness is a real issue. But when you look at running water, and you look at our air, and you look at the the physical economy, is this a state of mind, or is it a reality? Well, unfortunately, the state of mind is part of that of our reality.

So it's not the case that there is a state of mind and external to that there's a reality. You know, the way that, things work is that, our reality is mediated through our cultural assumptions. And if our cultural assumptions are very pessimistic, very fatalistic, as it is the case now, then it means that, you know, even though you and I can say that, you know, when the quality of life of most people is much better than ever before, and there are all these incredible things that have happened over the last fifty years, we can point to them. But if you feel that that actually is not important and maybe even exaggerated and you and you merely see a kind of sense of status and isolation, you feel atomized, as many people are, then that reality will be very different, because of their of the of your kind of cultural and and psychological assumptions. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's a huge problem that our cultural you know, essentially, our cultural values are profoundly fatalistic at the moment.

We really perceive ourselves not as the makers of history, but as the objects of history. There's a very strong sense of passivity that seems to have swept up our our cultural norms. And to that extent, it means that despite the incredible insights and us and gains and technological innovations that have occurred, we we kind of feel that things are worse than ever before. So just to give you an example, one of the the myths in in on both sides of the Atlantic is that the younger generations are worse off than ever before. And you have these stories about how young people cannot buy a house and, you know, that, you know, they cannot get jobs, their wages are lowered, they never live so badly, you know, sort of as their and and and their and their boomer parents have somehow stolen their birthright because they had this really nice time when everything was grand.

And, actually, when you look at the statistics, you'll find that the reality is very different. You know, sort of you not every boomer, you know, had a rich lifestyle. Not every boomer had was able to buy their house in their twenties or even in in their thirties. You had rich and poor boomers, but, you know, that reality is overlooked. Similarly, when you look at young people today, yes, they have all kinds of problems, you know, just like in every single generation.

But in terms of their life chances and their lifestyle, it's that it's not like they're the polar opposite of their parents or their grandparents' sort of generations. And yet we we tell the story all the time that these these kids are so badly off. They've been so put upon. And that's and and the more we say that, that becomes the reality. That becomes, you know, the real reality rather than what actually has is going on in our world.

So as a sociologist, do you see things heading in the right direction and that it's that it's just gonna take some time for this generation to develop the maturity and the grit that you essentially are calling for? No. I don't think that that will happen just by itself. I mean, the only way that will happen is if peep people do something about it because, you know, people have the idea that somehow things will change or there's a kind of pendulum swing or there are these cycles overlooks the fact that there are very profound cultural obstacles for that kind of clarity, to be realized. So we we somehow gotta create the condition where we are able to sort of encourage people to move forward, to foster a climate where people have greater belief in themselves and in their capacity to change things and make things happen.

And in particular, I don't think anything will change until we change the way we educate young people. I think that the way we educate young people is a recipe for failure and a recipe for feeling powerless. And some of them need that system of education that, stretches young people, expects more for from them, that raises their expectation rather than treat young people as if they are, you know, potential mental health patients, which is what we're doing at the moment. So you talked about both sides of the Atlantic. Do you see from a political perspective or an educational perspective, any group that is trying to reform education to develop this grit and maturity that you're calling for?

I know some you know, here and there, there are groups of individuals and there are groups of parents who are aware of these problems and trying to do something. But at the moment, I think many of them feel overwhelmed by the fact that the cultural pressures are going at very different direction. But I do think that there's a there's a there's a tendency which never used to exist before of challenging what the schools are doing. A lot of parents are raising questions and are worried, for example, about their kids being indoctrinated. Other parents are are worried about the fact that standards have really fallen, and they want their children to be intellectually stimulated a little bit more.

Other parents are, homeschooling. I mean, I'm not a fan of homeschooling, but I can understand why people are doing it because if they take their kids seriously, they want the best for them, and they feel that schools are basically babysitting them rather than educating them. So there is something afoot, and that's this is the one area where, people like myself and others can make a a bit of a difference in terms of encouraging this reaction and try to turn that into a to a movement, which can then have a an an impact in in in the kind of cultural landscape, in relation to education. It's interesting because I've I've read some of your pieces in the compact, and your background, and correct me if I if I say this wrong, but is more left leaning. And yet, from reading both sides and trying to arrive at the truth, there is a lot more talk on the right about anti wokeness, about toughness, about grit.

I mean, you've got Dan Crenshaw from Texas, who's a young Republican, talks about grit and Navy SEALs. You know, you talk about the anti woke kind of toughen up part, that ironically is coming from the right. How how do you reconcile all that? Well, I think what happens is that, you know, when you have a a section of society that feels culturally on the defensive, as the right is, they often will see things with greater clarity precisely because, you know, they are, you know, kind of in retreat and they can see and many of the problems they can see, for example, some of the problems that have been discussed in relation to the school. I do think that some of these criticisms from the right are, you know, on the money.

But there's a danger that, instead of taking a step back and asking the questions, how do we transform education so that it is it is really much more, able to give kids that kind of sense of agency that is being lacked. Very often, what they do is they try to, give an alternative, almost like the mirror image alternative so that, you know, they would like to displace work indoctrination with their indoctrination, which isn't particularly helpful. I mean, where they arrived is that we do it's not a shock of of of getting our kids to be tough and, you know, all the rest of it. It's a it's a question of independence. We can provide children with with the possibility of of gaining independence where they have to, you know, sort of make choices for themselves and where they have to navigate the world in a way that isn't continually dependent on adult advice, They're much more likely to get that strength that comes from that experience.

You know? It's a really great feeling when you on your own have succeeded in doing something, you know, without somebody holding your hand. And the way that young kids become genuinely strong is not just by going to the gym. It's by feeling independent, feeling that because that's confidence that comes from the experiences that they've gone through. So if I'm I'm hearing this correctly, there is no easy fix, and that the act of struggling, both physically or spiritually, psychologically, learning to critically think, that there is no shortcut.

And that we as a society have to recognize with freedom comes responsibility, and that we have to do the work. Yeah. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. That's what I would see as absolutely essential, that at the end of the day, instead of just simply coming up with these, kind of of the cuff answers and imagining that, there are you know, a slogan will do the trick the trick, we have to realize that we gotta make up for a a lot of bad stuff that has happened, that we miseducated, I think, around three or four generations of young kids. And we have to ask the question, well, how do we retrieve that situation?

And that means that we have got to reeducate ourselves as adults in order to play a a responsible, authoritative role with the young young people. So, Frank, let me ask you. In looking at the statistics for the recent election, there was a tremendous split over those people that had college educations and those people that did not. I I put to you that this reeducation that we're talking about applies to everybody. It's not whether or not you went to college or or or not.

And then it's it's it's reeducating people on universal values like common sense. How does that get communicated to the elites and and the college educated? And how does it get communicated to the non college educated where it brings people together as opposed to some kind of condescension? Well, again, it's a it's a big problem because in many ways, college education has become a in many disciplines has become a form of miseducation. I mean, I know universities really, really well.

And the universities have changed and colleges have changed from what they were at, you know, when I started teaching at universities when, essentially, they were about, in a sense, taking seriously academic excellence and academic values and where, essentially, your job as an academic was to get the kids to learn to question things and not take anything just like on on somebody else's opinion. And, you know, my job as an academic was to stretch young people as far as I could to bring out the best in them. I think that now when I go to, you know, universities, it's a very different ethos that prevails. And there is a lot more, you know, lot less of that challenge, lot more indoctrination, and a lot of miseducation. I think that very often academics believe that their job is to get students to become psychically distant from the views of their parents.

It's almost like as if colleges want to create a moral distance between, their undergraduates and the communities that they've come from. They think that these communities are backward. They're they're racist. They're they're confused and xenophobic. So we gotta get young people not to think like the people from the communities where they've come from.

And that's a that's a problem. So in a sense, I think that we we have to somehow ask the question, what is the role of higher education? Because at the moment, higher education is not nothing like not remotely like what a university, an a a academy should really be all about. And to me, the really important thing is to give confidence to people regardless of whether they go to college or not so that they understand that, they got the intellectual capacity, the potential to deal with relatively complex problems. Very often, they are told that problems are so complex that only experts can deal with them.

You know, obviously, there's a important role for expertise, but what you also need is for citizens to discuss and debate with each other, to use each other's, insights to get to the point where they can learn from that experience. So I I I think the education process is something that is direct should be directed to everybody. And in many respects, the people that didn't go to college aren't necessarily at a disadvantage when it comes to many of these issues that we've talked about. Yeah. No.

I I agree with that. And do you see a movement away from the indoctrination approach and the bias in colleges, or do you do you think the pendulum has not started to swing yet? Yeah. Unfortunately, at the moment, higher education is is a a lost cause. And I and I know that because, you know, I I I've got friends who teach in universities.

You know, I know the problems, you know, the the good professors, the kind of problems that they're kind of confronted with, the way you get ostracized if you raise decent views. You know, there was a time when the university was the one place you could say anything. Right? Academic freedom, free speech was more deeply entrenched in institutions of higher education, whereas now it's the opposite. It's probably the least open space, but at the most censorious environment.

And in general, I think the, the higher education system has become so deeply implicated in in censoring and in in controlling people's, mind and indoctrination indoctrinating that it's a it's very difficult to do something about it. The only thing that can be done in the short run is to try to build or or find or start new institutions. It's almost like we gotta create new universities, new institutions of higher education just to demonstrate to the world what a real university could look like. That certainly is a dramatic way to to fix it. I'm wondering if, as a student of history and as a sociologist, if we reminded people of the importance of debate And we reminded people that even though colleges historically have been liberal, there were conservatives amongst the ranks, and that something healthy came out of that debate.

I you know, people are bright, as you said. You know, they are in the swing states more educated than people might imagine. And I'm wondering if we could remind people of the importance of healthy debate, whether or not we could influence the colleges that way. We can try. I'm not entirely pessimistic because there are a lot of people who are fed up with this kind of, cultural intolerance that prevails.

And I know certainly in England where I do a lot of work, you have different initiatives which try to create platform for discussion and debate. I'm involved in organizing an event every year called the Battle of Ideas in October where you get thousands of young people come along, and debate is encouraged. And, you know, you can see there's a real appetite for that by by so many of them. So I think that what you're suggesting about creating initiatives that promote this more healthy attitude towards tolerance is the way forward. And, hopefully, at some point, you know, sort of it will create a dynamic a momentum, whereby more and more people will see that the upside and the importance of having a culture that is much more open to, argument and criticism than is the case at the moment.

So I think that's probably the way forward. What I what I think is a problem is the institution. I think the institutions are so deeply captured and are so, set in their ways that it's very difficult to do anything that is kind of effective at the short run. I hope I'm wrong. You know?

I hope I'm proved to be wrong because I would like to see a a a renaissance in higher education occurring in the Western world. Well, I I hope you're wrong too. I have to say that it does seem like democracies tend to get things done after a crisis or during a crisis, that it seems to take that to bring people together. And I'm I'm hoping that changes. And I also, in my own observations, do believe that at least in America, the Democrats are perhaps thinking about what they did wrong in a different way.

And they're from that humility, there is a potential to ask yourself what you've done wrong. And and putting back on the agenda, well, maybe we've lost the art of debate. Maybe there's an openness now because of the, in a sense, disappointment by a lot of people. So I at the Puck, we're trying to do that. We're trying to create a safe place for people to have these discussions.

That's why I really wanted to have you on, Frank, today, and it's been a it's been a real pleasure. I do think that ending on the point you've just made is really important, and and that's the question. To what extent do we learn from our experience? There are obviously some people who will learn from their experience. For example, I've noticed that some Democrats are no longer just simply saying that the reason why they lost is because, you know, of misogyny.

A lot of men didn't want a woman president, which is weird and stupid. A lot of democrats are also realizing that they failed to hear the voices of the people that were around them because they were reluctant to listen, and that's a a step in the right direction. However, there are also a lot of Democrats who basically are saying that they're so disappointed, and they're so, in a sense, offended by what has happened that they're gonna move out of America. Many of them are saying we're gonna move out of x onto a different social platform. So there's a kind of, not only a sense of defeatism, but, almost, making a virtue out of the fact that you've been defeated and somehow putting yourself into giving yourself a status of being a victim of of circumstance that somehow some malevolent forces have created a situation for which you're not responsible.

So I think that for Democrats, the key thing will be to take responsibility for their defeat and and realize that their setbacks, their defeat was to some extent of their own making. And and once you begin to, ask and, those kinds of questions and reflecting that kind of a way, it may well be possible that something new can emerge out of that kind of defeat. I think that's a wonderful way to end. I I guess I'll ask one final question, which is, is there any wish or thought process that you'd like the Republicans to go through? Well, the Republicans have got to have the confidence not to simply sort of embrace a kind of superficial triumphalist mode.

But the question that, you know, they have to deal with is this, they've they've deserved their victory. I mean, they really fought for it. I mean, the campaign that they, you know, was quite impressive despite what the legacy media said. So they deserve that victory, but now they're gonna have to adopt a much more reflective style of learning how to rule because, getting elected is one thing. Embracing the art of statementship and and of rule is something that many of them have got very much experience in, and they're gonna have to basically develop a kind of pragmatic style to which they can sort of execute their principles.

I I think, obviously, we cannot expect them not to act on their principles. But if you're gonna act on your principles, you gotta do it pragmatically, so it's got some effect upon public life. So, hopefully, that will occur, and I am encouraged by some of the Republicans. I particularly like JD Vance, who I know is very unpopular with Democrats because I think that he's an unusually, smart, intelligent young guy. And I again, I hope that he grows the kind of maturity that he will need to play at the the very important position that he's been, thrown into.

Well, Frank, this has been a real pleasure. I'm grateful that you were able to take the time out of your schedule to join us on the puck. So So have a wonderful, wonderful evening. It was very nice talking to you. All the best.

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