Margaret Atwood

speaker

143 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 9 Mar

Margaret Atwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism · 9 May 2025 podcast

How you can be a villain for one regime and a hero for the next. And that can work both ways.

Okay, so the answer to that question is, what questions was I attempting to answer? And remember when I start writing it, beginning of the 80s when there's already a backlash against a lot of the stuff that had been happening in the 60s and 70s. And things do tend to go that way.

So you have 10 or 15 years of a certain period, and then you have a pushback against it by people who didn't like it when it was happening. So Joan Didion predicted it. She said, some of these people are not happy. This is not their idea of how things should go. And that also can work both ways, because any group over 200 people is almost bound to have a schism.

Yeah, well, it's not my rule. I didn't make it up. So, 1980, you start getting the pushback, and you start getting the political organization of the religious right. And they were already saying things like women should belong in the home. And I was wondering, okay, so they're not in the home.

They're out there running around like mice and opening bank accounts and having jobs and all this uppity stuff that they're doing. How are you going to get them back into the home if you decide that's where they ought to be? Well, easy peasy, you cut off their funds. We had invented credit cards by that time. And I would suggest that we retain the use of cash money.

Not for everything, but just in case. Some negotiable currency that isn't controlled by other people might be a good idea. Yeah, so I started writing it then in answer to the question, if America were to have a totalitarian government, what kind would it be? And under what flag, as it were, would it fly?

And my answer to that was go back to the founders, namely the 17th century Puritan theocrats who never went away. They took different forms, but they didn't vanish. So looking at what's happening in the 80s with the political organization of the religious right, that is who you see in League trying to get rid of the voting rights and all the rest of it. Those are the folks.

It's not everybody's interpretation of Christianity, by the way.

Absolutely. And not only that, if you make it into a religion, which of course so many regimes throughout history have done, the divine right of kings, the Holy Roman Empire, if you connect it with a religion, then it becomes heresy to oppose it. It becomes a very powerful tool. You're not just against some prime minister or other, you're against God.

And that's a pretty serious thing in a believing community. And a lot of rulers have told a story about how they are there by divine fiat. In fact, you find it on the English money to this day.

Yeah, especially now. I think that's how we are to a certain extent as an entity on this planet, that if you tried to pay attention to everything that's going on, especially now with this deluge of information that is available, your head would explode. And a lot of people have immediate lives that they have to tend to. So if you have a young family, you know what that's like.

It's an immersive experience, and you can't just say, oh, let's do that next week. It's now, and you are in the moment, whether you do all this meditation stuff, be in the moment. If you have young children, you cannot help but be in the moment. You are in that moment, and somebody is shitting on the floor right now, and you have to do something about it now. So people have their own lives.

They have their immediate concerns. They have their own jobs and financial problems. They have stuff they have to deal with. And to try to take any sort of a wide or long view is quite hard for a lot of people because their own lives are so immediate, immersive, and stressed. So that's part of the problem.

And the other part of the problem is we would rather not look, especially if we feel powerless in the face of that which we are being asked to look at. Like, what do you expect me to do? So our really big problem and what is driving a lot of these other problems is what used to be called climate change and is now called the climate crisis.

And that is going to be more weather catastrophes, more fires, more droughts, more famines. And when you have famines, And water shortages, you're going to have social unrest, and you're going to have a great big refugee problem, which we already have now. So what are you going to do? And for most people, what can they do? And therefore, I would rather not look.

So it's like my friend who, when she sees a squirrel run over in the streets, she says, I don't want to look at that. Well, you know, who does? I don't want to look at a squashed squirrel either, but it's there.

Yes, I wouldn't call it a gift.

Well, gifts from the gods usually have a catch. Somebody asked me the other day, would you like to live forever? And I said, well, I've heard that story. Don't ask for eternal life unless you also ask for eternal youth, because it's not going to work out well. They have to be treated with care, gifts from the gods.

So there are certain areas where I pay quite a lot of attention, but other areas where I probably just don't. Like everybody else, there are certain things that I just don't know much about them. I don't know what goes on. Therefore, they're not my focus.

So the talent for insatiability kicks off around 1950, the most recent wave of it. In the 30s, the virtue was not to waste things. And in the 40s, that became very much more accentuated because not only did you not waste things, but you saved certain things up because it was the war effort. So you saved elastic bands. You saved fat in little tin cans. I don't know what they did with it.

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