#184 - Helen Pluckrose - Liberalism, Free Speech & the Authoritarian Turn

**Helen Pluckrose** (0:00)
That the root of liberalism is the belief, let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided they harm nobody else, nor deny them the same freedoms. I think people have got complacent. We've stopped recognizing liberalism as something we are, do and need to maintain, but as something that we are owed.
I would have a very radical stance in defense of freedom because not everybody can be arrested. The idea that you ever can defeat ideas by suppressing speech is just not supported by any evidence at all.

**Peter McCormack** (0:37)
Perhaps some form of revolution is what we're headed towards.

**Helen Pluckrose** (0:40)
A liberal revolution, yes.

**Peter McCormack** (0:43)
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Good morning, Helen. How are you?

**Helen Pluckrose** (1:10)
I am very well.

**Peter McCormack** (1:11)
Thank you for coming in. I've been very excited to talk to you ever since Chelsea spoke to you.
I feel like I'm in the final act now for me. I'm 47 I'm preparing to hand over life to my kids and trying to make sense of world. I had a great time in the 90s, growing up in the 90s, and I see a very confusing world where we are putting a lot of pressure on kids with trying to consider the world and have a position, a political position. I don't really understand what's going on with politics. I was very excited to talk to you because I want to understand how we've lost that amazing world I grew up in.

**Helen Pluckrose** (1:51)
Yeah, as a GenX myself, and four years older than you and absolutely refuting your sense of being past it, it certainly does seem that during the 90s, we were just a lot less neurotic when we were getting towards a place where there was a consensus of leave people alone unless they're hurting you, that we could take people on their own terms. I think it's easy to have rose-tinted spectacles here and to think that the things were a lot easier than they were, but there certainly was much more openness and tolerance. People are a lot less neurotic. I keep speaking to Millennials and Gen Z at the moment about how neurotic they're getting, particularly with regard to their sex lives.
Yes, it is troubling. Really?

**Peter McCormack** (2:52)
How do they get in neurotic about their sex lives?

**Helen Pluckrose** (2:55)
You see the discourses about women, who have body count and ideals of masculinity, and we have the end cells growing, who are claiming that women are only interested in the top 5 percent of men or whatever it is, maybe 20 percent. Then we have the young women going even more feminist in a way that is downright misandrist. Then we have the social conservatives rising and saying that women really need to get married at 18 and not go to university and have 12 children by the time they're 25
I would say, yes, it's certainly getting neurotic.

**Peter McCormack** (3:33)
Do you think we're overanalyzing the world these days? Because my memory in the 90s, the reason I liked it is, and we mentioned before, I did want to talk about phones and algorithms a little bit. But to give you the memory that you probably had is that if you went to meet somebody, a friend, you had to turn up on time because there was no way of texting and saying, I'm going to be five minutes late. It's like I'm meeting you at Woolworth at one o'clock. You had to be there at one o'clock. Maybe you'd wait around for a few minutes.
But now we're constantly connected and we're constantly connected to information and we're constantly connected to opinions. We didn't have that. I used to go and get my skateboard and go skateboarding and go to a concert and watch the concert. Now we have it is just like all the kids are connected all the time. Could that be something over-analyzing?

**Helen Pluckrose** (4:19)
I think so. Certainly, being too online, curating yourself, your presentation constantly online, I am quite convinced by the writing of Jonathan Hyatt on this, The Anxious Generation and I know he's had a lot of pushback. From some sort of really data-based empirical researchers in the field, who say that he is kind of narrowing in too much on this. He's making it the sole issue when there is not convincing evidence that say removing phones from schools do anything. So I think on those fine-grained details, I think that still very much up in the air.