The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1192: Anti-Conspiracy Activist's Self-Interested Motivations w/ Josh Neal

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

102 MinutesPG-13Josh Neal is a former psychology professor and author of the books "American Extremist" and "Understanding Conspiracy Theroies Vol. 1"Josh joins Pete to discuss his recent book, "Intolerant Interpretations."Intolerant InterpretationsJosh's SubstackJosh's YouTubeAmerican ExtremistUnderstanding Conspiracy Theroies Vol. 1Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Josh Neal's back. What's happening, Josh? It's going well, Pete. Love talking to you. Thanks for the invite as well. You're a very gracious host, and we always have good conversations. So I'm looking forward to it today. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Appreciate that a lot. Thank you for doing the Old Glory Club live stream last week. Gave us some context into the JFK mess and other things. But last time you were on, we talked about the term woke right, and we talked a little bit about your second book, understanding conspiracy theories. But the new book, Intolerant Interpretations, starts to go even beyond that and really starts to get into, start tearing apart. It seems like you're trying to tear apart, like, the basis behind these conspiracy theories, where they came from, and basically how they grew. And specifically, you know, it's really easy to say, oh, the president's head.

exploded and you know it looks like it came from the front but you know they're saying it came from the back but no it goes much deeper than that when when it when you start getting into conspiracy theories so um you know the first part of your new book you you specifically talk about uh richard Hofstetter and Carl Popper so um jump in there and uh start talking up you know if you can start uh start there and take us down the road of where we're at where we came from to get to where we are now yeah so again thanks for having me on to talk about the book available with their Antelope Hill publishing it's called intolerant interpretations and if you if you use code it's code pete queue you have 5% off so yeah I've been an antelope thing so cool awesome awesome

I view it as a sequel to understanding conspiracy theories. It's written that way. And yeah, as you pointed out, the book starts with sort of a genealogy of this anti-conspiracy polemic. Actually, the first chapter is called an abbreviated genealogy because honestly, if we really put our thinking hats on, it probably, you know, we can look much further into the past to figure out how. how we got to where we are today. But the very recent past is certainly enough history to kind of understand the climate that we're in now. And so, yeah, I did single out Carl Popper, and I singled out Richard Hofstadter for two, I think, very important reasons. I was kind of imagined myself having to do a rebuttal when I talk about my books or offer some of my arguments.

And one of those, like my imaginary interlocutor is, you know, well, why pick on Carl Popper? Why pick on Richard Hofstad? What makes them so important? And there's really two reasons, one for each. The first reason being that Carl Popper is basically the philosopher of the open society. He's the philosopher of the great replacement. And he's also, because of his, a lot of his intellectual work dealt with epistemology and things like that, he's also kind of like the philosopher for the anti-conspiracy theory point of view.

And there's two really important works that he wrote that I critique in the book. Obviously, the first is the open society and its enemies, and it's like a seven or 800 book. Basically, it's like the be-all and end-all of liberal democracy apology. It's a 700-page book justifying why open societies, which is to say liberal democracies are superior and preferable to close societies. and he gives several examples of what constitutes a closed society. NSDAP, Germany, Soviet Russia, fascist Europe, whether we're looking at Spain or Italy or Romania or really any of the countries where there was a fascist movement. But he even goes way back into human history.

The original closed society was Plato. Plato's Republic is basically the, if the open society and its enemies is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, then Plato's Republic is really the apotheosis, the intellectual apotheosis of, you know, nativist, authoritarian, ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states. that's what Popper and again maybe some context on Popper he was from central Europe he was from a in a well-educated high cultured bourgeois I want to say Lutheran family I think Richard Hofstadter came from a Lutheran family so maybe Popper wasn't but anyway they were upper class Jewish ethnically Jewish living in Europe and Popper in particular saw both sides of that authoritarian coin. He was a communist in his youth. He almost died at a communist rally. And then he was sometime later, obviously persecuted or felt the heat of the German Reich on his heels. And he

fled Europe and he sought sanctuary basically in, you know, what we tend to think of as the Atlantis states, England, the United States, I think even New Zealand. And so, So that experience informed his philosophy about the superiority of liberal democracies. And as a kind of secondhand to that work, in the mid-50s, he published a very, very short essay, like three pages, called the conspiracy theory of society. And basically, this was his anti-conspiracy polemic. He compares, in that short essay, he basically compares conspiracy theory epistemology to something like Homer or Homeric thinking, where that you've got this Mount Olympus of deities that are really pulling all the strings and more than just pulling all the strings. They're specifically moving people into place and positioning them to take important roles. So he basically says, you know, when you abandon God, you elevate man into this

theistic state. And so men become these supreme agents capable of all kinds of unexpected, unanticipated, shadowy conduct. What's interesting there is immediately, I think of Rizard Lagucco, his book, The Demon and Democracy, where he compares democracy. and communism and just shows how parallel they are in having to sell themselves. And all that does is it sounds like he's doing his best to sell liberal democracy while either hiding or not understanding that in order for liberal democracy to continue,

a conspiracy does have to happen. But it's not one continuous conspiracy. It's one conspiracy takes over and that gets supplanted by another conspiracy and another, and it's just on down the line. And you have, you just have competing conspiracies the whole time. Yeah. What's a chain of conspiracy, like a never-ending chain of conspiracies. Well, what Popper says is different. He actually says that things that we don't like, basically we, he argues we attribute outcomes that we don't like to conspiratorial origins.

But what he claims is really happening is that there are simply unexpected consequences. Sort of like that old line, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Like the road to conspiratorial thinking is paved with unintended consequences. And he says things like economic depressions, military conflicts, societal collapse. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th, because the The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Lidl items, all reduced to clear.

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Man does not replace God. Everything can be understood empirically through proper social theory, proper social theorizing. And so that's why I chose Carl Popper, because he has such a monumental legacy. And the more you dig into it, actually, the kind of creepier it gets, a lot of the, I won't say a lot, but some of the most well-known names in the contemporary society, people who are strong advocates of not only liberal democracy, but also like the censorship regime and using state power to prosecute political minorities, which is something that Karl Popper advocated for. You find that a lot of the really relevant people today were also connected to Carl Popper.

Cass Sunstein was a student of Carl Popper. George Soros was a student of Carl Popper. I think Richard Hofstadter may also have been at one point affiliated with him. So he, beyond his own works, Carl Popper was a mentor to or had close relationships with basically anyone who's ever had a bugaboo about nativism. So he was a really obvious example to pick. Richard Hofstadter, on the other hand, I think if I had to guess, is kind of a name that not many people think of anymore. he died somewhat early on, but he had a very successful career as an academic historian and public intellectual in the mid-20th century. Many of his, several of his books won Pulitzer Prizes.

So he was really, really crem de la creme. The Age of Reform was a Pulitzer Prize winning book. I believe that the paranoid style of American politics was another Pulitzer Prize winning essay. And in both of those works, Carl Popper, excuse me, Richard Hofstadter, basically takes aim at populists, rural types,

you know, flyover, Middle America, what San Francis would describe as middle American radicals. The kinds of people who probably donated to the John Birch Society, the kinds of people who probably supported the Tea Party, the kinds of people who became MAGA. Basically, in those two works, he's going after populism, and in particular, he's going after what he calls the paranoid style in American politics. And Richard Hofstadter also has his own legacy of influencing academics to write

anti-conspiracy polemics. And his most famous essay was The Paranoid Style in American Politics. basically he uses Freudian psychoanalysis as a in an artful way. That's his own word, by the way. I'll give you this second sort of 2A to why I chose these guys. But it's because of they tell them themselves basically in their works. They tell them themselves repeatedly. So it makes for a good learning exercise.

This is a running theme with a certain group of people. they can't help themselves. Yeah, and in particular, Popper and Hofstad are like at the top of the mountain of just letting you know exactly what's on their mind. That's how you can, at least for me, it's like if you want to present an argument and you want to present people as spearheads

or figureheads of a certain movement or whatever, I mean, you don't want to leave the audience feeling like you arbitrarily picked these people or whatever. So, I mean, it was really great that in both cases, they just telling themselves. So in the essay, Paranoid style in American politics, he's talking about Barry Goldwater. He coins this term pseudo-conservatism. And he talks about the paranoid style. So he says he uses paranoid in an artful way, appropriating it from psychoanalysis and psychology.

I think he says something like in the way that a historian of art would describe a certain period as Baroque or whatever, he wanted to use paranoid style in that same way. So which is like a way of saying you're not doing it academically, you're not doing it empirically, you're kind of literally bastardizing language to serve a partisan end. Like if you read between the lines, he's basically saying, I'm taking this term that has a very specific meaning in application. I'm taking it outside of its discipline, and I'm plopping it in a completely different discipline in an informal way just because, you know? And there's like so much of that today. So much of that today. I don't know if you saw, and I hate to even talk about this person because it just gives him attention. But Joel Berry from the Babylon B, he said there's going, he said very soon progressives are going to start in.

embracing white identity. Square peg, round hole, man. What the hell are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. And it seemed, you know, and then obviously, the most obvious one is the main woke, right guy. What the hell is the name?

James Lindsay. I mean, he's... How could you forget? He has nothing, is he's incoherent at this point. It's gotten to the point where they can't make, they know that they've lost. They know that neoliberalism is dying. They know that the open society is falling apart, what they love the most. And they're doing every, and it's, this isn't right after World War II when you have a couple of Jews who are basically advocating the open society because they don't want to go back to what it was just, you.

you know, 10 years ago, and, you know, they need a society that they can blend in in. And, yeah, I mean, we're past that at this point. And especially since October 2023, which I think is like literally a changing of the age. Like we're in a new age, you know. I totally agree. So Hofstadter, basically, and there's a couple of this, I don't want to spoil all of the really, really juicy bits of it. But there's so many like telling on yourself moments. Some of

them like they weren't obvious at the time but there's one passage where he talks about there's a famous French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan he was sort of like a structuralist, he's a feminist. Basically he's like your average

like shit lib French intellectual had all of the bad you know positions political positions. Like a precursor like a precursor to post like a precursor to the French postmodernist or something like that. Yeah, basically one generation earlier than that sort of overlapping into that movement getting its legs off the ground. But there's a famous Lacanian line that I think most people, most readers in this sphere have kind of come across one way

another. It gets quoted a lot. He says, you know, if you're paranoid, if you fear that your wife is cheating on you. Even if she is, you're still paranoid and it's illegitimate to have that fear. So your wife is cheating on you. You're suspicious that she's cheating on you. You're pathological. So like Hofstadter takes that and he uses it in the context of fluoridization in the water supply. He says, you know, even if it came out to be true at some point in the future that the government was putting, contaminating the water supply for expressly political, even socialist reasons. That's still exemplary of the paranoid style.

And then lo and behold decades later, that's basically exactly what happened. And that's like only the tip of the iceberg basically in terms of contaminating the food supply, the water supply, the soil, the air, everything that we kind of consume and are just moving through, even passively. Like we all know, we all have the receipts on that. It's not a mystery. It's basically pretty much an open and shut case. It did happen.

It happened for expressly political reasons. People still want it to happen. RFK Jr., as he was being sworn in as head of HHS, basically said, we're going to take the fluoride out of the water. So it's like, oh, but you're still a crank if you think that. You're still a crazy person if any of that troubles you in any way. So to my imaginary interlocutor who doesn't see any reason to specifically target these two people as being progenitors of this way of thinking, that's why. That's kind of my rebuttal. I was going to say before there's like a 2A aspect to that or like a tertiary aspect to that.

And it's entirely the way in which these academics basically told you what the final outcome of their preferred political program would be. Towards the end of the open society and its enemies, Popper basically says, you know, if we followed this open society policy to its final conclusion. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the little Newbridge warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite LIDL items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive.

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So these are two guys who basically laid out a sort of series of justifications for liberal democracy. They also issued a series of polemics against people who are skeptical of liberal democracy. And they also kind of spilled the beans on what's wrong with their preferred political program. So it's very difficult for me to find a better example of the kind of thing I'm trying to communicate to the audience, which is all of these kinds of things, racialism, conspiracyism, anti-liberalism are inexorably tied to one another. And it's not for arbitrary reasons. is for like first principles, political theory, and also just like, I was going to say urban planning, not urban planning, but like, like, basically like state craft and social engineer. Social engineering. Right.

Yeah, yeah. Like your demographic construction, things like that. Social engineering is more succinct. So I started with them and the more I read them and the more I do this kind of writing, I just feel. feel, like, vindicated in that decision because they just keep proving to be relevant over and over again. Before we move on to the next one, the term conspiracy theorist. Carl Popper used that term, I believe it was 1957. And then there's this, it's been revealed that.

The CIA was using that, like, had said, oh, that's the term we need to use against against people who are talking about the JFK. Is that right, or is it, or should we be looking to popper for that? I, you know, I've heard that. I've heard that basically all of my life. I've never independently researched that. I've kind of taken it at face value because I've heard other, and I've seen other, you know, well-regarded researchers make that claim before.

I would say, I would say this, that there's more than one road to critiquing liberal democracy. And I do think it comes down to sort of your specialization. I think people who are more into, who are more like wonks and more into political culture and more into the nitty gritty of institutions, and the ways they sort of, like octopus tentacles get involved, have their tentacles in every other pot.

Because obviously the CIA has a long history of social engineering. I'm actually just now reading this great book, Who Paid the Piper, which is basically, it's by Francis Stoner Saunders, and it's talking about the CIA during the Cold War, and their anti-communist initiatives. and how people like James Burnham were, you know, in effect, you know, whether explicitly or implicitly doing Cold War, culture war stuff on behalf of America against the communists. I've kind of always known that. It was kind of obvious.

If you work at, if you were working at National Review when he worked there, you were tied to the CIA in some way. Yeah. So, well, naively, I actually didn't know that. I was very late to the James Burnham train. Everyone was reading him during COVID and earlier, and I picked him up like two years ago. And my head was, my hat was blown off my head. I was like, wow, this is great. And then like a week later, someone was like, yeah, but Burnham was the spook.

I'm like, wait, what? Yeah, but that doesn't, but the thing, the thing about it is that doesn't bother me. Because, you know, when I think about the first two books that he wrote, when he wrote the managerial revolution, he wrote Machiavellians, I can't be 100% sure he was spooked up at that point. He was, you know, possibly, but still, it doesn't mean that he was writing those books for any other, any other intention than because he, that's the book he wanted to write at the time. Yeah. In particular, the managerial revolution seems like a relatively non-ideological kind of academic work. But anyway, I think there's probably multiple roads you can take

and for people who are, you know, as they say on the internet, like theory cells, who are into the philosophical tradition. I don't think, you know, focusing on Karl Popper versus focusing on the CIA, that there's any obstacle or that there's any hurdles or that they're not congruent with one another. This just happens to be the road that I took. And so I think there's legitimacy to both. I mean, obviously the CIA is involved in. political assassinations, regime change, coups.

So if anything, I think what is worth extracting out of this is sort of the, if you want to say, multidisciplinary or multifactorial, multi-personnel engine behind liberal democracy, that you can come at it from the popular culture space, you can come at it from the academic space, you can come at it from the intelligence services space, and basically it all leads you to the same thing, that you've got political conflict, rivalry, subterfuge, all the kinds of things that people like Carl Popper told you

don't actually happen and are not really relevant in understanding political, anything related to politics. Let's jump forward to Jonathan Haidt. You talk about his book, The Righteous Mind. That's one of those, Hyde is one of those people that really gets pushed by a lot of the people who call themselves

classical liberals, the people who want to return to the 90s, the golden age of the 90s. But one of the things that you point out is that their, his ideas about psychological, about how he misrepresents political differences between people who have, I think the terminology you use was broader moral palate, or what he used is broader moral palette and liberals, six intuitions versus liberals, versus liberals have three. So can you talk a little bit about how height continues this, how he explains. How he explains.

how this continues and moves forward from, you know, from World War II and the post-war consensus. Yeah. So I think a friend of yours, Astral Flight, made this really great observation to me. I didn't even realize it. That Jonathan Haidt was kind of like the Jordan Peterson before there was a Jordan Peterson. Five or six years before Jordan Peterson got into political commentary and political culture. You had Jonathan Haidt as this sort of centristian.

and I say none of this with invective or hatred. I actually think pretty out. Of all of the people who've done the IDW centrist, we just need to get a long thing. I really do look at Jonathan Haidt as being like the most honest and really the most competent person to try that out. But I would just say, like it's really remarkable.

If you want to compare the public intellectuals of say today or the last 10 years compared to 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, it's really startling. The issue I had with Jonathan Haidt was that his, and this is really the same issue with Jordan Peterson, even though it doesn't seem that way with Peterson, is they're actually very narrow-minded, I hesitate to say uneducated, but they are ignorant, really, of other disciplines beyond their own. Jordan Peterson, if you want to know about psychology, probably is one of the best living educators of psychology.

And this has always been apparent when it comes to philosophy, history, political theory, he's basically indistinguishable from like your grandpa sitting at the thing. Actually, your grandpa at Thanksgiving dinner probably knows more than Jordan Peterson. But same thing with Jonathan Haidt. very good, very astute as a sociologist, as a anthropologically minded person, obviously as a PhD of social psychology. But the big glaring hole in his theory of the moral foundations as applied to the political binary is this actually politically ignorant. So the Heights Moral Foundation's theory says that there are six elementary moral foundations or intuitions. care, fairness.

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doing to do make sure a lot of people tariff at the time there's a cooct

do you have seen more at Ergaret Pongue Pongue liberty sanctity

authority there's a sixth one that I'm actually blanking on at the moment and his research

demonstrated that conservatives were more in touch with all six than liberals were. And he gives the example of the John Kerry campaign back in 2004, and the rhetoric that was on the campaign trail.

And he basically said that Democrats were unable to access rhetoric that touched on moral intuitions like authority, sanctity, purity. Purity would have been the sixth one, right? That these are kind of like classically conservative, moral intuitions. They have to do with, they're inexorably bound up with like the church and religion. They're inexorably bound up with the military hierarchy and the state. They are inexorably bound up with the family and a paternal sort of view of the world. And so Height says, well, this is really a big problem. Democrats are losing these elections. They're losing the culture war. They're

not really able to communicate to all Americans. So he embarked on this research project to develop a way to help liberals expand their moral palate. Now, there's a couple of problems with that. First, and what I think the biggest problem is, is that his research actually demonstrates that liberals can access other moral intuitions. It's just that when they apply those moral intuitions, they're applied different. When a conservative Bible-thumping Rust Belter

practices sanctity, they're thinking about Christ, they're thinking about God, they're thinking about the church, they're thinking about the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, their pastor. But when, and this is according to height, when liberal, secular,

humanist types think in terms of sanctity, Well, they think about the environment. They think about pollution and climate change. They think about sort of these very novel, untraditional, outside of the box, ways of applying these basic moral intuitions. You know, what was the old liberal maxim, you know, think globally, act locally, that kind of describe. The problems are the way liberals think is in this fundamentally non-parochial way. So that tells us, one, that liberals don't have a problem accessing these moral intuitions. It's just they apply them differently.

So to me, the first problem that arises out of that is it tells us something about the populations themselves and the kinds of social worlds that they occupy. I extrapolate from that that we really have two completely different populations living side by side. as though they were actually one people. You know, when we hear in the, whatever you want to say, the Trump right, the online right, the dissident right, radical right, whatever. I mean, a lot of us, if not most of us are here, because we have certain foundational concerns about our kin,

about the folk, about the race, about homogeneity and a coherent national identity. This sort of issue in Heights theory, betrays the fact that we don't have a coherent national identity and that homogeneity is not just an issue in terms of racial characteristics or religious affiliation, but actually there are other ways in which people are or aren't alike. And that's meaningful in terms of how you organize your polity. So basically the punchline of that essay is there's two different political economies. This goes back to James Burnham. There are two different political

economies operating in this country. And while they're not necessarily opposed to one another, they are in conflict. You have the classical liberal political economy, bourgeois entrepreneurial capitalism, which even though that was critical in displacing the old aristocratic order and the monarchy and things we think of as even more based and conservative, and hierarchical and all these kinds of things. But relative to, like, modernity, where we are now, you know, that's pretty, it's pretty, they were still deeply devout religious people. They were still deeply patriarchal.

These were not people who, comparable today, anyway, who thought, like, we will literally burn through all of our social capital if it will earn more money or help us achieve some kind of cockamamie political agenda. you had this bourgeois entrepreneurial liberalism, and then what comes after that, as James Burnham said, is managerialism. Managerialism, the technocracy, the cult of expertise, credentialism, socialism, you know, the welfare state, all of these things, which are built on bourgeois entrepreneurialism, but also in a way sort of parasitize bourgeois capitalism. That's kind of what, like, one of the stories of the recent Trump victory with Vance as his VP is like, we're trying to put the managerial revolution back in the box a little bit here. Burnham says that, you know, managerialism emerged because, well, actually, St. Francis says this expanding on James Burnham, that nation states were growing so rapidly, both demographically and in terms of like their geographical territories. And so you had this dual problem of mass and scale.

They're getting larger. They're also getting more complicated. So if you're like an early 20th century robber baron, a capitalist, while it might have been possible for you in 1850 or 1900 or even 1950 to literally micromanage everything and understand a good example of this is maybe Walt Disney trying to put together Snow White. He was intimately involved in every. aspect of that production down to the finest detail.

And then if you look at what Disney is doing today, like the people who bankroll it have no control what's happening, no idea what's even happening in terms of casting and like CGI and whatever. So things were getting so large and kind of complicated that you had a new class of people emerge. And these were the managers. Technically minded, technically skilled people, usually with a college. education, usually living in an urban or suburban setting, who are not capitalists in the sense

that they have large reserves of money that they can allocate and spend and whatever, and that they are captains of industry. But they have very narrowly defined, highly skilled roles that put them, I think the quote from San Francis is, they literally put their hands on the levers of these industries. So as San Francis said, you know, the change in the kind of people who became in charge of things also became, or rather he says, the change in the class of people also became a change in the kind of people. So we went from capitalists to managers, but also we're dealing with a different demographic of people. You know, a lot of Ellis Islanders, you know, are getting into these positions. A lot of newer immigrant Americans are getting into these positions.

To your audience, I'm bringing this to a conclusion here. If it seems like a crazy digression, we could say in a sort of loose way that the liberal, democratic, liberal, progressive liberals, Democrats, socialists, these kinds of people, you know, in terms of Heights Moral Foundation, the threes versus the sixes, these are people who basically live in a completely different economy than the conservative person, a conservative person, even today, still lives in a farm, works on a farm, or runs their own business, or comes from a family that does that. You know, they tend, you know, statistically we know this. You know, they tend not to go to college. They tend not to complete their degrees.

They tend not to read as much. The divide, what Jonathan Haidt treats as psychological differences between liberals and conservatives really is a demographic difference. It's an economical difference. So it's not that liberals are out of touch with the authority moral intuition or the sanctity moral intuition. It's that they are basically siloed into a completely different style of life. And so they apply these moral intuitions to the world in wildly different ways. They even apply the same moral intuitions differently.

Jonathan Haidt points out that for conservatives, fairness has more to do with like proportionality, for example, compared to liberals where it's about like distributing to everyone. You know, everyone gets a piece of the pie. But conservatives say, well, that doesn't sound fair. Like, why does the guy who does nothing have as much say as I do? hence the proportionality, right? Okay, well, this goes into like one of the old debates like equity versus equality. Are we trying to give everyone an opportunity or are we trying to give everyone an outcome? Like, these are mentality differences that arise out of different economic social organizations. So I know I just threw a whole bunch at you. Maybe I'll take a pause there and let you pick apart from that. No. I mean, I think that that's, it's something that's been covered on this, on the show endlessly managerialism versus role by experts or, you know, roll by autark. So the next thing I wanted to move on to was just touch on this, you know, as quick as we can, because I really want to talk about Elul a little bit, get into. Lull and condiment. Ready for huge savings?

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how social forces shape behavior. Talk a little about that. Yeah. Yeah. So I came into contact with the work of a German, very well-south. celebrated German psychologist. His name is Gerd. I'm probably butchering it. He has a name like straight out of German folklore and he looks like like, you know, like the most German man on earth. A Gerd Gigerenser or Gerd Gigerenser, I have no idea how you would say it. Oh, I have no clue. I look. No, no idea.

He's a psychologist and, well, a little bit of context. One thing that's really interesting to me about the last 20 years of psychology publishing, popular publishing, academic publishing, is that since the turn of the century, there has been an extreme focus on irrationality, on what's sometimes called choice architecture, a decision-making, basically cognition, but in terms of our capacity to choose, what are the actual cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for a decision-making process? When do they go right? When do they go wrong? What are their limitations? This stretches all the way back to the, really the early 20th century. I want to say Herbert Spencer, maybe. I could be mixing up some of my names. But in the early to mid-ish 1960s,

you had what was called the probabilistic revolution in the social sciences, what basically refers to. Statisticians gained a lot of influence in academic. psychological research. And so there became this heavy focus on quantitative sort of mathematical reasoning to understand and explain social behavior.

And one of the people that was at the start of that was Daniel Kahneman. Now let's just table that now just to give some context for the audience. So Gerger-Giger-enzer is working sort of in this milieu, but he's coming at it from a different

point of view. one of the actually he's kind of like hearkening back to the very earliest theorists theoreticians in this statistical revolution he's basically saying that there's and this this is contrasting to the daniel connemans of the world basically saying that there's a type of logic that humans engage in that you could say is intrinsic to our decision-making process It's not arbitrary. It's actually evolutionary. And it's not only evolutionary.

It's environmentally bound, right? So in other words, thinking of human cognition, we need to think of it as something that developed within a context. We need to think of it as something that developed according to certain evolutionary pressures and limitations, selection pressures, for example. So he, again, I won't spill all the beans. I'll leave some for your audience if they want to read it. I hope you do. Pick it up at Antelope Hill publishing. He basically says that there are three rules of human social organization, more or less.

And there's actually no getting around them. You can't break them. You can't refine them. They are fine-tuned over countless generations. of evolution. So when I read that, my first thought was, and, you know, getting involved in all this radical politics stuff, I'm kind of a neophyte still. I've only since like 2014, 2015, really been thinking this way.

And one of the, like, one of the thoughts that are, or just like repeating questions I've always had, it's actually the subtitle of the essay that you referenced. You know, how did things get this bad? You know, we're always constantly asking herself, like, why are people like this? How do things get this way? Would, you know, or we play the historical revision game, you know, would things be different if, you know, group X won this war as opposed to group Y? Or, you know, if this president won this election or this, you know, and we're always asking ourselves, like, why are people like this? How did things get this way?

The point of my essay is to say that there's a profoundly evolutionary reason for people to become conformist. because conformism is effectively an evolutionary mechanism, or at least for us, it's this sort of thing we've accumulated, that helps us to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, catastrophe, risk, danger. You can't know everything. It's impossible to know everything. It's impossible to account for everything. And really all we can do is just, you know, look to the person to our left and right and do what they're doing. And this is like deeply encoded into us. And so it's very common for people to think like, well, it's what the universities did. It was brainwashing through media. It was brainwashing through Hollywood. It was brainwashing through the universities and the academics. And I'm not saying that that's wrong.

I'm not saying that that didn't play a role. What I'm saying is that before you ever read Foucault in freshman year of college, before you ever turned on the TV and saw some subliminal license. sensuous thing getting beamed into your brain, you were conforming to the social dynamics in your home, at the park, in the classroom, at the lunch table. And these are the things we need to think about in terms of why and how people adopt certain political beliefs. And the real point that I was trying to drive home in that essay, maybe I'm kind of a bleeding heart here. You tell me if you agree or disagree, the point I was trying to drive home is that we want to have actually empathy. It's going to sound like a libt hard moment. We want to actually have a sort of like patience and

compassion for people because it's very common for us who are sort of like initiated and know a little bit about this to get angry and bitter and like, man, like you should know better or you got duped or you were brainwashed by the race communists or the woke mind virus. actually most people have no idea consciously in an intellectual way about what's happening around them they're just simply imitating what the people around them are doing they are simply using the same solutions that have worked for the people around them in a sort of unthinking unconscious way because it's actually too mentally taxing cognitively demanding and socially punishing ostracizing to get into the weeds on every one of

of these individual issues, whether we're talking about LGBT or we're thinking about tariffs or the immigration policy or whatever, most people don't think. There is no actual, rational, cognitive, sort of deliberative process going on. It's just simply people going along and getting along. And when I read his book in the wild, actually I bought a bunch of his books and read a bunch of his papers around that time when I was writing this. It gave me a profound, actually, it felt like I was being like liberated, liberated by like this sort of anger at other people. Like, why aren't you taking up this challenge like I'm taking it up?

Why aren't you trying to decode all of the bullshit and why aren't you willing to ostracize yourself from your friends and your family in the name of the truth? because that's not actually what the kinds of foundational social dynamics we've evolved to function with. That's not how they operate, which isn't to say that they're like deviant or pathological. It just means that, you know, people like you and me are like a different breed of person, basically. And if we're getting in front of an audience, whether it's you and your podcast or me and my blog or whatever, or somebody at like a rally or a pub, you actually have to have like some heart for the people in front. front of you, the people who are gathered around you because they don't actually know better.

And most of the time people treat that as a sort of insult or a smear or they say it in a pejorative and condescending way in the same way that I don't know any better when it comes to physics or mechanical engineering doesn't make me like a loser or a cuck-servative or a dweep or whatever. It just means I don't have that specialization. I would need to rely on like a well-meaning expert, I think in the point of that essay, people believe and act the way they do far less for deliberative conscious reasons than they do for invisible social dynamics that bind and tether people together. That was another really long-winded answer, so I apologize. I don't want to be a pet aunt, but I think when using the term empathy, we have to be able

to separate what's known as effective empathy and cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to see another person's perspective. Effective empathy is the more dangerous one, and I think it's what's taken over a large amount of the left and progressivism, which is being able to understand one's another person's emotions, but also sharing them with them, trying to share their experience. I don't have any interest in that.

Understanding is a much different thing than actually seeking to put myself and to try to feel exactly what they're feeling. I think that leads us down the path of the where, where you that what's become the meme of how you know most people who would be right-wing care about the people most around them and then out here it's the people yeah the heat map and i think the inflation pushes up building costs so it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs under insurance happens

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Get the facts. Be drinkaware. Visit drinkaware. com. We have to be careful of that. Understanding where people are coming from is one thing. that section of empathy, which has become the most popular, where they want you to share and feel what other people are feeling, I have no interest in that. I have enough, I have enough

of my own problems. Yeah. I give three examples in that essay, and they all are examples of cognitive empathy. So I'm glad you made that distinction. I mean, affective empathy, that's the sort of, again, I don't say this in a really negative way, but it's kind of how we've ended up in this squishy, womanly school marm kind of mentality where it's like, well, how would you feel if that happened to you? Well, I would feel bad. So then don't judge them so harshly. It's like, that's not constructive. But one of the examples I give, if I can remember, one of one of gigrenzers one of his three rules is basically the default rule that if there's no other solution then you do what everyone else has done previously and i give the example of

you know somebody a young man who enlists in the u.s military in 2002 or 2003 and they did that for rule one do what other people around you do and so if you're a young man and you're watching TV and all of the men in your family are like this is fucking a travesty we need to go to war we need to defend America you think yes it's a travesty I need to go to war I need to defend America maybe maybe 10 other guys from your high school classroom did that and you're like I'm going to do that and then you go and it's awful and you come back and you're a fucking mess and you look at around at your other peers, other guys who you enlisted with, and they're developing drug problems or they kill themselves.

And what do you do? You develop a drug problem and you kill yourself. And like that's the deep, this is like a very sort of like bleak way of applying it, but it gave me a greater understanding. It's like, how does that happen? Does it happen because we didn't give them enough education? Did it happen because they didn't have enough socialization time? Did it happen?

Like all of these were not trying to understand the real problem types of explanations. It's like, no, he did it for like the three basic rules of social organization. You do what everyone else does. If there's no other solution, you do the solution that everyone else has been using. And if you're a young guy who enlisted in the military, well, you see a lot of your peers falling apart. completely and maybe killing themselves. Or another example I use is like a freshman-aged college girl. You know, how do they all fall into, or how do so many of them fall into this like destructive,

licentious, borderline, pornographic, sexual behavior? Because they looked around what the people around them were doing and they defaulted back to the same type of social behavior that most of the people around them were in. engaging it. And I think if you can understand the degree to which just about everybody you know is engaged in some kind of like memesis, then it really does deemphasize the extent to which you think of them as a competent individually, rationally minded person. Now, they may also be those things, but we are most of the time, we are that in a very limited capacity. You go to the hospital, your physician is giving you all these scans and using all this, you know, $50,000 words and they're flexing their upper learning degrees at you.

And you're like, wow, this guy's really smart. And then they turn around and then they watch Bill Maher. And you're like, what? Then they vote for Kamala Harris or whatever. You're like, wait, I thought you were like a thinking person. you realize actually that type of demanding deliberative cognitive function. If there was a big pie chart, how much of your life you're actually engaged in that, it's a tiny sliver of the pie.

Most of the rest of it is, I mean, why did that guy end up in medical school in the first place? Because he looked to his left and his right, and that's what the people around are doing. Or because someone from on high, their father, their mother, their grandfather said, you're going to do this. So they did it. It wasn't a deliberative individualistic process of rational choice. It was an unconscious, evolutionarily informed social process. So all that to say, I agree with you. We have to be careful about the E word. And my essay does skew on the cognitive empathy, not the affective empathy. So I appreciate you bringing that up. No problem. Let's move on to Connemon, because you've already mentioned him, Daniel Conneman.

He basically portrays human cognition as inherently flawed. How does that, how does that bolster a move towards technocracy? And, yeah, I mean, you mentioned a little too. So, I mean, whichever direction you want to take that. Yeah, Connman, I remember both when the Jonathan Haidt book and the Daniel Connman book came out. They came out within the few years of each other. And they were some of the biggest. I mean, the podcast circuit of 10, 15 years ago was like those two guys. Like every talk show, every podcast. And it's actually really, really difficult to overstate how influential Daniel Conneman has been,

on social science research, but also the general intellectual culture. So Daniel Kahnem, is Israeli psychologist who was in the IDF. He died, like last year, I think, killed himself. It's probably interesting. It's probably not totally meaningless to point out that he signed himself up for like one of these end-of-life self-terminating things. I don't know exactly. I don't know if you went to Denmark or wherever in those countries. Switzerland.

So his partner, Amos Tversky, I'm probably butchering these names because I'm not Israeli. They had been research partners since the 50s or the 60s. They were part of, they actually originated what's called the heuristics and biases research program. So to your listening audience, you know, if you ever took an introduction to psychology class at any point when you were in college,

there was probably a section on cognitive psychology, and a lot of it probably had to do with this idea of heuristics and biases. And basically, the heuristics and biases program says that human, and this, Gerd Gigerenser accepts this, by the way. He just sort of takes a different conclusion from the same general idea. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were basically perpetuating this line of research, they were both, you know, mathematically minded statistical thinkers. So they both perpetuated through their research and their public advocacy, their intellectual

work, the idea that human cognition is sort of a, it's based on like maybe a handful of mechanisms or principles, if you want to say. And we don't necessarily have an immediate ability. to activate those mechanisms or principles that kind of seem to have a life of their own. And they work in the background. And somehow magically we draw inferences and conclusions and answers to things. You know, like when I was a kid growing up, my dad would always say to me, you know, like, you know, if you've ever got a problem that you don't know the answer to, you know, stop thinking about it for a while. And a couple of hours later, you know, poof, it'll hit you. And I was like, well, that's kind of crazy.

And that would happen. Maybe you go to sleep and the answer comes to you in a dream or you're trying to remember the name of some actor and it hits you a week later. It's like, what happened in my brain that I went from really forcefully trying to think about this to not and then suddenly the answer comes. Well, this is the basic idea of deliberative executive cognition. There are a handful of mechanisms and principles that. operate somewhere kind of nebulously in the mind or within human consciousness that help us to

think and make choices and make calculations. There's a sort of a rudimentary brain calculator in there that is running all these programs and calculations and we don't really get to ever put our hands directly on it, but that's how the brain works. Now, Kahneman, and I'm basically, by the way, for your audience's benefit, I'm giving like a very stripped away version of that story. But the important thing to take away from it is that Canaman and Dversky basically argued. Inflation pushes up building costs, so it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs. Under insurance happens where there's a difference between the value of your cover

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And so their academic work was about helping experts become better decision makers by providing them with all of this statistically informed psychological research, which, by the way, is also what Gigerensor did. But the difference between Kahneman and Tversky versus Gigerensers, Giggerensors' idea was that these heuristics, and he didn't use the word biases. you just talked about them in terms of heuristics are like it doesn't get better than that like if you're telling me that evolution over millennia formed our brain to work in this way then it probably did it really well because just about everything else about us works really, really well

but you have to understand the context that the mind is developing in. You have to understand the context the kinds of choices we have been forced to make throughout human history. to understand how the brain arrives at those conclusions. And obviously we're living in this sort of like fairy tale Disneyland world that's completely removed from like primary evolutionary selection pressures.

And can, you know, Gigerensers' argument is basically we've got this finely tuned cognitive organ that now has to deal with a wildly unpredictable unstable, information-rich environment, which is a historically a unique circumstance that we've really

never, there's very little precedent for in the past. And so when humans make mistakes, it's because we have evolved in these niches, these tightly bound ecological niches to produce certain types of solutions

and to think about information in a particular way. We don't live in that world. If you want to zoom out and say, you know, the world of scarcity versus the world of abundance, right? In the world of scarcity, there's limited resources. There's also limited information. There's limited choices to me. But in a world of abundance, such as the one that we live in, to the extent that you could say it's a world of abundance,

well, you see things like, well, there's a great study that got published some years ago. I'll ask you, actually, there's a magical number. after which once presented with this number, a number of options, humans actually are not able to make a meaningful choice. Do you know what that number is? I don't. I don't. I think it's about a dozen. Okay.

Between six and 12. I was going to say six, yeah. Yeah. So, like, you go trying to buy a car. You see like three dozen cars on the lot. It's like, well, meaningfully, how do I know? which is the right car for me, where you go shopping for clothing like me. You go down the aisle and you see like 30 gazillion racks of jeans and you're like, I just need a

fucking pair of pants, man. Like I don't even know what I'm looking at. You know, this abundant information-rich environment is not something we're really evolutionarily adapted to. For Gigerenser, that's not a fundamental problem with human cognition. For Connemon, it is. And so So, Canaman, the thing that's even more interesting about Canaman, about not just his academic research program, but also his affiliations, if you read his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, which you won a Nobel Prize for, Nobel Prize in Behavioral Economy, he's talking about his good friend, Cass Sunstein. My good friend Cass Sunstein, whose judgment I trust so well, who at the same time that...

Well, I mean, I mean, Kahneman, like, was literally born in mandatory Palestine in, like, the 30s. Yes. It went to Paris. His parents escaped Paris because, you know, the evil Nazis came to power. He, they moved back to Palestine like right before, um, before it became Israel. I mean, this is, you want to talk about having your child, like having your life, your life's attitude set up for you right from the, from the start.

Yeah. It's a very charmed life. Um, so, you know. There's so much to say about Kahneman. It's actually the one essay I'm the most proud of because it really gets to a lot of things that have bothered me over the course of my life. I'll just say this. You know,

all throughout Kahneman's kind of portraying himself as on the side of like Joe Schmo. You know, here's all this research showing that you're kind of a dummy, but don't worry, you know, you're my dummy and I'm going to make sure nothing bad happens to you. So he has this sort of libertarian ethic about him where he talks about the need for sort of paternalism because people are so dumb and can't think straight and can't make decisions

for themselves. That means that they are easy prey for other people who would want, you know, demagogues, people who would want to manipulate them, what have you. And he treats, he views his research is basically a way to help Joe Schmoe navigate this world of complexity that he's just too much of a dumb Gentile Roupe to, to navigate on his own. And he keeps talking about, it's just really funny the way he keeps talking to people like Cass Sunstein, you know, my good friend Cass Sunstein with his tremendous work. Meanwhile, at the same time, Kahneman's writing that book, Cass Sunstein is writing his, a series of white papers with people like Adrian Vermeul on conspiracy theories, on cognitive infiltration, on like the OG misinformation. Like his whole idea

of cognitive infiltration, Cass Sunstein, that is, was literally, we're going to go into spaces where people are generating novel explanations for political and social crises, and we're going to fuck it up by deliberately throwing in pants on, you know, a head, retarded counter conspiracy theories. So it's a really, really dangerous situation.

I'll put a bow in it real quick. Did you just describe right-wing Twitter or what? I mean, that was one of his big bugaboo is, was the internet. So basically, you know, his essay on conspiracy theories was directly about 9-11 and the Israel conspiracies. He said, we're in this, this is like 2008, 2009.

So not like at the birth of the internet or even the birth of like, you know, AOL, within 10 years of it. And he's basically saying it's a really big problem that all of, he doesn't say this, but I'm editorializing a little bit. Cass Sunstein is basically saying to people, it's a problem. that these dumb Gentile rubs are looking at Israel the wrong way. And we need to figure out a solution to discourage them from doing that. And if we can't discourage them, we have to make the information economy so contaminated and unreliable that no social transformation can come as a result of that. And so that's the reason I wrote about Kahneman is because the basic conclusion of his research is that,

Humans need a class of credentialed technological experts to do the thinking for them. And you mentioned Elul. Illul, famous French sociologist, probably published like 100 books. He might be one of the most prolific writers of all time. He was a Christian. He was an anarchist. And he was French. That was the worst part about him.

he basically argued all the way back in the 1960s that there's this encroaching metaphysical problem in human society is called technique. This is actually very complicated his definition of technique, so I won't really get into it here on the show with you. I give a lot of time in the essay explaining it in a lot of different perspectives. So it's definitely comprehensive in the book. But basically he says that, you know, technique is this. Air grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans.

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and that in the medieval times that technique was subordinated to the aims of the church and sort of theological thinking. That, you know, what technique looked like in the mid-ages was, you know, theologians debating sort of the minutiae of like Christian metaphysics. You know, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, that kind of thing. But at some point in the last couple of hundred years, technique has become unmoored from other social forces or other social domains of human life. Technique is no longer just something you do to build a better bridge or to build a better government or to build a better cathedral or to build a better love for God. it's actually its own good, it's an own end that is sort of like colonizing every other social space. And if you look at the world around you, it seems like every endeavor that people are engaged in is kind of subordinated to this idea of more efficiency, more productivity, more conformity. people complain about the algorithm online.

It's kind of a way of talking about the problem of technique. People want to talk about the rapaciousness of capital. And even Iluil gives, there's a whole section in the technological society where he basically says, like, even in the early generations of sort of like Weberian, you know, wasp capitalism, that it was still pretty much kind of confined to economic logic. and economic concerns. And at some point after that, it became its own thing. Daniel Kahneman, the people involved in this heuristics and research program,

contemporary technocrats are really people who have become like the physical embodiment of this principle of technique, where, you know, we don't even care about a nation state or a community, all of these things are inefficient. You know, they don't, they don't grow or progress on their own. There's something that Jacques Allul says that I consider to be a really profound thing. He says people who are kind of hypnotized by the magic of technique, if you talk to them and express trepidation, trepidation about. like the direction of technological progress,

they will treat you as an enemy of mankind. Like what you're not, you don't want to go to Mars. You don't want to replace your eyeballs with glass computers. You don't want to be able to erase Down syndrome from the human DNA. Like whatever thing we can achieve through technological progress, if you are an advocate of that,

then your enemy are the Luddites. And, you know, like the spiritually Amish, people who have some skepticism at the idea that we can just keep innovating and progressing and making everything more technical. Just as an idea or as an example for your audience, like, I love heavy metal, but I really don't like a lot of heavy metal from the last 20 years. And it's really taking me my whole life to figure out why. If you compare Black Sabbath and Tony Iommi to, I don't know, the guitar, one of the guitar players from Lamb of God or Trivium or some death metal band. Like literally Tony Iommi grew up in like bombed out Birmingham, like around the factories. And the sound of heavy metal was the sound of industrial technological society. but Tony Iommi never like he still used that sound to write melodies and things that sort of resonate with the human spirit in our ears and are pleasing to hear but you listen to a band like Musuga I recently started listening to Mushugger that song Bleed the first time I heard it I was like wow that sounds like an airplane engine like that's such a crazy sound to make on guitar so I bought the whole album and every single song is like we're literally literally a

going to recreate the sound, you know, what the inside of your washing machine sounds like. And it's like guitar and guitar music was, whereas in the era of Black Sabbath, it's like, we're sort of imitating industrial society to produce music. It's like, and now today it's like we're sort of using music to recreate technological society. It's less pleasing to listen to. It's more technically demanding. The guys, you know, James Hetfield has a,

a much more aggressive rhythm hand than Tony Iommi has had. But, I mean, is every Metallica riff as great as every Black Sabbath riff? And then, you know, 20, 30 years later is who's ever headlining OzFest now? Are they really better than Pantera was in 1994? They may be better performers. The music may be more on the cutting edge, let's say, of a particular genre. But it's also like nobody buys those records anymore. Nobody goes to those concerts.

If you want to see a Lamb of God, you've got to see them on a big festival tour with the same seven or eight other bands that nobody will pay to see on their own tickets. Anyway, the point I'm making is that technique sucks and it ruins good things. Let's, okay, so you have an addendum that I don't even want to touch it. I want people to read that on their own because, you know, that's where, you know, if we start talking about that here, we're going to be, we'll start getting into maybe having to couch some language, especially talking about certain groups and things like that. Let's finish up talking about this. Let's talk about, let me ask this question.

If babies are born racist, that means we're just racist, right? Let's talk about Paul Bloom. Yeah. So let me. tell you a short story. Back when I was a university lecturer, obviously I'm from New York. I taught in New York, very racially, you know, multicultural, diverse in every sense of the word. So whether it was Midtown Manhattan or South Brooklyn or the Bronx or NASA or Queens, whatever, I had to teach the same material. And one of the chapters was on human development. from, you know, infancy till, you know, cradle of the grave, human psychology. And at the time I was teaching, around the time I had finished graduate school, Paul Bloom had published a series of studies that were, well, there were 60 Minutes segments on it.

He wrote, you know, New York Times best-selling books about it. basically he developed a very unique set of research methodologies by which he claimed you could get infants under 12 months old to demonstrate complex social cognitive behavior. Things that according to the psychological dogma of previous generations really didn't show up until like four, five, six, seven years. years old. According to Paul Bloom, it was present in babies as as young as three months old. Basically, what he would do is a kind of rudimentary friend-enemy distinction test. So infants would, and there were multiple iterations of this, I won't get into all the minutia

of it, but one such example was infants would basically watch sort of a play of two dolls interacting with one another or three dolls interacting with one another where you know the two dolls are maybe in conflict over something and then a third doll comes over and helps one maybe in a different iteration a third doll comes over and hurts another one basically the infants were they're measuring the responses of these infants to either aggressive or cooperative social behavior between complete strangers. So, you know, generally the outcome of the study was that babies tend to like the helpers more than they like the kind of antisocial, obstructive ones.

They like neutral people more than they like hurtful people. They like helpful people more than they like neutral people. And so I would show this 60-minute clip to myself. students and invariably Paul Bloom would try to scale up the findings of this research. Okay, so tier one is infants have a preference for pro-social behavior over antisocial behavior. Okay, so in Paul Bloom's world, that means there's a sort of rudimentary faculty there, pretty much from birth, where infants can make a friend-enemy distinction. And with each subsequent iteration of this experiment, they would fold in other.

their social conflicts, including racism. And again, around the same time, there was a whole bunch of studies based on what are called looking time research methodologies, basically how long does an infant stare at something and how, in particular, do they maintain their gaze or do they look away and get bored and seek other kinds of stimulation? So at the same time, Paul Bloom is doing this research, There's other research showing that, well, infants have a sort of racial preference. You know, white babies are going to look at a white face longer and more intently than they'll look at a black face or a yellow face or a red face or a brown face and so on and so forth. And basically, Paul Bloom's making this argument that we are much more cognitively complex at an earlier stage in human development. that would be part one.

That part two, we have an innate preference for pro-social or what's sometimes called use social behavior. And three, that's part of that preference is kinship preference. We have a bias towards people that look like us, so on and so forth. And I would show this, to go back to the story time, I would show this to my students. the students would be, you know, as young as fresh out of high school, as old as like in their 50s and 60s trying to get another degree because the economy was totally shit 10, 15 years ago. So, you know, black, white, Arab, Jewish, Christian, whatever. And routinely, the two things I always observed, it doesn't matter where I taught it, doesn't matter who I taught it to.

One, they were amazed at the idea that we have that sort of cognitive sophistication, that. early on so amazement but there was also a sort of horror at the idea of implicating infants in the sort of nasty prejudices and and social evils that adults get messed up in you know my class would be like okay sure maybe I'm racist but not like 24-week-old Timmy he can't be racist that's you know that's wrong and so my story students had this sort of innate sense that you shouldn't talk about infants that way, that you shouldn't responsibilize infants that way. And that kind of sat with me for a long time. And the point of the essay that I basically make is there's a really, really

heavy presumption that Paul Bloom is making, that whether it's wrong or correct, the whole theory, his whole model kind of falls apart. And the basic presumption he makes is that that kinship is a moral phenomenon as opposed to any other kind of cognitive phenomenon. In other words, is it necessarily, is there a moral dimension to kinship preference? I think that's an open question. I think it's a presumption that you're making that the behavior or the type of categorization that the infant is doing is necessarily moral as opposed to social, as opposed to some other facet of social sorting,

would be the technical phrase, some other type of cognitive sort of. Really, the only way you can, seemingly, the only way you can define those behaviors as moral is if you have a problem with those kinds of behaviors. If you see an issue with an individual identifying with someone that they're genetic, related to as opposed and showing preference for someone that they're genetically related to

over somebody else. And there's an excerpt in that essay from a New York Times piece that Paul Bloom wrote that again, like the way we started our conversation, basically gives away the whole game. He says, oh geez, I can probably pull it. It's probably worth pulling up the exact quote. If you'll just bear with me for like half a second. Sure. Here we go. All right, I'm not going to waste your time. Basically, he says there are key differences in the ways that infants develop morally. And the problem is not that they have those tendencies, is that they differ from how we would like them to be. So basically, he's saying we need to social engineer kinship preference out of infants. And if we can demonstrate that they show kinship preference as early as two, three months, then that's really as early as the social engineering program ought to start. And that was what my students were intrinsically picking up on in the classroom. They were recognizing that if you are treating this novel cognitive psychology experiment

as a pretext for a sort of rigorous disciplinary educational program, almost none of them ever said that. But the horror that they all saw in treating an infant like, like something you can mold was written all over their face. And that's really the big issue with Paul Bloom's body of work. And that's what I'm focusing on in that essay is that, look, it's an open question whether or not there's a utility and a benefit to studying moral and social development in infants. But if you're doing that with the express intention of trying to effectively derail cognitive development,

development, infant cognitive development, and there's neither a moral nor even a scientific justification for doing so. I chose Paul Bloom's essay because it's actually, or his book, because it's actually one of the worst books I've ever read in my entire life from an academic, you know, Ivy League educated researcher. There's no citations, which by the way, that doesn't bust my balls that there's no citations in it. But if you're like an Ivy League person, you're a department chair of universities, you're on sick. Like that's what you're supposed to do. Like that's just like the bare minimum. And there's just non sequitur after non sequitur after non sequitur. And it's it's almost, again, not to get too naughty and anti-Semitic here,

but like you're reading that that book of his is like getting into the mind of a Jewish propagandist because he's just telling you, he's demonstrating to you why his own logic doesn't really make sense. You're getting to see the weaknesses in their worldview. And there's a few other things he cites in there in terms of like anti-racist race science that I think probably your audience would really enjoy it. So that's, yeah, that's what's up with Paul Bloom. Yeah, it just, it goes back to that. I mean, At this point, it's been attributed to so many people. It's apocryphal that give me a child before they're two, three years old,

and I'll own their mind for the rest of their life. I'll mold their mind for the rest of their lives. Yeah, I mean, that's all I hear. And also what I hear is, I don't want this kid to grow up to be baby Hitler, so we need to make sure of that. So please let me have access to that mind so that it'll never think. to turn its gaze upon me. There's, in that book, I, like, it really, I was thunderstruck.

They're peppered all throughout the book. His book is called Just Babies Origins of Good and Evil, you know, a little bit of a punny title. Like, they're Just Babies, but also Just in the sense of, like, justice and all that kind of thing. Peppered all throughout the book are mentions of basically like collective violence against other groups and like in the first two or three pages

he mentions the show up and all with only there's one exception all throughout the book all of his examples of like evil racism evil group conflict it's always anti-Jewish pogrom stuff throughout the book. And you just can't help but read it and think like, there's an agenda here. This actually isn't science.

This isn't social theorizing. This is just, as I said in our last conversation, like this is just like a racial polemic. Like you are wearing the, and this is a concept I introduce in that essay. It's not my own concept, but I've kind of put my own flavor on it. Back in the 60s, you know, they're used to. to be this talk of ethnoscience as a way to talk about like, you know, some African guy in the bushes, you know, doing like witchcraft, voodoo. And basically there's there's an attempt to try to make, you know, non-industrial societies and their rudimentary, like, knowledge power,

make it on an equal footing to Western civilization. But I twist that a little bit and I say, okay, let's accept the premise that different groups practice the scientific method differently. That's basically what this concept of ethnoscience is trying to say, well, when people like Paul Bloom tried to do the scientific method, it's actually not about like objectivity, empiricism, science. knowledge, it's racial self-defense. And that's particularly egregious when you are making infants the object of your racial self-defense. Yeah, and I think if people pick up the,

pick up the book and read the, read the addendum, they'll get that. I think you wrap that up where basically a lot of the writers that you're covering, you know, most of the writers that you're covering, that's what they're doing. It's basically all of their work is in defense of their own self-interest. Yeah, which is why I think is an important book. I'm certainly not the first person to bark up this tree. But I do think I did it pretty comprehensively, and I tried to go after as many like central figures as possible. Are there other people, you know, besides Daniel Kahneman, who are worth interrogating? Yes. And I hope that somebody reads this and thinks, Well, I'll plug that hole.

I mean, this book is like very much in the vein of like a Kevin McDonald type of writing, right? So, you know, I don't think I'm necessarily trailblazing. But I do think, you know, with regard to Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haight, you know, these are two people who I think because of their recency, there's such a lack of skepticism towards their work. It's easy to look, you know, 50 years, 100 years in the past and say, oh, well, Carl Popper kind of, or Theodore Herzl or whoever, kind of like, you know, their shit's all fucked up, pardon my language. Like, it's obvious. But you're, you know, when it's in our lifetime and you're growing up and maturing whatever and you're seeing this work, you know, for a whole bunch of reasons, people don't put their scrutinizing lenses on. And even in the right, Jonathan.

Jonathan Heights's work is cited pretty much uncritically. And to me, like his ideas have always been on their face wrong. Same thing with Daniel Kahneman, like the idea that evolution over whatever, thousands of years, millions of years, tens of millions of years would create something like us that is like a 50-50 coin flip in terms of the shit going on between our ears as it has any positive utility like that's so obviously wrong and the thing that's so like to me kind of characteristic of someone like a daniel canaman is that they develop all this language and they develop all these concepts that you can't like test or apply

in the real world or that don't actually reduce confusion, but they actually create more confusion. So like one of the big concepts of Daniel Kahneman, and this is a tangent, I apologize, as he talks about the human consciousness basically being broken up into two systems, system one and system two, hence the title of his book, Thinking Fast and Slow. One is faster, one is slower. One's more prejudicial. one is more conservative and reserved. One is more irrational.

One is more irrational. And then if you ask yourself, well, where is system one in the brain or in the body? You can't point to it. It's not an actual thing that corresponds to like a material or social reality. Is that one hemisphere versus another or something? Right. Right, right. Even with Freud, and there's lots of bad things you can say.

Samat-Froid, but his tripartite model of the mind, more or less kind of corresponds to the major areas of the brain, prefrontal cortex, mid-brain, hind brain. There's a sort of analogical thing happening there. But with Kahneman, it's like I'm just making, it's literally wordcraft. It's just word wizardry. And the title of the book, Intolerant Interpretations, is a very specifically intended title. Like you need to hear those kinds of things and immediately disregard them. Like part of the problem that that a lot of us have for one reason or another is we're just uncritically accepting what's happening. And you can actually be like a jerk, like a disagreeable jerk from the outset and be right about like the whole affair. And that's what

That's what I'm encouraging people to do. I'm encouraging people to be a disagreeable jerk to basically fight. Like, just don't accept the premise. And that pertains to like our political activism. Like I don't need to entertain the prospect that the United States of America is a, you know, giant job fair for the whole rest of the world. I don't have to accept the premise that our ancestors were bad people and we need. need to be punished for it. I don't need to accept that we should encourage people to forego family formation. So because reasons, because reasons that on their face don't even stand up to

scrutiny anymore. You know, one of the things that was mentioned is just the myth of the individual, you know, coming from a libertarian background, the first thing somebody does when they become a libertarian, which is the most individualistic ideology out there, quote unquote, political ideology out there is they're like, oh, wow, I'm an individual. I need to find other people who consider themselves to be individuals. There's a fucking political party in this country of radical individuals. I mean, if that doesn't tell you that individuality and radical individualism is just a myth, that as soon as somebody finds, oh, I'm embracing this. But, oh, I want to hang out with other people who are radical individuals, too.

It's like, that doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about? You know, and people should, you know, once you start going down the rabbit hole of, you know, who preached libertarianism and where that came from and, you know, maybe look at some of the names. you may start seeing some similarities there to what we're talking about. Yeah, which is, again, it's a fine line that we have to walk because I, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think you would flat out reject anything associated with individuality. Like we are our own people.

I mean, this is why we're individuals within a group. which is why I emphasize people like Gerd Gigerenzer in my book is sort of an antidote to that. Yes, you are you, Peter R. Canonas, and there is no other Peter Arcanonas, and you are in critical ways very different from everyone around you. But at the end of the day, we're a collective, we're a sort of hive organism, we exist in physical spaces, in proximity to other people that we're. all depend on, even in ways that we can't possibly fathom. So that's, those, those are kind of the major takehomes of my book. Yeah. All right. And remind everybody again where they can find the book. Antelopehill Publishing.com. It's also on Amazon. If you like the way this stuff sounds, you can pick up my old books at Imperium Press. And I maintain a blog, janeal.substack.com,

where I basically continue the same type of writing. So Pete, I really appreciate it. You're a total gentleman. And to your audience, buy my book. Yeah, and a reminder, you get 5% off of, if you go buy his books at Antelope Hill and any other of the great books in Antelope Hill, if you use Code PQ, all one word at checkout.

And I cover shipping most of the time. So, yeah, my library is on the other side of the room. and if I were to start pulling out the amount of books from Antelope Hill, it'd be quite the pile. So head on over there. Thank you, Josh. Really appreciate it.