On this week’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special,” The Daily Wire editor-in-chief talked with Douglas Murray, author of “Madness Of Crowds: Gender, Identity, and Race,” about various cultural topics, including the dangers of utopian thinking and obsessing over equity.
During the discussion, Shapiro argues that there is an “unarticulated assumption” among the Left that “all inequalities are inequities,” an idea that fuels the desire to achieve “utopian leveling” within society.
In response to Shapiro’s comment, Murray paraphrased a “late friend” who once told him “you should run a million bloody miles” from the people “who you can see from the stare in their eyes, as they’re coming toward you, with an idea of how you should live your life, and how they know better than you.”
After offering the quote, Murray questions whether people would rather have equity, or whether they would rather become “content with a considerable degree of variation in all sorts of things.”
“We accept the fact that height shifts — changes, a lot — and that it actually has quite an important impact on your life, for some people,” observed Murray. “I could have never been a basketball player even if I wanted to.”
“There’s a lot of other factors that we have no say over: Very attractive people are disproportionately likely to be successful in their lives. What do we do about this? We don’t know any more than we do with height,” he said.
Murray argues that society has “selected a few things” to become obsessive about when it comes to equality of outcomes, while ignoring other factors that contribute to these outcomes, such as height and attractiveness.
“We probably have to, in order to lead contented or happy lives, reconcile ourselves with certain things in the world,” said Murray. “Just as one reconciles oneself with the fact that one will never be a basketball player, someone has to reconcile oneself with other things that one can’t be and do.”
Murray then proposed that the utopian-focused equity debate has stifled an important discussion that society should be having: How do we create a society in which “nobody is held back from achieving things because of a characteristic they have no say over, if they have the competency to achieve it.”
“How can we make sure we are societies with the best possible ladders system in them, rather than [focusing on] this bulking, moaning, whining, ‘there are things I haven’t got in my life,’ because we can all play that,” he said.
“It’s an absolutely unending game. That’s why I tell people don’t play the privilege game,” said Murray. “You could discover an earl in Britain, with a castle of their own, who you would say ‘that’s the most privileged person’ and they could have led a hell of a life. You have no idea.”
WATCH:
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.