Konstantin Kisin: „Proiectul occidental înseamnă libertate și asta face posibile toate lucrurile”

I want to touch on Yuri a little bit more here. As far as I can tell, we're kind of living in the world that Yuri Bezmenov predicted. He talked about this long stage of demoralization, which is essentially basically stopping people from believing in themselves. Exactly this Achilles' heel, this key thing that you're describing right now. And then there's this time period where all this is being normalized. I can't remember the second stage. And then the final stage is normalization, but there's also this stage of crisis. It kind of feels like the West is in a kind of crisis. Basically, a very destabilized society where all these values that have been kind of the rock on which American society was built are up for grabs. They are. I have been very enthused. I don't know how you feel about it, Jan, but the West's reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are quibbles I have, obviously, with some of it, particularly in Europe in terms of Germany. But generally speaking, I have been very pleasantly surprised by how actually quite unified the reaction has been. I think that I, like the person who authorized the invasion, overestimated the extent of the West's internal division. I don't think it turned out to be quite as bad as I thought it was, which enthused me. I think I was pleased to see that. But I don't think that means the problem is solved. We still have a problem. It's just not as bad as I thought it was. And the thing is, I think most people have no idea that they're tomorrow. They don't know that the lack of confidence that they now have in their own society is not normal. This endless self-flagellation is sort of like is seen as powerful. This is what we do now. But it's not normal. We're in a very abnormal society now, a society that endlessly questions itself. That's a very strange way to be. Likewise, if we were just obsessively proud of ourselves, it would be equally abnormal. I often think of a society as a bit like a human being, a human being who's just proud of themselves and just obsessed with how brilliant they are. It's probably not a healthy human being. But a human being who is obsessed with their inadequacies and their imperfections and the past mistakes is not a healthy human being either. And so that's why I've never been someone who said, oh, the West needs to just think that we're the best people ever and American exceptionalism and Western exceptionalism and there's nothing for us to learn and there's nothing for us to improve. The way you improve is by asking questions of yourself and demanding more of yourself as a society and being truly committed to the principles that you consider to be the core values of your civilization. But the fact that we spend so much time beating ourselves up now is not normal. It's not. It's not leading to good places. I always found it so fascinating that this particular brand of Marxist or Socialist thought infused with postmodernism, it actually comes from America. Are you unhappy about that as an Englishman now? And then, frankly, later I've been thinking, actually, it makes perfect sense that it would come from America. This is the place that really is the fulcrum where freedom is kind of sitting, I guess. Well, if we're victims of our own success, then the most successful place will be the place where the victimhood is greatest. If we're the fact that we've created the freest, most prosperous societies in the world, if that is what's causing the reaction, then it will be in the home of greater freedom, like the United States, where that would take place. That makes perfect sense, doesn't it? And this is one of the things that Francis, my co-host from Trigonometry, and I, we've been here in New York for a few days, and we kind of see how much more dynamic this country is than even us in the UK. This is the place where ideas are generated and discussed, and they have an impact, and they spread around the world. So we consume your culture in the UK, and because we speak English, we're sort of deluded into thinking that we are the same culture, whereas, of course, we aren't. It's one of the things that I find amazing that I talk about in the book is, in the UK now, we talk about how we're a nation of immigrants, which is a complete historical falsehood in every way. It's just nonsense. Britain is not a nation of immigrants at all. The only reason we repeat this rubbish is because we get it from you guys, because you are a nation of immigrants, and people would just take this part of the culture, import it into the UK, and just repeat it endlessly without realizing that, you know, different places have different histories. It's not that complicated, but it's a testament to the power of American culture in the Anglosphere, particularly, that we adopt all your ideas wholesale. So this is why I always sort of encourage my American friends is, please look after your culture, because we are the ones that are eating all the crap that gets produced, you know, as well as you. It's not just your own country that's affected by this. It's the entire world. I found your critique of multiculturalism to be one of the most thoughtful and interesting things that have summarized that I've come across. So I want to give you a chance to kind of tell me what you think about multiculturalism, because frankly, it sounds great, right, on the surface. Well, I think that the difficulty we got ourselves into, particularly in Western Europe, but I know less about the United States, I'll confess, but in Western Europe, we confused the desire to live in a multi-ethnic society, a society in which people from different ethnic backgrounds, different religious groups come together and live together peacefully, which I think is perfectly possible. It's more difficult than a sort of ethnostate like many of the ones that exist around the world. It's more of a challenge, but there are huge benefits that come from that too, in terms of innovation, drive, creativity. It's really important. But that is not the same as saying to people, you are here in Britain or in America, and here's a piece of land, and carve out for yourself a piece of this land in our country in which you live by the standards by which you choose. There is no need for you to integrate into our society. There's no need for you to abandon some of the ways of thinking and doing business that you did in the society from which you come. That doesn't work, because if we're living in America, if we're living in the United Kingdom, then there are certain things that we have to equalize and be common on in order to be able to live cohesively together. We have to have an understanding, for example, that we all live under the same law. We cannot have people who bring, whether that, you know, it's not just Muslims in our country, it's also Jews as well. You can't bring your religious legal system into a society and demand that that is parallel with the legal system of the state in which you operate. We all have to say, I am originally from Russia, but I am British. I've come to this country to be part of this country. Now, I'm not abandoning the things that I learned and the ways of thinking that I got by being born where I was born, but I have to embrace this new identity and make myself part of this society and contribute to it. This is one of the reasons I love doing what I do, because we've now created a YouTube show in the UK that employs local people. I, as someone who came from outside of the society, am now so meshed with it that I'm creating work for people who were born in that society. I'm creating jobs. That, to me, is the way that an immigrant, in my opinion, should be. And I'm not saying that because that's the way I am. I'm saying that because that's how I want it to be, because I think that's what the purpose of traveling to a different place and making a home there is. You become part of that society and you want to make it better. Whereas if the idea that we're teaching is you come to that society and you live isolated from that society, you don't necessarily learn the language of that society, you don't integrate, you don't embrace some of the important values, then you get to the stage where you have problems like the ones that we're seeing in the UK, where a teacher teaches his kids a lesson about religious tolerance, which involves something to do with the prophet, and suddenly this teacher has to go into hiding, because we have people in society who believe that their religious views are above the law, the law of the land to which they come or to which their parents brought them. This is not sustainable. We cannot live in a society where we have parallel structures. So multi-ethnic society, very, very important, very desirable, I think hugely beneficial. Multicultural society is the recipe for disaster. In the past in the US, there were very, very clear assimilationist policies. There's a whole series of steps you would take to become part, to become an American, to become part of the culture. But somewhere along the way, over the last 20, 30 years, that became racist, or any other, there's probably a whole bunch of other ists. Certainly colonialist would be a term that was used. So what you're describing is the cost here of a nation of immigrants where that sort of encourage everyone to join the shared culture is a problem. Why? Because the implicit assumption is that culture is better. And that is sort of an anathema, isn't it? Well, I think Thomas Sowell is the best on this. He talks about multiculturalism being the idea that you can praise any culture except Western culture and criticize only Western culture and other. I, by the way, don't make, I mean, I do say in the opening chapter is called trust me, West is best. But I'm not actually making a claim that Western society is best in some necessarily universal way. I just think it's best for people like me, and for people like us, whose values include things like freedom, the opportunity to speak their mind. There are plenty of people in the world who, I suppose, are less bothered by that and are more concerned about other things. They want perhaps more social cohesion than I'm obsessed about. They want society to act as one. There are more communitarian societies further east that do that. And if that's what people there want, then that's up to them. I'm just saying, I think those of us who think freedom is important, those of us who think the opportunity to speak your mind is important, those of us who think the pursuit of scientific rationality is important, that the hard sciences are important, that they're not Western colonialist patriarchal concepts, they're just the truth of how we improve society. You know, I just, I'm amazed every time we travel around the world how technology has made life so much better for us in some ways. And that comes from the idea that actually it's quite important to work out what's true and what's not true. It's not just opinions. There's physics and chemistry and biology and, by the way, psychology too. These are things that have predictive power. They're not just things that we can deconstruct endlessly with no consequence. So if we want to continue in these technologically advanced, scientifically expanding, progressing societies, the freedom is the thing that makes it all happen. And if you don't want that, there's lots of societies you can go and live in. Just don't bring that crap over here. Well, freedom and the acceptance that there is objective reality that we can all agree around, and that it exists outside of perception and, frankly, power dynamics. Absolutely. And to me, that is what the Western project is. That is why the West is successful. Because technologically, it's way ahead of everybody else. And that's because people are free to experiment. They're not taking dik-tat from a mid-level apparatchik, as they were in the Soviet Union, or they are now in communist China. You are free to make something and see if it works. And if people like it, and if it's of value to other people, you will be rewarded. Not because you managed to persuade some kind of Mandarin that what you're doing is the right thing. It's because that's what the people around you benefit from. You measure your contribution by the success you're having in society. Now, of course, that's an idealistic view. Not everyone who's successful in Western society is contributing. Some people are parasitic, too, and some organizations are parasitic. But the model is that if you create something that makes other people's lives better, you will be rewarded. And that is all based on the idea of freedom. And this is also the reason why so many people are clamoring to get here, because they know that that's actually possible. And it's certainly not possible everywhere, not by a long shot. Right. I mean, look at me. My parents were dirt poor when I was born, dirt poor. They then had a period when they were wealthy for a short period of time, sent me to boarding school in the UK. And in the meantime, my dad was falsely accused of various things in the Russian government, had to flee the country under false identity, lost all of his money. So I went to university as this rich kid. And by the time I was in year two, I was sleeping in the local park because I didn't have a roof over my head. And that was 20 years ago, Jan, just 20. And here I am sitting here in New York, just next to Madison Square Garden. We're having this conversation. Where does this happen? Which other part in the world does it happen that you've got no family, no connections, no one to pull strings for you? Where does it happen that you can just pursue a dream and make something of yourself and you have those opportunities? Are you telling me that that's happening in Russia now? No, it's not. Is it happening in communist China? No. Where are these societies that allow you to do this? It's only in a society like this one that allows you to achieve your potential. If you really want to, you can. Doesn't matter where you come from. Doesn't matter what your skin color is. That's why people come here. That's why people are dying in the Mediterranean, scraping and scrimping to get to the West. That's why people are crossing the southern border in this country. That's what they want. And by the way, look at all these racial activists in this country and in the UK. They talk about how America and Britain or whatever is the most racist country in the world. Notice how they never leave. They don't go to these whatever better places exist out there. They never leave. Why is that? Why is that? And arguably, many of them are quite entrepreneurial, I would say. Right. They've got the opportunity to do what they want to do here, which is the grift that they do. They've got that chance here because it's a society that rewards you if you pursue things. For the record, what is the grift? The grift, I think, is capitalizing on Western white guilt. That's what it is. We're very successful. Like every other society in human history, we've committed awful atrocities all around the world, like everybody else. But we are the most successful society ever. And we feel bad about it. We feel guilty about it. We feel terrible about it. And we've been trained to think like that. Like me, I'm a dark-skinned, first-generation immigrant. Even I'm like, oh, maybe I shouldn't talk about this because this is the idea that we've now indoctrinated in ourselves. And these people know that. And they know that it works. It's a tactic that works. I was saying this to you before we started. We have this election for conservative party leader in the UK at the moment, which is also about who will be the next leader of the country, the prime minister. And it's the most diverse field that we've ever seen in British politics. So there's more people in that race than in the left-wing Labour Party that have ever been a minister or a shadow minister. It's crazy how women of different backgrounds, from an African background, from an Asian background, an Indian background, people from all over the thing. And the conservatives, it makes me laugh how naive conservatives can be sometimes. They're thinking about, oh, well, if we do this, they're going to stop calling us names. They're going to stop calling us racist. They're thinking, oh, look how diverse we are now. Now we have it made, right? Right. Something like that, yeah. But it's never been about that. Calling people racist, they're not calling you racist because they care about race or racism or eliminating racism. They're calling you racist because it works. That's why they're doing it. They're not going to stop. They're not going to stop. But you're saying because it's a tool to gain power. It's a tool to shut people up. Because if you can't win the argument, if you can't actually have a conversation, well, you're saying we are a bad society. OK. What are we comparing to? Compared to what? This is one of Thomas Sowell's three great questions. Compared to what? In Russian, we have the same saying. Everything is understood in comparison. But if you can't win that conversation, then what you have to do is shut down anyone who asks that question. And it's just a tool. That's why they've got no problem. They'll take a gay person who doesn't agree with their politics, and they will say he's got internalized homophobia. They'll take a brown person and say they're a traitor to the race or a black person, they're a traitor to the race. Because it's not about the truth. It's about winning to these people. So free speech is important to you. Yeah, I think we've worked that out.