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Speaker 3: Meaning a live.
Speaker 4: Man like this man you letting butterfly flapping his wing.
Dig down in a forest, man, it.
Speaker 3: Gonna cause the tree fall.
Speaker 4: Letting five thousand miles away. Man, nobody seen nobody, You
don't need.
Speaker 5: No Man's like you followed at a little story and
you got back like that.
Speaker 6: Man, that's man.
Speaker 3: Man don't black and dang on the panel.
Speaker 6: Man no matter.
Speaker 3: Man All right, Aiden Paladin, Welcome back to the Jay
Burdens Show.
Speaker 6: How you doing?
Speaker 4: I'm good, Hey, thanks for having me back. How are
you doing?
Speaker 3: I'm doing quite well. I'm always excited to have you
on our last discussion I think was particularly interesting. But uh,
in the couple months since, you have continued to put
out a lot of great work on your YouTube channel.
Thank you, including a pretty interesting piece about left wing
political violence. Now, obviously the big story really of the
last year was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but political
violence has not stopped in the intervening time. Obviously, there's
been dramatic footage out of Minnesota. Two ICE agents were
shot in the Pacific Northwest overnight. This is continuing. So
I'm curious if you could, could you describe what provoked
you to make this and then you know what you found, right.
Speaker 4: So it was the assassination of Charlie Kirk that was
the impetus behind me looking into it. And then also
what I found to be a consistent problem in looking
into violence rates, terrorism rates, these kinds of things is
that there are often gaps in the data that are
just not accounted for, and so I wanted to take
a look for myself and see what we've got, For example,
massive data sets, the purest data set, which is Personals
of individual Radicalization in the United States, and then the
Global Terrorism Database. These are particularly the GTD Global Terrorism
Database is enormous. It's like forty eight thousand cases or
something like that, huge enormous data set that goes back
to the nineteen seventies, and the United States one purist
that goes back to the nineteen forties. So you have
an enormous amount of information in these data sets, and
what they include are not just Particularly the Global Terrorism
Database is very good on this one. It doesn't just
include injuries and casualties. It also includes attempted terrorist attacks
that didn't necessarily result in any injury or casualty, and
then it categorizes them when possible along with known domestic,
internet or international terrorist groups a group affiliation. And what
I was able to find in going through that is
that it seems that the left is because we commonly
hear that the right conducts far more acts of violence.
And first of all, in order to be able to
nail down what do you mean by the right is
more violent than the left, I decided to narrow that
down into acts of terror because I think those are
the most extreme. They're also far easier to classify as
an intentional political attack rather than things like street violence
or prison violence, which can have all sorts of motivations, interpersonal.
You know, with gangs, there's all kinds of drama and
things that are things that are involved in that. But
with terrorism, it's directed and it's usually political in some way.
So if I went through the when I went through
the Global Terrorism Database and accounted for all of the
attempted attacks that were not successful, groups that were broadly
speaking left wing, and I went through and not only
categorize them them myself based on you know, known affiliations,
like what do these groups represent? And they break down
into things like, particularly if you look at history, environmental groups,
animal rights groups, and then of course you have things
like Antifa and you know, more modern sort of left
wing groups versus the right wing ones. You know, your
classic KKK whatever you think about that, being aligned with
Democrats or not. You know, anti Islam is that one
can be a little bit iffy in some cases. But
broad speaking, so like whether underground classic left leaning terrorist
organization ku Klux Klan, whatever you think of them, is
categorized typically as a right wing organization, went through and
checked those. I also ran my personal checks of these
versus what other scholars had done. My alignment and my
categorizations lined up with theirs more or less identically, with
a couple of very slight variations. So I had both
gone through it myself and validated it with external sources.
And what I found is that people or left wing
groups were as likely to attempt acts of terror. Actually
they were slightly more so by about point five percent,
but it was nearly identical. The difference was that when
a left wing group or individual engaged in any sort
of terrorism, they were far less likely to kill or
injure anyone. I'm trying to find the exact statistic here
because I have it in my notes. The percentage of
right wing groups being completed attacks perpetrated in twenty two
and twenty nineteen in the US that resulted at least
one injury was sixty four point three percent. Well, fifty
nine percent of left wing completed attacks resulted in at
least one injury in that timeframe. A data further regarding
deaths illustrate this difference, as of completed right wing attacks
during this period, fifty percent resulted in at least one death, well,
twenty nine percent of completed left wing attacks resulted in
at least one death. In total, a right wing attack
is on average one point seven times one point seven
two times more likely to result in a death than
as a left wing attack, and a right wing attack
is one point nine times more likely to result in
an injury than is a left wing attack based on
trends in two thousand and two, So it seems to
be that the difference is not so much one of intent,
it's one of competence. The left, when it decides that
anyone on the left, either groups or individuals, decide they
want to engage in political terrorism, are far less efficacious
at carrying it out. If the goal of terrorism is
what the goal of terrorism is to terrorize people through death, injury,
and violence.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that there's several interesting factors here. I
think one of them. And I'm glad you brought up
the prison violence, right because oftentimes in discussions of these statistics,
and you see this a ton as well in the
discussion around school shootings, right, there's sort of a deliberate,
a calculated effort to sort of chum the waters, right,
And so like, you know, some guy getting depressed and
you know, painting his brains over the roof of his
Honda Civic is okay, sure that is a time a
gun was shot on a school property. That's not what
we're talking about. Somewhat similarly, you know, I don't pretend
to have any insight into how the Arian Brotherhood works,
but not really a political group per se. Any it's
sort of a different thing. Like if you go in
there and talk to those guys about like Francis Parker Yaki,
you probably won't get a warm response. Now, that said,
one of the things that you know, just upon first
hearing this from you, my reaction is, well, okay, So
that's when we consider the kind of like very serious
political terrorism. But what patterns do we see on the
kind of lower level violence, right, not necessarily street fights,
but for instance, I'm sure you saw the dramatic footage
of this conservative figure in Minnesota being you know, dragged
into a crowd and stabbed. How is something like that classified?
And also, and I realized this has past the scope
of what I was supposed to ask you, but you know.
Speaker 6: I'm curious about it.
Speaker 3: How does that bear out in the data for.
Speaker 4: What I looked at in Global Terrorism database and in
piis that isn't usually included because street riots and violence
like that, you're talking about emotional social contagion. There's emotions
are running high and they become contagious amongst crowds. This
is you know, very old why you don't shout fire
in a crowded movie theater. It makes everyone freak out
and they share their emotions instantaneously. This is mirror neuron stuff.
It evolved somewhere between twenty five and sixty five million
years ago. In primates, people have to be able to
communicate their emotions instantaneously via non rebel cues. So as
a result, it becomes very difficult even if one side
ends up committing more acts of violence against the other.
In terms of street violence, it's usually not planned. So
when I was specifically looking at the terrorism information, that
was to try and find a way to operationalize who
does violence and why is it that there is this
pervasive narrative that the right is overwhelmingly violent comparatively to
the left. And the reason why you're able to get
those kinds of findings from the data is again a
confidence issue, not a confidence issue. The left seems just
as confident in doing violence, and that's why they will
go out into the streets and stab somebody, particularly when
they're in these highly emotional, emotionally contagious environments. And funnily enough,
it links back to something that leftists themselves tend to
tout as their number one virtue, which is empathy. Ultimately,
that behavior, the street violence, the crowd violence, is driven
by those mirror neuron responses that are evolutionary adapted, evolutionarily
adapted and allow them to translate these emotions amongst each other.
They do organize, but it doesn't have to be organized.
The violence can erupt simultaneous or spontaneously, and it becomes
difficult to then pull apart well who started what was
this ideologically driven or was this emotionally driven? And where
do you draw the line there? And I think it
is difficult to delineate the two.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to get into that sort of empathy
you mentioned before we went live. You were talking about,
you know, Goad Sad and his framing of suicidal empathy,
a term I actually did not know. He was irresponsible
for popularizing. I've heard it through him.
Speaker 4: So he's about to publish a book on it, and
I think like three weeks so he's been He's not
the only one. It's been popularized by plenty of people,
but I think Elon Musk has been on Joe Rogan
to talk about God Sad's suicidal empathy hypothesis and stuff,
so I think he's become sort of the face of it.
Speaker 3: And so, as far as I understand, this is effectively
a pithier way to explain in the heat map meat,
which you know, for those who aren't familiar and terminally online, it's,
you know, a way to categorize how people rank order
their attachments. People generally described as conservative place the most
weight on their immediate connections with kind of a slow
taper off, whereas liberals, and again this is stated instead
of revealed, but place a much higher level of pull
or sway on these sort of universal bonds towards humanity
writ large or the universe, these these kind of more
abstract concepts. And so I'm curious, right when we talk
about empathy, what do you see going on there? And
you mentioned that you have at least some issues with
that term suicidal empathy, and I'm curious to get your
thoughts on it.
Speaker 4: So the Weights at All twenty fourteen analysis, the heat
map mean is probably like one of the most misunderstood,
i think intentionally misunderstood studies because it reveals something about
the Left that I think they feel very uncomfortable about.
The Weights at All analysis contains several studies and of
itself that produce that heat mapp. That's just from one
of the studies they conducted.
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Speaker 4: In one of the studies in the set, they gave
people a limited amount of empathy, and that's the most
That's the study within the set that I think has
the most very similitude, because empathy, as energy as time
is inherently limited. If every single person, or if anyone
cared about every single thing in the whole universe all
the time, as leftist claimed to be able to do,
you'd be apoplectech. You would not be able to get
anything done in your your own life because you'd be
so overarmed with emotions all the time. Empathy emotions are
intrinsically discriminatory. You have to choose what to care about
and what not to care about, otherwise you couldn't function.
So what I think the weights that all analysis actually reveals,
and I've made statements about this before, is that in
terms of where to select the empathy, leftists put it
out in this very far concentric ring, I think it
is the centers around about twelve or ten out very distantly,
and that's all of humanity, all animals, all things in existence.
The fourteenth concentric ring is all things in an existence.
That's where their lo ki of care is concerned, whereas yes,
with conservatives, their loki of care is friends, family, nation.
When you talk about how much empathy that you have,
because it is a limited resource, what this means in
practice is not so much I care about all things
in existence because you only have so much. That means
it has to be divided by all things in it existence. Functionally,
that means I don't care about anything except one thing.
I care about how I am perceived by others. In
claiming to care about anything and everything, that is narcissism.
That's which, as it turns out, is the only one
of the dark triad traits tetrad traits that is not
negatively linked to any measure of empathy. Narcissists are actually
very good at wielding and using empathy. And by narcissists,
I don't just mean people with clinical pathological levels of narcissism.
I mean with subclinical narcissistic traits. What seems to be
the overwhelming factor here that drives a leftist empathy is
actually narcissism. It's self enhancement, and it's making the self
look good. So when the leftist answered the weights at
all analysis there, they weren't thinking, no, I really care
about everything in an existence. They were thinking, I want
to look good to the researchers reading this page, reading
my response to this, or it is what he is
like a good person say yes, you know yes.
Speaker 3: And this is a common issue in statistical sampling, right
that you oftentimes get the answers that people think you
want to hear instead of what they actually think.
Speaker 4: Social Yes, I.
Speaker 3: Think it even relates to this whole this sort of
aesthetics of protest culture right where you see this constantly,
and conservatives make fun of these images, you know, where
they'll see a protest and they'll see all of these
people with cameras, you know, crowded around some sort of image,
right like that. The famous one you see in social
media is a burning trash can. And so you know,
one half of the image Macro will have this dramatic
shot of a burning trash can. The other shot from
a christ across the street shows a bunch of guys
with cameras standing in a largely empty city square with
a burning trash can. And they're right to make fun
of that because it is ridiculous. But on the same
to look at it another way, No, that's the power
of it, yes, right, Because what matters in this instance
isn't actually the mechanics of a protest, right, It isn't
actually how many people there. It is the sort of
the memetic impact of it.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: That event becomes those images and if you can in
your insert yourself into those images. And we've seen this
over and over and over again with the ice protests
in Minneapolis, right, these sort of failed attempts to create
an iconic moment. You know, you can think of the
you know, the rather you know, rotund woman, you know,
standing out in imitation of that famous photo of you know,
the Chinese guy who has run over by tanks, and
of course that didn't happen, right, She wasn't actually ground
a pulp, and she did not become you know, one
of these iconic images like the students placing flowers into
the barrels of the rifle.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: But you can see the attempt because again, the point
is not the protest. The point is to be a
person who is protesting and who is captured and who
is part of this sort of as you said earlier,
social contagion.
Speaker 4: Yes, and the reason to do that is again because
this is something not everyone who engages an activism is
a narcissist. However, activism very much appeals to narcissists. And
there's significant research on this that it certainly seems that
the reason why let me see if I can find
this citation right here on this there's wits. Let's see,
they do tend to do that. People who engage in
political action are often driven out of a desire to
be recognized. They want to be photographed. It is about
gaining attention, it's about creating, yes, these powerful images. Also
because that spreads the emotional contagion that spreads the message.
When other people see something that is emotionally evocative, like
a sad film, well you might think, why would anyone
want to watch a sad film if it's spreading negative emotions?
Feeling negative emotions is inherently unpleasant. However, people report consistently
that when they watch a sad movie, they enjoy it
when they in fact, there's a specific study on this,
let me find it here in film where this is
Hanich and colleagues Hannich at All twenty fourteen that were
specifically scenes where someone was told about the death of
a friend or relative, and when people said that the
scene made them feel sad, they had greater express greater
intention to watch the movie again if they had seen
it before, or to watch it if they'd never seen it.
So there is a positive emotional experience, a vicarious emotional
experience that's gained by feeling sad negative emotions because it's
very powerful, So it is potent, a potent political tool
to evoke negative emotions in other people. It doesn't necessarily
actually make them feel bad because they're feeling these emotions
from a safe distance.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, and this is something that the ancients recognized, right,
like the whole concept of a tragedy. Yes, it was
seen as both. And look, this is a much better
version of the mechanic we're describing. But you have this
idea of Catharsis, right, this sort of letting out of emotion.
But also this was seen as a civic act, right,
something that would sort of unify people because it was
a common emotional experience. And there's a kind of quip
that runs around right where it's like liberals don't actually
know things, they've just seen a couple of TV shows
and they base their opinions on the world on well
those TV shows.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've got a specific fighting on that as well.
Speaker 3: Oh well good, that was just a prejudice that I had,
and I'm glad to know that there's science to back
it up. Really the only time I care about science.
But in all seriousness, right, that very much is an
aspect of you know, the cultural lefts power, Right, is
this kind of you know, cultural mean complexes where you know,
these common emotional experiences and I think perhaps you see
this the best with the baby boomers because they lived
in a much more unified culture than either you or
I grew up in. But you can almost tell when
and you know, Devin Stack of Black Pilt has talked
about this, and you know, I may disagree with him
on certain things, but he's completely right here where he
talks about the Boomer speech right where you can tell
in their head they're running through that moment from Field
of Dreams or that moment in Dead Poe Society. It's
like the TV has taken over them, has possessed them.
And in much the same way, right, these incredibly powerful,
in some cases negative experiences. You could argue, there's something
you know, similar around a prominent twentieth century as a
religious political disaster. Right, people speak around it for the
whichever Indian is running YouTube, but it becomes this incredibly
powerful political force, that kind of emotional outpour. But aiden
you said you had actual science to back that up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a twenty nineteen study from Haymiddal And what
they did is that if you've seen the memes where
it's very common to see particularly people on the left
do this, although I've seen I guess some people on
the right do it as well. It's not that the
people on the right don't tend to get attached to
fictional figures. Amelia is certainly an example of.
Speaker 3: One literally me right, Ryan Goslin.
Speaker 4: There's plenty of those as well, but you'll often see
what the left tends to do more specifically, is less
the literally me maybe, but it's more this character would
agree with my political opinions and sort of using fictional
characters who are seen as.
Speaker 3: The donkey Kong says trans rights things right.
Speaker 4: Yes, and that's been found Hay Middle twenty nineteen. Specifically,
what they found is that one aspect of effective empathy
which is called peripheral rest Peripheral responsivity, those are emotional
reactives to immersive cues that you find in film and television,
was negatively related to all three dark triad traits, which
means that people who emotionally engage with fictional characters tend
to score lower in dark personality traits, But peripheral responsivity
had no relationship to any form of indirect relational aggression.
Indirect relational aggression are things like social exclusion, malicious humor,
and guilt tripping. So the people who post the spider
Man would vote the way I do are not necessarily
dark triad, but they are more likely to engage in
interpersonal aggression towards other people to force them via guilt tripping,
to force them via social exclusion and other tactics to
agree with them. It's social austracization and its aggression. All
that empathizing with fictional character stuff actually leads to exclusionary behaviors.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's a really you know, interesting thing as well,
because you know, you mentioned before, right, the difference between
you know, empathy per se and desire, being desirous of
being perceived as empathetic and another aspect of that as well,
I think is that maybe this is a slightly different dynamic,
is uh, the desire to on one hand purge others
and also avoid the purge, you know, the the kind
of like social competition that this belief structure allows you
to engage in. Like, for instance, you've literally ever worked
in an academic setting, you see this all the time,
that there is this sort of jockeying behind the scenes
using kind of you know, progressive politics, right, because that
is a secondary you know, I guess you'd say, method
of advancement, and when that becomes the kind of one
of the primary methods for sorting yourself, and that becomes
sort of like a known exploit, even aside from the
other things you're talking about, where these behaviors in particular
are associated with certain aspects or certain left wing political views.
So when you were now adding an additional layer of
selection on top, right, adding a sort of like ruthless game, yes,
side by side to select for these sort of dark
tech trad personality traits.
Speaker 4: It's a survival pressure, is exactly what it is. If
you are going to survive in predominantly left wing space,
you need to be performative that's why they're going out
into the streets right now in Minnesota and going and
you know, tracking down random people on the street and saying, okay, shout,
you know, f ice, f ice, you have to engage
in the performance or else you haven't painted the blood
over the top of your door to let us know
that we can pass over you. It's required within their
collective mindset that if you don't engage in this performative empathy,
tactical empathy, whatever you want to call it, therefore you
are unempathetic, and more specifically, you are unhuman. The dehumanization
factor that occurs with this, I mean, I think it's why,
like many things, obviously the overuse of terms like nazi, fascist,
those are all intended to dehumanize. And the reason for
that is, as I mentioned, it's because empathy need be selective,
because you can't care for all the people all the time.
So in order to divest themselves of caring for people,
they have to give them labels like nazi or fascist.
That makes them unhuman. And that's been linked by the
way to grandiose and to vulnerable narcissism. That specific type
of dehumanization in political ideology specifically.
Speaker 3: And I'm curious to get your thoughts, Aiden, because obviously
the discussion around the Charlie kirkshooter is incredibly fraught. People
have a lot of different opinions. I'll lead at that,
and I just know by mentioning this, I will get
one comment from one guy I know who you are,
who will tell me Charlie Kirk wasn't shot. But in
all seriousness, right, when you look at in figures like
you know Tiler Kyler Robbins, Yeah, the the Kirk shooter,
or you know these other kind of you know, lone
wolf attackers, the guy who shot three quadmalins trying to
hit Ice agents. Again going back to your thesis of confidence.
But to me, and this has been remarked upon, even
going back to oh who is the assassin?
Speaker 6: That was?
Speaker 3: His execution was summarized in Foucaut's Crime and Punish shoot.
He was an attempted regal assassin. But you see this
same on one hand, uh, you know, delusions of grandeur
but also narcissist, right, the idea that I will make
my mark on history through this one defining act. Yes,
And so I'm curious when you you have this kind
of you know, all of these variables coming together. It
seems that it's almost a miracle that we've only had,
you know, one successful and another attempted assassination in the
last couple of years, because it seems as if this
is sort of a perfect storm for you know, narcissists
to lash out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's at the end of twenty twenty five,
or near the end, I think it was. In August,
Centers for the State for Strategic and International Studies conducted
a survey on the number of right versus left wing
terrorist attacks or plots that had occurred since nineteen ninety
and what they found is that last year, September twenty
twenty five is when it was conducted, I think, or
at least published, was that, and that was before the
shooting of Charlie Kirk. Was that even at that time
it was the first year ever since the nineties that
labeled left wing violence had surpassed right wing violence. And
that year was according to from terrorist affiliated groups, it
was zero from the right to five on the left.
I think that the left is so activated now. These
are things that have always existed, and particularly this pathological
in some cases but oftentimes not pathological just trait like
narcissism that is raised up by the left because whoever
can be the biggest performative activist in some way or
another is given the most attention. It gains so much
social capital, so much social credit for them to behave
this way, particularly in the age of social media where
everything is put online, that it causes people who may
have some narcissistic tendencies to actively go out and engage
in violence and dangerous activity, people like Rene Good that
they wouldn't do in any other circumstance because they're just
focused on the social capital and they see examples of
how much social capital can be gained. Who's the guy
that a lot of like the Hassan Piker crowd, are
obsessed with who shot the not call written how although
they certainly hate him? Short the healthcare ceo.
Speaker 3: Oh Luigi Mangoni, Mangioni.
Speaker 4: That's it. Yes, these peop will become folk heroes even
though they're in prison or dead. It doesn't matter. And
a lot of times when it seems paradoxical, why would
a narcissist or someone with narcissistic traits put themselves in danger?
The one the thing they value the most in danger.
It's because the gain that they perceive of from that
they will get from doing these behaviors enter that's what
calculates first, rather than the possibility, because a narcissist or
someone with narcissisic traits doesn't consider the alternative that they
could be hurt, that they could die, because they're great,
They're so perfect. There is such an awesome person. There's
no way anything bad could happen to me. So they
don't calculate for that. They just and even if it's
calculated sort of in the back of their heads, it's like, well,
if I'm martyred, I'll be even more celebrated, I'll gain
even more social capital. Doesn't you can't use it if
you're dead. But that part doesn't compute. I don't think.
Speaker 3: Well, And that's another way to explain you know, the
main character syndrome, right, and you see this viewing, you
know footage of many of these activists that they genuinely believe,
as the meme goes, that they're in a Marvel movie, yes, right,
that they are at this kind of orchestrated you know
event where they will you do something grand and be
recognized for it I wanted to create correct my citation.
It was discipline and punished, and the execution was of
Robert Francois Domienne, who attempted to assassinate King Lewis king
Lee the heat very gruesome execution. Interesting book. Not the
biggest fan of Fucou, but there's a lot there. Conversation
for another day. I just wanted to correct that point.
Is I think that that that aspect of sort of
internally minimizing the consequences is is kind of interesting, especially
when you combine this with and you see this in
you know, Robinson Crooks, you know many of these kind
of you know, mass shooters right even before them, who
have this kind of you know, incredible I guess you
could say incredible uh you know nihilism about them. It's
the idea that you know, effectively nothing matters. And let's
be honest, you know, nihilism and narcissism are linked.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: That's something that people have been writing about for quite
some time. But I think it's sort of an interesting
thing as well because and if you've gone into the
there's this whole interesting uh you know circle. People call
it like shooter core, right, which is these online communities
that are sort of obsessed with school shooters, obsessed with
political violence. A lot of it is teenage edge lord stuff,
but they do keep producing these killers, like I'm not
sure if you remember the black Graper who shot up
a school. Oh yeah, you're odd guy. But these sort
of unfortunate individuals tend to sort into these communities. But again,
right there is this repeat and you can see it.
There's a woman on substack b X I think b
X rights. She does some interesting work on it, talking
about this sort of one vast minimization of consequences, where
the idea is, you know you will die in a
hail of glory, you know you will be able to
get your message out there. This will become like Ted Kazenski,
this kind of underground tome. You know that that sort
of you know, produces some sort of cultural response and
you will have you know, left your mark. Right then
the kind of narcissism part. And it's always interesting to
me to see the cases where you can find all
of those, all of those I guess you could say elements,
but not necessarily the conclusion, because this comes back to
our discussion of politicized violence. So the origin of the
chud Jack I believe was the Dallas Fort orthshooter went
to a grocery store, you know, killed a number of
people for being Hispanic. And what's interesting about that is that,
you know, he was reported as this kind of like
four Chan neo Nazi, but if you've read his manifesto,
it's completely insane, right, there's no political through lines whatsoever.
It is simply a sort of way to you know,
strike out, a way to you know, to basically answer
that combination of narcissism and nihilism. And I'm curious how
many of these people who were being drawn to the
left for the sake of political violence are there for
that reason instead of any you know, left wing politics
in particular. Aid. Sorry, that was a massive rant for me.
I'll throw him.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: There's two things that are related to that. One is
a study from Adam Schink adm ad A. Mczyk at
all from twenty twenty five, and they found that the
extreme ideologies of either side were related to For the right,
it was just grandiose narcissism. For the left it was
both vulnerable and grandiose narcissism. And again that doesn't mean
it's coherent and these are specifically what they classify as
extreme ideologies. So for people who were to the far
of either side those types of extreme you know, political
opinions are driven oftentimes by mental illness or at least
mental instability when you start talking about people who are
way way out there, so you will get that on
both sides. But Crispin and Bertram's twenty twenty five also
in their study they called this the dark ego vehicle,
which is specifically that individuals with pronounced dark personalities may
repurpose political and pro social activist This is a quote,
as a vehicle to satisfy their ego focused needs rather
than for the pursuit of pro social goals and social justice,
since participation in such activism may gave us give those
individuals not only opportunities to gain social status and engage
in social conflicts, but also to display moral superiority and
in my opinion, most importantly, dominate others. So you're talking
about people already who are emotionally or psychologically unstable, who
are going to go the furthest with this, the little
street level violence. Renee Good trying to hit a vice
officer with her car or whatever she was trying to
do there exactly Who's probably not? Just like abject pathological narcissism.
What drives a lot of these people to extreme acts,
as you say, it's that they'll be memoralized forever. That
is the ultimate goal of a narcissist or someone with
extreme narcissistics traits. It's more important to be memorialized to
be deified. And particularly I think when you combine that
with atheism or at least a lack of belief in
an afterlife. Why you've only got one shot, don't you.
You have one lifetime, You have one time, this one
life to leave your mark on the world. Might as
well go out in a blaze of glory. The guy
who set himself on fire.
Speaker 3: What was his name, Aaron Bush?
Speaker 6: Now?
Speaker 4: Aaron Bush? Now? Yes, because I was looking at that too.
Why did that guy do that? Ultimately, that's narcissism. It
seems insane to do something so devastating to the solve,
But I think the core of that is a narcissistic tendency.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that I want to get into.
You mentioned two distinct types of narcissism. There, grandiose and
then another category which I wasn't familiar with. Could you
explain the distinction between those.
Speaker 4: Yeah, grandiose narcissism. Let me find my first citation on this,
just so I can read it specifically, so I'm quite
clear on it. Where is it? Okay, let's see grandiose narcissism. No,
do I have this in the wrong order?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 4: It's because of how I've organized my stuff. Oh man,
Grandiose narcissism is essentially it's like, it's what we classically
think of with narcissism. I'm the best ever, I'm so important,
I'm the most amazing person in the world, whereas vulnerable
narcissism is a little bit different. That tends to be
people with actually very unstable egos, and the vulnerable narcissism
where's my It's hyper sensitivity to criticism, fragile self esteem,
and insecurity often masked by victimhood. So it's unsurprising that
you find vulnerable narcissism being a little bit more common
in leftist with extreme ide ideology, and although they also
have grandiose narcissism, again inflated self importance that is more
commonly linked with extreme right wing ideological positions. However, again
when you talk about the fringes of politics and people
who will go out and do violent, crazy things, even
though it is self harmful, self terminating, even it's this
dark ego vehicle.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that one other aspect of this that
it seems as if many people are unprepared for, and
I particularly mean older generations, is because of effectively the internet,
right rapid communication. This is no longer something that is
sort of highly geographically correlated. Like, sure, there's still more
riots in Portland. You're much more likely to be involved
in physical violence there for political reasons than anywhere else.
But have you fought at all, Not that you should have,
but the kind of flick armed trans groups like the
two A for all crowd. Have you paid attention to
that at all?
Speaker 4: I've noticed some of it, that's of course been growing
in frequency. That's come up a lot now again in
Minnesota with all the people out there with guns and
oh wait, I thought you were pro to a what's
your problem with these guys being out here armed?
Speaker 6: Yes?
Speaker 3: Exactly, like what you hypocrite? Why do you do you
object to this? You know, mentally unwell manned address heavily armed?
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 3: I was rude anyway, in.
Speaker 4: Just accurate statistically speaking.
Speaker 3: But my point being is that because of algorithms, because
of particularly chat services like Discord, but the same thing
happens on Telegram and others, this is no longer geographically correlated,
which I think is quite interesting. So you have this phenomenon,
and you know, I see this in a relatively conservative
area of the country where you sort of have these
almost like sleeper cells, right, who have formed a sort
of a nondirect digital community where these sort of ideas
are kind of amplified within one echo chamber. And I
think that that's a very interesting dynamic because before it
was like, oh well, you know, I can reliably be
assured that a teenager in Biloxi, Mississippi will be different
from one in Brooklyn, New York. And you know, while
that still may be sure on like a demographic level,
the political extremism I think is a very different beast
from the pre digital era.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah. So for example, there's a study I covered
this in the video I did on the Violent Stuff.
It's a Bacca, Cerivianus and Blackburn from twenty twenty three,
and they were looking at tanky subreddits, which is like
the perfect example of this stuff of what you're talking
about there, I think, where it's a group of people
who have some shared political ideology, are perhaps quite similar
political ideology, and what they sit around doing is compared
to the rest of Reddit, which is already you know,
leftist in nature, the tanky subreddits were a hundred times
more likely to make threats, fifty times more likely to
attack the identity of others, twenty one point two times
more likely to insult others, and five point three times
more likely to use profanity than the rest of Reddit.
They end up getting involved in these like you know,
highly ideologically extreme circles talking about things. And by the way,
the things that they talked about the most on these
English speaking subreddits was it wasn't things like that were
mostly related to US politics. A lot of it was
what were the things they were so Nikolaiechchescu, they hate him,
They talk about him all the time, for example, all
kinds of anger about that Israel Palestine, the weaker. Actually
they don't call it the weaker genocide. They call that
weaker re education camps or I should re education centers
or just re education or not even re education. What's
the word they used for it. Oh sorry, boarding schools,
that was the term weird boarding schools. They use different
language in order to reframe things, and they tend to
focus very much on things that are happening on the
other side of the planet. They don't talk a lot
about things that are happening nearby them, which it can
only be facilitated by the Internet and access to these
things that happen worldwide all the time, which actually kind
of goes back to the weights heat maps. Their focus
is out in these distant, concentric rings, very far away
from themselves. It's also why they tend to focus so
much on let's say, immigrant communities. Why are they out
here putting their lives on the line for people that
they don't really have anything in common with. And that's
because of identity fusion, which has also been found to
be let me see fusion significant among people who lean left.
That's see Counstead All twenty eighteen had a sample of
white American university students who reported feeling strongly fused with
Palestinians and Kurds, and when they who also identified as
left wing activists, and when they strongly identified with Palestinians
and Kurds and not with domestic leftist issues and domestic
leftist groups. They said they were more likely to go
out and fight and die and kill on behalf of
Palestinians and Kurds than they would for to fight and
die for domestic issues. The hypothesis why is well. The
hypothesis as to why is confusing. I think it's because
when you don't have personal experience with these groups, you
don't have any necessarily negative information about them. You can
make up in your head and fantasize about them being
just perfect victims, in the same way that you'll find
a lot of times when some and like Rene good
is It dies in one of these confrontations, they don't
want to look at any kind of negative information about
that person. Knowing as little as possible about someone allows
you to construct a version of that person or people
in your head that is very positive. Familiarity breeds contempt,
so they fuse themselves without groups they have no personal
relationship or ties to, and then they because they have
no personal relationship or ties, they can make them into
psychologically like these perfect moral beings comparatively to people that want.
Speaker 3: Oh exactly. I think that that's a huge, a huge
part of it.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: You see the same thing with like nature, right that
you know, nature is this sort of like deistic force
for many environmentalists that is completely disconnected from people who
actually go outside. Now obviously, you know, they're many environmentalists
that I think do good work. But I had a
very interesting interaction actually with my neighbor I write for
a conservation magazine or I have who knows if it'll
come out or not, with my buddy Braxton. And you know,
being a white guy from southwest Virginia, I've worked on
farms before, I've gone outside before, and you know, I
enjoy hunting and fishing, and so I have a you know,
a pretty realistic view of nature, right, like even the
US East Coast, which is not that dangerous one hundred
percent it is. And you compare that to you know,
my neighbor, who's a very nice lady but a stereotypical hippie,
got into a conversation about conservation and realized very quickly
we have radically different understandings of what nature means, right,
Because again, this is someone who grew up in an
urban area and for them, nature is the park, right,
It is a bald Garden literally instead of you know,
this thing that has positive and negative aspects.
Speaker 4: To still geographic documentary one.
Speaker 3: Hundred percent is Ken Burns or David Attenborough. And yeah,
I think that's definitely a part of it. I'm honestly
astounded that chaw Jescu features so much in their kind
of hatred. I do get coaching on it, right, like
that would make sense to me. Yeah, bizarre people, I
don't understand.
Speaker 4: It was one of the most slightest, one of the
most discussed topics across the five tanky subreddits that they sampled.
Speaker 6: There.
Speaker 4: We were just obsessed with them for some reason, or
maybe at that point in time when they conducted that,
it may have just been that at that moment they
were particularly obsessed.
Speaker 3: It's romanium month they I guess.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but very distant things from because again, yeah, if
it's close to you, you might have a little bit
more personal information. You can't create an idealized version of
it if you have too much knowledge of it. So
immigrants are a great h if you're a citizen, or
a great sort of source of place to place all
of this and the quote unquote because you don't really
know them. If you're not an immigrant, you can just
make up in your head, well, all immigrants must be
x y sad. They're all just struggling for a better life.
They're just you know, they're here with the best intentions.
They would never do any crimes or anything, because they're
just honest, hard working people. That's really easy to do,
in particular, if you're a awful for example, you know,
affluent white liberal female, right, you don't actually interact with
these people on a daily basis almost at all, if
at all. They exist out in the periphery, so it's
very easy to assign positive traits to them.
Speaker 3: Well, honestly, you see sort of the and I was
speaking with my wife about this because of the kind
of inverse relationship that upper class progressives have to poor
urban blacks and yeah, let's be honest, not even poor,
just lower old class and down whites. Yes, right, where
you know one of these groups you can probably guess
which has this sort of halo effect around right there,
they're seen as inherently virtuous. They're scene as you know,
inherently oppressed, whereas you know, their uncle Randy right, who
owns a dishwasher repair business, is inherently suspect. We don't like.
We think he's gross, we think he's low class. And
it's interesting. And I'm sure you remember this during the
the kind of Bush era right where there is this
sort of like oh, kind of open season on rednecks, right, yes,
and this sort of like competitive virtue signaling about how
awful and racist your family or your X y Z
distant relation was. Again because it was it was distant.
It was sort of, you know, a way to you know,
externalize again born from, let's be honest, very limited or
no real contact. And the positive side of that is
what you see in you know, diverse urban communities.
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Speaker 3: Where it's like those are sort of overly romanticized. And again,
as someone who has grown up in the South and
has familiarity with both of those groups, neither reading is true. Like, now,
let's be honest, like, there are very real problems with
white trash, and I don't particularly enjoy dealing with like,
you know, shitty methoads in the parking lot of a Walmart. No, also,
you know, agrats, Like, neither one of these things are
the kind of you know, the meticize that's not a word,
the sort of like romanticized version of it. But it
is interesting how there's both a positive and a negative
aspect to that kind of social distance. But sorry, I'll
kick it back to you.
Speaker 4: Oh no, sorry, had a weird connection issue there for
a second. It's back. It's good now. Yeah, very similar
growing up. I grew up until I was eleven in
rural West Virginia and then moved to Baltimore City, so
I've seen both sides of that. I've seen the white
you know, I grew up around the white trash meth
heads so cold, and then I grew up around the ghetto.
I mean, it's Baltimore. It's about as bad as it gets,
murder capital of the US. So but again for the
people who are the affluent white liberal females or female liberals,
the awfuls and people in that same sort of category,
they go to Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle Randy,
with racist Uncle Randy, so they've got a little flash
point of interaction with him that they can model who
Uncle Randy and other people like him are off of.
And in fact, I just did a video on Christmas
for the Christmas season and the political divides that that causes,
and that in particular is it seems like in the
data where they follow people's cell phones so they could
see how long they actually spent it at different locations
for Thanksgiving dinner and then pull them about it as well.
And it turned out that the leftists ended up staying
at those dinners for longer, but they reported it. They
were more not they to report it as being a negative,
hostile experience. So the conservatives wanted to leave, they wanted
to disengage, They didn't want to be involved in the
hostility and the arguments. The liberals wanted to stay and fight.
So it seems oftentimes too, is that they have to
maybe even do this virtue signaling, this performative stuff in
front of racist uncle Randy. They want to be confrontational
because again, even if there's no audience, particularly in the
age of social media, then they can go home and
type on social media and write an article about how
they defeated racist uncle Randy and then turn that performance
that they've done at the dinner table into a broader
performance for the public. But at least they can model
him because they kind of know him. They probably don't
have almost any interaction with inner city blacks in Baltimore City,
for example.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and I mean again, right, that is very
much we see a gap between actual empathy and a
desire to be perceived as empathetic. I realize this is
not at all scientific claim, but it's generally poor formed
to harass your family members at Thanksgiving. Yeah, that's not done.
But again, right, there is that kind of secondary social
market of being able to market on social media and
put yourself out as the kind of person who not
only has far left politics but is speaking truth to power, right,
and if that power is a seventy year old, aging
Vietnam veteran, indeterminate right. But again that's that element of
social signal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, and it probably is to signal to the
family members as well, to separate yourself to a certain extent.
Because one of the weird things about some of the
polling on that one in particular is that when they've
been surveyed on it, people on the left and right
both agree that going to things like family gatherings and
dinners are important and that it's good for emotional health.
But then when they actually go and do it, it
turns out it's used tactically for this performance of activism.
And whether that again, I don't think social media helps it.
There was a Victorio on Twitter A couple we have
been talking about this recently about how social media has
and the divide between women and men in political belief
has exploded since cell phones and social media became readily available,
or smartphones in particular. It didn't happen in two thousand,
It happened in like twenty ten or didn't happen in
nineteen ninety. It happened in two thousand and five, right
after social media and smartphones started to become ubiquitous. Because
now there's a perpetual audience, the performative nature of your empathy,
the performative nature of your activism is always in your pocket.
Before you could only do it at a street protest
or something, but now you can do it constantly, So
it reinforces the narcissistic behaviors and rewards them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that you know much. It's helpful
to view this through the kind of lens of selection
that when you ascribe, whether deliberately or not, social status
to certain behaviors, certain activities, you create a selection bias. Right,
you were filtering for certain people over others. Obviously vastly
different discussion, but we've seen this in hiring data. Right,
people of certain skin tones are not being hired. That
produces a massive downstream result. My home state of Virginia
has just decided that they will overpay non contractors. Yeah,
who knows, I may end up as a West Virginia
refugee sooner or later. But in all seriousness, right, again,
you're creating a selection pressure, and somewhat similarly, when you
know there is effectively rewards to be given for this
sort of anti social behavior, you're going to see more
of it now. One of the interesting things that I
am constantly wondering about is when we get from the
level of social selection to genetic selection, right, you know,
just kind of going through the biological bottleneck. It seems
that these would be negatively associated with production. That the
kind of mentally unwell people doing this, you know, narcissist
peace but think so interested in their image, do not reproduce.
Is that true? Am I completely wrong? And does it
even matter?
Speaker 4: You would think so? However, tactical empathy, performative empathy is
actually selected for evolutionarily. This has been observed. It's interesting
you brought this up because I actually have the evolutionary
rationale here. So specifically in chimps. This is a nineteen
ninety two paper from Burn and Witten W. H. I. T. E. N.
They found that chimps, what they'll do is male chimps
in particular, when there's high status males powerful males around
the lower status males will pretend to be innocent. They'll
pretend to just be interacting in a subservient or submissive
way comparatively to the male. But they will get erections
and hide their erections with their hands so that it
is visible to the fertile females and invisible or obfuscated
from the male. If chimps are able to do that,
then we have a pretty good rationale that this evolved
a long time ago as a strategy to make yourself
look good to do facework, as Irving Goffman would call it,
towards a selective party. So yeah, it actually seems that
there is now empathy. Genuine empathy obviously has evolutionary pressures
behind it, because it's a way to be able to
signal to other members of your group something is wrong,
there is danger. Being able to read faces, being able
to take perspectives allows you to feel with other members
of your tribe. So if a member of your tribe
is killed, you feel with their family and will want
to protect them, and this is advantageous to the survival
of the group, just as it is advantageous to be
able to read emotions to detect if another member of
the tribe is afraid. But then we also see, well,
this empathy evolves for that reason, you also get the
tactical layer. In order for the chimps to be able
to why why would a chimp do that? The only
reason to hide the erection. It has to be able
to simulate the minds of other chimps to know what
they can see and what they can't see, to know
that the males, the dominant males, can't see the erection
because it's been hidden with their hand, but that the
females can see it. So this very basic perspective, taking
that it's at the core of empathetic response evolutionarily is
also selected for to be tactical in certain circumstances.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's that's particularly interesting. And you know,
not to pull this down into you know, so called
dating discourse, which is really like the lowest common denominator
on the Internet. I tried to avoid if at all possible,
But you do see this, right that, like the the
meme of uh, you know, the the male feminist as
a predatory. Yeah, that is tactically assumed to sort of
gain access to certain spaces US. Some would say, I
mean like that that bears out right anecdotally. You and
I both probably know half a dozen examples so, yeah,
I mean, that's that's a very interesting thing that you
bring up there, And honestly, it's part of the reason
why generally speaking, it's it's things like you know, academia
are kind of a tough nut to crack because those
accreditation and prestige networks are so ideologically captured and when
they have that kind of you know, ability to designate
what is and isn't prestigious, there isn't isn't socially advantageous
you know, to people who are looking to sort of,
you know, climb up the social ladder, it's like, well, right,
what do you do then?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 3: Because that and I'm obviously I'm not asking you to
solve this problem in the remaining two minutes of this podcast,
but it does become a very difficult issue, right because
there are a number of people, some of them pathological,
some of them human, who are extremely susceptible to those
sort of social cues.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it is with the way that it's set up,
it actually creates a fertile breeding ground for dark personalities
machiaviliens in particular, and narcissists and psychopaths. Psychopaths are kind
of the worst at it, but sadists are not curiously,
but machiavellians, narcissists and sadus are able to recognize also
that when their internal emotions don't match what they're supposed
to feel, so they recognize that they are feeling incorrectly.
They will observe the way other people are expressing emotions
and they will mimic them. This is mirror neuron response.
It's also been observed in macaque monkeys, and it's again
millions of years old. When you know, when somebody waves
that you, someone's waving in a crowd, maybe they're waving
at you, so you wave back, that's a mirror neuron response.
It happens autonomically, and people who have these dark personality traits,
they recognize that they can maneuver their way into these
different situations, environments, groups and engaging them tactically by observing
others and emotions and mirroring them using this evolved mirror
neuron response. And it's unfortunately the institutions have to be
changed because otherwise, again it selects for people who can
manipulate the best.
Speaker 3: Now that's a valid point, so Aidan, we are coming
up on time. This has been a fascinating discussion. I'll
make sure to link to your work on YouTube, but
where can people find you and what are you working on?
Speaker 4: Yeap Aidan Paladin on YouTube. I'm about to start putting
out some shorts on this tactical empathy stuff. I've been
working on it for the last week and a half
or so since there were in a good thing happened
just because I was interested in it, and then I
did know also that Gad Sad was about to publish
his book on suicidal empathy, and it seems like it's
really hot topic right now that a lot of people
are curious about. I am also looking launching a substack
that will probably be before the video comes out, but
not before the YouTube shorts. So if you're interested in
kind of getting the TLDR on all of the major
subjects I'm going to cover in the video, those will
come out to shorts first, or some of it will
come out of shorts first. Then I'll put out something
on substack, the full audio version of it and the
actual article if you want to read that, and then
if you just want to watch the completed documentary video
that'll be out a couple weeks after that.
Speaker 3: Well, sure. I am looking forward to both of those
as far as my stuff, The Jay Burdon Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you want to listen to podcasts. If you want
to support me, you can throw me a few bucks
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Axios Remote Fitness Coaching again, Aiden, this was a ton
of fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having me always always a good time.
Speaker 3: To everyone at home, keep your head up. Well, I
can't last forever.
Speaker 6: Good night.
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