Gide, humans.

This episode is part of the Permission to Think series, which is a collaboration that I do with the University of Technology, Sydney,

whose Dean of Social Sciences, Alan Davison, Professor Alan Davidson, is a breath of fresh air in Australian education.

He's trying to create something unique at UTS,

which is a space for genuine inquiry and intellectual fearlessness

and the kinds of values of debate and consideration of other opinions,

even if they're weird or even if they're outside the mainstream,

even if they're currently politically or culturally unfashionable. He wants UTS to be the place where people who

are actually interested in the vibrant exchange of ideas can go and not feel like they're just

going to go and learn the way that they're supposed to think in the, given the cultural

climate that we happen to live in, in Western liberal

democracies in 2022. Therefore, he and I are collaborating on this, on this series, a permission to think.

And today's guest is another academic, Professor David Martin Jones, who has a PhD in political

thought from the London School of Economics. He now teaches

at King's College, London, those two shabby places. Never heard of them. Have you? Kings College,

London School of Economics? He's particularly interesting because he has some experience

and specialty and understanding of Asia. He was a political science lecturer at the National University of Singapore.

He is an associate editor of the University of Malaya's Southeast Asian Studies Journal.

And the reason why this is important is because he's developed a thesis

where he sees echoes of Maoism, of Mao's cultural revolution in the West today.

You know, you hear sometimes people, you know, the Jordan Peterson's of the world will talk about Marxism in universities and so on,

which is always a little bit of an awkward fit. It's not quite right that these people are being

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