The Price Of Thinking Out Loud - Douglas Murray - #109

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom, and welcome to Over One Million Downloads. That's right, we made it into the Seven Figures Club. Huge thank you to everybody who's supported us over the last 18 months. So it's only been going since January 2018, and it feels so good to hit that one million figure. Onto today's guest, what better of a way to celebrate hitting a million downloads than with Douglas Murray, international bestselling author of The Strange Death Of Europe, and his new book, The Madness Of Crowds, is absolutely sublime. A lot of sense making around some really contentious topics. I mean, the four chapters in the book are gay, women, race and trans, which kind of tells you everything that you need to know about what you're in for today. It's really fitting that this episode with Douglas marks the breaking of one million downloads because it absolutely reminded me why I love doing this podcast. You know, it's not a huge team. It's me and Video Guy Dean putting out two episodes every Monday and every Thursday with people like Ben Greenfield or James Altucher, Aubrey Marcus or Scott Barry Kaufman. It's a big project that is unrelenting in its workload. And having conversations like this with Douglas just make it so worthwhile. I genuinely would do this podcast even if no one was listening. But increasingly it seems like more and more people are. So thank you so much for tuning in. If you are not subscribed, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. You will get one episode every Monday and every Thursday with the most interesting humans on the planet delivered directly into your listening device of choice. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Douglas Murray.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by Douglas Murray, author of The Madness Of Crowds and bestselling author of The Strange Death Of Europe, Douglas, welcome to the show.

**Douglas Murray** (2:21)
It's been a great pleasure to join you so far.

**Chris Williamson** (2:24)
We've had a couple of technical issues, but got through them fine. And now we get on to the real issues. First things first, Madness Of Crowds, your new book, four chapters, women, gay, race and trans. Each one of those is a nuclear warhead ready to go off underneath my foot.
How are we going to be able to navigate this conversation? And how also did you navigate this without getting blown up?

**Douglas Murray** (2:56)
Well, I don't know. I've survived so far. The books have been out of fortnight.

**Chris Williamson** (3:02)
I'm still here.

**Douglas Murray** (3:06)
My view is that we've become in our societies really bad at having conversations, and we've become very bad at thinking because we can't think out loud, or at least the price of thinking out loud has become potential total career and life destruction. So when people wonder why people don't do it, it's not hard to find the reason. I think that for some reason in recent years, I noticed that these four issues in particular, there are others, but these four issues in particular were the ones which people just kept on, the moment they nicked the trip wire, they were just detonated.
I just found that really interesting also because I think all four issues are unbelievably interesting. And actually significant, I mean, have significant effects on people's lives and on our societies. So my view is that we've got this strange position in our societies at the moment where the only people who can sort of speak or think out loud are people who don't have any hierarchy above them, that's vulnerable to crowd stampeds and mobs and so on. So those of us who can think aloud, whether we're right or wrong, I don't know, but sort of have a disproportionate duty to talk and think and write. And so I decided just to take each of the absolute nuclear bomb issues head on, and just go jumping on in.

**Chris Williamson** (4:39)
You certainly did. Were there any, I was going to ask you this at the end, but I'm going to ask you now. Were there any chapters that you could have considered adding that you didn't?

**Douglas Murray** (4:48)
That's a very good question. There are two that I could have done that I didn't. One was Green, which I have been becoming more and more interested in. And I think that there's whatever people's views about the nature of climate change and the best way to deal with it and so on, it's clear there is at this point an element of crowd mentality that's kicking in.
And I suppose the other one that I could have done, I thought about doing, but decided to put off to another day was mental health, because I think that mental health in general is a fascinating, fascinating issue. It's come very fast into the mainstream, and I think that's good in all sorts of ways, but there are lots of issues around mental health that I'm very skeptical about. Not that, you know, we don't need to get into all of them, but I don't entirely share a lot of the presumptions of the age. And I think that it basically, it has some of the same attributes of the things I'm discussing here, is that you get on to the thing, and you don't know where to correct, or it becomes almost impossible to say stop at any point. And I tell you, I mean, with the mental health one, just not bang on, but one of the ones I noticed a few years ago was that there were certain mental illnesses that people clearly wanted to have, and ones they didn't. Well, okay, sorry, you just invited me to jump in an entirely new atomic bomb, but here we go.