Margaret Atwood on the Rise of Real World Authoritarians | Offline With Jon Favreau

everyone thinks that there is no privacy and everything is public, but that is not

real

ly true, it is only true if you connect to the internet, so if you can keep your phone off for a second, then you can have some moments of privacy. I'm trying. trying, you're trying, I'm John Favreau, welcome to log out, my guest today is the legendary Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood. Margaret has been called the prophet of dystopia, which unfortunately for us has become increasingly accurate over the course of 18 novels, nine story collections, and 18 books of poetry. Atwood has demonstrated an unsettling ability to predict the progressive spread of dystopia. theocracy and totalitarianism, most notably with her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, which returned to the public consciousness after the election of Donald Trump and a television adaptation a couple of weeks ago.

She wrote an article for the Atlantic titled "Go ahead and ban my book", where she takes on the Madison County, Virginia school board, which recently banned The Handmaid's Tale in her schools. In the article, Atwood argues that in the digital age no book ban will keep her writing. out of the hands of curious teenage students, it seemed like a perfect

offline

conversation, so I invited Margaret to talk about it here's Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood, welcome to the

offline

pleasure of being here. um I want to start with the big question about the state of the

world

, so obviously there's a lot to worry about these days, especially if you're a fan of democracy, but I've also seen an argument recently that 2022 was the year in which democracy counterattacked Ukraine, which is still standing, to the defeat of Le Pen, strongest in Europe. loss Trump's candidates lost in our midterm elections and I wonder, as someone who has thought and written a lot about the struggle between democracy and autocracy, where do you think we are right now?

I would say I'm not ruling you out. United States by any means, but there are certainly in these states that are banning books and what is this crazy new law that you have to register if you have a blog and mention someone in the Florida government what kind of Soviet? The thinking goes that yeah, some nutty Republican legislator introduced that bill, yeah, it's not a good thing, in fact, it would practically be some kind of 1930s Soviet Union, so if you

real

ly want to go there, maybe you should read . a little bit of History uh, yeah, it's very strange, but I would say that people now that they have come out of their slumber and realize that they can't take any of this for granted, I would say that they are fighting against what Do you think are some of the conditions that gave

rise

to this latest wave of authoritarianism not only in the United States but around the

world

when conditions are unstable and conditions are unstable and partly due to flooding and especially drought? lower harvests, food shortages that destabilize things, there is some kind of simple unrest and there is a great inclination to tear down governments and try to replace them with something else that people dearly hope will work better, so I think those are the conditions unstable ones that create anger and despair and then political actors try to increase that to make it really unstable or they or they say things like only I can fix it and people believe them right because they are desperate when Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. there was a debate about whether Putin would be able to make the shift from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, you know, and for people who don't know he's doing pretty well, yeah, well, that's what he's doing best, he's doing it. better than him at making that change. on the battlefield and I'm wondering what you've learned about how people come to support or at least tolerate totalitarian regimes like what Russia is becoming or has become, they don't want to be shot in the back of the head, so it's fear, it's fear. so it's fear and also Exodus so that all the people who can oppose this type of behavior leave if they can't, leaving behind those who have no power, those who are collaborators and supporters because they are getting something from it and Those fit well , because these regimes do not waste time.

When I was talking about The Handmaid's Tale from the beginning, people were like, well, well, why didn't they have a big street march? Well, why didn't they resist? Why not? They do this and that and we would never say blah blah, and I said, you don't understand these regimes, they'll kill you, they're not interested in justice and accommodation or any of that kind of stuff that they want. eliminate the opposition and if you are publicly resisting you are the opposition and you will be killed or exiled or imprisoned or something like that. What about people who can't tolerate the regime simply out of fear of what it might do? happens to them, but they are actively involved in something for them, yes, there are always jobs available, you know the prison guards and the camp supervisors and jobs like that, and there will always be people willing to take those jobs, so the people in the story of the maids said oh, why did women help control other women?

Answer read a little history, this is how colonial regimes worked, they recruited people from the countries they dominated and there was always someone you know if you can get a better salary and put food on the table. Many people will accept that. Thank you so much. You've said that The Handmaid's Tale was influenced in part by your experiences in various countries behind the Iron Curtain in the mid-'80s. What did you see there that shaped your thinking? What didn't I see there? What didn't I hear there? So it's not just what you see here, it's what you don't see here.

It may be a very small example. It was in Poland in 1980, there were four big book festivals and there were many very beautiful books. Illustrated children's books and I said why are there so many beautifully illustrated children's books and they said, think about it, are you thinking about it? I am Do you have Do you have the answer? I am not a politician. It is less likely to be controversial. Back then, now children's books can be quite controversial in the United States, but, you know, happy bunny stories in Poland in 1984, you were unlikely to get shot in the back of the head for that hmm or any other example. in the middle of this field Czechoslovakia why are we going to go out to the middle of the field because people are not going to talk to you in a room they are not going to talk to you in a hotel they are not going to talk to you "For you in a car we assumed that everyone had microphones , so we went to the middle of the field and then I heard some things that I couldn't repeat or write down because that would get people in trouble, okay?

So that's what you do." You are not seeing or hearing but maybe you are seeing and hearing in a field or other example 1989 is Berlin the wall is falling right at that moment we are there so the wall is falling the Sullen unpleasant is the German wall border guards that we that I met in 1984. they are the same people now they are smiling happy and friendly they are handing out cigarettes they are taking photos people are selling pieces of the wall colored pieces with more expensive graffiti we are launching maid service Story, we launched the film first in West Berlin, the after party is full of aesthetic conversations, the acting, the directing, the set design, the script, and all the things you talk about when you talk about movies, usually if you're not in a totalitarian regime.

Then we crossed to East Berlin and showed it in the theater there and this is the first time something like this has happened since before the war, okay, since Germany was divided, a very attentive audience, very, very attentive, that's right how he really concentrates. then a lot of bouquets of flowers are thrown on stage and people are not having aesthetic conversations, they are having political conversations for the first time, they have been able to have a political conversation for a long time and what they say is that this was our life, well, they don't. It's not referring to the clothing, it's referring to the fact that you couldn't trust anyone.

You never knew who you were talking to. You never knew if your next-door neighbor was ratting you out. You didn't know anything about that and you did see that movie. While a while ago you called the lives of others that was very much the flavor of East Germany before the wall fell, you said you made Gilead a theocracy because of America's puritan roots and clearly many totalitarian regimes They still use religion. religious images Religious rhetoric Why do you think it still works today at a time when people in most countries have become less religious in recent years?

You might think they have become less religious. He may have become less traditionally religious. Have you noticed the

rise

? in astrology and interesting Tarot cards, so yeah, and the absolute cultism of interest in health, what you're eating, what you're putting in your body, it's like people have little shrines to their own bodies that they They worship daily. Let me say that I think the religious impulse is very very very very very very old and it was probably an evolutionary plus and to some extent it probably still is. Let's assume that most people have an inherent tendency to believe in something bigger. that themselves, whether it's a standard religion of the kind we know or whether it's my daily horoscope, yeah, the planet Venus is taking a personal interest in me, okay, oh yeah, so as a teenager, I visited all the religions that could.

My hands to see what they were doing in their uh, including the spiritualist church, which at that time was a lot of quite old people, uh, but they said the word that shall not be spoken, uh, yeah, and they had their own book. of hymns they had rewritten. standard hymns but in their own words and they had their own rituals and procedures and they had a medium available at every spiritualist church meeting and their belief in something bigger than themselves was that there was an afterlife and their loved ones were in it. taking a personal interest in them and sending them messages that were never very helpful.

I must say it was never like betting on a horse or which dog to buy, it was things like being careful going down the stairs on Thursday, these are useful things that you should be careful going down the stairs any day of the week, yes on Thursdays, yes, a little good advice. So let's pretend that there is an inherent tendency to believe in something greater than oneself and that it is almost impossible to think of oneself as dead. because you're still a noun in a sentence that contains you, you say I'll be dead, there's still an eye, yeah there's nothing, so it's something that's built into the language and probably in our deep past, so my feelings about the religion. is if we are going to have them, we are going to have good ones and less and less harmful, but there will always be some people taking advantage and persuading other people that they have the true insight and the truth and give me some money, please, yes, and use it as a kind of galvanizing force for politics in the scam area, that only impacts your money, but in the political area, people try to take advantage of that and it's not for political advantage. his own side, but this is what Jesus meant, not if you read the red parts of the Bible that have Jesus' words in red, not a word, nothing about homosexuals, the thing about women is that he was with us Without sin, cast the first stone. double challenge, no one threw a stone, yeah, well, and you can and you can find, you can find the golden rule in almost every religion that exists on Earth, so why doesn't anyone pay attention to it?

I don't know, I guess everyone has the capacity for good and evil, without a doubt, you forgot the third one because there are three good, bad and stupid, you know, yeah, we're swimming in that right now. The plan is brought to you by zebiotics. We all have busy lives these days and we can. I can't afford to waste a day stuck on the couch because of a few drinks the night before. Zebiotics are the answer we have all been looking for. Zebiotics are pre-alcohol probiotics. It is the world's first genetically modified probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to address it. difficult mornings after drinking this is how it works when you drink alcohol it becomes a toxic byproduct in the gut it is this byproduct, not dehydration, that is to blame for your difficult next day.

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So I spent a good portion of my life thinking about the political power of storytelling, the first thing President Obama and I would do when we sat down to work on a speech. together was to discover the story I wanted to tell because I believed that telling stories was the only real opportunity to persuade people. Totalitarians usually have a simple and compelling story. I can make all our problems go away if we just make the people who are bad and different go away right, yeah, there are always those people, it's always those people, yeah, do you think democracies have a simple and compelling story to tell?

Well, they did during the Cold War, uh, and the simple story was that we are not those words, uh, and then we took the fall. of the wall that I've described in fascinating detail and then we had people saying the end of the Story, which I personally never believed, and you know, do you remember that game called Pick Up Sticks where you throw this bunch of sticks on the table? you were supposed to remember the suits without making any of the others move, it was almost impossible because when you have a static board, let's say a chess board and to move one of the pieces, let's say the wall falls down, everything else it moves, so you move one, you move another. hitting and picking up sticks and a lot of other sticks move, so during the '90s, when people were happily shopping and saying the end of history and capitalism and hooray for us and stuff like that, all the pieces moved, but the people no. paying attention and then came 9/11 and all the pieces moved again and then came the 2008 financial crisis and all the pieces moved again and we have one big piece that is moving and that would be the climate changes that would cause droughts, floods. low harvests, food shortages and anger, so there are a lot of moving pieces right now.

What's a compelling story to tell? I think the compelling story to tell right now is that there is hope. That's what people ask me a lot. What is your hope? There is hope, so I would say that the creation of new jobs and these kinds of angry disadvantaged areas is a hopeful thing to do the actions that people have already taken regarding climate change. It's a bit of a difficult story because history is things. It would be a lot worse if we hadn't done those things, which is true and they have statistics about it, so yes, we haven't done enough, but if we hadn't done anything, it would very much be where it is, etc., etc.

I didn't mean that if you want to be scared, do you really want to have Social Security taken away from Medicaid and new jobs? Yeah, you know, it's interesting because sometimes I wonder if they just have a harder story to tell when it's not purely in opposition to, you know, the villain of the time, like we were with the Soviet Union. , and part of the reason I wonder if it's complicated is because what we're trying to do is sew. Together with this extremely diverse set of people from different backgrounds and different places, we do this in the United States, but also now that we're kind of a global economy, we're doing it all over the world and it's much easier to get people to fear each other.

That what it's like for people to give each other a chance, particularly in a time of increasingly scarce resources, well, that's an important question, are we really in a time of increasingly scarce resources? Yeah well I was thinking about climate change there and what it's doing for the world okay so we did a program in the fall called practical utopias oh yeah I read about this yeah okay so having been Victorianist, not Victorian, it would be very old if it had been Victorian instead of just old, so the Mandate was that You shall create a material world that is carbon neutral or carbon negative, scalable, that is cheap enough for people to do it. and attractive enough that they want to do it, so that not everyone has to eat nothing but tofu, so it has to be that way. it has to be carbon neutral, carbon negative, scalable and attractive enough and then the second half was the social half, he was going to make decisions like what form of government you will have and each form has advantages and disadvantages, there are no free lunches in any of them. they. this, but your goal is the least expensive lunch, so what is the material cost to build your dome house quite often made of hemp?

What is the cost of a hereditary monarchy? What is the disadvantage of a tyranny? Let's say a benevolent dictatorship how quickly does it take to become non-benevolent usually pretty quickly? What about a democracy? What are the weaknesses? What are the strengths? What kind of democracy are you talking about? So they had to figure all that out. Are you going to have a police system if you're not, what if people don't agree with you and break the rules, what are you going to do? Things like that. I even added corpse disposal thinking they would shy away from corpse disposal, but they were, they were, they were there. with the corpse, they had already discovered everything which system of government was victorious.

Well, they had several decision-making circles, but remember there were eight teams and you can see the results. There is a link you can go to. You can see it, but none of them wanted a tyranny quite strangely and they had to think about things like healthcare and education and what about old people and all these things and they really went into it. We had facilitators. In case they fought too much and we had illustrators to draw pictures of what they came up with and I was very, very impressed with them. I thought they would give up much sooner.

These are complicated topics, you know, so you're I'm going to do the hemp advance, where are you going to get the hemp like that? uh, and I'm here to tell you that there are a lot of new materials coming out and a lot of new ways of doing things and mushrooms are going to be important in our future, so we say lack of resources, but maybe we've been looking for the wrong resources. Do we really have a lack of resources? Is our feeling about it based on previous ways of doing things? And are there other newer ways to do newer things? ways to make things that would solve some of these problems—mushrooms, for example, can dissolve plastics, clean up oil spills, and become fabrics.

Someone sent me a very nice bowler hat, it's not my size, but it's very pretty. I mean, one thing is. The hopeful thing about this is that it seems that when you focus people on making practical decisions that could improve their lives and the lives of their community and somehow let go of preconceived ideologies, you end up with a kind of of more productive results, very productive results, but of course this. It was a self-selected group, there were people who wanted to do this, there would be a lot of other people who wouldn't want to do this and there are a lot of people who wouldn't have time to do it because you're running so hard just to put food on the table and have some kind of of abode that is suitable.

Last month you were going to tell something in the Atlantic about a Virginia school board banning the Handmaid's Tale and at one point you wrote in this. Here I would like to point out that attempts to control media content are likely to come from either the so-called left or the so-called right, each side claiming to act in the name of the public good, where is that shown today? The left tries to control the content well, that's a big discussion, right? Yeah, we've had it here a few times, yeah, so I think you'd have to go to the bathroom with some people and work at media companies. it's weird that your phone is off and you ask them to tell you the real truth, yeah, yeah, so there's a certain amount of self-selection going on there, uh, and that's why there are all these spin-offs like podcasts and, um, some stacks and others. things that aren't subject to that particular editorial policy, eh, but you know everyone and this is a human thing, so pretend you're a Viking, you're going on a Viking raid and you need some Vikings to go with.

You're going to choose Vikings who are your friends and who you can trust, right? Oh, yeah, sure, so, people, yeah, sure, uh, people select that way, they select groups of people to work with that are copacetic with them. and that's why practical utopia is such an interesting experiment because none of these people knew each other, they're going to have to get along and trust each other even though they didn't know each other, but mostly we congregate in groups of people who agree. agree with us, yes, and that happens on both sides of the equation. We have gone through a period of extreme moral panic.

I think we're coming out of the end of the tunnel and that would be on the way. On the left, I think extreme moral panic is emerging now on the right, you can tell that when Tucker Carlson says he really hates Donald Trump and that news goes public, there's going to be some panic there, what? One thing I hear a lot from friends on the left is that the real extremism right now is on the right. The Republican Party has become more extreme. Donald Trump, you know, sent out a series of tweets. tweets that helped incite the right, yeah, so, so the next sentence is, therefore, you should give us a free pass and all that we've been doing right is not even that we have to have a strategy and tactics that stop that. extremism and then you know someone gets a call or someone gets canceled is not as dangerous as some of the hate speech that is increasing towards marginalized and marginalized people and maybe we want to delete Trump's tweets even if we don't like them because they incite violence and one thing I always struggle with and have in this Trump era is how to calibrate an effective response to extremism that doesn't compromise the Democratic principles that you're fighting against.

Well, instead of using the word Progressive, what are they? The word Righteous, yes, why is it like that? Yes, the word Progressive and progress there is some baggage there, so eugenics was once considered a progressive movement in the name of which several women were sterilized. his wills things like that and I remember from my childhood that you can't stop progress and what that usually meant was we're going to do something you don't like but it's progress hey you can't stop it yeah so I m I'm a little bit allergic, I'm quite allergic to those words and I would like to see people just talking about what's fair and their real audience, uh, since the real audience of anyone in the United States is the people you really have to convince.

The independents, you know, because it's a pre-match, they're elected sides at the other ends, you're not going to get them to change their minds, their decisions are made up, but as people in the middle who are watching this, they're watching. So good, who represents that reasonable means where they are not going to shoot me inthe back of the head that's what they're looking for and what's really going to work what's going to be fair uh what's going to make it so that I can walk down the street without people yelling at me uh, this kind of thing, well, in a way, it's even more important to convince those people in times of increasing extremism and authoritarianism and people are always under attack in times of increasing extremism and authoritarianism because they are the people that each side wants to convert, so when you hear people say that you are for or against me, you know you are talking to an extremist, yes, well, you have written. that in times of extremism and polarization like these, fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings and people are morally ambiguous, the goal of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

I interviewed a chimamanda adichie for this podcast and she told me that she worries that literature is becoming flat and boring because people are afraid to write about morally complex themes and characters. Do you ever feel that? What do you think about that? Oh, I think about that all the time. Too old to give a damn so I'll continue writing about morally ambiguous characters because that's the truth. The truth about people, everyone has a dark side, sometimes the dark side is very unpleasant. Sometimes it's just a pit of dubious confusion, but everyone has one and, um, to get that out of the way, sometimes I tell people okay, so I'm going to write a. novel in which everyone behaves all the time and is very, very nice, could you read it?

No, no, it doesn't sound like, it doesn't sound like a novel, it's not, it's a Richardson novel and it's called Sir Charles. Grandison and it's 600 pages, it's an 18th century novel, so he wrote a book called Pamela in which an upper class guy tries to seduce the maid and fails and ends up marrying her, then he wrote one called Clarison which the woman gets . seduced and gives birth to twins and dies also seduced by an aristocratic person then a delegation from the barista Kratz approaches him and says we are not all bad we are no different than that we want you to write a do you think I am doing? this does not?

No, we want you to write a novel in which an aristocrat behaves well like most of us because we behave well and he says that he is well behaved and he writes Sir Charles Grandison, which begins very uh. Promisingly, the heroine is almost kidnapped by bandits, but Sir Charles Grandison intervenes and rescues her as he would and they go to his country house, where he has some very nice sisters who act as companions and the rest of the 600 pages they're all about the good things that Sir Charles Grandison does and I'm still the only person who actually finished this book because I'm very cynical and I keep waiting for the point where we go to the seller and find out that he's running a coin counterfeit or that he has, you know, some vampires chained to pillars in the basement, it's nothing, we just move on, he's still good and that's why I'm the only person who's finished this, so yeah, he's not number one. interesting, but number one, number two, not true, yes, he must have done something wrong.

Did he ever get a little drunk? apparently no, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense, it's funny, it's something I've been thinking about a lot when I've done it. a two and a half year old boy and me, oh boy, yes, I know, yes, and he demands that I tell him stories every night before bed, so at first I want to protect a child from anything that is bad, that's like the first instinct. from a parent when the child is young. So I'm just telling happy stories and he's a little bored by happy stories and you have to start.

I'm realizing that the stories that I tell where there's some conflict or there's some drama or there's someone who's acting out, you know, those are the stories that he wants to hear because that's the human condition and I guess we're programmed to find That's more interesting than the 600 pages, okay, so be alert. They tell us the truth that there are dangers and those kinds of stories prepare us for the fact that there are dangers and maybe give us some coping mechanisms, but also children are always told to behave and be good, so stories about people not behaving and not being good or convincing to them here is a story from my life, so I had a little four and a half five year old who was in my room where I had a bookshelf and it was mostly poetry and essays and stuff and he said, I want you to read something from one of your books and the only thing I could think of was Stephen King's book on writing, by the way, pretty good, I know I like it so I think I remember it.

There was something about Stephen King when I was a kid and I thought well, this will be interesting, so I start reading and I find myself in the middle of the anecdote where he has a babysitter from hell who put him in the closet where she vomited. in his mother's shoes and my little son walks away, his eyes are getting big and then he says says read that again read that again I've never heard of such a thing yeah that's what people I was a fan of Grimm's fairy tales are unpurged versions and they're pretty harsh, you know, they're the ones with the eyeballs torn out and red-hot fingernails and pretty aggressive things, you know, heads falling down the chimney and whatever, but Some kids don't like the ones my sister liked.

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In your new book, uh, Old Babies in the Woods, there's an interview between you and a late George Orwell, uh, where you touch the Internet and tell it that, although it started with good intentions, its effect has been to collapse privacy and erode notion. of the individual Why do you think the Internet has eroded the notion of the individual? Well, everyone thinks there is no privacy and everything is public, but that's not really true, it's only true if you go online, you don't go online. I know things are different, okay, but this erosion of privacy in the individual was happening long before.

Remember I told you about going out into the countryside in 1984, so it's called having your house bugged or not knowing who a spy is. uh so yeah we've been spying on each other uh light forever and it's even in the Bible snooping around so before they invade anything they send spies of course like any normal person would do yeah so that's all you are until you are not who you say you are impostors scams uh lying spying uh all of this has been going on for a long time, in fact, you can go back to the reign of Elizabeth the First and look at her spy network, which was quite extensive, yeah. so and now it's now it's all of us all the time uh spying on each other well I wouldn't say you know I don't think that's true it's it's it's it's all of you all the time if that's where you want Yeah that's it true, so if you can keep your phone off for a second, then you can have some moments of privacy.

I'm trying, I'm trying, uh, a lot of the stories, um, yeah, it's been an ongoing effort now. um, a lot of the stories in Old Babes in the Wood are about a kind of looking back and the wisdom that comes with age. What do you want young people to know? What would you like to know? Oh, you can't tell them anything. I know that, oh, jumping in because they need it, they need to figure it out for themselves and their times are different than yours, so among the Inuit they have a custom that makes it so that older people don't give advice unless asked, so that I have a A piece of my essay book is called Burning Questions called Poland and the question was exactly what you just asked me.

What advice would you give to young people? The answer is none unless you're asked, so I'm kind of the unstoppable advisor that I didn't give. I was in the room, but I was in a supermarket and there were two guys and they were discussing the fact that their dishwasher wasn't working and I said, without being asked, have you changed the filter? and they said there is a filter, yes, so sometimes your advice is useful, yes, but if it's young people, they won't listen to it unless they've asked. Yes, I am definitely not a young person anymore.

I'm 41, but I'm at the age where you seem extremely young to me, 40. 41 is almost nothing I'm at the age where I'm young enough, young enough to know that I want advice, for the next half of my life, hopefully, but, but old enough to know that, uh, no, I don't. I don't know everything anymore, so do you have any good advice? Don't get tired of giving them to their stupid parents. Move out, get a job while you still know everything, but that's for teenagers. Yes, oh, yes. I remember when I was a teenager I knew everything, huh, but. fades, fades 41 with a toddler, so you probably need to be on a parenting blog, they will give you lots of advice.

Yo, too much advice, too much advice, but you should know, yes, before you follow any advice. I need to know what I need to know, I need to know what kind of advice to ask for and it's usually pretty specific, right? What do I do if my child fills in the blank? What if my kids keep putting beans up their noses? I don't know the answer to that question, but it happens, yes, it certainly happens, so you are surprised every day with the new thing that a child has. Yes, you can't tell them not to do something if you haven't anticipated what they will do.

They are about to do something I never thought they would do, which happens to us literally every day. You said on the Today Show this week that you were writing a memoir. What made you decide to do that? Oh, I got good. a lot of trouble for saying that don't say that don't say that yes we want it to be a surprise well, it's not a surprise eh, but I'm not supposed to say anything about it, okay, so here I am without saying anything about Well, well , I had to try, I had to try, I will be, I will be looking forward to reading it, so I will, yeah, against a left and a right, I won't, that's true, there's a little thing there, uh Margaret.

Atwood, thank you so much for joining offline. This was wonderful and I appreciate your time and wisdom. It's my pleasure and good luck. Thank you very much, especially wait until they turn four, oh boy, then then. You're in trouble, I know, I'm ready, thank you.