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