The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 154. Abandon Ideology | Gad Saad

Episode Date: February 14, 2021

This episode was recorded on January 18, 2021. Gad Saad and I discuss, among other topics, ideas as parasites, postmodernism, social constructivism, applying evolutionary thinking to understand humans’ consummatory nature, epistemic humility, nomological networks, the degrees of assault on truth, and more. Gad Saad is a Canadian-Lebanese evolutionary psychologist, professor, and author. He is best known for his work applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. His most popular book is The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. He is currently a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.-Thank you to our sponsors:Helix Sleep - for up to $200 off all mattresses and 2 free pillows, visit: Helixsleep.com/JORDANTHINKR - to start your free trial, visit: thinkr.orgThe Great Courses (Plus) - for a free month of unlimited access, visit: thegreatcoursesplus.com/peterson-For advertising inquiries, please email [e-mail]  

Welcome to season four, episode six of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. This is an episode featuring Gadsad called Infectious Ideas recorded January 18th, 2021. Gadsad and Jordan discuss among other things ideas as parasites, postmodernism, social constructivism, applying evolutionary thinking to understand humans' consumatory nature, epistemic humility, nomenological networks, the degrees of assault on truth and more. Gadsad is a Canadian Lebanese evolutionary psychologist,

professor, and author. He's best known for his work applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. His most popular book is the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense. He's currently a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. I love my mattress, an unhealthy amount of love. Thank you, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep has a quiz that just takes two minutes to complete and matches your body type

and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. You can even get a mattress that's hard on your partner's side and soft on yours if you want to be mean about it, or if that's what they like. I'm picky about my mattress. I have been forever, probably from having arthritis as a kid or just being a princess. Probably the arthritis realistically. And these guys are fantastic for quality. I have the Helix Midnight and it's perfect. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan, take their two-minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life.

Make sure your room is dark and cold and then we even better. Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixleap.com slash Jordan. That's helixleap.com slash Jordan for up to $200 off and two free pillows. If you haven't heard of thinker.org and you're someone who would like to consume more books, you should check it out. THINKR.org It reduces books to minutes and offers succinct summaries and key points of popular nonfiction.

I find it's best used if you've read the book and you really want to solidify the main points in your brain or if you have no time to read books, but you want to keep up to date and learn. I find it incredibly useful. You can find books like Never Split the Difference, How to Win Friends and Influence People, 12 more rules for life, and more. If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, and become a better thinker, go to thinker.org. That's THINKkr.org to start a free trial today. Again, that's THINkr.org. This episode is also brought to you

by the Great Courses Plus. When I was in university, I learned more on the internet than I did in class, hands down. Part of the way I learned was from online platforms that host courses like the Great Courses Plus. With the Great Courses Plus, you have unlimited access to thousands of video and audio lectures on hundreds of fascinating topics.

Learn a new language, learn about great philosophers like Nietzsche, or something that most certainly is in deoys of time, try critical business skills for success. The courses are taught by the best professors and top experts in their fields. The material is all extensively vetted and researched, and with the Great Courses Plus app, you're free to watch, listen, and learn on any device at any time.

Get started with a free month of unlimited access. Just visit the special URL, the great courses plus dot com slash Peterson. That's a whole month to learn anything you want for free. So, side up now. Remember, the Great Courses Plus dot com slash Peterson. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to rate and hit subscribe. Have a lovely week. Hello, everybody. Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Dr. Gad Sade, a friend of mine, a colleague, an early supporter of mine when those were few and those were few and far between when all the publicity emerged initially surrounding

me and the videos I made regarding Bill C-16 in Canada. I was one of the first people to interview me. And he took, I would say, a substantial risk in doing so. We stayed in contact since then, doing some podcasts together. We've done each other's podcasts. And we spoke together at a free speech rally in Toronto. And that's a couple of years ago. Now, three years ago, I think, three tumultuous years to say the least. God has recently written the parasitic mind how infectious ideas are killing common sense and a number of other books as well, which you can see arrayed behind him, the consuming instinct, a contributor to the evolutionary basis of consumption, if I remember correctly. The soul author, but the author of that one is the edited book. Right, and that's evolutionary psychology in the behavior. In the business. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to talk about Gads book today, but a variety

of other things too. So, and I think that. Welcome to season four, episode six of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. This is an episode featuring Gadsad, called Infectious Ideas, recorded January 18, 2021. Gadsad and Jordan discuss, among other things, ideas as parasites, postmodernism, social constructivism, applying evolutionary thinking to understand humans' consumer nature, epistemic humility, nomenological networks, the degrees of assault on truth and more. Gadsad is a Canadian Lebanese

evolutionary psychologist, professor, and author. He's best known for his work applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. His most popular book is the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense. He's currently a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.

I love my mattress and an unhealthy amount of love. Thank you, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep has a quiz that just takes two minutes to complete and matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. You can even get a mattress that's hard on your partner's side and soft on yours if you wanna be mean about it, or if that's what they like.

I'm picky about my mattress. I have been forever, probably from having arthritis as a kid or just being a princess, probably the arthritis realistically. And these guys are fantastic for quality. I have the Helix Midnight and it's perfect. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan, take their two minute sleep quiz

and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. Make sure your room is dark and cold and then we even better. Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixleap.com slash Jordan. That's helixleap.com slash Jordan for up to $200 off and two free pillows. If you haven't heard of thinker.org and you're someone who would like to consume more books, you should

check it out. THINKR.org. It reduces books to minutes and offers succinct summaries and key points of popular nonfiction. I find it's best used if you read the book and you really want to solidify the main points in your brain, or if you have no time to read books, but you want to keep up to date and learn. I find it incredibly useful. You can find books like Never Split the Difference, How to Win Friends and Influence People, 12 more rules for life, and more. If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, and become a better

thinker, go to thinker.org. That's THINKR.org to start a free trial today. Again, that's THINKR.org. This episode is also brought to you by the Great Courses Plus. When I was in university, I learned more on the internet than I did in class, hands down. Part of the way I learned was from online platforms that host courses, like the Great Courses Plus. With the Great Courses Plus, you have unlimited access to thousands of video and audio lectures on hundreds of fascinating topics. Learn a new language, learn about great philosophers like Nietzsche,

or something that most certainly is in deoys of time, try critical business skills for success. The courses are taught by the best professors and top experts in their fields. The material is all extensively vetted and researched, and with the Great Courses Plus app, you're free to watch, listen, and learn on any device at any time. Get started with a free month of unlimited access. Just visit the special URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Peterson. That's a whole month to learn anything you want for free. So, side up now.

Remember, the great courses plus dot com slash Peterson. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to rate and hit subscribe. Have a lovely week. Hello, everybody. Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Dr. Gad Saad, a friend of mine, a colleague, an early supporter of mine when those were few and those were few and far between when all the publicity emerged initially surrounding me and the videos I made regarding a Bill C-16 in Canada. God was one of the first people to interview me. And he took a, I would say, a substantial risk in doing so.

We stayed in contact since then doing some podcasts together. We've done each other's podcasts and we spoke together at a free speech rally in Toronto and that's a couple of years ago now. Three years ago I think. Three tumultuous years to say the least. Gat has recently written the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense and a number of other books as well, which you can see arrayed behind him, the consuming instinct,

a contributor to the evolutionary basis of consumption if I remember correctly. No, the soul author, that one, but the author of that want is the edited book. Right. And that's evolutionary psychology in the behavior in the business science. Yeah. Yeah.

So we're going to talk about Gads book today, but a variety of other things too. So, and I think the conversation will naturally tend towards the topics that are outlined in the book. And in any case, so let's start with that. You talk about infectious ideas. Anyways, I should say it's very nice to see you, Gat. And thank you very much for coming on to this podcast. You do, Jordan.

It's so nice to have you back in the public sphere. I can speak for millions of fans. We've missed you and I'm delighted to be with you. Well, I tell you, for me, it's a lifesaver, man, to be able to come back after being sick for so long and and To be able to jump back into doing this. I I'm certainly not at my peak by any stretch of the imagination But it's such a relief that I still have a life Waiting to be picked up and that I can ask people to come and talk to me and they will. And I can start communicating with people again.

It's literally a life saver. And I mean that most sincerely. So I really do appreciate you coming to talk to me. And I hope we get a long ways today. There's lots of things I want to talk to you about. You talk about infectious ideas. And let's talk about that a little bit. Your book, so I'm going to take a bit of a critical stance to begin with, I think, your book

concentrates a lot on infectious ideas on the left. And of course, that's being a particular preoccupation of mine in recent years, although I spent a lot of my career dissecting infectious ideas on the right, because I was very appalled as any reasonable person would be about what happened. I mean, it's ridiculous to even have to say it, but I was preoccupied in some sense by what happened in Germany in the 1930s and the 1940s. And the infectious ideas that possessed that entire community, that entire country, and the devastating consequences of that. And so, it's obviously the case that infectious ideas can emerge across the political spectrum, maybe even in the moderate center, but certainly on the right, but your book concentrates almost solely on the excesses, the ideological excesses of the left. And I'm wondering what you think of that as a scientist.

Sure. It's a great point that you raised. And I actually address it very early in the book where I argue that it is absolutely not the case that it's only one side of the political aisle that could be parasitized by bad ideas and idea pathogens. The reason why I specifically focus on ideas stemming from the left is not because this is a political book,

but rather because I operate and you've operated your entire life within an ecosystem called academia. And within the context of academia, the idea pathogens that are most likely to proliferate are those that are stemming that are being spawned by leftist professors. This certainly does not apply that the right could not itself be parasitized by countless other idea pathogens.

So it's not because I was trying to take a political position, but rather as any epidemiologist would do, or I call myself a parisophologist at the human mind, I happen to be focusing on idea pathogens that are the ones that define my daily reality. Exactly. Well, I can sympathize with that because I would say as well that as an academic, I haven't felt the pressure of right-wing conspiratorial theories in relationship to my work. But I would say this is something that has happened is that I started to talk about political ideas because of the consequences of left wing ideological thinking in the academy.

And what happened as a consequence of that was that I was branded as you have been as a right-wing thinker, an alt-right thinker, maybe even a Nazi, because I was called that on more than one occasion. And I think that might be true of you too, although you make a more, a less believable Nazi than me, I would say, given your background,

a less plausible Nazi, let's say. So I found that when I objected to the to the excesses of the left, the people who sprang to my defense tended logically enough to come from the right, and there were tendrils, feelers out from even the more radical right to see if, because I was opposed to the radical left, that I might be a supporter, say, of the radical right. And what was interesting about that to me, watching that is that You tend to think better of people when they come to your defense. And so I noticed a What would I say

It's it's hard to keep your centrist bearings when you go after one side of the political equation and you'll be friended at least in part by the other or the feelers are there. And so I'm wondering what do you think about that? Do you think that have you shifted more towards the right as a consequence of opposing the radical left. I don't think so because oftentimes people ask me, you know, you never espouse a particular

position about your political tribe. And I answer them not to be coy or to be evasive. I tell them that's because I truly don't believe in sort of an all-encompassing label that defines my political positions. There are many positions on which you would think, oh, this is a conservative position. So, for example, when it comes to open-door policy or a K.A. immigration policy, then you would think I'm quote-conservative. When it comes to capital punishment for predatory serial petal files, I have absolutely

no moral restraint in the idea of executing someone who's raised five children. That would be considered a conservative idea. When it comes to social issues, then you would think of me as extremely socially liberal and quote progressive. So really, my own personal tribe is one that is defined by examining each individual issue and then proposing a position based on sort of universal foundational principles. So the fact again that I criticized largely the left says nothing about my ability to have most of my friends be leftist by me believing in many of their positions. It's simply that, you know, the way I like to compare it is if I were an endocrinologist who specializes in treating diabetes, it would be silly for someone

to come to me and say, but wait a second, Dr. Sad, how come you're never exploring melanoma? Don't you know that melanoma is a deadly disease? Well, of course it is. I just happen to be someone who is studying diabetes that doesn't state anything about the dangers of the endless other panoply of diseases that might afflict human beings. And so I think it's really very much in that spirit that I wrote this book. It's not at all that the right cannot be parasitized. Take for example, anti-scientific reasoning. Oftentimes, my leftist colleagues will pretend as though it is the right who engages in anti-science

rhetoric. Now let's take a discipline that I'm in, evolutionary psychology. Well, when it comes to the rejection of evolution, it is much more likely to be people on the right who reject evolution. When it comes to evolutionary psychology, in particular, though, it's a lot more likely to be people on the left who reject evolutionary arguments for, to explain, for example, sex differences. So it's not that one party is anti-science more than the other, is that each party has its own anti-scientific lenses and myopia.

Okay, so I guess these questions are particularly germane given what happened in Washington in the last two weeks and what still might happen in the next few days. We'll see. I've noticed recently among friends and family members, as well as more broadly in the culture, that there is a pronounced increase in the degree to which conspiratorial theories, in particular, and paranoid theories are propagating on the right. I think, now I don't know much about QAnon, I've been out of the loop, and I should be more

on top of that, but I'm not. But I do know that it's popular and pervasive, and I do know that Trump's claims to have won the election are supported by a network of conspiratorial thinking. I was speaking with Douglas Murray about that, and you tell me what you think about this. This is sort of the conclusion of our discussion was that so Trump claims that he lost, or that he won the election.

And actually that he won it by a substantial margin. That's the claims as far as I've been able to understand them. And then to believe that, this is what you have to believe. You have to believe that the electoral system in the United States is broken to the degree that fraud is widespread and pervasive and of sufficient magnitude to move in election. You have to believe that people as close to Trump as Mike Pence have become part of a conspiratorial network or have been shut down by people who are able to put sufficient pressure on him.

You have to believe that the judiciary in the United States, which I believe has ruled something like 60 times against his claims and one time in favor, you have to believe that it's become uncontrollably corrupt, even on the Republican side, even when those Republicans were nominated by Trump or Trump's people. And you have to believe that the only person standing on moral high ground through all of this has been Trump. And each of those propositions seems to me to be have a low probability of truth and

they're combined probability is infinitesimally small. So but there's widespread support for Trump's claims that he won the election and was robbed of it. So someone who is looking at your book, especially from a leftist perspective would say, well, not only are you concentrating on the wrong side of the equation with regards to clear and present danger. But the omission of analysis of conspiratorial thinking on the right shows a blind spot that is of sufficient magnitude to threaten the stability of society. Now, not to say that you're personally responsible for that, by any stretch of the imagination. But, um, see, I've really been thinking about this because I have felt as an academic

that the greatest threat to my scientific inquiry and to my free inquiry has clear, and to my students for that matter has clearly come from the left. But, well, but there's no doubt that conspiratorial thinking is on the increase on the right. I mean, I knew that was going to happen five years ago, and that's partly the sorts of warnings that I was trying to put out that with enough cage rattling, the right was going to wake up. But, well, I'll let you comment on that. So, to go back, I guess to reiterate what I said earlier, but in a slightly different way, I think what the argument that you're making is that the susceptibility to believe the

S, there's actually now a psychometric scale, which perhaps you're aware of, that actually measures susceptibility to the S. It's actually published, I think, in the journal called Judgment and Decision Making, and there's been several follow-ups of that work. So really looking at the ability to believe nonsense using a psychometric scale, all I think that you are demonstrating in the question that you're posing is that But all I think that you are demonstrating in the question that you're posing is that the capacity for people to think in non-critical ways is not restricted to a political aisle. The left can be anti-scientific, the right can be anti-scientific, the left can succumb to idea pathogens, the right can succumb to idea pathogens.

In chapter 6 of my book book I talk about a particular cognitive myelody which I coined as ostrich parasitic syndrome. I think ostrich parasitic syndrome is something that all people can succumb to. By the way, not only the left and the right can succumb to ostrich parasitic syndrome. Being highly educated and otherwise intelligent does not inoculate you from many of these cognitive distortions and irrational ways of thinking. So you would typically think, oh well, well, professors who are in the business of critically thinking would be the ones who might be immune from this. And meanwhile, as I described in the book, the ones who spawn all of this nonsense are typically professors.

So again, to reiterate, I truly don't think that it is a political statement to argue that people can think irrationally. I simply chose to focus on the left because, as you said, that's the world that I inhabit. That's the dangers come from those folks. Now, but does it mean that, listen, I, in 2017, when you and I finally appeared at that event in, in Toronto, I had received because of what had happened with that journalist where she wasn't invited and so on. And do you remember all that stuff? Sure. Faith Goldie. Faith Goldie. I can remember. We made the extraordinarily difficult decision to not include her on the free speech panel. Right. More than that, we sort of advised the organizer what our thinking was. And then ultimately,

it was up to her. She was the one who was organizing, by simply stating that, the number of death threats that I have received, and without being able to absolutely know for sure, I would predict that based on the demographic profile of many of the people who were sending me death threats, they would have been much more on the right, right? So again, it's not as though I am negating the possibility that people on the right could be absolutely insane in their own unique and flowery ways. All I'm doing though in the book is I am

focusing on diabetes without rejecting the fact that melanoma could also be important. So again, it's really, I hope that people don't read the book as though it is a political treatise. It just so happens that that's the ecosystem that I resided. So what do you think the metaphor buys you? I mean, you're a biologically oriented thinker. You talk about ideas in some senses, if they're analogous to life forms. And so let's explore that metaphor a little bit. What do you think that buys you in terms of explanatory power? Well, what it does is it contextualizes

the fact that many people slowly walk into the abyss of infinite lunacy in complete complicity So let me let me give you a couple of analogies because again in part, it's just a pros that allows me to draw a powerful analogy But I actually do think that there are literal comparisons in using those biological metaphors. So take for example the spider wasp the spider wasp looks for a spider to sting, rendering its zombified, it's still alive, it then carries this much larger spider into its burrow.

And then it, while the spider is fully alive but zombified, it lays an egg, and then the offspring will eat the spider in vivo. Well, I argue that political correctness is akin to the spider wasps sting, right? It zombifies us into being complicit in our silence, leading us slowly into the burrow of infinite lunacy. So you could view it as just powerful writing rhetoric, or literally the equivalent, a memetic form equivalent of what happens in biological systems.

Take now what I talked for example about parasitic ideas. Well, in neuro parasitology what you typically study is how a particular parasite will end up making its way to the brain of its host, altering its neural circuitry so that then the host will engage in behaviors that are maladaptive to it, but adaptive for the parasite. And so when I was trying to come up with a powerful way of explaining why do people hold on and get infected by these alluring parasitic ideas, I thought, aha, the neuro-parasitological framework is the ideal framework to try to explain why otherwise supposedly rational people could completely become parasitized by insanity, right? Why it would be that the LGBTQ community could suddenly become in favor of Queers for Palestine as this is an actual group. So it's Queers for Palestine, for Palestine, but down, down, Zionist, pigs. So Tel Aviv is one of the most welcoming spots for the LGBTQ community.

And so if I'm a member of that community, it would make rational sense for me to be supporting a system, a political system, a country where I could live in safety and freedom. But instead, I walk around saying queers for Palestine. That sounds parasitic. It sounds like the idea, the framework, that would cause me to say queers for Palestine,

rather than Yehyeh Tel Aviv, is not a good position to hold. Because as someone who comes from the Middle East, I could tell you that LGBT community and Gaza or the West Bank are not usually embraced with infinite warmth. So this is why I thought that using a neuro-periodesological model would be really apt in describing why we become so intoxicated with these bad ideas. Okay, so a parasite takes over a host so that the parasite can replicate. So it has an interest in the outcome, so to speak, or it acts like it has an interest

in the outcome. That might be a more accurate way of thinking about it. So in order for that parasite metaphor to hold true, the ideas, the ideas which are acting as parasites, would have to have an interest in the outcome. So, are you presupposing that ideas, I guess you're presupposing like Dawkins, that ideas compete in a Darwinian fashion, and those that are the best at taking over their hosts are the ones that propagate. The difference between, and I, of course, I cite Dawkins' work, yes, the dramatic stuff, the difference between, say, a

mimetic approach and the approach that I take in the book is, I guess, twofold. One means can be negatively valanced, they can be neutral and they can be positively valanced, they can be neutral, and they can be positively valanced, right? So memes, a jingle. If I start humming a jingle and you happen to hear me, you know, humming that jingle, Jordan, then you might hum it as well. And so my memetic jingle has now infected your brain. So that could be a completely neutral meme, or it could be a positive beam. So first the the valence of

memes can be you know all possible options whereas the parasitic ideopathicism I'm speaking of implicitly if not explicitly stating that they are negative that's one. Number two, the memetic framework operates as though they're viral, whereas there's a unique element to it being parasitic, right? So pathogens can be viruses, they can be bacteria, they can be parasites, they can be fungi, and so I am, the reason why I call them idea pathogens is because pathogen is a broader term that can incorporate viral infection or parasitic infestation. So there are a few of these types of nuances between the approach that I'm taking

and the one that Dawkins took so many years ago. So a parasite tends to make a host act in ways that that aren't that good for the host. It seems to me that that's potentially where the metaphor breaks down here because it also seems to me that people who are pushing these ideas forward or who are allowing themselves to become possessed by them, which is a metaphor I've used, actually gain as a consequence. So they're working for the same purposes as the parasite. And so then you have to wonder if that actually constitutes a parasite. I mean, the people who are pushing,

I'm given ideological position, or even a given theoretical position, hypothetically benefit from pushing that position as a consequence of the effects it has on their success within their broad community. Sorry, if I may interrupt. No, I think I would look at it as does the parasitizing of your mind result in the proliferation of the idea pathogen. The idea pathogen doesn't care about your reproductive fitness.

So for example, take Islamophobia. If I can, now I'm speaking as a Islamic supremacist, if I want my society to become more Islamic, or not my society, the West to be more Islamic, spreading Islamophobia as a narrative is certainly very good. So if I could convince a lot of people in intelligentsia in the humanities and the social sciences that it is Islamophobic to ever criticize anything

about Islam. So if the Islamophobia meemaplex to use docks term or I would call it more of an idea package if I can parasitize enough minds to repeat this, then that Islam Islamophobia, meme of Plex by it spreading from brain to brain has an ultimate goal of creating greater Islamization of the West. I don't care about the reproductive fitness of the humanity's professor who is spreading that Islamophobia, idea pathogen. Do you follow what I mean? So, yeah, well, it might be to your benefit

if you actually did enhance the function of your host. If by being parasitized by the idea pathogen, it improves the reproductive fitness of the host. Yes, or in this situation, maybe the ideological or the academic status of the host because then the ideas could be spread more rapidly. That, it certainly does, right? So if we can create an echo chamber where we could then spread that idea packaging more readily as happens in the academic ecosystem, that's

perfect. But the reality is the reason why I like the term parasitic rather than mimetic is because by having, so go back to the example of queers for Palestine, by having someone from the LGBT community fighting hard against Islamophobia and fighting hard against the Zionist pigs and so on, it is actually detrimental to my reproductive fitness, I mean, or never mind my reproductive fitness, my survival, right? Being someone who is a member of the LGBT community and standing up for a system that would be brutal and repressively is not exactly a good rational strategy to pursue, and yet I pursue it precisely because I have been infected by a parasitic idea packaging. You follow what I'm saying?

Well, I follow it, but it doesn't explain to me exactly the motivation for putting the idea forward. You know, because the idea isn't literally hijacking the nervous system of its host in the same way that the parasitic wasp that you describe, hijacks the nervous system of the spider. Like there's no direct, there's no direct connection between the ideas and the motivations of the host. And so I guess that's partly, I'm striving to understand

that. Yeah, so I mean, in the sense that the parasitic wasp is actually causing a neuronal alteration, a direct neuronal alteration that causes the spider to become zombified, you're right. But ultimately, you know, not to be too reductionist, ultimately everything that we do, including our ideas, could be translated to neuronal fireings, right? Right, but you have to, hopefully you'll be able to specify that mechanism. So that leads to it. Well, I mean, I'm not suggesting that you should have pushed your research to the point where you could specify the neural mechanisms, but it does open up a problem, I would say.

Maybe the problem would be, what do you see in some sense in the continual debate between right and left might be construed in the terms that you're using as a constant battle between proponents of the claim that one set of ideas is parasitical while the other set isn't. And so, for example, people who object to a biological definition of sex or gender would claim that the reason that the person who puts that claim forward has been parasitized by an idea in your parlance. And I think this is actually quite close to the claim that is made, but that the true reason for the claim, so the true the true reason for the claim. So the true motivation for the claim is something operating behind the scenes is that the person who's making the claims is

bolstering their position of power or maintaining their position in the status quo or attempting to put down another group, but mostly for the purposes of maintaining the status quo within which they have an interest. So they're actually not putting forth an idea that has any objective validity, but being possessed in some sense by an idea that has a function similar to the function that you're describing. So how do you using this metaphor? How do you protect yourself or protect even the entire critical game where ideas are assessed from degenerating into something like claim and counter claim that all the ideas that are arguing are nothing but or that are competing are nothing but parasites?

So at first I'm going to hear maybe surprisingly be more charitable in attributing a cause to the people who originally espoused and spawned all those idea pathogens. And so when I was looking at all those pathogens, and by the way, let me just mention them very quickly for your viewers who may not have yet read the book. So postmodernism would be the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, cultural relativism, identity politics, biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human affairs, militant feminism, you know, critical race theory, each of these is an idea pathogen. So as I was trying to think of some common thread that runs through all these idea pathogen, very much like if I were an oncologist,

I may be someone specializing in pancreatic cancer, which is very different than melanoma, and yet of course all cancers at least share the one mechanism of unchecked cell division, right? So even though they might manifest themselves and project through different trajectories, there is some conciliant commonality across all cancers. And so I was trying to look for a similar synthetic explanation for what do all these idea pathogens have in common. And here's where I'm

going to be charitable. I think that these idea pathogens start off from a noble place. And they start off from a desire to pursue a noble cause, but regrettably in the pursuit of that noble cause, then they end up then they meaning the the proponents of those idea pathogens end up willing to murder truth in the service of pursuing that otherwise noble goal. Right. So for example, if we take equity feminism, most people who are going to be watching this show are probably equity feminists. I'm an equity feminist, and if I can speak for you, I bet you're an equity feminist, which means basically what? We are, you know, men and women should be equal under law, under the law. There should not be any institutional sexism or misogyny against one sex or the other. So the Christina Huff-Summer position.

So we can start off with that being a great idea. Right. Well, we could even push that a little bit further and say that if we had any sense, we'd want the sexes to be open up to equal exploitation, so to speak, because everybody has something to offer, and that only a fool would want to restrict half the population from offering what they have to offer, even if he was driven by nothing but self-interest. Fair enough. Great. And so the problem then arises when militant feminism comes in, they argue that in the service of that original goal, in the desire to squash the patriarchy and the status quo and so on,

we must now espouse a position that rejects the possibility that men and women are distinguishable from one another, not better, not worse, but there are evolutionary trajectory that would have resulted in recurring sex differences that are fully explained by biology and by evolution, while militant feminists will reject that and hence they suffer from biophobia and other idea pathogen in the service of that original noble goal. So take first, I'll just do one more if I may. Cultural relativism, the idea that we know, there are no human universals, each culture has to be

identified based on its own merits and so on. Again, it starts off with a kernel of truth. It seems to make sense. The gentleman who first espoused this Franz Boas, the anthropologist out of Columbia, was trying to stop the possibility that people might use biology in explaining differences between cultures and so on. And and therefore justify them that way exactly right that the biologist would say this is how it is and therefore that's how it should be exactly so in the service of that original noble goal they then end up building edifices of evidence for the next 100 years where the word biology is never uttered. Right? I mean, and that's been my whole career, right?

Which is I go into a business school and I look at organizational behavior and consumer behavior and personnel psychology and all of the other panoply of ways that we manifest our human nature in a business context. And never do we ever mention the word biology. Well, how could you study all of these purpose of important behaviors without recognizing that humans might be privy to their hormonal fluctuations? To me, it seems like a trivial, trivially obvious statement to most economists. This is hearsay. What does what the hormones have to do with the economy?

So again, you start off with France Boas having a noble cause, but then it metamorphicizes into complete lunacy in the service of that original noble goal. So I think if I were to look for a conciliate explanation as to why all these idea pathogens arise, it's because they start off with a kernel of truth, with a noble cause, but then they metamorphosize into bullshit. All right, so here's another way that they might be conceptualized as parasites, too. Imagine that the Academy has built up a reputation, which is like a reputation is like a storehouse of value in some sense. So you get a good reputation if you trade equitably with people.

And then your ability to trade equitably is relatively assured in the future, right? You'll be invited to trade. And so reputation is like a storehouse in some sense. Now, academia, at least in principle, or the intellectual exercise, has built up a certain reservoir of goodwill, which is indicated by the fact that people will pay to go to universities to be educated. And the hypothesis there is that the universities have something to offer that's of practical utility, of sufficient magnitude so that the cost is justifiable.

You go to university and you come out more productive. And the reason you come out more productive. And the reason you come out more productive is because the intellectual enterprise that the university has been engaged in has had actual practical relevance. And you might justify that claim by pointing to the fact that the technological improvements that have been generated in no small part by raw research have radically improved the standard of living of people everywhere in the world. And some of that's a consequence of pure academic research, a fair bit of it, pure scientific research.

Now, what happens is that other ideas come along that don't have the same functional utility, but have the same appearance. And so they're not so much parasit, they don't so much parasitized individuals, let's say, as they parasitize the entire system. The system has built up a reputation because it was offering solutions of pragmatic utility, even training students to think clearly and to assess arguments clearly and to communicate properly has tremendous economic value if you do it appropriately because that means they can operate more efficiently when they're solving problems. Now, but once that system is in place with its academic divisions and its modes of proof and

all of that, it can be mimicked by systems that perform the same functions punitively, but don't have the same pragmatic, they don't have the same history of demonstrating practical utility. Well, let me give you an example. The idea of peer review, peer review works in the sciences because there's a scientific method and because you can bring scientists together and you can ask them to adjudicate how stringently the scientific method was adhered to in a given research program. But then you can take the idea of peer review and you can translate it into a field like, let's say, sociology and you can mimic the academic writing style that's characteristic of the sciences,

and you can make claims that look on the surface of them to have been generated using the same technologies that the sciences use, but all it is is a facade. So that's where the, it at that level where their parasitic metaphor seems to me to be most appropriate and so let me let me let me that you raise a great point so a couple of things to mention here. Number one, I I reside in a business school. And if I were residing in an engineering school, I would probably say the exact same thing that I'm about to say, which is the idea pathogens that I discuss in the parasitic mind have simply not proliferated in the business school and the engineering school for exactly

the reasons that you began enunciating at the start of your of the current comment, right? Because those disciplines are coupled with reality. I cannot build a good economic model using postmodernist economics. I cannot build a econometric model of consumer choice that literally that predicts well, you know, how, you know, that develops an AI model that learns what I should prefer on Amazon using feminist

glaciology. So I cannot build a bridge using postmodernist physics. So because those disciplines are intimately coupled with reality, it becomes a lot more difficult for their epistemology to be parasitized by idea packages. Yeah, okay. So now. This brings up some questions about exactly what constitutes a claim to truth. And I think engineering is actually a really good place to start because scientists often claim

and I've had discussions with Sam Harris about this a lot. And we never did get to the bottom of it, partly because it's too damn complicated. But, you know, I tend to adopt a pragmatic theory of truth, even in the scientific domain. And what that essentially means is that your theory predicts the consequences of a set of actions in the world. And if you undertake those set of actions and that consequence emerges, then your theory is true enough. So what is done is it's just demonstrated its validity within that set of predictions. Now whether it can predict outside that's a different question, hopefully it could, it

would be generalizable, but it's at least it's true enough to have predicted that outcome. And so in engineering and I would say also in business, maybe not in business schools, but certainly in business, in engineering, when you build a bridge, there's a simple question, which is, does the bridge stand up to the load that it needs to be resistant to? And if the answer to that is yes, then your theory was good enough to build that bridge. Now maybe you could have built it more efficiently and maybe there's a more, you could have got more strength for less use of materials in time. That's certainly possible. But there is that there's the bottom line there that's very, very close.

And in business, it's the same thing, which is part of the advantage of a market economy is that your idea can be killed very rapidly. And that's actually an advantage because it helps you determine what a valid idea is in that domain and what a valid idea isn't. And it does seem like the closer that disciplines in the universities have adhered to the scientific methodology, the more resistant they have been to these parasitic ideas in your terminology. We should go over again exactly what those ideas are, right? Just so that everybody's clear about it. But I start with postmodernism since this is one that you've tackled also many times.

Yeah, you want to define it and you want to let let everybody know exactly what we're talking about. But it's most basic level postmodernism begins with the tenant that, you know, there is no objective truth that we are completely shackled by subjectivity, we're shackled by a wide range of biases. And so to argue about absolute truth is silly. And so maybe I think. OK, so sorry, let me add a bit to that.

So we can flesh it out. So the postmodernists also seem to claim, and I'm going to be as charitable as I possibly can in this description because I don't want to build up a straw man. They're very, very concerned with the effect that language has on defining reality. And the French postmodernist thinkers in particular seem to have come to the conclusion that reality is defined in totality by language. There's no getting outside of the language game. There isn't anything outside of language. So that would be different. That would be exactly that, right? The constructionism, language

creates, reality is exactly what you just described, correct? Right, and it's weak theory in some sense because it doesn't abide by its own principles. So for example, and this is one of its fundamental weaknesses, as far as I'm concerned, is that Derrida says that, but then he acts as if and also explicitly claims that power exists. Right, right. And so that language, so if you're building realities with language, the question arises of why you would do that, and the answer seems to be for the postmodernists, is that's power, and that's a quasi-marxism. Right, okay, so you think that seems fair, don't you think? What is fair? Would someone who was a postmodernist agree with that definition?

I mean, yes, the problem though is that postmodernism allows for a complete breakdown of reality as understood by a three-year-old. It is a form of, this is why by the way, in the book, I refer to it as intellectual terrorism. And I don't use these terms just to kind of come up with poetic prose. I genuinely mean so I compare postmodernism to the 911 hijackers who flew planes onto buildings. I argue that postmodernists fly buildings of bullshit into our edifices of reason. And maybe if I could share a couple of personal interactions that I've had with postmodernists

that capture the extent to which they depart from reality. Now, I do that. Sure. And then we'll get back to elucidating the list of ideas that you've defined as parasitic. Fantastic. So in 2002, and I think this story might be particularly relevant to you, Jordan, because,

of course, you broke through in the public conscience because of the gender pronoun stuff, while you'll see that this 2002 story was prophetic in predicting what would eventually happen. So in 2002, one of my doctoral students had just defended his dissertation and we were going out for a celebratory dinner. It was myself, my wife, him and his date for the evening. And so he contacts me before the date. We go out for the dinner and he kind of gives me a heads up and he says, well, you know, my date is a graduate student in cultural anthropology, radical feminism and postmodernism. It's kind of the holy trinity of bullshit. And so basically the reason why he was telling me this is he's basically saying, hopefully,

please be on your best behavior. Let's not. Yes, and you recount this in the book. Yeah, okay. So yeah, that's okay. No, go ahead. I'm just letting everybody know. Yes, yes, exactly. And so, I say, oh, yeah, don't worry. I'm, you know, I get it. I get you. This is your night. I'm going to be on my best behavior. Of course, that wasn't completely true because I couldn't resist trying to at least get a sense what this woman sense what her positions were. So at one point I said, oh I hear that you are a postmodernist. Yes.

Do you mind? So I'm an evolutionary psychologist. I do believe that there are certain human universals that serve as kind of a bedrock of similarities that we share, whether we are Peruvian, Nigerian or Japanese. Do you mind if I may be proposed what I consider to be a human universal, and then you can tell me how that, you don't think that that's the case. She goes absolutely go for it. Is it not the case that within Homo sapiens, only women, their children?

Is that not a human universal? So then she scoffs at my stupidity, at my narrow mind, at my misogyny. It says absolutely not. No, it's not true that women bear children. She said no, because in some Japanese tribe and their mythical folklore, it is the men who bear children. And so by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us very footed in pregnant. So once I kind of recovered from hearing such a position, I then said, okay, well, let me take a less, maybe less controversial or contentious example. Is it not true from any vantage point on Earth, sailors, and time immemorial have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and here Jordan

She used the kind of language creates reality the deadly that position. She goes, well, what do you mean by east and west? Those are arbitrary labels and what do you mean by the sun? That would you call the sun? I might call dancing hyena exact words. I said, okay, well, the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets them to west. And she said, well, I don't play those label games. So the reason why this is a powerful story that I continuously recount and hence included in the book is because she wasn't some psychiatric patient who escaped from the psychiatric incident. She was exactly aping what postmodernist espouse on a daily basis to their thousands of adoring students. When we can't agree that only women bear children and that there is such a thing as East and West and that there is such a thing as the

Sun, then it's intellectual terrorism. All right, so back to the parasite idea. So okay, no, no, let's not do that. Let's finish listing the ideas that you describe in your book as having this commonality. So there's postmodernism, and we already defined that as the hypothesis that reality is constituted by language. Right. Which by the way, is a close ally

to another idea pathogen, social constructivism, or if you want social constructivism on steroids, which basically, and the reason why I add the on steroids, because social constructivism, the idea that we are prone to socialization, no serious behavioral scientists would disagree with that and no evoud evolutionary behavioral scientists would disagree with the idea that Socialization is is an important force in shaping who we are

A little serious intellectual would deny that language shapes our conceptions of reality exactly Right, so the issue is degree exactly the problem and hence the steroid part is when you argue that everything that we are is due to social constructions. Right. It's the collapse of a multivariate scenario into a univariate scenario. Like a univariate collapse. And that's by the way, I remember your brilliant chat

with the woman from the British woman, that, you know, I don't remember her name, the lobster stuff. Where... Cassie Newman! Cassie Newman, thank you. Where you made exactly that point about multifactorial, right? Where you were, when she was arguing,

everything related to the gender gap must be due to misogyny. When the reality is that, of course, there might be 17 other factors with greater explanatory power that explains why we're there. But she can't see the world in a multi-factorio way. She only sees it as due to similar. Well, look, this might have some bearing on the attractiveness of certain sets of ideas. We might even see if it's the attractiveness

of the so-called parasitic ideas. I think it was Einstein who said that it probably wasn't, I probably got the source wrong, but it doesn't matter that a scientific explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Right. Right. And so, and that's an Occam's razor. Exactly. With a bit of a modification there. And you want to, a good theory buys you a lot. And you want your theory to buy you as much as possible, because it means you only have to learn a limited number of principles and you can explain a very large number of phenomena. So, but there's the attraction of the inappropriate collapse of the complex landscape into its simplified counterpart whereby

you rid yourself of complexity that's actually necessary and inevitable. What that means is that you couldn't make progress employing your theory in a pragmatic way, but if you don't ever test it in a way that it could be killed, you'll never find that out right and so it's it's very easy in my new book which is called beyond order i wrote a chapter called abandoned ideology and i'm making the point in there that you it's very tempting to collapse the world into to collapse the world such that one explanatory mechanism can account for everything, and that it's a game that intellectuals are particularly good at because their intellectual function enables them to generate plausible causal hypotheses. And so you can take something like power or sexuality or relative economic status, or economics for that matter, or love, or hate, or resentment, and you can generate a theory that accounts for virtually everything, relying

on only one of those factors. And that's because virtually everything that human beings do is affected by those factors. And so that that that that that's that pro is it it's that it's the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these is it the attractiveness of that simplification that accounts for the attractiveness of these parasitic ideas. So I would say the idea of you or the process of finding a simple explanation for an otherwise more complex phenomenon, maybe could be linked to, I don't know if you're familiar with the work. Do you know, are you familiar with Gerard Gigerenzer?

Yes. Right. So, so if you remember in his work, which by the way, I love the fact that he roots it in an evolutionary framework. Yes, I like his work a lot. Great. I actually had done many years ago. He his group had invited me to spend some time at the Max Planck Institute. And so he's got the idea of fast and frugal heuristics, right? Yes, right? It's a pragmatic theory essentially. Exactly, because it basically says, look, economists think that before we choose a given car, we engage in these elaborate laborious calculations

because we're seeking to maximize our utility, because otherwise we won't pick the optimal car if we don't engage in utility maximization. Of course, wow, that's a beautiful normative theory. It doesn't describe what consumers actually do, because you and I, when we chose our last car, we didn't look at all available options along on all available attributes before we make a choice. Rather, we couldn't.

We couldn't. There's too many. Exactly. We use the simplifying strategy. And in the parlance of Giger-Enzer, it would be a fast and frugal heuristic because we've evolved. I mean, if I sit there and calculate all of the distribution functions of what happens if I hear a wrestling behind me, the tiger will eat me before I finish all of the distributions, right? The calculation is

all the distributions. Therefore, in many cases when I deploy a fast and frugal heuristic, it makes perfect adaptive sense. But the downside of that, so to go back to your point, is that oftentimes I will apply a fast and frugal heuristic when I shouldn't have done so. So for certain complex phenomena, my innate pension to want to seek that one causal mechanism is actually in this case suboptimal. So knowing when I should deploy the fast and frugal heuristic and when I should rely on more complex, multifactorial reasoning is the real challenge here. Okay, so let's say that a robust discipline offers a set of simplifications that are pragmatically useful.

Okay, and then, being a developing mastery in the application of those heuristics, boosts you up the hierarchy that is built around their utilization. Okay, so, you have a theory that allows you to get a grip on the world and to do things in the world like build bridges. And then if you're good at applying that theory, you become good at building bridges and that and because people value that, that gives you a certain amount of status and authority and maybe even power, but we'll go for status and authority. So you have the simultaneous construction of a system that allows you to act in the world in a matter that is productive but also organize as a social

organize a society. Now it seems to me that post modernists get rid of the application to the world side of things. application to the world side of things. So they really have constructed a language game that actually operates according to their principles of reality. It isn't, it isn't hemmed in by the constraints of the actual world, except in so far as that world consists of a struggle for academic power and endless definitions of reality within the confines of a language game. I've actually argued exactly for what you just said and speculatively trying to explain why otherwise intelligent people like Meshèl Foucault and Jacques L'Aqual and Jacques Derrida would have espoused all the nonsense that they did and I I argue, and I think there is some evidence

to support my otherwise speculative hypothesis. So let me put it in colloquial terms. So I am one of those post-votaries. I'm Jacques Lacan, or I'm Jacques Derrida, and I'm looking with envy at the physicist and the biologist, the neuroscientist, and the mathematicians, getting all the glory. They're the hot quarterbacks on campus getting all the pretty

women, right? Why aren't we getting any attention? Well, you know what? If I create a world of folk profundity where I appear as though I'm saying something deeply profound and meaningful, whereas in reality I'm uttering complete gibberish, then maybe my pros can be as impenetrable as those harry mathematicians, right? Yeah, physicists, yeah. Exactly.

It would happen to be generally, if you do IQ ranking among the disciplines, the physicists are the smartest, surprise, surprise. Right. So we have physics envy. Exactly. So the physicists envy. Even economists have physics envy. And that's why they've created now sub disciplines of economics

that are completely mathematical, but fully devoid from any real world applications. It all stems originally from wanting to be accepted in the in the table of serious scientists, right? You're making two arguments now, I think. I think one is that in the example you just gave, it's actually the thinker that's the parasite, right?

Because the thinker wants to ratchet him or herself up the hierarchy and it takes the thinker as a jump to that corner. Yes, exactly, exactly. The originators of these theories in your example, they want to accrue to themselves the meritorious status that a true scientist or engineer would have generated. Yes. OK, and so and they do that by setting up a false system that looks like the true

system, but doesn't have any of this real world practicality. And they justify that by eliminating the notion of the real world. Yes. And so in that case, going back to our earlier conversation, in that case, the originator of the parasite is actually getting, I mean, literally reproductive fitness. Right. Well, but is also acting as a parasite on a system that's functional. But then you could say on top of that, now he's allowing ideas to enter his consciousness and some of those will, some of those will fulfill the function of producing this full reality

in which he can rise. And so it's a parasitical set of ideas within a parasitical strategy. Yes, yes, I like it. And by the way, for this particular parasitics light of hand to work, it relies actually on a principle that you and I probably teach in sort of the introductory psychology course. So, fundamental attribution error, the idea of that people sometimes attribute this positional traits to otherwise, for example, situational variables or vice versa, right? I did well on the exam because I'm smart rather than because the exam was easy, right? Well, the Jacques Derrida being the brilliant parasite that he was, he was relying on exactly that.

Let me explain how. If I get up in front of an audience, so now I'm Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan, and I espouse a never ending concatenation of syllables that are completely void of semantic meaning, but that sound extraordinarily profound. Two things can happen. The audience member can either say, I don't understand what Jacques Lacan is saying because I'm too dumb and he's very profound, or I don't understand what Jacques Lacaw is saying because he's a charlatan who's engaging in a folk profundity. Well, guess what? Most people in the audience go for the former, right?

When I explained this to my wife, by the way, she said, you know what, you just liberated me from a sense of feeling that I was inadequate in college. What I know. It's really a complicated problem. Like, look, my assumption generally is that if I don't, it's not always this. I can't read physics papers in physics journals.

I'm not mathematically gifted. And so there are all sorts of scientific and mathematical claims that I can't evaluate. But most of the time, when I read a book, if I don't understand it, I believe that the author hasn't made it clear. And I've read some difficult people. I've read Jung, who's unbelievably difficult. Nietzsche and neuroscience texts, Jocke Panks, Jeffrey Gray, Gray's book, Neurosycology of Anxiety.

That bloody book took me six months to read. It's a tough book. It's 1,500 references, something like that. And an idea pretty much in every sentence, very, very carefully written, but a very complicated book. But I hit the, I read Foucault, and I could understand him, but I thought most of what he said was trivial. Of course, power plays a role in human behavior, but it doesn't play the only role.

Of course, mental illness definitions are socially constructed in part. Every psychiatrist worth his salt knows that. It's hardly a radical claim. When I hit La Caa and Derrida, it was like, no, sorry, what you guys are saying, it's not that I'm stupid, it's that you're playing a game. You had enough self-confidence in your cognitive abilities that you didn't succumb to their fundamental attributions like of hand, right? So you're one of those rare animals that said, wait a minute, he's saying bullshit because

I know that I can think and I'm not getting him. The problem is that most people that are sitting passively in the audience didn't come with your confidence. Well, maybe that's it. Maybe it's that they also didn't have a good alternative. Like I was fortunate, because by the time I started reading that sort of thing, I'd always already established something approximating a career path in psychology,

in clinical psychology, with a heavy biological basis. And so, but if I was a student who had encountered nothing but that kind of theorizing, and I was interested in having an academic career, I might well believe that learning how to play that particular language game was valid and also the only route to success. I mean, one of the things that really staggers me about the postmodernist types that I read and encounter is that they have absolutely no exposure to biology as a science whatsoever. They don't know anything about evolutionary theory. By the way, not just post-modernists, most social scientists. Yes, certainly.

And of course, walking around in the business school, think that biology is some Nazi vulgar... Oh, it's the same. It's the same in psychology, to some degree. And but my sense has been that psychology has managed to steer clear of the worst excesses of, let's call it this, this degeneration into this abandonment of pragmatic necessity. They've managed to steer clear to that to the degree that the sub-disciplines have been rooted in biology. It's actually being a corrective.

It's interesting you say this because I, and I discussed this briefly in the book, I gave once, when my first book was released, this, this one right here, Evolution I Basis of Consumption, this is a book where I try to explain how you could apply evolutionary thinking to understand our consumer nature. I had given two talks at the University of Michigan. The first day, I think it was a Thursday, I gave the exact same talk, so I was giving the exact same talk in two different buildings, two different audiences. On one day, it was in the psychology department.

And as for your viewers who don't know, University of Michigan has consistently always rank in the top three to five psychology departments in the United States. And as for your viewers who don't know, University of Michigan has consistently always ranked in the top three to five psychology departments in the United States. My former doctor also provides at goddess PhD in psychology in University of Michigan. He actually overlapped with Amos Tversky, by the way,

just a little bit of a historical, parenthesis. So I give the talk on Thursday in front of the psychology department. And because, as you know, parenthesis. So I give the talk on Thursday in front of the psychology department. And because, as you said, many of them are neuroscientists, biological psychologists and so on, they're listening to it and they're like,

oh yeah, this is gorgeous, good stuff, God, love it. The exact same talk, the next day at the business school, which again, you would think, based on what we said earlier, they should be very pragmatic in their theoretical orientations. If something explains behavior, then I should accept it. But because they were so bereft of biological based thinking, Jordan, I couldn't get through a single sentence. It was as if I was metaphorically dodging tomatoes being thrown at me. I couldn't get through maybe five or six slides of my talk because they were so aghast and felt such disdain for my arguing that consumers are driven by biological

mechanisms. And so the business schools can drift away from the real world, I think more effectively than the engineering schools can or the biologists. And you'd hope that the necessity of contending with free market realities would protect the business school to some degree. But my experience with business schools, well, often positive is often being that the theorizers couldn't necessarily produce a business. Right. Right. Well, I just think because I found that when I give a talk in front of business practitioners

Then it's always very well received when I give the same talk in front of business school professors Depending on how vested they are in their a priori paradigms It either goes well or not. So if they are hardcore social constructivists Then I am a Nazi. I am a biological vulgarizer. It's its court test. What are you talking about with all this hormone business? So the practitioners are not vested in a paradigm. If I can offer them some guidelines for how to design advertising

messages that are maximally effective using an evolutionary lens, they go, sure, sign me up. I don't know. to do it, right? Right, because there's a practical problem to be. So everybody has two practical problems. We might say, broadly speaking, one is contending with the actual world. So because you have to get enough to eat,

that's the world of biological necessity. And then there's the world of sociological necessity, which is produced by the fact that you have to be with others while you solve your biological problems. And you can solve your biological problems by adapting extraordinarily well to the sociological world, as long as the sociological world has its tendrils out in the world and is solving problems. So you can be a postmodernist and believe that there's nothing in the world except language, as long So you can be a postmodernist and believe that there's nothing in the world except language as long as the university is nested in a system that's dealing

with the world well enough to feed you. And that isn't your immediate problem. So you lose the corrective. Okay, so let's continue with the list of... Let me give you another one that I think you're particularly I think sensitive to it. You've probably also applied on. So the die religion, which stems from identity politics, another idea, but the die is the acronym for Diversity Inclusion and Equity. That is such a dreadfully bad parasitic idea because it really removes, so let's again speak in the context of academia, but it can apply to other topics that apply to HR departments, human resources department. Before I start, are you out of your position at University Toronto now, Jordan? Are you? No, I'm on leave. You're on leave.

Okay, well, maybe it's a good thing, because since you were last at the university environment, the dye religion has only proliferated with much greater aliquity, so that now when you apply to grants for grants, with all of the major grants, the equivalent for our American viewers, the equivalent of, say, an NSF grant, the National Science Foundation.

We have similar grants for people in engineering or social sciences or natural sciences in Canada. You have to have a dive statement that basically says, you know, what have you done in the past to advance dive causes? What will you do if you get this grant, if this grant were granted to you? How would you uphold dive principles? And there is a colleague of mine, a physical person. That's for sure, can you, and the medical research group say, oh my god, exactly. So, yeah, that's unbelievable. A physical chemist at one of our mutual alma mater's McGill University, maybe I've given too much information here, was denied a grant because it didn't pass the die threshold.

In other words, it didn't matter what was the substantive content of his grant application, the scientific content. He just wasn't sufficiently convicted, by the way. Right. So that's an indication, that's a situation where the elevation of that particular ideological game that's been elevated over the game of science. Exactly. Now that would be fine if they were both games, but science isn't a game, right?

It's a technique for solving, it's a technique for solving it's a technique for solving genuine problems Sciences what allows you and I Friends that haven't otherwise seen each other physically for many years to reconnect today and have a fantastic conversation As if we were sitting next to each other. It's science that did that. It's not postmodernism It's not Buga Buga. It's not indigenous knowledge. Now again It's not Buga Buga, it's not indigenous knowledge. Now again, people think, let me mention what I just said now, indigenous knowledge. People will think, oh, that's racist, that's hateful.

If I wanna study something about the flora or fauna of an indigenous territory where indigenous people have lived there for thousands of years, I can defer to their domain specific knowledge because they've lived within that ecosystem. So specific knowledge about a particular phenomenon could be attributed to group A, knowing more than group B. That's what ethno-bottonists do. Exactly. But the epistemology of how I study the flora or fauna, how I adjudicate scientific issues within that ecosystem, there isn't a competition between the scientific method and indigenous way of knowing. There is only one game in town. It's called the

scientific method. Yeah, well, that's what knowing is. That's the thing. That's why there's only one game is because there, as soon as we use the word knowing and we apply it in a domain that would pertain to indigenous knowledge and a domain that would pertain to science. As soon as we use the uniting word knowledge, we're presupposing that knowledge is one thing. And knowledge has to be something like the use of abstractions to predict and control. The use of abstractions to predict and control. It's as simple as that. And you could be predicting and controlling all sorts of things, but you act in a way, you act in a manner that is intended to produce the outcome that you desire.

And the better you are at that the more knowledge you have. Right, so imagine if now in the university, you're the die principles are not only being used to determine who gets a shared professorship, who gets a grant, who do we hire as an assistant professor, but it's also used to make the point that there isn't a singular epistemology for seeking truth, which by the way I would love later to talk about chapter seven in my book, where I talk about how to seek truth, which is maybe relevant to the many conversations that you and Sam have had, because I introduce, I think, a very powerful way of adjudicating different claims of truth.

And we can talk about that as well. Absolutely. And the logical network? Exactly. Thank you, Turner. So we can talk about that if you want later. But I mean, imagine how grotesque it is to teach students. I mean, is there a Lebanese Jewish way of knowing?

Is there a green-eyed people way of knowing? Is there an indigenous way? The distribution of prime numbers is the distribution of prime numbers irrespective of the identity of the person who was studying the distribution of prime numbers. Isn't that what liberates us from the shackles of our personal identities? You know, and you can say that and you can still say that people use knowledge to obtain power.

That's a primary postmodernist claim. People use knowledge to obtain power. Now, that gets exaggerated into the statement that people only use knowledge to obtain power. Now, that gets exaggerated into the statement that people only use knowledge to obtain power, and that's all that's worth obtaining. And then, of course, that becomes wrong because both of those claims are too extreme. But even in science, you can criticize science and the manner in which science is practiced by saying, well, scientists are biased and self-interested, just like all other people, and they're going to use their theories to advance themselves in the sociological world.

And then you can be skeptical of their theories for exactly that reason. But then you also have to point out that, well, scientists have recognized this, and just like the wise founders of the American state put in a system of checks and balances, scientists have done the same thing and said, well, because we're likely to be blinded, even when making the most objective claims about reality that we can, we're likely to be blinded by our self-interest, so we'll put scientists into verbal competition with one another to help determine who's playing a straight game. And so the checks are already there.

And which is to say that you can adopt much of the criticism that the postmodernist level against the scientific game without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You still say, well, despite all that, despite the human nature, despite the primate nature of the scientific endeavor and the jockeying for position that goes along with it, there's still a residual that constitutes progressive, what progressive expansion of the domain of knowledge? Well, so what you're talking about the checks and balances, that replication is something that is central to the scientific method that is second nature

in physics or chemistry or biology, but not in the social sciences is where the social sciences fail. Now, obviously you know about the reproducibility, crisis and so on. I mean, I, I, yeah, I was always less pessimistic than about that than everyone else, because I, or not everyone, but most people, because I always assumed that 95% of what I was reading

wasn't reproducible and that we were bloody fortunate. If we ever got 5% of our research findings right, it's still 5%, 5% improvement in knowledge. If that's an annual rate, let's say, that's an unbelievably rapid rate of knowledge accrual. And if 95% of it is noise, well, say, LaVee, it's a lot of 100%. But by the way, that's one of the things that I love so much about evolution and psychology, which might allow us to segue eventually into a normal logical network, is many of the phenomena that evolutionists study by the very nature of, for example, them there being human universals, it forces you to either engage in a conceptual replication or rather a direct replication of that phenomenon. So for example, if you want to demonstrate that facial symmetry is one of the

Markers that are used when Deciding that someone is beautiful. I can demonstrate that in 73 different cultures. Right, right? We could talk about the nomological networks a little bit. So this is a way to establish, let me introduce it a bit. Okay, because I think this is a simple way of introducing it. What you want to do to demonstrate that something is real, you sort of triangulate, except you use more than three positions of reference. So for example, we've evolved our senses

are a normal logical network system. So we say that something is real. If we can see it, taste it, smell it, touch it, and hear it. Now, each of those senses relies on a different set of physical phenomena. So they're unlikely to be correlated randomly. And we've evolved five senses because it's been our experience evolutionarily that unless you can identify something with certainty across five independent dimensions, it's not necessarily real. But we go even farther than that in our attempts to define what's real outside of our conceptions.

Once we've established the reality of something using our five senses, then we consult with other people to see if we can find agreement on the phenomenon. And then we assume that if my five senses and your five senses report the same thing, especially if there's 50 of us and not just two, and that and across repeated occasions, then probably that thing is real. And a nomological network is sort of the formalization of that idea across measurement techniques in the sciences.

Yeah, I love the way you use the census to introduce this because there is a term that I didn't describe this phenomenon in the parasitic mind, but I've discussed it in other context. I call it sensorial convergence. So for example, there's a classic study in evolutionary psychology by two folks that I know, one of whom is a friend of mine, Randy Thornhill, where they asked women to rate the pleasantness of t-shirts that were worn by men. And it turns out that the one that they judge as most pleasing of fact-orally speaking is the one that they judge as most pleasing of, of, of, of fact early speaking is the one that is also identifying the guy who is the most symmetric. Yes. So in other words, there's sensorial

convergence so that two independent senses are arriving at the same final product. In this case, the product being the optimal male for me to choose and it would make perfect evolutionary sense for there to be that sensorial conversion. Right. And in the book, you introduced the nomological network, which isn't discussed very frequently in books that are written popularly, right? That's an idea that hasn't been discussed much outside of specialty courses, say, in methodology, in psychology. I actually think the psychologists

came up with the idea of nomological networks. Yeah, so I'm going to describe what you just said and tell you how my approach of nomological lectures is grander, if you'd like. So the folks who came up with the term nomological networks and psychology were coming up with a nomological network of triangulated evidence when establishing the validity of a psychological construct, right? So when you're establishing

convergent validity and discriminant validity, right? The the Campbell and Fisk stuff, which by the way if there are any graduate students in psychology, what never mind graduate students psychology, any any student should read the 1959 paper, the multi-trade multi-method matrix by Campbell and Fitz. It's one of the most

popular. Right, and there's an earlier one as well by Cronback and Meal in 1955. Very good. For validity and psychological tests. Exactly. Right, and it was part of the American Psychological Association's efforts to develop standards for psychological testing. So it is, in fact, a method of defining what's real. How do you know that something's real? And that's what a normal... So in each of these validity constructs, points to ticking off this construct as being

valid, then I've now in a nomological network sense established the veracity of that construct, the validity of that construct. Right. Network Sense established the veracity of that construct, the validity of that construct. Right, and that's actually something a bit different than maybe than a pragmatic proof of truth. Because from the pragmatic perspective, the theory is evaluated with regards to its utility as a tool. This is more like an analogy to sensory reality. Exactly. If something registers across multiple different methods of detecting it, it's probably real.

Detecting it across cultures, across space, across time, across methodologies, across paradise. So it's really the grand daddy of nomological networks. If Chromebach and Campbell and Fisk were talking in a more limited sense of how do you validate a psychological construct? This is saying how do you validate the veracity of a phenomenon? How do I establish that toy preferences are not singularly socially constructed? How can I establish that? So maybe, you do that by studying primates, for example.

You study primes, so here I'm doing across species. Now I'm going to do across cultures. Now I'm going to do across time periods. And then you might look at Androgenized versus Non-Androgenized Children, and you can look across variation in hormonal status. I am so delighted by how closely you've read the book. I am honored, my good man, that you're exactly right. And so if one box within my nomological network did not convince you, oftentimes the data

in that one box is sufficient to convince you. But if it isn't, then by acidulously building that entire network, I'm going to drown you in a tsunami of evidence. And so I consider this an incredibly powerful way to adjudicate between competing. And so, by the way, this is why in the book, I demonstrate that it is not only used for scientific phenomena or evolutionary phenomena, by building a nomological network for the question of, is Islam a peaceful religion or not? In other words, I could use this grand epistemological tool

to tackle imported phenomena, even if they are outside the realm of science. Does that make sense? Yes, definitely. Well, it's a matter of... So, to put. Well, it's a matter of... So, to put it simply, it's a matter of collecting evidence. Okay. If you study...

If you approach a phenomenon from one perspective, you might see a pattern there. But then the question is, are you seeing that pattern because of your method? Are you seeing that pattern? Like, are you reading into the data or the data revealing the pattern? And the answer to that is,

with one methodology, you don't know. So what you wanna do is use multiple methodologies and the more separate they are in their approach, the better. And so when I wrote, when I wrote maps of meaning, which was my first book, I wanted, I was looking for patterns, and when I wrote maps of meaning, which was my first book, I wanted, I was looking for patterns. And, but I was skeptical of it. I wanted to ensure that the patterns I was looking at sociologically and in literature, and were also manifest in psychology and in neuroscience. And I thought that that was Ford, that gave me the ability to use four dimensions of triangulation,

so to speak. Right. And the claim was, well, if the pattern emerges across these disparate modes of approach, it's probably, there's more, there's a higher probability that it's real. And so a psychology that's biologically informed is going to be richer than one that isn't because your theory has to not only account for behavior, let's say, in the instance, but it also has to be in accord with what's currently known about the function of the brain. Exactly.

And that's the approach that you're taking to analysis of business problems. Exactly. And by the way, it is truly a liberating way to view the world because it allows you, in a sense, to, so if you have epistemic humility, you're able to say, if now you, Jordan, you were asking, hey, you know, in Canada, Justin Trudeau passed the laws legalizing cannabis. What do you think of those laws?

Well, then I would say, you know what? I have epistemic humility. I simply don't know enough. I haven't built the requisite nomological network to pronounce a definitive position on this. On the other hand, if you ask me a question on a phenomenon for which I have built my nomological network, then I can enter that debate, that conversation with all the epistemic swagger that I'm afforded by the protection of having built that nomological network. So it's a really wonderful way to view the world because it allows me to exactly know when I can engage an issue with well-deserved

self-assuredness and when I should say, you know, I really just don't know enough about the topic. And by the way, someone like you who has of course also been a professor for many years, if you establish that epistemic honesty with your students, it's actually quite powerful because if an undergraduate student asks me a question and in front of everyone, I say, wow, you really stumped me with that question. You know, why don't you send me an email and let me look into it? What that does is it builds trust with those students, because it's saying this guy is not standing up in front of us

pretending to know everything. As a matter of fact, he was willing to admit that he was stumped by the student of a 20-year-old. OK, so let me ask you something about that epistemic humility in relate, because we want to tie this back. You defined a number of intellectual subfields as included in this parasitic network, let's say, under the parasitic rubric. And would it be reasonable to say that one of the, then you're left with a question,

which is how do you identify valid theories of knowledge from invalid theories of knowledge? It seems to me that postmodernism has to deny biological science because biological science keeps producing facts, claims, keeps making claims that are in commensurate with the postmodernists. Now it seems to me that a reasonable approach would be to say, well, the claim can't be real unless it meets the tenets of the postmodernist theory, but also manifests itself in the biological sciences. It has to do both. It can't just do one or the other.

Now, maybe that wouldn't work for the biologists, but the fact that the postmodernists tend to throw biology out is one of the facts that Shed's disrepute on their intellectual endeavor as far as I'm concerned because if they were honest theorists They'd look for what was solid in biology and ensure that the theories that they're constructing were in accordance with that rather than having to throw the The entire science out the window either by omission not knowing anything about it or by defining it as politically suspect and so so I'll introduce here another term. I didn't discuss this much in this book, in the Paracetic Mind, but I certainly have discussed it in some way. Otherwise, so the notion of conciliates, which is why, so let me introduce this term for your viewers who don't know it. The term was reintroduced into the vernacular by E.O. Wilson, the Harvard

biologist who wrote a book in the 1990s of that title, Consilience, Unity of Knowledge. So Consilience is very much related to the idea of nomological networks because what counts? Consilience is basically saying that can you put a bunch of things under one explanatory rubric? So physics is more conciliant than sociology, not necessarily, although notwithstanding what you said earlier about the IQ of physicists, it's not because physicists are smart and sociologists are done. It's because physicists operate using a conciliant tree of knowledge, which by the way, evolutionary theorists also do, you start with a meta theory that then goes into mid-level theories, which then goes into universal

phenomena, which then generates hypotheses, so that the field becomes very organized. The problem with postmodernists is that they exist in a leaf node of bullshit, right? It is perfectly unrelated to any conciliant tree of knowledge. Therefore, they can never advance anything, because as you said earlier, they exist within an ecosystem where they reward one another, but they can never build coherence, right? That's why physics and biology and the neurosciences and chemistry are prestigious. It's not because they are necessarily more scientific than sociology, it's because they take conciliates at heart. Does that make sense? Does that make sense?

Yes, I mean, I think to some degree too, that you also have to note that the phenomena that physicists deal with are in some sense simpler than the phenomena that the first geologists deal with, so the physicists and the chemists and even the biologists to some degree have plucked the low hanging fruit. That's August cult, by the way, we said this, right? Augustine Colt created a hierarchy of the sciences

and perhaps because he was a sociologist in Cline, he placed sociology at the apex of the sciences, precisely arguing what you just said, which is it's a lot easier to study the crystallography of a diamond than it is to study the rich complexity of humans within a social system. Right, although that doesn't make it simple, it's still really complicated. So, you know, it still requires a tremendous amount of intelligence to be a physicist

and to manage the mathematics, because although the theories have tremendous explanatory power, they're still very sophisticated. So, okay, so I've been trying to think about this from the perspective of a postmodernist, say, well, we're making the claim that biology and chemistry and physics, all these this multitude of pragmatic disciplines, engineering, to some degree psychology and business, they're valid enterprises and they need to take each other's findings into account. So the postmodernist might say, well, these various disciplines don't take our findings into account. it, various disciplines don't take our findings into account. And so they're being just as exclusionary as we are. Right. Now, is that a valid argument? No. Why are those useful

findings that they've come up with? And if you, I don't know any, please tell me about them. I actually challenged. Are they useful in restructuring society so that it's fairer? No Why not that's the claim right and no no no no, but it's not that straightforward because It's not like so let's let's make the presumption for a moment that these are essentially left-wing theories It's it's the case that it's not the case that the left wing politically has had nothing to offer the improvement of society. You see all sorts of ideas that are generated initially by the left that move into the mainstream that have made society a more civil place.

I mean, maybe that's the introduction of the eight hour workday or the 40 hour workweek or universal pension or at least in Canada and most other countries apart from the United States, universal healthcare. Almost everybody now presumes that those things are that they've improved the quality of life for everyone rich and poor alike. And I think I think that that's a reasonable claim. Is the, is the, are the claims of the postmodernists justified by the political effects of their actions? Can you give me an example of a postmodernist nugget that had it not been espoused specifically by a postmodernist, the world would be a poorer place, whether it be practically theoretically epistemologically. Can you think of one off the top of your head, George?

I can only do it generally, like in the manner that I just did, to say that, well, it's part of the domain of left-wing thought, and it's not reasonable to assume that nothing of any benefit has come out of the domain of left-wing thought, and it's not reasonable to assume that nothing of any benefit has come out of the domain of left-wing thought. I mean, that's a very general, it's a very general analysis. I'm not pointing to a particular theorem, for example. Right. But see, take for example, in your field of clinical psychology, we can say, okay, cognitive behavior therapy by studying that process and then by testing it using the scientific method in terms of its efficacy in reducing anxiety symptoms in patients.

If I say nothing more, I've just offered a single example of a valuable insight coming from clinical psychology, whether it be theoretical or in the practice of therapy. And of course, there are many more than that singular CBD example that I just gave. It would not be hyperbolic for me to say, and maybe I don't know enough about postmodernism, but I think I do. You can't even come up with one, I don't mean you, I mean in general. Yeah. No one can come up with a single example as simple as me just enunciating the value of cognitive behavior therapy at that level,

you can come up with one postmodernist insight. The only insight that we have is that we are shackled by subjectivity, we are shackled by our personal biases and that is true. And any human being with a functioning brain could have told you that. So do we need to build that kind of criticism has been leveled within fields by the practitioners in those fields many times, including by the postmodernist to their field. I would hesitate to say, I would say, you know, reflexively, I would say no, because if everything's a language game, then why play the postmodernist game? Right.

You know, why does it, why does it obtain privilege status in the hierarchy of truth claims, if there's nothing more than the world that's produced by language? Well, I think, I mean, because some of your viewers might be saying, well, why are they spending so much time on postmodernism and then there are other idea packages? The reason why actually it's important to talk about postmodernism, because it's a fundamental attack on the epistemology of truth. That's right. Well, now there's something we need to point out.

That's right. Exactly, right? So I had a very different mind, who actually happens to be a clinical psychologist also, just a lovely guy who once asked me, very pol a clinical psychologist also, just a lovely guy, who once asked me, very politely, he said, you know, Dad, did you mind if I ask you a personal question? I said, go ahead. He said, how come you are such a truth defender and so on, and you're perfectly happy to criticize all these leftist idea pathogens? They're very much along the lines of how you started our conversation today, Jordan. And yet, you're not as critical of Donald Trump's attacks on truth. And so let me answer that

question here, because in a sense, it will start to be a good one. Right? So Trump attacks specific truth statements. I have the biggest penis. All women have told me that I'm the greatest lover ever. There's never been a president who is as great as me. I have the biggest audiences at my rallies. Each of these might be demonstrably false and lies and therefore they are attacks on a particular truth statement. That to me is a lot less problematic while it is reprehensible, I disagree with any form of line, that is a lot less concerning to me

than a group of folks that are devoted to attacking the epistemology of truth. Okay, define that and define the epistemology of truth so that we can divide down the method is a way of tackling truth. The nomological networks that we spoke about earlier is a way of adjudicating between competing statements as to what is true or not. Those are so the scientific method and and all of its offshoot are ways by which we've agreed that that's the epistemology by which we create core knowledge and then build that front.

Right, okay, so let's outline that a little bit. So that's a really good point. So there are degrees of assault on truth. And the more fundamental the axiom that you're assaulting, the more dangerous you're assault. Bingo. Okay, so the non-postmodernist claim, so maybe this is the enlightenment claim, perhaps, is that there is a reality. I think it's deeper than that because I think that's actually grounded in Judeo-Christianity and even grounded far beyond that, probably grounded in biology itself, but it doesn't matter for the sake of this discussion.

There is an objective world. There is a knowable reality. Yes. Okay. There's a knowable reality that multiple people can have access to. There's a knowable reality, but our biases and limitations intellectually and physiologically make it difficult for us to know it. It's complex and we're limited.

There's a method by which we can overcome that. The method is the nomological method which you just described essentially, which is the use of multiple lines of evidence. Yes, lines of evidence derived from multiple sources, multiple people, multiple places across time. That enables us to determine with some certainty what that object of reality is. That enables us to predict and control things for our benefit. Beautiful. Okay. And the post-modernists, the post-modern attack is on all of that.

Everything. And that's why now I hope you might agree that it's not too harsh for me to say they are intellectual terrorists because they put these little bombs of BS that blow up the nomenological network that blows up the epistemology of truth, right? And so you're making a claim even beyond that though in the book, which is, and this is the claim that I want to get right to, which is that they put forward that theory in order to benefit from being theorists. That that benefit accrues to them personally as they ratchet themselves up their respective intellectual hierarchies and gain the status and power that goes along with that.

And the fact that it does damage to the entire system of knowledge itself is irrelevant. That's what do you call that damage that you don't mean when you bomb something. Collateral damage? Collateral damage, right. So they're willing to sacrifice the entire game of truth seeking to the promotion of their own individual careers within this, within the language hierarchy that they've built. And by the way, you hit on a wonderful segue to another, I think, important point in the book, and that is the distinction between de-entological ethics and consequentialist ethics, right?

De-entological ethics for the viewers who don't know. If I say it is always wrong to lie, that's an absolute statement, right? If I say it is okay to lie, if I'm trying to spare my spouse's feelings, that's a consequentialist statement. Well, it turns out, in many cases, the ones who espouse those parasitic idea pathogens are engaging their consequentialist ethical system, right? Because what they're saying is, if I murder truth in the service of this more important noble social justice goal, so be it, right? Whereas if you are an absolutist and the ontological you're you're positing an objective reality even with the main of ethics. Well, that's

another place where the the postmodern effort fails is that it can't help but refer to things that are outside of the language game. So by relying on consequentialist ethics, and I'd have to I haven't been able to think it through to figure out whether I agree with your claim that the postmodernists tend to be consequentialists. It makes sense to me. And I think that their emphasis on hurt feelings is an indication of that, right? Never because there's no objective reality, you can't sacrifice people's feelings or lived experience to any claim lived experience to any claim about objective reality. But by doing that, they elevate the subjective to the position of ultimate authority. And you know, maybe that's part of the driving motivation is the desire to elevate the subjective to omniscience.

Exactly. And this is why, and so I know you're not mathematically minded, but if I can just divert into my background of mathematics. In the book, I talk about the field of operations research, which is the field where you try to acematize, if you'd like, to put in axiomatic form and object a function that you're trying to maximize or minimize, right?

So for example, when I was a research assistant when I was an undergrad and a graduate student, I worked on a problem called the two-dimensional cutting stock problem. So if you have, for example, rectangles of metal, and you get an order to produce 20 x by y order to produce 20 x by y subsheets within that broader metal. How should I do the cut as to minimize the waste of metal? So operations research is a field that is commonly applied, for example, in business problems, where you're trying to minimize the queue time that consumers wait or maximize profits. So it's a very, very complicated mathematical field, applied mathematics field to solve real-world problems. So now let's apply it

to this consequentialist story. In the old days, the objective function of a university was maximize intellectual growth, maximize human knowledge. Today, it is not a problem. Credit-created on the idea that there was knowledge, that was genuine, there was a difference between forms of knowledge somewhere better than others, somewhere more valid than others. Right? So that's part of the claim that you can have knowledge at all. Exactly. Whereas now, the objective function is minimize hurt feelings, or it might be maximize learning whilst minimizing hurt feelings.

Well, you know, I wouldn't mind that so much if the claim that feelings were ultimately real was made tangible. Because then at least we'd have an ultimate reality that was outside of words. But you can't say that the world is a construct of words and then say at the same time, but there's nothing more real than my subjective feelings. Like I have some sympathy for that because I'm not sure that there is anything more real than pain, all things considered.

Like pain seems really real to me. And it's fundamentally subjective. And I think that a lot of what we consider ethical behavior is an attempt to minimize pain given it's fundamental reality. So it's not like I don't believe that subjective feelings are real and important. But I'm willing to claim that there is such a thing

as real and important and true. And so it's logically coherent for me to make that claim. It's the incoherence of the claims that bothers me. Well, it's part of what bothers me. Well, we should probably sum up to some degree, because we've been going for a while. All the five hours. I know, I know, but I'm starting to get tired

and I'm starting to lose my train of concentration. And so I don't want to do anything but a top-rate job on this. Let me summarize for a second what we've discussed. And then if you have other things to add that we haven't talked about, then we can go there. So we talked about ideas as parasites. And then we spent some time unraveling

what parasite might mean. And the conversation moved so that we kind of built a two-dimensional or two-strata model of parasitical idea. There'd be the parasitical behavior of the theorist who puts forth a theory that mimics a practically useful theory in the attempt to accrue to himself or herself goods that have been produced by theories that actually have broad practical utility. So there's that, and then there's the parasitical idea that serves that function for the person who's using it in a parasitical way. Okay, so, and then we talked about postmodern ideas in particular as examples of that.

And I guess the one, one of the things we haven't tied together there is exactly how the, why is it necessary or why has it happened that the ontological and epistemological claims of the postmodernists aid in a bet the parasitic function. That's a tough one. Why did they take the shape they actually talked about? Yeah, that's actually I make an attempt to explain that and let me know if you buy it. So remember earlier I was talking about what are some of the commonalities across the idea pathogens? Yeah. And I said that they kind of start off with the kernel of truth and they start off with

some noble original goal. The other thing that I would say, which I think answers the question that you just posed, is that each of those idea pathogens freezes from the pesky shackles of reality. So in a sense, they are liberating. So postmodernism liberates me from capital T truth. There is my truth, there is my lived experience. The transfix liberates me from the shackles of my biology and my genitalia.

So it's the attractiveness of that liberation that provides the mode of at least in part. The blur of the parasite, exactly. Right, if biology is useless, I don't need to know anything about it. And people do that a lot, people do that a lot. Look, social constructivism and other one of those idea pathogens frees me from the shackles of Realizing that I will never be nor will my son be the next Michael Jordan because social constructivism as espoused originally and by Behaviorism right the the famous quote which I cite in the book give me 12 children and I could make anyone a beggar or a surgeon or whatever

That is basically saying that it's only the unique socialization forces that can strain you in life that don't turn you into the next Michael Jordan. There is nothing a priory that didn't start us all with equal potentiality. Well, that's a lovely message. Well, it's two. Now, you got two messages there. As my subjective reality is the only reality, that's the first thing. And the second thing is, socialization can produce any outcome.

So that's a huge, that's a huge expansion of my potential power. I'm right by dint of my existence and my ability to modify the nature of reality without restriction. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. to modify the nature of reality without restriction. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And therefore, it is hopeful because it frees me from the shackles of the constraints of reality, right? I want to believe that any child that I could have produced could have genuinely had an equal probability of being the next Albert Einstein or Michael Jordan. That's hopeful, that's wonderful. It's also rooted in bullshit, right?

So I think all of these idea pathogens share the common desire for people to believe hopeful messages that are rooted in nonsense. Well, that's probably a good place to stop. Hey, Jordan, so nice to see you. We've been discussing the parasitic mind by Gadsad and when was it published? October six of this past year. So it's just a bit more than three months. How's it doing? If you're comparing it to all possible books, it's a smashing success. If we compare it to Jordan

Peterson's last book, then it's not doing very well. So it's life is about work. I don't want to compare my next book to that book. So, but it's been doing well, eh? It's doing very well. Oh good. I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad to hear it. So, do you think we did we miss anything in our discussion? No, I did.

Well, we did, but was the discussion sufficiently complete so that you're satisfied with it? I am more than anything. I'm just satisfied that you're feeling complete so that you're satisfied with it? I am more than anything. I'm just satisfied that you're feeling better, that your family's doing well, that you're back into this, on the saddle, and that hopefully we'll have your voice in the, I've been trying to hold the fork, but having someone like you missing makes it that much tougher.

So I'm so glad you're back. Big e-hug to you. And thank you so much for inviting me, Jordan. Thank you. Thank you very much for talking with me. I found it very enjoyable. And I felt that I got I know something more than I did when I started the conversation, which is always the hallmark of a good conversation. And I mean, we can dig into these things. The things we discussed today endlessly. We never get to the bottom of them fully. But maybe a little bit farther with each genuine conversation. And maybe the next one your book comes out, you'll be sure to come on my show so that

we can discuss it. Yes, well, if I have the wherewithal and the energy, I'd be happy to do that. And maybe we can discuss some of the things that where we haven't established any concordance, I know that I'll just, I noticed that you would talk admiringly about role theory in the parasitic mind. And I kind of, and I've noticed before

that you're not very fond of the idea of archetypes. And I thought, without something we could talk about at some point, because I think archetypes are biologically instantiated roles. And so it seems to me something we could talk about at some point, because I think archetypes are biologically instantiated roles. And so it seems to me that we could probably come to some agreement on that front. I actually agree with you. If we leave it within the biological realm, then an analysis of archetypes works well for me.

When we start introducing a bit of the kind of mythological occultist stuff that, regrettably, one of your eros engages in, that's when I started. Yeah, well, that's something that we could profitably discuss because I think there's a much stronger biological, well, look at it this way, God, if you imagine a culture imagined an ideal, a culture imagined an ideal. And then imagine that approximations to that ideal, people who approximated that ideal were more biologically fit as a consequence. They were more attractive, which you would be if you embodied a true ideal. Well, so what that would mean is that over time the society would come to evolve towards its imagined ideal. Yes. So that makes a

biologically instantiated archetype a very complicated thing because it starts in imagination, but it ends it instantiated in biology and no one's ever come up with a real mechanism for that, right? It doesn't, but that works. You you posit an ideal, then if you manifest it you're more attractive then the ideal starts to become something that evolution Tilted toward So I'm an agreement with everything you said so maybe we won't have much to disagree about yeah Well, well, we should be able to clear things up anyways, and sometimes that's a good way of resolving disagreements I look forward to adjourn so good. Okay. Okay. God. Thanks very much, thanks very much, hey. Bye, Pleasure. All right, bye, bye.

Bye, bye, take care. you