Based Camp - Based Camp： Were Progressives Good⧸Benign Before They Went Woke？

00:00:00.000 Would you like to know more?

00:00:05.700 Hi, Malcolm.

00:00:07.160 Hello, Simone, my wonderful wife. It's beautiful to be here with you today.

00:00:12.080 Glad to be talking. What are we going to talk about?

00:00:14.880 So on a recent podcast, you had brought up something where I disagreed with you. And

00:00:19.320 whenever we disagree on something, we like to hash it out so that we can get on the same page

00:00:24.120 with the topic. So we both agree that right now, progressivism in the far left has been

00:00:29.980 eaten by this super virus that has hollowed out the old predominant ideologies and just wears them

00:00:37.980 like a skin suit. And we agree that this super virus is primary objective or like the objective

00:00:44.760 ideological function of it. It's to remove in the moment emotional pain from people. That's

00:00:49.500 what it optimizes most of its decisions around. So those two things being agreed, where we disagreed

00:00:55.800 was the movements that it ate. What the progressive movements were in the 80s and 90s before the age

00:01:05.260 of the internet, before this super virus arose, what was their real objective and what were they

00:01:10.420 optimized around this?

00:01:12.220 Yeah, my position and the general impression that I'm under is progressivism is the move fast,

00:01:18.800 break things approach. Whereas conservatism is the hold on, wait, things are okay the way they are.

00:01:24.020 Let's not change things so quickly. And so I don't see progressivism as inherently bad. I can see it as

00:01:32.600 risky, obviously, because things do break when you move fast and when you're not careful. But it is

00:01:37.600 just one philosophy. And ultimately, both progressivism and conservatism must work in concert. Because if you

00:01:44.400 don't have advancement, if you don't have people moving fast and breaking things, you don't deal with new

00:01:50.600 existential threats, you don't advance. But if you only advance, if you only try new things and

00:01:57.080 constantly change, you both lose a lot of value collectively and a lot of efficiency and also

00:02:03.740 subject yourself to maybe more existential risks than you're building solutions to, if that makes

00:02:09.380 sense. Do you have a differing definition of these things?

00:02:11.320 I do. Yeah. So I think the progressive movement always had an aesthetic element to it that contained

00:02:19.200 what you're talking about and has always professed to care about that. For a long time, it's professed

00:02:24.180 to care about that. But I think we need to remember that something could be called the Patriot Act and be

00:02:28.960 totally unpatriotic, right? Like just because something professes something doesn't mean it doesn't.

00:02:33.040 And I think that when we're talking about when we talk about conservatives, modern or even older

00:02:40.000 conservatives, they'll often say that their movement, one of the big things they care about

00:02:43.960 is small government, right? And yet they almost never do anything that actually makes the government

00:02:49.460 smaller or that really deconsolidates executive power or that. And so just because a movement says

00:02:55.720 and a lot of members believe that this is something that they do, I don't think that we should take that

00:02:59.380 to mean that's actually what they're optimizing around. So when I look around progressive policy

00:03:05.040 pushes in the 90s and the 80s, they all really seem to me based around optimizing equality,

00:03:14.920 specifically equality of outcomes. And the more equality you had, the more equality you had in the

00:03:22.420 way people were treated, in the opportunities people had access to, in sort of everything, the better.

00:03:28.540 And this is not what it optimizes for anymore. An example of how much it doesn't optimize for

00:03:32.920 equality now can be seen in insane things that it's done recently. So it's a lot of people,

00:03:36.920 they might not agree with our original premise that it's been eaten and now it does something

00:03:40.080 entirely different. So if you look at what progressivism does now, so you have Simone's

00:03:44.180 vision of progressivism and my vision of progressivism, and we can talk about why each

00:03:47.960 of those visions might be negative in some ways, and we can get to that. And I think that the

00:03:51.540 equality drive is actually a pseudo-communist drive and that it's driven with the long-term plan to a

00:03:57.320 communist-like society, but, or very socialist-like society, like, as close to communism as you can

00:04:03.360 get. But if we go back to the main claim that we made at the beginning, which is that progressivism

00:04:08.660 today isn't that anymore. So when we look at something like the recent fight in California,

00:04:14.820 which was to have kids, like, not take tests or remove the amount of testing that kids get,

00:04:21.020 because some kids get bad grades on tests and that hurts their feelings. So let's remove this

00:04:26.740 thing that's hurting people's feelings. Now, obviously in the long-term, if you remove testing,

00:04:33.760 that testing was primarily motivating the kids who didn't have parents who were motivating them.

00:04:38.380 The rich kids' parents still send them to SAT prep. They're still sending their kids to forced

00:04:43.860 environments where they are in some way socially or economically or emotionally punished for not

00:04:51.640 continuing to achieve, to not continuing to do well. Whereas when you have less socio-economically

00:04:56.260 advantaged people, often they don't have as much time to spend on their kids in those ways. They

00:05:00.100 don't have as much time to engage those kids on those things. So the people who are vastly 0.96

00:05:05.000 disproportionately hurt by removing things like that are going to be the economically less fortunate.

00:05:10.940 So you are increasing inequality, but removing in the moment suffering. And you see this across

00:05:16.600 the board. Again, I always come back to the Hays movement as being a great example of this,

00:05:19.780 but I really think it is. The Healthy in Every Size movement saying that it is bigoted to teach

00:05:24.320 or publish research that shows that it might be unhealthy to be severely overweight. That causes

00:05:29.460 in the moment emotional pain, and therefore it is bad, regardless of whether or not it is true

00:05:34.260 and might help people in the long run. That's just, you then rework what is true and what is being

00:05:39.840 communicated to be the thing that hurts people less. Another area where you see this progressive

00:05:45.160 policy of not at all being like what progressives used to be is these drug programs where they're

00:05:50.900 giving hard drugs to people on the streets really at high levels, because not having your drug when

00:05:56.340 you want it causes emotional pain. Therefore, it is evil. Therefore, we should give it to people,

00:06:00.980 even if it causes more long-term suffering and exasperated social inequality caused by things

00:06:06.040 like mental disorders. And you can see this in polyamory, like the social movements that you

00:06:11.020 see today, right? I want sex now, right? And I might have some set of rules, but all of those rules I 0.66

00:06:18.380 have with my partner are based around removing emotional pain for me and the partner while doing

00:06:23.420 whatever I want.

00:06:25.200 All right, but I'm going to push back on your premise around equality. I think that-

00:06:30.180 Yes, the old objective.

00:06:32.020 Yeah, I don't think that's what progressivism is really about. I think that equality maybe correlates

00:06:39.600 more highly with Christianity. That's like a concept that was introduced with Jesus in the New Testament,

00:06:47.340 and it's all about like now the meek shall inherit. And this is about, that's where victimhood became 0.95

00:06:54.120 cool. That's where helping the poor became cool. That's where helping everyone became like a

00:07:00.500 desirable and virtuous thing. And I think that Christianity or like pro-religion groups have 0.91

00:07:08.240 isolated, sorry, sorry, oscillated between progressivism and conservatism. So I think that

00:07:12.700 there's a lower correlation between equality, which I very much like connect with Christianity

00:07:18.440 and conservatism or progressivism. And I think more of it has to do with who is in favor of

00:07:24.640 changing things and who is not in favor of changing things. There has been time when the

00:07:29.340 Catholic church and then broader Christianity has been very pro-change. And there have been times when

00:07:34.600 it has been very anti-change. So I don't agree with what your like basic argument is.

00:07:39.220 I really find the point you just made very fascinating. And I do agree that you're right,

00:07:45.200 that before Christianity, and this is actually a really interesting thing. If you study the

00:07:49.180 history of like early Christianity, the idea of looking with reverence on the less fortunate in

00:07:55.800 society was not really done. There was very little cultural precedent for doing that, at least within

00:08:04.060 the traditions in those geographic regions. And this is something you can actually see Romans talk a lot

00:08:09.240 about in the early Christian tradition, is they saw it as really interesting the way that

00:08:14.580 Christianity did that, and potentially even morally superior to their existing pagan practices. 0.74

00:08:19.480 As to why Christianity does that, I suspect it's because their original, like the progenitor of it all, 1.00

00:08:26.060 was somebody who was suffered, who was downtrodden, and that they showed their dedication through

00:08:34.580 suffering and unpraised suffering in the moment. And that is why for a long time after this,

00:08:41.540 and if you're not familiar with the early Christian church, the core thing you would do to be cool in

00:08:45.780 the Christian church was to become martyred. That was the highest act of devotion. And then when the

00:08:51.640 Roman government mission, Christians started freaking out about this because they could no longer do the

00:08:55.780 key thing, the end state, right? And so then what, that's when the monastic tradition started.

00:08:59.960 So they would, they just get, they got fed up that they couldn't get themselves killed. So they just

00:09:03.640 walk into the desert and then say, okay, I'll live this sort of life of suffering. But this elevated

00:09:07.980 this, this life of suffering, which really elevated the poor, which is really philosophically

00:09:13.160 interesting, but I don't know. I actually think both the progressive, the communist, and the

00:09:18.320 conservative faction, I love the conservative factions, like you guys aren't the Christians. And then the 0.99

00:09:21.660 Christians say, you guys are the progressives. They're like, you guys aren't the good Christians. 0.99

00:09:24.660 And the truth is that Western civilization has been so inundated in Christian values for so long. 0.62

00:09:29.740 I actually think both perspectives are different parts of the Christian kaleidoscope and represent

00:09:35.800 different Christian denomination values and different ways of relating to those values. And so I think

00:09:42.800 it's wrong to say that the conservatives are the Christian influence side and the progressives aren't

00:09:48.220 the Christian influence side. However, I think I, well, okay, but here's where I don't agree with you.

00:09:56.300 So when I look at the actual policy decisions that they were pushing, they were pushing for a very 0.98

00:10:01.980 specific and stupid kind of equality. And that is equality, regardless of what you do, that you can 0.97

00:10:09.700 dress any way, take any action, act in any way, put any amount of effort into something,

00:10:16.340 and you should still be socially treated the same and get the same rewards. You should be able to

00:10:21.460 not go to work and still get the same rewards as somebody who does go to work.

00:10:24.680 Whoa, no.

00:10:25.200 That's an extremist position.

00:10:27.300 That is one progressive group that has made arguments like that. And again, like there are,

00:10:32.700 that's, this is what I personally, cause I'm going to hold out. Like I'm trying to stand

00:10:36.060 progressivism here. Progressivism is about letting ideas out there, trying them, but it's not about

00:10:43.500 enforcing them and it's not about forcing them on other people. It is, Hey, let's try this social

00:10:48.520 experiment. Hey, let's try letting people dress whatever way they want. Let's try and see what

00:10:53.540 happens when women vote. And in the end. 1.00

00:10:55.580 But they never had a fail state. That's the thing about social experiments is they're supposed to

00:10:59.260 have a fail state. Like we know if X or Y happens.

00:11:02.340 Progressivism and conservatism are about the next step we take. They're not about determining what,

00:11:07.580 what fails or what succeeds. And in fact, a very progressive system would have a higher

00:11:13.200 revolution, a higher respawn rate than like a conservative system because the progressive

00:11:18.280 system would say, Oh wow. We all just tried like being naked for a year. That was dumb.

00:11:23.900 Here's a new progressive idea. Maybe we should wear clothes. Cool. Let's try it. Whereas 0.99

00:11:28.280 someone would be like, I don't know, man. I don't know. Did you see the article like advice

00:11:32.900 or something? And they're like, there's this cool new thing people are doing in San Francisco

00:11:36.540 called radical monogamy. But see, that's the progressive way. The conservative way in San

00:11:40.800 Francisco would be like, no, let's stick with polyamory. We know it works and let's not go

00:11:46.160 around changing things. And progressivism is... We tried this polyamory thing. Let's give it

00:11:50.400 another few centuries. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I'm saying. Like progressivism is great

00:11:54.500 because it allows for greater adaptability. I think conservatism is the also very necessary

00:12:00.640 hesitation before doing something crazy so that you don't end up hurting a lot of people. Because

00:12:06.380 a point that you make about governance, for example, is progressivism within governance models,

00:12:10.600 especially on the state level, is incredibly dangerous because when you do something wrong,

00:12:14.820 hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people may die. So there is a place for these things.

00:12:19.680 So here's how you convince me. Can you think of actual mainstream progressive policy positions?

00:12:26.820 You have a window here, okay? You have the 90s to the 50s, all right? And you've got progressive

00:12:33.620 positions from that period, okay? I want you to find a single one that was an actual policy position

00:12:41.380 that they pushed for that couldn't be argued to primarily be about equality instead of just

00:12:48.280 social accelerationism. Because what you're describing is social accelerationism. And you

00:12:52.660 get social acceleration, like Calvinist tradition, which we're both from, is a very socially accelerationist

00:12:57.940 position. They were always experimenting with new cultural practices. Gay marriage.

00:13:01.240 What? Gay marriage. Gay marriage? I don't think that's about equality. Hey, if it were about equality, 0.99

00:13:06.440 then we would have animal marriage too, all right? Like, this is for the gays. 1.00

00:13:10.040 What are you talking about? Come on. It was 100%. If you were about social change, 0.98

00:13:17.780 you would have animal marriage. Gay marriage was saying, this isn't hurting anyone, and it's not 0.99

00:13:23.040 involving any non-consenting entities, and therefore it should be allowed because equality explains the

00:13:29.920 push towards gay marriage much, much, much more so than just social experimentation.

00:13:35.160 And in fact, I would bet that many gay proponents would find that quite an insulting reason to say

00:13:40.100 why progressives were standing gay marriage. Was what? They just wanted social experimentation? 0.55

00:13:45.160 They just wanted social change? No. They were fighting for equality. And anyone would have told

00:13:49.720 you that. Perhaps you're right. I think it's acknowledging that an old social institution

00:13:57.300 was no longer relevant and allowing that social institution to evolve. That is to say, marriage. 0.94

00:14:02.800 Conservatives change their practices all the time. So if you want to talk about a big social change

00:14:08.320 that happened during that time, was the conservative antagonism towards abortion. That just wasn't true

00:14:13.960 before like the 50s. Conservatives were pro-abortion?

00:14:17.180 Yeah, they were pro-abortion. In fact, there were surveys done and conservatives were much more

00:14:22.440 pro-abortion than progressives. Really?

00:14:24.760 Yeah. So the abortion thing only came about because they were trying to capture the Catholic voting block,

00:14:29.340 which was always anti-abortion.

00:14:30.520 So I looked this up after recording, and at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1976,

00:14:37.540 the majority of the constituents there were pro-choice.

00:14:42.420 But like evangelicals being anti-abortion? No, that was not a thing historically. That was social

00:14:48.100 experimentation. Now you look at the highly derived evangelical movements. They're constantly coming

00:14:54.300 up with new social practices, like speaking in tongues, or weird types of parades they do, or,

00:14:59.520 uh-oh, now we're going to talk with each other with these words. You know, they're always socially

00:15:05.720 experimenting. What you are seeing here is progressives have defined a specific type of

00:15:11.900 social experimentation as good, as progressive. And because you grew up in that environment,

00:15:17.700 that was the only thing you saw. You saw all of the conservative social experimentation as intrinsically

00:15:23.760 regressive. When it wasn't, it was trying out new things. All of these quote-unquote

00:15:28.360 conservative cults, or like extremist conservative religious factions, that was social experimentation,

00:15:33.280 just as much as a hippie commune. Now, here's a separate argument. If you look across cultures,

00:15:39.800 you have cultures that are called, I want to say accelerationists or derivative, and they change a

00:15:45.020 lot. But you don't just see this in cultures, you see this with languages. So if you look at

00:15:48.320 specific language groups, as they've derived from Indo-European, some languages, just for whatever

00:15:53.420 reason, are really highly retained. They just don't change. They keep saying,

00:15:58.180 things the same, et cetera. Other groups that deviated from the same cultural evolutionary

00:16:02.860 tree at the same time, they just have a cultural tendency of changing really quickly in the way

00:16:07.940 they say things and the speed they adopt new words, everything like that. If you look historically,

00:16:13.820 actually the core differentiation here wasn't progressives versus conservatives. It was the

00:16:19.980 Catholic and Orthodox versus the Protestant traditions. The Protestant traditions, oh, it's derived.

00:16:25.400 The Protestant tradition has always been a highly derived tradition with certain iterations of the

00:16:30.360 Protestant tradition, specifically the Calvinist iteration being the most derived iteration of the

00:16:37.000 Protestant tradition. That's why when you look at the founders who were predominantly Calvinist,

00:16:41.180 you would see them doing things like editing their Bibles to try to make them more like up to date

00:16:45.520 with modern science and stuff like that. That was both highly derived, but a very conservative practice

00:16:51.260 because they still really followed this new social structure that they had created.

00:16:57.520 And I would argue that conservatism today is still the same in terms of its long-term objective as

00:17:03.000 conservatism in the 90s and 80s. And this is where you can see your core thesis falling apart,

00:17:07.900 I think, is that it is about intergenerational cultural fidelity. What they care about is their

00:17:13.780 culture surviving into the future. Yet, if you're looking at the Protestant traditions, specifically the most

00:17:19.680 fervent of the Protestant traditions, they're often highly derived cultural groups. Look at the Mormons

00:17:24.620 talk about a derived cultural group. They have very odd sorts of practices.

00:17:29.800 And they do innovate. They do adapt. It takes them a little while, but they adapt.

00:17:33.840 They do adapt. Yeah. They do a lot more social experimentation than I'd argue progressives do.

00:17:38.680 And their social technologies are really cool. Like we can get into the Mormon dating and stuff like

00:17:42.740 that. Like they've developed some pretty interesting social technologies. But let's actually talk about that.

00:17:46.980 So let's talk about how a single ward works. Just as an example, derived in newish social technology.

00:17:51.420 What they do is the single people. 0.95

00:17:53.740 So just to provide a little bit of context, like on Sundays, different waves of people will go to church services

00:18:02.260 and a singles ward would meet at a certain time, like maybe at 8 a.m. when like the rest of all the families

00:18:07.960 in that general area would meet at 10 a.m.

00:18:10.220 Single people.

00:18:11.100 And yeah, then it's, yeah, it's a church service followed by, you know, activities after where they hang out,

00:18:14.840 they go to lunch. But hold on, it's not just activities. So what they would do is they would

00:18:18.460 pair up usually people who were like dated or interested in each other in the ward to play

00:18:23.140 mother and father of the ward. And so instead of going back, like you would, if you were married

00:18:28.340 and going to your home and then doing family day with the kids, you would do family day with the

00:18:33.660 ward where this couple plays the role of mother and father and then hosts like an event, like a party,

00:18:39.400 like a mixer for the other people in the ward in the same way that they would do for their kids.

00:18:44.160 If they were older and it allowed them to try out relationships in a way that I think probably

00:18:49.540 led to healthier relationships forming. So that's an example of a newish social technology.

00:18:55.620 I don't know if it's that new.

00:18:56.740 Okay. I looked it up after recording and it appears that it gained prominence in the 1970s,

00:19:03.260 but was invented in the 1950s. So yes, a very new social technology.

00:19:09.260 It's more of a conservative tradition because that social technology was experimented with the idea

00:19:13.960 of forming relationships and transmitting the culture onto the next generation. So it was

00:19:19.920 towards conservative ends and not towards progressive ends where when they experiment

00:19:25.400 with new social practices, historically before they were eaten by the virus and now they're just

00:19:29.200 like a ghoul wearing a flesh suit. They were about maximizing equality. 0.72

00:19:34.020 Okay. Hold on. I don't think it's about maximizing equality. I think it goes back to a different

00:19:37.920 definition that you've given about both the present, but also past difference between progressivism

00:19:44.240 and conservatism with conservatism fighting for intergenerational wellbeing and progressivism

00:19:51.780 fighting for intragenerational wellbeing. So progressivism optimizing around the wellbeing of

00:19:57.820 people here and now, we don't really care about our grandchildren's grandchildren and conservatives

00:20:03.020 arguing more in favor of now. Screw our kids. 0.99

00:20:07.980 So the one big deviation from all this is global warming. Where does this fit into things for you?

00:20:13.860 Because it's the one area where progressives actually take a long-termist perspective.

00:20:18.860 Don't you think it's one of those things that's arbitrary, like with the war in Ukraine,

00:20:23.840 how in the United States, like it's almost, it's a little counterintuitive how we'll say Democrats

00:20:30.200 and Republicans decided to support different angles on the conflict. And I don't think necessarily

00:20:36.640 it had to be. So I'll give you my answer to this. Okay.

00:20:40.860 I think what's happening is the progressive institution has predominantly, when we talk

00:20:46.580 about the super virus or where it really began to spread, it was at university campuses. Okay. And

00:20:52.080 at that time, the conservative institutions, though, a lot of people think of it as conservative

00:20:56.400 as anti-academic, but that really wasn't true. If you go back to the conservatism of the seventies

00:21:00.080 and eighties, there were a lot of conservatives in academia back then. But once the progressives

00:21:04.100 had really captured the academic system as a means of replicating their ideology, because

00:21:08.960 they weren't having as many kids, so they needed to proselytize somewhere, then the conservative

00:21:13.600 institutions began to distrust anything that was coming out of academia. And global warming

00:21:19.240 really requires a law, an academic perspective to judge how dangerous it really is. And so I think

00:21:27.420 that what we're really seeing here is more a distrust of academia from conservatives and

00:21:32.940 the progressive priesthood, if they have a priesthood, which they do actually, it's academics.

00:21:37.440 That's the height of the, that's who tells them what's true and what's false. And the same

00:21:40.740 way that if you look at the older Catholic tradition and you wanted to go determine what

00:21:45.880 was true and what was false, and we can go over a different video in this, you'd go to your

00:21:49.120 priest, right? And that was the core divide between them and the Protestants. The Protestants said,

00:21:52.860 oh, you should determine this on your own. And obviously some Catholic traditions have different,

00:21:56.240 but the progressive faction, when they're trying to determine what's true and what's false about

00:21:59.600 the world, they say, ask the experts. But what do they really mean by experts? They mean people who

00:22:04.440 have been accredited by this university system where you can be fired for saying something too

00:22:07.920 conservative, right? That's not experts. That's just what's the progressive status quo,

00:22:11.900 which is really, especially now, right? Really, it just makes it a priesthood.

00:22:16.300 Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you've convinced me a little bit. I guess growing up with progressive culture,

00:22:25.880 one wants to believe that it's more well-meaning than it perhaps is, or more deep than it is.

00:22:35.220 Equality is well-meaning if you don't think about it.

00:22:36.920 No, yeah. If you don't think about it, but equality is a complete farce. There is no such

00:22:40.380 thing as equality. 0.86

00:22:41.780 Explain what you mean by that. That was fine words to a lot of people.

00:22:44.520 I know. But once you think about it, yes. So this happened, I realized this upon reading a book

00:22:51.880 called Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone. In one chapter, she describes a professor bringing a

00:22:57.720 cake to a class and dividing it fairly or equally. But then she describes all of the different ways

00:23:04.060 in which the cake can be equally divided. And I'm not going to give exact examples based on

00:23:08.980 who gets the best grades, who's the hungriest, who has the best way to tolerate a glycemic load,

00:23:13.940 who really likes cake the most, who she likes the best, who walked up first to get a piece of

00:23:19.480 cake. There are many ways to eat. I think I don't like the examples used just easier. I think a better

00:23:24.520 way to say it was, is it who's the hungriest, who needs calories the most, like who's physically the

00:23:30.020 biggest? Is it exactly equal distribution? Is it to the people who have less access to cake at home?

00:23:35.300 Is it people who have less money so they couldn't get a cake in class as much?

00:23:39.580 Or people who got better grades.

00:23:42.160 Yeah. Yeah. Or the people who got more cake last time get less cake this time.

00:23:45.580 Yeah. Yeah. Depending on sort of who you are and where you stand in this and how much you want cake,

00:23:52.280 it might, an equal division of the cake might feel very unfair to you, very unequal to you.

00:23:57.180 You could always manipulate what equality means.

00:23:59.520 Yes. And because you have to make a judgment call on how we define equal, and there is no

00:24:06.700 one universal thing that you can use as criteria, there is no such thing as true equality. There's

00:24:12.800 equality along one dimension, and it's a very one-dimensional way to think about things. So

00:24:17.640 yeah, if you base an entire political philosophy around equality, especially if that equality is not

00:24:24.700 something that also is core to that political philosophy, if equality were defined in

00:24:31.060 progressivism, I don't even know how it could be defined.

00:24:34.840 The reason it's not defined is because it's defined loosely so everyone can believe that if

00:24:39.820 things were divided more equally, they'd have more stuff.

00:24:42.180 They would benefit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what's really interesting about intersectionality

00:24:45.860 as a concept is that it's like a moving goalposts for equality that enables people to cheat. It's like

00:24:52.140 a cheat code for having things made more equal in your favor.

00:24:55.720 Yeah. Because it has allowed people to say, I deserve more and I am more excluded and have

00:25:00.880 a bunch of exclusionary labels. I think as progressivism began to be eaten by the virus,

00:25:06.020 as it began to optimize itself around removing emotional pain, it did begin to define this equality

00:25:12.020 that it was trying to create. Where equality is the people, the people who deserve the most are

00:25:17.780 the people most susceptible to emotional pain. And this is why you have these emotionally fragile

00:25:22.960 deserve so much special treatment when no sane culture would be like, oh yes, the emotionally

00:25:28.300 fragile, that is who should have the most resources and run the society. But within progressive culture,

00:25:35.620 yeah, of course the emotionally fragile, because it is their emotional fragility and their susceptibility

00:25:40.220 to emotional harm, which means they mean more protection in a society where the core promise,

00:25:44.240 the core thing that's getting people on board is we will protect you from pain. So I will say that

00:25:49.560 you have seen this transition, but I think yes, in 90s and 80s progressivism, they didn't know what

00:25:53.580 equality meant. And this is why those communist systems always fail. It's because they say, oh,

00:25:59.280 we're going to create equality. And then what happens just because humans are humans is that the groups

00:26:05.540 in power within these systems end up defining equality in a way that favors them. And if you're not

00:26:11.820 in power, then you can't do anything but revolt, create a new system. And then inevitably in a few

00:26:16.480 years, you end up redefining equality to what favors you. And so that's the problem with equality is it is

00:26:21.140 such a slippery concept. I think that we now have a progressive ideology that does define equality. It

00:26:26.900 does define who deserves more. The problem is it's just a really stupid definition. Even worse, it's a stupid 1.00

00:26:31.760 definition because, okay. How does it describe equality? Yes. The people most susceptible to emotional 1.00

00:26:38.060 pain deserve more. So the most mentally ill shall get all of them. Yes. Yes. Yes. You have seen this. 0.93

00:26:46.800 We're like, don't you understand? I have PTSD. I can't handle this right now. And the problem is

00:26:53.140 some people really do have PTSD and we need to create special things for them so that they don't

00:26:58.980 suffer for no reason. But when you incentivize this, when you create a system where the people who feel

00:27:04.960 emotional pain most easily, well, then you created a system where their entire social group, their entire

00:27:09.740 society is constantly rewarding a lack of emotional control. And so within their groups, within their

00:27:16.640 little governance structures, you constantly have these meltdowns. And this is bad for the individual in

00:27:23.000 these groups, because one, you're teaching an external locus of control, which like all of the research shows,

00:27:27.500 it's just horrible. And it makes you have lower your ability to control yourself emotionally. But true, when you

00:27:32.620 reward people for a lack of emotional control, then they at like a biological, like hard-coded level

00:27:39.400 lose the ability to control their emotions. And so this means that they experience a lot more pain over

00:27:46.960 the long run. Ironically, when you create an entire system, an entire ideology, an internal governance

00:27:55.100 framework around a moving emotional pain, you cause infinitely more emotional pain. And this is why

00:28:01.040 since Pew started doing the research on this, conservatives have always been happier than

00:28:07.340 progressives. Always. It's markedly happier. And it's because they do not have these systems

00:28:13.160 that are rewarding them for feeling bad. Yeah. Yeah. That's, uh, well then, I mean,

00:28:21.380 where would you say that this version of progressivism emerged?

00:28:26.460 I didn't. This is a different video. Yeah. We got to talk about the virus in a different video.

00:28:31.920 And I would love to. I'm not referring to the virus. I'm talking about the roots of progressivism.

00:28:36.420 Oh, equality progressivism?

00:28:37.660 Probably as an intra-generational well-being movement. Yeah, yeah. So progressivism as communism,

00:28:43.140 as an equality maximizer, this came from communism. It came from communist groups.

00:28:48.040 Oh. And before that, there was no focus on... So would you say, and communism rose around the

00:28:56.140 industrial revolution, right? Yeah. So if you look at things that my family fought for,

00:29:00.900 like historically, right? Like my family was never progressive family in terms of the ideology that

00:29:05.920 was motivating them. They were always motivated by maximizing individual agency was in the system.

00:29:10.180 But when they were in politics, you look at a few generations back, big supporters of women's

00:29:14.040 suffrage, big supporters of stuff like shorter work weeks during the age of robber barons,

00:29:19.600 trying to increase autonomy by being very workers' rights. I think you can be adaptive in what

00:29:25.100 maximizes individual well-being and autonomy, while also saying that just trying to optimize for these

00:29:31.740 things that the... That iteration of progressivism existed before the communist ideology really took

00:29:37.800 over the Democratic Party and made them into what they are.

00:29:40.600 What you're describing is, I think, maybe more like my original definition of progressivism. Like,

00:29:45.060 we're open to change and fixing things more quickly. No? You don't think so?

00:29:48.540 No. What I'm talking about is conservatism. All the things that I'm talking about, I consider

00:29:50.840 conservative ideas. And they were conservative ideas. They were Republican ideas. And a lot of

00:29:54.800 people say the Republicans and the progressives switched, but they didn't really. What happened is

00:29:58.740 racism switched between the parties. That absolutely happened. But if you look at the policy

00:30:04.180 positions that the various parties were having, what really happened is this communist strain basically

00:30:09.920 infected one of the groups. And it became the Communist Party and had no sort of ties to its

00:30:15.740 former self. Whereas the Republican movement did adapt to that. Like, it reactively took positions

00:30:21.340 that it hadn't taken before. But it maybe changed as much as the conservative and progressive movements

00:30:25.860 did during the Trump era. Where, like, there was definitely huge party switches. Like, the

00:30:29.900 protectionists became the non-protectionists. And, like, the populists became the non-populists. And

00:30:34.220 all of the people who were pro-war became the anti-war party. There was a huge party switch

00:30:38.680 then. But fundamentally, mostly the people who were still on one party were still in the

00:30:42.700 same party. And yet our grandkids will say, don't you, the party switched when Trump took

00:30:46.760 power? Which I think would make most progressives, like, what? No, you can't say that. No one

00:30:52.300 will say that in the future. But, like, it's so obvious that's going to be the way people

00:30:55.480 see things.

00:30:56.600 You think so?

00:30:57.540 Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

00:30:59.080 Interesting.

00:30:59.440 I don't agree with that. I'm just saying that's what people will say. And so I think

00:31:03.420 that we can mislabel this sort of, quote-unquote, flip that happened with the parties when it

00:31:08.280 really wasn't a full flip that happened with the parties.

00:31:10.580 Okay.

00:31:11.700 Have I changed your mind or not?

00:31:17.000 A little bit. I think a lot of it might, for me, be caught in the weeds. I would need

00:31:22.360 to go through the history of, you know, what, yeah, what all these things stood for in

00:31:27.580 the past.

00:31:27.880 And you two, too, you know? I'm talking, yeah.

00:31:30.860 Well, I love you, Simone. I love that we disagree about things and we make a point of trying

00:31:35.660 to come to, like, we haven't done this in a podcast before, where we, like, genuinely

00:31:39.160 hadn't really talked through something before the podcast. So now you guys are seeing how

00:31:43.560 we try to align on issues in our relationship and we'll keep talking about this until both

00:31:48.480 of us come to a position where I'm like, either you convince me or I convince you. So actually,

00:31:53.940 an argument she didn't make now that did convince me a lot, because we did talk about this

00:31:57.440 a little bit before the podcast. And it is that progressivism before the virus was much

00:32:02.520 more pluralistic in its aims and that I am overly simplifying it. And that did actually

00:32:07.520 convince me. And I do think that she's right. Is these equality-driven angles of progressivism

00:32:12.920 were only some of the most dominant factions, but there were many different factions within

00:32:17.440 the progressive movement before the virus that had many different objectives. And that

00:32:21.920 thought through that they were much more pluralistic and I'm overly simplifying them.

00:32:25.800 And so I did change my mind based on that argument, which didn't come up in this podcast.

00:32:29.280 Do you think you're oversimplifying them by saying that they were all fighting for equality?

00:32:35.380 Or are you still going to hold that all of these-

00:32:38.000 No, I'm just saying the predominant factions that had power to get things passed in the

00:32:40.920 legislature and stuff like that. I think that they were fighting for equality more than anything

00:32:44.680 else. I think that was their primary objective function. But I do also believe that it was a

00:32:49.280 diverse party back then, and it is wrong to paint the progressive party circa 80s, 90s, 70s, 60s,

00:32:55.860 as one group. In the same way that today, I think that you can't really ideologically dissent

00:33:01.160 without being expelled from the movement.

00:33:02.620 Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and maybe I'm thinking also more about my original point that progressivism is

00:33:10.540 more about being in favor of change and conservatism is not. Because I think you made an interesting

00:33:15.840 argument that a lot of conservative groups have been very innovative, but I think it can also

00:33:20.760 equally be argued that the progressive movement, especially today, is so ossified. It's so,

00:33:26.460 it is now just swathed in orthodoxy.

00:33:29.420 And to talk about what you mean there, some people might be like, oh, I disagree with that.

00:33:32.360 The TERF movement, historically, it would have had differences of opinions with other progressives,

00:33:37.380 but it fundamentally would have still been allied with the progressive party. Yet it has been,

00:33:41.460 these are feminists. These are old school blank slate as feminists. The reason they believe what 1.00

00:33:45.160 they believe, if you actually look at, they call themselves gender critical feminists. If you

00:33:48.800 actually look at why they hold the positions they hold, it's because they believe in the older

00:33:53.680 orthodoxy. And the older orthodoxy was that humans aren't born with anything. The only reason we have

00:34:00.020 gender is because we were raised to believe we have gender, right? And so they see anyone who is

00:34:07.200 ossifying this idea of gender or saying, oh no, gender is real, as fighting for this completely

00:34:12.840 fictional and that it's not based on any sort of biological reality patriarchy, and that we should

00:34:17.440 move towards a completely genderless society. I think a lot of people don't actually know what the

00:34:22.340 gender critical movement is actually fighting for. And they believe this because that used to actually

00:34:25.880 be the scientific consensus. Before academics were like, oh no, there actually are like really

00:34:30.680 systemic differences between the way men and women think. And we now know this, and that you can't

00:34:35.100 just raise a guy as a girl or raise a girl as a guy. And most of the time have that turn out okay. 0.87

00:34:40.900 Actually, you can, there's been intergender studies on this. I'm not saying what's true.

00:34:44.940 I'm saying what is the political orthodoxy of the academic institution now?

00:34:49.400 So we can get on that later. But this has been a fantastic conversation, Simone.

00:34:52.940 Yeah, I love talking with you about these things. I especially love when we disagree

00:34:56.060 because it gets really interesting.

00:34:57.940 Yeah, me too. That's where we're going to come up with a new idea and we can,

00:35:00.040 we have a new thing to talk about for a few days.

00:35:02.040 Oh yeah, things are so much more interesting when one or both of us is wrong because then we

00:35:06.240 become slightly more enlightened at the end, but only slightly.

00:35:10.280 All right, love you.

00:35:11.420 Love you too.

00:35:12.040 Love you too.

Based Camp - May 23, 2023

Based Camp： Were Progressives Good⧸Benign Before They Went Woke？

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