When I began my work life, the department of the company that handled people was called "Personnel". Personnel was responsible for taking care of employee needs and issues. Around the end of the 80's, Personnel suddenly became "Human Resources". I thought this was strange at the time but I subsequently realized that how the business viewed employees had changed. Employees were no longer people but just another type of depreciable resource. This was change, but it has not resulted in progress.

I read his books over and over again.

_If truth does not go far beyond our own understanding, it can be grabbed and manipulated by those in authority_ Theres so much more to this than meets the eye. Great depths of insight lie just beneath the obvious or mundane. He's understood a similar danger as many others have, though its so fundamental that discussing it is difficult.

Stunning. Thank you.

A delightful conversation! Thank you.

Timely.and solid analysis at the philosophical level. Given the deeper.level of consideration i find it depressing since it's syatemic and unstoppable. My instincts were already in this direction.(without knowing the why of 9t) - we aee actively seeking an enclave to allow us to live and breathe. I.wonder.what comes once we hit the buffers?

Thé anarchic energy of the free market ended Britain’s institutions. And technocracy.

I'd pay more than makes sense to read a detailed and lengthy review by this John Gray about the other John Gray's book "Men Are From Venus, Women Are From Mars".

it strikes me, contrary to my comment before, that neoliberalism, in condoning "choice", 'believes' that people make the best choices for themselves??? If neoliberalism promotes choice, why can't people choose not to work???

The grandstanding end of this discussion is embarrassing. People don’t protest the crimes of any random government, but their OWN government’s crimes; something they actually have a say or moral responsibility for. What would possibly be the purpose of protesting another government? The idea makes no sense. Gray lectures us on humility, and then posits some bizarre, universal moral duty of protest to (he thinks) outline the hypocrisy of today’s protests. What nonsense.

I honestly have never heard Gray sound so confused. Some decent ideas here, but also a lot of horse manure. Religion ushering in tolerance? Laughably, astonishingly false. Consumer choice was always a propagandistic selling point for the free market: the ultimate value was always the unleashing & deification of man as producer; choice was the hoi poloi’s reward for letting great men do their thing (and, especially, keep their rewards). I think he’s right about the inherent amorality of the market, but that’s not only a problem of choice, but of pluralism, which he’s apparently favors. What? Maybe I’m jumping the gun here because I’m only about a third through, but this seems to already be completely off the rails.

Zizek asks a similar question: can we do away with religion after the death of god? Following Jacques Alain Miller, Zizek believes that what dies on the cross is not JC but God. The question then becomes: after building our moral and ethical systems on monotheism, can we now safely pull up the ladder and abandon it? Gray would say we cannot

All of Gray's initial list of what is dead about liberalism are highly debatable. Liberalism was never about "libertarianism" in the current definition of that word. It was about "liberty", or "freedom" in a broad sense. Liberalism is at the very heart of freedom of speech enshrined in law. The supposed "woke" repression of points of view is largely a myth. I would like to see a list of the items being repressed. Scientific expertise acquired by government doesn't displace moral and political judgement. That's just a silly juxtaposition of paradigms or criteria seemingly at odds with each other but which are in fact complementary. We all must stop at red lights except ambulances or fire engines. Contrary to conventional wisdom, modern liberal society is really about intricate prohibitions that increase personal freedom. Think about food safety, or freedom from slander. The first is all based on technocratic scientific expertise, the second about limiting the power of the more powerful against those with less power. As someone said, modern government is a big insurance company with an army.

I look at the societies in the world, having spent a busy career living for several years in quite a few diverse regions. I’m able to make judgements based on direct experience of various systems of political and economic ideologies. I’m afraid that the Anglo American model of liberalism with universal suffrage produces the worst outcomes for citizens. It shouldn’t be surprising, when there is no threshold for mental capacity or societal responsibility within any form of a democracy you can’t expect optimal outcomes. We have what we deserve, mediocracy as opposed to meritocracy.

Linear history and progress is a myth. The heart of man needs redemeption. Calvary was the central act of history

Ah, 19 mins ish. The Inquisition. The Ayatollah. Universal values without argument.

philosophical/political theory seems to ignore activities of daily living, including cleaning, tidying, shopping and cooking, or that without manual workers, our system wouldn't work? yet, i suggest the latter 'jobs' conflict with more academic 'work', leaving those who do them, disenfranchised? more to the point, 'liberalism' has taken me, 61, all this time to try to figure out, and, I'm still not sure I have 'solved' it, definitely being poor. I have children and i've lost 3 teeth! Due to neoliberalism's 'mystique', i suggest we have a longer time to familiarise ourselves with it in order to prosper from it. indeed, it would seem that this ability can reasonably be stated to be a human right, given the centrality of the theory to our lives now? Thus, obtaining this above-delineated 'faculty' is another argument to support longevity research, no???

“Elicited praise from the likes of George Soros”….o’ dear!

What a disappointment at the end with the comments on wokeism. I took careful notes and was very impressed during the lecture, but on woke, Mr. Gray does not define it and hardly even describes it. Basically, as far as I can tell, all he does is accuse its proponents of insincerity. And as for why woke advocates focus on certain oppressed groups and not on the Uighurs, It’s clear that they don’t know much about them, so focus on the oppressed minorities they do, that is, those in their own countries. This starts with African-Americans because of the George Floyd murder.

This is kind of embarrassing, to be honest. He’s giving off a very old person being bigoted but still needing social approval energy here. If people don’t like your values, they don’t like your values, deal with it. How is government-sanctioned bigotry any more tolerant?

By bringing the Uygur's into this conversation, condemns him in my opinion. It reminds me that he supported Mrs Thatcher. If this man was a dispassionate intellectual, won't he know that Uygur's genocide was a means to destabilise China. Especially now that China is opened, he could at least try to discover the truth before opening his mouth.

"It was monotheism that gave us liberal tolerance"... That's a weird assumption

His argument for tenure is weak, to put it mildly

He’s an atheist. “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools,“ ‭‭Romans‬ ‭1‬:‭21‬-‭22‬ ESV

He is so bored he has to hold himself up with his arms. Somebody give this guy a vitamin.