Helen Lewis

Does he agree with?

No, no, no.

He also keeps saying things about the poor.

Oh, gross.

Right, but when you read some of that stuff, don't you think it's a bit like how people who regress to their past lives always end up that they would have been Cleopatra?

They would never have been some guy who died as a toothless peasant at the age of 12.

There is a kind of belief that if they lived in these ancient hierarchical societies, they would be one of life's winners.

I went back through my notes from when I was reading The Last Man, and I've written, do we want to return to a civil service run by eunuchs?

Right?

Is Elon Musk ready to make the ultimate sacrifice?

Because actually, that's much better if you have a professional unit class who are looking after democracy.

No, there's loads of stuff from this period that they don't want to take back.

And all of it is really predicated on the idea that, yeah, if you want to go back to Roman times, you're going to be a Roman citizen, not a slave, right?

You're one of life's winners.

So that's inevitably what you would have ended up as.

And the thing I kept coming back to was this thought experiment by the philosopher John Rawls, the veil of ignorance.

You know, you should make decisions not knowing which side of the outcome you'd end up on.

And if I said to you, do you honestly want to take your chances if you could be any citizen in the Roman Empire at any time or any citizen in America today?

I think almost everybody would take their chances being born in contemporary America rather than thinking that you were going to end up as Caligula.

Probably not.