In conversation with Maurice Saatchi
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Welcome, everyone. Whoa, that's loud. Welcome. My name is Larry Kramer. I am the president and vice chancellor here at the London School of Economics. And it's my pleasure to welcome all of you here to this very special event.

I doubt the word orgasm has been uttered from this podium before. I would not have expected to be the first person to do it, given what I taught, but here we are. Of course, the climax we'll be talking about tonight is of the mind, the unique, sometimes overwhelming pleasure one experiences when seeing an intellectual puzzle or issue from a new angle for the very first time. We'll hear more about that from tonight's speaker, the Lord Morris Saatchi.

It's hard to know where to begin in describing Morris, so I'll start with his most important accomplishment, being a graduate of LSE, and not just any graduate, but a top-notch student who won the Macmillan Prize for Sociology and went on to become an esteemed member of our Court of Governors. But that's just the beginning. Morris is nothing short of a legend in the advertising world. With his brother, he transformed the industry, taking Saatchi & Saatchi from a company of 11 to the biggest agency in the world.

In politics, he worked with Margaret Thatcher and John Major on four consecutive general election victories. In 1996, he entered the House of Lords and later became shadow minister for the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. He also served as chairman of the Conservative Party and chairman of the Center for Policy Studies. His legislative efforts in Parliament led to the passage of the 2016 Access to Medical Treatments Innovation Act.

But accomplishments don't really capture what's special here. Morris is someone of immense and varied talents, a creative force, and by the way, the designer of our logo, an inveterate political animal, a rock contour without equal, and someone who takes great delight in, as the blurb for his new book reads, debunking some of the world's most widely held social and cultural delusions.

I should also say he's been a fantastic friend to LSE and to me personally, and I'm enormously grateful for his partnership and counsel in my first year as president here, which I hope will continue. I hope the advice and counsel continues for a long time. The way I wrote that, it's like, which I hope continues for a long time. I hope I continue for a long time as well. And as long as I'm here, I hope Morris continues to be an advisor and counselor. So with that, it's my pleasure to invite Morris Satchi to the lecture. Thank you.

Well, I hope you all share my tremendous feeling of pride in being here because I've got absolutely no doubt that my time at LSE completely changed my life. I'm sure of it and I can even point to the moment when my life changed and set itself on the course that it took.

which was that in what used to be known as the Old Theatre, does it still exist? It does and it's still called the Old Theatre. It's still called the Old Theatre, well, you'll know it well. Anyway, the Old Theatre, which was obviously the scene of marvellous lectures, which were very important, the most important moment was that in those days, this doesn't happen now, I don't think, they used to put panels, big panels, outside the Old Theatre in the lobby...

And there, that was how your results were announced. And there were A4 pages, which started over the panel over there, which was F for fail. Then there was another big panel of lower second. There was another very, very big panel of upper second. And then right over there was a panel which only had three names on it.

of which one of them I'm very happy to say was mine. And as your brilliant new president was just saying, the fact of having a first from LSE and winning that prize for sociology, as an older and wiser person than me at the time said, this first...

it's going to be very important to you for five years, but after that it'll be completely forgotten. And he was totally right. But it was very important for five years, and it was very important because it gave us, gave me and therefore us, and Saatchi and Saatchi as it was then, intellectual credibility. And this was tremendously important. And if you had in mind that you were going to try and

take over America and Madison Avenue, well then intellectual credibility was very crucial. So to say I owe it all to LSE is a tremendous understatement. And I'm thrilled to be here now as a governor and to give whatever help to a man who is really going to be a most superb leader for you in the years ahead. Shall I speak about this book for a minute?

We're going to have a conversation about whatever the president wants to speak to me about. But we both thought I may as well say something about this book as I'm here. I was very interested, as Larry said, I was very interested in whether there is such a thing or whether there isn't, as what would be called a eureka moment. In other words, what in more biblical terms might be called a revelation moment.

I was very interested in whether such a thing actually exists or doesn't. And if it does exist, I was very interested in thinking of it as one might call an orgasm of the mind, a mental orgasm. And I was curious about whether the pleasure that that gives a person could be in any way...

similar to the blissful pleasure of a human orgasm, hence the title of the book. So, about this book, while writing this book, or the genesis of this book, while this was happening, two new words came into all our vocabulary, which are misinformation and disinformation.

and now these are used absolutely every day in every news program. So how anyone is supposed to know what's true and what's lies, I have no idea. Or if perhaps it's all lies. So I was very interested in that, and I thought this uncertainty about what was true and what was lies is no good at all for LSE, because LSE is about economics and political science.

So the idea that there is no science is very unattractive. So I looked into this to see if I could find whatever is supposed to be the truth, if there is such a thing. And the first chapter of this book deals with that. And as it touches on everything else that's in this book, I thought it was worth just giving you a little extract from it. And it'll relate to what we're going to talk about in a minute, I'm sure. So in this search for whether there is such a thing as truth,

I'm afraid to say that I discovered that for centuries there have been a stream of heroic attempts to unravel the difference between perception and reality. Scholars and scientists, as I'm sure you all know, have tried to do that for a thousand years. But after all those years of human progress, it's sad to report that it seems that the real nature of things remains as inaccessible as it was to Aristotle.

You recall that he said, "Fire burns both here and in Persia, but what is thought just changes before our eyes. The decision rests with perception." Now, all of us know that the sensations produced by the same object can vary with the circumstances. Lukewarm water will appear hot to a cold hand and cold to a hot hand. Colours look very different under a microscope. Even the sun in the heavens

we see only as it was eight minutes before. There was a person, the first person who tried to find some science in relation to perception and reality, was Plato. And as you know, unfortunately in Plato's allegory of the human condition, we were tied to chains in a dark cave, able to see a passing parade of objects we thought were real, but which were in fact only the shadows cast by the objects.

In the doctrine of the church, I discovered that reality is only to be found in the ancient gospels and biblical texts interpreted for us by a benevolent priesthood. It seems an inconvenient and stubborn fact that outside Newton's universe, where physical laws may govern reality, the world is conditioned by perception.

and perception is conditioned by the distorting factors of society, genetics, class, upbringing and the conscious or unconscious interests of the perceiver. Even the perception of physical objects cannot be relied on. We recall, you all know, that Descartes famously said that he couldn't be sure that the table at which he was sitting was really there because the only thing about which he could be certain

was that while he was thinking that the table might not be there after all, it was definite that he was there looking at it because he thought he was. And one of Tom Stoppard's characters explained this mystery as he wrote, "Although it appeared to a casual observer standing on the platform at Paddington Station that the train had left Paddington, in fact, as he says, all the observable phenomena indicated that Paddington had left the train.

In his film Rashomon, Kurosawa showed us four very different versions of reality. In 12th century Kyoto, a couple are ambushed. The wife is raped, the husband killed. After the event, four people recall the attack. By altering the perspective and order of events for each character, we perceive the unreality of their contrasting perceptions.

And this is the most frightening part. Even medical experts have been obliged to recognize the infinite power of human perception to control reality. They say that the act of suicide proves that in extremis perception is omnipotent. It has the ultimate power, even to the point of bringing around the final destruction of the human body. A mere cold or backache, or the perception of them,

would pose little problem to such an all-powerful force. This is presumably why 50% of all the drugs prescribed in the world today are said to be prescribed for conditions which are psychosomatic in origin. In other words, where the physical reality of the symptoms are brought about by afflictions of the mind. So at the end of all my researches, there still remains an irremediable tentativeness

about the logically perplexing question of what is real. Who can doubt that when we express, for example, political opinions or beliefs, then error, doubt and uncertainty come to the fore? I've understood that even in the natural sciences, nothing can be said with finality. The closest that science comes to proof, according to our great professor Popper,

The closest the science comes to proof is, as he says, a succession of unsuccessful attempts at falsification. This is why Professor Eyre was able to pronounce the death of the paradigm, the death of the syllogism as the paradigm of deductive reasoning. He showed that the apparently logical progression, pruning roses is good, I prune roses, I am good.

fails because the premise that pruning roses is good is open to question by those who prefer leggy, straggly roses with few blooms. Eyre, as you know, went on to confirm that a political statement is no different to preferring bon glace to a bacon sandwich. In the end, it seems that the most that science has to offer

about the question of human perception versus reality is the chaos theory of mathematics, the most potent symbol of which is the butterfly that flaps its wings over the Amazon rainforest and sets off an electrical storm over Chicago. But the next time it flaps its wings, nothing happens. We'll go on from there. So, thank you. We're going to do some...

conversation up here and then there'll be time for you guys to ask questions. I do want to ask the audience first up front, how many of you either have or have read the book already? Okay, or read about it? Okay, good. Just so I need to, man, some of these questions I'll fill in some background. I do want to start with, by the way, so it is an unusual book. It's oversized. It's filled with a lot of interesting illustrations. Not quite clear what they have to do with the essays.

Which is one of the things I want to talk about. So let's start with what made you want to write this book? It's so cheap too. Yeah, well we'll get to that. It's only 80 pounds. I think it's 89. 89 pounds. So what made you want to write it? Well I think really all the things that I described there. I was very interested to know whether there is such a thing as truth in anything.

And I thought this was a very compelling question. And therefore, the format of this book is that I take 21 popular sayings, statements, things people generally say about things, and then try to present the exact opposite.

And then I think the general idea is that I think it's called Socratic dialogue, isn't it? And isn't it supposed to be the route to wisdom, which is the conflict between two completely opposing points of view. And by the study of these opposing points of view, you're supposed to arrive at a point of wisdom, or in my world, an orgasm of the mind.

So the idea is you want the readers to be engaging with each of the essays, just so you all know. Well, I would have liked to be able to promise the readers an orgasm. That would be absolutely perfect. I was going to ask you to show us what it looks like on stage, but I thought that might be a little embarrassing. By the end of this conversation, they'll all be in that state. I will do my best.

So I do want to talk a little bit about audience and design, but I want to, what you just talked about, which is the kind of radical skepticism, which you were just talking about in Express. So are you sort of with Foucault and the people who say there is no truth and just power? I mean, isn't that what follows from all this? Especially given the role you've played in politics, I'm curious where the radical skepticism takes you.

Well, I think in politics, I am certainly prepared to say that in politics there is no such thing as truth. Whether you can go further than that, as some people have done, and say that there is no such thing as truth at all in any area...

which is in effect what I was... When I was quoting Professor Popper, that's what he said, that even in the natural sciences, there is no such thing as actual proof. And so I certainly see that that's true in politics. And by the way, that doesn't... You shouldn't take that to mean...

"Oh, this is a very cynical view of politics and politicians and politicians are all liars." I don't believe that at all. It's just that it is actually impossible to know what is the truth about, let's say, a political matter in a general election. For example, let's say in a general election that the big issue was daffodil production. Well, the government would say,

daffodil production is up. The opposition would say, daffodil production is down on when we were in office. The government would say, daffodil production is higher than the G8 average. And the opposition would say, daffodil production is lower than the G20 average.

And so it would go on and it would therefore be impossible to determine what is the actual truth about Daffodil production. Or if you want a more related to LSE, Larry, then if you take a heroic figure of mine, and I'm sure all yours, Lionel Robbins, and Lionel Robbins had a most beautiful description which I found very inspiring and rather life-changing.

a beautiful description of the free market. That's something we hear a lot about. And he described the free market very beautifully and in a very understandable way. He called it a perpetual referendum in which thousands of people cast their vote every day for all the hundreds of products and services on offer. And from the competition to win the votes of those people,

better and better products and services emerge. That's supposed to be the most basic principle of the free market, which is itself the most basic principle of capitalism.

But that isn't at all how capitalism has developed. It's developed in a completely different way to that description. And so, if you just take the subject of the free market, it's very hard to know what is the actual truth about whether the free market is a good thing or whether it isn't. It has turned into something very different, which is something I certainly didn't expect. I was a tremendous proponent of globalisation

But I didn't at all see that the effect of globalization would be the creation of giant global corporations who would in effect be cartels in one category after another and that therefore there would be a huge imbalance of power between the individual customer and the giant global corporation. That's not at all what Lionel Robbins was describing.

And so that's a very unhappy situation because the end result of... It's very sad if the end result of competition is the end of competition. That would be very unattractive. So, you know, now I'm puzzled, I guess. Especially the last part, though, then, reflects that there actually is some capacity to know what's happening and what isn't. And certainly there has to be. I mean, otherwise, how would you... Why would you be a conservative rather than a liberal?

Right? I mean, you obviously have some... And the reason I ask this, by the way, just for the audience, and I wanted to talk about this, which is there are those who would say...

You were one of the people who began the decline of politics the way it is in the '79 campaign, right? Where you played a major role in changing the way in which campaigns run through the kind of very powerful, simple messaging. In the essay that you wrote, you have the essays on politics, there's a bunch of them, they're kind of enigmatic.

But you did play an important role in how campaigns are waged. And you do kind of defend and justify it. But the way I understood it is by basically saying people aren't dumb, but they can be manipulated if you have the right information about them. And...

Or are you saying the opposite? I can put it much more nicely than that. What I was accused of, and have been accused of throughout the whole of my life, was, I think it was best put to me by Professor David Butler, you know him, the author of the Nuffield series on all the British general elections since 1945, Butler and Kavanagh, you know it.

Anyway, I had the great ill luck to go to a very nice lunch in Oxford where I happened to find myself sitting next to him. And he said to me, which did rather ruin the lunch and the day and more, he said, you are personally responsible for ruining British politics. LAUGHTER

And I said, well, OK, how did I do that? And he said, you reduced all the British general elections to negative campaigning. And, well, because he's a very wise and serious professor, that is a true statement. And if you regard that as a reduction...

in the standard of elections, well then I have to, I can certainly take some, not all the blame, I can certainly take some of the blame for that. But I would say, and I said to him, that one doesn't have to regard things that are negative as very bad. I said to him that it's the job of a political leader

at election time to point out the defects in the opponent's position. And that in election times, you certainly are in a boxing ring and it's going to happen that you're going to be punched very hard and you're going to be in a very bad state. Well, when that happens, there's only one thing to do then, which is that you have to land a blow on your opponent's chin, which knocks him out.

And it's therefore inevitable that that will be the way that it... Well, certainly it's since our time that general elections are conducted. And you mustn't all think this is a very bad thing because, well, Jesus Christ himself did say, ''I do not come to bring peace. ''I come with a sword, not peace.''

So that's worth remembering. And it's also worth remembering, by the way, that, by the way, nine of the Ten Commandments are negative. I rest my case. I want to stick with this for a minute. I do think a minute more. Partly because, you know, I mean...

Do you still feel the same way now, I guess, as well? It's given where politics has gone since '79 because you on this side, Roger Ailes on the American side, started something that has grown.

So, you know, use the image of you want, you're like a boxer in a ring and you want to knock the other guy out, except it's kind of turned into where you got two people standing in the ring beating the crap out of each other. Each one absolutely convinced that the next punch is going to put the other guy down and it never does. And so what we've ended up with is just an ugly fight that kind of never ends and goes nowhere. Well,

Well, I can tell you what I'd say about that. I must have seen more public opinion research in Britain than any other living person. And there is only one possible conclusion I must tell you, which is that the British public is the most sophisticated, most aware and most intelligent electorate in the world. I don't know about America.

I guarantee the British public is better. Let's leave them out. Speaking about a public I know a lot about, it's an absolute mystery how the British public know so much. They can't possibly be watching 24-hour news on CNN and BBC News. It's impossible. But somehow or other, they do know everything. And therefore, what happens in general elections is that the winner is the one with the best arguments.

and not the one with the prettiest face. And that's, I think, a very happy result for people, that they know, they can tell. And if, by the way, people go on to say, well, the result of all this negative campaigning is that you, me, you've reduced all these general elections just to sloganeering campaigns.

That's all it is. It's just sound bites. That's what you've done. You've reduced everything to that. But I can give you a very good answer to that indeed, which is that, in my opinion, a 'precy', which is what these few words are, a 'precy' is a modern form of good manners.

on the basis that people are busy and they've got other things to think about. The kind of simplicity that's involved in trying to reduce a complex political argument to a few words... Well, simplicity is, as I've discovered, it's the outcome of technical subtlety. It is the goal, not the starting point. And as final proof of that point, if you think about the...

Let's call them the rallying cries. We're not going to call them slogans because that's such an insulting term. The rallying cries that really did change the world. Well, let's look at them and see how many words were involved in those. How about one man, one vote? Or how about no taxation without representation? Or how about liberte, egalite, fraternite? They're not very complicated, are they?

but they took a tremendous amount of thought to arrive at. - Listen, my favorite political cartoon of all times was in the George Bush's first election, and it was Abraham Lincoln standing at the stage saying, "Read my lips, no more slaves."

Very good. Right, which we remember George Bush did this, read my lips, no more taxes, which was a way to kind of reduce, and then of course he immediately raised taxes. So I'm not sure, you know, again, I'm not sure I would agree that the reduction to sloganeering is helpful. I am curious, though, you must have some kind of theory about how it is then that the public, from your perspective, actually does have all this information and is using it. I mean, it does, look at who's winning elections.

at least in my country former country but but you must give credit to you if you do believe in one man one vote you must ultimately give credit to the people and the reason you must do that is that if i may speak for we the people for a moment just for a moment i'm not trying to be pompous about it but we i think of you as every man thank you for the people we actually own everything so we

So when you have the pleasure of walking through the Houses of Parliament and admiring the Chamber of the House of Lords, etc, the point to remember is that we, the people, we own all this. We pay for all the lighting. We pay for all the staff. We pay for all the clerks. We pay for the librarians. We pay for the entire thing. We pay for everything. And therefore, if we've developed an opinion about somebody,

who might be a leader or might be a loser, then that's what has to be respected. And I have no problem with that because I believe the public is highly intelligent. I can't answer your question of how, because I think that's a real mystery. I don't know how they know so much, but they seem to.

Well, especially, you know, look, you would defend democracy not necessarily on the grounds that people make the best choices collectively this way, but that they're entitled to make whatever choices they want to make collectively, whether they're good or bad. So you can be very cynical. This is where I thought you were starting. Very cynical about politics because there is no truth, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the strand in the United States, it was the Oliver Wendell Holmes strand of understanding democracy is he had total contempt for people, but

believe deeply in their ability to make whatever dumb choices they wanted for themselves versus, you know, like the contrary view in which this is the collective, the wisdom of crowds idea. But given where you started from, that's what I'm trying to figure out. Or I don't go further than that. But,

These people who are in charge of everything, it's not just that we have to accept their verdict in the end. I know people say that. No, I think I can go much further than that. These people admire somebody who believes in something. So, for example, I happen to have handy here.

Because I did say that LSC was the inspiration for everything, didn't I? You did. Right. Well, it is. And I hope I've explained in some ways why. But LSC also is... Also, you have to learn here, don't you? You also have to learn about the things which are not what you believe in.

and are the contrary to what you believe in. And so therefore in this lifetime's work, which I'm now so happy to talk to you about, I have kept in mind an LSE professor with whom I disagree completely. And he is, this is the voice of what might be called pragmatism, I suppose, which is a form of mind of which I totally disapprove. And...

So here you are. I found this. Monocle Oakshott. You must study him. He gave the inaugural address on assuming the professorship of political science at LSE. And I can quote this. Oakshott offered no political system, no doctrine, no grand philosophy, no dream, no happy ending. He dismissed, I'm now quoting, he dismissed the illusion of

that in politics there is a destination to be reached because he said, I'm quoting, this is what I, with which I totally disagree and have devoted my entire life to doing the exact opposite of what he says here. He said, "In political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination.

The enterprise is to keep a float on an even keel.

well it's very beautifully written isn't it so you don't need if you're on professor oakshot's boat which i hope you won't be you don't need any instruments because it's not going anywhere in particular it will catch the morning tide wherever it takes it this is called pragmatism and um it's the most beautiful definition you'll hear of that word but it is it is to me the exact opposite of what

of what politics is about. And it's the exact opposite of what we the people want to see. We don't want to see that. We want to see someone who actually has true beliefs that we can believe are sincere. And the beliefs are the most important thing. I mean, for example, if you want to - let's take him away as not a role model. If you want a role model, a wonderful role model, you can go into Westminster Abbey,

Well, there are some serious role models there, but you'll find a serious role model. If you walk into the nave of Westminster Abbey through the great door and then look to the left in the nave, you will see the tomb of Beatrice Webb, the founder of this magnificent institution, the best university in the world, without any doubt. And, well, just consider her view. Let's take her as the opposite of Michael Oakeshott. She said...

People fall in love with funny things. Some people fall in love with their chauffeur. I fell in love with Soviet communism. And LSE was founded by her and that marvellous group who had very, very strong beliefs about what society should be like. And it's from that origin that LSE has developed this most fabulous reputation in the world.

Oh God, I really want to talk about that, but this is, we'll do this later at dinner, some of this, because I want to get on some other topics. And I do want to spend a little time, especially because I want you guys, you should all go out and buy this book, and definitely look at it. Eighty pounds. Eighty-nine. I think it's so interesting. It's...

So remember, Moore spent many years in advertising and public relations, so the book itself just physically and visually is so interesting. So I'm curious, you know, the design, the oversight, the elaborate illustrations, the expensiveness, both who were your audience and what drove those design decisions? What are you trying to say or accomplish through the

through the design of the book, and in particular the illustrations, which as I say, it was not obvious to me, and some of them it was when they were embedded in the essays, but there are these beautiful color illustrations between the essays, and I wasn't quite sure what you're trying to do with that. I don't even charge £89 if there are no actual pictures inside the book. I think it went the other way. There's no other logic to it than that.

I'm sorry to say. So you put the picture, no, come on, you didn't put the pictures in there to drive up the price. Although once you put the pictures in, the price got driven up. So that's what I'm kind of curious about. Like I say, some of the illustrations, especially the one before the U.S. essay, there's this series, they're really beautiful.

sort of museum quality. - Oh, that's absolutely beautiful. - Yeah, they're all beautiful, since I'm not quite sure why they're there. So, you know, it's like, okay, why these? Why not something else?

Well, because one has to think very carefully about what the text is saying and then contemplate the picture and see what the connection is. That's part of the joy. And you're not going to tell us? That's part of the joy. I'm a dumb reader. The joy of discovering the merit of the book. This is part of the pleasure. That's why 89 pounds is a bargain. Okay, there you go. I can do much better than that.

Ask me more. All right, well, so just a few more. There's an essay on the United States, and then there's an essay on Russia. Yes. The essay on the United States is pretty unsparing in its criticism. And the American ambassador has said to me that she thinks it's very unkind. Well, maybe it's both. I mean, it starts with the idea of American idealism as actually something truly admirable, and the criticism is that the United States has failed entirely to achieve its own ideals. No, that's exactly what it says. LAUGHTER

When it comes to Russia, on the other hand, the essay reads almost like an apology for Putin. So I'm curious, like, how do you feel about those essays now? Because they were written right in the fall of these essays. Sure. Well, that's a very, very important and obviously highly topical point. And, well, let's just imagine, for example, that President Kennedy was right about

when after the Cuban Missile Crisis he addressed the commencement class at the American University. And obviously they were interested. This was six months before he was assassinated by the way in 1963.

And six months before, and obviously the students were interested in the Cuban Missile Crisis and what happened and how did he think he had averted the Third World War. There really was a serious, most serious risk of our lifetime of the Third World War then in that confrontation between America and Russia. And he explained it to these students, I thought, wonderfully, which was that he said he had learned during that crisis from one of his advisors the meaning of the word empathy

which he said wasn't a word that he had much used or much heard. And what he meant by empathy was that he thought it was very important to try and get into the mind of your opponent or even your enemy. And that he said that in order to understand what's in the mind, this is in 1963, what's in the mind of Russia, all you have to do, he said, is take two fingers and run them down the center of the map of Europe

and then you will understand the Russian position. And the Russian position is described, by the way, by our own foreign office, has a word for the Russian view, the Russian perspective, and the word is encirclement. And their encirclement means that it's their perspective that NATO, and in particular America in NATO, is a threat.

And that I didn't know until a few weeks ago when Lady Rothschild and I were having a marvellous dinner with Michael Clarke, who is now the great sort of Sky News, but he was the head of RUCI, so he really does understand these things. And he told us that he was sort of rather interested in this point of view I'm just expressing. And he said, well, they would think that about encirclement because...

They know that NATO has moved 1,000 miles closer to the Russian border since it was created in 1947. Well, I didn't know that. I don't think anyone knows that. But from a Russian point of view, that obviously is a threat. And therefore, if Russia had been...

better at propaganda. I know at the moment Russia is thought of as monsters and butchers and terrible bad people. So I was trying to say that if they had been better at propaganda than they are, they would have addressed themselves to the American people and said to the American people, looking at NATO moving towards them, and said, well, how would you like it if you had Russian nuclear missiles in Mexico? Or how about Cuba?

and then there would have been a much greater understanding of what they regarded as the threat that NATO and its new possible members posed to them. You might say that everything I've just said for the last five minutes is just an apology for Putin, but I don't see that at all. I think it's for President Kennedy's wisdom was to say that you must have some understanding. And maybe, I know you may all think this is a complete joke,

and I wouldn't really say it in polite society, but maybe President Trump, for all his unpredictability and all the other qualities that he's... negative qualities that he's said to have, maybe he does have some empathy with them. And maybe what will emerge from this war might be some reconciliation between America and Russia, and this would be an absolutely wonderful outcome.

So that's what I was trying to say, Larry. And on the American side, did you want anything? Actually, I'm really curious, given especially that last statement about Trump. I mean, how does that fit in with the American essay then? Well, I mean, for example, I mean, let's just look at one of the biggest critique of America in the essay on America is that I would regard this as the...

what I'm now going to describe as the second worst diplomatic decision in all human history. Let's consider the worst in all human history. Well, that definitely, clearly, is Hitler's decision six days after Pearl Harbor to declare war on America.

That was completely unnecessary. He didn't have to do that. America was still trying to decide not to get involved. So that was a calamitous decision from Germany's point of view, which had the result that it did. So let's say that's the absolute worst. Well, I would say the second worst diplomatic decision that there's been is the decision, which was in effect an American decision, to expel Russia from the G8 and make it into the G7.

That was because of something that Russia did, invading Crimea or something terrible, poisoning people or something. Some terrible behaviour. But the end result of that, let's just consider that, if you want to take President Kennedy's point of view. That expulsion is the equivalent of expelling a boy from school. And the expulsion of a boy from school, I would say, is going to last a complete lifetime. The total humiliation...

in front of all your friends of being expelled from school would be a calamity for your life, your self-esteem, your self-confidence and everything else, which would be something dreadful in your life. And so I think, Larry, that I would say that's the second worst decision in all human history. And it may be that the end result of this Ukraine war, it may be that the end result is that somehow there is some reconciliation between the West and Russia.

and that one goes back to Russia being part of the West and not a perpetual threat.

I don't know, these are very grand subjects and nobody knows, even President Trump doesn't know. These are very complex things but one can, if one wants to be hopeful about the world, think well that might possibly be an excellent outcome. - I think the challenge though is the, what we call conflation of understanding with excusing. So nobody, I think nobody acts without having in their own mind

a reasonable reason for doing what they're doing, right? Virtually nobody, I've never encountered anybody who when you understand and take the time doesn't in their own mind have a story for why they're doing what they're doing that seems reasonable to them. In fact, I think our biggest problem today is people don't make enough effort generally.

to do that when they get into disagreements with people. But that's one step short of saying, and therefore, because I understand how you saw it, it's okay to have done it. There is a huge difference between the fact that whether feeling encircled or not, Russia invaded first Crimea, then Ukraine has done so. And of course, NATO moved closer because countries that Russia had effectively occupied

became independent nations and chose to exercise the kind of freedoms that they have, chose to ally themselves with NATO in the West. So the question is, again, I'm not sure that it is important to understand, but it slides a little too quickly into what feels like excusing

who is the aggressor. That's what Trump is doing, you know, and so on. It may be that. And one thing we can be certain of is that this conversation we're just having now about Russia and America, well, that certainly fits what I was saying before. It's impossible to know what in that... Looking at those strategic questions, it's impossible to know what is the truth. There can't be a truth in that conversation. So where that leaves us...

I don't quite know. All looking to LSE students in order to solve everything, probably. It's so funny because...

Both things are true and they need to be true for all of us. For instance, I think one of the major problems we have today, and we're experiencing it every day on campus, are people who are so firmly convinced that they have the truth that it kind of justifies all sorts of shutting out and closing down and canceling and all of that. On the other hand, you know, the inability to grapple, one does need to make decisions and figure out how to act. So it's kind of how do we simultaneously hold...

those two beliefs at the same time, I think is the challenge of the moment. We have too much truth and not enough at the same time. I agree. All right. I want a couple more and then we'll go to you guys. The last essay, the last essay is on true love. You guys got to read this one because to me in some ways it was the most puzzling one of all because if you read the essay on its face, it's about everything but love.

Right, so there's talk about heroism, there's a little section on Muhammad Ali, talk about greatness, idealism, hope, and the search for scientific truth. So explain what it is you mean by true love. Because that would, I don't think most people would, that's not where you go, I mean I love Muhammad Ali, but you're right, I'm not. So what is it that you're trying to convey in that essay? Well, for example. And it's the last essay in the book. But one, which I'll come to in a moment. Okay. Okay.

Well, I mean, let's take... If you want an example of true love, which I was using as an example of true love, none of those examples are about what one normally uses the word for, which is love between a man and a woman, let's say, or two men or whatever, between two human beings. That is a definition of love. But I preferred mine, which was that it's a little bit more like Beatrice Webb. It's an absolute determination...

that your belief is the right one and that it will change the world for the better if your belief could come true. And I think I end completely, don't I, with the story of Sir Howard Florey, who you may not know. He is the person who actually discovered penicillin.

Now I don't know how many thousands or millions of lives have been saved by penicillin, but most interestingly it describes how at the time people had a whole list of the ways that you could measure the distress of a human body. And well they included heart rate, pulse rate, weight,

endless other metrics to the one that he thought was the most important. He decided out of all the metrics there was only one that really mattered which was body temperature and he concentrated completely his experiments on body temperature and it was the result of those experiments with mice

with penicillin which led to the discovery of penicillin and the spread of penicillin. So I think that's a very good example of what I would describe as true love which is that he was in love with what he thought was the most beautiful discovery and the most beautiful concept and he made it come true. It was a dream that came true. So that's my version of true love. I've got to read the end to you guys because he goes through that description and it says, "Here is a real miracle.

At exactly the same time that morning, the morning that this experiment is successful, at exactly the same time that morning, 26 May 1940, a miracle of another sort was taking place, the rescue of hundreds of thousands of British, French and Belgian soldiers who were trapped in northern France along the coast by Dunkirk. Professor Flory became Sir Howard Flory and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. We can conclude from this that love works in mysterious ways.

As Pascal explained, the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. Only an orgasm of the mind can bring such intellectual pleasure. Good luck. Exactly. Quite right. It's a wonderful ending, although I'm still not sure what it means. Which is part of the book, right? Yes, absolutely. Now, this will be the last one, because then there is a, I can only call it coda, which is after the last essay, there is a screenplay. Yes, there is. The essays are relatively short. The screenplay is not. I mean, it's not...

immensely long, but it's qualitatively different from everything else that's there. Now, basically I'm going to give you guys the plot and then a couple of passages and then ask you to explain. The plot is this: you have a man, unnamed, you have a man, he has a wife, he's had an affair on his wife, the wife calls him out on the affair, he basically explains to the wife that he doesn't care what she thinks because both she and the mistress are the same as far as he is concerned, which are there for him to use and for his pleasure and whatever he needs.

the wife and the mistress then meet and they decide to murder the man

So they, and this is one scene which is the murder. "Hitman, what do you think of yourself?" "Man, I think I've done a terrible thing." "Hitman, so do I. You have to be punished, you know, otherwise anyone could do it." "What do you think of acupuncture?" "Man, I don't know." "Hitman, acupuncturists use needles to pierce the body, very fine ones, less than one millimeter to relieve pain. Are you in pain?"

Pointing gun at the man's genitals. What about the new breakthrough treatment for genital cancer? Man, I'm not sure. Hitman, neither am I. I think they're over-egging the pudding on that one, gilding the lily a bit. You know what I mean, man, I do. Hitman, do something for me. And then he has the man basically create the scene that'll make it look like a robbery, and he shoots the man in his genitals. The man dies, presumably. And in the next scene, the wife and the mistress are getting married.

And in their marriage, it ends with their vows. And I just have to read the vows. We are all faced, these are the wife and the mistress together reading their vows out of the sight of the audience. We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale.

Most of these choices are on lesser points, but we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly. Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love, who give meaning to the indifferent universe.

And yet most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even to find joy in simple things like their family, their work, and the hope that future generations might understand more.

Okay, it's a beautiful passage. I love it. I agree with it. I'm not quite sure how it connects to the murderers. They just murdered the man. And so this whole thing, I was like, what is this there for? I don't understand. Tell me. The man is a bastard.

He's an absolute swine. And he had betrayed his wife to be with his mistress. He also betrayed his mistress, to whom he promised, as men do, apparently, that, don't worry, soon I'm going to tell her, and then we'll be married, and then we're going to find a nice house and have a nice new love. So he betrayed both of them. So it was very unfortunate for him that they actually met.

and when they met they decided this man is a bastard and therefore what we're going to do with him is get rid of him and so they kill him it happens that they also fall in love during the murder planning and therefore the end result is they get married and they have a very happy life and live happily ever after so that's a that's a marvelous thing

But again, it's a puzzling thing to add at the end of the book. It's so different from everything else. Yes, it is. So again, what were you thinking? Well, it does relate to a chapter in here called Men Are Awful. The chapter that is called Men Are Awful

That's just worth mentioning for one minute because obviously we can all see that men are awful because a day doesn't go by without some man being prosecuted or discovered or arrested for some kind of crime.

bad behavior towards a woman which can just be harassment of a more normal kind or something absolutely terrible in terms of violence and murder. So there are countless examples of how awful men are. But on the other hand, this says that

aside from thinking that this is very, very bad for women, that it's worth spending ten seconds on thinking how men came to be so awful. And the point that this makes, Larry, as you know, is that it suggests that a boy's upbringing...

The boy's journey from being a boy to being a man is a very, very difficult journey with many roadblocks, diversions and failings. And that's undoubtedly true and there are so many proofs of it. But the best proof of that, which is the difficulty of that journey, must be Hamlet.

Hamlet, I think we can all agree, everyone agrees, is the universal man. There must be a reason why Hamlet is performed somewhere in the world every four minutes.

there must be a reason for this amazing character's power. And I would suggest that when Laurence Olivier was making his tremendous film of Hamlet, he went to see the biographer of Freud and Ernest Jones, and he said what he wanted to know from Ernest Jones was,

For his performance as Hamlet, what was the reason? This is what has puzzled philosophers and scholars for 300 years. What was the reason for Hamlet's delay? His father's ghost had come to him, had told him that it was his own uncle, his father's brother, who had killed him, killed the king, and that therefore he asked Hamlet...

to have revenge and to kill his uncle. And Hamlet delays and delays and delays and delays, as you know. And Laurence Olivier wanted to know why Hamlet delayed. What was the reason for it? And Ernest Jones, in relation to Freud, Freud's biographer, said that the reason for Hamlet's delay was that the king was called Claudius, as you know. Through Claudius, Hamlet achieved the Oedipal feat

of murdering his father and marrying his mother. Now, you may think that sounds like a complete joke, but I would say that the boy has to somehow move from the love of a mother...

which is total and probably is never replaced in any way by anything else, to the love of a woman. And that's, in my view, an extremely perilous journey. And in Hamlet's case, it was a disastrous journey in which eight people were killed in the end as a result of his inability to work out that journey. So I think that the...

The chapter that deals with men are awful. Yes, you could say it's an apology for men, but maybe it is. I think boys have a very difficult journey in terms of their knowledge of girls. Maybe you'd say this is all different. You may well say this is all different now. This is how it was then, but the world's changed and there's no social media, etc. And therefore boys are no longer puzzled

by women or girls. They're no longer mystified by how a girl's body works and how their own body works. And that's all old. I'm not at all convinced that's true. It may just be that that moment of actually having some understanding of women's bodies and men's and boys' bodies, maybe that happened at 16 or 17. And maybe it now happens at 9 or 10. But nevertheless...

there is that journey from complete ignorance about sex to

some knowledge about sex. And during that journey, the relationship between a boy and a mother is absolutely critical. And very hard to, well I find it very hard to imagine how a boy quite makes that journey. So all I'm really saying to you is that I'm not trying to apologize for men and all the absolutely disgusting things that men do, including murdering and killing women. But I think boys have a very difficult upbringing and I have no idea how that could ever be resolved.

I will say, as the father of a 24-year-old daughter, no, they're as awful as ever. Young men. All right, last question, totally unfair one. I meant to add, I was going to feed you this beforehand, but I forgot. What's the one question about the book that you wish someone would ask? Oh, that's so easy. Oh, okay. Ready? Yeah. I'm looking at Lynn in the background. The question I would like to be asked by you, which you can do now, is, oh, Morris...

how can you possibly be so brilliant as to write this book?

Yeah, that was not the question I was expecting. But okay, maybe someone will ask that. We're now going to open this to Q&A from the audience. If you are online, just type your question in the Q&A or if you're here, raise your hand, wait to be called on, we'll bring your microphone. If you could, say your name and affiliation and then just ask one kind of short question so that we can get to as many as possible. So let's start, okay, we'll start right there.

Hello, my name is Sershwan, I'm a graduate student here at LSE. Of all the questions I was thinking about asking, I'm going to ask this one: Do you think there is some special satisfaction about convincing someone about something without the help of reality? Do you think there's something especially satisfying about that?

No, not at all. I would prefer that one could present a version of reality which the interlocutor would accept. That would be much more pleasing. So the woman over in the... Raise your hand higher. There you go. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSEIQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSEIQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event. Hi, thank you so much for this talk. It was very insightful. I remember Lois actually said that

you believed in globalization and free market, but then it didn't turn out to be what you expected. So I wonder, what did you expect back then and why do you think it didn't turn out that way? Yes. The reason I found it very compelling at the time and said so at the time, and we rather... We advocated it, I think, quite effectively. And anyway, we advocated it on the basis that

This was very simple. It was the economies of scale. Obviously, if you're going to have 30 different companies operating independently in 30 different countries, that's going to be a lot less effective than having three giant factories making five giant global products for all 30 countries.

And at the time, people said to us, "Well, this is absolutely terrible, because this is going to mean the complete removal of all the local companies, all the local skill, and you're making a terrible mistake, and this is going to make the world much worse." They meant that by only being interested in economies of scale above everything else, the result would be very bad for local communities.

Well, we didn't see that happening. The result that was not intended, let's call it the unintended consequence,

of globalization was the creation of, as I said, giant global cartels in one category after another. And that's, from my point of view, a very bad outcome because of what I said. If that means the end of competition, well, if the end result of competition is the end of competition, that's very bad because capitalism without competition is exploitation.

So, I mean, as an illustration, Mrs. Thatcher came after she had been, after she left office, she came to lunch and I said to her, this was about the time that all this was emerging about global companies, and I asked her if she knew the share of the top five banks in Britain in all financial transactions in Britain.

So that's mortgages, loans, go on, credit cards, everything. Insurance, everything. Did she know what was the share of the top five banks? She said she didn't. I said, it's 80%. She said with her eyes blazing, it's impossible. And she didn't mean by it's impossible, she didn't mean it wasn't true. She meant it was outrageous because that certainly wasn't her version or mine.

or Lionel Robbins version of what competition was supposed to be. So I didn't anticipate that that was the result, but it was the result of simple economies of scale, which is that what's the point of having 30 different products made in 30 different countries? It's obviously much more efficient to only have three.

and make them the same for all the 30 countries in five factories. That's obviously much, much cheaper and much better. And so that's what has happened. How that will ever unravel, I don't know. It won't, basically. That is now the world that has been created. And as I said, Larry, that does mean a huge imbalance of power.

between the giant global corporation and the individual customer. The best example I can give you is that while worrying about all that, I put it to the test. So I tried to ring some of these giant global companies, to ring them up. So I discovered that it took longer. It took longer to get through to Vodafone

than it did to get through to number 10 Downing Street. And if you think that's terrible, it took longer for me to get through to UK power networks than it did for me to get through to the White House. So somehow or other, whoever is in charge of all these companies, who we don't know, by the way, because the people in charge are totally anonymous people. That's part of the plan. You don't know their names. You've got absolutely no idea who they are. And...

I think that's a very bad outcome. If you believe Lionel Robbins' version of competition as much as I do and as much as I hope you all do, then this is a lousy outcome. And it's a bad version of capitalism which somebody will have to do something about. Linda Rothschild, who's at the back here, has devoted her life to something she calls inclusive capitalism.

Well, I don't know whether that's the answer or not. But I don't think we can go on being treated like ants. And that's not acceptable at all. So how this will ever be changed, I've got no idea. Thank you. Go ahead. You spoke about the power of images and in an age of...

and disinformation. I wonder if we could take a very specific image that many in this room in some way has been affected by, and that would be the bus during the Brexit referendum that said, we sent the EU $350 million a week, let's fund the NHS, instead let's take back control. When there's such a powerful image, but it turns out to be

erroneous information, is there a way to counter that? Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's a wonderful example and thank you very much for it. Because the only way out of that, you can't stop whoever made that statement, the Brexit campaign, you can't stop them from saying that. It wasn't illegal to say that.

And so they said it and that happens a lot. And if you want to know, so your question is, well, what's the answer to that? Well, the answer to that was that you'd have, this is the case of being in the boxing ring. If that's going to be their version of the marvellous benefit that you're going to get from Brexit, then you're going to have to find something absolutely devastating to say about Brexit. Then you might have a chance.

The best illustration I can give you about Brexit, if we want to take a really touchy subject, which we may as well... At that time of Brexit, I was the chairman of the Centre for Policy Journeys. We had lots of very nice relationships with polling organisations. I wanted to understand how it was that everyone was saying,

the people were going to vote for Brexit. I couldn't understand it. And so we asked one of the big polling companies if they would just do a poll for us, basically as a favour, which they agreed to do very nicely on the basis that we said, well, all we want is for it to be a very, very big sample so that nobody can say it's not a representative sample. So at least 3,000 people.

So we asked them to do that but we said we're not going to ask you for any demographics, we don't know anything about class differences, we're not interested in geographical differences, we're not interested in voting intention differences, we only want the answer to one question. A simple yes/no question, we just want that. When you do it without charging us a fortune because a think tank doesn't have the money, they said they would, they did it. And I'll now give you the answer.

And this will explain Brexit to the room forever. The question was, if you were convinced that immigration from the EU is under control, would you remain in the EU? 72% yes. So Brexit was about immigration.

And the bus was one example. But the basic story was that if you have Brexit, then all this invasion of all these people swarming in, they're taking our schools, they're taking our hospitals, they're taking our houses, they're taking everything. And that we're going to stop that with Brexit. That was the promise. But the unbelievable thing that then happened is that not only did immigration not fall...

As you all know, immigration actually trebled. So this is really an absolutely astounding fact and it may explain a lot about how our party was totally wiped out in the last general election because to promise that immigration would be controlled and have it then trebled is something that's very, very hard to forgive. Thank you. You talked about truth and perception earlier.

What's your truth about Donald Trump? Well, as I was saying to Larry earlier, I'd like to think that it was possible that he may have in his mind... You'll all think this is completely mad, but I'll say it. I'll try it. There is one theory about him, which is that he's done everything he possibly can in life.

and he's become president twice, unbelievable achievement, and there you are. And that he may now be somebody who, like any normal human being, would be starting to think about his legacy after he's gone, dead, I mean, and what would people say about him. It would be normal at his age for people to think that. And that he may therefore...

turn his mind to what would... what people are going to say about me after I've gone and he may... he may actually believe that he wants to be what Marco Rubio yesterday called the president of peace. He may actually want to be that and so it isn't just

some kind of desire to live up to an election promise, but that's really how he sees himself. And if that was true, that would be wonderful because only America has the power to bring around the peace in Ukraine or in the Middle East or anywhere. Only America has that unbelievable superpower status. So one could be slightly hopeful about that.

One could be slightly hopeful that, for example, one day there's something that Lin is trying to do. That one day he may say, well, I really should not forget the people who have actually elected me president. And although this is him talking to himself, everyone now says, oh, I'm just going to look after the billionaires, and it's a government of billionaires. It's a huge criticism of him. And he may say to himself, well, I don't want to go down in history as the president of billionaires.

And maybe I should do something which will look after the American working people who are the people who actually elected me. That could happen. So you may all say, well, this is just all hope in the air. But it's possible. It's possible. And as a normal human being, if he is a normal human being, you would start to turn your eyes towards what are people going to say about me after I'm gone. And so I have that hope.

It is possible that pigs may fly someday too. Exactly. In the middle. The woman in the green shirt. She doesn't believe in it. Thank you. That's possible. Just relating to the previous question, I just always think that right-wing slogans or rhetoric tends to be quite simple. Immigration's bad, taxes are bad, they take away your money. Whereas left-wing

rhetoric tends to be more nuanced because it has to be, you know, yes, we're going to take more money from you with taxes, but it goes on public goods for other people or immigration. Sure, you know, you can see why that might be, you know, bad if you're upset about, I don't know, losing your job or know someone who lost a job, but overall it's a net positive for the economy. It's very positive for this person who's got a better life and

Do you have any thoughts or suggestions about how liberals can have more, I think, succinct and more powerful messages rather than these nuanced, long-winded ones that I think sometimes fail to reach the point? Yes, I think I probably can. You can summarise, in fact you can know all you need to know,

about British politics in two sentences, which I can do for you now. Everything else is irrelevant. The two sentences are: Conservatives are efficient but cruel. Labour is caring but incompetent.

That's it, basically. And you can look back over the whole of Butler and Kavanagh and you will find exactly that. So if we manage to get ourselves as the Conservative Party into a position, which we did, in which we were inefficient and cruel, then you are going to get wiped out, aren't you? Which is what happened. Do you see an AI future where Labour isn't working?

I mean again, rather like my forlorn hope about President Trump, it's impossible to work out whether AI is a saint or a sinner. I just don't know. Nobody knows at this point.

I'd like to think that it will be, as the proponents and the advocates say, it'll be like the Industrial Revolution. And it'll be a phase which will be troubling for some time, but at the end of it, it will produce much greater wealth for everybody. And I think one has to believe that that's possible. Whether it's true or not, I really just don't know. Let's come all the way down here to the front.

Thank you. I wanted to ask a question regarding true love and perception, right? So whatever person's true love is to search or pursue a thing, an act associated with mediocrity, that however he thinks once is done will bring a better place to the world. Would your definition of true love mean, well, agree that this person

this person's pursuit for what most people think is mediocrity can be defined as true love. Well, I think I heard you saying that, how does this relate to mediocrity? And somebody who is interested in mediocrity.

Well, I can certainly address that very happily. I would regard mediocrity as a version of what I was saying about Professor Oakeshott, that pragmatism is a willingness to accept what you're calling mediocre, or I would call the status quo. And this is something I don't like at all, as I was saying. And again, sorry to quote President Kennedy again, but he is one of your great presidents, isn't he?

Oh, no. All right. Well, anyway, I quote him again. He did have fantastic speechwriters. Yes, he did. I mean, rhetorically, he's up there. He's up there. Kennedy, just ahead. In one of those speeches, unfortunately, it's the speech he never gave.

Because after his assassination, he was on... You may not know this. He was on his way, about November the 22nd, wasn't it? He was on his way to Austin, after Dallas, he was going to Austin, Texas, to give a speech at a dinner. And I've seen the speech, and I've seen how it ends, which I find most inspiring. Because the last words in the speech are, conformity and complacency will not do.

And so, yes, if you're asking me about mediocrity, I think all these things, that goes together. Pragmatism and mediocrity and a willingness to accept the status quo are all the things that I can't bear. And I would advise you not to bear them either because they're going to be... If you do follow that line, there's no happy outcome because a person must have some sense of purpose somewhere.

in life, I would say. In order to have a happy and fulfilled life, the person has to have some kind of driving aim, something that they want to achieve. And if that can be climbing Mount Everest or curing cancer or changing the world in some other way, that's absolutely fine. It doesn't have to be that, but it has to be a purpose. And that's a very good thing. So mediocrity and pragmatism and willingness to accept

the status quo, those would make you an unhappy person.

- Just in fairness to President Kennedy, I just wanna, for those of you who don't, I mean he had wonderful ideals, he was a fantastic rhetorician, he didn't have time to really accomplish very much, and he set us on a path for some really bad things. So Vietnam is really decisions that Kennedy made that Johnson was trapped with. And holding back on the Civil Rights Act was the Kennedy administration that Johnson pushed forward. So it's a mixed record, but we really don't know where he would've gone.

He had barely two years as president. Yes. If there is no absolute truth, so what makes you believe that your path is better? Why should anyone follow you, your party, over your opponents? And how do you convince people in, like you said, or knowing that it could be...

turn out to be completely wrong or is it just trial and error putting everyone through a test of time and see how it's going to turn out? Thank you. I don't think you can do that because they're waiting to see the results. I don't think you can quite do that because you have to make up your mind what it is that you want to see. And according to what I've been saying here,

You'd have to make up your mind just on the basis of belief and whether you are convinced by the argument or whether you're not. I'm putting to you that politics, my version of politics anyway, is an intellectual activity and it's based on the premise that the public is highly intelligent and therefore if the public is highly intelligent then you'd like to present arguments to them in a manner in which in a way that they could respect the argument.

And so I'm not sure that I'm answering your question other than to say that you have to be good at presenting your argument. And if you want to know why you should follow me and follow what I've been saying, well, then you have to weigh it up. I've presented my argument as best as I possibly can.

this evening. I think quite well actually. But it's up to you to think about it and think, well am I convinced by that? And if you're not convinced by it, then there is another answer to my version of a happy and fulfilled life, which I think was given us by Aristotle, the other version, the opposite of mine. So if you want that, you can have it. And I'll describe what he said it was.

Say nothing. I'm quoting him completely. Say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

So that's the alternative. If you don't want that, you've got me. You can follow me. So I think we're going to draw the event to a close now. You should say Maurice has agreed to spend a little time and stay here. We're selling some books. He'll sign them. I do want to say this. One of the real delights of the book, which you've seen here tonight, is the incredible breadth of...

and sources and places from which Morse draws these ideas. I often feel badly, my generation and generations

And your guys, who are younger than me, we did not get the same kind of education. And so the ability to just draw seamlessly across so many different kinds of things is itself one of the, perhaps the source of an orgasm of the mind. It's really one of the things that makes the book a delight to read, and it has made this conversation a delight to have. So please let us just thank the speaker and thank all of you and those who put this event together. Thank you.

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