In this episode, Simone and I discuss the persistent phenomenon that people on the right have a much easier time modeling the way that those on the left do, and why this is surprising. We also talk about the role that the media plays in shaping our perception of the world, and how it affects our ability to empathize with our opponents.
00:00:00.000Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is going to be an episode where we're going to go over a few research papers that explore lefty and righty brains again, really interestingly, but with a focus on a persistent phenomenon that has been found, which is that people on the right politically have a much easier time modeling how people on the left think than people on the left able to model people on the right.
00:00:27.200That is so strange. That is so strange.
00:00:30.000I grew up thinking, as someone on the left, that we were the empathetic ones, that we understood everyone better and we knew what everyone we needed. How can we get this so wrong?
00:00:39.440It's not just that. We're going to go into other things. Speaking of them not being empathetic, just to give a little thing away here. There were four studies with nearly 4,800 participants in the UK and the US to look at how much empathy each side had for their political opponents.
00:00:57.840This was called Empathetic Conservatives and Moralizing Liberals. Political intergroup empathy varies by political ideology and is explained by moral judgment.
00:01:06.760So what it showed is that liberals have less empathy for conservatives than conservatives have of liberals.
00:01:15.200This actually makes a lot of sense, too, because I remember being on the left growing up, having empathy for the entire world, but still seeing conservatives as this inhuman boogeyman.
00:01:38.640And this is seen in the data. This study was like, surprisingly, conservatives showed more empathy for liberals than liberals showed of conservatives. This asymmetry was found across studies and was statistically reliable.
00:01:49.300Why is it surprising? Maybe it's surprising because of your own biases going into the study.
00:01:53.960And I love the way the study explained this away. It's like, well, this is actually justified because lefties believe conservatives want to kill them and conservatives don't think lefties want to kill them.
00:02:03.800And I was like, well, but conservatives don't want to kill them. So it's not. This is like saying the Nazis were justified because blood libel.
00:02:12.260They're like, yeah, well, they did think the Jews were murdering their babies.
00:02:15.660But it's like, yeah, but the Jews weren't murdering their babies. That doesn't make their ideology justified.
00:02:20.460What are you talking about? Now, I note here that there was a great study done on the nature of the dehumanization, which I think helped.
00:02:27.360So this was the study, Political Meta Dehumanization in Mental Representations, Divergent Emphasis in the Minds of Liberals vs. Conservatives.
00:02:34.920And this study found that liberals and conservatives differed in how they dehumanize the other, at least in the framing of this study.
00:02:43.020So what this study found was that conservatives tend to view liberals as immature, while liberals see conservatives as savage, which is true.
00:02:53.620But one is like a pitying, like if you had more information.
00:02:57.760Yeah. Yeah. You're just misinformed. You're just, you're not exposed to the world as it is.
00:03:02.860I love how they're like, that's dehumanization. It's not dehumanization. That's just like, actually the way it is.
00:03:08.540If I believe that if they, if you actually empathize with someone and see them as human, you're going to think that the reason they hold these views is they just don't have access to as much information as you.
00:03:18.240Yeah, that you must know something that they don't know. And then that's why you view what you view. Yes.
00:03:24.680I remember viewing conservatives as a leftist young lady.
00:03:29.700No. And I remember I was a leftist at one point too. And I remember conservatives are the savages who live in the woods and are religious extremists and don't know any scary Bible thumping cultist monsters who don't care about other people at all.
00:03:47.720And just want you to live like them. And yeah. So I want to talk about like what creates this phenomenon.
00:03:52.680Yeah. And, and I should note the first study that I was mentioning that led to all of this. I heard one guy point out, this was short fight otaku, say that in one study, it was actually that lefties were three X worse the rate of conservatives in terms of modeling them.
00:04:07.380That exact study. So I don't know where exactly who it's getting that from, but it seems believable given what I've seen. And we recently.
00:04:14.760Oh, wait, no, no, no, no. This was what if altist who said that it's while we were.
00:04:18.100Oh yeah. But what if altist who said that? Yeah. Not short fight otaku. And this was a great video by what if altist, by the way, he's totally back. He's got some fun videos.
00:04:24.560The one that you missed that I thought was really good was on, and you should check it out. It was on the anti-civilization, looking at how the steps kept producing people in groups that went out and destroyed all of this various civilizations of the world, whether it was the Chinese, whether it was the Europeans, whether it was the Indians.
00:04:43.280And this one region of the world, like in Civ, like a spawn tour, just kept spawning the things that destroyed civilization. Yeah. Wait, the Reapers, how do you know Mass Effect?
00:04:55.940Well, in Serenity, there were. Oh, this is a different universe, whatever.
00:05:05.400But anyway, yes, very interesting. And we might do a different video on that idea, because I think it's really interesting, the idea of an anti-civilization. Although I'd go further, and I'd say that their civilization is the anti-Jews. They are the exact antithesis of Jewish history, i.e.
00:05:22.120Oh, because they're, well, if Jews represent order and process. And living in urban centers. These represent anarchy and distribution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And having a vested interest in maintaining a stable status quo, these individuals.
00:05:38.020They are entropy. Entropy incarnate. They lived almost entirely outside of cities, almost entirely with the benefit of the status quo being destroyed. Interesting, yeah.
00:05:47.640Very, very interesting to go into, but that's for another episode. But anyway, so he pointed that out, and I don't think that Rubyard lies about stuff. He seems to know his stuff, so he got it from somewhere. But what I was getting from Short Fattery Taku was a really interesting instance of this that happened recently.
00:06:03.960Where an individual named Bunis, or Bunny or something, who was a trans game maker, so one of our friends, Stuttering Craig, who does Side Scrollers, which is a conservative-leaning video game podcast, the number one video game podcast, I think.
00:06:17.640He did this, like, just focused on, like, video game news. He put together a reward show called the Real Gamer Awards. And Bunlis' game, Nightmare Cart, ended up winning. People would pay to vote, and the idea was to build an award show without any of the political bias.
00:06:35.780And they really wanted to do that. They wanted one that didn't have the lefty bias, that didn't have the righty bias. It was just like, these are games that we love.
00:06:42.380And this person, because they were so bad at modeling the modern right and what the modern right is striving for, did some tweet about how they were-
00:06:55.380Well, I mean, he is a genuine righty, but the genuine righties today are just fighting for a fair playing field for everyone.
00:07:03.460And they were unable to see this. So they reached out and they said, because the general righties don't have control of our culture right now. Our culture is controlled by the urban monoculture, which attempts to impose itself on everyone through media, through news, through leftist policy.
00:07:17.320And the right just wants everyone to be treated equally, regardless of your gender, sexuality, skin color, et cetera.
00:07:23.700You know, we've had reporters do double takes on us, where I was like, yeah, I believe that someone should only be promoted based on meritocracy.
00:07:29.700But they were like, are you sure you don't want to rephrase that? And I was like, no.
00:07:35.820Famous racist who said, I believe that we should judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. You know, that's who I agree with.
00:07:43.500But anyway, so this person, Bunnus, they ended up winning one of the categories.
00:07:47.460And of course, the people knew that they were trans. Nobody cared that they were trans.
00:07:51.540They had made a good game that didn't have a lot of politics in it.
00:07:54.820It was a racing game. It was called Nightmare Cart.
00:07:57.240And it was like a redo of like other other racing games.
00:07:59.780So anyway, they won. This individual said, oh, I'm going to go have gay trans sex was my like great gay trans girlfriend, furry sex or whatever.
00:08:09.560And they expected the people running this to be like, I hate you.
00:08:13.920How could you do that? How could you? Oh, no, we screwed up giving this to a transfer.
00:08:17.540And they were like, no, cool. Like, do what you want. Like, we're just trying to, you know, award you for your work.
00:08:24.900And they it was clear that they didn't understand the people who were hosting this award show at all, that the award show just wanted to genuinely help them and didn't care what their gender was.
00:08:34.940And so then they were like, I won't take the award, even though they had already accepted the award.
00:08:40.600And like, you didn't ask me for permission to give me this award.
00:08:43.920And this was, you know, and then a lot of people started hating them because they were basically being a jerk. Right.
00:08:49.960And even in their own internal understanding of the story, even still, they believe that the people hosting the show were like upset or didn't know that they were trans, which just wasn't the case.
00:09:01.560They just don't care. Yeah, they were voting on the game.
00:09:04.980Yeah, they were voting on the game. Right.
00:09:08.720And so we need to ask, why aren't they capable of seeing this?
00:09:13.560And I think it's because the left has a big problem right now.
00:09:18.120If they admitted the political reality within which they find themselves, a core part of their narrative begins to dissolve in a way that makes it hard to continue to support the left.
00:09:32.500And this is why they're so bad at modeling the right, which is they genuinely believe that the right is a group fighting to culturally oppress them or imposition them.
00:09:46.020And they cannot see that the right just wants to be able to live life the way they want to live life, to just do what they want, to be able to work at jobs without being discriminated against, to be able to play video games without them having gone through some sort of council that makes them, you know, obviously not produced by the best writers, obviously not produced by the best game makers, or they'd be good.
00:10:11.640You know, and we know this, like video games used to be good before you guys took over, right?
00:10:16.040Like, if you made games that were woke and good, as we have repeatedly seen, like, okay, you're like, oh, the right won't buy a game that's woke and good.
00:10:45.700It's trans individuals who make shitty games, who use our money from, like, previous games we supported before these individuals started ruining them to destroy the quality of something that we care about.
00:11:02.060Whether it's, you know, Acolyte or, you know, Veil Guard.
00:11:05.700And as we've, you can look at our Wachowski effect with Veil Guard, you can be like, well, these individuals were involved with the previous games.
00:11:11.960And it's like, yes, but after people become infected with the urban monocultural mind virus, they get really bad at everything.
00:11:23.640Why was Nightmare Cart able to still be good?
00:11:26.780It's because I think you could be heavily infected with the urban monocultural mind virus and still be a good engineer or still be good at, like, non-narrative-based games.
00:11:34.980You're just very bad at, like, creating narrative experiences often because you struggle to understand what people who aren't like you see in the world.
00:11:44.860And that's why games within that category are so rare.
00:11:53.820Because if they could put their mind in somebody like Stuttering Craig, right, they would understand that what he wants is just the best games to win.
00:12:05.200Well, that's, I mean, I was under the, I don't, I don't know him as well as you do.
00:12:08.480I was under the impression that he was only right insofar as Gamergate pushed a bunch of people to the right.
00:12:15.200And also anyone who actually cared about games became opposed to the urban monoculture was, which was actively killing good games.
00:12:22.780Well, yeah, and I think that this is something we're seeing across the board here with the modern right, which is that the urban monoculture created them by taking the things they care about and making them terrible.
00:12:34.500A lot of the left thought in the urban monoculture thought that if it could gain control of Star Wars, if it could gain control of the Assassin's Creed series, if it could gain control of these studios, that it would be able to use that control to finesse or sort of impose their cultural ideology on the people who were consuming that product.
00:12:57.740And that may have worked had they focused on also making those games good.
00:13:03.960But no, because gaining control of the studios also became affiliated with their sort of DEI promote people based on their beliefs, not based on their beliefs or their race or their sexuality or their gender presentation, and not based on their competency.
00:13:23.420And as the, what's he called again, the troll guy, we have a big overlap with him three or whatever.
00:13:28.880He, he, he, he said, if they had only not come for our games, like we were happy.
00:13:34.180If you had just not with our games, we wouldn't have cared.
00:13:39.680And this is the way like all of nerd culture was like nerd culture used to be a solidly lefty thing.
00:13:45.100And now nerd culture is solidly right wing, pretty much across the board, except for the people who still control like the, the, the, the conventions and stuff, because these are the large bureaucratic orgs.
00:13:56.640It really was the gaming that did it too.
00:13:58.880It really was the gaming, like did you not with gaming, but the more I think about it, it wasn't just gaming.
00:14:28.180I mean, do you have a different take on why the left can't model the right?
00:14:36.220I think that it, a lot of it comes down to isolation that for whatever reason.
00:14:43.480And you see this in graphs of friendship, that people, and especially women who are left leaning, are actively uncomfortable with having friends who are on the right, and they actively shun friends who are on the right.
00:14:58.660And when you look at the same rates of exchange, people who are, who report on surveys as being conservative also report as having a few progressive friends.
00:15:09.100So for some reason, there's this selective cultural isolationism, whereby a lot of conservatives are perfectly happy to be friends with progressive people, which would give them more ability to model them.
00:15:24.060The more time you spend around someone, the more you're able to model them, right?
00:15:27.540There's just a lot less willingness on the part of progressives to be friends with conservatives.
00:15:34.220Now, the question would be, when you look at these graphs, well, how is it that you have conservatives who are friends with progressives and progressives who have no friends who are conservative?
00:15:45.100I think that maybe there are just some progressives who are friends with lots of conservatives and they're unusual, but I think what's more likely is there's a lot of conservatives that just hide the fact that they're conservatives and are therefore friends with them.
00:15:58.820Like I, well, until I got famous, I had lots of friends who didn't know I had conservative views even after my views had started.
00:16:05.520And well, we know plenty of people who were like, yeah, I totally agree with you, but I would never say that in public.
00:16:09.680Like, so I guess that's what's going on is that there are a lot of sneaky conservatives or closet conservatives that are able to model progressives really well because they're friends with a bunch of them and progressives just can't.
00:16:23.280And this is a fascinating point when we talk about cultural imposition being the hallmark of modern progressivism is the very fact that people need to be closeted shows which direction the cultural pressure is going.
00:16:36.520And the same way you needed to be like a closeted gang in the 90s or something like that, you knew you would face cultural repercussions for, you know, and today you knew you would face cultural repercussions if you wanted a game show that was completely meritocratic, you know, and so you hide that, you know, I see this was the message thread was my class, you know, people crazy, like they're like all these Nazis and everything like that.
00:17:00.720And I'm like not even replying, right, because I'm like, I seem to remember you guys like marching through the street starting from the river to the sea, like you guys actually supporting the people who want to exterminate the Jews.
00:17:14.660This is like Claudia Gay, the woman who literally ran.
00:17:17.860Claudine Gay, that number one, like educational institution being like, well, you know, we shouldn't punish people for saying stuff about Jews, like, obviously, you know, this is a dehumanization of the Jews on the left.
00:17:32.420This is a breaking society into an ethnic hierarchy within the mainstream of the left.
00:17:37.360And the people who are fighting against us genuinely want a meritocratic society, i.e. what Martin Luther King was fighting for.
00:17:44.620But I think that the left still tells itself that that's what it's doing, like that it's unable to see that its actions no longer do that.
00:17:55.500And therefore, the people who actually wanted that but are free of it oppose it.
00:17:59.620And I think that this also comes down to a question that I have had for a long time, which is, why is it that the right and right-leaning influencers seem more prone to audience capture than left-leaning influencers?
00:18:13.060So if you're not familiar with audience capture, this is where an individual may start as a centrist and then become more and more in line with whichever political direction they were leaning because they end up developing an audience that is more extreme than them was in that political direction.
00:18:31.760And this happens much faster towards the right, influencers who are centrist moving towards the right than influencers who are centrist moving towards the left.
00:18:39.620And I think that the reason for this is actually due to the false narrative of their opponent that the left relies on to maintain its followers or its supporters, which is to say that once you begin to challenge the narrative that is normal and allowed within society and you see that they have been lying to you, it is much harder to go back.
00:19:08.100Whereas if you start as a centrist and you begin to challenge things in a left-leaning direction, you are not going to see as many, oh, here's all of the places the right lied to me about this.
00:19:20.960Because the right is honestly right now, because it's not the right of the past.
00:19:27.020Like you see people go, for example, anti-trans, they're not doing that for like religious reasons anymore.
00:19:33.020The main activists, whether it's like JK Rowling or Elon or whatever, right?
00:19:36.820It's because they gained access to more information.
00:19:40.000And you also see a pattern of when people entertain the right, specifically influencers or right-leaning ideas, they are pushed further right by anyone on the left.
00:19:52.380And Joe Rogan is a great example of this.
00:22:59.280Like maybe part of it too, is that they're seen as not counting because they're seen as coming from a position of privilege and cumulative wealth.
00:23:10.300Even if they're not, even if they're not wealthy, like even if they're the disenfranchised Appalachian poor described in J.D. Vance's hillbilly elegy, they're seen as still being.
00:23:32.640No, they know that there are poor, disenfranchised white people out there, but they do not see them as human.
00:23:39.840When they think of the people who are opposing them, they break them into two classes.
00:23:44.000One, a group of white, wealthy elites who keep them down.
00:23:47.880And then the subhuman troglodytes who mine, work in the mines, who work on the farms, who, this other group, they understand this other group doesn't have power.
00:24:00.220Or they're, maybe it's that they are expected to have views that are so repugnant, lifestyles and views that are so repugnant to the educated elites, that they see them as subhuman, but not deserving subhuman.
00:24:15.820Like, you grew up in America, you should have had the good sense to be progressive and educated and to live like me, and you don't, therefore, you had.
00:24:24.100You shouldn't, no, it's like you should have had the good sense to be born into a rich family like me.
00:24:29.620But like, the thing is, like, there are view, there are people in other countries who live lives of poverty and have cultures that ultimately are repugnant to, to progressive leftists.
00:24:41.100And yet, the poor, morally repugnant white people in America are seen as irredeemable, I think, because they should have known better or something.
00:24:54.540That they, they're us, they, they, how, how dare they have those views?
00:24:57.680Like, those people who practice genital mutilation, well, I may not agree with that, but, you know, once they, once we give them our culture and our assistance, they will become enlightened and know better.
00:25:10.380Oh, okay, so what you're arguing is they see them kind of like apostates.
00:25:14.480Yeah, I think they see them like apostates.
00:25:16.580If I'm modeling my old way of viewing things, I think that that's.
00:25:20.140It's like, they should have enough money.
00:25:22.080They had the, they had a chance to be a civilized good person and progressive, and they chose, they chose not to be.
00:28:33.820Like I always note that the natalist convention, one of the interesting things about it is everyone there seems to be happy to be alive and excited about the future.
00:28:56.480Well, Simone, any closing thoughts from you?
00:29:02.140This has just been somewhat mind blowing for me because even though it's been a long time since I've had that progressive cult mind space, it's still, I can still go back to it.
00:29:18.140And it's kind of shocking to realize that I wasn't this enlightened, empathetic person that I thought I was.
00:29:25.860And I still sometimes have this feeling like, well, I'm the evil conservative now, haha, like I don't care about people.
00:29:35.800And then I actually realized that the reason I switched over to this is I actually do.
00:29:41.400I do care about people and I care about evidence-based solutions and outcomes.
00:29:45.320And I can't, I can't do that and also still be on the left.
00:29:52.680And there were the instances in my life in which I had to encounter that in environmental advocacy and then in policy and then in pronatalism, it just keeps coming back.
00:30:04.000So it's, it's just crazy because I still am kind of brainwashed a little bit in the cult to believe, but of course, the, this makes me evil to want to, you know, I'm the, I'm the one who's not empathetic.
00:30:19.920I'm the one who can't model other people.
00:30:45.160I think this is why they can't, when everyone's like the left is lost right now, I think it's like nobody knows, like the leftists are all internally talking.
00:30:55.560And the reason why they're struggling so much is it requires seeing that they are the cultural imperialists, that they want everyone to follow their way of life, their cultural practices, whether it's the immigrants or the conservatives or anyone else.
00:31:09.260And their entire party is built around enforcing that.
00:31:12.840And the thing is, I feel as though if they actually owned that, it would go better because, for example, they would require assimilation from immigrant groups or only let in immigrants who were willing to assimilate, which would, which would go better.
00:31:34.140You know, go better than the Hispanics coming here and then voting more than 50% for Trump, the male ones, at least, and the females, you know.
00:31:42.360Well, yeah, but I mean, I feel like they're qualified to say that because, like Mike Solana has said, you know, a minimum requirement for coming here should be that you like America and you want to be an American.
00:31:56.040The point here being is that these Hispanic immigrants came here and the left just assumed that they would be converted to the urban monoculture and they haven't been, which is a serious miscalculation.