TRIGGERnometry - Benjamin Boyce: "The Rise of Social Justice is a Wake-Up Call"

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Benjamin Boyce is a content creator and graduate of The Evergreen State College. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a content creator and the graduate of the Evergreen State College. Benjamin Boyce, welcome to Trigonometry. Hey guys. Thanks for having me on. It's great to have you on. You've got the background. You're right there in the field of beautiful flowers. It's fantastic to have you on. anyone who doesn't know who you are, just tell a little bit about how are you where you are,

what has been your journey through life. How do you find yourself having this weird Zoom chat with us? Yeah. Well, the basic story is that I was going through life and I had a Dante moment. And instead of going to hell, I went to this small college in the woods called the Evergreen State College. And I went there to study literature and narrative specifically, how it operates, how you pull it part and put it together and what it does for and two people. And about halfway through my time at the Evergreen State College, a new president came on and he empowered some faculty and they created the college's purpose around social justice, but specifically about racial justice. And they began to implement ideas that I would ascribe to, I guess Robin DiAngelo is the most popular

proponent of these ideas called anti-racism. And whenever I speak about anti-racism, I'm putting that in quotes so we can get into that. But that was in 2015. By the spring of 2017, the college kind of collapsed in an absurdist version of a race war. And the students took over the campus, accused this very, very progressive, explicitly anti-racist institution of being the equivalent of, you know, the most white supremacist structure in the world or just a part of that white supremacist structure. They roamed the campus with baseball bats. They performed these things called struggle sessions, which is kind of a technical term.

They didn't know what they were doing, but they pilloried and mocked and yelled out and, you know, just kind of broke down various different authority figures. And they live streamed the entire thing to the internet thinking that they were the good guys. And it turned out that the world had a different idea of what they were doing. And then one professor that they targeted, Brett Weinstein, went on to kind of challenge them and then make what was going on more public than it already was, seeing that it was streamed online. Well, you're describing things that sound slightly familiar in the last few months, don't they? And this is really one of the reasons that we wanted to have this conversation with you, because you said just, before we started, you felt like that would be a warning to the world. And I know Brett did as well.

You know, we know Brett, we've met him. We'll be getting him on the show soon. He felt, I think, as well, that this was an opportunity for people to wake up to what was going on. And instead, as you said, it seems to have been more of a blueprint for how to move forward. So take us, you know, kind of through that, how this example of student activism running a mock now seems to be society running amok, or parts of society running a mock? Yeah, there's this interesting chicken egg quandary about, do the ideas come first, or does the radicalism or the behavior come first? So with regards to what happened in June of 2020, I think that we can see the buildup and then the explosion that happened worldwide, at least

in the Western world, about protests and stuff, nominally about Black, Lives Matter. But I think that there was a lot of just kind of pent up energy being released because everybody had been in lockdown. But that narrative that gave people a reason to protest, specifically Black Lives Matter and the various different things that that means. And people try to control what that means for various different ends, but it does mean different things. You know, there's the statement, Black Lives Matter, then there's the organization, then there's everything that's attached to that. So there's that layer that if you look at what happened at the Evergreen State College,

there's a very kind of basic explanation that a lot of students had been pent up all winter long, and now they had a reason to just express a lot of energy. They had been given these tools, I guess kind of loosely based on a Marxist principle of overthrowing the oppressor and lifting up the victim. and kind of reversing the scales of justice in a bid to equalize the scales of justice. So the students had those ideas at hand to justify what they were doing and to explain what they were doing to the world and to themselves and to the administration. But beneath that, beneath what the students were doing is the behavior of the faculty.

And what I've done, because I was going to the Evergreen State College, and I was working in the media department, so I was on camera a lot of the time, filming a lot of these workshops and seminars and lectures. I saw these ideas being implemented, and the ideas are very similar to, you know, exactly the same ideas that are now being implemented in a response to the protests currently. So there's been a big outcry about police injustice and the oppression of black people in America specifically. And now there's this entire set of ideas called anti-racism that corporations and school boards and municipalities and various different organizations are now implementing as a response to that. So at the Evergreen State College, this is my argument, is that the ideas allowed the protests to happen. In current events, the protests are allowing these ideas to be implemented. So I don't know if the ideas once implemented what they will actually do within any given structure or institution,

but I do know that they cause an extreme amount of tension and interpersonal conflict. And it fractures community. It makes it impossible to be a human being to a human being. I mean, Benjamin, you know, we're talking about students here. Isn't it a little bit? Look, students have always been, how can I put this, you know, Rick's. Dickheads. Yeah. Let's let's just say dickheads.

You know, they've always, you know, been a little bit balshy. If you go right the way back to the 60s when my dad was at university, they were doing sit-ins, you know, protesting, all the rest of it. Why is this movement now so dangerous as opposed to the movement of the 1960s? That's an interesting question. If you, if it depends on where the movement is going to be implemented. What we see now is that I guess there was a letter that was signed by 100 or 200 Princeton faculty and master's students that called for a reorganization of the institution of Princeton around ideas of anti-racism, around ideas that they call equity. And equity is not equality. Equity is equalization.

What equity does is that it takes perceived privilege and perceived. depression and it decreases everybody who has this so-called privilege in order to lift up everybody that has this so-called oppression. And what that ends up becoming is a redistribution of resources, both in the sense of just monetary resources or in positions of authority, but also moral reparations. That's what happens. And that's what happened at the Evergreen State College was that once everybody was no longer colorblind, everybody was focused and obsessed. with color, with race, with gender, sexuality, all these different vectors or intersectional markers of, you know, your privilege, oppression matrix. And what you were supposed to do is to

apologize, if you were a white man, you were supposed to apologize for your privilege, and put yourself behind everybody else. And if you were, let's say, a disabled, black, trans individual, you were put in front and you were given the moral authority. and it no longer had to do with the soundness of your argument, you know, or the content of your character. It had all about, it stressed not only your identity, but how you could maximize that identity to rest power and to gain attention. So the ideas that are being implemented, they make people go crazy. And everybody, depending on where they are at life, goes crazy in a different way. And what I've been doing recently is taking what I've discovered and studied at the Evergreen State College and using those tools that I developed to examine how people in New York City Council meetings, in, you know, Skype sessions and Zoom sessions are taking these ideas and implementing the same sort of fracturing of, you know, of community, of communalism of I'm going to talk to you as a person and using their identity.

to shift power dynamics and to, I guess, to forward some sort of justice. So the example I think you're talking about is a meeting in which a woman is chastising a guy for having his friend's black nephew on his lap or son on his lap. And she's chastising him for this as some kind of evidence of racism while the boy's black father is in the background, I think laughing is out of or something along those lines. So I see, but Benjamin, you bring up and repeatedly bring up this point about anti-racism, in inverted commas. Why is it in inverted commas?

For anyone who's just, who's not familiar with this whole thing, and they're just listening to this going, going, anti-racism, I mean, that sounds great. We should all be anti-racism, right? Not if you're Russian, mate. Well, mate, I was going to say, if you keep this shit up, as a white man, I'm going to make you apologize for everything, and you're going to get less speaking time on this podcast just to balance out the privilege. So, I mean, I'm seeing a brown woman.

She makes me apologize for being a white man every single day. I apologize. Anyway, carry out. Hey, if that's what gets you off, man. You know what? That is what gets him off. That's the real problem with this whole dynamic. But listen, for anyone who listens to the argument and goes, I'm against racism, I'm against racism.

We all are against racism. So why wouldn't you be anti-racist in this way? There is a very short video that was shared at my place of employment now, where there's a video of Ebrim X. Kendi, who's the author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, and he says that in this video, and I'm paraphrasing here, he says that to say that you're not racist doesn't mean anything, it's a denial. to ignore racism, to ignore color is to actually strip the experiences of those who have been oppressed. So you can't be not racist anymore.

You have to be actively anti-racist. And you ask, well, what does that mean? And when you get into this theology, it becomes very apparent that if you're a white person, you are operating in a state of ignorance as to the racism that is oppressing people. constantly, that everything that you take for granted, be it everything from, you know, literally everything is racist now if you start to look through the lens of disparities of outcome. So like a baseball game is racist or a wedding is racist or, you know, technology is racist. All these different parts of your life that you're taking for granted, actually you can see that they're all racist, that everything that you do or that you don't do is a marker of

your privilege and that you're constantly perpetuating this racism that's constantly oppressing everybody else. Or if you're in the minoritized group or the racialized group, then you are constantly under threat, both from macroaggressions, which would be history of the oppression of white people of your race, but all these microaggressions that are constantly operating behind the surface, or these peak aggressions that you can never actually locate because we don't have the technology to catch up to them. But you're constantly caught in a matrix of struggle and of oppression. And once you begin to internalize that kind of process of examining your life for all the things that you did or didn't do, and it doesn't matter what you intend, right,

it strips your agency away from you. You no longer have any purpose in life other than to fight against this implicit bias that you have, this unconscious bias that you have. And my contention, look at how it affects people is that it gradually erodes their ability to be a normal person functioning in the world because they are constantly overrun by this program that's imaginary that's not really tied to explicit acts of being good or doing good or being bad or doing wrong. I'm explaining in very general terms so we should probably land on something very specific. But I see that the theology, if you listen to the people who believe this, they're constantly saying you need to read more. You need to do the work more.

If you disagree with them, that's your fragility. There's all these tactics that it uses to make you, to convert you into a believer of the system. But once you're in the system, once you believe this belief, what are you supposed to do other than tear other people down or tear yourself down? I don't think of it as being constructive at all. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being,

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These are mass-produced objects. Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he sleeps. My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it fine. But the older I get, the more I notice that fine isn't actually fine. Your body tells you, if you're going to invest in anything for your home, your bed is the one that pays you back every single night. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale.

That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. And why do you not think it's constructive? Because isn't it, I mean, we do talk about privilege. And some people are more privileged than others. There's different types of privilege. I mean, for instance, if you might believe in white privilege, you're less likely to be get stopped and searched as a white person. You are if you're black. You know, if you're a man, you're more likely to earn more all these sorts of things. Isn't this a good thing that we're being made aware of it? Well, that is a really good question. And I constantly try to humble myself.

and interact with the good intentions behind the ideas and perform a struggle session on myself, because that's what it's kind of inviting us to do, is to really grill ourselves. And I think that insofar as you withstand criticism, you come out stronger. As long as you don't give up your agency, your self-control, your responsibility to somebody else, as long as you maintain ownership over your own guilt and shame and don't give it to other people. So, for example, at the Evergreen State College, towards the end of my tenure there, we had to go through mandatory privilege workshops or anti-oppression workshops. And in one workshop, I was asked to detail my privilege and then to detail the privileges that I don't have. And we broke up into small groups to kind of dwell on these things.

And I was in the group with the speaker who ended up being, who was a Evergreen Administrative. who figures into the documentary that I've done. She's a character in this story. And I'm like, well, I don't see the world as vectors of privilege and underprivilege. I don't look at my world that way. Why would I want to look at the world that way? And she's like, well, you are privileged to not look at the world that way. And other people aren't privileged enough to not see all the disadvantages that they have.

And then she detailed, she was a black woman, but she detailed all the privileges that she had about being able to go on vacation and being really happy that she was going on vacation. And she told a coworker that she was going to go on vacation. And then she realized that her coworker can't afford to go on vacation. And she was oppressing her coworker by expressing her own happiness of being able to, you know, to take a break from her work. And when she went on this lecture, because I knew this is what was going to happen. And I grew up in a Christian church, my dad's a pastor.

So I've been exposed to a lot of the mechanics of Christianity. And I've always been very aware of when they're being abused because I've seen the mechanics of Christianity be abused to control people. So what I saw happen in this lecture that she gave was that she just kept on breaking down everything in her life into this very rudimentary, very narrow way of looking at the world of do I have more or less than others? Now, when I resisted giving them my privilege and giving them my inventory, it's not because I don't have privilege. It's not that I, it's not because I don't have a deficit of privilege. I don't want to use my envy. I don't want to go through life envying everybody or feeling better than everybody, which is what you're supposed to do with this. And furthermore, I don't want them to be able to control.

my shame and myself. I don't want to go through life apologizing for being a white male. That completely distracts from whether or not I'm creating good content, right? So my focus is on making something good in the world. And the way that I can evaluate whether it's good or not is the effect that it has in the world. And whether or not I become, you know, better than other people or worse than other people, that's a very private thing for me to evaluate and then to either do better or to turn around and help somebody who's not as good off as me. And using all these tactics of guilt and shame, it's like a broken Christianity. It's got all the sin, but none of the redemption.

It's got all the darkness and the light. Benjamin, so let's talk about that because I think the religious aspect of this is interesting. A lot of us who have been paying attention to this thing, particularly those of us who are familiar with how religions operate, have begun to notice some similarities. And the one worry to me, you know, I'm skeptical of all religion or organized religion, certainly, because I see as a tool for manipulating people and imbueing people with original sin, guilt, shame, etc. Part of Islam, we're quite happy with that. Make one of clear, mate. Yes. Make it absolutely clear. You boys are great. Carole.

Yeah. Well done, mate. Saving us. Yes. Yeah. Anyway, moving swiftly on. So there seems to be a lot of similarities between what's happening. And the one concern that I've had for some time, which is what you put your finger on, is there seems to be one thing missing from this new religion, which is any sort of possibility of forgiveness, any sort of possibility of redemption that isn't a product of being destroyed. I mean, if you look at something like cancel culture, it's not enough for somebody to come and confess their sins. It's not enough for them to apologize. They have to be destroyed. They have to be fired. They have to lose their job.

They have to be ashamed. They must never appear on television again, et cetera. How much of a religious nature is there to this whole movement? That's a really interesting question that I think that you can go on forever to do that. And I think that I've interviewed people who have survived cults, gone through cults, And there's this one book that I'm feeling to recall right now, but it's an inventory of how the cultural revolution in China or the Chinese government implemented a totalitarian state. And there was a number of different tactics that they used. And one of those tactics that you use in a cult in order to maintain a rigid belief system and therefore maintain control over people is methods of exclusion.

if people disagree. Either you're with the program or you're out. And then your existence is erased. Actually, that's one of the literal tactics of destructive cult, is that they erase your existence. So when we talk about the religious nature, I think we really need to define what is religion. And this is probably beyond the confines of this discussion.

But if we really want to honestly critique in what ways social justice activism, or this current spate of moral panic is like a religion and the different tactics or mechanics of religious structures that the anti-racism, quote unquote, or the critical race theory or all these different theories and theosophies behave, then you really need to understand, I really think, or I would push, that you really need to understand the function of religion and the psychology of the individual and of the group, and where the individual and the group intersect and the negotiation between individuality and collectivism that religions

prove themselves as either destructive or constructive through. I guess what I'm asking, Benjamin, is what are the similarities? Why do you say this is like a religion? Well, okay, there's a zealotry aspect of it. If you look at the ways in which a certain faction of trans rights activism operates, and I'm making a distinction between transsexuals, trans people, and then a certain behavior on the internet, specifically towards a kind of slightly well-known children's author called J.K. Rowling, the way in which J.K. Rowling is being attempted to be erased for simply stating kind of a nuanced

opinion about the conflict between women's rights and trans women's rights and how we need to have a conversation about that and the ways in which radical trans rights activists feel empowered to erase her existence because her merely stating that women are a different category than trans women so upsets these individuals because it erases or attacks their reality and it shows that their reality is a construct of belief. In similar ways, the ways in which belief structures operate if they aren't constantly given a feedback into producing something in the world. If your belief doesn't constantly focus or come back to how do you feel and what are you doing?

Are you being a good person? If it is instead shifted onto, are you changing the world for the better? Is the world bad or can it be better? Then the locus of control or the focus is no longer on bettering yourself. it's about, you know, projecting all of your evil and your weakness, let's just say, your imperfection onto the structures in the world and then, therefore, you go after and you assault these structures in the world. I'm straying from the point about making it a religion or tying it directly to a religion, but there's just so many different mechanics going on in here that

I see similar areas to. And, you know, Benjamin, you know, I see this movement and, you know, we started this journey two years ago and we started listening to people and, you know, people like yourself. I'm from Venezuela. That means everybody who's watching and listening can have a drink. So that's what we do at Trigonometry because I always referenced my mum. But I've seen these ideas before. They bought new ideas. I saw them in 99 when Chavez came to power. You know, they're putting forward all these ideas and, you know, Venezuela collapsed. They're crap ideas. Why do we keep perpetuating them? Why do we keep going back to them? There was an article that was released in Reason magazine or Reason.com, and it was based on a scientific study of some sort.

And it talks about the ways in which virtue signaling or virtue signal culture empowers narcissistic sociopaths. And I've been seeing this over and over again. If you look at the footage of the Evergreen State College, you see that there's certain characters that get to the top of the fray. When the organization shatters, then it becomes a pure power play and it becomes purely theatrical. And in that type of environment, certain personalities get activated or rise to the top. So either these set of ideas of kind of inspire people to act like narcissistic sociopaths or they empower people who are already narcissistic sociopaths. I think that for a certain amount of people, it's really attractive. to be on the right side of history and to try to change the world.

It allows you to merge into a story that has, which is so superhuman and so otherworldly that you, in a sense, get inflamed by this transcendent fire of being able to actually tackle right now, 400 years of oppression. Right now, you can be involved in demolishing a system that has done nobody any good or every good that is done. done has come at the expense of people, somebody else, right? It's a zero-sum thinking with a messianic message that causes you to think that you're the Messiah. And it inflames your ego, and then you just go on this ego trip. So I think on one level, on the psychological level, revolutionary ideas are really suited for people who are discontent with themselves and who don't have a strong moral foundation that constantly causes them to focus first on themselves and then on the world. And I think that in a certain way, because of social media, because of

Facebook, the way that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are designed, it rewards narcissistic behavior. And these ideas kind of breed upon narcissistic behavior. So it's just, I think it's a conjunction of very similar different things and people being ignorant of the outcome of these ideas. You think part of it is also an ignorance of history because there seems to be these kind of cycles throughout history where it takes a few generations for people to forget what was a really bad idea. So suddenly you've got 20-year-olds now explaining to me how great communism is when I come from the Soviet Union, right?

And that's because they haven't been kind of, you might say they haven't been indoctrinated against it. And to some extent, they've probably been indoctrinated into it by their Marxist professors at university. Do you think this is kind of the cycle of history and which is back to the kind of 1930s? If that's the case, then what I think we should, well, here's the problem with this, but I have an idea. Why don't we just sandbox these ideas in the UK and in America? And give a city over to the communists and say, okay, let's run your experiment, abolish the police, empower social workers, create a communist government.

I nominate Hull. You've never been to Hull, Benjamin. I mean, it's not. No. Should I go there? No. Yeah, if you don't like having a good, no, that's unfair on the people of Hull. I'm sure it's a great town.

It really isn't. I mean, we love the people of Hull, but Hull, not so much. Anyway, carry on, Benjamin. And in a certain extent, the Evergreen State College story is a perfect example of how these ideas play out. But built within this activist rhetoric, built within the very foundations of critical race theory, of white fragility theory, of all these different ideas, is a shifting of the blame away from the self. So if Evergreen fails, which it has,

Evergreen ran an experiment and it failed. Everybody who still believes in Evergreen or believes in these ideas that kind of took over Evergreen shifts the blame to Tucker Carlson, shifts the blame to the right-wing media, shifts the blame to the yokels down the street that voted for Trump, right? So they can, they're literally unable, and this is my main criticism or the damning criticism of the Evergreen State College, is that they ran an experiment like good academics, but like bad academics, they were unable to actually do the work of examining why it went wrong, where it went wrong.

So even if we do give over Michigan to the Black Lives Matter government, and they fail, which they will, because everybody who generates income, everybody who is productive, will leave because their productivity will be given to the loudest people in the room who don't want to be productive, they just want to be right, it will fail, it will collapse, and then they'll blame it on capitalism. They'll always blame it on people who are living head. What does that mean? Like, is it still there? I mean, what's failing about it?

What's failed about it? So if you look at the numbers, and I'll try to make a nuanced point about this, if you look at the numbers, the Evergreen. State College ran their social justice experiment. In 2011, they made social justice, one of their guiding principles. In 2015, they made anti-racist indoctrination the way in which they were going to achieve social justice. In 2017, they fomented and justified after the fact this huge protest that went absolutely viral because it's absolutely stunning how everybody acted in this event. And then the feedback from the environment was, I don't want to go and get this kind of education.

I don't want to go to the Evergreen State College. And their enrollment has plummeted it dramatically. The administration has blamed everything except for the protest. They'll say, well, maybe the protest did something. But really, we think that it's just the economy is different or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They've gone so far as to pay a marketing team. I'm 90% certain to suppress my videos. on the Google search rhythm algorithm.

I'm the one who is reported constantly on Evergreen, and they stripped about a year ago, Google kind of flushed my videos from search results of Evergreen, and two weeks before then, the college hired that team. So they've tried to do everything they can to do good, but nobody wants to go there.

Nobody wants to go to the Evergreen State College. And this is the nuanced point. Even if you do want a social justice education, even if, as a student, you want to go and change the world. And to hell with understanding it, the goals to change it. Why would you go to the Evergreen State College, which proved that they can't even teach you how to do that effectively?

If you look at how the students overthrew the world, they're so ridiculous. They made complete fools of themselves, as did all the administrators. So even if you want that kind of education, which is what they're offering, why would you go there if you could go to any other college, literally any other college in the United States? But isn't part of the problem, Benjamin, is that, and I'm a former teacher, I was a teacher for 12 years. We have raised a generation of children to be, you know, to essentially see themselves as victims.

We try and sort all their conflicts out for them. It's a very selfish culture. We want to protect them. We have essentially raised a generation of adults now to be self-indulgent and narcissistic and think the entire world is about them. So can we really blame them when they go out and they start? not behaving like this. Well, see, in my reportage on the Evergreen State College and now in my reportage on current events, I'm not really concerned with the students or, let's call it the youth or the kids or whatever. I'm concerned with the administrators.

I'm concerned with the adults in the room. And if you look at the adults, like the people who are running, we have lost our sense of authority. It's not the generation that's acting crazy. We have lost our ability to have a strong, a positive, strong. role model of authority. We don't trust authority. We've gone down this road of deconstructing and deconstructing so long that we can't even, we can't stomach anybody drawing a line in the sand. I think that the fabric of our societies become so reactionary, in a sense, progressively reactionary,

that we had to elect a very belligerent authoritarian, authority figure, not authoritarian figure, but authority figure in Trump, just to kind of show us that we, like, show us the dark side of what we're missing. I think that if you look at Washington State on every level, if you look at the Evergreen State College, Seattle, and the governor, they're all very weak leaders who suppress, who suppress the, let's say the conservative faction who want to get back to work, constantly suppress the people who want to get back and get the economy rolling, and then constantly coddle the people who want to overthrow society. like it's filled with hypocrisy and weakness.

And it's interesting. So you say it's filled with hypocrisy and weakness. Don't you think one of the things that we saw in this country, which still to this day gets me upset, is the fact that, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, we can all agree that Black Lives Matter. We can all agree that, you know, racism, wherever it occurs, should be stamped out.

But if you look at the Black Lives Matter organization, and you see what they, that they want, you know, overthrowing capitalism, defunding the police, you know. I don't know the word they use for the nuclear family, but basically it's eradicating it. We all know that these are terrible, terrible ideas. But in our country right now, the head of the Labor Party criticized abolished the police, said it was a ridiculous idea. And he's now been got, he's now checked himself in yesterday, the day before, for unconscious, biasedness training. you're laughing mate we're fucked

no I know what else do you do when we're all fucked except for a laugh I'm a classical commusian you know it's just like the world is absurd at this point he was head of the criminal justice he was head of prosecutions

that was it he was head of prosecutions in this country he's now checked himself in for unconsciousness biasness trainers but anyway my point is why don't we have people who look at these simple things like BLM-1 and go, this is quite clearly neo-Marxist nonsense, and we shouldn't be following it? Yeah, yeah.

Well, you have to look at the way, and there's ways to spend when I'm going to say that might be a little conspiratorial theory, but I do think that there's an iterative process of how we got to this point. It happened in education, and it's happened in the media. The media has been captured or compromised, where there's such a stronghold on the narrative that always goes in one direction, that if three white supremacists show up on a street corner, they're going to use that as proof that white supremacy is on the rise. If an entire city gets torn down by, you know, progressive activists or Antifa activists, that will just be, oh, some people, went overboard, but it was a peaceful protest. Like, there's, on every level

of analysis, the media shifts the blame and doctors the narrative in such a way that it makes it impossible for you to simply say, no, that is ridiculous. So, the narrative's being controlled.

And insofar as the narrative is being controlled, everybody who's speaking against that narrative is atomized. We're all like, we're in this kind of this network of just individuals talking to each other, which is a particular weakness and strength of those who do embody or embrace individualism, is that we kind of have to do it together and let the institutions fall in a way and let the authority that they're expending on these stupid ideas just eventually completely drain them out. But it'll take a long time for Princeton to collapse.

It'll take a long time for the New York Times to collapse. But that's where they're heading. These huge trees are rotting from the inside out. Well, this is what I wanted to talk to you about, which is the way forward. And I'm not saying the three of us are going to come up with a solution right here, right now. But it seems to me that one of the big problems that we face as people with different political views, and we're not necessarily all on the same page, but the one thing that we embrace, as you said, is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and should not be judged on their group characteristics,

but rather on their character, which used to be a very fashionable idea now that's racist. But how do we deal with this? Because it seems to me that this idea that, you know, Dave Rubin is a big fan of this idea, you know, the marketplace of ideas. And if someone's got bad ideas, the way you defeat it is with good ideas. Well, it doesn't seem to me that we are in a marketplace of ideas. I think we're and have probably always been operating in a marketplace of emotions. And in the marketplace of emotions, being upset, being quote unquote, a victim,

being oppressed, et cetera, that trumps almost anything else. Certainly Trump's reasonableness, fact, a trump's rationality. So how do those of us who believe those things are more important triumph in this sort of cultural struggle? I recommend, and this comes from my experience as a teacher, I was a teacher too before I went to the Evergreen State College. I was actually a preschool teacher. So I don't really know if it was my 12 years teaching preschool or my first school.

four years at the Evergreen State College that gave me the tools to analyze this behavior. But we really have to take the long, play the long game. All of this emotion that's bright, that's vindictive, that's vengeful, that's victimizing, and that's victim-centric, that's narcissistic, it doesn't have a long shelf life. Once it expends everything, all the resources around itself, there's nothing left for it. And that works on a moral level too. It works on a artistic and aesthetic level too. So I do think that rationality should be and reason should be promoted. I don't think that they're going to be enough. What we need is better art. What we need is better storytelling. What we need is to engage people's curiosity rather than their victimhood.

Let me just interrupt you there just very briefly. You talk about this idea of this will burn out, you know, the emotion explodes and then, but one of the things we're seeing, as we've talked about, is that that initial explosion of emotion by the kids' generation that Francis asked you about, right? You said you're not concerned about them, and you're right, I think, to be concerned about the people who respond to that, the adults in the room, who then change institutions from the inside out. And so what you're left with, that initial emotional explosion changes an institution. And then we have some. something like the BBC in this country, which a lot of us used to respect. And I still hold on to

the idea of the BBC being potentially a neutral arbiter that can be used to bring the country back together. But it's been infiltrated by people with this mindset. The institution has been changed from the inside out. And they now, and I know this because I talk to people at the BBC, I get invited onto their programs, et cetera. And some of their people will tell me in private, you know, I can't say what I think in this place, right? So if the institutions get changed by that initial explosion of the emotion, I'm not sure your analysis is correct, because if the structures change, then, as I say, we're fucked. Yeah, well, okay, the spike of how it's going to burn out with the raw emotion is going to be much quicker than how it's going to burn out with the implementation

of systemic racial bias training and all this stuff. I'm not saying that's going to happen overnight with regards to the shutting down of actual creative, interesting, critical thought. But that's why we have to rely on the marketplace, just the capitalist marketplace with regards to media. People will get really tired of ingesting the crap ton of intersectional proper media that's now being, it's going to be put in place. And now because of this Black Lives Matter themed revolution, it's going, we're going to have a whole bunch of media that's writing through this social justice lens. And that has already been tested in smaller markets like with comic books or with video games and stuff. And it just, it doesn't satisfy. It's not really a satisfying story.

And only so many people can be a victim, right? Only so many people can actually embody that victimhood in a manner that they gain all the attention. Much more people want to hear the hero story. Much more people want to hear the off-color joke. And so we're going to go through a period. It's going to be several years of suppression of voices and of content. Thankfully, we have the Internet, but we don't know if it's going to have to be refigured to allow these ideas to perpetuate. But people's interest will go towards other things.

Now, in a work environment, and if you're working at a job, you can't afford to leave the job, you're going to need to actually study these ideas and come up with good arguments against them and figure out ways to allow yourself to speak or make connections with people who you don't think agree with you, but actually if you study people's behavior, more people don't want to go down this than do. It's going to take a lot of work. I'm not saying it's easy. And that we can't just, you're right, we can't just like, let it blow through us. We actually have to actively interact with it. But the feedback mechanism will be that eventually it's just not going to be satisfying on an aesthetic level or productive

on a fiscal level. And a lot of companies are going to say, why are we spending billions of dollars on this bias training that's making my employees not like each other anymore? Let's get rid of that. Go back to work. But Benjamin, you say all this and I'm sitting here and I'm agreeing with you. Isn't it pretty terrifying that you're going to be going to work and you're not going to be able to say what you think. And then all of a sudden, you know, you think, well, if I say this, if I disagree with it, I don't know, the concept of white fragility, I'm going to lose my job. I mean, that's a terrible way to live, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm not saying that we're in a good spot. We're not in a good spot. But going forward, I think we do have to reify the central

values that we hold dear. And if we have to hold those close to the chest, that is an opportunity for us to really examine why the ideas that we believed in and that now are out of fashion are very important. So we really have to get down to basics. Go beyond just free speech. Get into, you know, what is individualism, what is property, what is freedom of association, go back into the roots. It's a wake-up call to our civilization. If these ideas turn out to work, if anti-racism turns out to work, and if robbing from the supposed privileged and giving to the called depressed actually creates a better society, then maybe it was just our white discomfort all along. But if not, then we have to get back and really use this as an opportunity to get

back into what are we not doing right with regards to the young people that are growing up and with regards to what we allow our institutions of media and education and so on to actually promulgate. By the way, Constantine, if this system is showing to work, we're going to turn up, We're going to rename our podcast, white discomfort. No, mate, white and olive discomfort. I'm going with olives. That's, no, mate, you're white. If I'm going down, you're going down.

Mate, two weeks ago, you were saying I'm not white. You make up your fucking mind. I am the victim. I am oppressed. Get on your knees. Shrude is victim over here. There we go. So, but one thing that I wanted to ask you was,

what do you think is going to be the effect of this type of thinking on our cultural institutions. We're already seeing it a little bit. We've already seeing the BBC plunge. I think it was a hundred million into diversity. I can't even remember the language they used. I've got so turned off by it. But what do you think is going to be the impact on our cultural institutions with this type of thinking? I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes a smoothie. I'm waiting for the catch.

Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need a knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this tablewood? I think it's laminated. Okay, yeah, that's good.

That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. So your car today on. Carvana. Pick up these may apply. Having studied the psychology of it, what it does, and I might be proven wrong. This is just a shit. All I have is a crap load of anecdote.

I'm not a scientist. I haven't done a data analysis. But I just, I witness it from a narrative standpoint, from a human standpoint, that what it does is that it suppresses meritocracy. It suppresses the proof is in the pudding. It suppresses judging somebody by their output. It rather uplifts judging people by how they can be victimhood. So what you're going to see in your work environment is that there will be unstable personalities who see this as their opportunity. and those unstable narcissistic sociopathic personalities

were actually kept in check more or less, not perfectly, but kept in check by the stress on productivity. So if you give a narcissist the goal of being good because they're being good for everybody else, let's say like if you put a CEO, let's say you have this sociopathic CEO who doesn't give a shit about humanity, but if you reward him by tying his behavior

to rewarding other people, then you basically kind of harness that very selfish energy that has no morality. This behavior, however, within this system of morality that's being implemented doesn't produce anything any more

other than destruction. So I don't... I try to be optimistic, but at the same time, realistic with the fact that institution after institution will go through some variation of the Evergreen State College, where weak leadership will seed its

authority to bad actors over and over and over again, and the proof will be in the destruction of the productivity or the educational merit, or whatever product your institution is concerned with creating will be diminished by this ideology. That's what it's going to do. So basically, just to convert that into kind of ordinary examples, It would be, for example, the BBC will already have a massive campaign to defund it, to stop the taxpayer funding an organization that increasingly caters to a very small slice of the population. It's going to be things like that. It's going to be people not watching mainstream media, but watching trigonometry or watching Benjamin Boyce or whatever, because they feel that that's where getting good information from. It's going to be universities.

The one thing I was going to ask you, and I think it's an issue that bothers a lot of our viewers, and it bothers me. and it bothers Francis as people who, you know, who are considering bringing children into the world, is how do you protect your children in this environment from being indoctrinated? Because the school system is riddle with this stuff. Yeah. That is actually, I'm very concerned about that. That's a very big concern. And the only way to protect your child from this, which has captured many, many educational institutions is to kind of get to work. I think that a lot of people were asleep at the will. I think life was so good for, let's just say, Gen X, that we didn't show up to council meetings. We didn't show up to these board meetings. We didn't show up to the PTA. We didn't

show up. We allowed the activists to take over in a certain way. So we have to start showing up. We have to take the reins upon ourselves to tutor our children in critical thinking, to expose our children to rich ideas because the education system, which we were allowing to run on its own, was taken over by these other things. So we have to do the work ourselves in a way. So the responsibilities on us. If you don't agree with this stuff, you have to start your own thing. You really have to be able to say, if I don't believe in this ideology, will I sacrifice my job to live in a better world? Like, that's what you're going to, in certain cases, that's what you're going to have to do. That's what certain people have done. You know, I was really

lucky because I didn't have anything to begin with, right? But Brett Weinstein, in a way, like, he made good, but he was an example of somebody who sacrificed his career. And there's plenty of other examples of this for the truth. And, you know, there's people at the Evergreen State College that I talk to now who spoke up and who couldn't deny their conscience. A lot of people did deny their conscience, and now they're paying the price. And I think that it's an opportunity, any great tragedy is an opportunity to really prove your character, right? If we do think that content of character is what matters, then God damn it, then prove it then.

If that's what you really, then show that you have character, which involves sacrifice. You're talking to you, Francis. Yeah, mate, I've sacrificed enough. Certainly anyway. Trust me. But doesn't it also mean, like, so I'm on the left. I always have been former teacher, blah, blah, blah,

all the rest of it. And the way that this ideology has riddled the left and leftist thought, which, let's be fair, has some excellent ideas. Doesn't it mean that we're just never going to get elected ever again? That's a really good question. We'll see what happens in America. It's crazy. It's absolutely insane. We do not have a trustworthy left party. And I guess you could always say that they were always just like neoliberal or they weren't trustworthy in all these different. ways, but there's no set of ideas on the left that have not been infiltrated by this incredibly virulent and destructive ideology. And so what do you do?

You're basically, you're basically outright adjacent or far left prostrated, right, at this point in time. Like, those are your two options. So there has to be this politically homeless, you know, this centrist kind of weird encampment of people just pitching tents outside of the main structure. that are either, you know, something that you can't agree with if it's too conservative with you or something that you can't agree with because it's too crazy for you. So.

Well, we're fucked, aren't we? Well, unless you like camping. Yeah, we're all going to learn to camp very soon. But Benjamin, listen, it's been a pleasure talking to you. And I think you make some excellent points of someone who's seen how this has played out on a smaller scale. and how it might play out going forward. I think you're right. It's about people taking responsibility,

and that's what, you know, Francis and I have done that. And as you say, it's my favorite, one of my favorite movie quotes is from Fight Club, when it says it's only when you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. And I think, you know, us doing this show, you doing what you do, and there are lots of other people who try as best they can to step up.

And we know a lot of people who watch the show who are stepping up in small ways. and big ways to try and make, I mean, you know, there's the Maya and the Narcissus coming out to change the world for the better. So thanks for coming on. We've got one more question for you. And it's the same question we always end the show with, which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I think, I don't think we're focusing on our arches, our art support enough anymore. Like when we're going to get footwear, I think one thing that we've just completed.

completely lost is that footwear going to affect my back in a positive or negative manner. I don't think we're really thinking about the entire human being as a network of bones. We're so involved in our emotions that we're losing track slowly of taking care of our body. That was a facetious answer. I never know what not to talk about because it's not about what we're not talking about. It's about what we're not allowed to talk about. One thing that I think is that I don't think it's healthy to always be questioning everything to be a skeptic. about everything, but whenever you're in a situation where you're not allowed to question, that's when the questions need to be asked the most. So whenever you sense that there's something

that we can't be talking about, you know, so that that's kind of, my answer is that, that's kind of my job is to kind of smell that, that, that, where the conversation is falling apart and go towards that. So I never know what that's going to be because there's so much of it out there right now. And as a man who suffers from flat feet, thank you for raising that. It's important. Somebody had to do it and you did. So thank you. You stepped up when it counted, man. But listen, Benjamin, if people want to follow your work, you've got a YouTube channel, obviously, where else should people go to check out what you do? I'm on Twitter at Benjamin A. Boyce. I do a lot of pithy sentences. I think sentences are just like, that is what I want to be

known for. All these videos, you know, that's just a via. for sentences. So that's my main output. That in the YouTube channel, I highly recommend if you haven't heard what happened at the Evergreen State College story. I've made a 20-part documentary on the events showing everything that happened from found footage and documents that I got through the college with very minimal editorializing in it. And that's on my YouTube channel. It's linked right in the main page. It's very good and very scary all at once. So if you don't want to watch, Saw 17 or whatever it is. Check out the Evergreen documentary by Benjamin Boyce. Thank you for watching, guys, and we will see you very, very soon with another brilliant

episode. Make sure you go and follow Benjamin on the YouTube, subscribe to his channel, and hit him up on Twitter as well. Thanks for having me, guys. Thank you very much, Benjamin. Absolutely. Don't forget, we've also got live streams, and we've also got episodes. Our live streams are Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, always at 7 p.m. See you soon, guys.