Konstantin Kisin Is Taking You for a Ride
Jordan Peterson-lite goes viral
Evidently, a video of a short speech given at an Oxford Union Society debate event has begun to saturate the feeds of both the political right and, oddly, has also made inroads to the left as well. Konstantine Kisin, a comedian who seems to be vying for a role as a sort of uncredentialed Jordan Peterson, approached the filmed event — later published on Kisin’s own YouTube channel — as a performance rather than a debate, refusing questions and claiming that the proposition had already been won before he had reached the podium. Though the proposition ostensibly being debated was “This House Believes Wokeness Has Gone Too Far,” Kisin went on an almost nine minute long sharp-toned, and often quite funny, ramble that throws elements such as climate change, world poverty, magic boxes that can kill the world but ensure your child a good job, gender constructs and a few other random elements into a bowl and then, while twirling a crystal in front of his audience’s eyes, attempted convince them that he’d made a cake.
It would be one thing if this lecture were a string of right-wing talking points that had a sort of internal logic which led to a conclusion. That would have, particularly with Mr. Kisin’s charm, deeply endeared him to the political right and his star would rise amongst that particular audience, but Kisin’s ambitions seems broader than that and he employs techniques to try and grab a wider cluster of admirers than the easily swayed Fox News crowd.
Here’s the speech. You’ll want to watch it before you read on:
Part One — Priming the Pump
Mr. Kisin first, after a few lighthearted remarks, assures his audience that the argument in question had already been won before the speech he is about to make and thus allows us, as audience, to lower any pesky potential critical barriers which might effect your enjoyment of his performance; he is a comedian by trade, after all. It is worth noting that he doesn’t ever elaborate on what that argument was other than it having to do with “woke culture” going “too far.” He declines to define “woke culture” or in what sense it has exceeded its acceptable boundaries during the course of this monologue other than to say “I’m so tired of talking about woke culture. That’s why it’s gone too far more than anything else.”
This being the case, Mr. Kisin’s life must be a living hell as any search on the name “Konstantin Kisin” and “woke” will return dozens of individual speeches, interviews and articles where he is talking about just this thing. In fact, he seems to have based his career primarily on this single subject which we might bear in mind for later in the routine when he begins to talk about the value of a meaningful job. Nevertheless, not defining what he means by the term nor what the standards of “too far” might indicate is certainly convenient if you want to give any potential critics no purchase upon which to stake their arguments.
Now that we are no longer bothered by having to worry about the argument itself — imagine a pillow being lowered over your head while some whispers “shhh” repeatedly in your ear — Konstantin Kisin fully wins us over to his side by saying two things that feel bold and politically relevant to our ideologies, no matter which side of the political spectrum we’re on. It’s quite a brilliant bit of false trust-building.
Free speech is not some right wing reframing of whatever, it’s the foundation of western civilization.
This is a statement upon which one normally hangs ornaments: censorship by political correctness, censorship by book banning, censorship by some sort of political force. Without these ornaments, it is a framework that describes all democratic — a word I use with a great deal of trepidation — societies. It becomes a landing pad that all people on all sides of the political spectrum believe we, individually, own. If I am on the right, I interpret it to mean that I have a right to offend (which you do) without consequence (well…). To be even more generous, someone on the right might read this as, “Your tendency to get offended is too extreme and is curbing my speech.” Someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum might, on the other hand, say that hostility towards their, assumedly progressive, ideas is infringing upon THEIR free speech. Or, again, to jump in a little deeper, “If I can’t even mention my same sex partner without getting fired from my teaching job and potentially prosecuted, my speech is no longer free.”
Either way, Mr. Kisin has offered up an idea that sounds polemic, but upon which we will mostly all agree.
The only way to treat the problem of racism is to treat people on the content of their character and nothing else. And the fact that woke culture seeks to overturn that is a new form of racism that we must all oppose.
Well… yeah! Everyone should be treated equally! Of course! Same standards for everybody is how we play the game, isn’t it? Except… wait. What if I think the game is slanted because my country still evidences profound endemic racism? Then to give everyone the ability to be judged solely on the content of their character I would need to put mechanisms in place to take the racist thumb off of the scales, wouldn’t I? But what if I believed that those mechanisms WERE the thumb on the scale? Then giving everyone a fair shake would imply my dismantling of those things, right?
Either way, Konstantin agrees with my personal perspective on the issue, clearly. I know because what he said was something I FELT like I agreed with!
The argument having already been decided in favor (or is it opposition?) to things left undescribed by this charming gentleman, who can state our political beliefs with such sincerity and drama, pries… the mental mechanism… open. And I am now ready to accept, if he can hold the tone, just about everything that’s told to me. Because he and we are on the same team! Aren’t we?
It is done so elegantly here as to almost demand admiration and we are now ready for the meat of your argument, sir.
Part Two — If I Only Had a Brain
To move forward from this point we’re going to have to take a stab at doing the thing that Konstantin Kisin is trying to avoid at all costs: defining his terms. I make no pretense here that I can prove that he means what I think he means; if he, in fact, means anything at all. The video that he posted on his own YouTube channel makes claims to no prerequisite. We do, however, have some clues by the things he mocks along with the ideas of “woke culture.”
He mentions race in the slippery quote above and claims that “woke culture” desires to overturn… something about treating people fairly. It’s vague.
He makes fun of gender identities multiple times; so we can safely assume that’s part of it. (“About 15 months ago my wife got pregnant. Not me. Because we’re old school.”)
He accepts climate change only as a proxy argument to make a point and seems to not actually believe there’s a crisis. “For tonight, and tonight only, I will join you. I will join you worshipping at the feet of Saint Greta of climate change.” (This is particularly odd given that the actual meat of his argument, later, relates to solving climate change.)
We need to do our best to define his terms for two reasons: first, because if we can’t, there is literally no reason for us to even be discussing his speech at all and, second, because he makes his first, and probably riskiest overt attack by saying this:
One of the tenants of wokeness is that your feelings matter more than the truth.
He has spent a lot of careful effort convincing us that we are on his team and now he is going to test us. Am I one of these woke people that he is talking about and calling stupid? He is counting on my placing myself on the opposite team as those “woke idiots” and sticking with him. Remember how he said all those things that I felt like I agreed with earlier? Do I want to be one of those moronic “other” people?
I am unaware of any credentials or degrees that Mr. Kisin might hold that would give him any specialized insight into climate change, gender, racial prejudice or, frankly, anything. He does, however, in this talk explain that those who believe in things he doesn’t — it’s a broad game of whack-a-mole that he’s set up by not strictly defining what he believes — are “woke idiots.” But it’s hard to understand what he is basing that on given that most of us on Team Idiot can, at least, give some reasonable substantiation as to why we think these things are true.
The vast majority of climate scientists in the world believe that climate change is an extremely dangerous phenomenon which is caused by emissions produced by human beings. Here is NASA’s web page about the subject:
If you want to believe that these scientists and NASA are wrong about this, I’m not going to argue with you here; I’m writing about a snake-oil salesman, not whether gout exists. What I want to insist upon, though, is that my belief in the majority of scientists and NASA is a reasonable enough one to constitute a “fact.” I ALSO have emotions tied up in this, but I will argue that this belief, whether you agree with me or not, is not purely emotional as Konstantin Kisin suggests.
If I go to a search engine on the internet and type in the following search term, “gender pronoun psychology,” I am fairly quickly led, through several different prominent links, to an article on the website of the American Psychological Association providing guidelines on the use of gender in writing: an article which also delves into the ideas of gender versus sex and gender as a social construct.
In other words, “use the pronouns people ask you to use,” says the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in America. In an evaluation between that endorsement and the suggestion, presumably, by Konstantin Kisin — who does not, I repeat, as far as I know, have a degree in psychology — that I am being too woke, which would be the more fact-based choice?
Again, agree with the idea of using chosen pronouns or not, but at least consider that the weight of the APA is a reasonable enough basis to not sound simply emotional.
Racism is such a broad topic that it is difficult to quantify and it seems absurd that we would even be questioning that it’s a serious issue, but if we must, here is something from the Brookings Institute that attempts to do just that:
Brookings’ findings are that there is racial inequality in the United States and, while Kisin is speaking in England he has assaulted MY ability to discern facts from emotions and I live in the United States. If you live in Europe as Kisin does, do your own research. Find your own non-emotional source. Again, I am fairly confident that the researchers at the Brookings Institute — an organization which The Quarterly Journal of Economics claims is sited as often by conservative politicians as liberal ones: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/120/4/1191/1926642 — have enough intellectual rigor to support their findings to be true and not merely emotional. If “woke culture” is showing that there actually IS prejudice based on skin color, it’s because there is.
Part Three — Poverty and the Magic Box
The next part of Kisin’s lecture, which could, to be generous, be considered his “point,” is an impassioned discussion of world poverty and the role politics plays in it, intertwined with the potency of parental love. I deeply appreciate and agree with some of this, and it comes thrillingly close to an insightful liberal idea… before it goes somewhere truly strange.
What Kisin does from here is build his speech on what is known as the Ad Populum logical fallacy which says if you believe in one popularly accepted value in my argument, you must then agree with my proposition in total. In his monologue, Kisin discusses gruelling world poverty and how governments must always be working to increase prosperity. It’s a fairly rosy view of modern politics, but sure, we don’t like that people are starving. Then he discusses parenting and the deeply protective connection between a parent and a child. And who could possibly be against that? And if you share Kisin’s passion about these things, you must also believe that the “woke” left bases their decisions on “feelings rather than facts” which causes children to believe that they are victims and without franchise in their lives which, in turn, is what is keeping climate change — which he doesn’t believe in — from being solved.
Makes perfect sense, right? Or do you hate babies?
I’m going to take Mr. Kisin’s soapbox away from him here and tell you where I would’ve gone at this point. I will lack his charm and sharp wit, but I think I will draw this to a more reasonable conclusion. Picking up from his thread here I would’ve gone on to tell you that solving the climate crisis would involve working with those countries that he mentions, India and China as well as other nations with impoverished populations, to help relieve the poverty crisis. I would’ve suggested sharing clean technology solutions with those nations as an industry to bolster their prosperity. I would’ve explained that there was not a climate solution that doesn’t include the, at least attempted, remediation of poverty and that, though he insists that Britain’s CO2 emissions are only 2% of the world’s total, for a first world country to demand changes from second or third world countries without making any concessions themselves might be provocatively arrogant. Is my solution too optimistic; does it not account enough for the bitter realities of human greed? Maybe, but it’s better than “knock off the pronoun crap and our kids will invent their way out of the climate emergency.”
But that’s my argument and not his and what we’re trying to discuss is whether or not his holds any water. And I will admit to you that I can’t answer that question because I don’t think he actually makes any argument at all.
What Kisin says is that along the lines of “there will be poor with us always” and thus those nations will never participate in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions because the cost of the potential solutions will only make the poor poorer. Political pressure will keep those solutions from going anywhere. I’m not sure what this has to do with “woke culture” going “too far,” but he certainly acts like there’s a thread that leads from the idea to here, or from here to the idea. It’s hard to say. Anyway, in spite of evident changes in trends through legislation in both the west and China, he seems to believe that climate change is a problem that will not be solved politically.
Then he appeals to the biological instinct that a parent has to protect their young. And this pisses me off.
One of the cruelest ideas that we in the west force upon each other is that there is prescribed straightforward action that will insure success and happiness when dealing with the irreducible complexities of parenting. We tell each other that if we just do the right things, parenting is instinctual and easy. As a result, because there is no such thing as simplicity in raising a child, we face confusion and indecision and exhaustion and decide that we’re failures. If it is so easy for everyone else, why is it not for me?
Kisin’s idiotic magic CO2-releasing box tells us nothing at all about parenting. He attempts to simplify the thousands of decision a parent makes daily into a broad fable about being willing to make climate change worse if it will improve the prospects for one’s child. But this decision is hardly simple, and hardly relevant to a man who, as I’ve pointed out several times, doesn’t seem to believe that there is a climate crisis anyway. But take that contradiction away and there are still questions about success versus happiness, and the importance of self-determination, and whether or not there might be some things that you should NOT protect your child from in order to help them build self-reliance — boredom, for example — and whether the guy who sold you the magic box might’ve been pulling the wool over your eyes by appealing to your parental biological instinct in the first place.
But since Mr. Kisin is willing to pretend to accept climate change for the case of his argument, I will acquiesce to pretending to accept that poverty and love of our children will keep us from doing anything politically to fix climate change. (Do you see how strange that reads?) I will move to the point of the argument where he tries to superglue whatever he thinks “woke culture” is to the rest of this ramble.
If we cannot solve climate change politically, he seems to say, we must expect innovation from the young to do it for us. And the young are being convinced by “woke culture” that they are victims and cannot innovate. I suppose this is SOME sort of argument, but with his wobbly understanding of climate legislation and his refusal to define what “woke culture” is, it doesn’t mean much. I might suggest that his argument’s emotional content outweighs its facts.
But, ok, if I were to be sitting at a table with Mr. Kisin (which is evidently a pretty strange experience — https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2023/01/konstantin-kisindont-interivew-misrepresent-me ), I would say,
“Hey man, we have common ground! I agree with you that there is a problem with kids losing their agency. Maybe we could work together with some psychologists and sociologists to create programs to teach kids, with training also for the parents, how to drive their own futures. Now wait a second, Konstantin, not everyone gets to use the magic CO2 box; some of them are going to have to actually learn how to cope with the world. Let’s work on building up their confidence and their self esteem!”
And he might be pretty cool with this.
“And also, Brother KK, let’s get together on how we remove the obstacles that a prejudiced society might put in their way, just to make sure it’s an even playing field for the youngsters.
“Brother K?
“Konstantin?
“Mr Kisin?”
Because, you see, Konstantin Kisin and I have different ideas about what turns our kids into victims. And he’s not going to spell his out because he’s a comedian hunting for viewership and would rather leverage your prejudice to do that, but I can happily spell out mine.
We live in a far less safe society than that of even three decades ago. Kids have much less autonomy. And with education rising in cost while declining in value (generally), it becomes far more difficult for kids to take risks; to excel at new things. Their scaffolds are shaky and progress daunting. Job markets are often unstable and offer little security. They are watching the climate shift in front of their eyes and have been buried under a global pandemic for years. There are, pretty clearly, a lot of reasons for a young person to feel out of control of their own destiny. Because of many of these things parents lose sight of what they need to protect their kids from and which problems it might be worth letting kids solve for themselves. Then there are the polarizing effects of politics, the internet and, well, people like Konstantin Kisin telling them that if they do have ideas that differ from his, they are “woke idiots.”
But this vague idea of “woke culture” is not the problem. It’s because society has been bleeding our children dry of hope. One might take this a step further and say that people embracing ideologies that some consider “woke” are amongst the very few still teaching our children compassion and caring and to support each other, particularly outside their comfort zone, while characters like Konstatin Kisin are embracing something that feels a lot like cruelty.
Tell a child that they’re stupid for caring about the people around them and you will almost certainly create a helpless child.
And here, I think, is the crux of the problem. Kisin is trying to give us a magic box where we can press a button and it will harm people. And he is saying over and over again that we will do it because we believe that poverty is bad and that we love our children. And he is, in this speech, telling us that there is some group that fall under the category of “woke culture” that we MUST harm because we hate poverty and love our children. And it feels like it makes intuitive sense, but that is just a feeling. It makes no sense at all.
At the end of the day, what is to keep Kisin from raising his child the way he wants to and me from raising mine my way? If his kid, and other children whose parents believe his philosophy, grow up in the way he predicts, they will be confident and lead the way and kids raised the way I will raise mine will be the underclass. And if he’s wrong, then the outcomes will be reversed. And if we’re both wrong, it will be an unpredictable mix: by far the most likely outcome. Whichever way it all goes, the one thing I can say with absolute surety is that none of us are being helped by more functionally pointless, polarizing, speech made to garner some click-thru YouTube profit.
Whoever you are out there reading this, do what you think is right. Say what you’re going to say. Raise your child the way you want to raise your child. And accept all the consequences of these choices as a brave person should.
But please don’t let an internet comedian trick you into it. You’re better than that.
If you made it this far and found something of interest in this article, consider buying me a cuppa coffee.
https://ko-fi.com/kellymccubbin
T’anks.