293. An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West (1)
293. Konstantin Kisin — An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West
1 (9s):
You're listening to the Michael Scher show. Hi everybody. It's Michael Scherer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Scher show. I am the publisher on my day job of this magazine skeptic, which you can pick up at any bookstore in north America, or even some of the colonies for our guest today. And we, or you can go to.com and just click on magazine. You can order it there. Of course, it's all digital. Our issues this year are in trans matters. Abortion matters, race matters, which comes out in September and then nationalism matters.
1 (49s):
So the idea here is we are branching out a little bit of our skepticism to dealing with other controversies besides UFOs and psychics and that sort of thing. And the artwork behind me, I'm displaying on the podcast. Now, some of the original artwork from pat Lindsay, my late partner who died a year ago and just to feature in the old days, back in the nineties, when artists actually did paintings for magazine covers. So that's kind of cool. Anyway, my guest today is constant in kissing a journalist comedian, voiceover actor, and social commentator board in the Soviet union, where he experienced both untold wealth and grinding poverty.
1 (1m 30s):
He moved to the UK when he was 13 years old. Now an award-winning performer. He co-present the popular YouTube series trigger, trigger Nory, which I love alongside France's foster together. They've interviewed some of the most in demand intellectuals of our age, such as Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, and many others. Here's the new book, a immigrants and immigrants love letter to the west. I read it on audio as usual, and then I got the hard copy at reread this morning. Constant in it was a great read. Big fun. Give us a little bit of background you're opening chapters are on, on your own particular unique history. I'll just open here with your page one here.
1 (2m 10s):
Trust me. The west is west is best. Here's what you write. Non-controversial excuse me, I'm still having a little bit of COVID voice here. Black people in contemporary America often refer to the talk a conversation, which they advise their children, how to act if they're stopped by the police. I remember my parents giving me an equivalent lecture when I was seven years old and living in the Soviet union, except instead of learning how to placate trigger, happy cops, we were instructed how to keep our private conversations secret from the state that is pretty unusual for here in the west. So let's start there. Give us a little bit of background of how you came out of that environment.
2 (2m 54s):
Well, Michael, I suppose the most remarkable thing about that story is that I was growing up at the very, very, very tail end of the Soviet union by which most of the repression and the restriction and the censorship and the, the Golas and everything was long since over. And even at the very tail end of that society, my parents were quite rightly, you know, worried that things that we were discussing in the family home, which they were discussing in the family home criticism of the Soviet regime or communism or socialism, or the observation that, you know, maybe the shops are empty or whatever these, all of these things were considered difficult to talk about.
2 (3m 36s):
And frankly, not to be discussed outside the home, because if you, as a kid were to, to go to school and reveal some of this, you would be in big trouble and more importantly, your parents would be, be in big trouble. And our own family history of this was full of stories like this. So for example, my grandfather, again, very late in the Soviet union, I talk about this in a book, as you know, towards the mid eighties. I think it would've been, he criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was, you know, when he didn't even do it in public, he did it in a private conversation, private discussion, a supposed friend reported him to the KGB. They searched this raided his house.
2 (4m 16s):
The next day he was fired from his job. His wife was fired from her job and their children. That's my dad and, and his younger sister, both kicked out of university with all sorts of consequences. The friends ostracized them, many of them and so on and so forth. So they were kind of canceled before it was the cool thing to, to, to do. And there were many, many things like this in, in my own family. And of course, lots of people around us could tell you similar stories. So I grew up in an environment where there was a lot of censorship. There was a lot of self censorship. People worry about speaking their mind in public or even in private. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to write the book because I'm trying to warn people in the west that these new and cool, shiny things that we're all getting involved with are actually quite old, very, very tried and tested and don't lead us anywhere.
2 (5m 9s):
Good.
1 (5m 9s):
Right? There is this idea of the difference between private and public thoughts. You have that great, that thought experiment in your book of, from bill bur about if the New York times printed on their front page, all your private thoughts from the night before, you know, would, would anybody survive that
2 (5m 29s):
Well? Exactly. And so I think we've forgotten that human beings of flawed. This is one of the things we were Francis and I were just on, on Joe Rogans show a few weeks ago. And this is one of the things that we talked about. Part of, you know, I'm a big fan of Thomas soul in some of his writing. And this is one of the things he talks about in a book called a conflict of visions in which he talks about the difference between two visions. One of them is what he calls the constrained vision. And that is the idea that human beings are flawed, imperfect, they'll make mistakes and, and so on and so forth. And so the best way to predict what they're likely to do in the future is to look around history and, and how they're behaving now.
2 (6m 10s):
And the other vision is of course, the progressive vision, which says that human beings must be perfected. We must make a new man as we did in the Soviet union, homeless of ETUs. And we must pursue by all means this idea that human beings will be perfected. And so we've lent, it will leaned rather in very heavily in the west. I think particularly in the Anglosphere into this idea of the perfectability of man woman and all the other genders. And so we are kind of at a point where we, we expect each other to be perfect. And the idea that, you know, downloading your private thoughts and publishing 'em on the front page of a newspaper would end your career is something every single human being in the history of humanity could easily relate to.
2 (6m 50s):
And yet somehow we seem to have forgotten it.
1 (6m 52s):
Yeah, I love soul's work. And that particular analogy as Steve Pinker ran with in his book, the blank slate showing, you know, why it's not true, it's not, it's not enough just to say, well, that's a ridiculous idea. Why is it not true? And as he points out that the original eugenics movement in the west was supported by liberals, progressives, people who wanted to use genetic engineering to achieve this goal of, of perfecting hum human nature. And of course that, that's a, you know, that's, that's kind of the opposite of what it is now. Eugenics is often associated with the right wing after the Nazis.
1 (7m 33s):
But before that all the leading liberal intellectuals or progressive intellectuals supported it in that vein of, you know, if we can re-engineer society politically and economically, why can't we do it biologically?
2 (7m 47s):
Well, that's exactly right. And by the way, I appreciate that Pinker added that wise. It not true, but I guess Thomas, so who was big on facts, he is big on facts and, and all of that. Yeah. I think what he would say is actually the best way to understand the human beings of flawed is to embrace the fact that if you look historically, and if you look at how we behave in the present, we behave in ways that tell us that we are flawed. And so it's the observation of the past reality in addition to the points that Pinker makes in that book that I think are, are really a telltale sign that this perfect is, is constrained. It's, it's not forever. There's certain things that we'll never be able to eradicate.
2 (8m 28s):
That's why I, you know, I'm sure you like me love comedy because that is what comedy often seeks to expose the fact that we are not perfect. That the fact that we don't think in ways that we'd necessarily be proud of, even if, if we were to speak our thoughts out loud and very often the, the bits of material that land the hardest are when the comedian speaks about how they actually think in a way that you're not supposed to think. So that that's, that's always been the interesting thing about comedy, right?
1 (8m 58s):
Or like the definition of a political gaff is when a politician accidentally says something that's true and then has to walk it back. Right. Kinda like I know it's true. And you know, it's true. And I know that, you know, that it's true. And I know that, you know, that I know that and so on, but we all have to keep our mouth shut, you know, the emperor's new clothes and all that. Yeah. Figure also points out all that grim architecture in the Soviet union, in the Eastern block and particularly like east Germany and so on. I mean, you could just see it at the border looking left or right in Berlin. Just the difference in the architecture was based on this premise of your view of human nature, which is that, you know, people don't care about gardens and nature and, you know, you can just lay it out like plumbing in, in straight lines and blocks of apartments and people will be perfectly happy, you know, not so,
2 (9m 46s):
You know what, I, I don't know how, how true that is growing up in the Soviet union myself. I would say that actually, you know, the, the ability to build a country, essentially from scratch and to, to decide as a government, exactly what you're gonna do, did allow to build very beautiful cities in many ways, Moscow and Kiev, in terms of the parks and the big, what we call alleys in Russian Ali, you know, the, the, the very beautiful squares as well. I suspect this is a narrative that people in the west like, because it fits what they already think about the Soviets. I think the main reason that the Soviet buildings were crappy gray, you know, apartment blocks, etcetera, is cuz they're cheaper to, to, to build than housing people in, you know, semi detached to the detached houses.
2 (10m 32s):
I think that's a much more likely explanation. Yeah. That's a good point of, of why
1 (10m 36s):
That happened. Withdraw that because actually I've been to Moscow twice and I've been through many of those parks just out early morning in the, on, on a run or whatever. And they're gorgeous. Yeah. Back in the day when you could go there, that's too bad about another quote I used from dusty Osky, every man has reminisces, which he would not tell to anyone, but is, but only his friends, he has other matters in his mind, which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. That reminded me of some of the stuff you're writing about in your book.
