2025-12-22 EconTalk David Deutsch on the Pattern
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Duration: 01:26:16
Transcript
Russ Roberts
Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I’m your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links to other information related to today’s conversation. You’ll also find our archives with every episode we’ve done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at EconTalk.org. We’d love to hear from you. Before introducing today’s guest, I want to mention something important about when it was recorded. This week’s episode is about trying to understand violence against Jews and those who justify it. I want to alert listeners that it was recorded before the horrific attacks on Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Australia, which is why you will not hear it mentioned. It was recorded weeks before that tragedy. I also plan to post some additional thoughts about today’s thought-provoking episode at my sub stack, Listening to the Sirens. Feel free to check that out as well. And now on to today’s guest. Today is November 27th, 2025, and my guest is renowned physicist David Deutsch of Oxford University. David, welcome to EconTalk.
David Deutsch
Hi, thank you for having me.
Russ Roberts
Our topic today isn’t the interesting books that you’ve written, The Fabric of Reality, The Beginning of Infinity. We’re going to talk about a theory of yours about why Jews are hated. I’m a little uncomfortable with this topic for an episode of EconTalk. Many of you who are not Jewish may ask, why is this interesting? Why is it important? But I think at a minimum, you will get an understanding of your Jewish friends and neighbors that you didn’t have before and what’s happening in the Jewish community these days. And maybe something else as well, a better way of understanding how the world works. I want to start with a story. In 2004, Mel Gibson made the movie The Passion of Christ. It was a controversial film for a number of reasons, but many Jews and Jewish organizations felt it demonized Jews. It showed Jewish mobs, sinister Jewish leaders, a reluctant Pontius Pilate, implying that the Jews played an outsized role, if not a decisive one, in the crucifixion. At the time the movie came out, I had a position at the Mercatus Center, which is part of George Mason University where I was at the time. And a number of the staffers at the Mercatus Center approached me. They were puzzled by the response of Jewish organizations to the movie, and they asked me if I would hold a lunchtime session explaining Jewish attitudes. And these were young men and women who worked as support staff for the scholars in the center. A number of them were religious Christians. I said, I confess I hadn’t seen the movie. I confess I had no intention of seeing it. But I also said I’d be happy to get together and talk about why I thought Jews were uncomfortable with the movie. So we sat down over lunch, me and 10 to 15 people in a seminar room, and I said, you know, Jews historically had been accused of deicide, of killing God, that is Jesus, and that didn’t seem historically accurate. The Romans crucified him. But the main reason I said that the movie made Jews uncomfortable was that it wasn’t the historical accuracy of what happened to Jesus, which is after all a bit murky, but rather how the charge of deicide had been invoked to justify murdering Jews over time in history. For example, I explained when the crusaders went to the Holy Land in 1096 to Jerusalem to liberate the city from Muslim control, to kill the infidels as they saw it, they stopped along the way in France and Germany and killed thousands of Jews, a different kind of infidel, just for practice, I guess. So in Speyer and Worms and Mainz, in Cologne and Trier and Metz, they robbed Jewish homes and synagogues. They forced people to choose between conversion to Christianity or death, and they carried out massacres killing thousands of Jews in 1096 in these different cities, thousands. There’s a debate historically how many thousands, but it was thousands.
Russ Roberts
Now, there were a number of motivations. One was to punish Jews for killing Jesus. So when a movie came out, Mel Gibson’s movie, Blaming Jews for Killing Jesus, it makes us Jews a little uneasy, let’s say. So I was explaining this, and at some point, this very brief history lesson, not much longer than what I just said, maybe even shorter, I stopped and I looked around the room and I saw something extraordinary. Most of the 10 to 15 people around the table weren’t looking at me. They had averted their eyes. Many were literally studying their shoes. They were looking down. They looked extremely uncomfortable. When I asked what was going on, their answers made clear that they had never heard of this aspect of the Crusades. They knew nothing about it. And now that they had heard of it, they were deeply ashamed as Christians for the behavior of their Christian predecessors. Now, I’ve learned about the Crusades at some point, elementary school, middle school. My teachers never mentioned the murder of Jews during the Crusades, what are sometimes called the Rhineland massacres of 1096. Why would they? It wasn’t even a footnote worth putting at the bottom of the page. From the vantage point of history, it’s not even a sideshow. But from the vantage point of Jewish history, it was an epic tragedy that mirrored so many similar events throughout our history. Every summer during the Jewish month of Av, which usually falls out in the Gregorian calendar in August, sometimes July, religious Jews in 2025 fast for 24 hours, eating and drinking nothing, and recite special poems and prayers that commemorate and lament tragic moments of Jewish history, and there are way too many of them. It begins with the destruction of the two temples of Jerusalem and includes what are called pogroms, events like the Crusades, where a rowdy mob is whipped into a frenzy by Jew hatred and sets upon Jewish homes and businesses and synagogues setting fires, raping, murdering, and looting. It began 2000 years ago with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. It continued throughout the Middle Ages with Crusades and various blood libels, the false accusations that Jews needed blood from Gentile children to make matzahs for Passover, a particularly ugly lie given the Jews are forbidden to consume blood of any kind. This persecution and murder continued through the Chmielnicki massacres in 1648. It was in what is now Ukraine when tens of thousands of Jews were murdered, tens of thousands by marauding Ukrainian Cossacks. To the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in Bessarabia, part of the Russian Empire, where roughly 50 Jews were murdered, hundreds injured, thousands left homeless, through Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, when hundreds or maybe thousands of Jews died in a single night. 267 synagogues were set on fire, many burned to the ground, 7,500 Jewish businesses were vandalized and looted, Jewish homes invaded, plundered, numerous cemeteries desecrated to the Holocaust of six million dead.
Russ Roberts
Through October 7, when something like 800 Israeli civilians were murdered, women were raped, houses burned to the ground by Hamas, and 251 people were abducted and held in tunnels for hundreds of days. Those are just the famous ones among Jews. There are dozens, dozens of other examples where Jews throughout history were murdered in significant numbers by their neighbors on what are called pogroms, mobs, whipped into a frenzy. So the crusades weren’t for Jews. They’re not some kind of weird little historical moment. And I think it’s hard for non-Jews to understand how these historical episodes are part of Jewish cultural DNA. We don’t forget, and it would be foolish to forget, vigilance is a good idea. We remember, because we fear that this time is unlikely to be different. And that brings us to you, David. You have an unusual perspective on this long history of Jew hatred and violence against Jews, which you call the pattern. So I’d like you to describe what that is, and you’re also free to react to my little story and introduction if you’d like.
David Deutsch
Yeah, well, there are a few things in your story that I would actually disagree with.
Russ Roberts
Go ahead.
David Deutsch
I don’t think it began with the destruction of the temple. I think it began long before then. And there’s been one of the remarkable things about it which made me start thinking about it is the way it has been consistent over millennia, unlike almost any other meme that I can think of. So that’s one thing. Secondly, you mentioned the crusaders massacring Jews because the Jews killed Jesus. I think it’s the other way around. I think the impulse to massacre Jews came first, and the Jews killing Jesus was an excuse invented afterwards, after that impulse, in order to legitimize it. And the fact that this excuse absolutely doesn’t make sense, that is the beginning of what I want to understand, the pattern I want to understand, which is not the pattern of pogroms and massacres. Those are things that only happen occasionally. The thing which happens all the time, which I call the pattern, is the impulse to legitimize hurting Jews, which is the reaction of the other people, for example. The pogroms and so on almost always are a bottom-up phenomenon. They come from the people, not from the authorities. We’re sort of misled by the fact that in the most famous examples, like the Holocaust and the Inquisition, it was top-down, but far more often it was bottom-up. Sometimes the authorities tried to stop it, sometimes they didn’t care, sometimes they approved retrospectively until it got too out of hand and cities were being burned down and that kind of thing. So then they tried to stop it. But it was a moral perversion to legitimize hurting Jews, usually not to the extent of actually doing so. That was the normal state of affairs and it continues to be the normal state of affairs in our society today. This is the thing that’s very hard to point out. Therefore, I also don’t think it’s hatred. You called it Jew hate. I think Jew hate is another one of these symptoms of it which arise occasionally but are not typical. The thing is, this impulse to legitimize hurting Jews conflicts with a lot of other morality that exists in various cultures, not least Christian cultures. So it has to be accommodated because it’s not going to go away by itself. I think it has been diminishing very slowly over the centuries, but it has to be incorporated into the normal worldview of societies. So who was it? Saint Augustine said, yes, Jews have to suffer but they must not be killed. That was a piece of advice he gave to some ruler of some country who’d asked him for advice. From his point of view, it was a pro-Jewish thing to say because he wanted to take for granted the legitimacy of hurting Jews but make that consistent as far as he could with other moral ideas that he had. The way that the pattern works is that the actual violence, the pogroms, as you put it, the pogroms break out not when people believe the pattern more or less or whether it grips their minds more or less because I don’t think the pattern changes much over the time scale of a lifetime.
David Deutsch
It’s when there appears to be a threat to the pattern, when the moral rationalizations don’t seem to be working and the society seems to be going the other direction, that’s when the violence breaks out. So for example, with the 18th century enlightenment in Western Europe and again with the rising of the anglosphere in Britain, well-meaning people thought, oh well this is going to be the end of anti-Semitism, this is going to be the end of Jew hate because just as it’s the end of witch burnings and all sorts of other forms of violence and other forms of discrimination and so on, it’s going to go away. It did not go away. It got worse and in my explanation of this, that is normal. It got worse because the legitimacy of hurting Jews for being Jews was being threatened by another current of morality in society, which was the enlightenment. And the other great, and so there were ups and downs over the centuries, but the other great moment when the opposite happened to what people thought would happen is the foundation of Israel. The Zionists thought that once they had a state and had the legitimacy of a state for existing, where there were all sorts of taboos against using violence against a state that had been introduced in world international law and world morality, that the Jews could then settle down and be a nation like any other, which was not, didn’t figure in the fantastical inventions of the people. But they were wrong. The reverse happened. And so every other country, like India and Pakistan and dozens of countries which were founded at the same time, and all of them gained increased legitimacy for their own thing. And unfortunately, people like the Kurds suffered the backlash of that because not getting a state meant that nobody cared about their sovereignty or their integrity. But with Israel, it was the other way around, as it always is. So, yes, what was the other thing? Oh, yes, hatred.
Russ Roberts
Well, let’s hang on. We’ll let it out this little. I want you to clarify this a little bit, or maybe you can’t. I would just say that I’m fascinated by those addenda and corrections to my little historical narrative, and I’m intrigued. The puzzle remains. Why would the world, in its incredible diversity, cultural diversity, why would the world in its cultural diversity, its economic diversity over time and over space at any moment in time, why would there be any, who would think of legitimizing the murder of a particular group? Why would that be a thing in the air? Why should there be such a pattern? I agree with you empirically. There appears to be such a pattern, and what you’ve just added is quite fascinating about its response to other moral and cultural trends. But how does this get started? Where does it come from? It’s insane.
David Deutsch
It’s certainly insane in the normal meaning of the word, but I don’t think the sufferers from it are particularly insane by any other standard. I think the pattern is in some degree present in almost everybody. It used to be, one used to say, well, almost everybody in Europe and the Near East, but since the globalization of ideas, it’s really almost everybody anywhere in the world. Normally it’s at a very low level and does not give rise to violence or persecution or anything like that. It just gives rise to rather indirect things, like how people respond to the small amounts of violence that are still occurring. So it’s something that is inexplicable at that level as well as the level of violence. So where it comes from, why it exists, I’m afraid I don’t know, as you guessed. I don’t know where it comes from. But I think it’s more important initially to understand what something is than to explain why it is. For example, it was necessary to understand that the planets move around the sun before Newton could come up with the reason, the inverse square law. It would have been impossible to come up with the inverse square law to explain Ptolemy’s cosmology. So I think the standard way of thinking about the persecution of Jews or the violence against Jews and that kind of thing, while trying to force it into the mold of other forms of irrationality like racism or fear of the other or envy and so on. People say, of course, people envy Jews and they hate people that they envy. First of all, people don’t always hate people that they envy. Secondly, they didn’t always envy Jews. Just before the Enlightenment, before the emancipation of Jews, the stereotype of Jews was that they were primitive, superstitious people. That’s why Voltaire said he hated them. He particularly hated Jews because they had not accepted the Enlightenment. Then when Jews accepted the Enlightenment, people switched around and said that they were foreigners infiltrating society and becoming rich and becoming powerful and so on. Even though there were still places where Jews were poor and downtrodden and not very advanced at all. Most of the Jews whom the Nazis killed, for example, were below average income. Although perhaps they were the Jewish shopkeepers in the Polish villages were perhaps a little better off than the peasants. They were not better off than the elites who then justified murdering them. But let me just say this too. I don’t think the origin of it, you say, where did it come from? Where did it come from 2,500 years ago? That’s the earliest that I can find evidence of it. I don’t think we need to know that because I don’t think the vast majority of people who are gripped by the pattern have any idea about that. They don’t know where it came from. They don’t know what attributes of the Jews initially or whatever randomness or whatever initially led to it.
David Deutsch
There’s sort of a Freudian impulse to go to the psychological root of the phenomenon. But I don’t think it’s true in psychology and I don’t think it’s true in understanding history either. It’s a persistent phenomenon and it’s remarkably persistent.
Russ Roberts
Yeah, but you’re a man of science, not just a man of science. I like to think of myself as somewhat rational, but you’re a very serious physicist who’s made many, many serious contributions to our understanding of the world and to the discipline of physics and to just posit something that seems without any rationality. I mean, economists would say things like, well, you hear this argument, the Jews would have positions of power or economic success. And so of course, it was the incentive of various groups to push them out or to bar them from certain professions or to force them into particular occupations where they wouldn’t have to compete with them and so on. And I accept your point that that argument is lovely as far as it goes in some particular country in some particular century, but it can’t be a good explanation for the whole phenomenon, which is a deep, very simple, by the way, insight, fantastic application of Occam’s razor. I mean, it’s a beautiful place to start, but you got nothing else for me other than, and I’m giving you a hard time for fun, but about something that’s not funny, but you’re basically saying, I’m just going to try to repeat it my own words for people who are hearing this for the first time and their heads kind of realign maybe, you’re saying that throughout almost all of civilization, and certainly over the last thousand years, 2000 years, 2500 years, people are comfortable with the idea that Jews deserve to die. Is to be hurt. To be hurt. You know, beat up, brutalized or murdered. It’s such a strange idea and so many people listening are going to say, well, I don’t feel that way and I don’t know anyone who feels that way. Sure, there are people who are critical, say, of Israel, to take an important example, but they don’t hate, they don’t want Jews to be killed, they’re just offended by what Israel does, say, against Gazans. And that’s what’s explaining what’s going on now. And you’re saying, if I understand it correctly, I want to give you a chance to clarify, you’re saying, no, no, no, no, no, that’s a smokescreen. That’s a red herring. That’s a distraction. In fact, causation runs the other way. In their desire to hurt Jews, they’ll cook up a reason, oh, this time it’s Israel, another time it’s deicide, some other time it’s economic exploitation, it’s Jews are landlords, they’re exploiting the poor renters and that’s why we looted their shops. They stabbed us in the back in World War I, that was the German explanation. If you said to a Nazi in 1938, why did Kristallnacht happen? They would say, well, the Jews deserved it. They ruined the country back in the World War I. And then Jews, by the way, respond very rationally. They say, no, no, no, we served in the German army, we were decorated, we were decorated at a higher rate than the average soldier.
Russ Roberts
Fill in the blank, I’m making that up, I don’t know if it’s literally true, but it’s sometimes true in these stories that the facts are literally don’t make any sense. So you’re just saying that something twisted in the hearts of human beings is a lack of empathy for a particular group of people to the point that they are comfortable with them being hurt and might even urge it on or carried out themselves.
David Deutsch
Yeah, well, carried out themselves is very rare. I mean, as you said, there are dozens and dozens of cases in history, but that’s over thousands of years. Normally, it’s a matter of legitimizing, not of hurting Jews, it’s a matter of legitimizing hurting Jews. You mentioned the stabbed in the back myth at the end of World War I in Germany, but that myth carried over to England as well. And an English newspaper, I’ve forgotten the name, Morning Post, or one of the main English newspapers carried an account of Jewish perfidy in World War I, which kind of reversed this. So they didn’t say, wow, the Jews helped us by stabbing the Germans in the back, you know, we should thank them. It was the Jews caused the war and prevented it from stopping. Whereas the Germans were saying the Jews caused the war and made it stop, by the way, contradictory in itself. And this is the illogicality of the accusations that are formed as rationalizations of the pattern is itself a characteristic of the pattern. Because it’s a bit like the phenomenon of cults or religions, you know, the cults and religions often have credos, shibboleths, where to be a member, you have to assert something illogical. Right. And it’s a badge of membership. So in some situations, the more illogical the shibboleth is, the stronger it becomes as a badge of membership. So another kind of illogicality similar to the World War I, you know, in Germany, Britain, and then in America…
Russ Roberts
By the way, Henry Ford and Father Coughlin. We’re hearing it right now, because America gives $4 billion, which is a large number to me, but not a large number to Israel or to the United States budget, because Israel accepts $4 billion of foreign aid, which is used to buy American arms and has strings that it’s basically a subsidy to American weapons manufacturers. Because of that, America is being ruined. That’s a very common meme on the internet right now. And it’s irrational. It is, as are many other things in this complex of ideas. I just want to say, by the way, I’m against American aid. I was against it when I was living in America. Now that I live in Israel, I’m still against it. I don’t think America should be giving aid to Israel. Israel’s GDP is about $550 billion. The $4 billion it gets to the United States, it could easily finance on its own. And I think it should. So just want to get that in. Sorry, carry on.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it’s an irrelevant issue. And I think everyone knows it’s an irrelevant issue. So a similar thing, let me, another one that just came to my mind, there are, again, there are dozens and dozens of these things. Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, wrote three books about how bad the Jews are. I haven’t read them, but I understand that they are very virulent. And I know that one of the things he says there is, he repeats a very common trope at the time that Jewish doctors kill their patients. So one version…
Russ Roberts
They’re non-Jewish patients, presumably.
David Deutsch
They’re non-Jewish patients. Yeah, quite right. Yes. One version said that they have a pact that they must kill one in 10 of their gentile patients. I think Martin Luther didn’t say how many, but the University of Vienna said that it was 10%. So that was a common form of the libel. But Martin Luther pointed out, without himself realizing what he was saying, he pointed out as a kind of, look how irrational we are, he was kind of saying, because we know that they do this, and yet we still hire them as doctors. Now, he was pointing out something which is perfectly true. And again, a more widespread thing at the time was that Jews were expelled from various cities for various imaginary crimes. And then a few years, at most a generation later, they were welcomed back in. And it wasn’t that people said, oh, they didn’t commit those crimes. They just said, oh, well, the Jews come in now. They’ll be useful in X, Y, and Z, in trade, in medicine and whatever. Finance, yes. Oh, yeah. Well, that was the thing that only Jews were allowed to participate in finance. Officially, of course, in reality, everyone participates in finance and the Medici were not Jews.
Russ Roberts
I want to give an example from the current moment to both get your reaction and challenge my own skepticism about your thesis. And again, I have to say, there’s something deeply offensive about your claim. It’s disturbing. It is unacceptable. And yet, and in fact, for most of my life, we’re the same age. I’m 71, you’re 71. We’ve lived in a time with very little overt examples of violence against Jews, trivial amount through most of my life, trivial amount of any kind of anti-Semitic words, anything. But people would say, oh, you know, but anti-Semitism, it’s like a virus. It just kind of mutates and spreads. And it’s like, that’s not a satisfying answer as a social scientist. And it’s hard to understand how it could be true. So I’ve always been skeptical of it until the last two years with the war in Gaza. And I want to give an example from modern times and listeners, I’m not going to name names and you can speculate all you want. I’m not going to confirm or deny anything. But I follow a number of people on Twitter, on X, who have millions of followers. These are smart people, deeply thoughtful, interesting people. Some of them are extremely talented. Most of them are highly educated. Until October 7th, I would have said they are incredibly rational and nuanced and sophisticated thinkers and weighing evidence and so on. And yet, since October 7th, the following is true. And this is more, it’s a small number of data points in my own personal experience, but I know they are representative of a larger group. These folks have never said anything about the hostages. They have said nothing about Israel’s horrible moral dilemma of having 250 of their citizens kiDNApped and dragged into tunnels. They’ve never suggested what Israel should do instead of what they claim is genocide. They use the word genocide to describe a terrible tragedy, but it’s a tragedy of war, not what was defined as genocide until recently. They only post anti-Israel, they post about a few things. But when they post about Israel, which is regularly, they only post critical things, many of which are not true. I don’t mind if they post things that are true, but Israel’s many things it’s done that I’m ashamed of, the Jews are ashamed of, that deserve criticism. That doesn’t bother me. You can argue that Israel’s made a terrible tactical error in responding the way it does. You can say it’s made a moral error. That’s fine. I’m open to any of that if you make an argument. But a significant portion of what they post are lies. When those lies are uncovered, they never apologize. They never tell their followers, oh, you know, I exaggerated. I showed a video, I posted a video claiming that it was a video of Jews or Israelis on a tourist trip to watch the bombing of Gaza. That actually didn’t happen.
Russ Roberts
There weren’t any, and I probably shouldn’t have posted it. That doesn’t happen. They just put it up. I’m not going to detail all the things I think are dishonest. Again, I don’t mind people don’t agree with Israel, disagree with Israel. It has nothing to do with that. This is a relentless posting of grotesque things that are not true demonizing Israelis. And I wrote one of these people, because I know them well. And I said, you know, you’re endangering me and my children. I don’t mind if you’re critical, but by demonizing me, which is the pattern, by saying that I am a savage, that I am a supporter of genocide, you are justifying hurting me. You’re justifying hurting my children. Please don’t do that. Be nuanced. Be critical. But please do not only post things, many of which are not true. Now, we got no interesting back and forth about what’s true and what’s not true, and that’s a discussion for another day. But this phenomenon of a thoughtful person, who I respect, posting relentlessly critical things of Israel. Until I talk to you, David, I like to think that, well, they just have so much empathy for the Palestinians, and they struggle because their feed, like my feed, has been programmed to make me happy or really mad. Those are the two things that your feed on social media does. It either is designed to make you feel comforted or enraged. So of course, they got a bad feed. They’ve watched too many videos that aren’t true, and as a result, that’s all they see. And their love for the poor Palestinians, which I also empathize with, the people of Gaza, I think it’s a terrible tragedy what they’ve endured since October 7th at the hands of Israel. But their own leaders have, I think, bear immense, if not most, of the moral responsibility for their fate. But we can debate that. But I like to think, well, this person who’s acting on the internet, and I’ll say someone publicly, Tucker Carlson, whose theories of the world continue to morph into stranger and stranger conspiracies about Israel and Jews, they’re just so compassionate. They’re so empathetic for the state of the Palestinian people, which I can relate to. So it’s not so surprising that they’re anti-Israel right now. But you’re saying that’s really a misreading of what’s going on. You want to elaborate on that or agree with am I getting this right? And I have to say, even though I don’t like your theory, it does explain this perverse behavior of people I know are irrational everywhere else.
David Deutsch
Yes, well, I’m not going to say whether I like the theory or not, because I think that is irrelevant. I am interested in what’s true. And I try to pursue what’s true rather than what I like to be true. By the way, I should, before I get onto your friends who are consumed by the pattern, I just want to point out that Jews are not exempt from the pattern.
Russ Roberts
Correct. It’s true too.
David Deutsch
And I’m not referring to only to so-called self-hating Jews, who are a category by themselves, like Neturei Kata or those kind of people. I’m talking about ordinary people, as you say, rational people, caring people. Now, and again, I’m not going to name names, but Jews, Israelis, everybody, there is no one, no category of people who are immune from this, I don’t know what you call it, a mind virus. It’s not like other instances of that kind of thing. So I hesitate to use generic categories. It’s not a conspiracy theory about, you know, some, yeah, it’s different. Yeah, it’s very different. Now, but I don’t think that the people you’re talking about are moved by compassion or empathy. I don’t think they have that. That claiming to have that is, again, a rationalization. You can easily tell, as is often pointed out on social media and so on, that if they were empathic or compassionate, they would be compassionate with other Palestinians, for example, the ones who are being mistreated in other countries or expelled from other countries.
Russ Roberts
Yeah. And so with other tragedies in the world that aren’t related to Jews, they never say a word about them.
David Deutsch
Yes, exactly. But the most extreme example of this is that they don’t care about other Palestinians. They don’t care about Palestinians who are being killed or harmed or hurt by people who aren’t Jews. That never appears in the public discourse. So it’s not compassion.
Russ Roberts
But don’t you find it kind of condescending? I do, but it’s grown on me. Isn’t it kind of condescending to say, and people say about me all the time, they say, well, he’s a Zionist, so he’s an idiot. So what you’re suggesting is that when I look at these people I respect or used to respect, and I’m trying to understand their behavior, there’s a certain, I mean, it’s not really cheerful, but there’s a certain smugness of saying, well, they’ve got this disease and they can’t help it. It’s pitiful. It’s sad. But they’re just misguided beyond, they’re in the throes of a mental illness is what you’re effectively saying. It’s a disturbing way to look at other people.
David Deutsch
It would absolutely be illegitimate to look at other people like that in the course of an argument. If somebody says, the Israelis have committed genocide in Gaza, to reply to that by saying, you’re irrational. That’s an invalid argument. That’s an ad hominem argument, which should not be used in any circumstances, but especially not ones where people’s lives hang in the balance. So when one is making an argument for or against some proposition, one can’t use the attributes of the person putting forward the argument as part of your argument. That’s not legitimate. But nevertheless, irrationalities do happen. And this isn’t the only irrationality going around. I have been on the anti-irrational side of several different arguments. And when I say that, for example, inductivism is a philosophy that is incredibly seductive and which enters into people’s worldview, when they don’t know, they would deny that they are an inductivist. And I have to, I can’t say, yes, but you secretly are. I have to say, this thing you’re saying is false, never mind whether it is quote, inductivism. Never mind that. I will argue against your particular position. That’s if I want to argue with them, which I often do if they are careful thinkers who, in other respects, I have reason to believe, understand arguments and change their point of view according to them.
Russ Roberts
So let me ask you a related question. Early in this war in Gaza, many people complained that Israel is doing a very bad job with what is sometimes called hasbara, which means communication, making its case, and that Israel needed to do a better job. And obviously, the world’s opinion was spiraling out of control negatively against Israel because Israel was doing such a poor job. This is an old story. It goes back 77 years. People have always said Israelis are blunt, they’re overconfident, they’re dismissive of others, a form of the pattern already, but that of course, this is a cultural flaw of Israel is one of the reactions. And I’ve never believed that. It’s not clear that it would make any difference. However, I’m on X, that’s the social media platform I spend, you know, 10 years on, and I’m on X, which is a platform I spend too much time on. I’ve recently started removing it from my phone, I put it back on again, it’s like smoking, it’s an addiction, and then I take it off for a while, which is good, by the way, like smoking and stopping smoking. It’s right, every cigarette unsmoked is probably a benefit health-wise, may have other costs. So on X, this is war that goes on. And I look at it sometimes from 30,000 feet. Here’s the war. Somebody says something that’s not true. Again, I don’t want to debate whether some of these things might be true or kind of true, but let’s say it’s an actual misstatement of fact. So the Hasbara people pile on and correct so-and-so, is this a reasonable thing to do? Should we continue to play whack-a-mole with people who are the most crazy victims of the pattern, or should I just say, well, they’re a little bit crazy, or maybe very crazy, and they’re victims of this mind virus, I’m not going to waste my time trying to dissuade them or to dissuade others. But what’s your thought on that?
David Deutsch
Well, you made several points there. First of all, as far as the Hasbara goes, even before that, let me say that the fact that anti-Jewish rhetoric has risen, even among people who do not themselves participate in persecution or violence against Jews, that always happens. That’s a feature of every pogrom. Again, this is an odd feature of pogroms. The result of it is that bystanders side with the perpetrators rhetorically, even if they don’t join in, which most of them do not. So that’s one thing. The fact that it’s rising always happens and has got nothing to do with Israel or its public relations or anything like that. Having said that, I think that Israel’s public relations, as well as the well-meaning efforts of Jewish organizations or anti-antisemitism organizations, it’s not that they have got bad PR, it’s that they have the wrong theory of what they’re conflicting with.
Russ Roberts
Explain. They think it’s ignorance on the other side. They think it’s an education problem.
David Deutsch
Or that this is a form of prejudice or a form of racism and a form of… All these things that it’s blamed on.
Russ Roberts
A few good workshop sessions will clarify things and clear this up. Get the right facilitator in there.
David Deutsch
Whereas I think… I don’t know how to do this. I’m not a public relations person at all. But I can’t help thinking that if they had the right theory of what they are combating, they would do better at combating it. And I think there’s no single answer to whether one should respond to factual falsehoods. I sometimes do on X, and it’s because I’m thinking of the people who are just new coming to this, you know, a 16-year-old who’s just gone on X and suddenly encounters this torrent of facts saying that there was a Palestinian state that the Israelis invaded in 1948. Just to say, well, that isn’t true. And then to point out that, as usually, the allegation comes along with some emotional taint as well. So then I often also point out that what’s really happened is that this person is legitimizing hurting Jews for this. And it wouldn’t be a valid legitimization even if it were true. But it isn’t true. Like, you know, the Jews killed Jesus is not, you know, where people pretend to believe or rather make themselves believe because it’s part of their religion, that a crowd of Jews filled the square in front of Pontius Pilate. And when he said, who shall I kill, you know, they said, kill Jesus and we’ll take the responsibility for his blood on us and our children. Now, first of all, crowds don’t speak in unison. Secondly, if they did speak in unison, no crowd in history has ever said that they and their children should be punished. To the nth generation, no one has ever said that. That scene didn’t happen. It was made up for the purpose of being an illogical allegation that it was a badge of membership, in this case of Christianity, to endorse. So now, this applies also to Jewish people who are gripped by the pattern. By the way, I think gripped is perhaps the wrong word because most people who, in whom the pattern is part of their psychological makeup, which by the way included me before I began to realize what’s going on, most people are not overwhelmed by the pattern. The moment of being overwhelmed by the pattern is quite visible. It’s when the person can’t stop talking about Jews, as Douglas Murray has pointed out. That’s when people say, oh, this is a mental illness. But it’s not a mental illness. It’s an irrationality. In that respect, there are many other irrationalities that are like that. And I mentioned inductivism, which is one that I have tried to comment on. Not one of the worst, I would just suggest. There are others that are worse. But this one is particularly harmful politically. It is a thing that can destroy cultures. It can destroy empires. So for that reason, it is important to combat it. But combating it doesn’t necessarily mean eradicating it as a moral perversion. Because for example, I said that its clash with the formation of the State of Israel was one of the enemies, one of the great enemies of the pattern. And in fact, exacerbated the pattern at the time, as did the Enlightenment. But the Enlightenment and the formation of Israel are good things. And similarly, the Anglosphere is a very good thing. But it is the place, as Max Nordau pointed out in his address to the first Zionist Congress, which I always recommend to everybody.
Russ Roberts
We’ll link to it.
David Deutsch
Right. The Anglosphere is the place where all these things that he talked about in the way that the emancipation of the Jews was hypocritical and led to the opposite and so on, that didn’t happen in the Anglosphere, notably. But it’s not because people got less, quote, anti-Semitic. It’s because the actions of hurting Jews conflicted with the actions required by the Anglosphere morality. And that is why England was, Britain was an exception to, I must always say, and the Netherlands, Britain and the Netherlands were an exception to the upsurge of pogroms and anti-Semitic persecutions that followed the Enlightenment. So, and then to America. It was a bit too early for Nordau to mention America as well. But if he were speaking today, he would say, and America.
Russ Roberts
Explain that again. Say that again about Nordau’s thesis and why England was different.
David Deutsch
Yes. So, he said, and I think this is extremely perceptive of him at that time, 1897.
Russ Roberts
This is 1897. Yeah. He said, you would think that the era when the Jews were emancipated, when they got to be …
David Deutsch
Allowed for the first time to participate in society, to attend universities.
Russ Roberts
Come out of the ghetto. Yeah. Yeah.
David Deutsch
Get out of the ghetto, attend university, engage in business, become bankers, and so on. But this would just normalize the age-old pattern, but it made it worse. And that’s because the people implementing the Enlightenment, building Enlightenment polities, were not sincere, as he puts it. I mean, whether they were sincere or hypocritical or not, I don’t know whether one can say that in regard to unconscious ideas, unconscious motivations. But anyway, they weren’t. Britain, which was the last major European country to emancipate the Jews legally, that was precisely because they were serious. They waited to emancipate the Jews until they had resolved the conflict of the ancient patterns of persecution, the conflict between that and the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the Anglosphere, as we would now call it. Once they resolved that in the middle of the 19th century, then they emancipated the Jews, and it was no big deal. Even though, a little bit before, Gladstone, the great liberal, was railing against emancipating the Jews. But even then, he was railing against allowing them into parliament as MPs. There were Jews who were ready to be MPs, who would have been voted in, and who weren’t allowed by the rule that you had to swear on the Bible, on the New Testament. So that requirement was lifted at the time when the country was ready to accept that conflict between some of their previous values and some of their present values. And so that was how England was different, and still is different. And the fact that people still believe nonsense that they see on the internet has got nothing to do with that because they do not enact it. The pattern is a moral perversion which takes the form of compulsively legitimizing not enacting, hurting Jews for being Jews. And that can go up and down in a society, but what people do, especially in strong societies like the Anglosphere societies, what people do is more regulated by their political and social traditions than by their gut morality about different people.
Russ Roberts
This is fascinating. And I have to say, you know, my earlier unease with the, with your claim is softened by your observation about the people in the grip of this increasingly focus on the Jews. You know, that would be true of, take a modest historical example, Adolf Hitler, but it would be also true of people in today’s world who, puzzling it seems, as you point out and as I’m pointing out with my examples from social media, it’s all they write about sometimes. And increasingly to the extent, it’s not all they write about, the proportion grows over time. I will say, since the return of the hostages and the least temporary, mostly end of the war, some of the worst posters and reposters that I’m talking about have quieted down, but others have ratcheted it up. Let me ask you a question about how to respond. I’d like to turn to the general question, how to respond to this. I’m pretty sure you’re an atheist.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Russ Roberts
And I am a practicing Jew. You can’t see it on Zoom, but I’m wearing a kippah and I do my best to lead a serious Jewish life in the normative sense of Orthodox Judaism. So-called modern Orthodox is, would be my flavor, more or less. In the face of this reality, would you favor, I asked the same question to Sam Harris, by the way, who is also a very famous atheist, as I think you are. It’s a funny phrase, famously atheist, but meaning it’s well known. It’s not like a quiet thing I’m broaching here. Isn’t the solution to the pattern, the right response to the pattern, given your atheism, favoring assimilation. So, Herzl in 1897, beginning before that, and certainly in the first Zionist Congress, is making the case for a Jewish state where we’ll have a haven, a sanctuary, we’ll be safe. Hasn’t turned out quite that way. You could debate whether it’s been good for the Jews or not. But that’s one answer. You could argue historically it’s not been a complete success. I have to admit that. But a different answer would be, let’s go the opposite direction. Instead of creating a home for this crazy group of people who stand out in every society they’re in, which is also interesting and identifiable, despite the fact that they have mostly in the West, look a lot like the people around them, but it doesn’t matter. So, it’s not a skin color thing in the West, somehow. Shouldn’t the solution just be to fade away? Shouldn’t we, if you’re any kind of utilitarian, I’m not, but you might be, and many are, isn’t the solution to this horrible suffering that comes from the pattern? Just get rid of Jews, not exterminate them, God forbid, but let’s fade into the woodwork. Let’s change our names to less Jewish names. I’m Roberts, used to be Rabinowitz. That’s a step in the right direction. Take off your kippah. Don’t keep the Sabbath. Just merge, baby. That’s another way to cure the disease. Instead of debating people that they shouldn’t hate us, let’s just stop existing as a distinct category. Do you feel that way, ever?
David Deutsch
Absolutely not. I don’t think, so I think that this idea that assimilation is the solution to pogroms was believed by many people in the 19th century and was tried by many people, and the place where the Jews, where the extermination of the Jews began was the place where they were most assimilated in the whole of Europe. Probably the second choice, if you’d been told in 1900, that sometime in the coming century one of the nations in Europe is going to try to wipe out the Jews, the first choice of most people would have been France. Yeah. Germany, perhaps Austria, would have been second, third, if you allow Russia as part of Europe, they would have said Russia or Poland. Poland. They would not have said Germany. Germany was the place to which Jews fled during the pogroms of the first world war. Even though the Kaiser was deeply gripped by the pattern, but that didn’t affect the policies of the state, so the Jews took refuge in Germany. Then France would have been the place where what was called anti-Semitism, which by the way, I think is a very misleading name in several ways. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to choose a different name, because that it’s a pattern I think nobody can deny. So then came the Dreyfus affair, when the whole of France rose up against this one guy, just this big innocent guy, just because he was a Jew. And Herzl saw this, and having previously been an assimilationist, he was like, okay, it’s not going to work, guys. We need some other kind of solution. And that was the thing that converted many Jews, but still a minority, the majority of Jews. Some of them, I’m sorry to say, were themselves gripped by the version of the pattern, which was common among Orthodox Jews at the time, that either that Jews had been expelled from the Holy Land, or from Judea, or whatever you want to call it, for their sins, and they haven’t finished expiating them yet. So Zionism, or they would say, Jews should not go back to Judea until the Messiah comes. In other words, never. If you’d asked them, do you have anything against Jews, they would have said, of course not. We’re loyal to Jews. We have compassion with all Jews, even the ones who are not devout, and so on. So Zionism did not succeed well amongst Jews. The great majority rejected Zionism, but you mentioned Israel and whether it was a success. Several hundred thousand Jews were saved from the Holocaust because of the Jewish national home, as it was then, and then several hundred thousand more were saved from persecution and, in many cases, extermination again, because of the existence of Israel.
Russ Roberts
Yeah, I didn’t mean to say it was literally a mistake. It did not fulfill its expected destiny. And I have to quote, I think it’s Amos Oz, who said, when he lived in Europe, they said, we don’t want you here, or they tried to kill us. So he moved, then we created the state of Israel. Once we got there, they said, go back to where you came from.
David Deutsch
In both cases, I’m sorry to keep repeating this, but it is counterintuitive, so I have to repeat it. Those were rationalizations. Both go to Israel or do not go to Israel. All those things are rationalizations. And in its extreme form, the Nazis did not originally, at the beginning of the Holocaust, try to murder all the Jews. They tried to expel them because that was a way of hurting them. And the rest of the world joined in and said, right, well, Jews are not allowed to leave Nazi jurisdiction. Why? If you’d asked them, they wouldn’t have said because it is fitting for Jews to suffer, as St. Augustine would have said. But the underlying impulse was the same. The world clubbed together to prevent the Germans from expelling Jews from Germany and from the countries they conquered. And that’s why they embarked on killing them, because they couldn’t leave the situation as it was. It would have been unthinkable to people who were very gripped by the pattern.
Russ Roberts
Let’s talk about the West for a minute, which is a vague term, but there’s some shared understanding of what that means. A few days ago, it was a remarkable event. Actually, it’s not remarkable. It’s become relatively commonplace. At the Park East Synagogue, which is an iconic building in Manhattan, there was a protest as Jews entered, and presumably some non-Jews entered, to attend an event at the synagogue. It was an event to encourage people going to Israel. I should say that to make it clear that I understand people could think that’s a bad thing. I don’t. But, okay, that’s a legitimate position to hold that you don’t think people should be encouraged. Fine. And the way it’s encouraged in different parts, over the Green Line, et cetera, et cetera. But let’s look at what people said. They didn’t say people shouldn’t be encouraged to move to Israel. They chanted, death to the IDF. Interesting. Globalize the Intifada, which to me means promote the murder of innocent civilians. There are people who interpret that phrase differently. I’ll give them their due. We don’t want no Zionists here. Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out, meaning kill people who live in disputed parts of Israel, although some people would say that includes all of Israel. And my, I was going to say my favorites, I can’t use that word, but there’s a video of a woman screaming, go kill yourself, do the world a favor and effing kill yourself. But shouldn’t say effing. Go kill yourself, do the world a favor and effing kill yourself. Slit your throat. Do that, please, I beg you. It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic example of the pattern. In this case, legitimizing a person hurting themselves, but the anger and rage of this person is what’s, it’s scary. And the people who are tearing down hostage posters in the early days after October 7th with glee, with glee laughing as they did it. When people say, what, you know, I’m looking at on these videos, Jews would say, or passersby, many of them were Jewish, but maybe some of them weren’t. Don’t do that. And the people would just laugh at them and tear the poster down. I’m thinking, you know, remonstration, wagging your finger is not the right response in that setting. I have trouble saying what the right response is, but what are we supposed to do? Allegedly, we believe in freedom of speech. Is there some speech, especially when tied to the threat of violence, it happens on college campuses way too often in the last two years. The implication is it hasn’t broken out into actual violence, very rarely. A few times yes, tragically, but most of the time it’s just intimidation. It’s just basically saying, your life is in danger, Jew. Know it, be aware of it. And I’m curious, first of all, how the West could respond and how they might respond, and then how Jews should respond to this.
David Deutsch
The things you’re describing are part of the fact that there is a pogrom underway, this time a worldwide pogrom. And it includes strong manifestations, both in Britain and in America, which is sad because pogroms haven’t occurred in those countries for hundreds of years. The pattern has, but not pogroms. What do you do? So first of all, you note that what this is all about is legitimizing hurting Jews. That’s what’s going on when somebody tears down a poster and actually laughs and mocks the people who are hurt by this in order to hurt them. That is what it’s about. That’s what tearing down the posters is about. It’s not about helping Palestinians or anything like that. And also to legitimize hurting the hostages. So when you say, I forget who you said this about, but whoever it was, they don’t mention the hostages. Well, the reason they don’t mention the hostages is because the hostages’ plight is legitimate in their system of morality. So it doesn’t enter into the moral weighing up. When you say, what should the Israelis have done? What should the Israelis have done about what? Nothing bad was happening. Nothing illegitimate was happening. It’s very common for people to actually oppose the violence, but insist on its legitimacy. So they would say, I’m not, far from them themselves participating. They would say, people shouldn’t do this. Even Abbas and Arafat would say on occasion, terrorism, these actions are wrong because they set back the cause of the Palestinian people. They don’t say they are wrong because hurting people is wrong, because they’re constrained to say that in this case hurting people is right.
Russ Roberts
It’s a tactical error.
David Deutsch
It is the right thing morally, but tactically it happens to be that we shouldn’t do it on this occasion. So now what should Jews do about it? That’s another tactical issue. I think even now when many Jews are considering emigrating from Britain to America or from Britain to Australia or from Britain to Israel or from Israel to America and so on, people have to do what they think is best in their own lives, but it’s not going to affect the pogrom. The pogrom will die away if it, I don’t want to prophesy, but what normally happens is that pogroms die away, but the pattern does not. So I keep looking for signs and at the beginning of the pogrom I was tweeting every so often the pogrom is still worsening. A couple of times recently I’ve tweeted that the pogrom seems to have peaked, so I’m hoping that this peak comes before a decline. The decline is usually slow, the onset is usually very rapid, and this has been just like almost every other previous instance. The Crusaders you mentioned, the anti-Jewish, the French philosophes, all simultaneously becoming anti-Semitic as it was called later after emancipation. This was all similar thing and this time it’s also been a similar thing. I haven’t noticed it getting worse in the last few months. Let me close with one more challenge and get your response.
Russ Roberts
It’s a fascinating thesis, there’s much to recommend it as an outside observer, but you know there’s a flip side to the pattern it seems to me, which is I’m interested in lots of things, but every once in a while I find myself pulled in to fighting the pattern way too often. Part of me says, like I mentioned earlier, just take X off your phone, off your computer, stop, lead your life, love your wife, love your children, help your neighbor. This is a fool’s game, but there are other times where I say if I had said that in 1935 in Germany I would have been culpable and this is a moment where I think people have to stand up. I would just add parenthetically, because I haven’t said it in this conversation, that many, many people, many of you listening, many, many people around the world have stood up for the Jews, have showed tremendous empathy for Israel. You write me and say you’re praying for me, you write me and say you hope I’m okay, you write me and say you’re sorry this is happening, as 60% of our students are shuttling back and forth between Gaza, Lebanon and trying to understand Plato, Homer, and Shakespeare here at Shalem College. So it is a little more complicated than we’re saying, but my point is that I don’t want to be consumed by responding to the pattern. I don’t want to spend the rest of my, I hope, productive days foolishly getting worked up over something that is somewhat inevitable and in a way there’s a temptation to say this has to play out like you’re suggesting. But the other response is a little scary and I want to just touch on that and get your response, your reaction. The other response is that, first of all, it’s a different moment in history. We have a country, it’s one of the best armies in the world, we have a place to go, it’s fraught with its own insecurities, but this is not the same as in the past. Someone said, I forget who it is, I apologize, we’ll link to it. How do you feel about a tank with a Jewish star on it? Well, this person said, better a tank than on my sleeve, where I marched into a death camp. So the pattern in today’s world, unlike in the past where the Jews bowed their heads and took the blows from the truncheons and the guns and the violence of the mob, now the Jews have a way to fight back. And what has happened in the last six to 12 months has been quite extraordinary in military history and what Israel’s done to its local nations that are its enemies, Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis and so on, as well as Hamas. But out in the rest of the world, in the diaspora, I see everything ratcheting up and that crowd in front of the Park East Synagogue, while there were these people yelling these slogans, there were Jews on the other side yelling back. And you could understand that they probably were pretty enraged. And I’ve seen my own reaction emotionally to certain things like people tearing down posters.
Russ Roberts
If we’re not careful, we’re headed toward some kind of crazy war between Jews and Jew haters outside of Israel. Are you worried about that? Isn’t it worrisome to believe in a syndrome that is inevitable, that drives people crazy and the only thing I can do therefore is fight back? They’re my enemy.
David Deutsch
Well, the short answer is no, I’m not afraid of that. Although it is, I said I can’t prophesy, I mean, it’s always a possibility because things are going to happen that have never happened before. And so, you know, anything could happen. But one of the things that has never happened before, to my knowledge, is that there’s an enormous upsurge of anti-pattern feeling among non-Jews. More than ever before. I was just in a conversation on X the other day about the 1930s. And I pointed out that in the 1930s, in Britain, in the lead-up to the White Paper and the betrayal of the Balfour Declaration and the siding with imprisoning the Jews in Europe, and just the common anti-Semitism as you could call it of the upper class in Britain, Chamberlain and Co. There were people like Churchill and there’s this chap Wedgwood who I hadn’t heard of before, but he was a descendant of Josiah Wedgwood, the potter. He’s got a street here, Wedgwood has a street here in Jerusalem. It’s a mile from here. Cool.
Russ Roberts
Yeah. It’s Wedgwood here, but yeah.
David Deutsch
Wedgwood, Wedgwood. Okay. Yeah, well, he was remarkable. And there were a handful of remarkable people, both Labour and Conservative, mostly Labour, but Wedgwood was a Liberal. But there was nobody, not one person, prominent in Britain who was vitriolic in support of the Jews. Not one. There were people who were critical of the government, there were people who were saying, we should do more. There were people who were saying, it’s shameful we don’t do more. And a handful of people. But there was nobody who did things like what Douglas Murray is doing now. Not one. Whereas now there are, well, depends how prominent you mean, but there are several very prominent ones and dozens and dozens of slightly less prominent supporters of the Jews who are not giving up. And this is, so it’s not a matter of the mob outside and the Jews inside fighting back. By the way, that did happen occasionally. Not that it did them any good, but that did happen. But non-Jews seeing what is at stake, and by the way, even Christopher Hitchens, who was anti-Zionist and anti-Israel, realized what anti-Semitism is, that it’s a danger to civilization.
Russ Roberts
There’s an incredible clip of him expounding on that that I just saw yesterday. We’ll try to find it and post it.
David Deutsch
Yeah, I retweeted it again recently. So yeah, he didn’t get, I think during his life he understood more and more and more. And it’s a pity he died when he did because he, you know, I would have liked to speak to him and tell him about the pattern. Because he was trying to, like everybody, force the phenomenon into a predefined slot, in his case of imperialism and racism and, you know, protecting minorities and that kind of thing. Right, it’s got nothing to do with any of those. Those are all excuses. So, but anyway, that there are living prominent people. And I, again, mustn’t prophesy, but I can’t imagine this pogrom getting much worse without making the opposition to it more virulent as well.
Russ Roberts
Yeah, all I was saying is, and I want to make this clear for anybody who would misunderstand what I said before, I think I don’t want to become like my enemy, right? I do not want to have an obsession. But if my survival is at stake and my children’s survival is at stake, it’s hard to be calm about it. I don’t want to lower myself. I don’t want to degrade and corrode my soul in the same way that I think some of my enemies have turned out. But I also don’t want to be naive and ignore what is, I think, a real danger for the first time in my lifetime. But I love your point. We do have allies, and not just military allies, we do have that as well. But we have intellectual allies who are on our side. So that’s some comfort.
David Deutsch
I agree.
Russ Roberts
My guest today has been David Deutsch. David, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.
David Deutsch
Thanks for inviting me.
Russ Roberts
This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econtalk.org, where you can also comment on today’s podcast and find links and readings related to today’s conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I’m your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.
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