Cass Sunstein: belief

Transcript context

…When you say other forces, do you mean hostile foreign powers? Or there’s something illiberal in societies that is not sufficiently driven out by liberalism? I think there’s something illiberal in the human heart. I recently reread Orwell’s 1984, and what staggered me about it is that Orwell’s of two minds, and that’s the power of the book. Reading it the first three times I did, I thought this is a liberal book about the horrors of illiberal tyranny, but Orwell is into illiberal tyranny. He almost has an erotic connection to it, and that comes through in the book. That’s part of the power of the book. In the human soul, the idea of cruelty or suppression — or maybe, in gentler form, an insistence on order — that’s just there, and it occasionally triumphs. Liberalism is struggling. You can say the better angels of our nature. That’s probably a little too simple, but certainly, the forces of freedom are combating other forces, which sometimes involve fear, sometimes involve security, and these can override liberal commitments. Is there anything in your view to the Freudian critique of liberalism, that repression is inevitable, and it comes out in illiberal ways, and it’s hard to avoid and keep civilization?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.