The next session was just days later. It was after-hours, when other staff at the surgery had gone home. He remembers it smelt like disinfectant and even now the smell gives Philip chills. The dentist told the boy to take off his shoes and socks and undo his belt before directing him to lay down on the examination bed.
Philip closed his eyes and the hypnosis began. Relax, imagine the beach, the boy was told. Schwarz instructed him to think about palm trees and the sound of the ocean. He began to count down from 10, telling the boy he was feeling deeper, relaxed and more sleepy at each number. As Philip woke out of the trance and his mind came back into the room, the feeling of a black cloud formed above his head. Philip recalled feeling physically sick each evening he rode his bike home from these visits.
Did I put myself in this situation? For more than three years, Philip would ride to the Barney Street surgery, park his bike at the back of the building as instructed and chain it to a downpipe. The abuse in each session continued in the familiar, repetitive pattern.
Counting, palm trees, oceans. Hovering, touching. Sometimes it progressed further. And on some occasions, Philip says there was another man in the room.
Under hypnosis, Philip sometimes sensed Schwarz walk to the door and let another person inside. He never saw a face. The person stood in the periphery. He could hear the voice of a man instructing the dentist. The voices changed. But sometimes, Philip recognised the voice of a particular man. It was the voice of a man who had abused him before. It drove a wedge between him and his parents and at 16 he moved out of home and was living at De La Salle Brothers. The court heard from three other victims who detailed the abuse they suffered at the hands of Schwarz.
The youngest was nine when he first saw the dentist and endured fortnightly visits for two years. The abuse escalated, with the victim recalling how he felt scared, paralysed and robotic in those terrifying moments. Since then, he has struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and suffers psychosis, according to court documents. He obsessively picks his skin and thinks people are following him.
It was because of a former classmate that Philip finally broke the cycle of terror in early aged They barely knew each other. But their shared suffering brought them together. The details of those steps to end the abuse are too hard for Philip to talk about. Schwarz became threatening, telling the boy that without the sessions his bed wetting would come back, his focus on school would drop and all the work they had done for years would be wasted and reversed.
He remembers peddling aimlessly around the streets of the small town. I was very nervous about what would happen next. Philip says he told a priest in the Catholic Church and the Armidale police in the late s but nothing happened. For 30 years Philip fought to repair the damage. Family and friendships have been destroyed. In he told his parents in limited detail about the abuse and it left them shattered. His professional life has suffered. Traumatised, he has only been to the dentist five times since Schwarz and had a tooth collapse with a nerve exposed.
On his darkest days, Philip has been suicidal. Prompted by the Royal Commission on Child Sexual Abuse he decided to go back to the police one final time in Detectives from the Sex Crimes Squad formed Strike Force Holbeach and Philip was asked by investigators to approach his abuser in and secretly record the confrontation. His language changed. His posture changed. His facial expressions changed. His pupils dilated. Well, Jan, your book touches on so many topics that I myself have spent a lot of time thinking about.
They can certainly get away with it for quite some time. And why is that? So very different from episodes in the 20th century when it was absolutely out in the open that we were now going to try an alternative system. We going to do bureaucratic authoritarianism, fascism, whatever it might be. So, for quite some time we witnessed an ability by leaders to sort of talk the talk of democracy.
And that basically is incompatible with a notion of democracy. The institutions do not necessarily change. They still have a parliament. They still have elections that occurred and they have all the trappings of what is a democracy.
What does that say to you about the meaning for what a democracy is? Well, I would mention two things. The system has changed. One of my colleagues, Kim Scheppele has coined this very nice phrase, the Frankenstate. Wait a minute. The second thing I would just briefly add is that obviously constitutions matter and obviously the sort of obvious hardware of democracy such as the electoral system and who counts the votes and so on are very important.
You mentioned about how context matters so much. It reminds me a lot of the Hungarian constitution when they created their new constitution. Because one of the things that a Fidesz has done is utilize what are called cardinal laws, where it takes a two-thirds vote to be able to make a change.
And the previous constitution in Hungary utilized cardinal laws as well and they were designed to make it so that it encouraged no one party to be able to force a decision upon others. So, that in the future they effectively will have a veto over a number of different changes. My point is that, like you said, context does matter so much because in one case two-thirds majority asks people to have consensus.
In the other case, a two-thirds majority means one party has a veto over any kind of reform or change. It just completely changes the landscape of how we look at things. So, democracy is never one thing or the other. I agree. But then you realize maybe only too late that they were meant to interact with a particular kind of party system or party landscape.
And if that changes radically, then all of a sudden, also the rules might be instrumentalized in ways which are against the spirit of the constitution. The point is not actually what exactly is the majority. If I may just add one last point, to your observation. You know, liberal elitists always took power away and then handed it over to the European Union and so on. In a way that makes it extremely difficult for different future majorities to get their way in one form or another.
But in terms of the basics, does the structure allow different majorities to effect fundamental changes? Now, populism, especially in your account of populism, refers to this idea of a leader saying that they can speak for the people. And in many ways, it references back to an earlier concept of the common good, where government was supposed to put in policies and ideas that affected the people as a whole.
That helped everybody in the end. How is this different from populism? And is it really possible to govern for the common good in pluralistic societies that have so many different demands?
So, all of that I think is perfectly fine and normal. I mean, this is completely normal, ideally, even productive in a democracy to have these sorts of conflicts. So, they make it entirely moral. They make it entirely personal.
And that is, as hinted at earlier, very dangerous for any democracy. You can have very deep disagreements. I think democracy is about conflict, of course, also about consensus. But it really matters how you set up conflict and how you talk about the issue and above all how you talk about your adversary. And then those who talk in a way that, ultimately, is bound to be dangerous for democracy. The danger of course is that populism, especially the type of populism that you refer to is a perverted sense of democracy.
Is the conflict right now, especially in the United States, but possibly throughout the world, is the conflict today really about different notions of democracy itself? So, you can talk about all kinds of stuff where you can find compromises and negotiate.
But if democracy itself, you know, starts to be up for grabs, we have a problem. Democracy that kind of adopts this defeatist attitude, I think, also has a problem. But as you will no longer be surprised to hear, I think, this sort of arch right-wing populist strategy has been cultural and even though some of these figures constantly talk about unifying the people, it, of course, always means unification on their terms. Populism has a lot of similarities to fascism, at least in how we talk about it.
Is militant democracy democratic? You have the criminal law, but everything else is sort of basically up for political contestation. Clearly, the parameters are different. There are different understandings of free speech. There are different understandings of the limits to which you might possibly go in terms of banning political parties, something that has happened in a number of European countries.
So, the right to organize a party, the right to speech, And so on that, of course, we have in the United States as well. And if not, maybe some measures, should be taken. And the same you might say for impeachment. I mean, you remember, that this was sort of on the table earlier this year.
I think it was, because it essentially is about restricting the rights of a particular set of actors. So, can particular states do something with their local regulations about elections?
And this, I think, is also an indication that there are sort of shades of gray here. And, I think, always has to be on the table when anybody touches the subject, but there are many in-between steps you can take.
The crowd, you know, is right there. And ideally of course you would never even get close to having to use some of these tools. One of the things that I found interesting about your book was how you dance through some of the issues in democracy and really kind of contemplate different concepts.
But it appeals to a sense of majoritarianism. They should be able to do what they want to be able to do. You have an interesting quote.
Is that willingness to have some sense of constraint upon itself, is that one of the key differences between populist leadership and more democratic leadership? So I would say the real constraints are a little bit different. And again, this is something that, especially rightwing populists are not really going to do. So, when they request information or they want to hold government accountable, they basically try to find ways of avoiding it.
So again, not declaring authoritarianism openly or anything, but you see where something is going and we can see the distinctions and we can see the differences between different majorities acting in different ways. You mentioned that democracy requires some opportunity for the opposition to be able to regain power. Is it necessary for powerful interests to lose before democracy is fully truly realized?
Again, very good, i. So, this criterion was to get at that problem that basically there needs to be a sense that you might at least under some circumstances be able to mobilize majorities, such that to put it bluntly, powerful people can really lose something. But in a general sense, yes.
I think there needs to be a greater sense that in democracy, something is really at stake. Of course, there are plenty of democracies around the world where something is at stake and sometimes the results of that are also pretty bad.
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