Speaker 1: If you want to support the show and get the
episodes early and ad free, head on over to Freemanbeyond
the Wall dot com forward slash Support. I want to
explain something right now. If you support me through substack
or Patreon, you have access to an RSS feed that
you can plug into any podcastcher, including Apple, and you'll
be able to listen to the episodes through there. If
you support me through subscribe, star gum Road, or on
my website directly, I will send you a link where
you can download the file and you can listen to
it any way you wish. I really appreciate the support
everyone gives me. It keeps the show going. It allows
me to basically put out an episode every day now,
and I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to accelerate.
I think sometimes you see that I'm putting out two
even three a day, and yeah, can't do it without you,
So thank you for the support. Head on over to
Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com, forward slash Support and
do it there.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Piking Yana Show.
Josh Neils back.
Speaker 2: What's happening, Josh, It's going well.
Speaker 3: Pete love talking to you. Thanks for the invite as well.
You're a very gracious host, and we always have good conversations,
so I'm looking forward to it today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot. Thank
you for doing the Old Glory Club live stream last week.
Gave us some context into the JFK mess and and
other things. But last time you were, we were Last
time you were on, we talked about the term woke right,
and we talked a little bit about your second book,
Understanding Conspiracy Theories. But the new book, Intolerant Intolerant Interpretations
is starts to go even beyond that and really starts
to get into start tearing apart. It seems like you're
trying to tear apart like the basis behind these conspiracy theories,
where they came from, and basically how they grew and
specifically you know, it's really easy to say, oh, the
president's head exploded, and you know it looks like it
came from the front, but you know they're saying it
came from the back. But no, it goes much deeper
than that. When when when you start getting into conspiracy theories.
So you know the first part of your new book
you you specifically talk about Richard Hofstetter and Carl Popper.
So jump in there and start talking to you know,
if you can start, uh, start there and take us
down the road of where we're at, where where we
came from to get to where we are now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so again thanks for having me on to talk
about the book available with their Antelope Hill Publishing. It's
called Intolerant Interpretations.
Speaker 1: And uh and if you if you use code, I
guess code pete Q five percent off. So yeah, I've
been an adult things so cool.
Speaker 3: Awesome, awesome. I view it as a sequel to Understanding
conspiracy Theories. Uh, it's written that way. And yeah, as
you pointed out, the book starts with sort of a
genealogy of this like anti conspiracy polemic. It's called actually
the first chapter, it's called and abbreviated genealogy because honestly,
if we really put our thinking hats on it, probably,
you know, we could look much further into the past
to figure out how we got to where we are today.
But the very recent history, very recent past, is certainly
enough history to kind of understand the climate that we're
in now. And so yeah, I did single out Carl Popper,
and I singled out Richard Hofstatter for two I think
very important reasons. I was kind of imagine myself having
to do a rebuttal when I talk about my books
or offer some of my arguments, and one of those,
like my imaginary interlocutor, is, you know, well, why pick
on Carl Popper, Why pick on Richard Hofstatter? What makes
them so important? And there's really two reasons, one for each.
The first reason being that that Carl Popper is basically
the philosopher of the open society. He's the philosopher of
the great replacement. And he's also because of his a
lot of his intellectual work dealt with epistemology and things
like that, he's also kind of like the philosopher for
the anti conspiracy theory point of view. And there's two
really important works that he wrote that I critique in
the book. Obviously. The first is The Open Society and
its Enemies, And it's like a seven or eight hundred book. Basically,
it's it's it's it's like the be all and end
all of liberal democracy apology, right, that's kind of what
it's a seven hundred, eight hundred page book justifying why
open societies, which is to say, liberal democracies are superior
and preferable to closed societies. And he gives several examples
of what constitutes a closed society NSDAP Germany, Soviet Russia,
Fascist Europe, whether we're looking at Spain or Italy or
Romania or really any of the countries where there was
a fascist movement. But he even goes way back into
human history. The original closed society was Plato. Plato's republic
is basically the if the open society and its enemies
is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, then Plato's republic is
really the apotheosis the intellectual apotheosis of you know, nativist, authoritarian,
ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states. That's what Popper. And again
maybe some context on Popper. He was from Central Europe.
He was from a well educated, high cultured bourgeois I
want to say, Lutheran family. I think Richard Hofstadter came
from a Lutheran family, so maybe Popper wasn't. But anyway,
they were upper class Jewish ethnically Jewish living in Europe,
and Popper in particular saw both sides of that authoritarian coin.
He was a communist in his youth, he almost died
at a communist rally, and then he was some time
later obviously persecuted or felt felt the heat of the
German Reich on his heels, and he fled Europe and
he sought sanctuary basically in you know what we tend
to think of as the Atlanticist states, England, the United States,
I think even New Zealand. And so that experience informed
his philosophy about the superiority of liberal democracies, and as
a kind of second hand to that work, in the
mid fifties, he published a very very short essay like
three pages called The Conspiracy Theory of Society, and basically
this was his anti conspiracy polemic. He compares in that
short essay, he basically compares conspiracy theory epistemology to something
like homer or Homeric thinking, where that you've got this
mount olympus of deities that are really pulling all the strings.
And more than just pulling all the strings, they're specifically
moving people into place and positioning them to take important roles.
So he basically says, you know, when you abandon, when
you abandon God, you elevate man into this theistic state
and so men become these supreme agents, capable of all
kinds of unexpected, unanticipated, shadowy conduct.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting there is, immediately you know, I think
of Raizard Luguco his book The Demon and Democracy, where
he compares democracy and communism and just shows how parallel
they are in having to sell themselves. And all that
does is it sounds like he's selling. He's doing his
best to sell liberal democracy while either hiding or not
understanding that in order for liberal democracy to continue, a
conspiracy does have to happen. But it's not one continuous conspiracy.
It's one conspiracy takes over and that gets planted by
another conspira or is he another and it's just not
on down the line, I mean you have you just
have competing conspiracies the whole time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what's a chain of conspiracy? Like a never ending
chain of conspiracies? Well, what Popper says is different. He
actually says that things that we don't like Basically, he argues,
we attribute outcomes that we don't like to conspiratorial origins.
But what he claims is really happening is that there
are simply unexpected consequences sort of like that old line
the road to hell is paved with good intentions, like
the road to conspiratorial thinking is paved with unintended consequences.
So and he says things like, you know, economic depressions,
military conflicts, societal collapse, the whole list. These are these
are all things that that come about as a consequence
of other political actions that are being undertaken, and that
are social theorists responsibility is to trace those lines and
figure out the causality, right, But ultimately it's never a conspiracy.
Man does not replace God. Everything can be understood empirically
through proper social theory, proper social theorizing. And so that's
why I chose Carl Popper, because he has such a
monumental legacy and the more you dig into it, actually
the kind of creepier it gets. A lot of the
I will say a lot, but some of the most
well known names in contemporary society, people who are strong
advocates of not only liberal democracy, but also like the
censorship regime and using state power to prosecute political minorities,
which is something that Karl Popper advocated for. You find
that a lot of the really relevant people today were
also connected to Carl Popper. Cass Sunstein was a student
of Carl Popper. George Soros was a student of Carl Popper.
I think Richard Hofstadter may also have been at one
point affiliated with him, so he, beyond his own works,
Carl Popper was a mentor to, or had close relationships
with basically anyone who's ever had a bugaboo about nativism,
so he was a really obvious example to pick. Richard Hofstadter,
on the other hand, I think, if I had to guess,
it is kind of a name that not many people
think of anymore. He died somewhat early on, but he
had a very successful career as an academic historian and
public intellectual in the mid twentieth century. Many of the
several of his books won Polser Prizes, so he was
really really krem de la Cremuh. The Age of Reform
was a Politz Serprise winning book. I believe that The
Paranoid Style in American Politics was another Politz Surprise winning essay,
and in both of those works, uh, Carl Popper, excuse me.
Richard Hofstadter basically takes aim at populists, rural types middle
you know, flyover Middle America with San Francis would describe
as Middle American radicals, the kinds of people who probably
donated to the John Birch Society, the kinds of people
who probably supported the Tea Party, the kinds of people
who became Maga. Basically, in those two works, he's going
after populism, and in particular he's going after what he
calls the paranoid style in American politics. And Richard Hofstadter
also has his own legacy of influencing academics to write
anti conspiracys, and his most famous essay was the Paranoid
Style of American Politics. Basically he uses Freudian psychoanalysis as
a in an artful way. That's his own word. By
the way, I'll give you this this second sort of
two a to why I chose these guys. But it's
because of they tell them themselves. Basically in their works
they tell them themselves repeatedly, so it makes for a
good learning.
Speaker 2: This is a this is a.
Speaker 1: Running theme with a certain group of people. They can't
help themselves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in particular, Popper and Hopstat are like at
the top of the mountain of just letting you know
exactly what's on their mind. That's how you can, at
least for me, it's like, if you want to present
an argument and you want to present people as spearheads
or or figureheads of a certain movement or whatever, I mean,
you don't want leave the audience feeling like you arbitrary
really picked these people or whatever. So I mean it
was really great that in both cases they just they
just telling themselves. So in the essay of Paranoid Style
in American Politics, he's talking about Barry Goldwater. He coins
this term pseudo conservatism, and he talks about the paranoid style.
So he says he uses paranoid in an artful way,
appropriating it from psychoanalysis and psychology. I think he says
something like, in the way that a historian of art
would describe a certain period as barok or whatever, he
wanted to use paranoid style in that same way. So,
which is like a way of saying, you're not doing
it academically, you're not doing it empirically, you're kind of
literally bastardizing language to serve a partisan end. Like if
you read between the lines, he's basically saying, I'm taking
this term that has a very specific meaning, an application
I'm taking it outside of his discipline and I'm plopping
it in a completely different discipline, in an informal way,
just because you know, and there's.
Speaker 1: Like so much of that today, so much of that today.
I don't know if you saw. And I hate to
even talk about this person because it just gives him attention.
But Joel Berry from the Babylon b he said, there's
going he said, very soon, progressives are going to start
embracing white identity, square peg round hole man, what the
hell are you doing?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it seems you know, and and then obviously
the most obvious one is the main wook right guy.
What the hell is the same James Lindsay. I mean,
he's forget he has nothing is he's incoherent. At this point,
it's gotten to the point where they they can't make
They know that they've lost. They know that neoliberalism is dying,
they know that the open society is falling apart what
they love the most, and they're doing every and it's
this isn't right after World War Two when you have
a couple of Jews who are basically advocating the open
society because they don't want to go back to what
it was just you know, ten years ago, and you know,
they need a society that they can blend in in
and yeah, I mean we're past that at this point,
and especially especially since October twenty twenty three, which I
think is like literally a changing of the age, like
like we're in a new age now.
Speaker 3: I totally agree. So Hofstadter basically, and there's a couple
I don't want to spoil all of the really really
juicy bits of it, but there's so many like telling
on yourself moments, some of them like they weren't obvious
at the time. But there's one passage where he talks about, Uh,
there's a famous French psychoanalyst, Jacques lacan.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: He's sort of like a here's a structuralist, he's a feminist. Basically,
he's like your average like shit lib French intellectual had
all of the bad you know positions, political positions.
Speaker 1: Like a precursor to post like a precur precursor to
the French postmodernist or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, basically one generation earlier than that, sort of overlapping
into the that movement getting its legs off the ground.
But there's a famous Lakhanian line that I think most people,
most readers in this sphere have kind of come across
one way or another, gets quoted a lot. He says,
you know, if you're paranoid, if you if you fear
that your wife is cheating on you, even if she is,
you're still paranoid, and it's illegitimate to have that fear.
So your wife is cheating on you, you're suspicious that
she's cheating on you, you're pathological. So look like Hofstadter
takes that and he uses it in the context of
floridization in the water supply. He says, you know, if
even if it came out to be true at some
point in the future that the government was putting contaminating
the water supply for expressly political even socialist reasons, would
that's still exemplary of the paranoid style. And then lo
and behold, decades later, that's basically exactly what happened. And
that's like only the tip of the iceberg, basically in
terms of contaminating the food supply, the water supply, the soil,
the air, everything that we kind of consume and and
are just moving through even passively, like we all know
we all have the receipts on that. It's not a
mystery there's it's basically pretty much an open and shut case.
It did happen, It happened for expressly political reasons. Still
people still want it to happen. RFK Junior, as he
was being sworn in as head of HHS, basically said,
we're going to take the floride out of the water.
So it's it's like, oh, but you're still a crank
if you think that, You're still a crazy person if
any of that troubles you in any way. So to
my imaginary interlocutor who doesn't see any reason to specifically
target these two people as being progenitors of this way
of thinking, that's why that's kind of my rebuttal I
was going to say before, there's like a two A
aspect to that, or like you know, like a tertiary
aspect to that, and it's it's entirely the way in
which these these academics basically told you what the final
outcome of their preferred political program would be. Towards the
end of the Open Society and its enemies, Popper basically says,
you know, if we followed this open society policy to
its final conclusion. Then it's not only conceivable, I'm paraphrasing,
by the way, just for the audience at home, it's
not only conceivable but highly likely that you would have
mass scale a demographic replacement. You know that it would
so rupture the health and stability and coherency of an area,
But the open society is still better, so we have
to do it. So these are two guys who basically
laid out a sort of series of justifications for liberal democracy.
They also issued a series of polemics against people who
are skeptical of liberal democracy, and they also kind of
spilled the beans on what's wrong with their preferred political program.
So it's very difficult for me to find like a
better example of the kind of thing I'm trying to
communicate to the audience, which is all of these kinds
of things racialism, conspiracism, anti liberalism are inexorably tied to
one another. And it's not for arbitrary reasons. It's for
like first principles political theory. And also just like I
was gonna say, urban planning, not urban planning, but like
like basically like state craft and and and and and.
Speaker 2: Social engineer social engineering.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, like your demographic construction things like that,
social engineering is more succinct. So I started with them.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: And the more I read that and the more I
do this kind of writing, I just feel like vindicated
in that decision because they just keep proving to be
relevant over and over again.
Speaker 1: Before we move on to the next next one, the.
Speaker 2: Term conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Theorist Carl Popper wrote, use that term, and I believe
it was nineteen fifty seven. And then there's this it's
been revealed that the CIA was using that, like head said, Oh,
that's the term we need to use against against people
who are talking about the JFK.
Speaker 2: Is that is that right? Or is it?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 2: Or should we be looking at Popper for that?
Speaker 3: I you know, I've heard that. I've heard that basically
all of my life. I've never independently researched that. I've
kind of taken it at face value because I've heard
other and I've seen other, you know, well regarded researchers
make that claim. Before I would say, I would say
this that there there's more than one road to critiquing
liberal democracy, and I do think it comes down to
sort of your specialization. I think people who are more
into who are more like wonks and more into political culture,
and more into the nitty gritty of institutions and and
and the ways they sort of like octopus tentacles, get involved,
have their have their their tentacles in every other pot.
Because obviously the CIA has a long, a long history
of social engineering. I'm actually just now reading this great
book Who Paid the Piper, which is basically it's by
uh Francis Stoner Saunders, and is talking about the CIA
during the Cold War, and they're anti communist initiatives. And
now people like James Burnham were you know, in effect,
you know, whether explicitly or implicitly doing Cold War culture
war stuff on behalf of America against the Communists.
Speaker 1: I've kind of always known that it was kind of
obvious if you work at if you were working at
National Review when he worked there, you were you were
tied to the CIA in some way.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So well, naively, I actually didn't know that. I
was very late to the James Burnham train. Everyone was
reading him during COVID and earlier, and I picked him
up like two years ago, and my head was my
hat was blown off, my head I was like, Wow,
this is great. And then and then like a week
later someone was like, yeah, but Burnham was the spook.
I'm like, wait, what so.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that doesn't But but the thing the thing
about it is that doesn't bother me because you know,
when I think about the first two books that he wrote,
when he wrote The manager or Revolution, he wrote Machiavellians,
I can't be one hundred percent sure he was spooked
up at that point. He was, you know, possibly, but
still it doesn't mean that he was writing those books
for any other any other intention then, because he that's
that's the book he wanted to write at the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in particular, The Managerial Revolution seems like a relatively
non ideological kind of academic work. But anyway, I think
there's probably multiple roads you can take. And for people
who are you know, as they say on the internet,
like theory cells, who are into the philosophical tradition, I
don't think, you know, focusing on Carl Popper versus focusing
on the cia that there's any obstacle or that there's
any hurdles, or that they're not congruent with one another.
This just happens to be the road that I took,
and so I think there's legitimacy to both. I mean,
obviously the CIA is involved in political assassinations, regime change coups,
so we're If anything, I think what is worth extracting
out of this is sort of the if you want
to say, multidisciplinary or multi factorial, multi personnel engine behind
liberal democracy. That you can come at it from the
popular culture space, you can come at it from the
academic space, you can come at it from the intelligence
services space, and basically it all leads you to the
same thing that you've got political conflict, rivalry, subterfuge, all
the kinds of things that people like Carl Popper told
you don't actually happen and are not really relevant in
understanding political anything related to politics.
Speaker 1: Let's jump forward to Jonathan Heyde. You talk about his
book The Righteous Mind. That's one of those height is
one of those people that really gets pushed by a
lot of the people who call themselves classical liberals, the
people who want to return to the nineties, the golden
age of the nineties. But you know, one of the
things that you point out is that they're his ideas
about psychological about how he misrepresents political differences between people
who have I think the terminology use was broader moral
palette or what he used is broader moral palette, and
liberals six intuitions versus h versus liberals have three. So
can you talk a little bit about how hype continues this,
how he explains how this continues and moves forward from
you know, from World War two and the post war consensus.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I think a friend of yours, astral Flight,
made this really great observation to me. I didn't even
realize it that Jonathan Height was kind of like the
Jordan Peterson Before there was a Jordan Peterson. Five or
six years before Jordan Peterson got into political commentary and
political culture, you had Jonathan Hight as this sort of centrist.
And I say none of this with invective or hatred.
I actually think pretty of all of the people who've
done the IDW centrist, we just need to get a
long thing. I really do look at Jonathan Height as
being like the most honest and really the most competent
person to try that out. But I would just say,
like it's really remarkable if you want to compare the
public intellectuals of say today or the last ten years
compared to twenty thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years ago. It's
really startling. The issue I had with Jonathan Hite was
that his and this is really the same issue with
Jordan Peterson, even though it doesn't seem that way with Peterson,
is they're actually very narrow minded. I hesitate to say uneducated,
but they are ignorant really of other disciplines beyond their own.
Jordan Peterson, if you want to know about psychology, probably
is one of the best living educators of psychology. But
when and this has always been a parent when it
comes to philosophy, history, political theory, He's basically indistinguishable from
like your grandpa sitting at the actually your grandpa at
Thanksgiving dinner probably knows more than Jordan Peterson. But same
thing with Jonathan Hyde. Very good, very astute as a sociologist,
as a anthropologically minded person, obviously as a PhD of
social psychology. But the big glaring hole in his theory
of the moral foundations as applied to the political binary
is actually politically ignorant. So the job so that the
heights moral Foundations theory says that there are six elementary
moral foundations or intuitions care, fairness, liberty, sanctity, authority, there's
a sixth one that I'm actually blanking on at the moment.
And his research demonstrated that conservatives were more in touch
with all six than liberals were. And he gives the
example of the John Kerry campaign back in two thousand
and four and the rhetoric that was on the campaign trail,
and he basically said that that Democrats were unable to
access rhetoric that touched on moral intuitions like authority, prey, sanctity, purity,
Purity would have been the sixth one, right, that these
are kind of like classically conservative moral intuitions. They have
to do with They're they're inexorably bound up with like
the church and religion. They're inexorably bound up with the military,
hierarchy and the state. They are inexorably built bound up
with the family and a paternal sort of view of
the world. And so Heit says, well, this is really
a big problem. Democrats are losing these elections, they're losing
the culture war. They're not really able to communicate to
all Americans. So he embarked on this research project to
develop a way to help liberals expand their moral palate.
There's a couple of problems with that. First, and what
I think the biggest problem is is that his research
actually demonstrates that liberals can access other moral intuitions. It's
just that when they apply those moral intuitions, they're applied differently.
When a conservative Bible thumping rust belter practices sanctity, they're
thinking about Christ, they're thinking about God, they're thinking about
the Church, they're thinking about the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments,
they're pastor. But when this is according to Height, when
liberal secular humanist types think in terms of sanctity, well,
they think about the environment, they think about pollution and
climate change, they think about sort of these very novel, untraditional,
outside of the box ways of applying these basic moral intuitions.
You know, what was the old liberal maxim, you know,
think globally, act locally. That kind of describes the problems
are the way liberal think is in this fundamentally non
parochial way. So that tells us one that liberals don't
have a problem accessing these moral intuitions, it's just they
apply them differently. So to me, the first problem that
arises out of that is it tells us something about
the populations themselves and the kinds of social worlds that
they occupy. I extrapolate from that that we really have
two completely different populations living side by side as though
they were actually one people. You know, when we are
we here in the whatever you want to say, the
Trump right, the online right, the dissident right, to radical right,
all right, whatever. I mean, A lot of us, if
not most of us, are here because we have certain
foundational concerns about our kin, about the folk, about the race,
about homogeneity and a coherent national identity. This sort of
issue in Heights. Theorizing betrays the fact that we don't
have a coherent national identity, and that homogeneity is not
just an issue in terms of racial characteristics or religious affiliation,
but actually there are other ways in which people are
or aren't alike, and that's meaningful in terms of how
you organize your polity. So basically the punchline of that
essay is there's two different political economies. This goes back
to James Burnham. There are two different political economies operating
in this country, and while they're not necessarily opposed to
one another, they are in conflict. You have the classical
liberal political economy, bourgeois entrepreneurial capitalism, which even though that
was critical in displacing the old aristocratic order and the
monarchy and things we think of as even more based
and conservative and hierarchical and all these kinds of things,
but relative to like modernity where we are now, you know,
that's pretty, it's pretty. They were still deeply devout religious people.
They were still deeply patriarchal. These were not people who
who comparable today anyway, who thought like we will literally
burn through all of our social capital if it will
earn more money or help us achieve some kind of
Kakami political agenda. You had this bourgeois entrepreneurial liberalism, and
then what comes after that, as James Burnham said, is managerialism, managerialism,
the technocracy, the cult of expertise, credentialism, socialism, you know,
the welfare state, all of these things which are built
on bourgeois entrepreneurialism, but also in a way sort of
parasitize bourgeois capitalism. That's kind of like one of the
stories of the recent Trump victory with Vance as his VP,
is like we're trying to put the managerial revolution back
in the box a little bit. Here. Burnham says that,
you know, managerialism emerged because actually San Francis says this,
expanding on James Burnham, that nation states were growing so
rapidly both demographically in terms of like their geographical territories,
and so you had this dual problem of mass and scale.
They're getting larger, they're also getting more complicated. So if
you're a you know, if you're like an early twentieth
century robber baron, a capitalist, well you while it might
have been possible for you in eighteen fifty or nineteen
hundred or even nineteen fifty to literally micromanage everything and
understand A good example of this is maybe Walt Disney
trying to put together Snow White. He was intimately involved
in every aspect of that production down to the finest detail.
And then if you look at what Disney's doing today,
like the people who bankroll it have no control what's happening,
no idea, what's even happening in terms of casting and
like CGI and whatever. So things were getting so large
and kind of complicated that you had a new class
of people emerge, and these were the managers, technically minded,
technically skilled people, usually with a college education, usually living
in an urban or suburban setting, who are not capitalists
in the sense that they have large reserves of money
that they can allocate and spend and whatever, and that
they are captains of industry, but they have very narrowly defined,
highly skilled roles that put them. I think the quote
from San Francis is they literally put their hands on
the levers of these industries. So, as San Francis said,
you know, the change in the kind of people who
became in charge of things also became who. Rather, he says,
the change in the class of people also became a
change in the kind of people. So we went from
capitalists to managers. But also we're dealing with a different
demographic of people. You know, a lot of you know,
Ellis Islanders, you know, are getting into these positions. A
lot of newer immigrant Americans are getting into these positions.
To your audience, I'm bringing this to a conclusion here.
If it seems like a crazy digression, we could say,
in a sort of loose way that the liberal democratic
you know, liberal progressive liberals, democrats, socialists, these kinds of
people you know, in terms of heights, moral foundation, the
threes versus the sixes. These are people who basically live
in a completely different economy than the conservative person or
concerned a person even today still lives in a farm,
works on a farm, or runs their own business, or
comes from a family that does that. You know, they tend,
you know, statistically, we know this. You know, they tend
not to go to college, They tend not to complete
their degrees, They tend not to read as much. The
divide what Jonathan Hyde treats as psychological differences between liberals
and conservatives really is a demographic difference. It's an economical difference.
So it's not that liberals are out of touch with
the authority moral intuition or the sanctity moral intuition. It's
that they are basically siloed into a completely different style
of life, and so they apply these moral intuitions to
the world in wildly different ways. They even apply the
same moral intuitions differently. Jonathan Hyde points out that for conservatives,
fairness has more to do with like portionality, for example,
compared to liberals, where it's about like distributing to everyone.
Now everyone gets a piece of the pie, but conservatives say,
well that doesn't sound fair, Like why does the guy
who does nothing have as much say as I do?
Hence the proportionality?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Okay, well there's an opportunity. This goes into like one
of the old debates like equity versus equality. Are we
trying to give everyone an opportunity or are we trying
to give everyone an outcome? Like? These are mentality differences
that arise out of different economic social organizations. So, I know,
I just threw a whole bunch at you. Maybe I'll
take a pause there and let you pick apart from that.
Speaker 1: No, I mean I think that that's it's something that's
been covered on this on the show endlessly managerialism versus
role by experts or you know, role by ads hark.
So the next thing I wanted to move on to
was just touch on this, you know, as quick as
quick as we can, because I really want to talk
about a Louis a little bit and get into a
lull and Connoman, the the idea that unconscious group dynamics
and not individual brainwashing drive shifts and culture, and how
the American myth of individualism, you know, as a noble
as a noble lie obscures how social forces shape behavior.
Speaker 2: Talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I came. I came into contact with the
work of a German, very well celebrated German psychologist. His
name is Gerd. I'm probably butchering it. He has a
name like straight out of German folklore. And he looks like, like,
you know, like the most German Man on earth, a
Gerd gigorinz er or gigor Or. I have no idea
how you would say.
Speaker 2: It, Oh, I have, I have no clue. I looked,
no no idea.
Speaker 3: He's a psychologist and well, a little bit of context.
One thing that's really interesting to me about the last
twenty years of psychology publishing, popular publishing, academic publishing is
that since the turn of the century there has been
an extreme focus on irrationality, on what's sometimes called choice architecture,
a decision making basically cognition, but in terms of our
capacity to choose. What are the actual cognitive mechanisms that
are responsible for a decision making process, When do they
go right, when do they go wrong? What are their limitations?
This stretches all the way back to the really the
early twentieth century. I want to say Herbert Spencer. Maybe
I could be mixing up some of my names. But
in the early to midish nineteen sixties you had what
was called the probabilistic revolution in the social science is
what basically refers to. Statisticians gained a lot of influence
in academic psychological research, and so there became this quantity,
this intent, heavy focus on quantitative sort of mathematical reasoning
to understand and explain social behavior. And one of the
people that was at the start of that was Daniel Konneman.
Now let's just table that now, just to give some
context for the audience. So Gert Gigorenzer is working sort
of in this milieu, but he's coming at it from
a different point of view. One of the actually he's
kind of like hearkening back to the very earliest theorists
theoreticians in this statistical revolution. He's basically saying that there's
and this this is contrasting to the Daniel Konnomans of
the world, basically saying that there's a type of logic
that humans engage in that you could say is intrinsic
to our decision making process. It's not arbitrary, it's actually evolutionary.
And it's not only evolutionary, it's environmentally bound. Right, So
in other words, thinking of human cognition, we need to
think of it as something that developed within a context.
We need to think of it as something that developed
according to certain evolutionary pressures and limitations, selection pressures, for example.
So he and again I won't spill all the beans.
I'll leave some for your you know, your audience, if
they want to read it. I hope you do. Pick
it up an anal up Hill Publishing. He basically says
that there are three rules of human social organization, more
or less, and and there's actually no getting around them.
There's no you can't break them, you can't refine them.
They are fine tuned over countless generations of evolution. So
when I read that, my first thought was, and you know,
it's getting involved in all this radical politics stuff. I'm
kind of a neophyte still. I've only since like twenty fourteen,
twenty fifteen really been thinking this way. And one of
the like kind one of the thoughts that are or
just like repeating questions I've always had is actually the
subtitle of the essay that you referenced. You know how
did things get this bad? You know, we're always constantly
asking ourself like, why are people like this? How do
things get this way? Would you know? Or we play
the historical revision game, you know, would things be different
if you know Group X won this war as opposed
to group HY, or you know, if this president won
this election or this you know, and we're we're always
asking ourselves like, why are people like this? How did
things get this way? The point of my essay is
to say that there's a profoundly evilulutionary reason for people
to become conformist, because conformism is effectively an evolutionary mechanism,
or at least for us, it's this sort of thing
we've accumulated that helps us to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, catastrophe, risk, danger.
You can't know everything. It's impossible to know everything, it's
impossible to account for everything, and really all we can
do is just, you know, look to the person to
our left and right and do what they're doing. And
this is like deeply encoded into us, and so it's
very common for people to think like, well, it's what
the universities did. It was brainwashing through media, it was
brainwashing through Hollywood. It was brainwashing through the universities and
the academics. And I'm not saying that that's wrong. I'm
not saying that that didn't play a role. What I'm
saying is that before you ever read foucaut in freshman
year of college, before you have turned on the TV
and saw some subliminal, licentious thing getting beamed into your brain,
you were conforming to the social dynamics in your home,
at the park, in the classroom, at the lunch table.
And these are the things we need to think about
in terms of why and how people adopt certain political beliefs.
And the real point of that I was trying to
drive home in that essay. Maybe I'm kind of a
bleeding heart here. You tell me if you agree or disagree.
The point I was trying to drive home is that
we want to have actually empathy. It's gonna sound like
a libtard moment. We want to actually have a sort
of like patience and compassion for people, because it's very
common for us who are sort of like initiated and
know a little bit about this to get angry and
bitter and like man, like you should know better, or
you got dooped where you get were brainwashed by the
race communists or the woke mind virus. Actually, most people
have no idea consciously in an intellectual way about what's
happening around them. They're just simply imitating what the people
around them are doing. They are simply using the same
solutions that have worked for the people around them in
a sort of unthinking, unconscious way. Because it's actually too
mentally taxing, cognitively demanding, and socially punishing, ostracizing to get
into the weeds on every one of these individual issues,
whether we're talking about LGBT, or we're thinking about tariffs
or the immigration policy or whatever. Most people don't think
there is no actual rational, cognitive, sort of deliberative process
going on. It's just simply people going along and getting along.
And when I read his book in the Wild, actually
I bought a bunch of his book, I read a
bunch of his papers at around that time. When I
was writing this, it gave me a profound Actually it
felt like I was being like liberated, liberated by like
this sort of anger at other people, like why aren't
you taking up this challenge? Like I'm taking it up.
Why aren't you trying to decode all of the bullshit,
and why aren't you willing to ostracize yourself from your
friends and your family in the name of the truth.
Because that's not actually what the kinds of foundational social
dynamics we've evolved to function with. That's not how they operate.
Which isn't to say that they're like deviant or pathological.
It just means that, you know, people like you and
me are like a different breed of person basically, And
if we're getting in front of an audience, whether it's
you and your podcast or me and my blog or whatever,
or somebody at like a rally or a pub, you
actually have to have like some heart for the people
in front of you, the people who are gathered around you,
because they don't actually know better. And most of the
time people treat that as a sort of insult or
a smear, or they say in a pejorative and condescending way.
In the same way that I don't know any better
when it comes to physics or mechanical engineering doesn't make
me like a loser or a conservative or adeb or whatever.
It just means I don't have that specialization I would
need to rely on a well meaning expert. I think,
to the point of that essay, people believe and act
the way they do far less for deliberative, conscious reasons
than they do for invisible social dynamics that bind and
tether people together. That was another really long winded answer,
so I apologize.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be a pedant, but I think
when when using the term empathy, we have to be
able to separate what's known as effective empathy and cognitive empathy.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to see another person's perspective.
Effective empathy is the more dangerous one, and I think
it's what's taken over a large amount of the left
and progressivism, which is being able to understand one's another
person's emotions, but also sharing them with them, trying to
share their experience. I don't have any interest in that.
Understanding is a much different thing than actually seeking to
seeking to put myself and to try to feel exactly
what they're feeling. I think that leads that leads us
down the path of the where you that what's become
the meme of of how you know, most people who
would be right wing care about the people most around them,
and then out here, it's the people. Yeah, the heat map,
and I think the we have to be careful of that.
Understanding where people are coming from is one thing real
that that section of empathy which has become the most popular,
where you're trying where they want you to share and
feel what other people are feeling. I have no interest
in that.
Speaker 2: I have enough. I have enough of my own problems.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I give three examples in that essay, and they
all are examples of cognitive empathy. So I'm glad you
made that distinction. I mean affective empathy. That's the sort
of Again I don't say this in a really negative way,
but it's kind of how we've ended up in this squishy,
womanly school marm kind of mentality where it's like, well,
how do you feel if that happened to you? I
would feel bad, So then don't judge them so harshly.
It's like, that's not constructive. But one of the examples
I give, if I can remember, one of Gigrinser's one
of his three rules is basically the default rule that
if there's no other solution, then you do what everyone
else has done previously. And I give the example of
somebody a young man who enlists in the US military
in two thousand and two or two thousand and three,
and they did that for rule one to what other
people around you do. And so if you're a young
man and you're watching TV and all of the men
in your family are like, this is fucking a travesty.
We need to go to war. We need to defend America.
You think, yes, it's a travesty. I need to go
to war. I need to defend America. Maybe ten other
guys from your high school classroom did that, and you're like,
I'm going to do that. And then you go and
it's awful, and you come back and you're a fucking mess,
and you look around at your other peers, other guys
who you enlisted with, and they're developing drug problems or
they kill themselves, and what do you do. You develop
a drug problem and you kill yourself, and like that's
the default. This is like a very sort of like
bleak way of applying it, but it gave me a
greater understanding. It's like, how does that happen? Does it
happen because we didn't give them enough education? Did it
happen because they didn't have enough socialization? Time did it
happen because like, like all of these were not trying
to understand the real problem types of explanations. It's like, no,
he had he did it for like the three basic
rules of social organization, you do what everyone else does.
If there's no other solution, you do the solution that
everyone else has been using. And if you're a young
guy who listed in the military, well you see a
lot of your peers falling apart completely and maybe killing themselves.
Or another example I use is like a freshman aged
college girl. You know, how do they all fall into
or how does so many of them fall into this
like destructive, licentious, borderline pornographic sexual behavior because they looked
around at what the people around them were doing, and
they defaulted back to the same type of social behavior
that most of the people around them were engaging it.
And I think if you can understand the degree to
which just about everybody you know is engaged in some
kind of like mimesis, then it really does de emphasize
the extent to which you think of them as a competent, individually,
rationally minded person. Now, they may also be those things,
but we are most of the time we are that
in a very limited capacity. You go to the hospital,
your physician is giving you all these scans and using
all of this large, you know, fifty thousand dollars words,
and they're flexing their upper learning degrees at you, and
you're like, Wow, this guy's really smart. And then they
turn around and then they watch Bill Maher and what
then they vote for Kamala Harris or whatever. You're like, wait,
I thought you were like a thinking person. You realize
actually this that type of demanding, deliberative cognitive function. You know,
if there was a big pie chart, how much of
your life you're you know, you're actually engaged in that.
It's a tiny sliver of the pie. Most of the
rest of it is. I mean, why did that guy
end up in medical school in the first place. Because
he looked to his left and his right and that's
what the people around him were doing. Or because someone
from on high their their father, their mother, their grandfather
said you're going to do this, and so they did it.
It wasn't a deliberative, individualistic process of rational choice. It
was unconscious, evolutionarily informed social process. So all that to say,
I agree with you. We have to be careful about
the e word, and my essay does skew on the
cognitive empathy and not the affect of empathy. So I
appreciate you bringing that up.
Speaker 2: No problem.
Speaker 1: Let's let's move on to Conoman because you've already mentioned him.
Daniel Kneman, he basically portrays human cognition as inherently flawed.
How does that? How does that bolster a move towards technocracy?
And yeah, I mean you mentioned it a little too,
so I mean, whichever direction you want to take that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Cooman, I remember when I remember both when the
Jonathan Hype book and then Daniel Conoman book came out.
They came out within a few years of each other,
and they were some of the biggest I mean, the
podcast circuit of ten to fifteen years ago was like
those two guys, like every talk show, every podcast, and
it's it's actually really really difficult to overstate how influential
Daniel Kahneman has been on social science research but also
the general intellectual culture. So Daniel Conoman's Israeli psychologist who
was in the ideaf. He died like last year, I think,
killed himself. It's probably interesting, it's probably not totally meaningless
to point out that he signed himself up for like
one of these you know, end of life self terminating things.
I don't know exactly. I don't know if you went
to Denmark or wherever in those countries they have. So
his partner, Amos Tversky, I'm probably butchering these names because
I'm not Israeli. They had been research partners since the
fifties of the sixties they were part of They actually
originated what's called the Heuristics and Biases research program. So
to your listening audience, you know, if you ever took
a psych instruction to psychology class at any point when
you were in college, there was probably a section on
cognitive psychology, and a lot of it probably had to
do with this idea of heuristics and biases. And basically
the Heuristics and Biases program says that human and this
Gerd Gigorinzer accepts this, by the way, he just sort
of takes a different conclusion from the same general idea.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tavski were basically perpetuating this line
of research. They were both you know, mathematically minded, statistical thinkers,
so they both perpetuated through their research and their public advocacy,
their intellectual work. The idea that human cognition is sort
of a it's based on it like maybe a handful
of mechanisms or principles, if you want to say, and
we don't necessarily have an immediate ability to activate those
mechanisms or principles. They kind of seem to have a
life of their own, uh, And they work in the background,
and somehow magically we draw inferences and conclusions and and
and answers to things. You know, Like when I was
a kid growing up, my dad would always say to me,
you know, like, you know, if you've ever got a
problem you don't know the answer to, you know, stop
thinking about it for a while, and a couple of
hours later, you know, poof, it'll hit you. And I
was like, well, that's kind of crazy, and that would happen.
Maybe you go to sleep and the answer comes to
you in a dream, or or you're trying to remember
the name of some actor and it hits you a
week later. It's like, what happened in my brain that
I went from really forcedly trying to think about this
to not and then suddenly the answer comes. Well, this
is the basic idea of deliberative executive cognition. There are
a handful of mechanisms and principles that operate somewhere kind
of nebulously in the mind or within human consciousness that
help us to think and make choices and make calculations.
There's a sort of a rudimentary brain calculator in there
that is running all these programs and calculations, and we
don't really get to ever put our hands directly on it.
But that's how the brain works.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: Canman and I'm basically, by the way, for your audience's benefit,
I'm giving like a very stripped away version of that story.
But the important thing to take away from it is
that Caniman and Diversity basically argued that this is an
inexorably flawed evolutionary process that leads us to basically make
a lot of errors, that human cognition is barely better
than a coin flip. And so their academic work was
about helping experts become better decision makers by providing them
with all of this statistically informed psychological research, which, by
the way, is also what Gigorenzer did. But the difference
between Counterman and Tversky versus Gigazers Gigorenzer's idea was that
these heuristics, and he didn't use the word biases, he
just talked about them in terms of heuristics, are like
it doesn't get better than that. Like, if you're telling
me that evolution over millennia formed our brain to work
in this way, then it probably did it really well,
because just about everything else about us works really really well.
But you have to understand the context that the mind
is developing it. You have to understand the context the
kinds of choices we have been forced to make throughout
human history to understand how the brain arrives at those conclusions.
And obviously we're living in this sort of like fairy
tale Disneyland world that's completely removed from like primary evolutionary
selection pressures, and can you know, Gigorenzer's argument is, basically,
we've got this finely tuned cognitive organ that now has
to deal with a wildly unpredictable, unstable, information rich environment,
which is a you know, historically a unique circumstance that
we've really never there's a very little precedent for it
in the past, and so when humans make mistakes, it's
because we are we have evolved in these niches, these
tightly bound ecological niches, to produce certain types of solutions
and to think about information in a particular way. We
don't live in that world if you want to think,
if you want to zoom out and say, you know,
the world of scarcity versus the world of abundance. Right,
in the world of scarcity, there's limited resources, there's also
limited information, there's limited choices to me. But in a
world of abundance, such as as the one that we
live in, to the extent that you could say it's
a world of abundance, well, you see things like, well,
there's a great study that got published some years ago.
I'll ask you, actually, there's a magical number after which,
once presented with this number a number of options, humans
actually are not able to make a meaningful choice. Do
you know what that number is?
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't.
Speaker 3: I think it's about a dozen between six and twelve.
Speaker 2: Six. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, like you go trying to buy a car, you
see like three dozen cars on the lot, it's like, well, meaningfully,
how do I know which is the right car for me?
Or you go shopping for clothing like me and you
go down the mail the Aisle and you see like
thirty gazillion racks of genes and you're like, I just
need a fucking pair of pants. Man, Like, I don't
even know what I'm looking at. You know, this abundant
information rich environment is not something we're really evolutionarily adapted to.
For Gigaenzer, that's not a fundamental problem with human cognition.
For Kaniman, it is, and so Canaman. The thing that's
even more interesting about Caneman about not just his academic
research program, but also his affiliations. If you read his
book Thinking Fast and Slow, which you want to Nobel
Prize for Nobel Prize and behavioral Economy, he's talking about
his good friend Cass suns Team, my great friend cast Sunstein,
whose judgment I trust so well, who at the same
time that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean Condoman like was literally born in
mandatory Palestine in like the thirties.
Speaker 2: Yes, it went to Paris.
Speaker 1: His parents escaped Paris because you know, the evil Nazis
came to power, they moved back to Palestine, like right
before before it became Israel.
Speaker 2: I mean this is.
Speaker 1: You want to talk about having your child, like having
your life, your life's attitude set up for you right
from the start.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a very charmed life. So, you know, there's
so much to say about Countman. It's actually the one
essay I'm the most proud of because it really gets
to a lot of things that have bothered me over
the course of my life. I'll just say this. You know,
all throughout, Conoman's kind of portraying himself as on the
side of like Joshmo. You know, here's all this research
showing that you're kind of a dummy, but don't worry.
You know, you're my dummy, and I'm going to make
sure nothing Dad happens to you. So he has this
sort of libertarian ethic about him where he talks about
the need for sort of paternalism because people are so
dumb and can't think straight and can't make decisions for themselves.
That means that they are easy prey for other people
who would want, you know, demagogues, people who would want
to manipulate them, what have you. And he treats he
views his research as basically a way to help Joshmo
navigate this world of complexity that he's just too much
of a dumb, gentile group to navigate on his own
and he keeps talking about It's just really funny the
way he keeps talking about people like Cass Sunstein, you know,
my good friend Cass Sunstein with his tremendous work. Meanwhile,
at the same time Cauntman's writing that book, Cass Sunstein
is writing his a series of white papers with people
like Adrian Vermule on conspiracy theories, on cognitive infiltration, on
like the og misinformation, like his whole idea of cognitive
infiltration Cass Sunstein that is was literally, We're going to
go into spaces where people are generating novel explanations for
political and social crises, and we're going to fuck it
up by deliberately throwing in pants on on you know,
a head retarded counter conspiracy theories. So it's a really
really dangerous situation. I'll put it. I'll put a bone
it real quick, just like.
Speaker 1: You just describe right wing Twitter or what I mean.
Speaker 3: That was one of his big bugaboos was the Internet's basically,
you know, his essay on conspiracy theories was directly about
nine to eleven and the Israel conspiracies. We're in this
union is like two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,
So not like at the birth of the Internet or
even the birth of like, you know, AOL within ten
years of it. And he's basically saying it's a really
big problem that all of He doesn't say this, but
I'm editorializing a little bit. Cass s Enstein is basically
setting to people, it's a problem that these dumb, gentile
rubs are looking at Israel the wrong way, and we
need to figure out a solution to discourage them from
doing that. And if we can't discourage them, we have
to make the information economy so contaminated and unreliable that
no social transformation can come as a result of that.
And so that's the reason I wrote about Konman is
because the basic conclusion of his research is that humans
need a class of credentialed technological experts to do the
thinking for them. And you mentioned elul Eluill, famous French sociologist,
probably published like a hundred books. He might be one
of the one of the most prolific writers of all
time time. He's a Christian, he was an anarchist, and
he was French. That was the worst part about him.
He basically argued all the way back in the nineteen
sixties that there's this encroaching metaphysical problem in human society
is called technique. This is very actually, very complicated his
definition of technique, so I won't really get into it
here on the show with you. I give a lot
of time in the essay explaining it in a lot
of different perspectives, so it's definitely comprehensive in the book.
But basically he says that, you know, technique is this,
to put it very simply, is this sort of efficiency
mechanism that throughout different periods of human history was subordinated
to some other aspect of human social life. He says,
you know, in the Roman in the Greek and Roman
times or the Roman times, that technique was subordinated to
state craft, and that in the Medieval times that technique
was subordinated to the aims of the Church and sort
of theological thinking that you know, what technique looked like
in the Mid Ages was you know, theologians debating sort
of the minutia of like Christian metaphysics. You know, how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin,
that kind of thing. But at some point in the
last couple of hundred years, technique has become unmoored from
other social forces or other social domains of human life.
Technique is no longer just something you do to build
a better bridge, or to build a better government, or
to build a better cathedral, or to build a better
love for God. It's actually it's own good, its own end.
That sort of like colonizing every other social space. And
if you look at the world around you, it seems
like every endeavor that people are engaged in is kind
of subordinated to this idea of more efficiency, more productivity,
more conformity. If people complain about the algorithm online, it's
kind of a way of talking about the problem of technique.
People want to talk about the rapaciousness of capital, and
even ilul gives there's a whole section in the technological
society where it basically says like even in the early
generations of sort of like Babarian, you know, wasp capitalism,
that it was still pretty much kind of confined to
economic logic and economic conscernts, and at some point after
that it became its own thing. Daniel Kahneman the people
involved in this heuristics and research program, contemporary technocrats are
really people who have become like the physical embodiment of
this principle of technique, where you know, we don't even
care about a nation, state or a community. All of
these things are inefficient, you know, they they don't they
don't grow or progress on their own. There's something that
Jacques Oleeuell says that I consider to be a really
profound thing. He says, people who are kind of hypnotized
by the magic of technique, if you talk to them
and express trepidation, trepidation about like the direction of technological progress,
they will treat you as an enemy of mankind, like
what you're not. You don't want to go to Mars.
You don't want to replace your eyeballs with glass computers,
you don't want to be able to erase down syndrome
from the human you know, DNA, like whatever thing we
can achieve through technological progress. If you are an advocate
of that, then your enemy are the Luddites and you know,
like the spiritually amish people who have some skepticism at
the idea that we can just keep innovating and progressing
and making everything more technical. Just as an idea or
as an example for your audience, Like I love heavy metal,
but I really don't like a lot of heavy metal
from the last twenty years, and it's really taken me
my whole life to figure out why. If you compare
Black Sabbath and Tony Iomi, t I don't know the
guitar one of the guitar players from Lamb of God
or Trivium or some death metal band. Like literally, Tony
Iomi grew up in like bombed out, burning Birmingham, like
around the factories, and the sound of heavy metal was
the sound of industrial technological society. But Tony Iomi never
like he still used that sound to write melodies and
things that sort of resonate with the human spirit and
our ears and are pleasing to hear. But you listen
to a band like My Sugar. I recently started listening
to My Sugar. That song bleed. The first time I
heard it, I was like, Wow, that sounds like an
airplane engine, Like that's such a crazy sound to make
on guitar. So I bought the whole album and every
single song is like, we're literally gonna recreate the sound.
You know what the inside of your washing machine sounds like,
And it's like guitar and guitar music was whereas in
the era of Black sabbag it's like we're sort of
imitating industrial society to produce music. It's like, and now
today it's like we're sort of using music to recreate
technological society. It's less pleasing to listen to, it's more
technically demanding. The guys, you know, James Headfield has a
much more aggressive rhythm hand than Tony Iomi has had.
But I mean, is every Metallica riff as great as
every Black Sabbath riff? And then you know, twenty thirty
years later, is who's ever headlining oz Fest? Now? Are
they really better than Pantera was in nineteen ninety four.
They may be better performers, the music may be more
on the cutting edge, let's say, of a particular genre.
But it's also like nobody buys those records anymore. Nobody
goes to those concerts. If you want to see a
Lamb of God, you've got to see them, like on
a big festival tour with the same seven or eight
other bands that nobody will pay to see on their
own tickets. Anyway, the point I'm making is that technique
sucks and it ruins good things.
Speaker 1: Let's uh okay, So you have an addendum that I
I don't even want to touch it. I want people
to read that on their own, because you know, that's
where you know, if we start talking about that here,
we're going to be we'll start getting into maybe, yeah,
having to couch some language, especially talking about certain groups
and things like that. Let's finish up talking about this.
So let's talk about let me ask this question, if
babies are born racist? What's that means? We're just racist?
Speaker 2: Right? Talk about Paul Bloom.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So let me tell you a short story. Back
when I was a university lecturer, obviously New York. I
taught in New York very racially, you know, multiculturally diverse
in every sense of the word. So whether it was
Midtown Manhattan or South Brooklyn or the Bronx or Nasau
or Queen's whatever, I had to teach the same material.
And one of the chapters was on human development from
you know, infancy to Cradles of the grave human psychology.
And at the time I was teaching, or around the
time I had finished graduate school, Paul Bloom had published
a series of studies that were well there were sixty
minutes segments on it. He wrote, you know New York
Times best selling books about it. Basically, he developed a
very unique set of research methodologies by which he claimed
you could get infants under twelve months old to demonstrate
complex social cognitive behavior, things that, according to the psychological
dogma of previous generations, really didn't show up until like four, five, six,
seven years old. According to Paul Bloom, it was present
in babies as young as three months old. Basically, what
he would do is a kind of rudimentary friend enemy
distinction test, so they were so infants would and there
are multiple iterations of this. I won't get into all
the minutia of it, but one such example was infants
would basically watch sort of a play of two dolls
interacting with one another, or three dolls interacting with one another,
where you know, the two dolls are maybe in conflict
over something, and then a third doll comes over and
helps one, maybe in a different a third doll comes
over and hurts another one. Basically, the infants were They're
measuring the responses of these infants to either aggressive or
cooperative social behavior between complete strangers. So you know, generally,
the outcome of the study was that babies tend to
like the helpers more than they like the kind of
anti social obstructive ones. They like neutral people more than
they liked hurtful people. They like helpful people more than
they like neutral people. And so I would show the
sixty minutes clip to my students, and invariably Paul Bloom
would would try to scale up the findings of this research. Okay,
so Tier one is infants have a preference for pro
social behavior over anti social behavior. Okay, So in Paul
Bloom's world, that means there's a sort of rudimentary fact
faculty there pretty much from birth, where infants can make
a friend enemy distinction. And with each subsequent iteration of
this experiment, they would fold in other social conflicts, including racism.
And again, around the same time, there was a whole
bunch of studies based on what are called looking time research.
Methodology is basically, how long does an infant stare at
something and how in particular do they maintain their gaze
or do they look away and get bored and seek
other kinds of stimulation. So at the same time Paul
Bloom is doing this research, there's other research showing that well,
infants have a sort of racial preference. You know, white
babies are going to look at a white face longer
and more intently than they'll look at a black face
or a yellow face, or a red face or a
brown face, and so on and so forth. And basically
Paul Bloom was making this argument that we are much
more cognitively complex at an earlier stage and human human development.
That would be part one. That part two, we have
an innate preference for pro social or what's sometimes called
you social behavior. And three that's part of that preference
is kinship preference. We have a bias towards people that
look like us, so on and so forth. And I
would show this to go back to the story time.
I would show this to my students. The students would
be you know, as young as fresh out of high school,
as old as like in their fifties and sixties, trying
to get another degree because the economy was totally shit
ten fifteen years ago, so you know, black, white, Arab, Jewish, Christian, whatever,
And routinely the two things I always observed, doesn't matter
where I taught it, doesn't matter who I taught it to.
One they were amazed at the idea that we have
that sort of cognitive sophistication that early on, so amazement,
but there was also a sort of horror at the
idea of implicating infants in the sort of nasty prejudices
and social evils that adults get messed up in. You know,
my class would be like, Okay, sure, maybe I'm racist,
but not like twenty four week old Timmy. He can't
be racist. That's wrong. And so my students had this
sort of innate sense that you shouldn't talk about infants
that way, that you shouldn't responsibilize infants that way, And
that kind of sat with me for a long time.
And the point of the essay that I basically make
is is there's a really really heavy presumption that Paul
Bloom is making that, whether it's wrong or correct, the
whole theory, his whole model kind of falls apart. And
the basic presumption he makes is that kinship is a
moral phenomenon as opposed to any other kind of cognitive phenomenon.
In other words, is it necessarily is there a moral
dimension to kinship preference. I think that's an open question.
I think it's a presumption that you're making that the
behavior or the type of categorization that the infant is
doing is necessarily moral as opposed to social, as opposed
to some other facet of social sorting would be the
technical phrase, some other type of cognitive sorting. Really, the
only way you can, seemingly, the only way you can
define those behaviors as moral, is if you have a
problem with those kinds of behaviors, if you see an
issue with an individual identifying with someone that they're genetically
related to, as opposed and showing preference for someone that
they are genetically related to over somebody else. And there's
a there's an excerpt in that essay from a New
York Times piece that that Paul Bloom wrote that again,
like the way we started our conversation basically gives away
the whole game. He says, oh, jeez, I can probably
pull it's probably worth pulling up the exact quote. If
you'll just bear with me for like half a second.
Speaker 4: Sure, here we go, all right, I'm not going to
waste your time.
Speaker 3: Basically, he says, there are there are there are key
differences in the ways that in develop morally, and the
problem is not that they have those tendencies, it's that
they differ from how we would like them to be.
So basically, he's saying, we need to social engineer kinship
preference out of infants, and if we can demonstrate that
they show kinship preference as early as two to three months,
then that's really as early as the social engineering program
ought to start. And that was what my students were
intrinsically picking up on in the classroom. They were recognizing
that if you are treating this novel cognitive psychology experiment
as a pretext for a sort of rigorous disciplinary educational program.
Almost none of them ever said that, but the horror
that they all saw in treating an infant like like
something you can mold was written all over their face.
And that's really the big issue with Paul Blum's body
of work, And that's what I'm focusing on in that
say is that, look, it's an open question whether or
not there's a utility and a benefit to studying moral
and social development and infants. But if you're doing that
with the express intention of trying to effectively derail cognitive
development infant cognitive development, then there's really there's neither a
moral nor even a scientific justification for doing so. I
chose ball Paul Bloom's essay because it's actually or his book,
because it's actually one of the worst books I've ever
read in my entire life. From an academic, you know,
Ivy League educated researcher. There's no citations, which, by the way,
like that doesn't bust my balls that there's no citations
in it. But if you're like an Ivy League person,
you're a department chair of universities, you're on sick like
that's what you're supposed to do. Like that, this just
like the bare minimum, and it's just non sequitor after
non sequitor after nonsequitor, and it's it's it's almost again
not to get too naughty and anti semitic here, but
like you're reading that book of his is like getting
into the mind of a Jewish propagandist because he's just
telling you he's he's demonstrating to you why his own
logic doesn't really make sense. You're getting to see the
weaknesses in their worldview. And there's a few other things
he cites in there in terms of like anti racist
race science that I think probably your audience would really
enjoy it. So that's, yeah, that's what's up with Paul Bloom.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it just it goes back to that. I mean,
at this point it's been attributed to so many people
a hypocryphal that give me a child before they're two
three years old, and I'll I'll own their mind for
the rest of their lives. I'll mold their mind for
the rest of their lives. Yeah, I mean, that's that's
all I ca here. And you know, and also what
I hear is, I don't want this kid to grow
up to be baby Hitler, so we need to we
need to make sure of that. So please let me
have access to that mind so that it'll never think
to turn its gaze upon me.
Speaker 3: There's in that book. I like it, really, I was thunderstruck.
They're peppered all throughout the book. His book is called
Just Babies Origins of Good and Evil, you know, a
little bit of a punny title, like they're just babies,
but also just in the sense of like justice and
all that kind of thing. Peppered all throughout the book
are mentions of basically like collective violence against other groups
and like in the first two or three pages he
mentions the show and almost with only there's one exception.
All throughout the book, all of his examples of like
evil racism, evil group conflict. It's always anti Jewish pogrim
stuff throughout the book, and like you just can't help
but read it and think, like there's an agenda here.
This actually isn't science, This isn't social theorizing. This is
just as I said in our last conversation, like this
is just like a racial polemic, like you are wearing
the And this is a concept I introduce in that essay.
It's not my own concept, but I've kind of put
my own flavor on it. Back in the sixties, you know,
there used to be this talk of ethnoscience as a
way to talk about like, you know, some African guy
in the bushes, you know, doing like witchcraft, voodoo, and
basically there there was an attempt to try to make,
you know, non industrial societies and their rudimentary like knowledge power,
make it on an equal footing to you know, Western civilization.
But I twist that a little bit, and I say, Okay,
let's accept the premise that different groups practice the scientific
method differently. That's basically what this concept of ethnoscience is
trying to say. Well, when when people like Paul Bloom
try to do the scientific method. It's actually not about
like objectivity, empiricism, uh, science knowledge, It's it's racial self defense.
And that's particularly egregious when you are making infants the
object of your racial self defense.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think if people pick up the pick up
the book and read the read the addendum, they'll get that.
They'll I think you wrap that up where basically a
lot of the writers that you're you know, most of
the writers that you're covering, that's what they're doing. It's
basically all of their work is in defense of their
own self interest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is why I think is an important book.
I'm certainly not the first person to bark up this
treat but I do think I did it pretty comprehensively,
and I tried to go after as many like central
figures as possible. Are there other people of the you know,
besides Daniel Conneman who are worth interrogating. Yes, And I
hope that somebody reads this and thinks, well, I'll plug
that hole. I mean, this book is like very much
in the vein of like a Kevin McDonald type of writing, right,
So you know, I don't think I'm necessarily trailblazing, but
I do think, you know, with regard to Daniel Kahneman
and Jonathan Hight. You know, these are two people who
I think, because of their recency, there's such a lack
of skepticism forwards their work. It's easy to look, you know,
fifty years, one hundred years in the past and say, oh, well,
Carl Popper kind of or Theodore Herzel or whoever, kind
of like, you know, their shit's all fucked up. Part
of my language, like it's obvious, but you're you know,
when it's in our lifetime and you're growing up and
maturing whatever, and you're seeing this work. You know, for
a whole bunch of reasons, people don't put their their
scrutinizing lenses on. And even in the right Jonathan Jonathan
Heights's work is cited pretty much uncritically, and to me,
like his ideas have always been on their face wrong,
same thing with Daniel Khneman, Like the idea that evolution
over whatever, thousands of years, millions of years, tens of
millions of years would create something like us that is
like a fifty to fifty coin flip in terms of
the shit going on between our ears as has any
positive utility. Like that's so obviously wrong. And the thing
that's so like to me kind of characteristic of someone
like a Daniel Conneman is that they develop all this
language and they develop all these concepts that you can't
like test or apply in the real world, or that
don't actually reduce confusion, but they actually create more confusion.
So like there's like one of the big concepts of
Daniel Connoman and this is a tangent I apologize this.
He talks about the human consciousness basically being broken up
into two systems, System one and system two. Hence the
title of his book Thinking Fast and Slow. One is faster,
one is slower, one's more prejudicial, one is more conservative
and reserved. One is more rational, one is more irrational.
And then if you ask yourself, well, where is System
one in the brain or in the body, or you
can't point to it. It's not a it's not an
actual thing that corresponds to like a material or social reality.
Speaker 1: Chemisphere is that one hemisphere versus another or something.
Speaker 3: Right right right? Even with Freud, And there's lots of
bad things you can say about Freud, but his tripartite
model of the mind more or less kind of corresponds
to the major areas of the brain prefrontal cortex, mid brain,
hind brain. There's this sort of analogical thing happening there,
but with kind of an it's like I'm just making
it's it's literally word craft, it's just word wizardry. And
and then you know, the title of the book, Intolerant
Interpretations is a very specifically intended title, like you need
to hear those kinds of things and immediately disregard them.
Like part of the problem that a lot of us have,
for one reason or another is we're just uncritically accepting
what's happening. And you can actually be like a like
a jerk, like a disagreeable jerk from the outset and
be right about like the whole affair. And that's that's
what I'm That's what I'm encouraging people to do. I'm
encouraging people to be a disagreeable jerk to basically fight
like like just don't accept the premise and and that
that that pertains to like our political activism, Like I
don't need to entertain the prospect that the United States
of America is a you know, giant job fair for
the whole rest of the world. I don't have to
accept the premise that our ancestors were bad people and
we need to be punished for it. I don't need
to accept that we should encourage people to forego family
formation so because reasons, because reasons that, like, on their
face don't even stand up to scrutiny anymore.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: One of the things that was mentioned is just the
myth of the individual you know, coming from a libertarian background,
the first thing somebody does when they become a libertarian,
which is the most individualistic ideology out there political quote
unquote political ideology out there, is they're like, oh, wow,
I'm an individual I need to find other people who
consider themselves to be individuals. There's a fucking political party
in this country of radical individuals. I mean, if that
doesn't tell you that individuality and radical individualism is just
a myth that as soon as somebody finds, oh I'm
embracing this, but oh I want to hang out with
other people who who are radical individuals too, It's like
that doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about?
You know, and you know people should you know, once
you start going down the rabbit hole of you know,
who preach libertarianism and where that came from, and you know,
maybe look at some of the names yep, yeah, yeah,
may start seeing some some similarities there too to what
we're talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is again it's a fine line that we
have to walk because I I correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't think you would flat out reject anything associated
with individuality, like we are our own people, I mean,
but this is why.
Speaker 1: We're individual We're individuals within a group mmma.
Speaker 3: Which is why I emphasize people like Gerd gigorinz Or
in my book as sort of an antidote to that. Yes,
you are you, Peter R. Cononas, and there is no
other Peter R. Cononas, uh, and you are in critical
ways very different from everyone around you. But at the
end of the day, we're a collective. We're a sort
of hive organism. We exist in physical spaces in proximity
to other people that we all depend on, even in
ways that we can't possibly fathom. So that's those are
kind of the major take homes of my book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, And remind everybody again where they can
find the.
Speaker 3: Book Antelope Hill Publishing dot Com. It's also on Amazon.
If you like the way this stuff sounds, you can
pick up my old books at Imperium Press. And I
maintain a blog Janiel dot substack dot com where I
basically continue the same type of writing. So Pete, I
really appreciate it your total gentlemen, and to your audience
by my book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a reminder, yeah, five percent off of if
you go buy his books at Antelope Hill and any
other of the great books at Antelope Hill if you
use code pe q all one word at check out,
and I cover shipping most of the time. So yeah,
I've my library is on the other side of the room,
and if I were to start pulling out the amount
of books from Antelope Hill, it'd be quite the pile.
So head on over there. Thank you, Josh really appreciate it.