Mike Freedman
Welcome to 1984 Today, your one stop shop for all things dystopia. I'm your host, Mike Freedman. There are many themes we want to explore with this podcast:
What constitutes a dystopia and how it comes into being.
The nature and dangers of utopian thinking.
How we imagine and create art about perfect and imperfect worlds
How we define progress and whether it's a good thing.
How technology enables concentration of power and drives social alienation.
How to protect and increase individual freedom.
So it's a pleasure and a great opportunity to have someone with us now whose work encompasses all of the above and more: Elle Griffin. Elle is the author of The Elysian, a newsletter that goes out to over 11,000 subscribers sharing nonfiction and fiction on the idea of Utopia.
She's a fellow with Substack and Roots of Progress. She's a freelance journalist with bylines in Esquire. Insider, Forbes and more. She has degrees in Fashion Merchandising and French, and did her graduate studies in Mariology, a field I was unaware of until her bio explained that it's the study of the Virgin Mary. Elle, I'm impressed, intimidated and most of all, curious.
Thank you for joining me.
Elle Griffin
Thank you so much for having me.
Mike Freedman
Well, I suppose for our starter then I would bring up the fact that you, at least within the Substack community, elevated your profile slightly by responding to one of these ginned up controversies that bubbles up from the mainstream press every once in a while. In November 2023, Jonathan Katz at The Atlantic wrote an article called “Substack has a Nazi problem” about the fact that there were people on Substack who were publishing newsletters and monetizing them who genuinely were racists and white supremacists and white nationalists and in general unsavory types.
The upshot of his article mainly being that this is a problem that requires censorship and demonetization and de-platforming. And you took the initiative to create an open letter in December, a couple of weeks after that article came out. That was cosigned by quite a few fellow authors on Substack. I'll accept the deep emotional wound of not being invited to sign it on the basis that we didn't know each other then.
And your response was that Substack and the people on it should be able to publish what they want because it's important to have an open debate and places where people can gather and discuss things rather than driving them underground. So to begin the conversation, I'd love to draw you out on how you came across Jonathan Katz's article, what you thought of it, and articles like that with that type of angle, and how you went about writing the open letter, getting it signed, putting it out there, what the response was.
Elle Griffin
Yeah, I think well, I saw the Jonathan Katz article and my first impression was it's nuts.
This is a platform I've now been writing for, for three years. And I just have to say that the product design of it is so much different than any other platform I've ever been on. So my letter was actually not to say we have free speech. It actually wasn't very free speech absolutist at all. It was really just in in the you know, in this kind of battle against extremism on the Internet.
I actually think Substack's product design has worked a lot better at that than centralized moderation has on other platforms. I mean, the upset here, you know, Katz's upset was over 16 accounts on Substack that we wouldn't have even heard of if he didn't find them and publicize them. And he admits in the article himself that he went on extremist chat channels to try to find out what the Substack accounts were that were anti-Semitic or hateful.
You know, after his article, I went and looked for these accounts, and from what I can understand, only 3 to 4 of them are actually active and only one of them is making any money. And he's making to the tune of about a couple hundred dollars a month. And from what I can tell of his content, they're like reviews of music albums, not hate speech, as far as I can tell.
Mike Freedman
A Nazi music critic. That's a new one on me. So that almost sounds interesting.
Elle Griffin
I think people were upset about things that he said off of the platform.
And they were also upset that one of the founders of Substack, Hamish Mackenzie, invited him on his podcast. So it came off as this like Substack is promoting this guy who I guess has some kind of morally unimpeachable character. And I get it. Like I wish that even that much hate didn't exist on the platform. But my, you know, my argument was other social media platforms have hundreds of thousands of extremist accounts that are actively being promoted and viralized and, yes, monetized.
And there can be no doubt that Facebook, MailChimp, Amazon books or any other platform one could want to write for post many more hate accounts and are making much more money from them than Substack. And you know, the only difference is they aren't being targeted by the Atlantic, who, by the way, their largest competitor is independent writers on Substack.
And if we're going to argue that the founders of a company shouldn't promote hate content, well, yeah, that's a great bar. But then what is Elon Musk doing and why is that okay? It kind of just seemed like everybody was in this upset over Substack, over a couple of dozen accounts. And and I just, you know, in my head, I thought that pushing content to leave Substack only to remain on literally any other platform seemed nonsensical to me.
Mike Freedman
It also, I mean, maybe I'm coming at it from a more absolutist position than the one you yourself hold, but I just have perhaps a bias in favor of the idea that sunshine is the best disinfectant, right? I, I think it's probably a good thing to know where the Nazis are and who they are. And if there are people that want to get together and, you know, drink Schlitz and wear pillowcases on their heads and have a fire on their lawn, maybe it's important for us to know who they are so that they don't nip out of the shadows and surprise us one day. And it also makes it significantly less sexy when it's quite obvious, as you say, that it's oh, it's like this one guy. He makes a couple of hundred bucks. He has some far out opinions that very few people agree with, obviously, because we know what kind of money he makes and it shows how unpopular it is.
Elle Griffin
Right.
Mike Freedman
Versus keeping in a way, you know, keeping the ballot secret. So to speak. You know, you never know how popular a film is at the Oscars. It just wins. They don't publish the votes, as William Goldman said. Right. So you never really know if it was, you know, was it by two votes that that film is the best film? Was it by a thousand votes?
Elle Griffin
Yeah. And any kind of censorship is obviously dangerous because even the deplatforming that happened from Facebook and Twitter, what did they do? They just created Parler and and Truth Social. And what ended up happening is all of our major media organizations aren't on there, so we don't even know what's happening there unless you have an account there.
Whereas when it was all on Twitter, everybody was reporting on it left and right. Everything that was happening, every idea everybody had. I'm not sure that it's better to take a bunch of people off the platform and, you know, create other places where...
Mike Freedman
Well, sure. And you know what else Nazis do? They buy shoes. What are we going to do, outlaw Timberland? Right. Because they're you know, they're doing business with Nazis. I mean, it's it's the type of line of logic that I just think is, it's emotionally understandable. It's unseemly and unpleasant and in my view, incorrect, the attitudes that a lot of these people have.
But the idea that there should not be any where they can express it other than in the the garage of their house or, you know, in a meeting in the woods. I just think that's more dangerous, as you say.
Elle Griffin
Yeah. And I don't think platforms should be promoting it or allowing it to go viral. I think it's ridiculous. But I can be on Twitter for 2 seconds and instantly see the most hateful thing Kanye said show up in my feed without even following him at all. On Substack, it's incredibly hard to go viral. There's no way to do it. You have to follow somebody.
Mike Freedman
It's just you and your readers are there for you.
Elle Griffin
Exactly. So I think that's a much safer approach, you know?
Mike Freedman
Mm. No, I agree. And so I guess I'm, I'm curious, especially since it doesn't seem like it was a proper fire under you defense of free speech in an absolute way. What, what was it in you that snapped and felt you had to respond to this article by Jonathan Katz and the genesis of that open letter?
Elle Griffin
To be clear, I am an advocate for free speech. I just think that and in this case, the argument is over extremism on platforms. And I know that platforms are owned by companies and that companies can have different rules. Sure. So I was...
Mike Freedman
It's not a First Amendment argument.
Elle Griffin
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And in the case of the Katz article, honestly, it's not just him. There were a lot of people before him who have tried to target Substack in the mainstream media and the worst possible thing that could happen is all the mainstream media organizations vilify Substack to the point that everybody leaves the platform. The platform can't make money.
And we have to all make our living writing for The Atlantic again instead of writing for ourselves on Substack. So to me it is so frustrating to just see Substack steamrolled by the mainstream media over and over again in this in these kind of culture wars. And so after the Katz piece and I was just, you know, went in and did my own research and tried to figure out, like, what was the real problem here?
I wrote my own Substack Note, just kind of like their Twitter about it, just saying, you know, things are better here than anywhere else, literally anywhere else on the Internet. And the founder of Substack, Hamish Mackenzie, sent me an email just being like, thank you so much for this note. And so I think it was something like, you know, love this note, you nailed it.
And I just responded back, No, actually, you're nailing it. Thank you for designing the platform this way. And I mentioned to him that I had reached out to the Atlantic, and I had proposed a rebuttal piece to them. Nobody got back to me. Of course.
Mike Freedman
I'm so shocked.
Elle Griffin
And so then I was like, I think I'm just going to write.
I'm going to extend it into my own letter on Substack. And he was like, he's like, Well, if you do, I'd be happy to help you find people to sign it if you want. And so then I was like, okay, let's just do that. So I wrote an article, he sent an email to some people, and I sent email out to all of my people, and I sent them all the drafts that I wrote and was like, What do you think?
And they signed their names on a Google doc and, and then we published it. We were very aware at this time that there was another writer on Substack who was circling like an opposition letter. So I think that's where the idea of like, let's get signatures came from, because originally I was just going to write an essay. But then since I found out that this, you know, these other writers were doing an opposition document and they were trying to get signatures. I was like, well, we, you know, I guess they should do the same thing.
So it ended up turning crazy.
Mike Freedman
Yeah. It's an interesting thing, this social media world and you know, in marketing what they call social proof just why why is it that I mean, first of all, why is it that what would be considered the most basic middle of the road idea is now considered a kind of rebellious fringe belief in terms of defending the right of people to publish what they want to publish.
And second of all, why do we take certain ideas more seriously if they have a bunch of signatures underneath them? I just the open letter thing I, I applaud you for doing it and I was delighted to see it and I enjoyed reading it. But I just, I find myself musing on this question, what has happened? The Overton Window in our culture somehow has shifted over time in my lifetime so much that we actually now have a public discussion which seems to believe that a strong free speech stance is somehow a right wing or a conservative position.
That to be liberal in quotation marks, is somehow to be wringing your hands about the idea that someone somewhere might be thinking something someone else wouldn't like. It's just a very strange time for these ideas and for us as a society. I mean, that's just my feeling. I'm curious about you, especially since after sending it out, I'd love to know what the response was.
Elle Griffin
Well, I think that it's actually not very surprising because it's the response was something that we have been dealing with for thousands of years, which is, now we call it virtue signaling. But the idea is that we, you know, try to paint ourselves in the white. And sometimes you have to paint somebody else in the black to do that. It's not ideal. It doesn't involve reason or logic. It's more emotional than anything.
But I actually wrote an article about this recently because David Hume wrote that humans are not rational beings, they're emotional. And so to try to counter that with reason is like one of the biggest challenges of humanity at all times. So I think when I, when I wrote this response and then the next day the opposition response came out and immediately, you know, there was a lot of support for my letter.
In fact, we had to open up the letter to further signatories because so many people wanted to sign it. I think there ended up being like 500 signatures if we add everyone on Notes who signed themselves. But then there was this kind of weird antagonism that was painting the argument as pro-Nazi and the people that were pro-moderation were the anti-Nazis. And so people were actually calling me and many other writers like me Nazis and that was when I was like, okay, well, we're anti-Nazi here. We just have a different idea of what will solve a problem.
Mike Freedman
I think part of it is also something that's happened in the intelligentsia in Western societies. I mean, it's in a way, it's always been there, but it seems more prominent now, which is a kind of obsession with the way you use language, as if using the language changes the thing described or changes the reality. And so what you said makes perfect sense to me, not in the sense that I think it's a good way of viewing it, but it makes sense that that would be the reaction you got.
Because, I mean, why do some people identify themselves as anti-fascist or anti-racist? It's because you immediately discredit anyone that disagrees with whatever, you know, bill of goods you're selling. Anyone who opposes an anti-racist in quotation marks is de facto racist. It's a very clever semantic frame to impose on a discussion to immediately, as you say, make yourself the good person.
And anyone who doesn't agree with all of your ideas is aligned with the least savory people.
Elle Griffin
Right. Well, the opposition called their, I think the headline of the article was something like Substack Writers against Nazis. And I mean, I could have called my piece the exact same thing. I could have given it that same title, because I also don't want to see Nazis in my...
Mike Freedman
Substack writers against Nazis and moderators.
Elle Griffin
And I just think product design has been more effective against, you know, Nazi and hate content than moderation has been, as evidenced by Twitter and Facebook. But I think that, you know, when you see the word Nazi and the word Substack together any amount of times you're just like, Oh, this seems like something I need to distance myself from. We're not having that same conversation. We're not calling Twitter the Nazi place to hang out.
Mike Freedman
It's evident that Twitter's new management have significantly altered the type of conversations people are comfortable having on there. Or maybe they have this, this is the bit that maybe I think maybe I'm being naive, but maybe they haven't. Maybe the differences since they aren't apparently in quotation marks aren't using the same techniques of shadow banning and suppressing and deemphasizing the circulation of certain tweets, maybe the same thing that was there before is there now. They're just not keeping it away from you. So perhaps it's not about emboldening people to come out and say things that other people find offensive or problematic. It could just be that they're not bothering to hide it. I have to you know, I don't know what's going on under the bonnet over there.
I can't say for certain which it is. So that's the other thing. Going back to this sunlight being a good disinfectant idea is that's why it's so important to have this stuff out to an extent, out in the open. That doesn't mean you're going to you know, get the the nearest right wing extremist and give them the biggest microphone on the biggest platform.
But it just means, you know, it's good to know what's going on, where these people are, what they say. So you can really measure if there's more chatter coming from that corner or not. No?
Elle Griffin
Yeah, I mean, I think so.
Mike Freedman
And apart from the suggestion or the inference that you were somehow sympathizing with Nazis because you mentioned that demonetizing them might not get rid of them, shocking concept, I know, there was no really unpleasant pushback from the open letter? You didn't, did you get any inquiries from mainstream press to take your perspective or did you get angry death threats from people who thought you were empowering Nazis and they thought you should stop?
Elle Griffin
No, I mean, I did see my letter quoted significantly in the mainstream press, the New York Times and a bunch of other ones, all in articles.
But of course, they're from the mainstream media. But the benefit of Substack is that, you know, even my piece that I published, I locked the comments to paid subscribers and I didn't respond to people on Notes because it just was getting, I could see that it was kind of getting out of any kind of realm of logic. So I just feel like I'm not going to just jump in and try to defend myself.
It's just going to keep this conversation, you know, in the stream forever. And I didn't want to do that. So for me, it wasn't that crazy. I didn't get any crazy email. I had one subscriber write me a list of why I was evil and asked for a refund.
But other than that, and my honest...
Mike Freedman
In that moment, what did you suddenly discover your refund policy was?
Elle Griffin
I just gave a full refund. But I just I think that, you know, well, I had asked her to write me an email being like, you know, I'm so sorry you felt this way, like, let me know, because I thought we were going to be able to have an intellectual kind of debate about it. But then she kind of just was like, Your whole personality sucks.
Mike Freedman
I've been reading you for three years and liking everything you said. Well, now I know you suck. Give me my money back. You're wrong. Nuanced debate. Fantastic.
Elle Griffin
Well, I can't be everything to everyone.
Mike Freedman
Look, I had an episode with C.J Hopkins, who's a writer you may have heard of who's going through a court case in Germany because he wrote a book that features, in a very low key way, features a swastika on the cover as a comment on what he saw as a kind of nascent totalitarianism or fascism in the policy of the German government, which is the country where he's living and he's being prosecuted for distributing material in support of an extremist organization, which is obviously totally not what he's on about.
And after that episode came out, you know, he was great. He was very supportive of the episode and of the podcast. And he shared it quite widely. And we got a bunch of new subscribers, and it was amazing, it was almost like mathematical, somehow as soon as we got above a certain number of subscribers, suddenly I had someone in a comment section sharing something about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
And it's like I had to look at that and think for a second, Who do I want to be? I talked to my wife about it. I really agonized over it. Like, I really don't want to be someone who's deleting someone's comments or who's banning people just because they're responding. I want people to respond.
I want to see a lively conversation, a kind of community engagement. And I'm happy to holler back and to be challenged and to defend something if I said something someone wants to pull me up on. And I really you know, I sat with it. I had to just let it go. And luckily the fire died down, it didn't become a kind of troll battle that went on forever, so I didn't need to do anything about it. But it was really instructive seeing myself having that challenge. And since you have a very healthy subscriber base and this experience you're talking about, when you think of your own approach to moderation, I remember CJ, who's very much in favor of free speech and right now fighting essentially a free speech, legal fight, he was saying he shuts people down in the comments or bans them if they cross a certain line because it's his space and he's not a country. So it's different. So I'm very curious if you see it the same way or differently in terms of how you moderate, curate your own space.
Elle Griffin
Yeah, I mean, that is the benefit of Substack is I can fully moderate my space and I think that is much more effective than Substack choosing how they want to do that. For me, I have chosen to create a Substack where there is the CEO of a company and an anarchist in the same comment section, because we are talking about politics and business and ideas and I want us to be able to have conversations about that.
I think there needs to be a place for that on the Internet. Now, if somebody responds with a comment that just gives a hot take, like CEO said, go die, then I will say, I'm sorry, this doesn't, you know, meet my guidelines at the literary salon. I'm afraid you're going to have to back up your position if that's how you feel.
Mike Freedman
I see that you wrote “I don't like you or your stupid face. Your face is stupid. Go die.” Yeah, well, can you please elucidate your nuanced opinion, please?
Elle Griffin
Well, that doesn't happen very often. First of all, look, all of my essays, the comments are locked to subscribers only.
So you would have to pay to say that.
Mike Freedman
People buy tomatoes to throw at people.
Elle Griffin
I don't think that's why they buy them.
Mike Freedman
Anyway, so that's your approach basically to try and have it be a conversation and then if for whatever reason it degenerates, then you have to draw a line.
Elle Griffin
I just delete it or ban them from commenting. So yeah.
Mike Freedman
It makes sense and something that's very unique about your approach and your work, which is why I was very keen to, to speak with you, is you, you write both nonfiction and fiction and it's great to have you to talk about that because the fascinating things about dystopia to me come from both directions. They are both the the real trends in the world around me and in technology and society that I see that I think are important to discuss and to question, but also the great novels, the characters, the ways people dream up, as I called it in the intro, imperfect worlds. So I'd really love to know why, why utopia, why perfect and imperfect worlds? What drew you to that direction?
Elle Griffin
Because everything right now in the media is dystopia. We need a counterbalance.
Mike Freedman
Is this when I apologize?
Elle Griffin
No, no, I get why it's an exciting genre.
But I do think that it has caused some problems in our society in the fact that when you see in in all of our, you know, fantasy, not just books, but shows, TV shows, films, everything, video games, that AI is used to create the apocalypse and kill off humanity. And a computer chip in your brain is for government surveillance.
And you just, you only see the dystopian uses for technology or the dystopian, you know, things that governments do. Then it just creates this global pessimism. And I think that is very all the rage right now. And I wanted to counter that. There's been this kind of idea of solar punk as a genre, but there's like no actual books and that genre is just kind of like this idea.
Mike Freedman
Solar punk?
Elle Griffin
It's this genre where there's all this technology and stuff, but it's used to create this more beautiful pastoral setting. So it's not a, it's not common. It's just kind of a niche, a niche thing that people have taken an interest in. But, but I think we actually do need that. I think we need to see, you know, there was one episode of Black Mirror, I think it was called San Junipero where the, you know, the dot on your temple puts you into a virtual world.
And that is used because as we learn, a quadriplegic and a woman who are dying are able to live out full lives in this virtual world. It's a utopian vision. Now the fact that the rest of that series was all dystopian and how things can go wrong, I think, you know, is a bummer.
But that one episode that San Junipero was, it was hopeful, it was good. There was still a dramatic storyline. There was still curves where we were like, What's going to happen? But it gave, it actually gave a more utopian worldview than other...
Mike Freedman
And it's quite telling, I think, if I'm not mistaken, that episode is the one that won the, what was it, an Emmy I think.
Elle Griffin
Oh did it.
Mike Freedman
It was, it was that specific episode that was awarded something in the television world.
(Edit: Black Mirror has won multiple awards for several episodes, including three Emmys for Outstanding TV Movie. San Junipero won 6 awards, two of which were Emmys. The USS Callister episode of Black Mirror won 7 awards, of which four were Emmys. Sorry for understating your case, Charlie Brooker; as a big fan, I've let the side down.)
Elle Griffin
Oh, that's because it was so good.
Mike Freedman
Right. But it's also. Yeah, I mean, there's the old George Clooney line when he was questioned about this in a press conference when he was promoting a film, he said Americans like a little too much cheese in their soufflé. So, you know, is it that that's what people really want, is the the hopefulness, the happy talk?
Do you think people are actually kind of mainlining the bummer, the down the downer, the the negative trip?
Elle Griffin
I don't, I think that that is such...everybody always says nobody wants utopian fiction. Everybody only wants dystopian fiction. That's just the way we're wired. And I think that is so not true because why? Why to this day, what are the most watched television series? It's like Friends and Seinfeld and the Office. And these were shows where literally nothing bad ever happens.
And every episode you can expect to just be happy. Today, all of our shows are dark, you know, big, dramatic. Everything is horrible. And then what do you want to do after you watch that? You're like, I'm going to go watch a Friends episode.
And I think we saw a resurgence of that this year when we saw Ted Lasso and how incredible that did. It was like it was not, it was not a sitcom. So it wasn't fluffy. There was dramatic elements there. You know, people were suffering from mental ailments and not everything went right. But it was still so positive and uplifting and hopeful.
And I think that we just, our whole media landscape needs more of that. It shouldn't be “Everything is only, you know, dystopian saga versus fluffy romance.” We can have something that is positive and, you know, and real and good.
Mike Freedman
Yeah. While you were talking, I was listening to you and I was really feeling like there is a very interesting, almost visceral reaction to this idea of de-emphasizing the negative in the world in favor of something that's lighter or more positive or uplifting, something to do with a, in a way, being kind of dishonest or willfully choosing not to see, quote, all the bad stuff.
And that's not me saying you're doing that. It's, I'm noticing that there is a kind of a knee jerk. So maybe this idea of “people want dystopia”, well, maybe we're fascinated by it. You know, the doomscrolling, the worst case scenarios, the endless lists of all the things that are going wrong or historically wrong, you know, the Freudian death wish of it all, so to speak.
But I do feel like I don't want to say that we have to have some kind of social realist rule where you need to be constantly banging on about everything that sucks because that's what's real, because the joy is real. The happiness is real. The pleasure and the possibility are real. Why do I have that reaction?
Elle Griffin
This is, I don't know, because, that's just been human nature forever. But I mean, it's the same thing with the Academy Awards. Like what is everybody saying is going to win the Academy Award this year? It's going to be Oppenheimer. Why wouldn't Barbie win it? There's a reason. And it's just because we take serious work more seriously. Every year I attend the Sundance Film Festival. And, you know, this year I have a press pass. And my sole purpose was to go see all of the utopian or hopeful films.
Let me just tell you, there are hundreds of films coming to Sundance this year. There are five that I want to see that have any kind of hopeful. I mean, they literally, they talk about fracking, they talk about racism. They talk about, you know, disease in third world countries. And there's just this idea that the more depressing and serious the subject matter is, the more seriously we can take that art. And it's, I don't know why it's like that.
It really drives me insane because that is not the best art. And when you actually see what people want, it's not like, everyone's going to watch the really depressing movie all the time.
And just for whatever reason, you know, when you have to make an actor cry, that seems like harder to do than to make them smile. So that seems like it's more deserving of an award. I don't know. But it's the same thing with Pulitzer Prize winning novels, or Pulitzer Prize winning literature. I went back and looked and it was like every single one was just horribly depressing.
There was nothing...we don't reward seeing the good in life. We only reward seeing the bad. I don't, it's, I don't know why.
Mike Freedman
And in a way, again, there's this sense continuing from the reaction I was sharing with you, there's this sense that somehow if I'm reading something that's focused on or emphasizing we're entirely about the good or the happy or the joyful, there is some dark knotted part of me that thinks of it as therefore ultimately false or leaving out something.
I can't tell you why that is, but I see it and I understand what you mean. And I really do sympathize with your question.
Elle Griffin
I think it's associated with naivete. I think that if you see it, if you see a child and an adult standing at the window, looking out at the rain, like the adult would be like, oh, it's such a crappy day. And the kid will be like “Puddles!” and both are true. Like, it is raining and there are puddles, but like, which outlook is the more real? They're both real. You know, you can choose to see that as a positive thing or you can choose to see that as a negative thing.
One is not more real than the other, though they're both real. So it's interesting that I think that when you grow up to see the child's response as being positive, we associate that with naivete. They don't know anything. They don't know yet, that rain will make it so much harder to go outside today. I don't know.
Mike Freedman
Well, they just don't have the same amount of head noise as grownups.
You know, they're not constantly, well, maybe they are, but in a different way. The children are not in the same rut of habitually telling themselves a story about their life in their own head all the time, always complaining about what I have to do and where I have to go. And it sucks more if it's raining than if it's sunny. And I like this and I don't like that.
Elle Griffin
Right?
Mike Freedman
I mean, my approach with this project is in a way aligned with what you're talking about, because I try to keep my sense of humor about this. I do take these things seriously. I do have concerns about certain aspects of what's going on culturally, socially, technologically. And part of me feels there would be something irresponsible to take that too lightly.
But at the same time, there are some very strange, weird and funny things going on in the world. And I feel like if we are to survive the 21st century as a society worth preserving, we have to keep our sense of humor and our sense of the ridiculous because some of this stuff is just laughable. I remember what Mel Brooks said when he was interviewed about The Producers, which of course, was his film, and then a very famous musical, which in its way made fun of Hitler. And that came out in 1968. It's 23 years, which proves the South Park theory that everything's funny after 22 years. Right. So so, you know, it came out and it was controversial, really, you can't joke about this. You can't have Dick Shawn playing Hitler and have a musical and, you know, have chicks in SS uniforms, high kicking like the Rockettes, that's not okay.
And I saw this great line. He said maybe if more people had laughed at Hitler the first time, he would never have gotten that much power. So I think there's a tremendous truth in that, that the mockery can serve us well, that ridicule that prefers using to an extent to take some of this stuff or some of these people seriously, you know, like Jonathan Katz, you know, why does someone get to determine what is the serious debate? In a way that's part of the presumption of the media establishment. They get to decide when it's a serious question, when we all have to kind of furrow our brows and and really not joke about this kind of thing.
Elle Griffin
Yeah. Okay. I have to stop by what you just said. I think that you're right. We need to laugh about it. Actually, on the subject of kind of a lighthearted Hitler.
Mike Freedman
I'm all ears now. Go.
Elle Griffin
Jojo Rabbit.
Mike Freedman
I haven't seen it, actually.
Elle Griffin
Oh, my gosh. It is. It is one of the best films of all time. One of my favorite films of all time takes place in Nazi Germany with a little boy who basically participates in like a summer camp that is like pro-Nazi, where he's, like, learning to shoot with the Nazis. It's like a little kid. And so Hitler becomes his best friend, like, an imaginary friend. But the whole thing manages to condemn the hatred and take those events very seriously. I mean, the child's mom dies, his friends die, and yet it is such a positive and hopeful movie about humanity as the great example of what I think I would say is like utopian in the sense of like a positive worldview. Even as dark things are happening.
Mike Freedman
Like Life Is Beautiful.
Elle Griffin
Right? Right, exactly. And the second thing I want to bring up is I don't think that necessarily like having things like that, but we could just like laugh Hitler away or that he wouldn't have come into power if we could have...
Mike Freedman
That was Mel Brooks, not me.
Elle Griffin
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, we saw up until World War Two, like I'm right now, I'm studying humanist literature and all of these humanist philosophers throughout the world were like largely pacifist, completely pacifist, like anti-war until World War Two. And then suddenly all of the humanists become pro-war in this one case. Why? Because the people that they were up against were actually anti humanist.
There was this huge anti-humanist movement. A lot of the German philosophers at the time were like, you know, rational thinking and critical thinking is not the answer. What we need is power. What we need is, you know, to just assert what we need.
Mike Freedman
And the enemy, blood and soil.
Elle Griffin
Yes, it was just all about power. And, you know, the humanists at that time realized the only way, that you can't tamp something down like that by saying you should think critically. And if they could change their mind from being focused on power to being focused on rational thinking, like, no, that's not going to work.
They had to meet power with power. They had to, they had to go to war against them. They had to fight them down. I think that all you know, but there's a reason why the Katz article was so upsetting to everybody. And that's because there's this, everybody remembers World War Two, even though we weren't there for it.
It was one of the most horrible things to happen in human history. And it was reason enough that we're all like, this is resurging. Like how? Like back then we should have stopped things sooner. Can we stop things sooner now? You know, like, and maybe it's just start with on the internet, but we notice that people are saying hateful things on the Internet.
Maybe we should stop it there before it gets into power. And we have to remember that the reason why Hitler came into power, the reason why even Putin came into power, they were elected. They were elected before they were even really crazy. I mean, sometimes the craziness helped them get even more powerful because, you know, it was after Hitler was sent to prison that suddenly all of his followers were coming out of the woodwork being like, now we've got to elect them, you know?
[Edit: Elle has, in the comments thread of the episode, corrected herself on the question of Hitler being elected. Hitler was appointed as chancellor without being voted into that position. He was also plenty crazy before he won any votes. I'd note, not on Elle's behalf, that the Nazi Party did win votes in several elections up to 1933, and were in fact the most popular party in 1932 and 1933 (winning 37% in July 1932, 33% in November 1932, with the next largest party receiving between 21% and 24% of the votes). So while Hitler wasn't elected as chancellor, he did lead the largest and most popular parliamentary party in a democratic country, until other parties were outlawed.]
Or we can see a similar thing playing out with Trump in the way followers are like, you know, bringing anything against him makes him more powerful. And so I think that it's like, you know, laughing isn't going to be enough. But we need to meet it with power, but where do we meet it and at what time and at what place?
Like, how do we stop it from infiltrating democracy?
Mike Freedman
And when you have people who to use the kind of, the OG Nazis, the version one Nazis as an example, you know, when you have essentially a grievance politics, an ideology that at least in part draws on the idea of people who feel that they have been shortchanged, cut loose by their leaders, stabbed in the back, was the big phrase at the time historically, cracking down on that, trying to silence people, trying to punish them into accepting that they are not in an inferior, subjugated position, plays into that grievance narrative.
It plays into their sense of victimhood but you know, that whole 'it's okay to punch a Nazi' thing on the Internet happened where you'd see some alt right douche getting, you know, slapped in the face while reporting from some protest somewhere. There was a whole meme video thing of people going around and just wanting to hit someone in the head, whoever had a side parting and was wearing khakis, right?
And it's just like, well, these are people who say that their opponents are unreasonable and violent and that they are not safe in their own country, which is why they want to be idiots about how to, quote, take their power back. You're not going to convince them that they're wrong by making them feel like they're being victimized and justifying it morally.
That's not a winning strategy.
Elle Griffin
Right? I mean, I think the one great thing that authoritarian leaders do that draws a lot of attention to them is that they focus on all the bad things that are happening. They don't, they don't say, here's a solution to the problems that we're facing. They say, here's the problem. The rich people are getting richer. The poor people are getting poorer. Capitalism is destroying the country. It's holding you down. They point out all the problems but there's not, they don't give a solution at all. The solution is elect me, and somehow that's going to change things. I mean, Hitler was like anti-communism, anti-communism, anti-communism at a time when everyone was very, very worried about communism and how that would affect their culture. So like, of course, you know, if you're serious...
Mike Freedman
And then he signed a pact with Stalin.
Elle Griffin
Yeah and you're the people that are in charge of electing them, you're like oh yeah, I'm anti-that too. Sign me up, you know, like it makes sense, it's virtue signaling. It's like I want, I want things to be better than they are.
Mike Freedman
But “I want things to be better than they are” comes with, as you said, a certain caveat from the people giving the pitch that tends to put my back up, which is essentially everything would be better if everyone did what I say, and that seems to be the kind of basic pitch of most people who are putting forward, shall we say, an agenda driven by either grievance or catastrophe.
So on the one hand, people who are saying there's something that's either going very wrong or that will go very wrong unless we make sweeping changes, and that's why I should have the power, and there are other people saying that these groups of people are being hurt and subjugated and so to fix that, I, not they, I should have the power to empower them.
It makes me think of this distinction in the sound of the word utopia that I find fascinating, which is that it's utopia, but there's also eutopia with an E on the front. And utopia means 'no place' in Greek, right? And eutopia means 'good place'. So it's a pun sitting somewhere between a place that doesn't or can't exist and a place that's good. Hmm. And maybe there's, you know, a sense of the impossibility of that good place. That is part of why we prefer talking about the bad stuff.
Elle Griffin
And, you know, Thomas More, who penned that novel [Utopia] was very much satirizing the, you know, Italy he lived in, in a time when it was very dangerous to do so. And he was eventually killed because he refused to acknowledge the king's, you know, marriage or annulment of his last marriage. He was a staunch Catholic. So I think that to call it both good place and no place is a little bit a way of playing it safe, too, because you're like, well, here's my idea for a better culture, but it doesn't even exist.
Mike Freedman
Oh, I'm not saying that you're doing anything wrong.
Elle Griffin
Yeah, you're not doing anything wrong. Here's some ideas.
Mike Freedman
You are very well versed from your work and your own reading and research in the history of these books about utopian places. And I just wonder, would I be off base if I observed that as the material circumstances of daily life have improved, child mortality goes down, sicknesses are cured, medicine becomes more effective, society becomes quite literally more liberal in terms of who's accepted, who falls within the mainstream, who can walk down the street holding hands with whom and so on. It's disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that society is worse now in the material self-evident ways than it was now.
Elle Griffin
It's way better.
Mike Freedman
And that's what I mean, that at the same time that that's been going on, we've moved from speculative utopian novels written in dark times to really dark fiction. So why is it, as things get better, why do we have darker dreams?
Elle Griffin
I don't know the answer to that, but it's, I mean, it's the same reason why the well, it's like the demographic of people who listen to true crime murder, it's like it's all just like housewives, middle class, like successful.
Mike Freedman
Who do you think marries the serial killers by mail?
Elle Griffin
I do think you have to be at a certain level of happiness to be able to withstand the dark. Like you're not going to, if you're living in like a horrible life situation, you wouldn't want to read a dystopian novel. Like if you're, if you were sex trafficked your whole life, are you going to want to read a novel in which that happens all the time, probably not.
But if you're like super happy and life is good, why not read it? Because it's fun and it's not any real threat to you.
Mike Freedman
How the other half lives.
Elle Griffin
So maybe actually, I do have an answer to that question after all.
Mike Freedman
I'll never forget when I visited a few places in sub-Saharan Africa and when I've been there the music is so cheerful, so upbeat, dancey, major chords, uplifting, happy voices singing in harmony. And then a country like Norway, which regularly is in the top three on the Human Development Index, produces Satanic black metal.
Elle Griffin
That actually makes sense if you think about it.
Mike Freedman
In your way of putting it, right. It's and this is why in dark times Hollywood and publishing houses, they all suddenly turn into kind of no, what people want is escape, what people want is the happy stuff, but even the happy stuff, what passes for entertainment now, Marvel movies and that kind of thing. Maybe I'm being disingenuous slightly, but I don't think I can remember the last time I saw a film where the lead wasn't an anti-hero, where it wasn't a flawed person suffering with some serious problem who'd had some awful thing happen to them, you know, a kind of just a strong central character that had real principles and didn't do terrible things or have some fatal problem in their mind or in their heart.
I just don't know if we create or envisage characters like that anymore.
Elle Griffin
I, I do think there is a case for okay, I have maybe a controversial opinion on this because I kind of feel like the anti-hero maybe is causing people to think about things more traumatically or to feel like they have more trauma in their lives. I'm talking about like mental health. I feel like mental health is maybe an issue that is, for example, I have friends who are very, very upset because they were once shoved into a locker by a high school student when they were in high school. And that still traumatizes them to this day. And that was like a huge trauma for them, whereas I was like, Oh, yeah, I was bullied really hard in high school too, but like everybody was, it's not traumatic. So it's like, you know, it's just a part of life. Like, I don't see that as a trauma.
And then I read the study that was about miscarriage throughout the world and how different cultures look at it. And it was saying that in places where miscarriage is really, really common, it's not actually, that it's not seen as a trauma. It's just like seen as an everyday thing. You know, people will be like, oh, I had a miscarriage. Oh, I'm sorry, that sucks, but they have a different relationship with it. Whereas in the US, having a miscarriage is like a serious trauma because in our head we imagine that it never happens. And so it feels like this rare, this rare trauma and I kind of feel that TV is doing this to us where it's making it seem like everything should be a trauma, and then we associate it as a trauma...one example that I thought was a great counterbalance was The Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
It was the first time I've ever seen a foster youth not portrayed as a traumatic character. Every time you ever see a, you know, a high school or middle school kid as a foster kid in a movie, at this moment, this is a hugely traumatized individual. And the Hunt for the Wilderpeople was the first time I saw that and I thought, oh, this doesn't have to be a traumatizing experience. Like this kid is thriving. He's doing well. And same with Schitt's Creek. When they decided to have a world view in which, you know, being with any kind of like LGBTQ community was not a trauma, they decided that was not going to be a trauma in their show. You have these gay characters and and none of them are ever dealing with that being a trauma. It would be so much better for today's youth to see that you can be you, you can be gay or you can identify as queer, and that doesn't have to be a traumatic thing. Like whereas even though, you know, most media will portray it as this horribly depressing and horribly traumatic thing, like I think that we need to stop having so many traumatic anti-heroes that are just completely traumatized.
We need to have characters that can have bad things happen to them and still not be traumatized by them because that's normal, that's part of life.
Mike Freedman
And to be resilient is not the same as being unfeeling.
Elle Griffin
Exactly. Exactly. I've had horribly traumatic things happen to me in my life, but I choose not to see them as a trauma.
Mike Freedman
I wonder, like if I were to say I read a book by Hemingway, for example, just to not to choose him for him, but as part of a generation of writers...
Elle Griffin
Don't get me started on Hemingway.
Mike Freedman
Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Well, just to kind of, if you read Henry Miller, one of these guys from that generation, you read the bio at the beginning of the book and all these guys, and of course, yes, I know, they were almost all guys, that's a whole other conversation, I'm not promoting that as a desirable thing, but they were all like, served in the military, drove an ambulance, was on the front line, was a cub reporter on a crime beat. They lived in the world. They had experiences in a rough and tumble, difficult, uncertain environment where they themselves lived and met other people who were living in the raw, who were living a difficult experience or a difficult life. And then they leveraged that experience of human beings into literature. So even if they were people who wanted to be writers from when they were teenagers, they didn't come out at the age of 21 like, now, having not really ever seen someone crying about anything other than a bad grade or a wedgie, I'm going to write about suffering. Or a singer who comes out and releases a single at the age of 19 about love. And it's like, Yeah, I'm not putting down the idea that younger people don't have deep experiences, but the knowledge of extremity, the real gamut of human emotions, going through that perhaps leads to a different picture of how people are shaped. And when we have a television or media-driven idea of how people are shaped, when a writer goes about constructing a character, or at least a writer who's kind of trained through the accepted methods, you want to have a character who's flawed, they have to have something happen to them that introduces this kind of negative flow into their being. And so, you know, that's why you have so many central characters who lost a child. It's like the off the shelf writer's solution to, you know, how can we have this character be haunted? Well, they lost a kid when they were younger. Boom, done. So this idea, in a way, it feels to me like part of what you're saying is, it's a post-modern idea, really, that when we're culturally influenced by media, where our experience of the world is watching things about the world, we are learning about our fellow human beings based on how the fake human beings in the story world are shaped, which leads us to think, Oh, well, if something negative happened to me in my childhood, then that is now my flaw for my life perhaps. And when you live in the real world, you see that people have awful, unbelievable experiences and then go win a Nobel Prize or swim across the Atlantic or just have a wonderful family life and don't show any kind of pathology about their negative experiences. So I think you're really on to something.
Elle Griffin
Yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of funny, like John Wick tries to say that, it satirizes that idea because it's like...
Mike Freedman
It's about his dog.
Elle Griffin
I think that that kind of making fun of our modern culture to like, be so traumatized by something, like going on full war...
Mike Freedman
Well, you've got to have an inciting incident anyway.
Elle Griffin
Yeah, the inciting incident, you know, we don't have to be like that in real life.
Mike Freedman
Yeah. And another thing that came up when you were speaking is Jean Baudrillard, the philosopher, have you ever read a very short book of his called The Spirit of Terrorism?
Elle Griffin
No.
Mike Freedman
I'm not going to encourage anyone to read Baudrillard, don't worry, but in that book, he hits upon a very interesting idea where he's talking about, it was his kind of philosophical response to 9/11 and to suicide terrorism more broadly, and one of his observations was that the Western world, if that is a definition that still holds meaning, is a society that has shaped itself on the basis of defeating death, that we we want to be alive. We worship youth, we worship longevity. We want to stay alive as long as possible. We want people not to die. We want people not to be infirm and not to be sick. And therefore, a society which at its heart has this total abhorrence of infirmity and death and in a way has almost banished the acceptability of the shadow part of our existence out of our worldview, to be challenged by people who worship and seek death and do not want to preserve their own lives is like a clash of polarities that can never be reconciled. And I've never forgotten that observation. And I feel like it's related to what we've been talking about as well.
Elle Griffin
Well, I think it even then, you know, those are people that I mean, from what I understand, the suicide..what do we call them?
Mike Freedman
Well, they're not always bombers, so, yeah, you could say suicide terrorists.
Elle Griffin
Suicide terrorists, from what I understand, that's because the idea of being a martyr is glorified. Right. And if you and if, you know, in the past, being a martyr meant like somebody was persecuting you for your faith, so you died, you know, believing in your faith. But I think a shortcut to that. If nobody is persecuting you in your religion, it's like, oh, well, I'll just go kill myself for the cause and then be a martyr. It's like the the glorification of the martyr, at least from what I understand.
Mike Freedman
Yeah, and that's a valid point as well, I guess in a way to value an eternal life in paradise more than a life on earth is still to value life. And you could argue that people don't necessarily think they really die, which is why they're not actually seeking death, that could be a broader, more philosophical discussion.
I guess that's an argument that holds water. I wouldn't challenge it too much, but my feeling is just that there's something in Baudrillard's point about that, that there's an almost irreconcilable difference between an individual who worships death and an individual who worships life. And that culturally we've been so terrified and horrified about the negative side of life, or rather what we think is the negative side of life, but in fact, it's just a part of life. Death is a part of life, like you said, about miscarriages. I'm sure they're not pleasant or desirable for the individuals who have them, but they're part of life. They happen. And we have this habit, and we brought it up earlier with the puddles and the rain, that we have this habit of determining that something is good and something is bad simply because it's either desirable or undesirable. But one doesn't stop being a natural part of life just because we don't like it.
Elle Griffin
Right. And this is my case for a kind of humanism because a lot of religion, if you add in the era of an afterlife, well, there's so much gray area there. We probably can't get on the same page over what we should do with our lives if we have different views on what's going to happen in the afterlife to us, you know, but we can both agree that what happens here that we should, you know, treat people with kindness and respect and treat people the way you want to be treated and don't treat people the way you don't want to be treated.
So like, to me, the the humanist idea of like, okay, we can follow the golden rule in life, we can all get behind that. Even if different religions have different views on what you know, what will happen afterwards.
Mike Freedman
Well, since you brought up religion, I'm curious if you're willing to circle back to this new-to-me field of study known as Mariology? One, because I'm fascinated by it as a concept, as a study and I'm curious as to why that was, what you wanted for yourself, for your graduate studies, but also because a common feature historically in totalitarian systems is either the eradication of religion or the replacement of it with something else. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has written quite a lot about his idea that Nazism wasn't a political ideology, it was a religion, and it became the state religion of Germany instead of Christianity as a kind of hodgepodge of paganism and blood, soil, mythology, all that stuff. And you see that with communism as well, the belief that religion is the opiate of the masses.
So I'm curious about where Mariology came into your life, where it sits in terms of your own religious or non-religious attitudes and and why you think it is that regimes that want to control people in a way have to either kill or replace their God.
Elle Griffin
Hmm. Okay.
Mike Freedman
Answers on a postcard. 25 words or less.
Elle Griffin
So I think I can answer very quickly. The people using religion for totalitarian, I don't actually think religion is the impetus of evil. I think it's the impetus that evil and good, depending on how you use it and people will use religion for evil and they will use it for good just as they will any ideology.
So I'm not convinced that, like having religion or not having religion is like better or worse than anything else. It's just like, what? What do you want to do with it? So I kind of think that it comes back to human intention and whether or not you yourself are, are a good person rather than the religion itself.
And then second, I think that my interest in Mariology came from when I was in my twenties. I do these reading challenges myself where I like pick something maybe I want to tackle. And then I spent a lot of time reading it. So I read the Bible front to back and studied it as I was reading it.
And when I got to the end, I was not satisfied that I understood why, why we were supposed to believe this religion. And I needed earlier first materials.
I remembered reading at the time that Dan Brown was given access to the Vatican library to write The Da Vinci Code and that he was able to study some of the earliest documents of that faith by doing that. And then after he wrote The Da Vinci Code, the pope shut that down so that civilians could not enter the Vatican library anymore.
But the Marian Library was still available. To access that, you had to be a student of Mariology and and anyways, I was interested in that because I was very interested in the feminine in religion, more so than I was in the masculine in religion anyways. So I decided to pursue it and I did get access to the Marian Research Library, which was really incredible especially because now the program doesn't exist anymore.
Mike Freedman
What did you do to piss them off?
Elle Griffin
You know, it was kind of funny because I was the only...well, I'm not the only layperson. There were other, maybe, maybe two other laypeople in my program. Everybody else was priests and nuns. So it was a very interesting experience. But yeah, so I went and studied as every thing I could get my hands on and of, you know, even earlier time periods in the Bible because, you know, the New Testament, the Gospels are all, you know, start or all were all written after the destruction of the temple, you know, after 70 AD. So they're far removed from the events that they're writing about anyways. So I wanted to understand kind of like what led up to that and everything. And it was really interesting from that standpoint. I think that I mean, I could go into great depth on what I thought was very interesting there.
But ultimately I found that very fascinating. And I did just decide not to be religious at all after that interest.
Mike Freedman
So you decided not to be religious after that?
Elle Griffin
I decided to be. It sounds like a wonderful book.
Mike Freedman
Oh, so you mean you decided you were going to be religious and read the Bible and and try to believe it? Is that it?
Elle Griffin
Well, I was reading a lot of the Dalai Lama at the time, and he had this quote. He was kind of like I had all these spiritual seekers always coming up to Dharamsala to get my advice and wisdom. And he's like, I say, what I always tell them is there are a million roads to peace. Just pick which one you want to be on and stick with it, because otherwise you'll just be spiritually confused and you'll feel you're always searching for the answer and never finding it.
So it's like, just like pick one and then you can be at peace. And I think something you said something along the lines of, look, choose whatever faith you grew up in, that'll be the easiest or whatever. So I was like, okay, like I'm going to be a Catholic because I've always thought it was beautiful. I love the cathedrals, the stained glass, the smoke and the incense, all that stuff.
Mike Freedman
Who doesn't love incense?
Elle Griffin
Great. It was great. The arts, choirs, I could go on and on. So I decided that I was going to be Catholic, but then naturally, just approached it like a researcher. Like you say, I couldn't do it.
Mike Freedman
So you decided to become a Catholic and then did like, “Let's go into this with an analytical framework and try and dissect the origins so that I know for a fact this is historically the basis of my faith.”
Elle Griffin
It's really telling about my personality. I, I could just be one of those people, but, you know, just blind. This sounds.
Mike Freedman
Legit. This sounds legit. Cool.
Elle Griffin
I was like, if I was going to believe this and base my whole life around it, then it better be true.
Mike Freedman
So how did that work out for you?
Elle Griffin
It's not true.
Mike Freedman
And so your qualified opinion as a bona fide Mariologist who has read the Bible cover to cover and visited and presumably read some of the contents of the Marian Library is...nah.
Elle Griffin
That's not what I'm saying, I actually, I still think that it's very powerful, I think, and I would never be an apologist like trying to convince somebody that their religion is not true. Because I still see the beauty of it and why you would want to believe that. And I would not want to take that away from anyone. But I think for me, you know, learning, learning and studying these original texts, like, for example, you know, one thing that Catholics really hinge on is that Mary was a virgin, physically never had sex, but you study the, you know, the literature in the original Greek, which the Gospels were written in. Mary, the word for Virgin was a Greek term that actually meant unmarried at the time. Another famous unmarried woman at that time, Isis, was the goddess in Egyptian culture. But she had sex. She had sex with Osiris.
And that's what caused her to give birth to Horus, who was also called the Son of God. And Isis was also called the Queen of Heaven. She was also called the mother of God. She was, you know, so we see all this terminology being used for Isis at that time that were then being also used for Mary.
And it was kind of like these New Testament authors were like, okay, you know Isis, and you know the whole story that God, like this is the new Isis, it was what it would be like today saying “they are the apple of tech companies.” You're like immediately, you know what that means. We're very familiar with Apple and their minimalist design and the white boxes and everything, and that's very much what the New Testament authors were doing.
So, to attribute the same importance to Mary, they were like, this is an important figure is what we're trying to tell you. And we're saying that she was unmarried because at the time being unmarried meant that you didn't you weren't the property of your husband. You weren't yet purchased. You were, you know, and so that was why it was powerful. It had nothing to do with physicality until centuries, centuries and centuries later.
I mean, even to the point that, you know, I think there was a traditional precedent earlier, but it wasn't until it's translated in English and the word 'virgin' was used that it got the physical sense in a more tangible way.
Mike Freedman
So she was an independent woman.
Elle Griffin
Exactly. She belongs to no man. And that was powerful. So like that is still a powerful story. If we go back to the original way that it was written and the original way that it was intended, that is still a powerful story, even without all the things we added to it in the years and generations after. So I don't think that we need to take that away and be like, that's not still a powerful mythology or a story.
Like it still is. We're just, you know, I think we add a bunch of stuff and interpret it differently now.
Mike Freedman
And if someone is going to come from a deprived, difficult situation and raise a child who then goes on to be fierce and independent and overthrow norms and demands society to adjust, to make space for them, it's going to be a strong, independent, single mother that does it. Just ask Tupac.
Elle Griffin
Exactly. And the New Testament authors were writing with a very specific cause. They were opposing the Roman government who destroyed their temple and their city and what are you going to do in opposition to that? You're going to say, oh, well, okay, I don't want to, you know, be too controversial, people that may be Catholic listening to this, but if we're not going to assume that Mary was physically a virgin, then she was probably raped by a Roman soldier. That was very, very common in those days.
So to say, okay, she was not married and she had a son, and that son rose up and, you know, was a peaceful protester against the Roman government. Okay. Super powerful story. Super powerful story. You don't even need to add everything to it for that to still be a powerful story of this, you know, unmarried woman. Yeah.
Mike Freedman
An origin story about a flawed character. Springing from a trauma.
Elle Griffin
Right.
Mike Freedman
And then fast forward 2000 years and you've got Batman watching his parents get shot in an alley. No, I mean, I'm not making light of it, just, and this is part of why I love discussing the creative and the artistic interpretations of these ideas about the world and about people, because we really do see that these are our myths, these are fables.
And they've aged with us and they've changed with us and we've shaped them differently. And we've put them into new modern contexts and in some ways maybe simplified or debased them in other ways, maybe kind of used them up a bit, but like Isis, you know, Osiris and Horus and, you know, a trinity and then another trinity and then into the modern age with our own versions of this. And by the way, there's also a long tradition, I'm sure you came across it, of kind of apocalyptic, I won't harsh the mellow of some very devout religious people, but shall we say apocalyptic predictions that did not come to pass. There's a book by John Michael Greer called Apocalypse Not about all the times the world was supposed to end and didn't.
And in a way our, you know, one generous or optimistic way of looking at our dystopian ideas, these dark stories we tell about the world, either in nonfiction or fiction, is humans seem to, among our many traits, be people who love the idea of an impending catastrophe. I mean, in a way, it speaks to our mortality, right? Each of us is a world, and we're born with a tremendous burden of being. We, at least we believe we're the only species that really knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that our world, the world of me, will come to an end. Right now, each of us is living with an impending apocalypse, right? You know, it's the name of our species, Homo sapiens, right? The man who knows. And I think that there's something in us maybe so deep, it's not intellectual, that we deal with the inevitability of our life arc by interpreting it and seeing its reflections and shadows and projections into the world around us, maybe.
Elle Griffin
Yeah. I mean, that is certainly the case with the Jesus Mary story, which, you know, was originally a story of rising up against your oppressors. And there's still power to these people that were destroyed, which then the exact same story is used a thousand years later, too, as a way of showing why women needed to be meek and subservient and, you know, hands in prayer and quiet and graceful and, you know, the same story is used in so many different ways. So depending on our own interpretation and what we what we want to see in the world.
Mike Freedman
Now, did you ever see a film called Jacob's Ladder?
Elle Griffin
No.
Mike Freedman
It's a wonderful movie. I mean, probably not going to be on your watch list because it's not an uplifting movie. I mean, in one interpretation, maybe it is. And I won't spoil it by telling you, you know, the twists and turns of the story. But there's a wonderful line spoken by one of the characters where he says that it's a matter of perception that, on the one hand, you might feel that you're assailed by evil spirits who are torturing you because they're taking away all of your attachments to your terrestrial life. But if you think of it differently then the demons that are torturing you by showing you how the real world, the physical world, doesn't matter, then really they're just angels setting you free and it's just a matter of how you look at it. And in a way, I guess our catastrophizing, our emphasis on our love of the melodramatic and of the apocalyptic, again, it's a matter of perception in a way, right? That when people say we have to save the planet, the planet will be fine. What we really mean is whatever of human civilization we are currently experiencing may not be stable or sustainable in a new environmental context. You know, we are the transient portion of this earth.
Elle Griffin
Yep. That's why I took so much issue with the Ministry for the Future book, because that is supposed to be, people call it utopian. I have no idea why it is, but I was so frustrated with it because it's just showing how the climate is making the earth uninhabitable and everybody just dies. I mean, everybody in India just gets cooked because it's too hot in a heat wave and just dies. And the whole time I was reading it, the whole way through, all these people are trying to come up with solutions, geotech, geoengineering, solutions, to try to make the sun less hot. And I was like, literally, this whole book could be solved with one thing: allow people to move. If we didn't have borders, if countries let other people in, then everybody in India could have moved.
I mean, the history of, we were just talking about Homo sapiens, the history of all of our life, of like humanity, has been nomadic, moving based on the temperatures of the earth. The fact that we're going to lock somebody in and say they're stuck to live in a place that was too hot or too cold is the problem, not the fact that there are places that are too hot or too cold. Because there are other places that are not.
Mike Freedman
Yeah, I hadn't thought of it from that angle before. That's a good point. I do remember you'd written one of your articles about an idea of a borderless world where people can just kind of, like The Walking Dead idea, you wake up one day, suddenly there's no borders, there's no guards telling you you can't go there, you can't move there. No one's going to check your residency papers. And you drew on a study that had shown where people would move to, is that correct? And what the world would look like, how it would change if borders were not something that prevented people from going where they wanted to go.
Elle Griffin
Yeah.
Mike Freedman
And your conclusion was...
Elle Griffin
That if you could live wherever in the world you wanted, you would pick a place that is ideal for you. Maybe if you want to go to college, you pick a place with free education, maybe you go move to the Nordic countries. Maybe if you value weather, you go move down to Mexico, maybe if you, you know, want to have a good job, you move to a centre where there's a big economy. You want free childcare, you don't have a big family, you know, these places. And what that would do is if suddenly, you know, I also predicated my idea on the fact that everything would move to a sales tax rather than an income tax, just because if you're transient and you're, I mean, right now, that income tax is already a huge problem because I can be living in Spain on a digital nomad visa and be being taxed in Utah, which is getting my money, which is silly because my money should be going to where I'm living. I should be fueling the economy I choose to live in. So in this case, if the borders are open and they're all earning money on sales tax, then it's in the country's best interest to be the best place to live, because that's how they'll attract people and money. And if they're not, then everyone will leave.
What would happen? I mean, when Russia's conscription happened, 100,000 people left and went to Georgia. And Georgia suddenly starts having this bustling economy, all these Russians that moved in, well, but those people were only able to do that somewhat illegally. So that wasn't available to the larger population. But if that was more legal, if you could move from China to the US, if you could move to Russia from the US, then what would happen?
We would pull the wind out of the sails of some very totalitarian governments nobody wants to live under. And if you were a good place to live, then those places would get better to live because they're richer.
Mike Freedman
You know, this is where I think the dark, twisted, knotted, gnarled ghoul in the corner of my mind just...all I think about is the fact that people move around already. We have long standing debates about migration and immigration around the world. And at least according to the people that tell the story about it, a significant rise in both its prevalence and the volume of people crossing borders, and it's not usually the more open economies that people want to move to that are the ones that are the limiting factor. It's more usually the repressive regimes not wanting to lose their worker base, their tax base, right?
Elle Griffin
Right.
Mike Freedman
So, I mean, it sounds fine, but...
Elle Griffin
I would have to say if the US said the borders are open for you to live here and Russia and China were still like, no, you have to stay here, it would still be way easier to move. Trying to keep somebody from leaving someplace is much harder than trying to allow someone to enter it.
Mike Freedman
Yeah, I think we're possibly moving towards a time where we're going to start having arguments like that more frequently anyway, simply because there are many reasons to discuss, some of the reasons you've given, a world where we have a less nationalistic idea of of where the locus of control should be over the movement of populations.
But at the same time, we do see that where people's passionate concerns lie tend to be where they live and where the rubber meets the road of meaningful adjustments, it happens on a local level. So, for example, you know, I could speculate that we could be more likely to resolve environmental challenges with meaningful local action protecting waterways and forests and and wetlands and so forth, than international treaties that simply introduce additional taxes and a kind of trading system between major companies. That's just a theory of mine. But that's kind of what I mean, that this has been a question for a very long time. Who really has the right to be in the place and who has the right to decide who comes and who goes? And more often than not, it's the gang. Whomever is gathering the tribute of an area decides who comes in and wants people to stay and pay and wants to control against people coming in who are going to challenge their authority, right?
And perhaps a time for that mentality is passing and something new might be arising. But whether it would be a better or more sensitive or human-centred idea, maybe I'm more cynical than hopeful.
Elle Griffin
I loved Matthew Iglesias's book, 1 Billion Americans, because he actually takes a, he's pro-immigration. He wants there to be 1 billion Americans. But he is like, he makes the kind of conservative case for why we should do that. And that's that India and China have triple, quadruple the people that we do. They're going to control things way sooner than any of us think. And I think that in the U.S., we're like, well, we have the biggest military, so we will always be the, you know, in the globally dominant position.
Mike Freedman
But wait until you have to put the Navy against China in the South China Sea to defend and see how that works out.
Elle Griffin
Exactly, like, in the next World War, there's a good chance the US won't win. And it's not because we're not strong enough with our military, it's because we don't have enough people.
Mike Freedman
And it also wouldn't necessarily be that the U.S. would be on the wrong side of it in terms of the purpose of a fight like that. That's the the risky thing, right, that, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick, a very famous dystopian novel about what would have happened if the Nazis and the Japanese had won the Second World War and divvied up dominance over the U.S., it's the winning side that writes the history books. Another great novel, Fatherland, by Robert Harris, about Nazis winning the Second World War. And it's decades later that a dogged investigator discovers the Holocaust because no one ever found out about it, because the Nazis won the war. So nobody ever learned. You know, it's, this is really something that I do think about, that as we see a new movement of jostling for position in a preparation for potentially another global fight over who's going to determine the path of global affairs for the next hundred years, it worries me that the winning side is the one that will write the story of the battle.
Elle Griffin
Absolutely.
Mike Freedman
And when we have regimes that, shall we say, are not overtly sympathetic to values that I would consider human-centred and liberal and focused on lifting up individuals and ensuring civil liberties, it's quite worrying to see how powerful they are on paper.
Elle Griffin
Absolutely. Yeah. I hope it doesn't come to that. But I mean, it doesn't even need to come to war for that to be an issue. If China wants to start, I mean, they already have, I guess, some sort of reeducation camps or whatever, some dubious moral things happening, I guess they could decide that we want to pollute the world a ton and have tons of these reeducation camps, and that's totally okay. And there's nothing anybody else in the world can do about that. And in fact, they won't trade with America if America doesn't get on board and start taking some of their hostages and start polluting more.
I'm giving a ridiculous example, but I'm just saying, our power as a country comes not just from military but also from trade. And we in a lot of ways force China to get better on pollution, because if not, we weren't going to buy from them. You know, we have certain standards we require them to adhere to, for us to purchase from them. And that has forced them to act in a certain way. So they could just as easily force us to act in a certain way if they have the economic power. And it's very likely very easy for them to do that.
Mike Freedman
And I'd also propose that the strongest, I would like to believe that the strongest weapon in the American arsenal is the American story. I would like to think that because I think that is, in my limited subjective understanding of humans, a more likely reason for people to walk hundreds or thousands of miles hungry and cold and thirsty just in order to be illegal and unwelcome in a different place, perhaps where they don't even speak the language, whether it is absolutely true or not, whether it's justified or not, whether it contains illusions of inconvenient or horrific historical actions, I think we all know the answers to those questions. But the idea that America chose to represent, and the story it chose to tell about itself, I believe, is what attracted people there.
Elle Griffin
Oh, yeah. The American dream. Well.
Mike Freedman
Yeah. I mean, there's the old George Carlin joke, right, that, you know, they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Elle Griffin
Maybe there are other places where you can better achieve the American dream than America. But the fact that America has the story, that's to your point, that's the most powerful thing.
Mike Freedman
And it circles to, you know, where we kind of jumped off is, narratives matter, stories matter, mythology matters. And people, for whatever reason, may feel that they are better placed to be free in the self-described land of the free than in a country with more civil liberties. Who knows? And in a way, it feels to me that one of the dystopian trends I see in American politics and society is the inability or unwillingness to both live up to and to continue the telling of that story. It's an own goal. It's an internal collapse, not an outside force, per se. Or rather, it would be too easy to blame it on a bad actor who's deceiving Americans into hating their own country. I think there's something about a kind of imperial exhaustion. You know, Rome ceases to be a republic. It becomes an empire. Then it just feels hollow and dishonest and people stop believing in it and it just falls away. And there's something very poignant about that. And I think that the idea of what America set itself out to mean to people, whether or not it's true, for that to be gone from the world, I think would be an impoverishment. And I really don't want that to sound like a jingoistic or nationalistic thing because I don't mean it that way.
Elle Griffin
Yeah. I mean, like every country, I think it's complex, but I think America is unique in that it's maybe one of the first places where so many cultures became one. So I do think it's kind of weird that we call it an American culture now because whatever we would call an American culture is like 200 years old. And we were all like, then everybody was a bunch of different cultures. So it's like, well, we're just really an example of a global culture and it's just going to look like when, as more and more people, you know, combine in a place and you know, people will also say like, Oh, the Westernization of the world, it's as if everything is becoming more like America. But like, again, America is the mingling of hundreds of other cultures. And the more cultures mingle, the more they become like each other. And they start to speak the same language. And they, you know, you can call an Uber in France, just as you can in the U.S., like there are parts of the culture that become homogenized naturally as a result of being a mingling of people, because you need to be able to work together and, you know, have community together.
So, you know, I think maybe it is the Westernization of the world, but really it's just the globalization of the world. As people come together more, that's what it kind of ends up looking like, America, because that's what America did.
Mike Freedman
Well, so going back to your idea of a world without borders, where people go where they want, in a way some things globalized before others maybe.
Elle Griffin
Yeah. And I don't think it's necessarily a good thing that we create our roles based on our ethnicities or where we're from. I think that that has had some bad effects, it's why a lot of people went to wars. A lot of wars are bad.
Mike Freedman
And you could even argue that a lot of the people who migrated to the United States to begin with were leaving places where they were defined by who other people thought they were.
Elle Griffin
Exactly. It's much better to group ourselves by oh, we all play the same video game or like, we all go to the same yoga studio or we're all Substack writers. Like, they're better groupings of people than where we live in our ethnicity.
Mike Freedman
Well, that's one of the kind of more upbeat side effects of the Internet, I think. And in a way, it was its original spirit, the kind of newsgroup, anarchic chat room buddy buddy idea of whoever you were talking to online was your kind of person because of what you were talking about or what you were interested in. And it really didn't matter where they were from. As we've spent this time together, I'm curious to ask you before we wrap up, your desire for a positive outlook, your emphasis on utopia and hopefulness, where do you find your hope?
Elle Griffin
Um, most interesting question. Because everywhere, the world keeps getting better. There are good stories that show us why that is and how that could continue to be. We all have ideas about how we can make it even better from here. Unfortunately, all of our journalism points out all the problems and a lot of our fiction is dystopian. We still see the world as a negative place, and this is the doom prism that I am up against in my work.
Mike Freedman
And from the bottom of my heart. I hope that your candle overcomes the darkness.
Elle Griffin
We just need more utopian fiction to even up the balance a little bit.
Mike Freedman
Don't get me wrong, I think I agree with you. I hope that hope can grow and actually meet the world in a meaningful way, rather than just being a kind of nice fantasy about what could be. Hope on one side is necessary and, on the other side, it can be counterproductive as a distraction.
So I think anything that can help us to become more connected to our fellow human beings, more compassionate, more engaged with the real world and more accepting of reality, as we were saying about how the rough comes with the smooth, not to be catastrophic in our thinking, not to be fixated on our own negative experiences as defining us, you know, some possibility of actually growing in some meaningful way, I think that's something I would hope for.
Elle Griffin
I'm with you.
Mike Freedman
Well, Elle, I hope that it's been pleasant speaking to me because it's definitely been wonderful speaking with you.
Elle Griffin
Yeah, that was really fun. Thank you. A lot of conversation, really covered everything.
Mike Freedman
Yeah, e definitely stretched our legs: religion, Nazis, fiction, you single-handedly disproving Catholicism.
Elle Griffin
No, that's not true!
Mike Freedman
I'm joking. Obviously that's the bit I'll clip and put out on the...I'm joking.
Well, that's it for this episode of 1984 Today. I'm grateful to our guest, Elle Griffin, for joining us, and of course to you for listening. Please check the show notes for links to Elle's work. And as usual, if you want to support this podcast, please share widely.
Wherever you are, whatever you're up to, keep the fire burning. We'll be back with more fuel next time. Goodbye.
